by Glenn Cooper
FOUR
MORNING PRAYER IN the chapel. Lesson-plan reviews. Teaching. Marking homework. Evening prayer. Communal dining in the residence. Reading and meditation. Night-time prayer. Bed.
Such was Elisabetta’s rhythm, the gentle pulse of her weekdays.
Saturdays were for chapel and private prayer, shopping, chatting with sisters and novices, perhaps a football match on TV or a movie.
But Sunday was her favorite. She took Mass at the Basilica Santa Maria in Trastevere. It was here that, as a girl, she took her First Communion, here that she prayed for her sick mother, here that she saw her off with an achingly sad Funeral Mass, here that she came for confession, for solace, for joy.
It was curious, Elisabetta mused, the way her life had unfolded. As a teenager she’d been besotted with notions of adventure and travel, and archeology seemed a ticket to the exotic. But the gravitational pull of the ancient Basilica of Santa Maria proved stronger than those of Luxor or Teotihuacan. Her father, the absentminded widower, would need her, she had decided. Zazo and Micaela, each with their own charmingly self-centered ways, were clearly not the ones to look after him properly, particularly as he grew older. So at university she set her sights closer to home and took up classical archeology.
Then Zazo introduced her to his academy pal, Marco. Good sweet Marco who wanted nothing more than to be a policeman, marry the woman of his dreams and root like a madman for A.S. Roma. He’d never leave Rome, that was for sure, so Elisabetta further narrowed her aspirations to Roman archeology and the early Christian period when the catacombs began to honeycomb the soft volcanic tuff of the city. She would stay in Rome forever. With Marco, with her family.
And then, that terrible night when Marco was ripped away from her. That night had heralded a long spell of physical healing and intense reflection after which she disassembled the person she was and reassembled the person she wanted to be.
Now Elisabetta’s entire universe lay within a mere square kilometer on the western bank of the Tiber. Her school was there, her church, her father’s flat on the Via Luigi Masi. They were the same few blocks that had circumscribed her childhood. The insularity was comforting, like a womb.
Mass was over. Elisabetta had taken communion from old Father Santoro, the priest who also tended to the clerical needs of her order and whose aged voice retained the timbre of a finely cast bell. She lingered under the apse vault after most parishioners had departed, soaking in the stillness. There were biblical scenes above her head set against a sea of golden tiles. The dome was fashioned by Cavallini in the twelfth century and the stories he depicted in mosaic were so intricate that she was, after all these years, still discovering images she had never noticed before. Once she had located the slender mockingbird mosaic, devilishly difficult to find, she always made a point to crane her neck and blink a silent hello to it.
In the thin light of a spring morning Elisabetta walked purposefully to her father’s apartment. The people she passed fell into two camps. One group, mostly older folks, actively sought out her gaze, hoping for a smile and a blessing nod in return. The other group seemed to pretend that she didn’t exist, her robes a cloak of invisibility. She preferred the latter. These walks were precious to her, private reminders of the secular life she’d left behind. She enjoyed looking in store windows, reading the movie posters, watching the easy street intimacy of young couples, remembering what it felt like to walk these streets as a ‘civilian’. But nothing she saw changed her mind or chipped away at her bedrock certainties; the opposite was true. Each passage through her old domain was an affirmation. She was proud to wear her faith on her black sleeves, to openly celebrate the intense love for Christ that she carried within her heart.
When she arrived at her father’s door she braced herself. He never failed to open it with a backhanded swipe, not so much out of sourness any longer but, unquestionably, out of habit.
They kissed. He was so quick with the peck that he missed Elisabetta’s cheek and landed his lips on the edge of her veil. ‘How was Mass?’ he asked.
‘It was lovely.’
‘Blinded by the light?’
She followed him toward the kitchen.
Elisabetta sighed. ‘Yes, exactly, Papa.’
As usual, her nose was assaulted by the heavy Cavendish pipe tobacco that fogged the air. When she was a girl she hardly noticed it, except when someone at school sniffed at her jumper and made fun. It was simply the way her world smelled. Now that she was an adult, she shuddered to think what was going on inside her father’s lungs after all these decades.
