Four Seasons in Rome

by Anthony Doerr

  Neither of the nurses I can find speak English. I ask for water and am given an empty cup. I steal a blanket from an empty bed in another room and put it over Shauna’s feet. I pour tap water into her mouth.

  Shauna has been in her room a half hour when a nurse enters, flips on the lights, and—I am pretty sure—tells me I cannot stay the night. There is more groaning from the other beds. I pretend I don’t understand. The nurse puts her hands on her hips, looks at a clipboard, and flips off the light. I can hear her move down the ward, the soles of her shoes squeaking.

  Breathing. Traffic. The groaning of the elevator. “I’m scared,” Shauna whispers. Her eyes reflect a streetlight.

  “I know.”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with you. You need to rest. They’re putting fluids back into you.”

  “But the boys.”

  “The boys are fine.”

  The old woman coughs and coughs. I begin to get the feeling the coughing is aimed at us, at our lack of consideration. It is around two when I leave and the IV bag is empty and Shauna is miles from sleep. I hurry up the empty staircases, beneath the dark trees, running the last quarter mile past the Fontanone, its blue water churning on and on.

  Owen is up at five forty-five. By five fifty he has already had a bowel movement and dragged a cup full of water off the kitchen table and drenched his pajamas.

  I telephone Tacy, who is able to come by ten thirty. Laura is sleepy, but able to take the boys at seven. When I leave, they are in their high chairs throwing Honey Nut Cheerios onto the floor and laughing. I jog to the hospital, through the entrance, up the stairs, and into Shauna’s room, signing nothing, seeing nobody. Shauna looks infinitely better. They have put a second bag of fluids into her during the night, and the pink in her cheeks is back. The old woman is still coughing; the younger woman is sitting up, talking into a cell phone. By nine no one has come to speak with us. We wait and wait. To enter a hospital in Italy, we learn, is to relinquish all sovereignty over time.

  “Do you feel okay?”

  “I feel better. I feel fine.”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “No.” She looks at me. “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you feel well enough to leave?”

  “Probably. But don’t we want to know what happened?”

  We wait another half hour. We are fine. Everything is going to be fine. I buy croissants and orange juice. Pina, the Academy’s assistant director of operations, a warm, animated woman who loves our boys, comes to sit with us around eleven.

  Farther down the ward, in a room identical to Shauna’s, I see a trio of doctors moving between beds. One scribbles on a clipboard, one asks questions, one takes a pulse. But another half hour passes and no one comes into our room.

  The city, Pina tells us, is glutted with pilgrims. The wait to get into the basilica to view the pope’s body is almost twenty-four hours. The city estimates that nearly 2 million mourners have come from Poland alone. Pina waited in line for eight hours yesterday and did not even reach the piazza. Police have started turning back pilgrims who try to get in the back of the line, she says. His body will be buried before they can reach it. Authorities are text-messaging every cell subscriber in Rome: Stay away.

  Get in line on Wednesday; still in line on Friday.

  Around two, the trio of doctors finally enters our room. They spend a long time with the coughing woman in the corner, asking her questions, listening to her chest. Nothing is rushed—there are no stats, no blood-spattered nurses sprinting in with bad news. Eventually they come over to us, listen to Pina awhile, then ask Shauna questions. Pina laughs, the doctors laugh. Shauna and I follow very little, nodding with half-open mouths, waiting for Pina to turn to us. It is an awful feeling, actually, to cling to what you suspect must be a pronouncement of your fate, your wife’s fate, and yet not be entirely sure the discussion isn’t about a television program. I study Pina’s face, her busy mouth, her big eyes. I hear the female doctor say soleggiato, “sunny.” Sunny? Is this the diagnosis?

  “Pina,” I say. “We aren’t following.”

  She pats Shauna’s hand. “They say they are fairly confident that dehydration and exhaustion brought on the fainting spell,” she says. “And that you subsequently had an anxiety attack.”

  We exhale. Dehydration. Exhaustion. She is not pregnant. Essentially the diagnosis is one we already know: twins. Shauna is discharged an hour later. Before we leave, I fill out one form, the size of an index card, writing down our address, the number on my permit of stay, and our passport numbers. We will never receive a bill.

