The Fifth Gospel (8 page)

I've often wondered whether there was a trauma in her life that she never told me about. There's only one surviving picture of Mona when she was training to be a nurse, and she's very thin, with sunken eyes. She explained to me that the work came as a shock after the ease of high school. I always understood this as a request not to pry. I wasn't the first man she'd slept with, but even so, our marriage night was awkward. I had underestimated the psychological toll of making love to a priest-in-training. Accustomed to the company of other men, I was never ashamed of nakedness, or of walking around our home half-clothed. I thought it would demystify the cassock for Mona to see that I was human underneath it. Yet it was almost a week before we consummated the marriage. I began to fear, after the days of false starts, that our love would be mechanical and cringing.

It was not. Once she had exhausted her own defenses, she became eager. My lips bled from where she'd bitten me. From the way certain neighbors avoided my eyes, I knew they were offended by the sounds they heard from upstairs. We both looked forward to meeting each other again each night. It was, in a life of discipline, an opportunity for freedom and pleasure.

A life of discipline.
That
was what should've worried me. Some of our neighbors had misgivings about a priest with a wife, no matter what we did in bed. Mona felt their disapproval keenly. Every social event introduced more problems. Gatherings of priests are designed so that single, celibate men will be surrounded by other single, celibate men. Priests drink and eat together, play soccer and smoke cigars together,
visit museums and tour archaeological sites together. To bring an attractive woman to a priestly gathering is a cruel faux pas. Yet to decline invitations because one has a wife is a sure way to stop receiving them. Mona and I agreed that I must go to a certain number of events, just to stay on the list. I encouraged her to spend these evenings visiting friends in Rome, or with other Vatican housewives. I was aware, though, after a time, that she spent the nights alone.

It's unfair to blame the culture of our country. We could've lived outside the walls, in a Church-owned apartment in Rome. Certainly we had no illusions about what Vatican life entailed. But there was one great difference between us, and I discovered it only after we were married. Namely: that my parents were dead, and that her parents were pretending not to be.

Signor and Signora Falceri lived on the next street over, in an apartment building near the gendarme barracks. They had been supportive of our marriage and made no fuss when Mona left the Roman Catholic church for the Greek Catholic one. But I hadn't known, until the marriage began and the pretenses ended, how miserable Mona's mother was. Mona's father was a Vatican Radio technician who'd made the mistake of marrying a woman he didn't respect. Signora Falceri was a passable cook with a gentle sense of humor whose failings weren't immediately clear to me. Only later did Mona explain that her father came from a large family and wanted many children. Her mother had nearly died in childbirth with Mona, and the doctors had discovered a defect in her womb that made it dangerous for her to bear again. Now, when they came to visit us, they visited separately. Mona didn't cherish seeing her father. But it was visits from her beloved mother that left my wife in ruins.

A Greek doesn't need to be told that tragedy runs in families. I knew Mona harbored a certain fear of becoming her mother. When Peter's first two trimesters went peacefully, we took it as proof that the curse had been lifted. Then, in the final trimester, we almost lost him twice. The doctors reassured us that Peter was far enough along to survive, but it seemed as if Mona's body had begun to reject him. In the end, she was rushed to the delivery ward because the umbilical cord was strangling him. When our son was finally delivered, the obstetrician called him Hercules because he had survived a noose snaked twice around his neck. Mona would later cry that she had tried to kill her son.

In the months that followed, the woman I married disappeared. I have more memories of my mother-in-law nursing Peter with a bottle than I have of Mona nursing Peter with a breast. Signora Falceri kept Mona company while I was at work, and to this day I can't see that woman's face without thinking how she tortured my wife. While Mona sat on the couch, eking out some desperate happiness from the madness in her brain, her mother, as if offering loving advice, would announce that our present struggle was nothing compared to what would come later. That we must not delude ourselves. That sadness was a flower. I have searched whole libraries for the source of that proverb—
sadness is a flower
—and in all the world there is no rabbinic gloss to uncoil it. She meant, I believe, that Mona's new temperament had a dark beauty, which we must come to accept. Also: that it would only grow. I'm sickened to think of how many days I let mother and daughter sit on the couch, watching television, while that miserable woman, seeing her own child slowly dying, poisoned her anyway. Peter doesn't see his grandparents today. He asks why. I lie to him, and think to myself that someday I will explain.

