Vatican Waltz (12 page)

At last, late in the afternoon, after I'd wandered along a street where it seemed that every third shop was selling
ITALIA
T-shirts and miniature ceramic Colosseums, I ended up in Campo de' Fiori. It was a few hundred square yards of cobblestone surrounded by somewhat tattered palazzi and narrow buildings and full of fruit vendors and the tables and chairs of outdoor cafés. In the center of the square stood a statue of a hooded figure; for some reason it drew me. A plaque there stated that the figure was Giordano Bruno. The unfortunate and brave philosopher had been burned at the stake on this spot in 1600 for espousing the heresy that not only did the earth revolve around the sun, but that there might be other suns and other universes in God's kingdom.

Not exactly what I needed to see at that particular moment.

But Campo de' Fiori was a lively place, an even mix, it seemed, of ordinary Italians enjoying coffee at outdoor tables and tourists, wide-eyed like me, wandering the cobblestones with a half-eaten peach or plum in hand and gazing at the scores of architectural details—the cornices and carved eagles, the metal skulls on doorways, the arched windows and stone lions looking down at us from their places beneath flat roofs.

There was a spirit to those buildings that I'd never encountered at home. They spoke of a thousand years of human habitation—everything from the fiery death of Giordano Bruno to the processions of emperors and popes. They'd seen wars, invasions, occupations, bountiful times, and desperate times. Something in their old solidity and the simple beauty of their lines gave me faith that, whatever happened with Cardinal Rosario, whatever happened on this earth, at some point in our eternal travels, everything would be fine. Eventually, eventually, as Julian of Norwich had been quoted as saying in one of the books Father Alberto gave me, “All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Julian of Norwich—it seemed strange and wonderful that I should think of her then, because her visions had led her to believe in a compassionate, not a wrathful God, and she'd claimed, openly, that Christ was both father and mother spirit. Life was for learning, she said, not for suffering and penance, and in order to learn we sometimes have to fail and endure. Father Alberto had told me that she'd never been canonized—something he thought was “a monstrous mistake”—but that he prayed to her every day.

Thinking of her, floating around in my small, jet-lagged ecstasy, hungry again and remembering Father Alberto's love of food, I asked a young Italian woman about my own age for a restaurant recommendation. She led me a little way down a crooked lane—
vicolo
is the Italian word: not a street, exactly, and not really an alley—that angled off Campo de' Fiori, and at a bend in the lane she pointed to an awning above a patio that held two or three tables and told me it was a restaurant and the best place to eat in that neighborhood. I went across the patio and through the front door and was greeted by an elderly woman as if I were her long-lost grandchild. There were no menus. I was seated at an uncovered wooden table, and within a minute a waiter started bringing the meal of the day. Mineral water in a bottle and a jug of white wine; an antipasto that included a bowl of cooked lentils, a bowl of fennel, a plate of various salamis, olives, fresh bread; and a bright green olive oil. Then came two different pastas in another large bowl—one very cheesy and the other in a succulent tomato sauce. By then I was more than full, but the waiter hadn't finished. He brought the meat dish—a loin of pork. And then, for dessert, a fruit-and-jelly torte.

I was used to Italian food, of course, but not used to consuming it in such quantity. Still, I've always had the habit of eating a little too much when I'm nervous, and I've always had a bit of trouble with my weight (giving up something for Lent helped; running on the beach in the warm weather helped), and it seemed wrong to refuse any of the dishes the kitchen sent my way. I ate and ate, watching the families around me, listening to the music of the language, letting myself enjoy the way the sounds, tastes, and smells seemed to bring my grandmother back to the table with me. What a mistake it was, I said half aloud to my father, not to have come here with me.

At last, when the steady stream of food seemed to have finally gone quiet, I paid and thanked the waiter and made the long walk back to the hotel with the mad Roman traffic honking and roaring close beside me all the way. I took the stairs up to my room, washed, prayed for only half an hour, then undressed and fell into bed and was enveloped immediately in a wonderful, deep sleep.