  At home, I pay Tacy, who seems entirely unperturbed by the event, as if Filipina mothers are always fainting, no big deal. Every time I am around Tacy, I am reminded of the stories about Raphael, who apparently was perpetually calm, never angry with his assistants; he was handsome and understated and wrote sweet letters to importunate dukes explaining why a painting or tapestry would be late. And yet he died of overwork at age thirty-seven.

  Shauna takes a shower, plays with Henry and Owen awhile, then climbs into bed.

  The twins crawl to me, rest their heads in my lap. Their soft flesh; their sticky fingers. I read them Big Fish, Little Fish; I try to imagine myself as a single parent. I push the stroller to the wine shop on Carini, buy two cases of water, load the big bottles into the baskets beneath the stroller, and push it sweating back through the streets. I stop in the garden behind the Academy and let the boys crawl through the grass.

  The heads of the pines loom over us, complicated and gauzy. I remember, precisely and for the first time, what a friend, standing in our kitchen back in Boise, said to Shauna the day before we left: “Not many people would just up and move to Italy with two babies, you know.”

  Back then I thought it was just a thing to say.

  At dusk, bats pour out of archways and swoop past the terrace, flying in shadowy arcs. Night seeps through the trees, the windows, the mind.

  I think I know some Italian and then my wife collapses in the kitchen and I realize I know nothing. I can say “This stroller is made in New Zealand” and “I would like to reserve a table for two,” but I can’t ask “Why was she shivering so violently?” or “What, fundamentally, is the status of my wife’s health?” because I can’t formulate the questions and won’t comprehend the answers. So I stay inside the walls of Sì and No and Buongiorno and Buona sera, confined to my own crimped versions of the city, trying to learn what I can by peering through a keyhole now and then. There is the woman and her husband who feed the stray cats in front of our building every night, pulling up in their white van and whistling softly and setting out foil packets of boiled meat. There is the kind face of the butcher in his Tecnica ski hat, and his bleached-blond and machine-tanned son, whom we call Jude Law, wearing his surfing necklace, peering into his ringing cell phone and rolling his eyes at me and shouting, in English, “Girlfriend again!” There’s Maria at the pasta shop, and our friend Lavinia at the Academy’s photo archive, and Marco the expectant father of twins, and good old Lorenzo the gatekeeper. But do I really know any of them? Can I say that I understand any of their lives?

  We came to Rome because we’d always regret it if we didn’t, because every timidity eventually turns into regret. But the enormity of what I don’t know about this place never ceases to amaze me. In 1282, the Tuscan monk Ristoro d’Arezzo declared, “It is a dreadful thing for the inhabitants of a house not to know how it is made.”47 Dreadful, indeed. What I think he meant was that we ought to understand the earth we live on, its skies, its stones. We ought to understand why we live the lives we live. But I don’t even understand the apartment building in which I live. How is linoleum made? Or window glass, or porcelain? By what power does water rise to the third floor and pour out of this faucet?

  Forget the house, how about the body? Arteriosclerosis, embolism, thrombosis, infarction—I don’t know what any of those things are. Do we really know t
hat Shauna fainted because she was tired? Or did she faint because a little clot is wandering the tunnels of her arteries, waiting to stop up her blood supply and finish her off?

  And what about Rome? Rome is beautiful, Rome is ugly. Something about this city exacerbates contrasts, the incongruities and contradictions, a Levi’s billboard rippling on the façade of a four-hundred-year-old church, a drunk sleeping on the tram in $300 shoes. Four mornings ago I watched a man chat with the baker for five minutes while a half dozen of us waited behind him, then climb into a Mercedes and tear off at fifty miles an hour. As if he had not a single second to spare.

  Ciao, ciao. Buongiorno, buongiorno. I understand less about Italy now than I did in November. Maybe I understand less about Italy now than I did when I was seven, filling in the outlines of the Colosseum in a coloring book.

  What is Rome? It’s a place where a grown man can drive a tiny car called a Panda or Musa (the Muse) or Punto (the Dot) or Stilo (the Stylus) or Picasso.

