Vatican Waltz (19 page)

“Yes,” he said. “Archbishop Romero. A few brave men and a few brave women do things like that. Cardinal Zossimo, they say, walks through the worst neighborhoods of Genoa at night, speaking to the prostitutes and drug addicts and the boys in gangs. Not trying to convince them to go to church or change their lives, just speaking to them,
seeing
them, which is what the rest of the society refuses to do. He would make a wonderful pope, that man, though the chances of him ever being elected are nonexistent. More likely, I think, he'll someday be killed.”

Bruno snorted bitterly and pushed his empty dish a few inches to the side. The waiter came and removed it and took my dish away, too, and asked if we wanted more wine. We did. After he was gone, Bruno said, “You heard my father last night, didn't you? They killed John Paul I. Poison, probably. But of course there was never an autopsy or any investigation. Think of it. Corruption reaches that high up into the Church. It is that difficult and that dangerous to try to change things. Small changes, yes, of course. Mass on Saturday night in addition to Sunday. Confession face-to-face. And so on. Even those things met with resistance, and it was only the charisma of John XXIII that enabled such changes to be made, and now they are slowly being reversed. But the big things? Those things threaten the powers that be. And when people have power and money, within the Church, within the State, they'll do almost anything to hold on to it.”

“Including murdering a pope?”

“Yes, of course,” he said. “Murder is as human as going to the toilet. Why shouldn't it exist within the Church?”

The waiter brought the meat dishes, sausage and veal. I touched my finger to the envelope. “What does this mean, then?”

Bruno shrugged. “I am not sure. It could be a trick to get you to go there. Perhaps they want to hurt you, and want you to be away from Rome when that happens, so it attracts less attention. Perhaps they want to do some damage to Cardinal Zossimo's reputation by having him meet with an American radical.”

“I'm hardly a radical,” I said. “And no one knows me here.”

“Not yet, no. But Lamb of God has a huge influence on certain newspaper writers. It would be a simple matter to place a few articles there, saying you are an American, a foreigner, who has come here to destroy the Church.”

I watched him cut and chew a piece of meat. I'd always had a not-very-respectful feeling about conspiracy theorists. I could feel that disrespect rising up between us, and I tried to push it back down.

“It could also be,” Bruno went on, “that Cardinal Rosario—he's not Grossetto, after all; he has no link to Lamb of God, none that we know of anyway—it could be that he actually wanted to say something different to you than he said but that he couldn't be seen to do that in front of anyone else. He couldn't risk your going and announcing, in public, ‘Rosario thinks women should be ordained.' ”

“Or it could be Father Clement.”

“Yes, perhaps that is the most likely. I know him a bit. We worked together out of the same office for a few months when I was first ordained. A good man.”

“He seemed upset in the meeting. I had the feeling he wanted to say something to me but couldn't.”

“Yes, well, then probably he brought that note to the hotel or arranged for someone else to bring it. Either he had a sense you should make your case to Zossimo or he reports to Zossimo in secret—or both.”

“But how would he know where I was staying?”

“Not difficult. First, in Italy, you must always register your name with a passport when you check in, yes? Second, someone could have followed us there when I took you. Not difficult.”

“All this intrigue over a person as small as me,” I said. “I can't believe that.”

“Small in some ways, yes,” Bruno agreed. “In other ways, not so small. I have been thinking about this, Cynthia. Do you really believe the archbishop of Boston would have written a letter recommending you to a cardinal in Rome if he thought you were just an ordinary parishioner, a young woman, a nurse, who happened to be upset about one of the rules of the Church and came to him claiming to have been given messages from God? Are you that naive? Or are you just being disingenuous?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Sometimes I feel I live in my own little shell, set apart from the real world of men and women. I've felt that way ever since I was a girl. My friends would be talking about boys, and then later about careers and marriage and money, and it seemed to me that that shell separated me from them. I felt bad about it, plenty of times. Lonely. Isolated. Wondering if I wanted to feel superior to them as a kind of defense, and not join in with them and have an ordinary life.”

Bruno nodded as if he understood, and told me to eat and drink.

“I was followed when I went to Santa Maria,” I said. “I didn't want to upset you. It was the same man who came to the hotel.”

“Wonderful! How well you've been greeted here in our country!”

I showed him the picture on my phone and he looked at it a long time, then shrugged and said,
“Albanese,”
as if he'd known as much all along.

“I confronted him. I asked him why he was doing it, who was sending him. He was the one who said, ‘
Grossetto.' ”

“Wonderful, perfect,” Father Bruno said, with a biting sarcasm that surprised me. “And you confronted him. Excellent!”

“Yes. Men, I've found, don't like to be yelled at in public.”