I was awakened from that sleep by a persistent knocking. I was so groggy and seemed to have traveled so far from the depths of unconsciousness that I thought, at first, I must have slept all the way through and missed breakfast and it was Father Bruno at the door, telling me we were late for our meeting. But when I looked at the alarm clock beside the bed it read 1:15, and when I peeked outside the windows it was dark. The knocking paused momentarily, then started up again. Hasty taps, persistent, not loud.
“Signorina? Signorina Piantedosi?”
someone was saying on the other side. I wondered if the place was on fire.

I got up and went to the door and called out a question. No words there, just more knocking in a steady rhythm. I hesitated a moment, then unlatched and opened the door. Standing there was a tall man, a stranger, with three or four days' growth of beard and features that seemed somehow un-Italian, one eye blue and one brown. I could see then that he was drunk, and I was starting to slam the door when he said
“Signorina bella”
in heavily accented Italian and reached out and took hold of my shoulders with both hands. From the depths of me I felt my ninth-grade street self rise up, and without thinking about it I kicked him hard, once, in the left knee. He stumbled backward a step, and I managed to get the door closed tight between us and to lock it with shaking hands. I went to the phone, called downstairs, and told the people at the desk what had happened. There were profuse apologies, and the assurance—after a moment—that the tall man had been chased from the hotel and would never return. He'd inquired at the desk earlier, using my name. Was he a friend of mine?

“Absolutely not,” I said. “He tried to grab me.”

More apologies. “Tomorrow the manager will speak to you and apologize personally,” the clerk said.

I went back to bed but couldn't sleep. I thought of the warnings I'd heard in America and realized how foolish I'd been to open the door at that hour. Seduced by the beauty of the city and the kindness of a few people I had met, I'd forgotten the basic rules of safety for a woman traveling alone. Eventually I drifted to sleep and woke up, drifted to sleep and woke up again, and at last, probably at four a.m., fell into a more solid rest and was awakened by the alarm at seven.

After another shower, an hour of prayer, and breakfast—just coffee and pastry—in the downstairs dining room, I went outside and saw Father Bruno waiting there beside his father's blue van. He was wearing an expression that was equal parts anxiety and welcome. The morning was sunny and mild, warmer but less humid than a hot Boston day, and I was surprised to feel a fresh breeze skipping down the street, a wash of wind that didn't smell like big city at all. I hadn't seen any skyscrapers on the drive in or during the previous day's meandering. In places, at moments, Rome felt like a sprawling, ancient village.

“Mi hai aspettato tanto tempo?“
I asked.

“No, no, no, five minutes, nothing at all. Everything is fine. I came early. I didn't want you to miss your appointment.”

I climbed into the front seat, and we cut and swerved out of our graffiti-decorated neighborhood and over to the river, where we made a sharp right turn at a round, fortress-like building.

“Castel Sant'Angelo,” Father Bruno said, pointing to it. “There's a secret escape route leading from the Vatican palace to that place. Whenever a pope felt like somebody was going to try to kill him, he hid there.”

For a moment it seemed so strange to me, the idea of a pope worried about being killed. There had been no shortage of violence in Revere when I was growing up—fights, assaults, the occasional underworld assassination or gang shooting; I'd done enough reading of history to be familiar with wars and invasions, torture and slavery; I'd seen patients come into the ER with gunshot and stab wounds—so I don't know how I'd managed to preserve my naiveté into my twenties. Maybe
naiveté
wasn't the right word for it. I suppose I simply wanted the world to be populated by compassionate, considerate men and women, so I looked for evidence to support that view and ignored, or half ignored, the darker side. It was part of what had led me to open the door in the middle of the night in a strange city. But I remembered then that Pope John Paul had been shot right in St. Peter's Square. A little more remembering, and I called to mind a conversation with Father Alberto about it, some details: a Turkish man, Agca was his last name; after the first shots, the Vatican security chief and a brave nun had wrestled him to the ground, probably saving the pope's life. “When he recovered,” Father Alberto said, “John Paul went to visit Agca in jail to say he forgave him. Who would do something like that?”

