“And what does that liberation look like? What does it feel like? Being neutered and dull? Going extinct?”
The Dalai Lama shook his head. “Extinction of ego, of all sense that you are only individual, unconnected to life. Extinction of desire. Buddha said, after the ego is finished, you reach a state that cannot be described, that is not understandable to us in our human minds now.”
“Very similar to what we believe,” the Pope said. “Though without reincarnation.”
“You have purgatory.”
“Yes.”
“The soul suffer there, yes? Has a glimpse of God but must suffer until purified.”
“Exactly.”
“For us, this purification take place in many lifetimes. Almost same.”
“Speaking of purification,” I said. “I would like a swim. As long as we’re here, I’d like a good swim.”
“Your skin polish, amore,” Rosa warned. She gestured to the holy ones, “And their disguises.”
Before I could tell her that I didn’t care as much about preserving the disguise as I did about not feeling like a sweat-caked mule, the door opened and another man appeared on the threshold. I wondered if the entire staff had been trained to behave as if they were on stage, because after two seconds of posing, this man made three long steps into the room, came to a halt, stood up to his full height in a posture that was almost military, and announced, “Sono Giacomo! I am Giacomo! Come with me! Let me show you what you will wear!”
31
There are people to whom you don’t say no. I don’t understand why that is, but certain people are so persuasive, so determined, so stubborn, or so painfully vulnerable, that refusing them becomes an impossibility, the equivalent of saying no to aging and death. Antonio Mazzo was all of these things and one of these people. Some of the impossibility of refusing him had to do with the fact that he was feeding us and letting us sleep in his grand home. Some of it was a charisma he seemed to have been born with; some of it an entitlement bred of great fame. And some of it—most of it, I believe—came from the fact that, without saying anything, we all agreed that we didn’t want to damage his fragile ego, a brittle and priceless parchment held behind glass. When you shook his hand, you could feel how easily the parchment could be torn; you could see it in the watery yellow eyes and hear it in his complaint about the mysterious “something” he was missing. Giacomo—his butler or aide or house manager—had clearly made a career, a life, of protecting this ego. He was the king’s valet. I couldn’t help realizing, as the valet led us down a long corridor into a large storage room, that the Pope was nothing like this. Yes, there were times when he insisted on having his way. But the root of that was conviction, not ego; certainty, not fragility.
My musings aside, however, one thing was clear from Giacomo’s manner: we were going to the party, and in the costumes Mazzo had selected for us. I could already sense the Holy Father’s reluctance, but there was simply not going to be any discussion.
Mazzo’s storage room resembled a fashion glutton’s pantry: Racks and racks and racks of dresses, suits, and coats. Boxes upon cardboard boxes stuffed so full that we could see protruding hats, gloves, belts, lingerie, pajamas. A hundred pairs of shoes were lined up along one wall next to more boxes with socks and leggings. There were slippers and sandals; there were boots in abundance. We stepped farther into the room and saw furs, scarves, swords, helmets, masks of various shapes and sizes, costumes enough to outfit every Bollywood production for the calendar year.
We stood facing Giacomo in a silent—I almost want to say a “cowed”—half circle, as though we were new interns at the palace, being shown the ropes. The chemistry of our little group had turned docile. In his early or mid-seventies, ridiculously tall for an Italian, balding, thin, with a wide jaw that made his face pear-shaped, Giacomo spoke elegant Italian, and in his speech you heard this same incontrovertibility. He might have been announcing a law just passed by the Roman Senate: “Claudius decrees that all slaves must have eight glasses of wine on Sabbath eve…”
Who was going to argue?
He motioned for us to come and stand beside a table on which a stack of folded clothing had been neatly arranged. Holding the linen napkin Mazzo had ruined with his notes, Giacomo began to act out what seemed to me another in a series of scenes. “Lei, carissima,” he said to Rosa, checking his notes and placing a hand on her shoulder in a way I didn’t like. “You, dearest. Lei andrà alla festa come una suora.” You will be going to the party as a nun.
