“I’ve been thinking I should go to Genoa and try to see this Cardinal Zossimo.”
“How?” he asked. “You will have no letter of introduction this time, no archbishop who knows him personally and recommends you. The cardinals”—he floated one hand up into the sky—“they live above us, unapproachable, protected by layers and layers of bureaucracy.”
“But you said this cardinal was different. He came out into the streets. You said Father Clement might be—”
“Yes, sure, he came out into the streets when thousands of people were burning cars and breaking windows. But it is not as though you will see him walking along the main boulevard there and tap him on the shoulder and ask him to allow women to become priests, and he will say, ‘Sure, yes, let’s sit down and discuss this.’ ”
“I think I’ll try anyway,” I said, put off a bit by the note of condescension. “I have eight more days here before I have to fly home. What am I going to do? Spend that time seeing the sights?”
Father Bruno was shaking his head. “I cannot go with you,” he said, as if I were asking him to. Which, in a way, I think I was. “To Genoa. I can’t get away.”
“I wouldn’t ask that.”
“But I will drive you to the train station, and if I see this tall Albanese with the two different eyes, I will strangle him with my own hands and go to Hell for it. And I will make a reservation for you at a nice hotel so you are not in a dangerous part of the city—there are some bad places—posti brutti—in Genoa. I will try, through friends here, to get a message to someone in the cardinal’s office telling him you’re not as crazy as you seem to be. That is the best I can do. I think it will not be enough. And I think, possibly, it is even dangerous for you to go there. I would ask you not to, but I sense that it would do no good. Am I right?”
“Absolutely.”
He nodded and thought for a moment, and then I saw a small ironic smile touch the corners of his lips. He sighed in a satisfied way, as if the meal had met his expectations, thanked me for it, then said, “It has been a strange thing, meeting you, Cynthia Piantedosi. Lucia called me last night and said something about you. She said, ‘That woman has a shine around her, some kind of aura. She seems to me to be living behind a disguise.’ I told her I thought she was right, I just did not know what was there beneath the disguise. Who are you? A saint? A spy? A radical?”
“The most ordinary girl in the world,” I said, and he made an expression I’d seen many times before, something that reminded me instantly of my father. He lifted his eyebrows while closing his eyes and turning down the corners of his lips. It was a facial maybe, a gesture of half belief: skepticism and affection blended in a way that seemed perfectly Italian to me.
CHAPTER TEN
The train to Genoa left Rome’s Termini Station at a few minutes past ten the next morning. We barely made it. Father Bruno was atypically late. As I waited in a light rain out in front of the Old Palace Hotel, I wondered if he might be trying to keep me from traveling to Genoa by making me miss the express train. But he pulled up in Franco’s van, fifteen minutes late and overflowing with apologies. Once the apologies were finished, he focused on getting us through the mad Roman traffic and said almost nothing.
Eleven minutes before the train was supposed to depart, he turned into the station lot, parked the van in a clearly marked bus stop, two wheels up on the sidewalk, helped me carry my luggage into the station, showed me where to buy a ticket and how to validate it in the yellow metal box near the track. As I waited there, he rushed over to buy me an umbrella and then to a little shop to buy a bagful of various kinds of pastries and panini I could take along on the trip. “It’s a sin to be hungry,” he said, but behind his smile I could see a shadow of worry.
Just before I boarded the train he said, “I have two different friends who are trying to get a message to Zossimo’s office. And I’ve booked you in a very nice hotel that’s walking distance to the Curia. Here”—he handed me a manila envelope—“everything you need. A map. The hotel reservation. Good luck, my friend. Please be careful. Call me and tell me what happens.”
I gave him a warm embrace, held him tight against me for a few seconds. I turned and climbed the steps of the train, found my seat, first class, in a glass-walled coupé. I was facing three middle-aged Italian women, beautifully dressed and obviously friends. As the train pulled out of the station, I saw that Father Bruno was walking along the platform beside the window, waving to get my attention. He was mouthing something in Italian, rather urgently it seemed to me, then he took his phone out of his pocket and pointed at it and raised it high above his head. I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed he might be telling me to call him when I arrived.
