Four Seasons in Rome

by Anthony Doerr

  Fill bun with peeled banana “dog.”

  Enjoy.

  The third step is the important one, the piacere, the “enjoy.”

  Shauna and I bring the stroller up via Carini in the last light of the day and reach the Porta San Pancrazio. We are crossing the street when our tires grind over powdered glass in the dimples of the asphalt. I crouch for a second; the glass is nearly gone, hardly more than sand. The awful smacking sound comes back to me, the sirens, the little rental Peugeot smashed against the travertine.

  “Only he who always remembers how frail a thing man is will weigh life in an impartial balance,”45 Pliny said. In his day, life was terribly fragile: infant mortality, scholars have estimated, was 300 in 1,000: that is, about 30 percent of all live-born babies died within the first year. A mean life-expectancy was only twenty-five. Death was everywhere. It’s no wonder Pliny devotes so many pages to honey, the different varieties, the best times to collect it, its sweetness so intoxicating because it was so fleeting, and even now, nearly twenty centuries later, Romans seem far more aware of their own evanescence than Americans do. Romans discuss death over dinner; they wait in line to examine the corpses of their dead heroes; they take the arms of revered old parents and escort them through the parks on Sundays. Six or seven times, since coming to Italy, I’ve seen young people on park benches reading novels to grandmothers. I’ve seen hundred-year-old women picking stolidly through eggplants at the market, or dragging pull-along grocery carts up hills on ruined ankles, or slumped in piazzas under shawls with whirlpools of suffering turning in their eyes.

  Decay of republic, disintegration of empire, the ongoing crumble of Church—death is the river that runs through town, driving along beneath the bridges, roiling in the rapids beside the hospitals on Tiber Island. Death is in the stains on the walls; it’s the weight of Keats’s tombstone upon the sod, the permission slip Romans sign when a long-haired girl climbs onto the back of her boyfriend’s Vespa, when the banker puts the transmission in park and takes the librarian in his arms. I agree to live now, live as sweetly as I can, to fill my clothes with wind and my eyes with lights, but I understand I’ll have to leave in the end.

  We Americans, with our closed-door executions and gated retirement communities, are the ones who seem to have a hard time thinking about death. I picture the man crouched atop St. Peter’s a half mile away, 435 feet of open air beneath his shoelaces, who knows what fatigue in his heart, gravity tugging at him, Easter Sunday slipping away, two or three helicopters ratcheting over his head. The view beyond the tips of his eyelashes is on postcards all over the world: the arms of Bernini’s colonnade, Mussolini’s via della Conciliazione, the bisecting thread of the river, and the apartments of Rome fading off into darkness.

  If he slips, if he pushes off, what will he think as the roof of the church hurtles toward his face?

  Finally?

  If only I’d had time, had children, had better shoes?

  Or, Thank you, thank you, thank you?

  He doesn’t jump. The firefighters lasso him and haul him back over the railing. He is forty-five years old and still lives with his mother. She is in the papers most of the week, thanking God.

  But death is still in the air. Five days after Easter the pope’s condition has deteriorated significantly. In a city of nuns, I’ve never seen so many: nuns in khaki, nuns in blue, nuns in crisp, dazzling white. In front of St. Peter’s, they stand in groups of three or four, talking quietly. I pass one, pulling a rosary through her fingers, with the most intense black eyes I have ever seen, gazing up at the windows of the pope’s apartments. It is as if her eyes are going to burn right out of her face and go rising up into the sunlight.

  There are maybe a thousand people, all told, inside the colonnade. Hardly anyone is sitting. Most of them face the windows of the papal apartments. Everything is quiet—quiet enough to hear the water pouring into the basins of the fountains. A flag flaps lightly, and pigeons rise past the obelisk.

  A street away, in front of Castle Sant’Angelo, at least a hundred white vans are parked bumper to bumper, each with a satellite dish on the roof. Cameramen in vests chew panini; two reporters share a hot dog.

  Today seems an especially bad day to die: the first of April, and the weather is perfect, the apples and nectarines flowering, the persimmons just starting. Spring is not so much a season in Rome as an onslaught of colors: silver, gold, green.

