Monsignor Ackerman stood up and started to walk again. It was as if he had to walk off a cramp. Really, what he wanted to walk off was his life. Nate followed along. The priest talked, almost to himself, again.
“I’ve never met a priest who was not diminished by celibacy. Never. Don’t let them tell you that they love in the abstract or love in general. That’s bullshit. That’s their rationalization. It’s their way of avoiding real love. It’s their way of avoiding commitments.”
He picked up a rock by the path and threw it against a tomb.
“Celibacy leaves a wound. Some people kid themselves into thinking it doesn’t, but it does. You try to compensate, but you are never really whole. Some priests drown their sorrows in alcohol or pills. A lot of them overeat and get obese. Food is a great drug.”
Nate had noticed that a lot of priests were obese, but he had never really thought about why.
Ackerman was growing agitated again, and there was no stopping him. “Some guys travel all the time to escape. Others take secret lovers. Some redecorate the rectory over and over again. That’s a classic clerical tradition, decorating. Just look at all the frescoes in the Vatican. It’s a kind of retail therapy that’s been going on for centuries.”
“What are they trying to compensate for?” asked Nate.
“It’s all really just a pitiful compensation for the lack of love,” said Ackerman. “Celibates are all trying to make up for the one thing they tell everybody else is the reason for living—love. We tell everybody that God is love, but we don’t have any in our own lives.”
Nate thought Ackerman was just over the top.
“Spare me your self-pity,” said Nate. “Lots of people live all or part of their lives without sex. What about all the sick or handicapped? What about widows? They’re celibate. Even married people don’t have sex all the time.” He thought of his own marriage.
“Is that what you think I’m talking about?” asked Ackerman angrily. “Sex? Grow up! I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about love.”
He turned to Nate, almost screaming. “I don’t have to take that from you, Nate Condon. Look at you. Life comes easy to you. You’re handsome. You’re rich. You’re athletic. You’re smart. You’re respected. Everybody loves YOU!”
He poked his finger at Nate with each staccato declaration. “The world is your oyster. You never wake up and look in the mirror and hate what you see. There’s no conflict in the life of the Nate Condons of this world. It’s different for me. I hate what I see in the mirror.”
Nate was silent. He had never thought of himself as privileged. But he guessed Ackerman was right. Life had given him some challenges, but no internal conflicts.
“I married myself to Holy Mother the Church, and she hates me. She tells me every day that there is something wrong with me. Mother Church tells me that I am ‘intrinsically disordered.’ What does that mean? I’m told that my deepest desires and yearnings, which hurt no one, are my path to hell. Basically, my own Church tells me I am a freak. It tells me that God has made some ghastly mistake.”
Ackerman stopped walking for a moment. A sob came out of him from somewhere deep inside. A lady down the path in the cemetery heard it and looked in their direction. Nate knew she probably assumed that Ackerman was grieving someone who had died. He was: himself.
Ackerman sat down on a stone bench. His sobbing stopped, which was a relief to Nate.
Ackerman started talking again. “Sex and lies are not really the biggest clerical sins. John XXIII thought ambition was the real clerical sin. We use it as a substitute for love and affection. Look at the bishops. They don’t fool me! I read their dossiers all day, every day. They’re nothing but a bunch of peacocks preening themselves in hopes of getting noticed by the next guy up the ladder. Peacocks, all of them!”
Ackerman stood up again and kicked at the gravel in the path, sending it flying. He was full of furious energy now.
“Yes, Your Excellency! No, Your Eminence! Where else in the whole goddamn world do grown men expect to be called excellent or eminent? But they know the truth. They’re just like all these poor slobs buried here.” Ackerman gestured toward the array of tombs stretching off into the distance. “We all share the same demons. They’re no more excellent than the next guy.”
Nate interjected, “There must be some healthy and happy priests.”
“Sure,” said Ackerman. “But they aren’t over here in Rome.
“Plenty of good guys get ordained, but they don’t stay here. They go home to Iowa or Missouri or wherever.” He gestured off toward the horizon. “They go back and become ordinary parish priests. If they are lucky, they fall in love with their parishes, and if they are really lucky, their parishioners fall in love with them. But they never look back. That’s what I should have done.”
