But then he said, “Parish priests become the bishop. Bishops become the archbishop. Archbishops become the cardinal. The cardinal maybe, one day, becomes the pope.”
“I’m not asking for women cardinals, Your Eminence.”
“Not now, no.”
“I’m asking for the Church to consider a change that would very likely invigorate her around the world.”
Cardinal Rosario turned his head halfway in the direction of Father Clement.
“Invigorire,” I said, before the priest, who seemed momentarily distracted, could translate.
The cardinal nodded as if he’d known the word, but had wanted to be sure. “You breathe in and then out,” he said, lifting one hand from the table and swinging it away and then back toward him. “The Church in various places at various times passes through periods of favor and disfavor. History makes those periods. Inside them, our Church,” he held his hands apart as if holding a ball, “grows larger and smaller, more popular and less popular. But she doesn’t change.”
“I ask you,” I said, “I plead with you, Your Eminence, only to raise this issue at the next convocation of the cardinals, only to do that.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head sadly. Then he started to speak in quick, quiet tones to Father Clement, as if the meeting had already ended and I had been dismissed. “Cardinal Rosario,” Father Clement said, blinking in his nervous way, “sees in you a good woman. And he respects the recommendation of his friend Archbishop Menendez. Truly respects it. But he says that what you’re asking of him is simply not possible, and with respect for you and admiration for your faith, he declines.”
“No hope, then?” I said. “Could we meet once more?”
Father Clement translated the question but did not need to translate the answer. The cardinal was moving his head side to side, eyes down, the second finger of his right hand tapping on the top of the left. His eyes came up to me, and he said, “My good daughter, be very careful now here on such a path like this. There are people here who, if they don’t see you as I see you, would form the wrong opinion and perhaps wish you harm.”
And with that, before I could say anything else, the cardinal blessed me with the sign of the cross and stood and turned away.
I stood also. Father Clement held the door for the cardinal, and as he was doing so, as I was beginning to feel a whole city of hope breaking apart inside me, the bespectacled priest turned almost a hundred eighty degrees and looked at me. Cardinal Rosario was going out the door and couldn’t see him. Father Clement had so much pain in his face I thought for a moment that he was going to ask my forgiveness. He seemed desperately to want to say something. I thought I saw him try to speak or smile, but his lips only wobbled and his forehead pinched up like that of a man about to weep. And then he closed the door almost all the way and I listened to their footsteps, out of time with each other, fading in the tile corridor.
I WAS LEFT ALONE IN the conference room. I sat back down and waited there for probably five or six minutes in a kind of daze, expecting someone to come and escort me to the street. The door had been left slightly ajar, and finally I heard sounds in the hallway—voices, passing footsteps—and I made myself stand and go down the stairs and walk out of the building. It seemed strange that they would let me leave unaccompanied, because the whole place—the twelve-foot ceilings, the tile corridor with its dark, heavy-looking doors and huge gold-framed portraits of popes, cardinals, and Church patrons—had a mysterious feeling to it, as if secret work were being done in those closed conference rooms and offices. I retraced my steps along the corridor, down the white marble stairway, past the man at the glassless window with his ledger book sitting open in front of him. He might or might not have acknowledged me; I didn’t notice. I was wrapped up tight in a skin of depression, something so rare in my life that for those few minutes I almost felt as though another woman had occupied my body.
I remember stepping out into the air—which seemed suddenly so much warmer than when I’d arrived—and thinking that some message about me must have been sent down to the man in the outdoor booth because he seemed to have been watching for me and he looked at me as if I were an enemy who’d managed to find her way inside the gated compound. She needed to be observed carefully to make sure she left without stealing a gold ornament or spray-painting obscene messages on the wall. Keeping a distance of six or eight feet between our bodies, he escorted me past the Swiss guards and through the huge open gate, then stood there as if to make sure I wouldn’t try to rush back in.