Befitting a full professor, Carlo Celestino’s was a spacious flat on the top floor of a clay-white apartment block on a narrow sloping street. There were three bedrooms – she’d shared one with Micaela from early childhood until Elisabetta first left for university. Zazo, the blessed son, had always rated his own room. Now their bedrooms gathered dust, locked into time warps. The door to her father’s bedroom was closed. It was always shut and she had no idea what state it was in, though the rest of the apartment was at worst, only untidy. Dust and grime were the domain of the housekeeper but the woman was too scared to touch the teetering stacks of papers and books that covered most wooden surfaces of the reception rooms.
Carlo Celestino hardly fit the stereotypical image of a mathematician. He had the square shoulders, squat legs and ruddy complexion of a farmer, which made him the odd man out amongst a cadre of spindly, wan colleagues who populated the Department of Theoretical Mathematics at La Sapienza. But he’d always been different, a genetic outlier who had sprung unexpectedly from a lineage of simple dairymen, a fellow whose first boyhood memories were not of cows and pastures but of numbers whirring through his head, organizing themselves.
He’d held onto his parents’ ancient farmhouse in Abruzzo and still took weekends and holidays in the rolling hills overlooking the Adriatic doing as much physical work on the hilly land as his sixty-eight-year-old body would take, letting his mind play with the theorem he’d wrestled with his entire life: the Goldbach Conjecture, a mathematical confection that his wife had claimed he loved more than her. Imagine, she’d said, with that look of exasperation that Elisabetta and Micaela would inherit, spending all your time trying to prove the assertion that every even integer greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers! She couldn’t fathom it then, and what would she have thought if she’d lived another twenty-five years? Here he was, still trying to prove the damned theorem for the sake of bragging rights which had eluded the world’s mathematicians for 250 years.
Elisabetta thought her father looked tired, his thick white hair more disheveled than usual. ‘How have you been feeling, Papa?’
‘Me? Fine. Why?’
‘No reason. Just asking. When are Micaela and Zazo coming?’
‘They won’t arrive before you’ve finished cooking, you know that.’
She laughed and donned an apron. ‘Let’s have a look at the joint.’
He got the lamb from the fridge and while she was unwrapping the brown paper he suddenly blurted out, ‘They don’t want to give me any new grad students.’
‘I knew there was something,’ she said, keeping her gaze on the pink meat.
‘They do that when they think someone’s gotten too old or too feeble.’
‘I’m sure it’s neither,’ Elisabetta said. ‘But maybe you should be glad you’re not taking on new students. It’s four or five years until they get their degrees. Sometimes longer.’
‘The next stage will be offering me an emeritus position, then moving my office to the basement. I know how these things work, believe me.’ Carlo frowned fiercely, his bushy eyebrows almost meeting above the bridge of his nose. His big fists clenched.
Elisabetta washed her hands and began sprinkling the meat with sea salt.
‘What will these donkeys say when I crack Goldbach?’ he sneered.
‘You go and work, Papa. I’ll get on with the cooking.’
By the time Zazo and Micaela arrived the kitchen window was steamed up. Zazo sniffed the air like a dog and patted Elisabetta’s back. ‘Keep up the good work,’ he said, peering into a bubbling saucepan. ‘You’re almost at the finish line.’
Zazo and Elisabetta both had the graceful frames of their mother, who had been a woman with the poise and figure of a catwalk model. Zazo kept fit playing soccer after work and lifting weights in the barracks gym, and with his solid jaw and sensitive eyes he remained an eligible bachelor perpetually on the brink of commitment.
‘Good to see you too,’ Elisabetta said happily. ‘Is Arturo here?’
‘Unless he’s hiding, I don’t think so.’ Zazo tasted the red sauce with her stirring spoon. She shooed him away and called out for Micaela.
Elisabetta heard her before seeing her. Micaela’s voice grabbed people’s attention like the persistent bark of a chained dog. She was complaining to her father about Arturo. ‘He didn’t have to swap! He knew he was invited! What a jerk!’
