“I said he was a good boy,” Franco said, looking at her. “Would you rather I get upset about soccer?”
There was a rough, teasing tone to their exchange, a kind of intimate banter. It was almost sexual, I thought, and I felt a twinge of envy, a quick, sad thought: I would never have someone to joke with that way.
“You used to work for the Vatican, didn’t you?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
He looked at his son instead of at me, and I wished I’d kept silent. “I did,” he admitted. “I was young. I needed a job. Like you and Bruno, I had a great respect for the Church, or for what I thought the Church was.”
“And you were disillusioned?”
A bark of harsh laughter escaped him. It reminded me of Monsignor Ferraponte’s first response when I’d told him I was being called to the priesthood. “Disincantato,” he corrected. “Disenchanted. Sì, disincantato. Yes, because what I saw there, in the inner circles, had nothing to do with the love of Christ. Nothing.”
“Pope John XXIII seemed Christlike to me. Pope John Paul.”
He nodded vigorously and said, “Sì, sì,” before pouring himself more wine. “They were clean men wading across a river of filth.”
“That’s a little strong, isn’t it, Papa?” interjected Bruno.
Franco gave his son a stern look. “If you could see what I saw, you wouldn’t say that.”
“I see some of it.”
“The higher up you go”—Franco swung his wine glass a bit too excitedly, splashing a few drops onto his sleeve—“the worse it is. Even the popes can’t do some of the things they want to. It’s like”—he turned back to me—“your president. He could be an honest man. I believe he is. But if your Congress is corrupt, if all they think about is power and money, then he will be in handcuffs. Am I right?”
“I don’t really follow politics,” I said.
“A half answer.”
“Franco,” Lucia cut in. “Don’t let the wine make you mean.” She turned to me. “It’s because of me, his feelings about the Vatican.”
“Sure, because of you,” Franco said bitterly. “The Prince of Love, the religion of love, and when they have true love in the world, what happens? They bring out the rule book, like a lead pipe, and hit you over the head with it.”
“Now,” Father Bruno said to Lucia. “Now, I think, is the time for cake.”
She smiled and got up from the table, and when I made a move to follow she flapped a hand at me to stay. The silence that fell over us then was more than awkward; there were dissonant chords sounding in the sweet air, dark secrets and painful memories swooping and darting around the table like swallows at dusk. I wondered if Franco might still be bitter about my mother’s leaving, still angry at my father for stealing her away. I wondered if she’d been forced to leave and if she’d seen, in my father, only someone who reminded her of her true love. Franco cradled his glass in both hands, staring at it, and I kept looking at him, wondering how much I could ask. He gave me an almost taunting lift of the eyebrows, as if to say: Go ahead! But for some reason, I don’t know exactly why, to change the subject maybe, or to change the tone of the evening, or because I was afraid of what I might learn, I asked, “Does the word ‘grossetto’ mean anything to you? Is it an Italian word? Dialect?”
Franco lifted the corners of his lips into a bitter smile. “Grossetto,” he said, almost laughing. “Sure, it means something to me. It means ‘demon.’ ”
“In dialect?”
Another snort of not very nice laughter.
“He is a cardinal,” Father Bruno put in. “Giovanni Grossetto. From Venice. Very conservative.”
“Conservative?” his father said, tossing the word the length of the table like a spear. “He’s a demon. His people, the Lamb of God people, they’re all demons. They want to turn the Church back to the time of the Crusades. Kill the infidels!” he shouted, spilling more wine and glaring at his son. “They’ll come for you one day, you’ll see. The way Mussolini’s fascisti came for Moretti. They’ll come for you, and then you’ll understand that I was right.”
“It’s not the wartime, Papa. And you were what? Five years old then?”
“Old enough to see and to hear,” Franco said, almost shouting now, speaking so loudly I was sure Lucia heard him inside the house. “Three of my cousins died in Africa in the war, for nothing. Two of my uncles were taken away and beaten.”
“Not by members of the Church,” Father Bruno said.