“A lover?” one of the women said to me.
“No, a friend, a priest.”
She raised her carefully plucked eyebrows. “A priest lover,” she said, grinning. “The most appreciative.”
NOT LONG AFTER WE PULLED out of the enclosed station and left the center of the city behind, we passed through a stretch of ugliness. The high concrete walls at the sides of the tracks were covered in graffiti. The apartment buildings beyond them showed broken windows, laundry hanging over the sills, clusters of rusting antennas standing crookedly on the roofs. Through the speckling of raindrops on the train window the neighborhood didn’t seem quite as desperately poor as some parts of Boston I’d seen, but it had the same feeling to it: no beauty, no luxury, no softness, none of the orderliness you saw even in slightly better off places. I thought how hard it must be to cultivate a spiritual life if you were constantly worried about money and physical safety, and I thought that when I went home, when this whole episode was over, when I’d exhausted every option for acting on the messages I was getting from God, I was going to volunteer in a neighborhood like that and try to get the Church to work harder to change the lives of those people.
I remember thinking about the immigrants Father Bruno said he worked with, Albanians who’d left dire poverty and oppression and come to a place like this. I tried to put myself into the mind of the man who’d been following me. I offered up a prayer for him.
And then we were in the countryside, and I was looking out at herds of sheep in green fields and hillsides with neat rows of olive trees crossing them. I loved that landscape. Like the buildings in Campo de’ Fiori, these fields and hills had seen, from the Etruscans to Berlusconi, every kind of human behavior. Thousands of years from now, when we’d lived through another series of foolishness, violence, and hope, it would still be here, offering itself to us. All we had to do was grow our food in soil like this, harvest more food from the sea, build shelter, bear and raise children, pray to our Creator. So much was given to us without our having done anything in particular to deserve it, yet we complicated those gifts in so many different ways. We cheated, envied, stole from one another, divided ourselves into opposing groups. We took more than we needed, ravaged the earth. We found reasons to hate and kill, torment and torture. But somehow—even in that whirling ball of bad energy—love, tenderness, and compassion survived like flowers on a battlefield. I had a moment then, thinking that way, really the first moment in my life, when I seriously considered leaving the Catholic Church. I don’t know why I felt it just then, but the feeling was as undeniable as it was surprising. Not a temptation of the Devil, as I once would have assumed, but a kind of breaking down of the walls of the person I believed myself to be. Why, I thought, why be Catholic or Protestant or Jew or anything else with a label and rules? Why not, as Bruno’s father argued, just lead a simple life of prayer and work, try to love, try to give, and not do anything at all that separated me from other people?
In a moment the thought had passed, but it left a residue, a thin, silvery trail like the ones left by the snails that crawled out of my father’s garden and across our brick walk. Why call myself anything but Cynthia the human being?
The countryside just north of Rome’s suburbs had been softly rolling hills, a landscape o
f fruit trees and fields, stone walls and narrow roads along which trucks and cars scooted like colorful toys. But as the train moved farther from the city, the topography changed again, the hills grew steeper, and there were long, slanting fields planted in what appeared to be some kind of grain, about to be harvested. The rain had stopped by then. On the foggy eastern horizon I began to be able to make out blue mountain ranges rising one behind the next like a series of revelations.
