The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

“Stella?”

  “I can hardly hear you. Can you go outside or move to a window?”

  “I am outside,” I said, stepping out onto the balcony.

  “Why didn’t you call? I’ve been worried sick.”

  “I couldn’t get the cell phone to work.”

  “We went over everything.”

  “I dialed all the numbers you gave me but nothing happened. And my landlady can’t get it to work for the United States, and she’s got three cell phones. Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Ma, did you put in the Italian SIM card? It’s in the case with the phone. You just open the back of the phone the way I showed you and slip it in. And I didn’t have the number of your landlady’s phone till I got your e-mail. I got this number from her. You were supposed to call from the airport. Listen, Ma, I just wanted to know how you are, that you’re all right. Today, you know. The anniversary.”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you called.”

  The next morning I gave a talk at the Club di Giulietta to a dozen young women, Juliet surrogates, including Samantha, who’d made the arrangements. I entertained them with imaginary letters to famous tragic lovers: Dido, Francesca, Guenevere, Isolde, Norma, Aïda. Were they different from the young women who wrote to Juliet, to Ann Landers and Dear Abby?

  Or is it the same thing over and over?

  “The problem,” I said, in Italian, “is this: these women haven’t learned how to suffer, haven’t learned how to translate their suffering into thought, their jealousy into self-knowledge, their unrequited love into a deeper understanding of love itself. Our task, as Juliets, is to teach these young woman to learn how to suffer like intelligent young women, not like dumb animals who can’t articulate their experiences.”

  Not too bad, I thought, but at lunch with Samantha, I had my doubts. It was good advice, of course. But like a lot of good advice it’s not really the sort of thing you can teach someone. Nor was it something I could apply in my own case.

  The next morning I had coffee in a bar in Piazza Signori—the drawing room of Verona. This piazza, with its elegant Romanesque facades, was relatively quiet, unlike neighboring Piazza delle Erbe. Only the one bar, and the Caffè Dante. It was eight o’clock in the morning, early October and cool. The sky was pale blue. I was thinking about Samantha’s advice, about Juliet’s advice. I’d sat in this piazza, in this bar, with Paul. I read Catullus and drank more coffee till the waiter began to set up tables outside the Caffè Dante. It would probably be too chilly to eat outside, though I was warm enough in my cloth coat. The sky was gray now, like the piazza. I walked around the piazza. A sign in stone on the east side said: ci siamo, e ci rimaneremo. We’re here, and we’re going to stay here.

  I had lunch at Caffè Dante as soon as it opened. Paul and I had eaten here. It was warm in the café and I pulled off my sweater. I was wearing a white blouse with a high collar tucked into a dark blue skirt that was pleasantly tight around my hips. Samantha had helped me tie my hair up in a French twist. I could feel it coming loose, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t looking at anything. I couldn’t focus, and when someone walked by wearing a suit like Paul’s, I had to take my glasses off and put them back on again.

  The waiter brought my pasta, I don’t remember what it was, and then thin slices of horse in a thick tomato sauce. I’m not really fond of horse, but it’s a specialty in Verona. Not bad, but the sauce was too heavy, or maybe I was just too sad.

  15

  “Confession” (October 2006)

  The next morning I took a very early train to Rome so I wouldn’t have to change trains in Bologna. Samantha and Giorgio drove me to the station and we promised to write.

  The train stopped in Florence, backed into the station. I wasn’t scheduled to meet Father Viglietti till the next day, and I thought of getting off. Going to the Uffizi, or to the Accademia. There were friends I could call, now that I’d installed the Italian SIM card in my cell phone. But nothing called to me. Not “The Primavera,” not Donatello’s “David,” not the “Portrait of Federigo da Montefeltro.” I was too anxious to get to Rome. I had a copy of Saint Augustine’s Confessions in my briefcase, but I hadn’t opened it.

  The sacrament of confession, I knew now, was instituted by Christ after the crucifixion when he appeared to his disciples, outside the empty tomb, and breathed on them and gave them the power to forgive sins, or not forgive them. Not as a personal prerogative, of course, but in their official capacity as deputy priests. This power has been handed down from one generation of deputy priests to the next through the apostolic succession and now rested in the hands of men such as Father Viglietti.