It had been so decreed.
The smile that broke across Rosa’s face lit the room like the flash from a camera. Not worried in the slightest that a certain someone in our company might find a non-nun in a nun’s outfit sacrilegious, she glanced at me and erupted in laughter, hair tossing, fine teeth showing, earrings shaking, the veins on her neck throbbing in irreverent ecstasy. The Pope smiled at her, happy that she was happy, but the smile held all sorts of mysteries. Even with all the practice I’d had—a lifetime of practice, really—I couldn’t read his emotions at that moment. Behind his glasses the Dalai Lama’s mood was even more obscure. He was standing as still as one of the lions at the entrance to Mazzo’s villa, the famous face holding an undeniable power, but expressionless. Oblivious to them both, my darling wife took the nun’s habit from Giacomo and held it against the front of her body in a pose of absolute delight.
“Lei.” Now Giacomo pointed a long, knuckly finger at the Dalai Lama and lifted from the pile the blue, gold-trimmed uniform of a police captain, a carabinieri officer. “You will be a member of the police. But this is not an ordinary party, signore,” he added, handing over the uniform with great formality. “This is a Mazzo party! And so”—he reached into a box beneath the table—“we have for you a holster, gun, and nightstick. Authentic, all of them, tutti, but the pistola is without bullets so we don’t risk an accident!”
At that moment I would have checked to see how the Dalai Lama, prince of nonviolence, was reacting to the idea of partying with a pistol on his belt, but my eyes had fastened themselves to the pile of costumes. Diminished now by half, it showed that a plain tweed suit was next, and set beside it were accoutrements—a pipe, a fedora, heavy-framed eyeglasses. For me, I assumed. Beneath the suit, peeking out around the edges of the tweed, was the outfit of a medieval king.
I heard Giacomo say, in his stilted Italian again, and again with the sweeping gestures of a stage actor, “Signor Mazzo has decided that, on account of some craziness we endured in past parties, we need to have a psychoanalyst in residence for one night.” He sent an oily smile in my direction and handed the suit to me. It had been folded in half. I held it in my arms like a prison-issue blanket, and I stood there with my eyes on the king outfit. After a moment I shifted them to Rosa. She’d seen what was coming next, too, and even she seemed a bit worried. The Pope as king: it should have felt no more sacrilegious than the businessman’s suit he’d been wearing, but somehow it did. If the Pope was to be arrayed in the garb of power, it should be spiritual, not temporal power. Her earlier delight had ebbed like the sea after a huge wave has broken. Her eyes flipped up to the Pope, and that gave me the courage to turn and look at him, too, even while Giacomo was happily handing over the pipe and eyeglasses and I was trying to balance them on the pile of cloth in my arms.
Cheeks tightened, shoulders pushed back, the Holy Father appeared on the verge of balking, of having finally reached the place where he was unable to play along with whatever foolish thing happened. His rather absurd original disguise, applied by the marvelous Mario: no problem. Lunch with a prostitute: absolutely okay—his idea, in fact. His beloved almost-niece dousing him with the benefits of Buddhism and then taking him to a place where rows of strangers sat cross-legged in meditation: perfectly fine. My cousin’s deep well of spiritual self-confidence had enabled him calmly—even happily—to go along with all that and stick to his plan of being an ordinary man for a few days. But dressing up as a king in preparatio
n for attending a party that, we could already sense, was going to be a kind of perfection of decadence? You didn’t have to be his first cousin to read in his body language and facial expression that such a joke—if “joke” is the word—was simply going to be the pebble that made the heavy load of ordinariness too much for him.
He was going to refuse, I could sense it. And his refusal was going to set up a confrontation between him and the great Mazzo. Giacomo would ask for an explanation, would tell him that Mazzo’s guests were duty bound to obey their famous host’s instructions: that was simply the way it had always been done; otherwise the actor would take offense, would be injured. I would try to act as peacemaker; it wouldn’t work. Rosa would suggest that her friend be given a different costume, or allowed to go as he was; Giacomo would dig in his heels. The Pope’s refusal would spark a similar sentiment in the Dalai Lama, and our hope of a comfortable night in the countryside would quickly disintegrate. We’d end up sleeping in the fields, pissing behind trees, taking turns bathing in a fetid roadside canal while the others stood sentry.