  It’s a feast every damned week. It’s maddening retail hours. It’s a city about to become half old-people’s home/half tourist museum. It’s like America before coffee was “to go,” when a playground was a patch of gravel, some cigarette butts, and an uninspected swing set; when everybody smoked; when businesses in your neighborhood were owned by people who lived in your neighborhood; when children still stood on the front seats of moving cars and spread their fingers across the dash. It’s a public health-care service that ensures assistance to both Italians and foreigners in an equal manner and allows a doctor to make a decision such as keeping Shauna overnight without having to worry about costing her several thousand dollars. It’s our friend Cristiano Urbani, who is the first male in his family in at least four generations not to become a fishmonger. “You know,” he says, “they get up so early in the morning. And they always smell like fish!” It’s an economy in recession, the lowest birthrate in Europe (1.3 children per woman), 40 percent of thirty- to thirty-four-year-olds still living with their parents. It’s a place where stoplights are open to interpretation, lattes should never be ordered after lunch, and a man is not considered a failure if he’s forty years old and still spinning dough in a pizzeria. It’s a country where parents let their kids play soccer in the streets and walk home from school unaccompanied, where your first thought when you see an adult man talking to a child in the street is not necessarily Child molester.

  One block I feel as though I’m unraveling the hyphae of some elemental memory, ivy swinging from Michelangelo’s unfinished bridge behind the Palazzo Farnese, water pouring from a satyr’s mouth into an upturned scallop shell—meaning is reverberating through the stones, a key is slipping into a keyhole, and the largest gate between me and this city is finally going to open.

  The next block I see two men in zippered leather with rings through their lips dropping rocks off the Ponte Sisto at passing joggers, and I think, There is nothing here I’ll ever understand.

  Che carini. Che belli. The moon gleams above the terrace. Right now, from every direction, from Europe, from South America, from Africa, people stream into Rome to mourn one dead man, to glimpse an incandescent, two-thousand-year-old mystery. And I walk around as though kidnapped by insurgents, beauty streaming through the edges of the blindfold. As I watch, one after another, five, then six, then seven swifts dive into the throat of a chimney.

  “Though you are a whole world, Rome,” Goethe wrote in 1790, “still, without love, the world’s not the world, Rome cannot be Rome.”48

  A spring night is a power that sweeps through the crowded sheaves of blooming tulips and pours into your heart like a river.

  On the morning of the pope’s funeral, April 8, three fighter jets roar over the apartment, rattling dishes in the cupboards. Helicopters float above the Vatican.

  Shauna looks better, makes jokes, lugs both boys around in her arms. I work all morning on a book review, then walk the crest of the Janiculum, past the big statue of Garibaldi on horseback, past the pedestals and busts of all his lieutenants, down the steep, narrow alley plunging toward the Tiber. Still I don’t see the throngs, not the way the news keeps telling us to expect: between 4 and 5 million mourners, a four-kilometer queue to see John Paul’s body, twenty mourners—exhausted, dehydrated—fainting every hour.

  Then I reach the river. Volunteers in fluorescent green, many wearing fedoras with feathers stuck in the bands, block the street. There is no entering any of the streets I might ordinarily use to approach the basilica. Ambulances and military vehicles idle in intersections; everything is sealed off. To get any closer I’ll have to cross the Tiber and work my way around to the Vatican from the far bank.

  Along the bridge closest to me, the Ponte Principe Amedeo Savoia Aosta, candles stand along the length of the parapets, dead inside red glass. Pilgrims drowse on the cobbles: a group of college kids, women in beach chairs, a collared priest wearing what looks like snowpants. The water below is pale green, wrinkled silver with sunlight. A plywood plank the width and length of a minivan travels slowly downstream.

  The riverside plane trees on the far side are dropping so many seeds, the air seems filled with snow. The seeds tap softly against the lenses of my sunglasses. A fireboat trolls by, then a police boat. Dust blows up from the media depot by Castle Sant’Angelo.

  People walk about with sleeping bags folded in their arms. Tents line the jogging path. Every tenth pilgrim I pass is carrying a big overnight backpack or dragging a suitcase on wheels. Nearly everyone has the glassy, hollow look you get when you’ve slept on something too hard and awakened too early for too many days in a row.