  Contrition, of course, is part of the deal. The sacrament’s not going to take if you’re not really sorry for whatever it is you did and if you don’t pay the debt you’ve incurred by sinning.

  Hard to credit, but it externalized something, as Stella liked to say, gave it a shape and a name, gave bodily form to our conviction (mine and just about everyone else’s) that in some mysterious way the universe, the totality, cares about our behavior, that a preference for torturing animals or small children is not the same as a preference for pistachio ice cream or Italian ices.

  My heart was restless. This restlessness was something I could understand on an experiential level, in the body, along the pulse and in the heart. So to speak. It was like the tug of beauty I felt coming from the Chopin Étude in C Minor or “C. C. Rider,” or “Casta Diva.” The kite string again. Paul and I flying a kite, trying to let out a mile of string up at Warren Dunes on Lake Michigan. Letting the string out was one thing; reeling it back in was another. We pulled too hard, the string broke, and we never saw the kite again.

  In the afternoon I walked along the Tiber, pausing in front of Carcere Regina Coeli—Queen of Heaven Prison—and trying to imagine what prison life would be like, but not getting very far. I was no longer agitated, as I’d been in Verona. But I was in a state of great excitement, too, as might be expected of a traveler about to embark on a long and dangerous journey.

  That night in the hotel I browsed through the Confessions, thinking I might get a glimpse of my destination. But I landed on Book V, where Augustine describes his experiences in Rome. He was not a happy camper. He had come to teach rhetoric, but his students would skip out just before the end of his lectures to avoid paying his fees.

  I was not going to meet Father Viglietti till one o’clock, so in the morning I walked from the hotel to the Vatican and located the Excavations office. I hadn’t made the required e-mail reservation, but I paid my nine euros and was put in with a group of pilgrims from Lyon. Mostly women my age. Very well decked out. It was not too cold in Rome. I’d left my coat behind at the hotel and worn just a heavy sweater over a turtleneck. I could follow the French-speaking tour guide, but my mind was on other things, and it wasn’t till Father Viglietti explained, at lunch, that I began to understand what I had seen. Like so many things in Italy the whole excavation below the Basilica of Saint Peter was wrapped in scandal. In a space below the high altar excavators had discovered not the bones of Saint Peter but the bones of sheep, oxen, pigs, and a mouse. One archaeologist had cut the electricity when he was gone so other archaeologists couldn’t do any work. At first there was no evidence that Saint Peter had been buried there, but later a woman had discovered his bones, as well as a lot of inscriptions, but she had been completely discredited. In the seventeenth century archaeologists had discovered a number of erotic items that the pope of the day had apparently thrown in the Tiber, but Father Viglietti wasn’t clear about these items, and apparently no one else was, either.

  We were eating lunch in a restaurant in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. We reminisced about the times we’d spent playing The Roman Republic, going for drinks in the Seminary Street Pub, arguing about the Republic and the Empire, but our hearts weren’t in it.

  After lunch we sat on the stone steps that circle the fountain. I kept the strap on
my briefcase, which I’d almost forgotten in the restaurant, hooked under my arm.

  “This is where I made my last confession,” I said. “In the church. And then Paul came. I thought . . . It doesn’t matter. I was thinking, I’d like to make my confession now. To you. We can just do it, right? Privately? An auricular confession. Well, not so privately, but just the two of us.”

  “What have you done, Frances, that can’t wait till you get home?”

  “You won’t know unless . . . Please, Father.”

  Father Viglietti was very reluctant.

  “You don’t need any equipment, do you? Holy water?”

  “No,” he said. “No special equipment. It has been a long time, hasn’t it.”

  “Bless me, Father,” I said, “for I have sinned.”

  “How long since your last confession?”

  “Forty-three years.”

  “Go on.”

  “Father, I’ve committed murder. I killed someone. In cold blood. Well, I was angry, but I know that’s no excuse. You remember Jimmy, Stella’s boyfriend. Her husband, actually. He wanted . . .”

