Pilgrims

by Garrison Keillor

  He wanted to head back to the Forum. You could find a tour group and tag along and listen to the guide for free. He and Daryl had done that yesterday. It was neat. And cost nothing.

  “The Catholic Church is earning a million bucks a day. The Pope is collecting money online, did you hear?” said Daryl. “It’s called PayPal.” The others groaned.

  She stopped. “I’m sorry. I forgot something at the hotel. Don’t wait. I’ll catch up later.”

  “What?” said Carl.

  “It’s a female thing. I’ll find you later.” And she slipped away. “Hey!” he was saying, and then she was around the corner, slipping through the throngs, and made her way to the little coffee shop where Maria sat waiting, pouring sugar into an espresso. She was all dressed up in a white jacket and slacks, a gray sweater, a big straw hat. She looked as if she’d spent a couple hours putting herself together. She stood up and they embraced and Margie smelled a faint aroma of sandalwood. Maria grinned. “It’s my papa’s aftershave. Mother’s very fond of it. She’s a rather stubborn thing except when she smells this and then she’s—what’s the expression?—a piece of cake.”

  A BEAUTIFUL IDEA

  The waiter brought Margie an Americano. Maria leaned back and lit up a cigarette. The smoke drifted up into her face and she waved it away.

  “You’re my friend and friends have to be honest,” she said. “I’ve got two pieces of advice for you. Call me crazy, tell me we’re no longer friends, but I have to say this. I think you should leave your husband and I think you should buy an apartment in Rome.”

  Margie laughed. “No halfway measures, huh?”

  “You’re fifty-three. You’re in your prime. It doesn’t last forever. You gave him thirty … what?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “You gave him thirty-five years. That’s half your life. Americans believe in therapy. It works for some things, it doesn’t work for this. Love is a mystery and it comes and goes, nobody has ever understood it. People long for permanence. It’s a beautiful idea but it doesn’t exist. Because experience changes us. It’s not in our natures to be stable. People crave stability until we get a good hard look at it and then we long for freedom and the next adventure. So we have to adapt, or else go crazy.”

  “Why should I buy an apartment?”

  Maria stubbed out the cigarette and leaned forward and laid her hands down on the table, her fingers spread. “Number one, you will love living here. Rome is an international city. You will find things here you could not dream of. Or things you could only dream of. The light of the ages. Magic. Freedom of the spirit. All of your needs satisfied. I can show you if you want to see for yourself, but number two, I have bought and sold four apartments for myself in the past eight years and it was the most fantastic investment I ever made.”

  She leaned forward and whispered, “One hundred fifty percent profit over eight years. One hundred fifty. The stock market is broken. Banks pay next to nothing. Gold is for the Swiss. Diamonds, art, rare musical instruments—nothing compares to real estate.

  “I have friends in the business. I can get discounts,” she said, leaning back. “But only if you want. I don’t want to sell you anything you don’t want. It’s neither here nor there to me. I only offer as a friend.”

  And then she leaned forward and whispered again. “The hotel where Papa and my mama made love and created me—it has been made into condominiums. Very nice. Not far from here. The room they occupied that night—on the fourth floor, looking toward St. Peter’s—it’s for sale. Do you want to see it?”

  Yes, actually she did want to see it.

  “The day after tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll talk to my friends and see what deal I can get. I’ll give you the address.” She wrote it out in a big hand—No. 25 Via Maggio—and gave it to Margie and leaned forward and took her into a big warm embrace. “I am so lucky to find you,” said Maria. “I always wanted a friend like you. An openhearted American friend.” She signaled the waiter and asked for a Campari and soda. “We’d be even dearer friends if you lived here.

  “A well-adjusted person needs two cultures, not one,” she said, clinking the ice in her drink. “This is the place where you can become you. This is your safe place. Your holy place. There is a great spiritual depth here and not just the church. Pagan spirits too. The spirit of the immortal past can illuminate your soul. It sounds hocus-pocus but it’s the wisdom of Italy. The past is fertilizer and we blossom from it.”