When word spread that Mona had left us, families at our church reached out. They cooked us meals. They organized a babysitting schedule so that I could return to work. Eventually Sister Helena took over many of these duties, but even now, no priest at our church receives more generous Christmas gifts than I do, and it would embarrass the most hardened pirates to see the booty Peter receives on his name day. I've always detected an undercurrent of pity and inevitability in this kindness, as if a Greek boy who married a Roman girl was taking a certain risk, and now my life has become the honorable aftermath. The parishioners don't mean anything by it. All Christians believe the business of human life is to pay down the debt on old sins. These good people helped support me until the day came when I could shoulder my debt myself.

I had a fantasy once, which I thought I would carry with me always. It was the fantasy of my wife's return. I would encourage her to take shifts at the hospital again. I would take care of Peter full-time until she was ready to know him better. Then she would discover that our son is not an omen, not an emblem of her failures. He is precocious, conscientious, and good-hearted. Teachers praise him. He is invited to many birthday
parties. He has my nose and Simon's eyes, but he has Mona's thick, dark hair; her round face; her cheerful smile. He will be grateful someday that he looks more like his mother than his father. In my dreams Mona would discover, through him, that she had never completely left. That we could rebuild what we once had, since the foundation we set together continues to rise.

But I've lost that fantasy, as surely as I've sloughed my old skin. To my surprise, I've discovered I can be whole without it. Only one part of it stubbornly remains: I want Peter to understand that his mother's love for him isn't a fiction I've created. I want him to understand that there are sources of himself that lie outside of me. From Mona come his deep intuitions of difficult truths, his fondness for jokes and riddles, his magical love of animals. His mother would fascinate him. I want nothing more than to share them with each other.

Wherever Mona is today, I imagine her full of regret for the life we shared, or else for her decision to end it. It would've broken me to feel regret on that scale, but I never did. Every time I looked back, Peter pointed me forward. I am still midstream in the voyage I began with my wife. Every night I thank God for my son.

C
HAPTER
7

W
HEN I WAKE,
the floor beside me is empty. Peter's gone.

Fumbling into the hallway, I find Leo and Sofia looking up from their breakfasts at the kitchen table. Leo points to the balcony, where a tiny body is hunched up like a cricket, bent forward over squatting legs, coloring with a crayon.

“He's making a card for Simon,” Leo explains.

I smile. “I'll take him up to the roof.”

Sofia whispers, “Father Simon's not there.”

The look on Leo's face supplies the rest. They don't know where he's gone.

When I dial my brother's mobile, he picks up on the fourth ring.

“Where are you?” I say.

“At the apartment.”

“Are you okay?”

“Couldn't sleep. When I get back, I'll take you and Peter to breakfast.”

Leo and Sofia are both watching me. Sofia must've been tending to Peter since he woke up. The poor woman is still wearing her bathrobe.

“No,” I tell him. “Don't go anywhere. We'll meet you there.”

IN THE LIGHT OF
day, it seems eerie that the apartment is unchanged. The wreckage hasn't all burned off like the darkness. Peter's hand is clamped to mine as we enter. He steps over toys as if they're poisonous
mushrooms. In the kitchen, the broken plate is gone, the spilled food cleaned up. All the windows are open. Simon is sitting alone at the table, pretending that he hasn't been smoking.

Peter dashes away from me to give Simon the handmade card. There are four stick figures holding hands: Mona, me, Peter, and Simon. On closer inspection, however, Mona is wearing a habit. My heart sinks. It's Sister Helena.

Simon lifts Peter onto his lap and squeezes him. After admiring the card, he presses his lips into the thicket of wild hair. “I love you,” I hear him whisper. “Babbo and I won't let anything happen to you.”

The sink is empty. Dishes washed and cleaned. The sponge looks as if it's been wrung dry with an industrial winch. I'm surprised Simon was able to stop himself from cleaning the whole apartment.

“What time does Sister Helena come with the laundry?” he asks.

I'm too distracted to answer. Now that the mess in the kitchen is gone, what remains is more obvious.

“Earth to Alex,” Simon says.

“Peter,” I say, “before we get breakfast, could you go wash your hands?”

Nervously he traipses down the hall.

“What's wrong?” Simon asks.

Surely he has noticed it, too. I point to the areas where the damage is concentrated. The credenza by the door; the bookshelves; the side table where the phone is kept.

Simon shrugs.

“He was looking for something,” I say. “He opened everything with doors. Except
that
.”

Eastern Christians keep a special corner in their homes where icons are arranged around a book of the gospels. In our apartment the icon corner is modest—just a dressed-up curio cabinet where Peter and I pray. But in the attack it wasn't touched.

“He must've known what that was,” I say.

Nothing but sacred objects are kept in an icon corner. The intruder knew there was no need to look there for whatever he wanted. Almost no Italian layman would've known so much about our rituals. Last night's ideas about a deranged intruder inspired by religious madness already seem impossible.