  I told him the whole story.

  He didn’t say anything for a long time. I kept my head down, but I was aware of the water splashing in the fountain, of the footsteps—high heels, flats, boots—on the gray paving stones; the waiters clearing the tables in the restaurants; the traffic on the via della Lungaretta; someone playing an accordion and singing.

  “Frances,” he said finally. “You know something?”

  I waited. Keeping my head down, as if expecting a blow.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Doesn’t matter?” And I understood immediately that Father Viglietti was a step ahead of me. I’d been expecting him to hold his hand up and say “Turn back, Frances,” but he was beckoning me to follow him into the indifferent Lucretian universe. I’d crossed one line after another, one Rubicon after another. I’d thought I’d gone as far as I could go, but now a new landscape was opening up before me, still another Rubicon. ’Tis but a man gone, Roderigo says to Iago as he lies in wait for Cassio. Was that Jimmy, too? ’Tis but a man gone. I didn’t want to think so.

  “That’s not all, Father,” I said.

  I could see he was surprised.

  “You’ve killed more people?”

  “No, just the one. But I made a mess of things, didn’t I? Stella was going to file for divorce. I didn’t have to kill anyone. She could have gotten a restraining order. She could have gone to Jimmy’s uncle. He would have protected her. And now she has, in fact. He’s the one she looks to when she needs advice or affirmation. Not me. And Paul. Why was I such a naysayer? Why didn’t we get new tires and drive the car around? He could have managed. Why did I put the kibosh on the telescope? It was too expensive, sure, but we could have managed, and he could have seen 3C 273 again before he died. And the piano. I shouldn’t have sold it, I realized that, later—realized it as they were carting it down the driveway to the truck. I still could have tracked it down, bought it back. Maybe. And why didn’t I listen to Dr. Franklin, who wanted Paul to start taking lithium? Maybe lithium would have calmed him down, helped him with his damned shoelaces. But instead I gave him a hard time every step of the way. He wanted new locks, an alarm system, a dog, a pistol. So what? Jimmy didn’t come in the apartment, the way Paul thought, but he might have, and he did in fact come in the house on Prairie Street and trash the chandelier.

  “What have I done with my life, Father? I taught a dead language for forty-one years. I’ve published a translation of Catullus that no one will read. I discovered the Verona codex and didn’t say anything about it because . . . I dropped my fountain pen and spilled ink on the floor. I sold a car for three quarters of a million dollars and then invested that so I could make more money. What happened to the impulse that Paul and I had to give away all our possessions? Give the money to the poor. That was after we’d been drinking, of course, and we didn’t know what we’d do next. I did give away one of Paul’s pots, a copper saucepan, and he never got over it!

  “I drove the car over a hundred miles an hour. How stupid was that? I could have killed someone, someone else.

  “And what about Tommy? I lay down with him in the Palmer House and then killed his nephew and then I humiliated him. Couldn’t face him. Couldn’t do the honest thing.

  “You know something, Father? I know now that the atoms in my fingernails were generated in the cores of distant stars. We’re all stardust. But that’s not enough. Not for me, anyway.

  “You remember you heard a funny noise in church one Saturday afternoon? You wanted to know if I was all right? That was God making that noise. That’s your music of the spheres.

  “My life doesn’t add up to anything, Father. More like the story of Troy—all in a day’s work—than Rome, going in circles instead of moving forward. I’ve worn out all the roles I used to play—daughter, student, lover, wife, mother, Latin teacher. Now I’m just . . . I don’t know what I’m doing. Every September, when school starts up again, it starts up without me.”

  I’d never experienced an awkward silence with Father Viglietti, but I thought I was about to experience one now as I was starting to sink into the implications of what I’d just “confessed.” The music, the buskers—guitars, an accordion, even a double bass—all seemed far, far away.

  “Frankeska,” he said finally, switching to Latin. “Non absolutione sed ‘grappa’ opus est.” You don’t need absolution. You need a grappa, and then a nap.”

  “Tonight?” I said. “Could we have dinner, sort it out over a glass of wine? We could have deep-fried artichokes at one of those restaurants near Campo de’ Fiori. Carciofi alla Giudia.”