“No, but the Church stood by. The Church let him do what he did. Il duce. They could have stopped him. Lamb of God is a mind-set that grew out of that other mind-set.”
“Out of fascism, Papa?”
“Of course out of fascism! The fascist mind-set is not limited to Mussolini, you know, or to Hitler. It’s a kind of thinking, a way of looking at humanity. Us and Them. We’re right, they’re wrong, they’re inferior, they’re dangerous and poisonous and weak—so we’ll eliminate them and then human life will be perfect.”
“Most Catholics don’t have that mind-set.”
“Most Italians weren’t fascists, either, Bruno. It doesn’t take a majority to change a society, or a faith. Only a small minority that yells, threatens, kills, that is willing to do anything to prove to themselves that they’re right.”
“Not this again, please,” Lucia said as she came out carrying a thin torte with diagonal strips of crust laid neatly over a layer of fruit. She cut slices of it and set them on plates in front of us. “Do we have to have this same argument every time we entertain guests for dinner?”
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s fine. My father says some of the same things.”
“Your father says those same things because his father was taken away and he never saw him again,” Franco said. “Did he tell you that?”
“No, never.”
“That’s why he left Italy. Another uncle took him, and he was smart to leave. Those kinds of things don’t happen in America. You don’t have a Vatican in America. You don’t have this dance between the Church rulers and the people, this Vatican waltz, everything smooth, silky, refined…except that one of the partners is holding a knife behind the back of the other. And if the partner tries a new step, something different, creative, beautiful”—he made a thrust with one hand—“in it goes.”
“We’ve had our own troubles,” I said. “Different kinds of troubles. We have Lamb of God, too. I was close to a priest, an older man, a friend. He was hit by a car, and there are people who think it wasn’t an accident.”
“It wasn’t,” Franco said confidently. “I can tell you from this chair, here, in Italy, ten thousand kilometers away, that it was no accident.”
I noticed that when the jug of wine was empty, Lucia carried it into the house but didn’t refill it and bring it out again. Instead she reappeared with a pot of coffee, poured four cups, and we drank it with the torte—a succulent dolce, all butter and sugar and slices of apricot.
“Are we finished now?” she asked pleasantly, looking at Franco.
“She asked about Grossetto,” Franco said.
“Grossetto,” Lucia said to me, “Franco is convinced that Grossetto had Pope John Paul I killed.”
“Killed?”
“Poisoned. He was about to start an investigation into the Vatican Bank. Grossetto controlled the bank and wanted, himself, to be pope. Many people believe this.”
I was speechless for a moment. It was an idea straight out of a script for The Godfather, Part III. A fantasy, I’d always thought. A Hollywood convenience. “Is that really possible?”
Franco laughed, bitterly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry you came here and had your nice notions broken up into pieces. You have a true relationship with Christ, anyone can see that. Bruno has that. Lucia and I have that, though maybe you’re not seeing it tonight in me. The best thing is to hold on to that and forget all the rest of it. Forget the pope. Forget Rosario and Grossetto and all that shit. Religion is like
, forgive me, it’s like what you do with a loved one in the bedroom. Beautiful but private. You don’t invite the other people into that world. You don’t need regulations and rules to govern your feelings there.”
“Enough,” Lucia said. “Look, you’re embarrassing her. Enough now.” She reached across the corner of the table and put a hand on my arm. “Is there anything you especially want to see in Italy? We can arrange for you to see the Sistine Chapel, privately, if you want to get up early. Franco still has connections there, with the tour guides and so on. Would you like that?”
“Of course, yes,” I said. “Bruno recommended I see Santa Maria in Trastevere, and I did, and it was just wonderful. I feel I could go back there a hundred days in a row. I’d be happy to have a job there, mopping the floors. I’ve never seen a church like that.”
“That’s what I mean,” Franco said. “That’s the bedroom. You go into that building and you have intimacy, real intimacy with God. You don’t need Mass for that. You don’t need the cardinals and the rules.”
“But without the Vatican, that place would cease to exist,” Bruno said. “You can’t just have religious feeling with no structure.”