“So, why didn’t you just go home and become a parish priest?” asked Nate, looking Ackerman straight in the eye. “You could have had a good life.”
“You want the truth? I didn’t want it. I was too proud. That was my real sin. I was too proud to do the ordinary crap of being a parish priest.”
Nate looked at Ackerman.
“Don’t look at me like I’m some kind of freak. I’m not the only one who was too proud for ordinary parish work. Just look at these bishops. None of them, truth be told, ever wanted to be ordinary parish priests. They all say they did, but they didn’t.” He paused for a few seconds. “They didn’t want the endless confessions, depressing nursing homes, stinking prisons, and daily onslaught of hospital rooms and funerals, crazy people, and endless problems any more than I did. It bored me. It bores most bishops. I wanted what most bishops really want. I wanted to be in charge.”
“Did you get what you wanted here?” asked Nate.
“Does it look like I got what I wanted?” responded Ackerman, gesturing toward himself. “I’m a pathetic bureaucrat who drinks his nights away in dark bars, pretending to be someone else. I hate my life. I got nothing. It all turns to ashes in your mouth.”
Once more he kicked the gravel in the path and snorted.
“It’s ironic,” he said. “This is actually the most honest confession of my life, and you aren’t even a priest. You can’t give me absolution, can you, Father Condon?” Ackerman made the sign of the cross in the air, as if blessing the graves.
Ackerman turned toward Nate and looked straight into his eyes.
“What do you think cardinals like Crepi and Salazar really believe? Anything? Do you think they believe in God? Do you think they believe in Jesus Christ? Do you think they believe in carrying their cross, self-sacrifice, humility, and being a servant of others? Nonsense! Hell, they won’t even wash women’s feet on Holy Thursday. They want people to serve them. That’s it—nothing else! Especially those two, Crepi and Salazar. They are as corrupt as they come. Like I told you, look into them. The Camorra has something on them. I’ve heard that for years.
“Something happened down in Napoli, thirty or forty years ago. That’s what I hear. They were involved in somebody’s death. A man or boy fell off a ferryboat or something like that. The Camorra saved their asses. So, now they owe them forever, just like Faust. Go down to Naples and see for yourself. It must be something big for them to finger their own pals for assassination and launder money for drug lords.”
“I’ll look into it,” said Nate. “If there is something there, I will find it.”
Ackerman attempted to laugh again. Instead, it came out as a half scream and ended as a snort.
“Me and my petty little sins can’t hold a candle to Crepi and Salazar, especially that sniveling little Colombian.” He broke a branch off a nearby tree and started hitting a monument. “They are all a bunch of goddamned Pharisees,” he said, smashing the stick on the stone. “They got what they wanted, places of honor at banquets and titles of respect. Everything Jesus preached against.”
The stick Ackerman was smashing on the tomb was in splinters now.
“Are you jealou
s of them?” asked Nate.
“Ha!” answered Ackerman, throwing his stick. “Not anymore. It’s all crap. Nobody cares about them and their endless pretensions. People here in Italy laugh at them—the ‘men in dresses,’ they say.
“No, I don’t want what they have. All I really want now is to be Matt Ackerman, just plain old Matthew Ackerman from St. Louis, Missouri. But it’s too late for that. I lost myself, my soul, in Faust’s bargain here in Rome.”
Nate could see tears running down Ackerman’s cheeks. For the first time, he really felt sorry for the priest. Nate repeated his earlier question. “So, why didn’t you just leave?”
“I don’t know, for a lot of reasons, I guess. I was afraid that I couldn’t make a living doing anything else. Remember what the bad steward in the gospel says, ‘To beg, I am ashamed. To dig ditches, I am not able.’ It doesn’t make any sense now, but I was afraid. What would I do? Where would I go? Who would have me, a balding middle-aged gay guy with no skills and no money? Fear kept me here. I was stuck. And now I’m finished.”
It occurred to Nate that this was more than a confession. It was a valediction.