Before Peter finishes in the bathroom, I quickly follow in the man's footsteps. Sister Helena heard him calling for Simon from the hall outside Peter's room. The hall leads to the bathroom and, across the way, to my bedroom. The bathroom is untouched; so was Peter's bedroom. I feel an electric tingle down my neck. It looks as if the intruder went straight to the master bedroom.

My bed is undisturbed. If the dresser drawers were rifled, then Simon erased all sign of it when he dressed after showering last night. But when I look more carefully, I see one shelf was touched: the one where I keep my travel books on the countries where Simon is posted. The volume on Turkey lies on the floor. Below it, an odd gap has appeared on the bottom shelf. Something's missing.

“Alli,” I hear Simon call from the foyer. “Come here a sec.”

My books on the Shroud. They're gone, along with my handwritten research for Ugo.

My heart knocks against my ribs. My very first instinct was right. The break-in and Ugo's murder must be connected. This surely has to do with Ugo's exhibit.

“Alex!” Simon repeats, louder now.

When I walk numbly back to the foyer, he's pointing at something on the floor. In his eyes is a new wariness. “I've been staring at it all morning,” he says quietly. “But it just clicked.”

“Simon,” I murmur, “whoever did this must've known we helped Ugo on his exhibit.”

But Simon is too distracted to process it. “Notice anything missing?” he says through his teeth.

I kneel beside him among the capsized toys and phone books.

He's pointing to my day planner. It's turned to yesterday's page. Not until I leaf forward do I understand.

Today and tomorrow have been torn out.

I'm frozen. It bubbles up in me like tar, what this means.

“What was on those pages?” Simon asks.

Everything. A cross-section of our lives. Fall term starts next week, so I had written down my teaching schedule. All our plans with Simon were there, too.

I murmur what Simon has already figured out. “He's still looking for us.”

My brother begins to dial a number on his mobile phone. “I'm going to reserve a room at the Casa for you and Peter.”

The Casa. Our Vatican hotel. Very private; very anonymous. It solidifies what this all means. Peter and I aren't safe anymore in our own home.

Even as Simon talks to the receptionist, a sharp knock comes at the door. Peter instantly comes running out of the bathroom in terror. With him pressed against the backs of my legs, I step forward and turn the knob.

It's a gendarme. The same one from last night.

“Officer,” I say eagerly, “you caught someone?”

“Unfortunately, no, Father. I just need to take a few more notes.”

I invite him inside, but he chooses to stand on the threshold, stooping to inspect the doorjamb.

Peter tugs at me, not wanting the policeman to be here. Maybe not wanting to be here himself.

The cop glances up. “Father, your nun told me the door was locked when the man entered.”

“That's right. When I leave the apartment, I always lock it.”

“Even last night?”

“I double-checked it before I left for Castel Gandolfo.”

He stares at the doorjamb. One of his fingers runs up and down the wood. He tests the knob. It takes me a second to understand. There's no damage to the door or frame.

“I'm going to need to take some photos,” he says. “I'll call you later to discuss some things.”

PETER REFUSES TO STAY
at the apartment while the policeman is there, so we pass an hour outdoors before our meeting with Uncle Lucio. Keeping to the well-guarded trails, we visit the fountains in the pope's gardens, which Simon and I know by unofficial names from our childhood. Fountain of the dead frog. Fountain of the unexplained eel. Fountain of the night Caterina Fiori drank too much and danced. Eventually we find ourselves at the little playground beside the Vatican tennis court, where Peter asks his uncle to stand behind the swing and push him higher and higher. From the arc of his flight, he cries out, “Simon! Do you know why the leaves change color? It's chlorophyll!”

His hobbyhorse of late.

Simon is staring elsewhere, into the distance. When he becomes aware of his silence, he says, “Why don't all trees change color?”

He was never a strong student, but after four years of college, and four years of seminary, and three more years of Academy, he has become an advertisement for our Church's constitutional obsession with schooling. John Paul holds a doctorate in theology and a doctorate in philosophy. We encourage Peter to learn anything and everything.

“Because,” Peter shouts, “the chlorophyll just stays in their leaves!”

Simon and I trade a glance, deciding this sounds right. “Do you know,” Simon says, “what
I've
been reading about?”

“Tigers?” Peter cries.

“Remember Doctor Nogara?”

I send him a high-voltage stare, but he ignores me.

“He let me feed the birds,” Peter says.

For the briefest moment, Simon smiles. “A long time ago, near the city where Doctor Nogara and I met, there was a saint named Simeon Stylites. He sat on top of a pillar for almost forty years and never came down. He even died up there.”

