The Fifth Gospel (56 page)

John's theology has reached its summit. At the moment of Jesus' death, Shepherd and Lamb converge. The two snakes of Ugo's caduceus meet. The gospel stops dead in its tracks to point out that these are symbols, that they come from the Old Testament. John is saying, emphatically,
This is why Jesus died. Like the shepherd, he laid down his life for his flock. Like the lamb, he saved us with his blood.
John even says these events came straight from the testimony of the Beloved Disciple. In other words, they express a symbolic truth that is essential to understanding Jesus Christ. On earth, however, in history,
they didn't really happen
.

Of all the wounds on the Turin Shroud, the bloodiest is the spear wound in Jesus' side. Yet the earthly Jesus was never pierced in his side. This wound is no more historical than the armed mob that Jesus magically knocked off its feet by saying, “I AM.” No more historical than the sponge raised on the limp stalk of hyssop. They all belong together, to the same family of symbols, because the writer of John made all these changes for the same reason: to make his point about the Shepherd and the Lamb.

Which means that the forger of the Shroud—whoever he may have been, whenever he may have worked—made the same mistake as the author of the Diatessaron. By merging the testimony of all four gospels together, he erased the difference between theology and history. He created a terrible, heartbreaking mishmash. Putting the spear wound on the burial cloth is no different from putting a crook in Jesus' hand because he was the Good Shepherd or a coat of wool on his shoulders because he was the Lamb of God. When the Beloved Disciple says his testimony is “true,” he means it in the same way John does when he calls
Jesus “the true light,” or when Jesus himself says—only in the gospel of John—“I am the True Vine” and “I am the true bread.” To be literal about these symbols is to miss their beauty and importance. The genius of John's gospel is that it refuses to be bound by an earthly straitjacket. John's spear wound gestures at the truth that lies beyond mere facts. The Shroud, then, does the same. It is a powerful symbol—but it has never been a relic.

I've spent my life combing these verses for meaning. Yet when Ugo came to me, wanting to show me what he'd found, I closed my eyes. And Simon did infinitely worse.
So this is why my friend died. Because I taught him how to read the gospels. And because he had the bravery to speak out about what they revealed.

C
HAPTER
40

I
WANT TO FALL
to my knees. I have never been so blindsided by my own failure. The anguish is a cord wrapped around my chest, tightening, tightening. My body is unsteady. But my eyes are fixed on the Greek letters of the Diatessaron photograph. They accuse me of having been a hypocrite. A fool. I ask my own students to read carefully, to search for complexity and meaning in the evidence God puts before us, and here I have known my own gospels as dimly as I knew Ugo, who suffered with a secret that would have tortured and haunted any believer in the Shroud but that must have been unspeakable hell to him, salting the whole earth of his life, laying waste to him before he ever arrived at Castel Gandolfo. And Simon, who knew how he suffered, seems to have chosen to end his life with even more suffering. If that's true, then it makes my own brother, whose heart I thought I understood as well as I understand my own, as much a stranger to me as the man on the Shroud.

The words slip out into the stillness of Lucio's bedroom.

“What do we do, Uncle? They want me to testify tomorrow.”

He lifts himself off the bed and hoists himself up on his cane. He doesn't put a hand on me. But he comes and stands by my side, unmoving, as if to remind me I'm not alone.

“Do you still have his cassock?” he says.

“Yes.”

“And the gun case?”

I nod.

He lets go of the cane. For a moment he stands on his own legs. Peering at the verses of the gospels, he frowns the same way he does when reading the newspaper for its obituaries. These old friends. These memories of happier times.

“If you bring those items here,” he says, “I can arrange to have the garbage trucks come at dawn.”

“He killed Ugo! How can you not care?”

“He took a fish to feed a multitude. You think he should sacrifice his entire future for that?”

I jab my finger at the photo of the Diatessaron page. “He killed Ugo to hide what we were giving the Orthodox!”

Lucio cocks his head and says nothing.

“Does the Holy Father know?” I ask.

“Of course not.”

“Does Archbishop Nowak?”

“No.”

The air is still. Nothing moves except a red dot on one of the medical machines, racing forward, forward.

“Did your mother ever tell you,” he says finally, “that your great-­grand uncle led the voting after the eighth ballot in the conclave of 1922? He almost became pope.” Lucio smiles foggily into the air. “And that man was nothing compared to Simon.”

“Don't, Uncle.”

“He could wear the white someday.”

“Not anymore.”

Lucio raises an eyebrow, as if I'm missing the point.

“I don't see that you have a choice,” he says.

I stare at him. Maybe he's right. He has put words to this powerless feeling. Nothing remains but different ways to reconcile ourselves to what must come next.