Ackerman suddenly stopped in front of a stone mausoleum with a crest over its door that looked like an American eagle. The inscription under the crest in Latin abbreviations read “Pont. Col. Amer. Sept.”
Curious as to why they had stopped, Nate asked, “Whose tomb is this?”
“This is the mausoleum for the North American College,” said Ackerman. He was suddenly calm, as if he were a tour guide. “I suppose I could be buried here.
“In the old days,” the priest explained, “if a student at the NAC died over here in Rome, they didn’t ship his body home to America. They buried him here. Now they fly you home in a box, but there are still a few guys who would rather be buried here. They don’t even go home when they’re dead.”
“Seems strange,” said Nate. “I guess they lose connection with their homes.”
“No,” said Ackerman, “they lose connection with themselves.” Ackerman turned to Nate and asked, “Are you going to help me?”
“I do feel sorry for you, Monsignor, but I have to follow the investigation where it leads,” answered Nate. “I’m not stopping now. Besides, even if I did stop this investigation, there is no guarantee of safety for either of us. I’m sorry.”
“Then I am a dead man,” said Ackerman. “There is nowhere to hide from these people.”
Ackerman asked Nate quietly, “If I die before you leave Rome, would you make sure that my ashes are sent home to Missouri? Maybe there I can just be Matt Ackerman again.”
“Yes,” answered Nate, touched by the request and aware that it was no idle thought. They stood there a moment as if frozen. Then Nate said, “I’ll pray for you, Monsignor.”
“Good,” said the priest. Then Matt Ackerman turned and walked silently off into the City of the Dead.
19
NAPOLI, MATER DOLOROSA
THE TRAIN WHEELS DID NOT MAKE THE USUAL CLICKETY-CLACK. The Frecciarossa, or red arrow, trains operate on welded rails, gliding noiselessly along at speeds of up to two hundred miles per hour. They travel from Rome to Naples—140 miles—in only an hour and ten minutes. As the towns flew past Nate’s window—Anzio, Gaeta, Falciano, and Casoria—he thought, Why doesn’t Amtrak have something like this?
Nate was following up on Monsignor Ackerman’s accusations against Crepi and Salazar, made during their walk through the cemetery at San Lorenzo the day before.
Ackerman had been so insistent that Nate didn’t waste any time following up on the lead. While still on the tram coming back from the cemetery at San Lorenzo, he called his assistant. “Please do some research on Cardinals Crepi and Salazar,” he said. “See what you can find out about them from thirty or forty years ago—newspaper articles, police reports, anything.”
Miss Orsuto was superefficient. In the half hour it took him to get back to his little office near the Vatican, she managed to find a newspaper article in the online archives of Il Mattino, the Naples daily. It was from June, forty-two years earlier.
The article reported that there had been a tragic accident on the overnight traghetto from Naples to Palermo. It said that a young boy, Gianluca Luppino, age seventeen, had fallen overboard and drowned. It mentioned that two priests, monsignors from the Vatican, Crepi and Salazar, had been witnesses. They had seen him go overboard. There was a photo of the two young priests looking very serious. The boy’s body had been retrieved from the water, and the harbor police in Sicily had pronounced it an accident.
A follow-up article a few days later showed a photo of the boy’s mother, Giulia Luppino, age thirty-nine, at the funeral in Naples. She had collapsed from grief at the boy’s funeral and had been taken to the hospital. The paper reported that the whole city had been captured by her sad story. Thousands of flowers had been sent to her hospital room at Ospedale Cardinale Ascalesi. The Napolitani are a bighearted people, and they are nothing if not emotional at other people’s suffering.
Giulia Luppino was still alive forty-two years later, now age eighty-one. Sandra had tracked her down. She could find anyone. With a few phone calls, Miss Orsuto made contact with her. The old woman still lived just north of Naples, in Scampia. Her apartment was in the most crime-ridden and drug-infested housing development in all of Italy, maybe in all of Europe, a place called the Vele, the sails. It got its name from the triangular shape of the gargantuan concrete buildings that, from a distance, had the look of enormous sailing ships.