I reached out from under my pile of tweed and put one hand on my cousin’s shoulder—a movement that caused the pipe to slip and fall to the floor with an ugly cracking sound. Giacomo frowned, bent from his great height to retrieve it. I managed to say the word “Se”—if—as in “If it makes you uncomfortable, Holy Father, please say so and we’ll skip the party altogether. We’ll find another place to stay.” But before I could get past this “If” I saw a wave of resolve move through the Pope’s facial muscles. The moment of resistance passed. He set his lips, he nodded.
Giacomo, smiling victoriously, obnoxiously, as if this were Mazzo’s most amazing bit of imagination and creativity, lifted the king’s robe with great dignity, and then reached under the table and produced a brass crown. He looked triumphantly upon my cousin and declared, “And you, my good friend, will go to the party as…a great king, a leader of his people!”
I bit the inside of my cheeks, hard, because what I wanted to say to Giacomo after this great triumph of his was something like: “You tall idiot! You cazzo! You supercilious, pear-faced, cazzo idiot!”
But I noticed that my cousin had regained his balance. “Allora, va bene. Okay, very well,” he said in his slightly accented Italian, and in a slightly forced tone. “A good idea. In fact, many people comment that I do have the bearing of a leader. Only please spare me the crown. I have a scalp condition that prevents me from wearing hats in hot weather. They cause me to perspire there, which makes the condition worse. Do you think Signor Mazzo would allow me to attend in the robe, but without the headpiece?”
Giacomo hesitated, the wide lower half of his face twisted into an exaggerated frown. At that moment I realized I didn’t like him. There was something smug about the man. His smugness made me think of some of the Vatican assistants, who seemed to think their closeness to a famous man elevated them above the position of ordinary mortals. I could feel a sly anger stirring inside me. Like most angry swirls, it had less to do with what was happening at the actual moment and more with memory and association: I was thinking of my Vatican colleagues, one or more of whom had clearly used the Pope’s disappearance to tarnish my good name. They’d be perfectly happy to see me lose my job, go to jail even, or at least live out my life in disgrace for having abused my office and harmed the reputation of the most beloved Pope in modern history. I was about to say something to our smugly smiling Giacomo, something less than kind, when Rosa saved me.
“I’m a hairdresser by profession, Giacomo,” she said. “I’ve seen these conditions and they can actually be quite dangerous. If the nerves of the scalp become irritated enough, then the inflammation can travel down into the lining of the brain, and we’d have a real problem on our hands. It would ruin the party, wouldn’t it, to have to call an ambulance in the middle of the festivities?”
Giacomo was looking down at her from his great height, skeptically, it seemed. “We’ve had ambulances before,” he noted.
But, after two seconds of hesitation, he gave a slow shrug—pretending not to care about the crown—and turned his attention to me. “You will have a table and chair,” he said. “You will sit, please, for at least the first half of the party, until the dancing starts. Our guests will come to you for counsel, and Signor Mazzo would like it if you could amuse them with your responses. Make them laugh. Soothe them. Impart some of your immigrant wisdom, your worldliness. Can you do that?”
“Of course,” I said, glad to be off the subject of the Pope’s crown. “Naturally.”
“He has extraordinary wisdom,” Rosa put in. “For an immigrant.”
Giacomo nodded, eyeing me so carefully I wondered how much of my disguise had worn thin, or if the lack of an accent had given me away. At last he said, “The party begins quite early. It is important to Signor Mazzo that all guests be prompt. You will notice that everyone arrives exactly at eight p.m. We have hired some people to help with the parking. Signor Mazzo asks that one of them be allowed to move your car into the stables to make room. Would you give me the keys?”