  The Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II is completely cordoned off. On the next bridge upriver, the Ponte Sant’Angelo, pilgrims are packed shoulder to shoulder. I squeeze in. Dozens of radios play, all tuned to the same station. Everyone is slow and calm, facing the same direction. An altar boy with a sign in Polish squeezes past. Two nuns sit hugging their knees on a sheet of cardboard. Someone beside the pope’s body, a half mile away, finishes a speech, and applause reverberates through the radios and hisses out of distant speakers, erected on scaffolding.

  It takes me fifteen minutes to get across the bridge. On the other side, along the fringes of the crowd, men sell whatever they can: John Paul dinner plates, John Paul T-shirts, John Paul heads molded from plastic, a misaligned seam bisecting his face. Thousands and thousands of people clutch newsprint copies of the pope’s will in different languages—as if he were some wealthy uncle who might have left them something. And maybe he did.

  I clamber up on a railing and manage to glimpse the basilica a half mile away, massive and dignified at the far end of via della Conciliazione, a thin red foam of cardinals on the top stair, a tide of black behind them, presidents, queens, ambassadors, chancellors. Then come the descending parallels of streetlamps and a couple million bodies, like a beach of multicolored sand stretching all the way to the river. The air ripples; white media canopies, pitched on rooftops, flap against their tethers.

  I think, If all the victims of the tsunami shuffled up a single boulevard, this is what it might look like. But this is more: 2 million, 3 million. Twice the population of Idaho. The numbers are too large to mean much until I am confronted with an entire city block of outhouses: at least a thousand of them, in three curving rows, bright blue, fans humming. A truck has somehow eased into their mass and sucks sewage out of the toilets, one after another.

  Now there is applause, now singing. The song drifts from throats and radios and speaker towers. Someone up at the basilica begins a blessing, and practically everyone’s face around me turns down. Preghiamo. Let us pray.

  A cameraman on a scaffolding peels a banana. A priest in broken eyeglasses sleeps slumped against a tree trunk. A map of the earth, printed on a beach towel, is draped over his shoulders.

  It’s as if I’ve wandered into the biggest tailgate party in history, three days too long, the enthusiasm faded to a raw-throated, glassy fatigue—some people are cry
ing; many are asleep. Volunteers hand out liters of water. A woman cradles a full-grown German shepherd. A man snores.

  The blues of paramedics, the bright greens of volunteers, the navy pants and red pant-stripe of carabinieri—all the colors of Italy have turned out. Piazza Pia is closed; Borgo Sant’Angelo is closed. I will have to circumnavigate the entire state of the Vatican, I realize, only to end up where I started. All these somber faces, listening to their radios, staring at each other’s back. If they’re very tall, or lucky, all they can see is scaffolding, and cameras. Otherwise they’re all looking at the back of someone else’s head. And yet they’re here, feeling that they’re part of something.

  I suddenly feel a bit proprietary about it—why is my access restricted? Who gave all these Polish flagbearers the right? And then I realize that this is the point—the papacy of John Paul, the Catholic Church, even Rome itself, belongs to anyone who is lucky enough to believe in it. This is medieval Catholicism: Rome at the hub of a vast and slowly revolving wheel, a cult of personality, a Metropolis of Church. Technology exposed every curve of John Paul’s face to billions; he was the most familiar man in the world, your village pastor, your grandfather, your confessor, and the world is that much less consistent and safe without him.

  The speakers sing again. The radios sing again. Maybe this right now is his final miracle: somehow he has transformed millions of spectators into millions of participants.

  In the distance the great dome drifts in a tide of silver air, presiding over everything. This is the largest funeral in the history of the world, the largest gathering of dignitaries, and the largest single pilgrimage in the history of Christendom. For now it is dense, almost private. A woman pushes through the crowd, head down, wildflowers in both fists. Beside me a teenager with strands of barbed wire tattooed around his wrists wipes his eyes with the hem of his shirt. A nun on a suitcase gives me a smile. The slow singing starts and stops, and the men and women around me begin to respond to the mass, mumbling low in a smattering of languages. The sky blows past the cupola, hurrying, another April, the bright clouds moving as they’ve always moved above the events of this city, and 4 million voices rise to meet them.