I decided to put these thoughts aside for the moment rather than let them touch the air. I knew Rosa would accuse me of overworrying. And I was afraid she’d come up with another of her crazy notions—buying a tent and sleeping bags in the nearest town, driving to the coast, and making camp on a deserted stretch of beach, or going back to L’Aquila and spending the night on the sidewalk there so we’d truly know what that Gypsy woman with her begging bowl felt like. It would be a spiritual lesson, she’d say. I’d resist. The Pope and the Dalai Lama would back her up. Yours truly would end up sleeping on cold concrete and waking to the sight of a policeman and a pair of handcuffs.
The road angled this way and that and then, climbing more steeply, entered a territory of such magnificence I decided that I would, in fact, be perfectly happy to sleep right there, to live and die right there, in the elements. Ahead and to either side of us, stretching as far as we could see in every direction, spread a vast landscape of untouched meadows and stone-pocked, lime-green slopes. Behind them, gray mountain peaks stood up in the sunlight like sentries guarding a castle we couldn’t yet see.
“The miracle of creation,” the Holy Father said.
They were the first words anyone had spoken since L’Aquila.
I’d been all over Italy, from the pink-sand beaches of Sardinia to the Dolomites’ stony peaks, but I’d never been so moved by a landscape. “Spiritual” is the word that came to mind. It was a quiet, gorgeous emptiness with this thin ribbon of gravel angling back and forth across it like an indirect ascent to heaven. There was no other human footprint to be seen, not even the sense that we were in any kind of park or preserve, that anyone was watching over what happened here. We’d go along for a few minutes, small stones ticking up against the Maserati’s underbelly, and then the road would wrap around the base of one of the great, slanting slopes and we’d be presented with an entirely different aspect of the view. Little by little we were gaining altitude, seeing more, breathing thinner air. The broad green valleys dropped farther below us. There were patches of scrub brush but not a single tree, and then we turned another corner and came upon a flock of sheep watched over by a solitary man holding an old-fashioned shepherd’s crook in one hand. Behind him stood a tiny metal shed where he must have spent his nights or taken shelter from storms. I wondered if we’d stumbled upon a remake of The Greatest Story Ever Told.
“Stop, please!” the Pope called out suddenly.
Rosa pulled the car onto the shoulder. We all got out. The air was at least ten degrees cooler than what we’d felt in L’Aquila, cool, soundless, eerily still. The Pope set off along the stony field and we followed him. The shepherd looked up. Like a single creature, his sheep shifted their heads away from us and trotted off as if we’d come to that place only to turn them into food.
“Salve!” the Pope called. A traditional greeting, pronounced “SAHL-vay,” equivalent, perhaps, to the English “Greetings.”
The shepherd nodded in a puzzled way. Not wary, not in the least concerned, just puzzled, as if he’d stepped out of the world of people so many years ago that he believed he was no longer recognizable as part of the species. As we drew closer I could see that he had only one working eye, and a week’s growth of charcoal-colored stubble on his face. But, if the woman in the restaurant had been surrounded by an aura of bitterness, this man was surrounded by the exact opposite. Nothing, it seemed, could upset him, not even the sight of four strangers leaving their Maserati unlocked on the shoulder of the road and marching toward him on a sunny July day. We came up close and stood there; he watched us, waited, unafraid.
“Ci dispiace disturbarla.” We’re sorry to disturb you, the Pope went on in his accented but capable South American Italian. “We came to pray with you, do you mind?”
I thought it was an odd thing to say, even for a pope. I expected the rough-hewn man to throw back his head and laugh, to ask us who we were, who we thought we were. Rosa turned her head and met my eyes, expecting the same response, I was sure.
“Va bene,” the shepherd said. Fine. Okay. From the look on his face, the request had surprised him about as much as the sun coming up that morning had surprised him.
“Shall we kneel?” the Pope asked.
The shepherd shook his head and pointed one finger skyward. “He don’t care if you kneel,” he said, his tone the very definition of matter-of-fact. “He don’t care what clothes you have on.” He turned his lonely eye to me. “What color skin you have don’t matter to Him.”