“Stop, please,” his father said. “I hear the word ‘Vatican,’ and my digestion goes bad.”
Another painful silence followed. I started to do Father Alberto’s Prayer of Giving for the man sitting to my right.
“Do you have a lover?” Lucia asked. “A boyfriend?”
For the smallest moment I had the sense that she might be trying to fix me up with Bruno. I was too embarrassed to look at him, and I think he felt the same way. “I wonder sometimes,” I said, “if I push men away. Something about me likes my solitary world so much that when they show an interest in me I step back.”
“That will change,” she said. “I can see in your face that you will be a wife and mother.”
“She predicts the future,” Franco said. “And more often than not she’s right.”
“Maybe it will be an Italian man,” Lucia suggested.
I couldn’t find any response to that. I was blushing again. I felt painfully young.
For a little while then the conversation faltered. We sipped our coffee and looked around the shadowed yard, and then we took refuge in talk about the weather—drought, humidity, the beauty of a New England snowstorm. It was a way of sewing up the ragged torn cloth of our night together, but I found myself thinking the whole time about marriage and motherhood. Somehow—and this was strange—even with Franco’s wine-fueled talk I could sense the bond of love between him and Lucia. He felt perfectly free to spout off in her presence, and she felt perfectly free to reprimand him. And that rough, honest love and her remark about seeing my future—it raised a welt of self-pity in me, a longing, an absence.
At last Lucia stood up, and I helped her carry the dishes into the kitchen, offered to help wash them, complimented her on the meal three times. She apologized for Franco—“His bitterness has strong roots” was the way she put it—hugged and kissed me warmly, said, “I hope we will see you here again.”
It was dark outside by then, a few stars sparkling above the valley and a ribbon of headlights and taillights running below us like a red-and-white river.
Franco stood up, somewhat unsteadily, and at the door of the van surprised me by taking both my hands and kissing me first on one cheek, then on the other. “I like you,” he said. “Bruno’s a religious person. You’re a religious person. Maybe I will reconsider one day and start going to Mass again.”
“Come and visit my father, he’d enjoy that.”
“No, no,” Franco said. “He left us. We didn’t leave him. He must come back here before he dies.”
“I’ll try to convince him.”
I got into the van, waved another good-bye. Bruno drove us along the driveway, down the dirt road, and as far as the highway before he spoke. “He embarrasses me,” he said, “but many of the things he says are correct.”
“I can tell he loves you. He reminds me of my father. Gruff, but you can sense the tenderness below.”
“Very far below,” Bruno said, laughing somewhat sadly.
“That woman isn’t your mother.”
“No,” he said. “My mother left, long ago. Found another man, one who didn’t work so many hours. Lucia is my father’s girlfriend. She’s lived in the house for more than twenty years, since I was a small boy. She’s been like a mother to me, a good woman. My father’s anger toward the Church comes in part from his love of her, because when my mother left, the Church forbade him from getting married again and so he was caught between obedience to the laws of the Church and obedience to the law of his heart.”
“Lots of people are in that situation,” I said.
He said, “Yes, I agree,” with such sadness that I decided he must have a lover or must have given up someone he loved when he entered the priesthood. But I felt he’d been embarrassed and bruised enough for one night, so I kept quiet and watched the dark hillsides sweep past.
When Bruno dropped me off at the gates to the hotel, I thanked him twice, reached out and took his hand and squeezed it, and climbed out of the van. I noticed that he waited to drive away until I’d gone through the tall gates and as far as the end of the driveway.
WITH EVERYTHING THAT HAD HAPPENED during that day, the late-night visit at the hotel, the disappointing conversation with Cardinal Rosario, the wonderful hour in Santa Maria, my half-crazed chasing of the tall man, the strange but enjoyable meal at Franco and Lucia’s—it should not have been a good night for prayer. But occasionally the mind exhausts itself, running in circles, chasing happiness, grasping onto this tremor of fear and that splinter of insult, and if you let it, sometimes it will just grow tired of that and be quiet, like a little child who’s run around the yard for most of an afternoon, then falls asleep in the flower bed.