Micaela stomped into the kitchen. She was more like her father – shorter than her siblings, compact, with the heavier facial features of his lineage. When the children were small, people had talked about Elisabetta’s and Zazo’s attractive faces and Micaela’s fiery attitude. Nothing had changed. ‘Arturo’s not coming,’ she announced to her sister.
‘I heard. A pity.’
‘Some shit-head in the casualty ward wanted the day off and unbelievably Arturo agreed to take his shift. He’s soft in the head.’
Elisabetta smiled. Pretty much the only time she heard swearing these days was from her sister. ‘Maybe he’s soft in the heart.’
‘I hate him.’
‘No, you don’t.’ The two girls finally kissed. ‘I like your hair,’ Elisabetta said. It was wavier than usual, similar to the style that Elisabetta herself had worn before hers was shorn.
‘Thanks. It’s hot in here. You must be wilting.’ Compared to Elisabetta, black-clad and draped, Micaela appeared almost naked in her low-cut dancer top.
‘I’m fine. Come and help.’
The dining table sat six and, when there were fewer, Flavia Celestino’s chair stayed empty as if inviting her spirit back into the fold.
‘How was your week?’ Elisabetta asked her brother, passing the serving bowl.
‘You can imagine,’ Zazo said. ‘We’ve got dozens of cardinals and their staffs arriving soon. My boss’s boss is agitated, my boss is agitated and, for the sake of my men, I’m supposed to be agitated.’
‘And you’re not?’ his father asked.
‘When was the last time you saw me upset?’
They all knew the answer but no one spoke of it. It was twelve years ago. They well remembered the wild state he was in when he rushed inside the hospital to find Elisabetta half-dead in one casualty room and Marco’s corpse cooling in another. They remembered how his anger had smoldered during the aftermath when at first he wasn’t allowed to participate in the investigation and later when he was denied access to case files after the official inquiries stalled. He was too close to the matter, a related party, he’d been told. His lack of impartiality would jeopardize a prosecution.
What prosecution, he’d demanded? You haven’t caught anyone? You don’t have a single lead? The investigation’s a joke.
After a year of frustration Zazo and his superiors reached the boiling point at the same time. He wanted out, they wanted him out. His natural cheerfulness had been eclipsed by sarcasm and bursts of hostility toward the upper echelons of his command structure and he’d been called on the carpet for the occasional bout of heavy-handedness during an arrest. They made him see a psychologist who found him fundamentally healthy but in need of a change of assignment to a place that didn’t provide daily reminders of the outrage perpetrated against his best friend and his sister.
Zazo’s commander suggested the Gendarme Corps of Vatican City, the civil police force that patrolled the Vatican, a lower-key job where the most egregious offenders he’d have to contend with were pickpockets and traffic scofflaws. Strings were pulled and it was done. He traded uniforms.
Zazo had done well at the Vatican. He regained his equanimity and rose through the ranks to the level of major. He was able to afford his own apartment. He had a car and a motorbike. There was always a pretty girl on his arm. He couldn’t complain, his life was good except for those moments when Marco’s ghostly bled-out corpse came to him in a flashback.
Carlo commented on the tenderness of the lamb, then grunted, ‘Maybe when there’s a new Pope you can get a promotion to his security detail. The new man always likes to change things around.’
Half the plain-clothes men doing close security for the Pope were from the Gendarmerie, the other half from the Swiss Guards. ‘I can’t work with the Swiss Guards. Most of them are pricks.’
‘Swiss,’ Carlo grunted disagreeably. ‘You’re probably right.’
After Elisabetta cleared the dinner plates, Micaela laid out the tiramisu she’d brought from a bakery. She’d been moody and uncharacteristically silent during the meal and it only took a gentle prod from Elisabetta to get her to uncork.
Micaela was in her last year of training in gastroenterology at the St Andrea Hospital. She wanted to stay put; Arturo was on staff there, she liked her department. She’d been angling for the one open junior-faculty position. ‘They’re giving it to Fanchetti,’ she moaned.
‘Why?’ her father snapped. ‘You’re better than him. I wouldn’t let that joker put a scope up my rear.’