“You pray, then,” the Pope said. “We’ll follow.”
Another Cyclopean “Va bene.” The man shifted his crook so that it was leaning against one shoulder and he put his left forearm across his navel and his right hand over his left wrist. Instead of bowing his head, he tilted it slightly upward. “My Mother and my Father,” he began. “We are here on the land You gave. We breathe the air You gave. Our heart makes go the blood in us so that we live. We are here. We ask for nothing.”
Silence. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. At last the Pope said, “Amen.” He turned to me, his face beaming, lit with joy. “What can we give him, Paolo?”
I shrugged. I had the wad of money in my pocket. Rosa had the keys to the Maserati. What would such things mean to a man like this?
The Pope had left his jacket in the car. I saw him loosen the tie and unbutton his shirt, and I thought for a moment that he’d take it off and hand it over to the man—an absurd gift it would have been, for a person who no doubt hadn’t worn a tailored shirt for one hour in his life. But then I saw that the Holy Father was reaching both hands up to the thin silvery chain around his neck, a chain that held a medal of the Virgin Mother. Many years before, his own mother had given it to him to mark his ordination. The Blessed Mother was his patroness, his protectress, and I knew for a fact that the medal meant more to him than any other physical object in all the Vatican museums. Struggling a bit, he lifted the loop of chain up and over his face—I worried it would peel the goatee away—and handed it over.
The shepherd didn’t thank him. If you knew who he was, I thought. If you knew what that medal means to him. For just a second I wanted to say, “This is the Pope of Rome.” But of course I didn’t. The shepherd took the medal into the coarse palm of one hand and then, in the simplest and most unself-conscious of gestures, brought it to his mouth and kissed it, then put it over his own head and left it hanging outside his sweater.
He made the slightest of bows to us, almost imperceptible, then turned away—not rudely, just simply, as if our business—odd as it was—had been accomplished and now we all needed to go back to our lives.
We turned and hiked toward the car, the Pope and I shoulder to shoulder, Rosa and the Dalai Lama ahead, walking slowly, admiring the view.
“What made you do that?” I asked him.
He hesitated, lost in thought, or reluctant to answer. After a time, he said, “I saw that man in one of my dreams. Saw him exactly the way we saw him as we were driving up the road. Something’s happening to me, cousin. Something very strange.”
“In the dream did you give him the medal?”
He shook his head. “It just came to me to do that.” Another pause. “After his magnificent prayer.”
18
Probably, at that point, we should have left the Parco Nazionale d’Abruzzo, carrying away with us the memory of marvelous views and our fine moment with the shepherd. No doubt we should have done that. Instead, we drove farther along the gravel road, and as we went, Rosa had what she would later call “a thought.”
I have to say now that if there was one critical lesson I’d taken away from the years of marriage with my fine Neapolitan wife, it was that once she took hold of an idea, it was impossible to dislodge it. Some of these notions were excellent. It was her idea to have a child, for example, a blessing I’ll be grateful for until my dying breath. And some of our most enjoyable trips had come about because of her sudden inspirations, her gift for embracing spontaneity.
&nb
sp; But this “thought”—the idea that we should show our guests the Italian countryside by sending them up on the parco’s rickety ski lift—was, I believed then…uninspired. We’d gone only a little way past the shepherd’s hut, dipping into a valley for a while so that the sloped fields formed a green V in front of us and we seemed to be heading downhill, when she said, “Look, a chairlift. What a great way to reach Campo Imperatore!”
“What’s Campo Imperatore?”
“The summit!”
“Not a good idea, Rosa.”
She asked me why, as I knew she would, and I couldn’t say why, because the reason for my objection had to do with a secret the Pope had shared with me years before. Though he flew in airplanes when he absolutely had to—and he absolutely had to quite often—the Holy Father was terrified of heights. He always took a seat close to the middle of the plane, always asked that the shades in his row be pulled down so he couldn’t look out, even sometimes took a mild sedative if the fear had a particularly strong grip on him or if bad weather was forecast.