I was still on American time and tired, but the child of my mind was still running, so I propped a pillow against the headboard of the circular bed and sat there with my eyes closed and my hands folded, asking for guidance.
As I often did, I prayed for the souls of my mother and grandmother and for Father Alberto, and for the health and well-being of my father. I prayed, too, that night, for Father Bruno, who seemed, like his father, to be caught between his feelings for the Church and his feelings for another human being. I prayed for Cardinal Rosario and the priest in the meeting, for Father Welch, Archbishop Menendez, Monsignor Ferraponte, my Aunt Chiara. In that hour, at least, it wasn’t so difficult to accept the idea that God has His plans and ways, that there is an element of surrender involved in the true spiritual path, and that surrendering to God’s will often involves pain. I had, I told myself, been practicing that surrender my whole life.
Eventually I sank down, beyond all thinking, beyond what seemed to me a vague vision of my own future troubles, and into a quiet place where I rested for a long time. In that place, my disappointment, worry, and sadness amounted to specks of dust on an impossibly large mosaic. I saw, as if they were set up before my eyes, the billions of lives in that mosaic—long and short, famous and anonymous, satisfied and miserable—there were countless connections among those souls, countless secrets, an abundance of love and trouble. All of it arranged just so in the endless, unfathomable universe. A complexity like that had to have been put into motion by some Grand Designer. To my mind, in that hour of prayer, it seemed clear that our response to that grand design should be a life of obedience, but not the strict, narrow-minded obedience of the Lamb of God people. The obedience I was thinking of was more difficult than that; it was an insistence on compassion and an acceptance of our true calling on this earth, whatever pain that acceptance might hold.
As I came slowly out of the prayer, I said one Hail Mary, then took off my clothes and lay down to sleep. In the absurd round bed, amid the swirl of a million possibilities, I tried to keep my mind fixed on the image of Jesus’ arm around his mother’s shoulders. Only that.
&n
bsp; CHAPTER NINE
Breakfast was included with the price of a room at the Old Palace Hotel and was served on a second-floor balcony that overlooked the front yard’s fruit trees and flowering bushes. Strong coffee with hot milk. A creamy coconut yogurt. Cheese, salami, bread, a pear nectar I liked so much I promised myself I’d find a store at home that stocked it and buy a case. From my seat at a round metal table for two I had a view down over the tops of the lemon and fig trees, across the busy road, across the river, over the roofs of some low buildings, and as far as the dome of St. Peter’s. As I ate I found myself listening to a conversation of two couples at one of the other tables. They were talking about taking a trip to Assisi that day, and I had to restrain myself from asking if I could tag along. Two hours each way, I heard one of the men say. But the conversation and the sparkle of excitement I felt about being that close to the birthplace of two of the greatest saints, Francis and Clare, was like a layer of makeup over badly flawed skin. As fascinating as Italy was, the churches, the food, the ruins, and as much as I wanted to see the Colosseum and the Sistine Chapel, I hadn’t come to Rome to be a tourist; I’d had a purpose. Foolishly, I’d expected there to be some kind of ongoing conversation with people in the Church hierarchy. A series of meetings, maybe. A movement of sympathetic cardinals and clergy. The movement would come to the attention of the pope. Maybe we’d even have an audience.
It had been a fantasy, of course, I saw that clearly now. Egotistical, too. But I’d been so convinced of the authenticity of the visions, so sure that the messages came directly from God, that it was hard for me to believe I’d gotten one “no” and the case was closed.
I was sitting there with my refilled coffee cup and swirling disappointments when Claudia, the woman in charge of the hotel, stepped out onto the balcony. From the moment Father Bruno had introduced us, she’d been intimidating to me. Tall, trim, elegant, a perfectly proportioned face, black hair held back to show gold earrings studded with what looked like emeralds—deep down, in some hidden compartment of my thoughts, I had to admit that she was the kind of woman I wished, in another life, that I might be. Her English was nearly perfect. There was something regal about her. When I’d spoken to her, checking in, she told me the palazzo had been in her family for five generations.
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