‘He’s a man, I’m a woman, end of story,’ Micaela said.
‘They can’t be that sexist,’ Elisabetta said. ‘In this day and age?’
‘Come on! You work for the single most sexist organization in the world!’ Micaela cried out.
Elisabetta smiled. ‘The hospital is secular. The Church is most decidedly not.’
The apartment buzzer rang.
‘Who the hell is that?’ Carlo growled. ‘On a Sunday?’ He lumbered toward the hall.
‘Maybe it’s Arturo,’ Zazo said, eliciting a snort from Micaela.
Elisabetta quietly put her fork down and got up.
They heard Carlo shouting into the scratchy intercom and when he returned to the dining room he had a puzzled expression.
‘There’s a guy downstairs who says he’s Archbishop Luongo’s driver. He says he’s here to pick up Elisabetta.’
‘He’s early,’ Elisabetta said, adjusting her leather belt. ‘I was going to tell you.’
‘Tell us what?’ Zazo asked.
‘My old professor, Tommaso De Stefano, visited me. He’s still with the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology. He wants my help with a project. I said no but he insisted. I’ve got to run. I’m sorry to leave the dishes.’
‘Where are you going?’ Micaela asked, dumbstruck. In fact, they all stared. Elisabetta’s life was so predictable that this deviation from routine seemed to catch them mightily by surprise.
‘The catacombs,’ she said. ‘St Callixtus. But please don’t tell anyone.’
It seemed as though a lifetime had passed since Elisabetta had last entered these grounds. The entrance to St Callixtus was off the Appian Way which, on a late Sunday afternoon, was nearly deserted. She’d forgotten how quickly the land turned rural when one passed through the ancient southern walls of the city.
Off the main road, the avenue leading to the catacombs was lined by stands of tall cypresses, their tops glowing orange in the dwindling sunlight. Beyond was a large tract of wooded and agricultural land owned by the Church and containing an old Trappist monastery, a dormitory for the catacomb guides and the Quo Vadis? church. To the west lay the Catacombs of Domitilla. To the east, the Catacombs of San Sebastiano. The whole region was sacred.
The driver – who had remained mute during their journey – sprung out and opened the car door before Elisabetta had a chance to work the handle herself. Professor De Stefano was waiting at the public entrance, a low structure whi
ch resembled a simple Mediterranean villa.
Inside, De Stefano led her past the policeman who stood guard at the visitors’ iron gate. From there they headed down a stone stairway into the bowels of the earth.
‘It’s a walk,’ he said. ‘Halfway to Domitilla. There’s really no short cut.’
Elisabetta lifted her robes just enough to prevent herself from tripping. The subterranean air was dead and familiar. ‘I remember the way,’ she replied. She felt a disturbing blend of apprehension and excitement course through her as she remembered her previous times here and thought ahead to the imminent new revelations.
They moved briskly through the normal tourist areas. The galleries, cut by pickaxes and shovels from the soft volcanic tufo from the second through the fifth centuries AD, were somber remains of a broad sweep of history. The Romans had always buried or cremated their dead in necropolises outside the city walls for it was strictly forbidden to do so within the city limits. The wealthy built family tombs. The poor were crammed into mass graves.
Yet the early Christians stubbornly refused to mix their dead with pagan bones and most of them were too poor to afford proper tombs. A solution was found on the rural estates of sympathizers. Dig your necropolises, they were told. Burrow as extensively as you please, come and visit your dead freely, but leave our fields intact. Thus the catacombs were spawned at all compass points outside the city walls but especially to the south, off the Appian Way.
Over the centuries vast networks of subterranean galleries were tunneled to hold the remains of Popes and martyrs, commoners and the lofty. The Popes had elaborate frescoed vaults where pilgrims came to venerate them. The poor had small loculi, not much more than stone shelves cut into the rock to hold their wrapped bodies. Perhaps their names were inscribed in the stone, perhaps not. Loved ones left behind the holy symbols of their new religion, the fish, the anchor, the dove and the chi-rho cross. As time went on, the galleries were extended into multi-level mazes, miles of tunnels to accommodate hundreds of thousands of the dead faithful.