  I look up at John Paul’s bedroom and think, If his bed is near the window, he can watch clouds soaring past the cupola—huge anvils of cumulus, pale and full of shoulders. The wind slowly tears them to shreds. Thin blades of light slip through and touch down everywhere.

  The following day is Saturday. The front three pages of every newspaper are about the pope. The Corriere della Sera runs twenty-six pages of coverage. Even on the pop stations they talk about him, machine-gun bursts of Italian between Lionel Richie and the Bee Gees. Il Papa, they say, il Papa. In his apartment he’s burning up, lungs failing, kidneys failing. Every person we run into seems to know something new. He’s conscious, he’s unconscious, he’s recognizing his staff, he’s not in a coma. Already they’ve given him the Sacrament of the Infirm, and the special Communion you only get when you’re hours away.

  It seems impossible but today is more beautiful than yesterday. The sky is a depthless, flawless cobalt. Everywhere little chamomile daisies open their white faces to the sun—the lawns look as if they’re covered with snow.

  A breeze lifts great clouds of pollen out of the cypresses. Bells toll. Around the world, prayers gather and fly toward us, hurrying past our windows on the way to the Vatican from Brazil, from China, from Poland.

  More than three miles of artwork hang in the Vatican Museums, and the pope could have any of it brought in front of him: a Raphael, a Michelangelo, a Caravaggio, a Fra Angelico. Instead he wants only to hear something read from the Bible in Polish.

  By noon, maybe fifty thousand people are gathered in the piazza, gazing up at the windows of his apartment.

  After dinner, after the boys are asleep, I walk down to the Vatican one more time. It is the hour of the passeggiata and the streets are crowded. Most everyone is beautifully dressed: glossy shoes, sport jackets, long skirts. Down the entire quarter mile of via della Conciliazione, camera lights glow white. Maybe a thousand lenses are aimed toward the basilica. Women with designer handbags give interviews; priests in white give interviews. Pigeons wheel above the fountains. Everyone seems to be waiting, and every journalist seems to be trying to make a story out of the waiting.

  The sky is that heartbreaking violet you see only on very clear nights, violet pocked with a few warm stars. Figures mill on rooftops, on top of the colonnade. Candles burn here and there.

  More people are crammed into the square than on Christmas Day or Easter—I’d guess sixty thousand. Three windows of the pope’s apartments are lit. Along the whole top floor, only those windows glow. I can’t help but wonder if things are frantic behind his curtains, if doctors are rushing back and forth.

  Maybe a dozen priests gather on the left side of the basilica steps and take turns praying quietly into a microphone. Mostly they do Rosaries, Hail Marys, over and over. The crowd murmurs along.

  Men with fifty-pound cameras push past us. They say John Paul II was the first pope to live in the twenty-four-hour media cycle, and it’s obvious he’s dying in one. Everything is filmed; everyone is filming. Raised arms hold cell phones, digital cameras. If the pope could look over his sill, he’d see a sea of faces strobed by a thousand flashbulbs, his ashen face transformed into pixels and channeled through lenses into cables and air, into the instant-transmission scrutiny of the world.

  This is the pope who reputedly joked, “If it didn’t happen on television, it didn’t happen.” Well, this is happening. Four oversize screens mounted in the piazza show pilgrims, show the cathedral, show a close-up of St. Peter’s stone beard. A bald man in Nikes and a suit stands a little apart, his head bow
ed. As I watch, two separate photographers crouch in front of him and take a dozen exposures each.

  In front of the basilica, one of the priests, a young man, takes the microphone and sings a song I don’t recognize. His voice is almost impossibly sweet. The crowd sings along. I shut my eyes. There is something very real about this moment, despite the cameras, despite the spectacle—something of the stillness that exists beneath the helter-skelter commotion of Rome, and I don’t mean only in the catacombs or the deep corners of cathedrals, or out in the countryside along fallen arcades of aqueducts, but that rises now and then from a piazza in the middle of a winter day, or from an umbrella pine early in the morning—a hush that creeps out of the earth and fills your heart with something like peace.