His voice seems to come from far away, as if he finds something entrancing about this detachment. About the thought of retreating into himself like a monk rather than embracing the world like a priest.

“So how did he go pee?” Peter asks.

The one, timeless question.

Simon laughs.

“Peter,” I say, trying to muster a serious look, “do not repeat that at school.”

He swings higher, grinning. There are few greater joys than to make his uncle happy.

Little by little, the hour slips by. We see nobody we know. We hear no news. There's a distinct impression, as we peer down over the Vatican walls, that nobody in Rome this morning is paying close attention to the facts of our lives.

When we've nearly reached the doorstep of Lucio's palace, Sister Helena calls to say she can't watch Peter later today. Then, sounding as if she's nearly in tears, she rushes to get off the phone. As we hang up, I wonder if there's something she didn't tell me. Something she may not
even have realized until she got home last night. Sometimes she takes Peter to visit with neighbors in the building. She might've left the door unlocked.

THE GOVERNOR'S PALACE IS
a young building by local standards—younger than John Paul. It dates to 1929, when Italy agreed to make the Vatican an independent country. The blueprint was for a seminary, but the pope, finding himself in need of a national government, converted it to an office building. Today it's where Vatican bureaucrats come and go, planning postage stamps of Michelangelo. We call it the Governor's Palace in remembrance of the days when a layman ran this town, but there are no more governors anymore. The new sheriff wears a collar. Lucio lives in a suite of private apartments on the top floor with his priest-secretary Don Diego, who answers the door when we arrive.

“Come in, Fathers,” he says. “And son.”

He bends down to welcome Peter, mainly so that he can avoid looking at Simon. They are the same age, two priests on the fast track, and to Diego this means competition. Behind him, gloomy classical music fills the air. Lucio was an accomplished pianist before the onset of arthritis, and he used to keep a framed newspaper article here describing a performance of Mozart he gave in his youth. Now the piano goes unplayed, and the soundtrack is macabre Russians and Scandinavians. This particular work by Grieg sounds like the theme music of Calvinism.

Diego ushers us into my uncle's private office. Instead of facing Saint Peter's, it has a northern exposure that keeps it clammy. One of Lucio's predecessors was a plain-talking American archbishop who kept a bearskin rug on the floor and Westerns playing on the television.
That
was an apartment Peter would've enjoyed visiting. But my uncle's taste runs to oriental rugs and claw-footed chairs because they're available free of charge from the Vatican warehouse, where the stockpile of baroque furniture grows each time another prelate dies.

“Forgive me,” Lucio says, raising his arms, “for not being able to stand and welcome you.”

This has been his greeting since he suffered a small stroke last year. In its aftermath he has given up wearing the scarlet skullcap and scarlet-­trimmed cassock of a cardinal because his balance sometimes fails and
his hands can't manage the buttons or sash. Instead he dresses in a loose-fitting priest suit, and a nun drapes a pectoral cross over his neck every morning. Simon and I come forward to clasp his outstretched hands, and Simon, as always, gets a longer squeeze than mine. The longest, however, is reserved for Peter.

“Come over here, my boy,” Lucio says, tapping his desk eagerly.

The stroke paralyzed part of Lucio's face, but he worked hard at rehab so that his appearance wouldn't frighten Peter. While they embrace, I glance at the papers on the desk, looking for gendarme reports about Ugo or our apartment. But there are only the budget reports that are the oxygen of Lucio's existence. He is the mayor of a small city that always needs updated facilities and new parking lots; the minister of culture to the world's greatest collection of ancient and Renaissance art; the employer of more than a thousand workers who receive free health care, duty-free shopping, and subsidized food, without paying a penny in income tax; and the negotiator of a fragile relationship with secular Rome, to which our landlocked country owes all its petroleum shipments, garbage collection, and electricity. I try to remind myself, whenever I brood on the way Lucio neglected Simon and me, that he was busy honoring the promise he made to John Paul.

“Do you want a drink?” he says to Peter now, managing to make both halves of his mouth move. “We have orange juice.”

Peter's face brightens. He almost leaps off my uncle's lap to follow Diego out of the room to fetch it.

“I trust,” my uncle adds in a lower voice, “there were no other incidents last night?”

The question seems like a courtesy. Nothing happens in this country without his knowing.

“No,” I say. “Nothing else.”

But Simon jumps in. “The gendarmes don't have anything,” he says with an edge. “Meanwhile Alex and Peter can't even sleep under their own roof.”

His tone takes me by surprise.