He threw back his head and laughed, and for just a moment I could see the happy, handsome boy he'd been long ago, before his mother ran off and his father turned bitter and he made certain decisions about his life. “You,” he said, “are either crazy or touched by God or both.”

“Crazy, probably.”

“If He needed somebody to change His church, He would choose a person like you. Brave. Stubborn. A bit of a
pazza.
Am I correct?”

“About the stubborn part, yes.”

After we'd eaten another bite or two, he asked, “What will you do?”

“I don't know. I don't want to have come all this way, had one meeting, heard one refusal, and then go home. I'm not made like that. I don't like to quit things once I start them.”

“A good trait.”

“I've been thinking I should go to Genoa and try to see this Cardinal Zossimo.”

“How?” he asked. “You will have no letter of introduction this time, no archbishop who knows him personally and recommends you. The cardinals”—he floated one hand up into the sky—“they live above us, unapproachable, protected by layers and layers of bureaucracy.”

“But you said this cardinal was different. He came out into the streets. You said Father Clement might be—”

“Yes, sure, he came out into the streets when thousands of people were burning cars and breaking windows. But it is not as though you will see him walking along the main boulevard there and tap him on the shoulder and ask him to allow women to become priests, and he will say, ‘Sure, yes, let's sit down and discuss this.' ”

“I think I'll try anyway,” I said, put off a bit by the note of condescension. “I have eight more days here before I have to fly home. What am I going to do? Spend that time seeing the sights?”

Father Bruno was shaking his head. “I cannot go with you,” he said, as if I were asking him to. Which, in a way, I think I was. “To Genoa. I can't get away.”

“I wouldn't ask that.”

“But I will drive you to the train station, and if I see this tall
Albanese
with the two different eyes, I will strangle him with my own hands and go to Hell for it. And I will make a reservation for you at a nice hotel so you are not in a dangerous part of the city—there are some bad places—
posti
brutti—
in Genoa. I will try, through friends here, to get a message to someone in the cardinal's office telling him you're not as crazy as you seem to be. That is the best I can do. I think it will not be enough. And I think, possibly, it is even dangerous for you to go there. I would ask you not to, but I sense that it would do no good. Am I right?”

“Absolutely.”

He nodded and thought for a moment, and then I saw a small ironic smile touch the corners of his lips. He sighed in a satisfied way, as if the meal had met his expectations, thanked me for it, then said, “It has been a strange thing, meeting you, Cynthia Piantedosi. Lucia called me last night and said something about you. She said, ‘That woman has a shine around her, some kind of aura. She seems to me to be living behind a disguise.' I told her I thought she was right, I just did not know what was there beneath the disguise. Who are you? A saint? A spy? A radical?”

“The most ordinary girl in the world,” I said, and he made an expression I'd seen many times before, something that reminded me instantly of my father. He lifted his eyebrows while closing his eyes and turning down the corners of his lips. It was a facial
maybe,
a gesture of half belief: skepticism and affection blended in a way that seemed perfectly Italian to me.

The train to Genoa left Rome's Termini Station at a few minutes past ten the next morning. We barely made it. Father Bruno was atypically late. As I waited in a light rain out in front of the Old Palace Hotel, I wondered if he might be trying to keep me from traveling to Genoa by making me miss the express train. But he pulled up in Franco's van, fifteen minutes late and overflowing with apologies. Once the apologies were finished, he focused on getting us through the mad Roman traffic and said almost nothing.

Eleven minutes before the train was supposed to depart, he turned into the station lot, parked the van in a clearly marked bus stop, two wheels up on the sidewalk, helped me carry my luggage into the station, showed me where to buy a ticket and how to validate it in the yellow metal box near the track. As I waited there, he rushed over to buy me an umbrella and then to a little shop to buy a bagful of various kinds of pastries and panini I could take along on the trip. “It's a sin to be hungry,” he said, but behind his smile I could see a shadow of worry.

Just before I boarded the train he said, “I have two different friends who are trying to get a message to Zossimo's office. And I've booked you in a very nice hotel that's walking distance to the Curia. Here”—he handed me a manila envelope—“everything you need. A map. The hotel reservation. Good luck, my friend. Please be careful. Call me and tell me what happens.”

I gave him a warm embrace, held him tight against me for a few seconds. I turned and climbed the steps of the train, found my seat, first class, in a glass-walled coupé. I was facing three middle-aged Italian women, beautifully dressed and obviously friends. As the train pulled out of the station, I saw that Father Bruno was walking along the platform beside the window, waving to get my attention. He was mouthing something in Italian, rather urgently it seemed to me, then he took his phone out of his pocket and pointed at it and raised it high above his head. I couldn't be sure, but it seemed he might be telling me to call him when I arrived.