The express train made its only stop at a city that began and ended with O, and as we were pulling out of the station there, I looked up and saw that it was an ancient hill town, set on a top-hat-shaped piece of land. As protection, no doubt, against invaders. A few hundred buildings rested on that slanted plateau above sandy cliffs. I saw one enormous church there, towering over everything, and I thought about the people who must have designed and built it, hundreds of years ago. What they wanted was to raise a structure in tribute to the mystery that had given them life—such a simple and straightforward project. Once the building was in place, though, ideas and rules attached themselves to it like insects clinging onto something sweet, eating away at it, using it to fatten themselves and spread disease. We started to move again, and soon the hilltop city passed from view behind us, but I sat there with the three Italian women still facing me in the quiet, glassed-in coupé, and I kept thinking about the church builders. I wondered if all of them—masons, sculptors, painters, architects—had enjoyed a deep prayer life. I wondered if that was the source of their artistic inspiration: a longing to describe what they’d experienced, to use their skill to give physical shape to the fragments of the Kingdom of Heaven they saw in their meditations. And I wondered if it was that link to the mysterious dimension of life, not so much the food or the art, that drew millions of people to Italy year after year from all over the world.
I sat back and closed my eyes, and I thought: Martino Zossimo Genova. Three words on a sheet of stationery, and here I was, going hundreds of miles out of my way, to a city I’d never seen, not having any idea what I would find there. Surely I was a foolish person.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The hotel in Genoa would turn out to be shouting distance from the train station, an easy walk for me, even with the umbrella and two bags. For a few seconds, as I asked directions from a station worker, I had the eerie sense—a slight shadowy weight against my back—that someone was following me. I didn’t turn around to look until I’d left the station and headed out into what had become a sunny day. No one.
I cut across a small park with a few red-faced, raggedly dressed men and one woman lying in it, bottles of wine half hidden against their hips. The hotel, one block beyond the park, was called the Savoia, and it had a modest presence on the street, just a four-story brick face with a set of steps and a doorway bracketed by two windows. Inside it was so spectacular I began to worry immediately about the cost.
“Your account has been taken care of,” the clerk at the desk informed me when I asked what the rate would be.
“By who?”
The clerk was a young man but dressed in a suit and tie that made him seem like a middle-aged accountant who’d been too long on the job. He checked his records. “Someone who wished not to be named,” he said primly.
A cold draft of paranoia touched me then. For a moment, before I remembered that Father Bruno had chosen the hotel, I wondered if this was another part of some elaborate trap.
“A person? An institution?”
“I’m not allowed to say. The manager comes in again tomorrow morning. You may speak with him then if you’d like.”
I was chaperoned through the tiled lobby—it was surrounded by reading rooms with leather-covered tables, leather armchairs, dark bookshelves, gilded mirrors, and small stone sculptures behind glass—and into the elevator by a man who introduced himself as Mabu, who said he was originally from Morocco and who must have been six and a half feet tall.
“Could you check with me first,” I asked him, “before you send outside phone calls or anyone up to the room?”
“Certo,” he said solemnly, the word emerging from behind his large jaw as if it had been spoken in a barrel. Of course.
The fourth-floor room he showed me to was an embarrassment of riches, three or four times as large as my room at home. It had enough floor space for an aerobics workout, an enormous bed—not round, thank you—a writing table, a coffee bar, a beautifully tiled bath, and two tall windows looking out over rooftops to the port. I decided Father Bruno must have been so embarrassed by the incident at the first hotel that he wanted to make sure nothing close to that would happen again, but even so I couldn’t imagine him paying for this out of his own pocket. Mabu set down my bags as if they were as light as boxes of Kleenex. There were, he informed me, Jacuzzis on the top-floor veranda, and a breakfast buffet would be served each day in the dining room on that same floor, starting at seven a.m. “How long will you be with us, Signorina?”
“I don’t know. One or two nights at least, maybe longer.”
“Very good,” he said, and when I tipped him he made a dignified half bow in my direction, closed the door quietly behind him, and left me there feeling like I’d accidentally been given a room reserved for visiting royalty.