  The pope dies just after nine thirty that evening, April 2. Inside his apartment, a cardinal says his name three times. A startlingly beautiful girl in denim beside me weeps silently. Bells begin to clang, or maybe it’s just one bell, up on the left side of the basilica, swaying heavily back and forth. It echoes off the cobbles, off the pillars, off the gathered heads.

  I think maybe I’ll see something thin and glorious slip out of the sky, but nothing comes. The piazza is quiet, except for the bell and the water spilling into the fountains. I think of Henry and Owen, a mile away, asleep behind their doors. I think, This is going to happen to all of us.

  People pour into Rome. Within a day the streets around the Vatican are mobbed. The radio guesses 2 million pilgrims are coming; the Internet guesses 3. All along the Janiculum, apartments are rented out. Hotels are overbooked. We hear that Katie Couric is staying down the street; we see Americans in vests at the Bar Gianicolo, a little café beside the Porta San Pancrazio, ordering Pepsis.

  Despite the furor, I work nonstop on my short story, crashing through a fifth draft, then a sixth, oscillating between exhilaration and despair.

  One minute I think, This here, this is a good sentence. The next I am on the brink of throwing the whole thing away. But I am used to this by now.

  Three nights after the death of the pope, Shauna and I watch a DVD on our computer. The boys are asleep. The city is stuffed with visitors; impromptu campgrounds are springing up in fairgrounds, a concert hall, an empty railway building. We are near the end of the movie when Shauna says, “I don’t feel well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My neck is tingling. Everything is tingling.”

  She blinks and starts fanning her face. Her fingers, I notice, are very pale. She climbs out of bed. She gets back in. I glance at the clock: 10:31 p.m. I stop the movie.

  “I don’t feel well,” she says again, and splotches of pink bloom and fade on her throat. I run to get her a glass of water, and by the time I bring it to her she has climbed out of bed again. She hurries across the room. She sets the glass on the kitchen table. She tries to shake feeling into her fingers. Then her eyes go blank and she falls over.

  One moment, but a moment in which you can feel the globe stop and pivot, and that enormous eye of God stare through the atmosphere and clouds and roof and ceiling, through your clothes and skin, and fix on the blind, self-deluded creature in the dark that is you.

  Our little kitchen seems frozen in a terrible, silvered light. Shauna is lying on the baby blankets in front of the couch, one knee caught beneath her. Miraculously, her head has come to rest on a folded corner of blanket. I wonder about the pope and three days and reincarnation. Waves of panic build along the horizon.

  I drag Shauna onto the couch. She is conscious again maybe five seconds later, but her eyes are strange. Silky. She has begun to shiver badly—not like a seizure, but with that kind of intensity. I pin her fingers between mine. Her palms are cold.

  “You fainted,” I say. I am trying to believe it.

  She whispers, “I can’t breathe.” But she is breathing. I pile blankets on top of her. I cram thick socks onto her feet. Twelve feet away Owen sleeps in his bathroom, and Henry sleeps in the room next to that.

  Doctors, I think, doctors. I know a few from college. A friend’s father in Boise is a neurologist. Is it morning there? I fumble through pages in my address book. The sequence of numbers I need to dial to reach the United States has fled my brain. 0–001? 0–11? Shauna trembles beneath her blankets—three of them, all the blankets we have. Wouldn’t it be easier to pretend this had never happened? Wouldn’t it be easier if we were home and I could put her in our own car and drive her five minutes to the emergency room?

  “Do you need to go to the hospital, Shauna? Do you think you need to go to the hospital?”

  Her teeth jackhammer against each other. “I’m scared,” she says.

  I don’t remember everything that happens next. I call the gatekeeper, Norm, who calls a taxi. I call Laura, our lovely, fearless neighbor, who is in our hallway in a minute. I am explaining about the boys’ milk, the boys’ bottles, but she is already waving me out the door.

  Somehow we get to the sidewalk. Somehow another Academy fellow, Sean, and an Italian man I have not met have heard we need help. They sit with us on the Academy steps. The nearest emergency room is Regina Margherita, on viale Trastevere, less than a mile away. Shauna has our yellow fleece blanket around her shoulders. In the quiet I can hear her teeth clacking.

