To either side of the front doors irregular-sized chunks of white marble had been embedded in the concrete walls. There were letters cut into the worn surfaces, Greek or Latin, I guessed, no doubt thousands of years old. Inside, I needed a few seconds to let my eyes adjust. Thick stone columns stood to either side of the nave, though, strangely, they were all slightly different from one another—different type of stone, somewhat different color and shape—as if they’d been salvaged from four or five broken-up churches and combined there to make something new. There were plain brown pews that looked a thousand years older than the ones in St. Anthony’s and orange, pink, brown, and white marble tiles set into the floor—triangles, rectangles, odd chunks arranged in circular patterns. It all seemed so smoky and used, so far from the sparkling neatness and bright lights of St. Anthony’s and so far outside the orbit of attention St. Peter’s occupied. But when I stepped toward the middle of the nave and looked at the altar, I saw that the shabbiness of the front of the building was just another disguise. Behind the marble altar stood a crescent of a dozen brown wooden chairs like the ones you’d expect to see bishops sitting in at Easter Mass, and above them was a fresco, all arms and faces, the scene interrupted by two windows with winged figures around them. Above that, two-thirds of the way to the ceiling, an incredible mosaic ran all the way to the top of the curved dome.
Midway up was a wide band that had a line of sheep in it, six to each side. Above the band were nine human figures, with Jesus and Mary at the center, both of them seated, bracketed by apostles to either side, all of it against a background of thousands of tiny gold tiles. I had a feeling similar to what I’d felt in front of the Pietà: I didn’t really need to see the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum, the Forum. God sparkled in those ancient chips of color and was singing to me through them. That was enough. That might sound like an immature thing to say, an idea born of a few minutes’ excitement, but I suddenly had the sense that the real purpose of coming to Rome hadn’t been to convince the cardinal or make a pilgrimage to St. Peter’s, but to see this church.
I genuflected and walked up the aisle and noticed that, in the part of the mosaic that covered the curved half bowl of the apse, Jesus had his arm around his mother. They were sitting close together, his head a foot or so above hers, their bodies wrapped in robes. You could clearly see his thin fingers resting on her opposite shoulder. That, I thought, that was my Jesus. Not the tortured man hanging from nails on a cross, not the strict young future rabbi turning over tables in the temple, but an ordinary-looking, loving man, the embodiment of God, giving his mother an embrace that seemed to say, there is no distinction here, she and I are made of the same stuff.
On a flat section to the side of that indented, curved ceiling, there was another fresco, this one of Mary lying on a bed with Jesus standing over her. To my surprise I saw that Jesus was holding a baby. After staring at the images for several minutes I thought I understood: Jesus had seen Mary’s entire life on Earth from the moment of her birth to the moment of her assumption into Heaven and had been standing close beside her all that time. The baby was himself; Jesus almost seemed to be comforting it against the pain that waited in its future. Caught in a sudden gust of happiness, I sat in one of the hard pews. I could hear the noise of a few tourists who were shuffling around and whispering to one another. I could smell candle smoke. I could sense an older woman farther down the pew running rosary beads through her fingertips the way my grandmother had, as if she were squeezing pits from cherries, one after the next.
Instead of trying to pray, I kept my eyes open and studied the main mosaic in front of me. Jesus and Mary were sitting up straight, but not stiffly straight. They didn’t look sad or wounded. They weren’t off in some distant realm separated from the sinful world by an uncrossable distance. Something in their posture and faces spoke of a perfect and perfectly compassionate understanding of the human condition. I sat there for a long time studying them, and it began to seem to me that the disappointment of the day had been reversed. For months I’d been praying and praying for a sign, and in Santa Maria, it seemed, the sign had at last been given. I couldn’t have said exactly what I felt I was supposed to do, but something about seeing Jesus with his arm around his mother that way and seeing him standing there holding the baby and looking down at Mary gave me the sure sense that others in the world, including the man who’d designed those mosaics, understood Christianity in a way that had been lost to the Vatican authorities over the past several hundred years.
It was more than simply the role of Mary or the role of women in the Church. It went beyond that. It was an aspect of Jesus himself, the spirit we all revered, some tenderness in him that I’d been imagining since I was a tiny girl, some way of giving his mother her rightful place of importance in the story—that grand, sweeping epic that had stood at the heart of my interior world for as long as I could remember. The hero of that story was more than someone who walked around with a dozen disciples trailing him, doing miracles, yelling at people, eventually allowing himself to be tortured and killed in the fulfillment of a prophecy that had been spoken thousands of years before.
The gesture of him with his arm around his mother rendered him—and her—fully human and real in a way nothing else I’d ever seen or heard had been able to do. It seemed to wash into the gutter all the doubt that had attached itself to me over the past few years. I stayed there a long time, filled up with that new happiness, as if the oxtail gravy at lunch had been spiked with a sweet Roman morphine.
Then I floated back down the side aisle of the church and out through the heavy wooden doors. They squeaked on their hinges as if complaining “Don’t leave, don’t leave.” I went out past the boy kicking his empty plastic bottle and the woman kneeling there with the black shawl and dress wrapped around her, eyes lowered, hand still outstretched.