I waited on the sidewalk, half hypnotized. Father Bruno hadn’t yet come to fetch me, and I realized with a great sweep of sadness that I’d been in the building only about twenty minutes. All that money—my father’s and my own—all that effort and trouble: the difficult half hour with Monsignor Ferraponte, the slightly hopeful conversation with Archbishop Menendez, all those talks with Father Alberto and Father Welch, the books I’d read, the hours of prayer in which I’d felt so personally addressed by God, the sting of leaving my father behind—in the span of twenty minutes all of it had been turned to ash.
When Father Bruno drove up, when I climbed into the passenger seat of the van and he started off, I burst into tears and wept the way I hadn’t wept for as long as I could remember. My chin was resting on my chest; the tears dripped into the lap of my dress, making spots there the size and color of raisins. I felt like an absolute and perfect fool. Father Bruno reached a hand across and rested it lightly on my back.
We went only a few blocks and then, in the great Italian tradition of food as medicine, he stopped at a small café—more illegal parking—and told me I had to go in with him, stand at the bar, and have an espresso. We did that. No conversation, just the white china cups with a red line around the top, the hot dose of sugary caffeine, the company of a few strangers and a barista named Gino with waxed curls at the tips of his moustache.
Back in the van, Bruno said, “A woman like you going into a building like that. How could you come out happy? Am I wrong?”
“I don’t know. Not wrong. No.”
He asked me to tell him what the meeting had been about, and I felt then that I had nothing to lose, that there was no hope, no possibility of any good outcome now. I couldn’t feel more foolish than I already felt, so I gave him the story, start to finish.
He made no response. It seemed to me that he was pretending to concentrate on the driving, whereas on the two other trips we’d taken, he hadn’t given the road more than half his attention. At last he said, “I have your things in back. I packed up everything and moved you out of the hotel, and they gave me a fifty percent refund. I found you a much nicer place.”
“Please keep the money,” I said. “For gas. For your time.”
“I used it to pay part of the bill at the new hotel.”
Without saying anything else, he drove across the river into a pretty, residential section of the city and pulled up at another tall wrought-iron gate in front of what looked to be a small palace. The building was made of white limestone, with at least a dozen windows in the front wall and several balconies where, in a romantic movie, in another era, a young prince and princess might have sat enjoying a carafe of wine on a September afternoon. The grounds were planted with shrubs and small trees, all of them past bloom and waiting, in an orderly silence, for the start of winter. Bruno lifted my bags out of the back of the van, pushed a button that made the gate swing open, and carried them down a gravel driveway, one in each hand. A courtyard huddled there, shaded by trees and a grape arbor. Several rear doors opened onto it. He led me through one of them and, at an interior door, took a key from his pocket.
“I know the woman who owns this hotel. Claudia Maniscalco is her name. It used to be a true palazzo. Her family let it go into disrepair, and she moved back from Milano to oversee the renovations.”
He opened the door onto a room that was something out of a futuristic universe. The chairs were curved pieces of thin black metal, cushionless. The bed
was huge and round. On the walls hung framed posters of American movie stars—Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Jayne Mansfield.
“Is okay?” he asked, in English.
“Yes, beautiful,” I said, though really, it was almost clownish to my eye. Expensive-looking, half absurd. It fit me about as well as a miniskirt or a garish tattoo.
He set my bags to one side of the bed, and then, as if he’d been pondering his response for half an hour, he said, “This is something we talk about often, my friends and I. Not so much about women becoming priests as men priests being able to marry and have a family. And we talk about the fact that even here, even in Italy, people do not take the Church seriously the way they once did. There are some elements within the Church, here and in other places in Europe, that are dangerous now, I think. The people in those groups are like a wounded animal. They can see what is happening. They see that they are no longer taken so seriously, that people are leaving the Church, that the young people are laughing at it. It hurts them, makes them angry, makes them afraid. Normal feelings. But what they do with those feelings is very bad. They begin to see those other people, those who do not go to Mass, those who were baptized and then left the Church, or those within the Church, like you, who are trying to change it, they see them as enemies, as the Devil, or under the influence of the Devil, and once they see a person that way, he ceases to become a full person, and then they can do anything to him, or to her. Anything at all. This is why I worry about you now.”
The long oration seemed to have been percolating inside him for years, and was connected, I thought, to the sadness I’d noticed in his face from the first minute. The emotion of it brought his sleepy dark eyes to life, and I saw a resemblance to my father there, just a flash of it.