Bruno interrupted my musing: “All the important roads into Rome go straight to the end at the churches,” he said, trying out his English for the first time. “So the pilgrim, when they coming in Rome, see in front of them first the churches.”

I nodded politely to show I understood, but I was having a hard time focusing. I felt a film of sweat on the palms of my hands. Before leaving home, I'd looked up the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on my computer but then decided not to spend more than a few seconds studying the images. I don't know why, exactly. So I'd go into the meeting with a fresh mind, maybe, not imagining beforehand the place where it would be held or what might be said there. I wanted to keep my thoughts free of all that, to trust that I'd find my way, that the right words would be given to me when I needed them.

“Did you sleep well?” Bruno asked, in Italian again, as if his quick adventure with English had been too terrifying to repeat. “Did you see the Vatican? St. Peter's? Did you find a place to eat? After I drove away I realized I should have recommended someplace. There are too many restaurants here that serve bad food and prey on tourists.”

After thinking about it for a few seconds, I decided to tell him what had happened in the night. He was furious. “No more in this hotel, then,” he said. “I do not like this neighborhood. It is not safe enough for a person like you. When you're in the meeting now, I will find you another hotel, maybe a little more expensive if that is okay. I will go to this hotel and explain and end your reservation and see if I can get your payment returned to you.”

I told him I didn't want him to go to so much trouble, but, in fact, I was happy when he insisted.

“This is the way people do things here,” he said with a quick bitterness. “Do they call the police? No. Why? Because then there will be twenty reports to fill out, questions, a black mark against the hotel. They chase the man out and the manager apologizes. Ridiculous! Absurd! What did this man look like?”

I described him as best I could: strange way of speaking, tall and bony, different-colored eyes, and Bruno said immediately,
“Albanese.”
An Albanian.

At breakfast that morning I'd noticed the tendency in Italian newspapers to blame Albanian immigrants for every crime committed in the entire country. I made a small face.

“I'm not prejudiced,” he said quickly. “Not at all. We have plenty of our own bad people. But some of the Albanians and North Africans who came here are so desperately poor they'll do anything to earn a few euros. Anything. They'll sell trinkets to tourists on the street. They'll do slave labor all day for next to nothing. If someone sees them drunk and tells them, ‘Here's five euros, go up to room 300 and knock on the door and scare the person who answers,' they'll do it. Trust me, I know this. I do volunteer work with these people twice a week; I've heard their stories.”

“I believe you,” I said, “but what I don't believe is that someone would pay him to target
me.
More likely he just saw me go up to the room and followed me.”

“But you said it was one
A.M
.”

“It was.”

“And you went back to the hotel at what time?”

“I lost track. Nine, maybe. Nine thirty.”

“And he waited three and a half hours before he went up to your room?”

“Then it was just chance.”

“But I thought you said he called you by name.”

“You're a lawyer's son,” I said, trying to make light of it. I wanted to put the night behind me and concentrate on what lay just ahead.

Bruno wouldn't allow it. “It is known that you are here,” he said ominously.

“Of course it is. You know it. The people at the hotel know it.”

“Cardinal Rosario's office knows it.”

“I hope so.”

“And other people at the Vatican know it. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is like your CIA. Anyone who goes there—any foreigner, especially—is seen as a threat to the established order. You frighten them, so they are trying to frighten you in return.”

I thought about that for exactly two seconds. “Either you're paranoid,” I said, “or I'm naive. The man was a drunk who'd been hanging out in the lobby and heard my name—nothing more than that.”

“You should work where I work. You should hear what I hear and what my father heard all those years!”

I thought, for just one moment, about asking if he'd heard of Lamb of God, if that movement within the American Catholic Church was active in Italy, too, but I decided it must be known to the Vatican, and I let the subject drop. As we drove through the streets near the Vatican, Bruno's mad pace was slowed somewhat by the thick flow of cars, trucks, and buzzing motorbikes. I asked him if he'd always wanted to be a priest.