I walked into the sunlit square and looked up at the sky, and for a few seconds I felt that my loneliness, the loneliness that had seemed to walk along beside me like an empty shell of a person for twenty-two years, had magically disappeared. Some other spirit was living inside me, a comfort, a twin soul. I felt something that even my deepest prayer had not made me feel: that I was fully, completely, totally lovable, as who I was, a woman walking the surface of the earth. Beyond opening myself to that love, there was nothing I had to do, nothing at all.
When I lowered my eyes, the first person they settled on there—another of God’s little jokes—behind the large fountain at the center of the square, just his head showing above the stone lip, watching me, was the man who’d come knocking on my hotel door at one in the morning.
As soon as my eyes met his, he turned his back and walked off in the opposite direction. I followed him, I don’t know why—instinct, anger, a fierceness fed by my newly discovered lovability, or a desire to find out if Father Bruno was right and someone had sent this person to follow me. He turned onto one of the narrow streets, an alley really, that led off the square, and I kept following him.
I turned into the alley, too, and caught sight of him, maybe a hundred feet ahead, just as he made a sharp left into a much narrower alley. I broke into a run, my shoes clattering on the cobblestones, one or two people in the human river of Romans and tourists glancing at me as I hurried past. When I turned left into the narrower alley, I had to go only about ten steps before I realized it was a dead end. The man who’d been following me must have realized the same thing. Too late. Because there he was, pressing himself into a corner where one of the stone buildings jutted out a few feet from its neighbor. He wasn’t very good at hiding. I could see one elbow sticking out. I slowed to a walk and took the phone out of my purse, and as I came to the corner of the building I whirled around and held the phone up at the level of his face. Before he could move, I’d taken two quick pictures.
I could see almost immediately what I hadn’t been calm enough to see in that one frightened moment in the doorway of the first hotel room: there was something wrong with the
man. Just from looking at his angular features with the splotches of black hair above a high forehead and wide-set, mismatched eyes, I could sense that something wasn’t right. It wasn’t drunkenness: the expression on his face made him seem like a boy in a man’s body. And when I started to shout at him, still holding the phone up, his first instinct was to flinch and cower back into the brick corner almost the way a boy would do if he were being yelled at by his mother.
“Chiamerò la polizia! I’m going to call the police!” I said, very loudly. My whole body was shaking. “I have your picture, here, on my phone! And unless you tell me why you’re following me, I’m going to call the police and show them this picture.”
He made a helpless gesture, half shrug, as if he didn’t understand what I was saying, and for a second it seemed he’d try to run off. He made a move to his right, back toward the alley, but I reached out my arm and put a hand against his shoulder and I yelled, “NO! Stop!” and to my surprise he did stop. He stood there, almost a foot taller, a hundred pounds heavier, staring down at me, terrified. “Tell me!” I yelled. “Why? Why are you following me?”
He said something in a thickly accented, trembling voice, three syllables. If it was Italian, it was no kind of Italian I’d ever heard.
I poked my finger into the middle of his chest and held up the phone again. “Tell me,” I said, “or I’m going to the police. Is someone paying you to follow me?”
He looked at me without speaking for probably the count of five, said the word again: “grossetto,” pushed my arm away, and sprinted out of the alley.
I had to stand there for several minutes, taking deep breaths. It was as if the sight of that man’s face had awakened some sleeping warrior in me, something that was as far from the Cynthia Piantedosi of my prayer life as I was now from the streets of Revere, Massachusetts. Eventually I calmed down enough to walk back out to the end of the alley and then to the square and then, retracing my steps, back to the hotel.
Several times on that walk I turned and looked behind me to see if I was being followed. Twice I cut down side streets, walked half a block, and then made an about-face and turned back in the opposite direction. But I didn’t see the man again, and no one else seemed to be watching me.
AT SEVEN O’CLOCK THAT NIGHT I went out and stood on the sidewalk in front of the gate. After I’d been waiting several minutes, running my eyes over every pedestrian I could see, Father Bruno pulled up in the van and I climbed in. We drove toward the outskirts of the city and then into rolling countryside, green hills and olive groves, vineyards and estate houses perched on small rises. He seemed wrapped in a silent tension. I told him how much I’d liked Santa Maria in Trastevere and thanked him for recommending it.
“A special church” was all he said.
He turned off a two-lane road that ran between cultivated yards and small houses—a scene that was a more rural version of what I’d grown up with on Tapley Avenue—and onto a paved, unlined street, and then turned again onto a dirt road that curved this way and that, and climbed a gentle hillside.
Father Bruno had seemed upset or angry from the first—I wondered if I had somehow insulted him, if he’d wanted a different response from me in the hotel room—and he seemed to grow more uncomfortable with every mile we traveled. “You have to understand,” he said at last, the words practically bursting out of him in rapid-fire Italian, “devi capire, my father is a good man, but he has no love for the Church. He believes in God, but he despises the Vatican and everything it stands for. Try not to get him onto that subject, please. And if he gets onto that subject, don’t encourage him.”