  She wasn’t sure about pagan spirits illuminating her soul, but the idea of divorce—maybe she should think about it.

  Well, actually she was thinking about it.

  A woman in Sartell got a divorce last year because her husband was always chuckling. She told him to stop and he couldn’t. Or didn’t. So she told him she was leaving him and he chuckled. It was in the paper. So what about emotional abandonment?

  She went to an Internet café and Googled “divorce, grounds,” and found that in marriage, nothing is trivial. People had split up over the failure of one spouse to use coasters. A woman in Wisconsin had divorced her husband for beginning every sentence with the word “So.” “So,” he’d say, “we going to town now or what?” “So,” he’d say, “what’s for supper then?”

  Snoring was grounds for divorce, and farting, and peeing in the shower, but about emotional abandonment, nothing. She found a web site called Divorce Q&A for Women.

  Q: My husband got into a snit because I asked him to turn down the sound of the basketball game which he and his friend Mike were watching in the living room. We live in a mobile home and I work an early morning shift as a crossing guard at an elementary school on the other side of town and must leave the house at 4 A.M. to take two different buses to get there and then walk ten blocks, all to work four hours at $8/hr, so I need my sleep, and there he was drinking beer at 10 p.m. and hollering about a stupid basketball game, and I asked him to please be quiet, and he went to Mike’s house and has spent nights there for three weeks. Is that abandonment? (He returns home in the mornings after I’ve left.)

  A: If he comes back, it is not abandonment.

  “I’ve always been fascinated by the law myself,” said Lyle, looking over Margie’s shoulder at the screen. She jumped and tried to close the Q & A window.

  “How’s everything going?” said Marilyn, pulling up a chair.

  “Fine,” said Margie, closing the window.

  Marilyn said, “Don’t worry. You’re not the first person to think about divorce. I’ve thought about it fifteen times. So has Lyle, I’ll bet.” He nodded.

  “Not so much since I hit my head, but before that, I did.”

  IN THE PIAZZA

  To the Piazza Navona in the rain to look at the fantastic fountains—a naked man stabbing an octopus who has grasped him by his thigh; big-butt bare-breasted ladies riding winged turtles; cherubs clinging to a wild-eyed horse galloping in the surf. And above the square a billboard for vacuum cleaners, a happy housewife hoovering away, her glad children cheering her on. Clint stood in the rain and shot picture after picture, the sheer drama of the fountains, the swash and splash of water, the pool pricked by thousands of raindrops, puddles on the pavement, the gray and cream and salmon buildings beyond, their balconies decked with broad-leafed tropical plants.

  “Remember the fishing opener that year?” said Wally, studying the pool.

  “The year we gave up fishing openers? We sat in a boat in a cold rain, the coffee was cold, the sandwiches were wet, and we watched our bobbers bob for a couple hours, and we said to hell with it, and I haven’t been fishing since,” said Clint.

  “What’s the difference between rococo and baroque?” said Eloise, reading a guidebook. “Rococo is like baroque,” said Margie, “except more so.”

  A woman in white stood at a high window facing the piazza, and when Clint aimed his camera up, she pulled the drapes. Margie had read about the piazza in O Paradiso, it was where Joanne the farm widow met the mime Alfredo who told her with his
hands and eyes that he loved her soul and then he struck a heroic lover’s pose atop a wooden crate and held it for seventy-five minutes as passersby dropped change in the straw hat on the sidewalk and Joanne watched him for those seventy-five minutes of perfect stillness.

  Lovers see the world with fresh exuberant eyes. They make a strip mall into the Alhambra and a Midwestern Main Street into the Boulevard of Beautiful Dreams. Lovers scatter blessings wherever they go, their keenness, their hunger and passionate gentleness, the music of touch—and when I looked at Alfredo, he was no longer a forty-three-year-old street mime who lived in the backseat of his Fiat, he was the spirit of generosity let loose in the world, whom I had found on a wooden box in the Piazza Navona.