I spent a little while standing at the windows, looking out at the port from which Christopher Columbus was supposed to have sailed. It wasn’t the prettiest of views, but it was new to me, another door opening onto another piece of life, and after all those years of not traveling very far, every view from every new angle—through train and hotel windows, from the street—held a dancing thrill inside it. To the right the buildings of the city stood along a curve of seashore, pinched between a range of dry hills and the water. A traffic-choked elevated highway came sweeping in from the direction I was looking. West, maybe, though geography had never been my strong suit. West or northwest. Toward France. On the far side of the highway I could see two huge white cruise ships at anchor and then, farther left, an intricate jumble of old rooftops and pastel apartment buildings. The yellowish afternoon light on the hills and housefronts—it was almost golden—and the blues, purples, and grays that daubed the undersides of a parade of puffy clouds reminded me exactly of the colors in the coffee-table book Father Alberto had given me for Christmas so many years before. “I know you’ll go there one day,” he’d said, and of course I hadn’t believed him.
I had thought that they were made-up colors, meant to suggest Heaven, but I saw now that they were real, specific to Italy, maybe, or to moments when you had a particularly strong yearning for the presence of God. As sometimes happened, as I ran my eyes over the view, it began to seem that I was linked to everything I saw. All of it—cars on the roadway, plants in the rooftop gardens, clouds, sea, harbor cranes—shared something with the innermost part of me. I don’t know exactly what to call it, an isness, maybe, an atomic essence, divine breath. The drunks in the park and the brioches under glass in the train station, the leather handles of the suitcase and the young man at the reception desk, we were all part and parcel of the fabric of existence, God’s tapestry. How could anyone who felt that ever hurt another soul?
After a time I sat in one of the upholstered chairs, the blue arms embroidered with lines of gold thread, and I closed my eyes and prayed for the soul of my friend Alberto Ghirardelli. It seemed undeniable to me that such a spirit—particles that had taken the shape of someone so generous, funny, and alive—had to continue to exist in some other dimension after it left the body. What form it took there I couldn’t possibly imagine—not as a middle-aged man, I knew that; the idea of a static Heaven had never made much sense to me—but I had a strong feeling of his presence then, so strong it almost felt like he was actually in the room. It seemed natural to speak to him as I had once spoken to him in the confessional, so I did that. “It was you who started me on this journey, so if things go bad, Father, you’re catching the blame. If you’re in a place where you can hear me and help me, please don’t let me
make a fool of myself by coming here, by failing miserably, by being conceited enough to think I could change something so much bigger than me. Please let me have understood correctly the message in my prayers and not have mixed it up out of stupidity or egotism. I love you. I hope you’re at peace.”
He didn’t answer, of course. And yet simply remembering our conversations helped. I sank down into a quiet space, and in that space all doubt evaporated. It slowly came to seem obvious to me that I was doing what I should be doing. There were no visions, just a quiet room that seemed painted in the same blues and purples I’d seen through the window. I rested there for a long time, simply feeling the fact of my own aliveness and the energy of life around me. It would be too easy to describe that energy as the presence of God. I believe that’s what it was, but those words somehow can’t match the perfection and mystery any more than the actuality and mystery of time can be captured by numbers on a clock face.
Slowly, in a way that felt absolutely unhurried, I found myself returning to awareness of the hotel room. I moved my eyes over the window trim—the corner seam where two pieces of wood met, a tiny chip in the beige paint there—and then slowly the world of nameable, separate shapes reasserted itself. I said a prayer for my father and mother and grandmother, as I always did, and realized I was hungry. Either something about being in Italy made me want to eat all the time or I was having a late-in-life growth spurt.
I showered and changed clothes and, after a short conversation with Mabu—who held the door open for me—went out in search of a place to have dinner. It took all of a block to realize that Genoa didn’t feel anything like Rome. There were fewer of the loud motorbikes, no legions of tourists, no one juggling in traffic, no river running through neighborhoods that still carried the architectural marks of the time of Christ. I soon realized, also, that it was too early to eat dinner. Restaurants in Italy don’t open for the evening meal until seven or seven thirty at the earliest, so I stopped into the first church I passed, an old gray hulk of a building, set on a busy corner, that leaned toward the street as if it might fall on its face at any moment. It wasn’t my favorite place, large and bland, gray stone inside and out, dim light, a sense not of hope but of past suffering and pessimism. I didn’t stay long.
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