Vatican Waltz

by Roland Merullo

  Yes, I thought. That’s why I’m doing this.

  When the time came, I went through the security line, telling myself I was setting out to find that God, too, and then I was sitting in a black, cushioned chair looking out the window at the Alitalia plane that would carry me across the Atlantic. Half the other waiting travelers were speaking Italian. I observed them carefully, their fine shoes and neatly creased pants, their stylish dresses and jewelry. They were tourists, obviously, having come to Boston on vacation, and that idea seemed amusing and surprising. It had never occurred to me that people in the rest of the world would choose my neighborhood for an exotic trip. Maybe some of them had taken the subway out to Revere or been given a recommendation to eat at Rossetti’s. Maybe my father and I had sat near them on our happy night or had seen them walking on the beach. I had an urge to strike up a conversation with a mother and daughter sitting nearby, to ask them a hundred questions about Rome. But, in their expensive clothes and fancy hairstyles, they seemed so much more sophisticated than I felt, and I was afraid of looking stupid. I concentrated instead on listening to the language, realizing that my father’s stubborn return to Italian coincided exactly with the first time I’d told him I might go to Rome. Maybe he’d been preparing me, then, all those weeks.

  I said a prayer for him. I tried to imagine his life before I came into it: a child in a fascist society with its bluster, violence, and lies. German occupation. American bombs and soldiers. Wreckage everywhere, lines for food, the decision to leave, and then the harrowing boat trip in early adolescence. I knew from stories my uncles told that there had been widespread anti-Italian feeling in 1940s and 1950s Boston. Instead of finishing school, my father had lied about his age and found a job as a laborer on the subway, laying track and stringing wire. An older Italian man had taken him on as an apprentice mechanic, and he’d ended up learning those skills, becoming a master mechanic, and doing that work for almost fifty years.

  What I didn’t know, what I’d never had the courage to ask, was why he’d waited until age forty-two to marry, then eleven more years to have a child. What had a woman so many years his junior seen in him? “My aunt, she introduced us once at a wedding” was the story. But my mother had been twenty then, a few years younger than I was. My father was thirty-nine. What kind of life made a twenty-year-old, Italian-born beauty fall in love with a man her father’s age? And why had I neglected to ask? In the photographs I saw, they were standing close, arms around each other’s waists, seemingly in love. But what had the fiber of that love been made of? A common heritage? A lopsided physical attraction? A comfort she took from him, surrounded, as she was, by a hostile, half-alien world? I had wanted to be seen by my father as a full soul. But had I ever really done that for him?

  Soon we were being summoned to the gate, showing boarding passes, striding down the long walkway with its bouncy floor. I felt another surge of excitement and then a small jolt of nerves as I actually stepped onto the plane. Again I just did what everyone else did. I found my seat. I saw people stuffing things into the overhead compartment, so I put my bag up there, too, saving out The Wisdom of the Desert and a pharmaceuticals textbook. It seemed to take a long time for passengers to settle in, and then the flight attendants gave us a miniclass on what to do if we crashed in water or ran out of oxygen. There was a swelling knot of nerves in my belly as the plane backed out of its parking place and rolled toward the runway. I was holding tight to the arms of the seat.

  “First time flying?” the person in the seat beside me asked.

  He was a nice-looking man, fifty or sixty years old, dressed in a suit, and he looked as comfortable there as my father did in his chair in front of the television. I told him it was, that I was going on vacation to Rome, and he said, “Rome is simply the greatest city in the world. I’ve been there dozens of times on business, and my life’s dream, when I retire, is for my wife and me to sell our house, and rent an apartment in Trastevere, do you know it?”

  “I don’t know anyplace there.”

  “It was the working-class section years ago. Then the movie stars and artists discovered it, and now it’s the Italian SoHo.”

  I nodded and smiled, afraid to reveal how little I knew of the world.

  “Rome,” he said, as if he was speaking the name of a lover. “I just want to walk the streets all day for the last ten or twenty years of my life, go into museums, have great meals, stroll in the parks. You’re not going to drive, I hope.”