  “On the west side of the piazza stands the former friary of the Augustinians a favored trysting spot for Pope Julius of Orange and his mistress, Queen Christina of Sweden,” Eloise read from the guidebook. “A young German friar named Martin Luther lived in the room below the papal chamber, and the loud cries of the splenetic, hunchbacked, beetle-browed Julius and his short, stout, pockmarked paramour may have been what triggered the Reformation.”

  Margie led them into the church of St. Agnese with its high dome and fruit-salad arches and columns, and in the vast dimness a statue of the saint standing in flames, hands outstretched, looking only mildly perturbed, as if to say, “This, after I just had my toenails done.” Tourists shuffled across the marble floor, stood at the brass railings, gazed at the balconies, and tried not to gawk at the few devout women kneeling and whispering to God. Though you had to wonder about the young woman whose shoulders shook, her muffled sobs clearly visible. What was up with her? Love troubles, most likely. She didn’t look pregnant, at least not from the rear. Maybe her lover had done her wrong and she had shot him, and, before descending to the dungeon cell, she was making amends with the Lord. The pilgrims stood together, looking at her, kneeling, weeping, rocking to and fro.

  “I wonder how many people actually attend this church. I hear church attendance is very poor in Italy,” said Clint.

  Father Wilmer said that attendance isn’t the mark of success. That the church has no mark of success. And if you want success, probably this isn’t the place to find it.

  “Okay,” said Clint. “Thanks for the information.”

  Everywhere you looked, statues of saints looked mournfully or beatifically or thoughtfully at you, or gazed up toward heaven, or gazed at you and directed you to look up toward heaven. The Blessed Virgin stood by a rack of candles, sympathizing with each person who came to light a candle and say a prayer.

  “Father Emil once fired me as the Virgin Mary from the Christmas pageant because I didn’t say my lines loud enough,” Margie said. “He yelled at me, ‘Don’t just stand there like you’re a statue. You’re the Mother of God, for crying out loud. Speak up.’ I burst into tears and ran out of the room and he yelled, ‘What’s the matter with her?’ and then he got somebody else. Mary Magendanz, who was stiff as a board and mumbled. It was humiliating. Especially for my mother.”

  She had said this to Carl, who was not listening. He was whispering to Clint. “Pretty amazing for a Lutheran to see this, huh?” Clint nodded.

  “We Lutherans always were pretty plain. No incense, except for Old Spice, and no statues. Though of course some members are less physically active than others.”

  “The statues are so you know you’re not alone if you come in here alone.”

  “Lutherans don’t go to church alone.”

  “Strength in numbers, huh?”

  “Not really. But we get strength from each other.”

  “Well, there you are. We believe you come to God alone.”

  “Well, yes, of course. And we believe you come before God naked. But that doesn’t mean you have to take your clothes off.”

  “Thank God.”

  “The church was built by Pope Giovanni della Cancelleria (John the Omitted) about whom little is known,” read Eloise. “St. Agnese was an early church organist and, in a fit of spiritual ecstasy, she played without ceasing, even after ordered to stop, whereupon they attempted to suffocate her with seat cushions, then stoned her with shoes, and finally set her on fire, and she played and sang until consumed.”

  St. Agnese reminded Clint of his mother as she canned tomatoes in August, pulling the hot jars out of the pressure cooker. And also his mother’s cousin Ruthie who used to go to Clearwater, Florida, every winter with her husband, Arthur, because, she said, the Lord had led them to witness the resort-goers, which they did, walking along the beach in long white paper gowns with Bible verses painted on in big black block letters, warning of eternal hellfire if people did not repent immediately, which most sunbathers, already a little scorched, declined. Ruthie and Arthur always wore broad-brimmed hats and plenty of sunscreen. A verse in Deuteronomy had warned them about skin cancer, they said. They spent several hours a day trudging the beaches, and if anyone looked at them and smiled, they stopped in their tracks and stood so as to permit the sunbather to get the full benefit of Scripture truth… .

  Clint told this story to Carl, standing near the statue, and as he got into the story, Clint’s voice got a little louder, and people in far corners of the sanctuary turned around, startled—the acoustics were such as to make him seem to be talking right into their ear.