I decided I shouldn’t reveal that secret in front of the Dalai Lama and Rosa. Behind me, the Pope was holding to an austere silence. I could almost feel his mind working: he was ashamed. Even with all his decades of prayer and meditation, he’d never been able to completely conquer the fear of heights. He was worried, I was sure, about what the Dalai Lama might think of this, as if every holy man worth his robe should long ago have come to terms with his own death. But it wasn’t death that frightened my cousin, it was being up high, especially being up high in a place where he didn’t have his feet on something solid. (Standing out on the papal balcony seemed not to bother him in the slightest.)
“No reason,” I told Rosa. “I just think it’s not the best idea right now.”
“ ‘No reason’ is so typical of you,” she said, in a harsh whisper. “It means you can’t defend your position, and you know it.” She looked in the rearview. “Dalai,” she said, “would you like to see all this from a different vantage point?”
It was a trick question. I closed my eyes and waited for the inevitable.
“Yes, yes, very much!”
“Holy Father, okay with you?”
“Of course,” the Pope said, but the words came out sounding like the squeaking door in the tunnel to Castel Sant’Angelo.
A Neapolitan smirk in my direction. A too-quick turn into the chairlift base camp, or whatever it’s called. The chairs were running, all of them empty. Typical. Some bureaucrat in the Department of Tourism had quoted a scientific survey claiming that the chairs up to Campo Imperatore would be more efficiently used if they ran summer and winter, not just in ski season. This same bureaucrat owned shares in a company that made the lift cable, and he wanted it to wear out quickly and need replacement, at the cost of a hundred million euro. Or, more likely, some member of parliament or other high official had a troubled nephew who needed a job, and so he had come up with the idea of paying the boy to run the chairlift…in early July! Nepotism in the national park! Wait till the newspapers get hold of that story!
As we pulled up close to the whirring machinery and parked, the troubled nephew roused himself from sleep and shuffled over. “Ai, che macchina!” he said, in a voice that made me think he’d breakfasted on beer. Ai, what a car!
“Yes,” Rosa said. “We’ll let you sit in it for a few minutes if you let us ride the lift.”
“D’accordo,” the man said. Agreed.
He was a lanky thirty-year-old, and, judging by the watery eyes and loose mouth, unemployable in the extreme. But even an unemployable man could sit there and turn the chairs on and off, greet those few visitors who wandered into the enormous parco on a day when all of Italy had gone to the beach. He had the habit of swinging his head almost violently to one side so the shock of black hair lifted off his forehead, and now he made a circuit of the Maserati, admiring the silvery swoops and green fenders, swinging his head again and again, then took a seat at Rosa’s invitation and moved the steering wheel back and forth like a child.
“Can we ride?” Rosa asked him.
“Certo!” Sure! “I’ll give you some blankets, too. Chilly up there.”
“I rode one time on this flying chair!” the Dalai Lama said excitedly. “In New Mexico!”
The Pope stood beside him in a terrified silence.
Rosa had the supply of extra clothes in the car’s small trunk. She took out four sweaters. The nephew disappeared for a moment into his tiny shed, re-emerged with four wool blankets that dated to World War II, then pulled a lever that slowed the chairs on their cables. The Holy Father had left his suit coat in the car—easy treasure for a thief—and he and the Dalai Lama stood there looking like tourists, fake hair tousled by the breeze, the Pope’s goatee wobbling, the Dalai Lama’s dark glasses about to blow off. Once we were sweatered and wrapped, the nephew positioned us so the chairs would clip us behind the knees. I could see the look of abject fear on the Pope’s face, and moved to accompany him, but “No, no,” Rosa insisted. “Let the two of them sit together, Paolo. They need some private time to talk.”