  “I’m sorry, Frances,” he said. “It’s the rector’s dinner tonight, a fundraiser for the Clementine Pontifical Academy. I might be able to get you a ticket for four hundred fifty dollars. A seat at the rector’s table will set you back fifteen thousand.” He laughed.

  “I understand,” I said. Though I didn’t really understand.

  “You have to go?”

  “I’m the rector.”

  “I didn’t realize that,” I said. “You never told me.”

  “You’re leaving in the morning?”

  I nodded. “But I have something for you.” I handed him the copy of Catullus Redivivus that I’d been carrying in my briefcase. “I’ve already inscribed it,” I said.

  He tucked the book under his arm and held both my hands in his. For a long time. We were both reluctant to let go.

  “Ave atque vale,” I said. Hello and good-bye.

  “Ave atque vale,” he replied. “Do you need a cab?” he asked. “Back to your hotel?”

  “No,” I said. “I think I’ll just stay here for a while. In the piazza. And then I’ll walk back. It’s not far.”

  I sat on the steps of the fountain all afternoon. I did not go into the church. I did not feel that I was free from sin. But I felt free from something. I wanted to call Stella. To hear her voice. It was late afternoon, eleven or twelve o’clock in Milwaukee. By this time lots of young people had gathered around the fountain. I got out my cell phone, but instead of calling Stella, I decided to try my astronomy app in the daytime. Something I’d never done. It worked. Astonishing. I kept looking up at the gray-blue sky, but of course there were no stars. And then looking back at the little screen on the cell phone. It was October, but the little screen on the phone was full of spring constellations. Pegasus was rising over Testaccio, Virgo was setting over the Janiculum. It was disorienting. To see these constellations in the daytime. In October. I couldn’t get my mind around it.

  I sat on the steps till it started to get dark and the steps started to get crowded. A young couple with a baby that needed its diaper changed sat down next to me. I kept holding up my cell phone to see the stars and then looking at the sky itself, but I couldn’t ignore the smell. Mamma and Papà were struggling with the baby’s diaper. The baby really stunk it up. People�
�young people who’d never changed a baby’s diaper in their lives—moved away. I stayed put. Mamma and Papà had run out of baby wipes. I offered them a packet of Kleenex from my purse.

  The father disposed of the diaper.

  “I have a daughter too,” I said.

  “Well,” the mother said, “we should have asked you to change her.”

  “I’d have done it in half the time,” I said, and we started chatting.

  What was I looking at? they wanted to know.

  “The stars,” I said. They took turns looking at the stars on the screen on the phone and then up into the darkening blue sky.

  I listened to the sexually charged banter of the young people sitting on the steps, touching and rubbing against each other. The lashing of the fountain, the gurgling of the baby, and the buskers scattered around the piazza.

  “The Big Dipper,” the man said, looking at the phone and then at the sky and then back at the phone. Only he called it orsa maggiore.

  A man lay on his back near the church steps, knees up, supporting a young woman in a short checkered skirt who was spinning something on her fingers. Another man played a small accordion while another juggled three balls, then four, then five. I thought they were together but couldn’t be sure.

  We sat on the steps till it grew dark and the real stars began to appear. There was too much light pollution to see any but the brightest stars—Altair in the east, Aldebaran in the west, Deneb overhead. Rome is at about the same latitude as Galesburg, so I felt right at home. If she looked up, Stella would see the same night sky, though Milwaukee is a little farther north, and it wouldn’t be dark for another six hours. Or seven. I could never remember.

  I held the baby while her mother went to one of the trattorias in the piazza to get something to eat. She brought back a tray of salami and cheese, omelets, couscous, tarts and pizzas, pasta, crostini, salads, desserts. A half-liter of wine. Real glasses. Napkins.

  I thought I could taste the stars, the food was so good, and the wine; and hear them too, in the sounds of the piazza, and even smell them in the faint smell of the baby’s diaper that still lingered in the air. And hold them in my arms, like the baby, whose name was Gina. I could hear it, the music of the spheres. Well, I could hear something.