“We'll give them what they want,” Lucio says. He points to the Diatessaron page. “We'll explain that they made a terrible mistake by giving the Shroud to the Orthodox. And when they ask us to keep quiet, we'll agree. As long as Simon isn't punished.”

I shake my head.

“Alexander, even without the cassock and gun case, they have enough evidence to convict him. There's no alternative.”

“He
killed
for this. Ugo
died
for this. Simon would rather be convicted than let a reunion with the Orthodox fail.”

Lucio sniffs. “It would be naïve to assume the Holy Father will tell the Orthodox just because we tell him. The Orthodox don't even read the Bible the same way we do. To them, it's all factual.”

I glare at him. “The Shroud is a fake! He's not going to give them a fake.”

Lucio pats me on the back. “Bring me the cassock and the gun case. I'll take care of everything.”

I stare over his shoulder at one of the photos on the wall. Simon, at about Peter's age. He is sitting in our father's lap, looking up at him. In his eyes is a perfect admiration. Beside them is our mother, who peers into the camera and smiles. There is something indefinable in her eyes, mischief and wisdom and peace, as if she knows something no one else does. Her hands are covering the slightest bump in her belly.

“No,” I say. “I can't do that. I'll find another way.”

“There
is
no other way.”

But already, as I look at that photo, my heart begins to break. Because I know, better than I have ever known anything, that he's wrong.

OUTSIDE, THE MOON IS
full. The air is soft with powdery light. I walk as far as the garden by Sister Helena's priory before I stop and loop my fingers through the metal fence to hold myself up. I close my eyes and breathe. My chest begins to heave.

I love him. I will always love him. He never planned to do this. He came to Castel Gandolfo without a weapon. He could've run away from what he'd done, but instead he called the police. And while he waited for them to arrive, he took off his raincoat and knelt beside his friend to spread it over him.

A wind rushes through the garden, bending the stalks away from me. The plants pull at the soil as if to run from their own roots.

I imagine the size of Simon's hand. The size of the gun in it. Leo called it a peashooter. The smallest, least powerful weapon he could find. One giant finger looped against that trigger must've left no room to move. All it took was a tiny nudge.

I would do anything to believe it was an accident. Except that there is no accidental way the gun could've been in Simon's hand.

I sit down. My fingers claw at the hot soil. He could've confessed. They would've asked him why he did it, and that's when he could've kept silent to protect the Shroud. Instead, he let the silence protect himself, too. That choice, even more than what he did to Ugo, makes him a stranger to me.

I was fourteen years old when he told me he didn't want to be a Greek Catholic anymore. He sat me down and explained that on Sundays he would still walk me to our church, and come back afterward to pick me up, but from now on he would be going to Mass, not Divine Liturgy. I never understood why he wanted to leave. We both loved our Greek church. To see our father appear from behind the wall of icons, glittering in golden robes, fresh from the altar, where no laymen were allowed, had been one of our few opportunities to believe he was an important man. But that day, I told Simon I would leave our Greek church, too, because no matter where we went on Sundays, I wanted us to go together.

He refused. He forced me to stay. He made sure that I was tonsured as an altar server in the Greek church. He made sure the priests there continued my Greek lessons. From that day on, whenever he asked me about the girls I was interested in, the first ones he mentioned were always the daughters of families from my Greek congregation.

He shouldn't have been able to become a Roman Catholic. Canon law says the rite of the father is the rite of his sons. But Simon asked Lucio for help. And my uncle, who never wanted anything more in the world than a nephew to continue our family line, finally realized what Simon could be. That was the moment he began to steal my brother away from me, to set him on the road where even I knew he belonged.

So every Sunday morning, I polished the shoes while Simon ironed the clothes. We shaved together in the mirror. And then he walked me to my church and put me in the arms of my parish. And left me behind.

He has been preparing me, all my life, for this moment. And all my life I have been resisting it. He became a Roman Catholic because his work with me was finally done. It must've almost killed him to be a father to his little brother. He knew he was made to outgrow our village, our home, our father's small shoes. But he stayed with me as long as
he could. As Lucio said, there was really no choice. In a Christian life, maybe there never is. Simon buried himself in order to raise me. The imprint of that decision is the watermark on every other feat he's ever performed. That willingness to surrender everything. To sacrifice all. Future; priesthood; even the life of a friend.

If you love something, die for it. That's the message of the gospels.
Whoever loses his life for my sake,
Jesus said,
will save it
. I hate my brother for what he did. I hate him more for what I have to do tomorrow. But as I think about the account we're about to settle, I also feel relieved. It is finished. The odyssey of being his brother. The fear of the destination. The unpaid debt. The wondering what we were made for. Tomorrow, it is finished.