  I told him I had a distant relative who was going to help me get around. I was hoping he’d meet me at the airport.

  “That’s wise. The only bad thing about the city, the only bad thing about the country, really, is that the people drive as if they’re constantly showing off for one another. It’s like a hockey game. Do you know hockey?”

  “No.”

  “In hockey, which is a beautiful sport, the players are constantly trying to show who’s tougher. They fight, they whack each other with sticks, they elbow each other in the face. It’s exactly the same in Italy with the drivers.” But he was smiling as he said all this, making it seem as though Italy, or at least the Italian road, was a kind of comic strip. “You’ll have a great time,” he said, in an encouraging way. “Which part of the city are you staying in?”

  “Near the Vatican. I rented the hotel online. They said it was walking distance.”

  He assured me it was a good section of the city, not the nicest but safe for a woman traveling alone: “If you keep your wits about you.”

  It was amazing to me how much speed the plane gathered as we went down the runway, and it was frightening to feel the lift in my belly, the way we bounced from side to side after the wheels left the ground. Once we were airborne, the man took out his computer, but before he began to work on it he said, “A Merton fan, I see.”

  “Yes. I just bought this one.”

  He asked if he could look at it and flipped through a few of the pages. “I read him in college,” he said, handing the book back to me. “It made so much sense then, the things he was saying.”

  “And now?”

  He shrugged, smiled. “Now real life has taken over.”

  “What he’s talking about seems exactly like real life to me.”

  “Wait thirty years,” he said knowingly, and then he turned to his computer screen and we said nothing after that. Out the window, I caught just a glimpse of the northern end of Revere Beach, and then the coastline of the North Shore, a bright jumble in twilight: I could see water towers, squat gas tanks, gray roofs. A few miniature boats scratching thin white lines on the sea, heading home.

  I READ A BIT AND studied the textbook a bit, and then, after the meal, settled in with a blanket. I was thinking, for some reason, of the ways people limit themselves: of the man beside me, of Laura Annina, of my father not wanting to break his routine and see Italy again. Was it only fear, or were they enviably satisfied with their lives while I was too restless in mine? Maybe, I thought, as I slipped toward sleep, it had something to do with not having a mother. Maybe the spiritual itch started there. Merton, I remembered, had also lost his mother when he was very young.…

  I was awakened by the attendants serving breakfast. Soon the pilot announced that we could see Italy out the windows on the side of the plane where I was sitting. I looked down and was surprised at how closely it resembled the map. I don’t know why I should have been, but somehow I thought the actual land would be messier, the edges blurred.

  We landed, and there was a short delay and then the confusion of immigration and customs. A bit like confession, I thought tiredly; that same twinge of concern as you approached it; that same feeling of cleanliness as you walked away. Just beyond the customs zone I saw a man—much too young to be my father’s cousin Franco—holding up a sign that said CYNTHIA PIANTEDOSI. Spelled correctly for once. It was a nice way to be greeted. The person holding the sign turned out to be Franco’s son, and to my surprise, he also turned out to be a priest. He shook
my hand warmly, insisted I call him “Bruno,” not “Father Bruno,” and also insisted on rolling the larger of my two bags out of the terminal to a small blue van in the parking area. “This belongs to my father,” he said in Italian, “but he let me use it today to take you to the hotel. He sends his regards. Tomorrow night we will go to his house for dinner.”

  “My father told me about you. I had no idea you were a priest.”

  He smiled proudly, as if having been ordained was the fulfillment of a childhood dream. Beneath the smile, though, lay a shadow of something else—misery, confusion, doubt—that anyone on earth could see. “Già cinque anni. Five years already,” he said, his Italian so much cleaner than what I was used to hearing at home. “I have a minor position at the Vatican.”