“We talk about this,” he went on, “but we talk about it quietly, in secret, usually with only our closest friends. It is a little bit like living in Communist Russia a generation ago.”
“I should just go home now,” I said, thinking of facing my father with my head hanging, thinking of the questions he’d ask and the answers I’d have to give. “I should just let things be as they are and live the life I was living.”
“You could do that,” he said, “yes. But you are in Rome, you are in Italy. You should at least enjoy yourself. Rest now. Tonight I will come take you to dinner at my father’s house, but tomorrow there are places you must see. Your Italian is so good, you’ll have no trouble. One place you must see is a church, a very special church. It is called Santa Maria in Trastevere. I can make you a small map.” He took a pen from his breast pocket and, using a pad of paper that sat next to the telephone on a stylish black bureau, drew me a simple map with the river and main streets and told me I could walk to the church in probably twenty minutes, or he could drive me there now, on his way back to work.
I was suddenly worn out. I thanked him but said I wanted to rest. He wrote his phone number on the bottom of the pad of paper and said that if I needed anything, anything at all, if there was any kind of problem, I should be sure to call him. Then he hugged me against him and left in a way that seemed hurried, as if our quick embrace in a hotel room had made him uncomfortable or as if he didn’t fully trust me with what he’d revealed.
I lay down on the circular mattress and stared at the ceiling, which had been painted a dark purple to resemble the night sky. I thought of Laura Annila and I understood her a little better then: if you stayed in your familiar world, if you didn’t ask too much from life, if you didn’t try to push a boyfriend to marry you or a cardinal to change the rules, you protected yourself from a certain level of pain. There would be unavoidable disappointments—arguments, illness—but not very much in the way of failure. You could blame your disappointments on fate or bad luck, the unfairness of class or race or gender; failures, though, would be all your own.
I decided—Father Alberto had recommended this for especially difficult times—to do the Prayer of Giving for myself. I pretended I was outside myself, looking on with the loving eyes of my grandmother, and I breathed in the pain I was feeling and filtered it through that love, and breathed it out again as something else—determination, forgiveness, acceptance. For the first few minutes it seemed a foolish exercise, something forced and false. But I kept at it, as Father had advised me to, and in time, inch by inch, I pulled myself out of the muddy swamp of defeat. Your will, not my will, I said. Your will, not mine. Over and over again until a different kind of hypnosis took hold. Bad, good, neutral—things happened the way they were supposed to happen; it didn’t mean I shouldn’t have tried. I couldn’t know what might come of that trying, what seed of doubt I might have planted in the cardinal’s mind, what tiny bit of support Father Bruno and his friends might feel from knowing someone else had made an effort.
I decided, after praying for a long while, prone, on the ridiculous circular bed, that moping around the hotel all afternoon was a bad idea. I would go and see the church Bruno had recommended. Being in a church always gave me a sense of calm, always seemed to take my life and shift it out from under its cascade of thoughts. So many of those thoughts were useless, or even counterproductive, a waste of energy. Most of them had to do with worrying about things that couldn’t be changed, or hoping things would turn out a certain way. I had been able, for one example, to almost completely give up thinking about becoming someone’s wife one day. It might happen. Even in the midst of my strenuous attempt to become a priest, I still hoped it would happen. But I didn’t worry about it any longer. In that one section of my life, at least, I had turned my hopes over to God. If the right man came along, at the right time, if he asked me to marry him, if I loved him, if I thought we could make a nice family together and live in harmony, that would be exciting and fine. If not, it would be God’s will, and I knew I could accept it.
An attitude like that wasn’t the same as passivity. It was activity within a bubble of a certain size. If God decided to let that bubble break open and allow me to move out beyond it into the larger sphere of married women and men, that would be wonderful. If not, I had to continue to do everything I could within the confines of my present life. I wanted to feel the same way about pursuing the priesthood. That bubble seemed to have a very thick skin. I felt as though I’d been punching and kicking against it from the inside, trying to break a hole through it, and on that day it had become clear to me that the job would remain unfinished. And yet, despite all my prayers, I wasn’t truly at peace with that.