  One day Ruthie was moved by the Spirit to kneel at the foot of a chaise longue occupied by a fat man in a bright red bathing suit who had scoffed at her—said something like, “Get out of the way, fattycakes. You’re blocking my light”—and she cried, “I am bringing you the light” and knelt down, not seeing the hibachi in the sand on which he was roasting his knockwurst. She prayed for him loudly and then felt the heat of the paper Gospel dress going up in flames… .

  “Do you realize how loud your voice is?” said Irene. “People can hear you all over. You may as well climb up in the pulpit.”

  Arthur tore the burning dress off her and there she stood in her foundation garments, but she felt no shame at all. None. She felt the sudden powerful indwelling of the Holy Spirit and she cried out, “Thank you, Lord Jesus, for taking away my shame!” She felt changed forever. She had been freed once and for all from the condemnation of the law and given the true sense of liberty that is the birthright of the true believer—free from the mere decorum of piety, free from moral fastidiousness—and she started dancing around in her underwear, a sort of born-again Charleston with some Grizzly Bear moves thrown in. Arthur told her to stop for God’s sake, that people were watching, and she cried, “Don’t you see, Arthur? God has delivered me into a state of pure blessedness!” and she snatched up an alcoholic drink from a table and drank it and cried, “Praise the Lord!” And then she unsnapped her brassiere… .

  “Please come outdoors,” said Irene. “People are staring. A priest just looked out of that alcove over there. They are going to call the cops.” “They have called the cops,” said Mr. Keillor, who had been walking by the church and heard Clint’s voice and came inside.

  “Where have you been keeping yourself?” she said. “Did you pick up your traps and move to the Ritz-Carlton?”

  “Are you talking to me?” he said. “I’ve been seeing friends.”

  “Maybe you ought to move here, if you have friends here.” She beckoned him closer with an index finger. “As a friend, I think you should consider starting a new life,” she said. “You might be funnier in Italian.”

  The author could not understand where Irene’s anger was coming from. So unrelenting, after all these years. What had he done? He decided not to ask. Too many possible answers. She had been a close friend of his first wife’s cousin, and perhaps she had heard things about his restless, reckless twenties and thirties, but why take it out on him now? Have mercy. He backed away and bumped into a pew and sat down in it and pulled his brown Moleskine notebook from his jacket pocket. She drilled into him with her dark pencil-point eyes, bitter scorn writ large on her thin lips, hands on her hips, her jaw
jutting out like a fist—and suddenly he remembered the scene on the beach when they were seventeen. Irene in a (rather unrevealing) two-piece suit, he in bloomerish swim trunks and a bilious green shirt to cover his bony chest, she talking about a book that changed her life and handing it to him, Air and Space by Kahlil Gibran, and he opened it to the sentence, “The longing that we feel within will lead us to the light and to the sacred togetherness of the creation and the universal soul which is not the Other but which is through you and before you and over you and also with you in all of your comings and goings.” She had thrust the book at him and told him to read it and he accepted it, though it was pure gibberish, and then what? That was forty years ago. Oh my God, he thought. He had forgotten to return her book! It had joined the togetherness of a pile of junk and been hauled away by the trashman. She was angry at him for rejecting the book that had changed her life!

  Clint was not done with his story—Arthur had not been liberated. He still had his Gospel smock on. He tried to restrain Ruthie from going around bare-bosomed and hugging people. She was a robust woman and he had a hell of a time wrangling her back to the tourist cabins and when he finally got her there, she was buck naked and shouting out praise to the Lord. The next morning, after a restless night of prayer and praise, he got her into the car and headed for Minnesota. She said, “Quench not the Spirit, Arthur.” She kept saying it. “Hold fast to the truth. Quench not the Spirit.” And Arthur replied, “Abstain from all appearance of evil, such as running around naked.” And she said, “Take no thought for what ye shall wear. The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment. Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. If then God so clothe the grass, which is today in the field, and tomorrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith?”