  In two minutes he had ferried me out of the airport parking lot and into a land of ugliness. I felt a wash of disappointment and then another wash of embarrassment at my own foolishness. For some reason I’d imagined that all of Rome, every bit of it, would be ancient buildings and ruins, and here out the windows what I saw was only modern-day commercial clutter: factories and electric wires, billboards, an acre of old cars crushed and stacked like cardboard boxes, the occasional unattractive apartment building, all gray concrete and flat, featureless planes. And my neighbor on the flight had been absolutely correct: the driving was madness.

  Father Bruno seemed perfectly comfortable in the midst of the madness, though, changing lanes the way some people change radio stations. It was sport to him, hockey on wheels. He raced up to within inches of the bumpers of trucks, then waited for an opening, darted left or right, and went racing along in pursuit of the next bumper. I was curious to learn about the life of a priest in Italy but afraid to distract him, so I kept silent and he kept his eyes on the road and the pretend-happy expression on his face. After half an hour or so he took an exit and curved down from the elevated highway into the city.

  “This is more like I imagined Rome to be,” I said, wondering what my Italian sounded like to him. A small accent? Noise against his ears?

  Another sorrow-lined smile. “Roma,” he said. “My home. My father moved here to work at the Vatican when I was very young. He’s a lawyer, retired now.”

  In that part of the city I saw no ruins or elaborate fountains, but there were at least some nice-looking, fairly old, stucco apartment buildings—lemon- and ochre- and apricot-colored, the windows bracketed with brown or green shutters flapping open to either side or closed tight against the morning. We sped past one church. It was squeezed lopsidedly between two younger buildings, as if they were its grandchildren holding it upright: pocked gray stone, worn wooden doors. The sight of it sent a wave of happiness through me. Everything else might be unfamiliar here, but I’d be at home in the churches, I knew that. My prayers would take me beyond superficial differences—language, smells, national habits, down into a quiet unity, a place with no flags or passports or accents.

  By the time we’d gone another block we were caught up in a swirling soup of traffic, made worse by cars parked on both sides of the narrow streets, and then we at last broke free and entered a residential district of five-story apartment buildings with graffiti on the ground floors and rust stains by the gutters. There was a sidewalk sale going on, block after block of it. I caught glimpses of women standing beside tables covered with cardboard boxes. Clothes and books, it looked like.

  Father Bruno made a left onto a narrower street and double-parked near a sign that read ALBERGO. “This is the place you reserved,” he said, with the smallest note of disdain. “Not the best hotel in the city and not the best neighborhood either, but close to the Vatican and you can walk around at night here without worry.”

  “Thank you so much,” I said. “I can carry my own bags in. It’s no problem.”

  “What time tomorrow is your meeting?”

  “I’m supposed to be at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at ten thirty. I’m meeting Cardinal Rosario.”

  “An important place and an important man,” he said, and, when I didn’t respond: “I’ll come for you at ten.”

  “That will give us enough time?”

  “Oh, yes. It is very close. You can almost walk there. I will be here at ten, don’t worry. If you want to see the Vatican now, go to the end of this street and turn left and follow the people.”

  “Thank you so much again,” I said.

  “Niente,” he said. “It’s nothing.” He nodded and smiled, and when I closed the door he carried his unspoken sorrows away with him into the Italian morning.

  I hadn’t wanted an expensive hotel and had found this one, Albergo delle Mura, online. The lobby was small but gleaming, all tile and chrome, the people at the desk friendly enough. The room one of them showed me to, up three flights of stairs, was perfectly adequate. I closed the door and sat on the bed, and even though the sink in the bathroom was dripping and the single window looked out on nothing more interesting than the roof of an apartment building across the street, I felt absolutely bathed in happiness. I was in Italy, in Rome! It had thrilled me to hear Italian spoken, to see it on the billboards and signs. The colors and shapes of the cars, the style of the architecture, even the way the people walked seemed fresh and fascinating to me. Tired as I was from the time change and the long flight, I could hardly wait to go out into the city, but I unpacked first, took a shower, changed clothes.