This
is what we were made for.

I COUNT THE STEPS.
I touch the new lock on the old door. I watch the new key as it turns. When I step inside, Mona and Peter look up with the same expression. As if I've come home too soon. As if I've woken them from a wonderful dream. Peter slowly crawls out of her lap to welcome me. The sight of him makes me want to hide my face and cry.

“Peter,” I manage to say, “it's bedtime. Please go brush and wash.”

He looks at me and doesn't argue. I've never worked harder to hide my feelings from him. Yet he senses them. His heart tunes automatically to the same frequency of sadness.

“Go,” I repeat.

I follow him and numbly watch him run the water. The cake of soap slips out of his hands, so I put it between his palms and hold his hands between mine as we lather.

“Babbo, why are you so sad?” he whispers.

From behind me, Mona says softly, “I don't think he wants to talk about that right now, Peter.”

But in the same mirror where Simon and I used to shave together, he watches me. Those blue eyes. My brother's eyes. My mother's eyes. In the photos on Lucio's wall, even my uncle used to have those eyes.

“Get in your pajamas,” I say.

For a moment, as he changes clothes, he is almost naked in front of us. And the mother who has never seen him in underwear glances away. Around his thighs, briefly visible when he contorts himself to pull on
his pants, are faint rings where the leg holes of his underwear fit snugly. I think of Simon's bruise.

He rushes into bed and turns to me. “Is Simon okay?” he says.

But I tell him we aren't going to bed. “Follow me.”

When we get to the door of the apartment, he says, “Where are we going?”

I motion for Mona to come, too. Then I lead them up the stairs to the roof.

It is like standing on the deck of a ship at night. The ocean below us twinkles. Wash on a clothesline billows like signal flags. Across the channel is John Paul's palace. Beneath us, like fishing boats, are the buildings of our village. Supermarket and post office. Autopark and museums. Rising above them all, white as baptism, is Saint Peter's.

Holding my son in my arms, I step almost to the edge of the roof, so that he can see everything. Then I say, “Peter, what's your happiest memory here?”

He smiles and looks over at Mona. “Seeing Mamma,” he says.

She touches his cheek and whispers, “Alex, why are you doing this?”

“Peter, open your eyes as big as they'll go,” I say, “and look at everything. Then squeeze your eyes closed tight, and make a postcard in your mind.”

“Why?”

I kneel so that we're at the same level. “I want you to remember everything you see tonight.”

And I think:
B
ecause we may not see it very much anymore. Because this isn't one of those times when we say see you later. This is a time when we say good-bye.

With a quaver in his voice he says, “What's wrong, Babbo?”

“No matter what happens,” I whisper, “we'll always have each other, you and I. Always.”

Into this child's life God has put only one example of love that never fails. I am it. From the bottom of my heart I mean those words.
No matter what happens
.

“Are we going to live at Mamma's house?” he asks.

My throat closes. “Sweetheart, no.”

I feel broken. I lift him in my arms and squeeze almost as hard as I can.

“Then why are we here?”

There is no answer he can understand. So I lift him in the air and point to all our favorite places. I remind him of the things we've done here, the adventures we've had. The way we used to sit in the shade of the trees below us, throwing pieces of old bread to the birds, watching people drop letters into the big yellow box at the post office and imagining the countries they were destined for. The night we climbed to the top of Saint Peter's to watch the fireworks for John Paul's silver jubilee, and we saw John Paul sitting in his own window, watching them, too. The winter morning we came out of the Annona, the village supermarket, and our plastic bag broke and the eggs cracked all over the street and Peter started to cry until—a miracle—for the only time in his life, it started to snow. Remember, Peter, that magical feeling. How, in an instant, every particle of sadness can be swept away by the smallest gift of God's love. He watches us. Cares for us. Never, ever abandons us.

God bless Mona, she comes to my rescue. When I am empty and exhausted, when Peter wants to hear more stories but my memories are growing darker and darker, she begins to tell him about when we were young. About what I was like as a boy.

“Mamma,” he asks, “did Babbo used to be good at soccer?”

Mona smiles. “Oh,
very
good.”

“Even as good as Simon?”

The muscles under her eyes tighten. “Peter, in every way, he was better.”

I carry my son back downstairs. He frowns when he sees the apartment again. He tucks himself in bed, then gets up. He closes the closet and checks that it's really shut. We pray. Mona holds his hand, and somehow that's enough. I turn out the light and see fingernails of moonlight reflecting in the wet of his eyes.

“I love you,” I say.