I got up off the round bed and walked out into the courtyard, down the gravel drive, and through the tall front gate, and I felt the residue of the morning’s disappointment like a weight on my neck and shoulders. Beginning to shift and rearrange itself beneath that weight, though—and I could feel this, too—was my conviction that the world spun the way its Creator wanted it to spin and that the secret of happiness was to align ourselves with His will. Going to a church always made me remember that. And I was hungry, on top of everything else.
A meal, I thought, a good meal, an hour in a beautiful church, and the weight would begin to seem bearable.
Just outside the gates of what I’d come to think of as the Old Palace Hotel was a very busy four-lane road and, on the other side of it, the Tiber River. In that part of the city the river was sunk thirty or forty feet below the level of the street, with rocky banks and stone walls rising up on either side. As I crossed a marble bridge there—flat, loud with traffic, decorated with carved angels—I noticed a man rowing along in a racing shell like the ones I sometimes saw on the Charles River. He was going fast, facing backward, working very hard, his efforts marked by small circular puddles where the blades of his oars left the water. For a few seconds after each stroke the circular puddles remained visible behind the boat in two neat rows, shrinking. Then, like impossible hopes, like twins with short identical lives, they disappeared.
On the far side of the river I saw a rat squeezing its body down between the bars of a sewer grate.
Glancing from time to time at Father Bruno’s simple map, I followed a route that was positively wild with motorbikes, motorcycles, delivery trucks, and speeding cars. There was one brave soul juggling bowling pins at a stoplight—right in the middle of the street. I watched him for a moment—he dropped one pin, laughed at himself, collected donations—and then I went on, eventually turning onto a half-sunken lane and finding myself in a different part of Rome. This neighborhood was loud with traffic noise, too, but there were more pedestrians hurrying along the narrow slanted sidewalks. They carried briefcases or pushed strollers and didn’t seem to be tourists. The neighborhood had a feeling of homey oldness; a sign on one worn stone house said casa di Dante.
I walked on, passing several small restaurants, until I came to one that seemed right, and I went in and was seated at a table among a crowd of Italians enjoying their midday meal. The waitress greeted me, handed me a menu in hard black covers. Opening it I saw that there were twenty or thirty different kinds of pasta listed under primi piatti. When she came again, she brought bottled water, bread, and olive oil in a shallow dish, and I ordered something I’d never eaten before—spaghetti in oxtail gravy. I asked for a glass of wine, too.
The wine was light and delicious, and the tomato gravy had actual pieces of oxtail in it; I was surprised how much taste that little bit of bone and meat added. The bread was slightly salty with a hard crust, the pasta perfectly al dente. As I drank and chewed, I looked around the small room at the tables and chairs crowded close together, Italian couples and families at various stages of their meals. Ordinary life, I thought. Decent, ordinary life with its patches of fun and worry. Unlike the one American in their midst, these people weren’t trying to change anything, weren’t pushing hard against the inside of any bubble, weren’t radicals, troublemakers, or fools.
But as I had hoped it would, the meal turned that line of thought in a slightly more positive direction. I thanked the waitress and then, after some wandering around the alleys and narrow streets, cars squeezing past so close I could have readjusted their side mirrors with a swing of my hips, I found the church Father Bruno had marked on his map. Santa Maria in Trastevere, it was called. It was set in an uneven, sloping square with a fountain in the middle. The square was a less trendy version of Campo de’ Fiori, and the church was, at least from the outside, much less grand than St. Peter’s. Between the plain gray columns out front and the chipped wooden entrance doors, a Gypsy boy, three or four years old, was kicking an empty plastic suntan lotion bottle back and forth as if it were a soccer ball. A woman who appeared to be his mother was half kneeling, half sitting on the pavement, holding an infant against her chest, one cupped hand extended. I put a five-euro coin in her palm, and the woman, so beautiful with her black hair and coppery skin, looked up and smiled. Just before I turned away from her, I saw that the infant wrapped in the folds of her dress was actually a doll.
Vatican Waltz Page 14