  Following Bruno’s directions, I walked to the end of the street and turned left. A wall made of thin red bricks, faded and old-looking, slanted up and away from me. As he’d promised, there was what seemed like a river of tourists, so I followed them through the entrance marked CITTÀ DEL VATICANO and into St. Peter’s Square: the fountain, the obelisk, the twin rows of stone columns at its circumference, the grand church with the pope’s balcony and the famous dome. Seeing it that way, in person, sent another burst of joy through me. After a few minutes in a line that snaked through metal detectors and past two security guards, I stepped through the doors of the church that, in a certain way, stood at the center of my universe. Just inside the front entrance was Michelangelo’s Pietà. Softly lit, protected by bulletproof glass, it was a treasure sent to us from some finer world. I stood in front of it for a long time. As had been the case with St. Peter’s, I’d seen it before, of course, many times, in the book Father Alberto had given me, in photos, in a TV special. But the Pietà felt familiar in a way that St. Peter’s did not, a way that had nothing to do with books and photos. After a while I understood that for years I’d been seeing it, or some image I associated with it, in my prayers. Something in the folds of white marble whispered to me in a language that was familiar but not quite understandable. I stood there trying to make sense of that, but the connection was vague, a strand of thought linking dream and day. According to the biblical accounts, Mary had been a young girl—fourteen or fifteen, probably—when she’d discovered she was pregnant. Pregnancy without marriage, in her time, meant nothing but disgrace, a future of poverty, misery, and shame. Joseph—many years older and really a mysterious figure—had saved her from that fate. But why had he married her? Pity? Simple charity? Loneliness? An intuition that the child she carried was an exceptional soul? And what had happened to him after Christ’s birth? There wasn’t a word in the Bible about that. Or about what Mary’s life had been like after her husband died.

  After a while I left those questions and that magnificent sculpture and wandered around the rest of the enormous church. The nave was crowded with tour groups, nuns, kids, couples with guidebooks. There must have been twenty different languages in the air. I studied everything—the colors and designs of the worn floor tiles, the columns standing there like redwoods, Michelangelo’s domed ceiling, the murals and stained glass, the main altar, the side altars, the confessionals, the yellow marble fountains, the resting place of one of my heroes, Pope John XXIII. It was a museum of my faith, and I wandered around examining every surface, every twist of decorative marble along the ceiling,
every pew.

  After a time I stepped into one of the side chapels, which was mainly empty, and knelt for a few minutes on the hard tile, wishing I could magically summon my grandmother and Father Alberto and set them down beside me there. I wanted to share St. Peter’s with them, or, at least, be able to send them a postcard of the Pietà. I closed my eyes and pictured Mary’s sculpted face. Most likely she’d looked nothing like Michelangelo’s marble woman, not so beautiful, not so unlined and unworried. Brown-skinned, not white, occasionally weary or upset. It didn’t matter. What mattered to me was that in those perfect features Michelangelo had captured the essence of the human predicament: the sorrows of bodily existence and the confidence of true faith. I told myself that making peace between those two things was the only balance I had to strike. Just that. Be afraid, be nervous, be sad—fine. But lay the blanket of faith over those cold, restless children. Let them rest.

  I sat in a pew there for close to an hour, then went and stood in front of the sculpture again, and again it was like listening to music I knew and loved. This is enough, I thought. Even if nothing comes of the meeting with Cardinal Rosario, this is more than enough to justify the expense and the effort of coming here. Just this.

  When I left finally, hungry and weary, I sat for a while on the lip of the fountain in the square, looking at Michelangelo’s dome and the dark metal doors and the pilgrims filing in and out. I had the thought then—strange for me—that, for the rest of my life I would try to come to Rome on vacations. I’d save up for fifty weeks, then make an annual pilgrimage to this place. The strangeness came from the fast transition—in my mind, at least—from provincial girl to world traveler and from the feeling, so strong, that here, in the heart of the heart of the Church’s rules and regulations, those things didn’t matter to me at all. What mattered was having a solid building, a temple, that served as an anchor for my inner wanderings. That was what St. Anthony’s had always been. Now my world was larger.