Sandra told Nate that there had been a movie made about Vele a few years before. The film, Gomorrah, was about the ultimate in degraded modern human life in a concrete desert.
Living in the Vele was beastly and monochromatic, a real-life film noir. The only time Napolitani visited the Vele was to buy heroin. Miss Orsuto said it was known as the heroin capital of Europe.
Sandra made up a file of clippings about the incident forty-two years earlier and about the Vele. When Nate got back to the office, he asked her to make arrangements for him to visit the dead boy’s mother in Naples.
So, the day after his walk with Ackerman, Nate and Sandra were headed south to Naples on the Frecciarossa to interview Giulia Luppino.
Sandra Orsuto was going along to translate and facilitate. In a very short time Nate had really come to rely on her. She was not only efficient, but also discreet and thoughtful. Her language skills had been opening doors for him all over Rome.
The train pulled into Naples Central, a dirty and giant old structure in the heart of chaotic and criminal Napoli.
Napoli is a city one either loves or hates. It has one of the most spectacular urban settings in the world on the Bay of Naples. As a port city, it has all the squalor and tawdriness of any sailor’s town.
The American Seventh Fleet is home ported in Naples. American sailors know it well. Navy officers say that Naples has the weather of San Diego and the ambiance of Calcutta.
Everything is crowded in Naples, especially the area downtown near the train station. Nate and Sandra detrained at the central station and went directly to the taxi stand in front.
Miss Orsuto asked several taxis in the queue to take them to the Vele in Scampia. When the taxi drivers heard the address, they wagged their fingers at them and spat an emphatic “No.” Sometimes, they just laughed out loud.
One taxi driver said to her in Napolitano dialect, “You’re crazy, lady, you and your man in his fancy Armani suit. You don’t want to go there, unless you are buying heroin.”
Finally, one driver outside the normal queue agreed to take them. His vehicle had no taxi medallion or license displayed. Sandra had agreed to pay him the equivalent of one hundred dollars, the price of their luxury train tickets to Naples. The “taxi” driver also agreed to wait for them and bring them back after their visit.
They climbed into the taxi, a filthy and decrepit Fiat Panda, the workhorse of the Italian poor. There was no air-conditioning. All the window
s were rolled down to let in air in the stifling heat and humidity of a Naples summer day. It had been a long time since Nate had ridden in a car with no air-conditioning.
They inched along, street by street, through the traffic fumes of Napoli centro. They had barely gone four blocks when a boy reached in the open rear window and tried to snatch Sandra’s purse. Nate leaned over and grabbed the boy’s arm and nearly broke it. The boy retreated, but not without her purse. Luckily, Miss Orsuto, knowing the ways of Naples, had put her money and identification in her shoulder bag, which was on the floor of the car, firmly fixed under her foot.
Eventually, the taxi freed itself from downtown traffic and climbed up and out of central Naples. The streets became wider, the landscape more desolate. There was trash along the roadside. Plastic bags were caught in the scrawny tree limbs and clung to the bus stop signs. Nate started getting nervous. This was uncharted territory for foreigners.
Whenever you are in a strange country where you don’t speak the language, there is a feeling of helplessness. It’s like being a child again. He was glad that Miss Orsuto was along to translate it all for him.
The taxi came to a stop on a long concrete parking area. A few abandoned cars in the parcheggio appeared to have been totally stripped. One car had even been torched.
Sandra and Nate climbed out of the taxi. As soon as the door was closed, the driver said, “Ciao,” and took off. They stood there open mouthed for a second, realizing that they had just been abandoned.
A concrete bridge led across a kind of moat that surrounded the apartment building before them. They crossed it.
Sandra pointed to a huge vinyl sign, yellow with black lettering, that someone had hung above from the balconies of the top three floors of the building. She read aloud, “Quando il vento dei soprusi sara’ finitio, le vele sarranno spieagate verso le felicita.” She translated, “‘When the wind of the oppressors is done, the Vele will be pushed toward happiness.’ That’s so Napolitano. They are always poetic, even in the most depressing of circumstances,” she said wryly.
Strange Gods Page 22