I handed them over. More of the smug smile. A semi-sarcastic bow. “Eight p.m.,” Giacomo repeated, and then, almost in imitation of his boss, he strode away.
32
At a quarter to eight, after a careful shower and a quick, if amateurish, touch-up of my skin color and hair cream, dressed dutifully in my too-hot tweed suit, carrying my pipe, hat, tortoiseshell glasses, and resentment, and already sweating, I went down the carpeted hall to the Pope’s room and found him standing at a window, staring out. He was dressed in the kingly robe, but it fit him badly in the shoulders, as if it had been sewn for a smaller man. The window stretched floor to ceiling and was open, letting a hot breath of air into the room. Through it I could see that the fading daylight lay across the villa’s fields a soft, golden sheet that was losing its luster, slowly, slowly, as each second passed. “Holy Father,” I said quietly to his back, “if this is too awful for you, we can still decline to go. Probably no one except Giacomo would even notice at this point.”
He didn’t answer.
“It’s so disrespectful, on the one hand,” I went on. “Borderline sacrilegious. And risky, on the other. No doubt someone will recognize you and we’ll all be sent back to Rome in the morning.”
Still nothing.
“Holy Father?”
He turned, and even though I knew the king’s vestments were only a cheap replica, there was still something awe-inspiring about seeing him that way. His body language had changed. He was the Pope again—powerful, magisterial, the Vicar of Christ on earth—even with the blond goatee and wig and a bit of color in his face from our time in the sun. It seemed absolutely impossible that the partygoers wouldn’t see what I saw—and that one or more of them wouldn’t know about the huge reward and turn us in. My only hope—admittedly a frail one—rested in the idea that even if they happened to be sober tonight, the type of people invited to a Mazzo party would be unlikely to have spent a lot of time gazing at the Pope’s photo, watching his appearances on TV, or reading about him in their glitzy travel magazines.
“Join me at the table, cousin,” he said in a grave tone.
We sat close to each other at a small, lacquered table in two high-backed chairs. My hands were on the tabletop, and the Pope reached out and momentarily covered them with his own. I stared into the brown depths of his eyes. “My beloved cousin,” he said. There was a TV in the corner, and I assumed he’d been watching it and had felt guilty about causing so much trouble. At the very least I assumed he’d say we were skipping the party. Possibly he was going to ask me to put in a call to the Vatican and have the papal helicopter sent to carry him back to his real life.
“I have something to tell you,” he said. “Something important and possibly upsetting.”
“I’m at your service, Holy Father.” I’d spoken calmly enough, but when he removed his hands I put my own in my lap, squeezed one with the other, and saw
that my palms had left sweaty tracks on the lacquered surface.
My cousin made the expression he often made when I addressed him that way: lips twisted to one side, eyes averted, a ripple of impatience crossing the high, freckled forehead.
“The Dalai Lama and I both have something to tell you, actually.”
“I’m at your service,” I repeated clumsily. This was it, then: our adventure was finished. We’d face the consequences now.
The same expression again. A sigh of impatience.
“Cousin,” he said, “please listen closely…After Tenzin and I had prayed together in the cathedral in Ferrara this afternoon and were sitting in the pew, side by side, we became aware of one of the paintings on the wall there. It was a gorgeous work, elaborately framed, that showed the Blessed Mother holding Jesus. Jesus was very young, an infant, and, as sometimes happens, the painter had made him rather large for his age. The Christ Child was naked, but positioned in a discreet way. None of this is uncommon, as you know. In fact, it’s almost a cliché of the genre.” He hesitated a moment, scratched at his goatee. “But what was astounding—and Tenzin noticed it first, not I—was that Mary had the tip of one finger in the child’s mouth. Her second finger, I believe it was. Just the top, to the knuckle. It was done in something like the way modern mothers use a rubber nipple—what is it called?”
“A binkie.”
“Yes.” The Pope averted his eyes again and shifted uncomfortably. Through the open window we could hear tires on the gravel drive below, the sound of doors slamming, the lilting voices of the first of Mazzo’s arriving guests.
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 21