“But I thought he worked there.”
“His whole career,” Father Bruno said, as if that explained everything.
Another hundred yards, and we turned into the drive of a very nice, modern house, brown stucco walls, red tile roof, large, neat garden with staked tomato plants, a grape arbor, and what looked like cherry and peach trees standing in even rows on the west-facing slope. Beyond them spread a view of the valley and the highway that ran through it. The dry hillsides beyond were spotted with grand estates and vineyards. Father Bruno followed the driveway around to the back of the house and pulled to a stop in a cloud of dust, and waiting there was a man who might have been my father’s brother. Same short, stocky body. Same strong arms and neck. The same workman’s hands protruding from the cuffs of a white, long-sleeved shirt. Even the same bristly salt-and-pepper hair above a high forehead. Behind him, set in the shade of the grape arbor, was a wooden table with four chairs. I got out, walked over to him, shook his hand, and introduced myself, and he examined my face carefully, almost the way Cardinal Rosario had. “I haven’t seen your father since we were schoolboys,” he said, “but I see in you his eyes and mouth.”
“Did you know my mother?”
“I was in love with your mother. I wanted to marry her. She left before I could ask her, then wrote, a few years later, to say she had married my cousin.”
That bit of family history was delivered abruptly and not in a particularly kind way. I had the feeling Franco had been preparing to say it to me from the minute he’d heard I’d be visiting. I was glad when a woman appeared at the back door, younger than Franco by perhaps fifteen years, still quite pretty, with graying brown hair and a somewhat heavy build. She was carrying a platter heaped with cooked greens, and she smiled at me in a welcoming way. She set down the platter in the middle of the table and, turning back toward the house, motioned for me to follow.
Inside, in a kitchen with yellow tile walls and pots simmering on the stove, she told me her name was Lucia, and, without any fuss at all, handed me a tray with four bowls on it, salt and pepper shakers, a bottle of olive oil, and a plate with half a loaf of bread. She picked up another platter that held sliced, juicy-looking tomatoes in olive oil with oregano flakes on them, and before we went out the door she said, in a rougher version of Italian than I’d been hearing that day, “Franco can be a pain in the ass. Don’t pay too much attention.”
It was all done so simply and straightforwardly, as if we’d been friends forever, or as if we were more than distantly related. I couldn’t tell at first if Lucia was Franco’s wife, girlfriend, or maid. But when we were out in the yard she said, “Franco, sit,” in a certain tone of voice that made me understand they were probably longtime lovers. We started in on the tomatoes, bread, and olive oil and then the greens, and Lucia disappeared into the house and came out again with a huge ceramic bowl of spaghetti. I could smell sage and butter—we were strictly a tomato sauce family at home—as she spooned some onto our plates. Franco poured from a jug of white wine, and for a time his mood softened and the conversation moved fairly easily through questions about my life in America: How was my father’s health? How did he occupy his time? What was it like where we lived?
But then, after we’d dispensed with the spaghetti and Lucia had brought out a plate of veal, sausages, and meatballs in a tomato gravy and Franco, I noticed, had drunk three or four glasses of wine, he fixed me with a stern look and said, “You’re not a nun, are you?”
“Oh, no. A nurse.”
He grunted. “My son,” he gestured with his fork in the direction of Bruno, “becomes a priest. Otherwise a good boy.”
I couldn’t tell if he’d meant it as a joke. There was an awkward pause, matched by a small, awkward smile on Father Bruno’s lips.
“Becomes a priest,” Franco went on. “Throws in his lot with the crooks and liars. Did you know,” he went on without waiting for any response, “that the Vatican secretly owns seventy percent of the commercial real estate in Rome. Seventy percent!” He held his fork up like an exclamation point. “They take in money from churches all over the world, too. Poor people giving a euro, a few pennies. It flows there”—he pointed with his fork down into the valley in what I supposed was the direction of St. Peter’s—“and they have their summer palaces, their expensive clothes. Some popes wore shoes from Prada!”
“
I didn’t know that,” I said in as neutral a way as I could manage. What I wanted to say was: You worked for the Vatican all those years. Those pennies and euros went to pay your salary, to buy this land and build this house.
“And you’re like him?” Franco asked, gesturing to his son. “Religious?”
“Yes,” I said. “I pray a lot. It gives me great comfort. I can go to Mass without thinking about the bad aspects of the Church.”
Another grunt.
“In just the same way,” I went on, “that I can be an American and proud of my country without feeling connected to the bad things it has done in history. I take a more individual view of those things. There are good people and bad, everywhere, in all countries and all organizations. There is good and bad in everyone.”
Franco grunted again. He cut off a piece of sausage with his fork, chewed, washed it down with a gulp of wine.
“This is Franco’s passion,” Lucia said. “His hobby. Some men watch soccer and argue in the bars about the different teams. He reads the newspaper, and anytime he meets a new person, after a while he starts to complain about the popes, the cardinals, and the priests. His son is a good boy, a fine young man, and all his father does is criticize the Church in his presence.”
Vatican Waltz Page 15