  The taxi driver drives like every Italian taxi driver and we are inside the hospital in perhaps two minutes. They admit her with a wave of the hand. A short, calm nurse in sneakers ushers us into an examination room. He retrieves a doctor. The doctor is tall and sleepy-looking. He smells of mothballs. My sledgehammer Italian fails us: I cannot describe tingling, or losing consciousness, or the inability to breathe. The word I know for “faint” is indistinto.

  I try, “La mia moglie, lei è indistinta.” My wife, she is indistinct. Eventually Sean’s Italian friend comes in from the waiting room and rescues us.

  The doctor examines. Our new friend translates. I pray. I love my wife but I am ashamed to admit that the prayers I send up are selfish. What if I have to take care of our babies alone? Every minute tied to them, no one to spell me, no one to laugh with, no one to ask, when they wake crying at 4 a.m., “Do we just let them cry?” No one to keep the other baby happy as I change a diaper on the cobbles of Piazza Navona?

  Widower with Twins: a lousy, short-lived sitcom.

  The doctor asks Shauna to hold out her tongue. He puts drops on it to make her tranquillo. I ask if she can have another blanket. After a half hour or so, she has finally stopped shivering. The little nurse spends a long time probing Shauna’s forearm with a needle, trying to find a vein, and my wife lies mildly sedated on a table in her thick socks, and our Italian friend goes green and has to sit down in another room, and I pace and wonder about my sons sleeping up on the hill and about the little scraps of trash—wadded tissues, the backings of Band-Aids—gathered in the corners of the examination room. I try to get Shauna to rehash her day, when she ate, when she drank water, but she is drugged now and scared and a five-foot-tall man in Reeboks is repeatedly jabbing her forearm with a needle.

  Eventually we realize she had only one glass of water all day. Nothing to drink since lunch.

  “We have two babies,” I tell the doctor. “Twins.” He looks at Shauna and cocks his head, as if computing this. Or perhaps my Italian is so bad I have told him something else. This is a persistent fear in Italy, that I am insulting people, that I am giving incorrect directions, asking for more grapefruit sauce.

  I tell the nurse a joke, in English: “What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.”

  He doesn’t laugh. They finally draw blood. They give her an IV. They give her an EKG. They ask me questions about menstruation I don’t understand and I think they are wondering if she is pregnant. The doctor says he’d like to keep her tutta la notte. All the night.

  At one in the morning in a foreign hospital the mind wanders down thorny paths. Brain tumor? Neurological disorder? Auspices, ome
ns: the great, all-knowing eye peers into us from miles away and knows everything there is to know.

  “Maybe you’re just worn out from the boys,” I tell Shauna.

  “Maybe,” she says.

  We hold hands. Her bed is wheeled into an elevator that smells of urine. The elevator rasps upward and she is taken down a hall and through a doorway. An orderly flips on lights. Two women, in two other beds, groan awake and twist in their sheets.

  The orderly positions Shauna’s bed in the corner, tells us something I don’t understand, then flips the lights back off and leaves. The women sniffle. The one by the window is big and, I think, quite old. She begins to cough. The window looks down onto viale Trastevere, at almost exactly the place we saw the man and the Newfoundland get on the motorino. There is traffic even now: cars, a bus, a half-empty tram shuttling past, a girl standing in the last car, her palms pressed to the window.

  The room has only the three beds and two IV stands and a radiator with its paint peeling off in long, deciduous strips. No chairs. The bathroom is down the hall. Shauna is pale, pale; she looks as if she were deposited into the bottom right of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, forms and faces tumbling through the blue, cowering before the ferryman’s horrible paddle. “Whereas the signs of death are innumerable,” Pliny wrote in a chapter on disease, “there are no signs of health being secure.”46

  The old woman rattles off chains of coughs. The other is quiet. Shauna’s IV drips silently, the bag imperceptibly deflating. A moan echoes down the hall. I alternate squatting on the floor and sitting on the edge of the bed. I feel paranoid and raw, twelve months of sleeplessness chewing away at me. Laura is watching the boys and they’re probably asleep anyway, but I’m deeply uncomfortable being away from them; I feel as though they are suddenly vulnerable. As if we have been skating all this time in Italy across a barely frozen pond, and now the ice has finally given way.