“A lover?” one of the women said to me.

“No, a friend, a priest.”

She raised her carefully plucked eyebrows. “A priest lover,” she said, grinning. “The most appreciative.”

NOT LONG AFTER WE PULLED
out of the enclosed station and left the center of the city behind, we passed through a stretch of ugliness. The high concrete walls at the sides of the tracks were covered in graffiti. The apartment buildings beyond them showed broken windows, laundry hanging over the sills, clusters of rusting antennas standing crookedly on the roofs. Through the speckling of raindrops on the train window the neighborhood didn't seem quite as desperately poor as some parts of Boston I'd seen, but it had the same feeling to it: no beauty, no luxury, no softness, none of the orderliness you saw even in slightly better off places. I thought how hard it must be to cultivate a spiritual life if you were constantly worried about money and physical safety, and I thought that when I went home, when this whole episode was over, when I'd exhausted every option for acting on the messages I was getting from God, I was going to volunteer in a neighborhood like that and try to get the Church to work harder to change the lives of those people.

I remember thinking about the immigrants Father Bruno said he worked with, Albanians who'd left dire poverty and oppression and come to a place like this. I tried to put myself into the mind of the man who'd been following me. I offered up a prayer for him.

And then we were in the countryside, and I was looking out at herds of sheep in green fields and hillsides with neat rows of olive trees crossing them. I loved that landscape. Like the buildings in Campo de' Fiori, these fields and hills had seen, from the Etruscans to Berlusconi, every kind of human behavior. Thousands of years from now, when we'd lived through another series of foolishness, violence, and hope, it would still be here, offering itself to us. All we had to do was grow our food in soil like this, harvest more food from the sea, build shelter, bear and raise children, pray to our Creator. So much was given to us without our having done anything in particular to deserve it, yet we complicated those gifts in so many different ways. We cheated, envied, stole from one another, divided ourselves into opposing groups. We took more than we needed, ravaged the earth. We found reasons to hate and kill, torment and torture. But somehow—even in that whirling ball of bad energy—love, tenderness, and compassion survived like flowers on a battlefield. I had a moment then, thinking that way, really the first moment in my life, when I seriously considered leaving the Catholic Church. I don't know why I felt it just then, but the feeling was as undeniable as it was surprising. Not a temptation of the Devil, as I once would have assumed, but a kind of breaking down of the walls of the person I believed myself to be. Why, I thought, why be Catholic or Protestant or Jew or anything else with a label and rules? Why not, as Bruno's father argued, just lead a simple life of prayer and work, try to love, try to give, and not do anything at all that separated me from other people?

In a moment the thought had passed, but it left a residue, a thin, silvery trail like the ones left by the snails that crawled out of my father's garden and across our brick walk. Why call myself anything but Cynthia the human being?

The countryside just north of Rome's suburbs had been softly rolling hills, a landscape of fruit trees and fields, stone walls and narrow roads along which trucks and cars scooted like colorful toys. But as the train moved farther from the city, the topography changed again, the hills grew steeper, and there were long, slanting fields planted in what appeared to be some kind of grain, about to be harvested. The rain had stopped by then. On the foggy eastern horizon I began to be able to make out blue mountain ranges rising one behind the next like a series of revelations.

The express train made its only stop at a city that began and ended with
O,
and as we were pulling out of the station there, I looked up and saw that it was an ancient hill town, set on a top-hat-shaped piece of land. As protection, no doubt, against invaders. A few hundred buildings rested on that slanted plateau above sandy cliffs. I saw one enormous church there, towering over everything, and I thought about the people who must have designed and built it, hundreds of years ago. What they wanted was to raise a structure in tribute to the mystery that had given them life—such a simple and straightforward project. Once the building was in place, though, ideas and rules attached themselves to it like insects clinging onto something sweet, eating away at it, using it to fatten themselves and spread disease. We started to move again, and soon the hilltop city passed from view behind us, but I sat there with the three Italian women still facing me in the quiet, glassed-in coupé, and I kept thinking about the church builders. I wondered if all of them—masons, sculptors, painters, architects—had enjoyed a deep prayer life. I wondered if that was the source of their artistic inspiration: a longing to describe what they'd experienced, to use their skill to give physical shape to the fragments of the Kingdom of Heaven they saw in their meditations. And I wondered if it was that link to the mysterious dimension of life, not so much the food or the art, that drew millions of people to Italy year after year from all over the world.

I sat back and closed my eyes, and I thought: Martino Zossimo Genova. Three words on a sheet of stationery, and here I was, going hundreds of miles out of my way, to a city I'd never seen, not having any idea what I would find there. Surely I was a foolish person.