I wanted to tell her that, once he was airborne, there was no way the Pope would be able to speak. But things happened too quickly. The chair swung around behind the holy men. Plop, they were seated, the Dalai Lama giggling. Off they went, swinging up and away, a well-off businessman and a rock star, friends on vacation. Rosa and I caught the next chair. Once we were safely aboard and once the metal bar was pulled down in front of us, the nephew speeded things up. Almost immediately I realized he’d been right about the chill. With the breeze and the altitude, the temperature started sinking like a gravestone tossed from an ocean liner. Rosa and I wrapped the blankets around us. I looked ahead, but all I could see was the Pope’s left hand tightly clasping the edge of the seat. The Dalai Lama was arranging the blanket around his new friend, laughing, talking; I’d been right: Giorgio was frozen in terror.
“Now they’ll have a chance to enjoy a real conversation,” Rosa said. “A few minutes of privacy. And you with your worries and objections!”
“Yes, I’m a fool,” I said.
“At least you’ve started to be able to admit it.”
Up we went, up and up and up, clanging over the iron towers and swinging side to side in the breeze. Below us spread a vista from some painter’s idea of paradise: lime-green valleys and sharp gray cliff sides, endless and untouched. “Turn around,” Rosa said at one point. “You can see the Adriatic.”
It was true. There in the eastern distance lay a sparkling blue bay. Pescara, it must have been, or Giulianova, but as we climbed, that warm, sunny, seaside vision became part of another universe. I said a silent prayer of thanks to the nephew. He’d described the air in the higher elevations as fresca—which means “fresh” or “chilly,” but the word he should have used was fredda—“cold.” Or perhaps frigida. We wrapped ourselves tighter in the blankets and pushed in close against each other. “This is so romantic,” Rosa said.
“Very.”
“I wonder if they’re skiing, at the top,” she added, making a joke, but as the chair bumped over another tower, the hotel at the summit came into view, and it didn’t seem totally out of the question that we might see snow there.
“Holy Father!” I yelled out—I wasn’t worried about using his title; there was no one around to hear. “Are you and the Dalai okay?”
“Sì, Paolo. Grazie!” he yelled back over his shoulder, the words positively vibrating with fear. Strangely enough—was it payment for the papal fib?—the instant the last word reached my ears our forward movement suddenly stopped. The whirring above our heads went quiet. The chair swung this way and that in smaller and smaller shifts, then came to rest.
“Wonderful,” I said. “The nephew has left for the day, hot-wired the Maserati and gone for a joyride. We’ll be here all night.”
“What nephew?” Rosa asked.
“We could freeze to death up here. What a wonderful idea this
was.”
“You’re looking for a reason to argue,” she said. “You’ve been looking for an argument from the moment you came out of the tunnel at Castel Sant’Angelo.”
“I don’t look for arguments, Rosa,” I said. “I look for logic. Good decision making. Common sense.”
“Typical masculine comment.”
“Yes. I am, in case you haven’t noticed, a man. And proud to be one…at this moment, especially.”
“You still don’t get it,” she muttered, and then, after a minute of icy silence that seemed on the verge of turning into something worse, “Remember when we went to the marriage counselor?”
“I remember how much it cost.”
“She told us when we started to have a fight we should stop and think about some good memory we have, as a couple. Remember?”
“Yes, and look how splendidly that worked.”
“I want you to try it. Right now. I’ll try it, too. Think of something nice.”
I turned my face away, staring out over the cold mountains. I took a breath. I could feel—this is such a perverse aspect of being human—a resistance to making peace. Why is that? I wonder. What is the draw of argument and dissension? Simply the urge to win? To blame every hardship on someone else? Surely this magnetism of discord is the root of war. I could feel it almost as if it were a living creature inside me. But then, who can say why, the bad urge slipped away and I did what Rosa had asked me to do: cast my mind back in time in search of something finer. There had been a day—Anna Lisa must have been two or three—when we’d taken her to the beach at Viareggio. A weekend trip, probably just at this time of year. As soon as she saw the water, our little girl ran toward it ecstatically, stopped at the edge, bent over from the waist as toddlers do, and splashed her hands in the sea, then looked back at us as if to say: “A miracle!”
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 10
