Vatican Waltz

by Roland Merullo

  The city itself had a pleasant, understated personality, as if it were suffused with the knowledge that it had been an important metropolis centuries before, in its adolescence, and had grown tired of all that fuss and bother and was content now to be just an ordinary adult. Its squat palazzi were half hidden behind clacking trolleys and sidewalk cafés. One grand, tarnished building, dirty with roadway soot, sucked students in and spewed them out again as if it were a huge set of lungs and the young men and women were particles of oxygen.

  I wandered and wandered, soaking in the newness, still washed clean, inside and out, by the memory of my long quiet prayer. In that state of mind it was all but impossible to worry or be afraid, ridiculous to look behind me to see who might be following. Franco’s tales of Vatican intrigue felt as though they belonged to a different orbit in the spin and whirl of atoms. Nothing could hurt me.

  I had Father Bruno’s map, with the cardinal’s office—the Curia, it was called—clearly marked, but I decided to savor the feeling of being a carefree tourist for a little while and save my business for the next morning. On a bending lane a twenty-minute walk from the Savoia, I found a restaurant to my liking. It was just opening its doors: ten tables, a hundred bottles of wine in shelves against the walls, and a waitress so calm and attentive she seemed to have been set down there from another happy dimension of the universe. Another fine meal, more nervous overeating, a few minutes of prayer for my father.

  Afterward, in the first darkness, I walked back along Via Arsenale, the busy street that led to the hotel. It was a narrow-sidewalked thoroughfare enlivened, even at that hour, by a carnival of cars, buses, motorcycles, students, and two-chair tables in front of crammed cafés. Via Arsenale wasn’t the straightest route back. I had to climb a steep hill and make a left turn rather than cutting the corner and going more directly, but Mabu had told me in the hotel lobby that Via Prè, running parallel and closer to the water, was a place to avoid. At night absolutely, he said, but even during the day.

  When I returned to the hotel, full-bellied and tired from the long afternoon, Mabu was there to greet me. He said someone had come inquiring, asking when I’d gone out, where I might be found. I thought it might be one of the friends of the friends of Father Bruno, with advice about how best to make an appointment to see the cardinal. “A short man,” Mabu said, “with a tattoo here.” He pointed to the side of his neck.

  “Italian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he leave a message?”

  “Check at the desk.”

  There were no messages at the desk and nothing on my phone when I went upstairs. I lay down in the luxurious bed and within two minutes was buried in sleep. I had a dream then, just a piece of a vision of a dream, that seemed to have my mother in it. I’d seen pictures of her, of course. And in my mind’s eye, thousands of times, I’d imagined her. But the sense of her in that dream carried no visual image. She was there, for a moment, an instant, one beam of selfless love, and then she was being torn away from me.

  THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER BREAKFAST on the top-floor patio and a quick peek at the Jacuzzis, I went out into the city again and soon found the Curia—a slim, three-story gray domino of a building standing between a travel agency and a bank. If it hadn’t been for the cardinal’s seal high up on the facade and the X Mabu had made on Father Bruno’s map, I might have walked right past it. I stepped in through a small wooden door cut into a larger door and realized that, like so many other buildings I’d seen in Italy, the street view was only a tiny piece of the picture, an illusion, a disguise. It made me think of the way the human condition pretended to be one thing but was actually something else. Like Santa Maria in Trastevere—worn, almost shabby on the outside but spectacular within—and like the city of Rome itself, an ancient architectural miracle surrounded by a thick ring of modern mess, it seemed obvious to me at that moment that the life we lived was a kind of stage play. We walked around in costume, a flimsy disguise of titles, status, possessions, personality, and looks that masked an enormous interior universe. On the surface my grandmother had been an old woman with aching hands and teardrop-shaped glasses; an inch beneath that she’d been a giant of a soul, a furnace of love, constantly giving off heat. Father Alberto had been a priest, but beyond that title and those vows and the plain black shirt and pants, his true self shone like a gem in gauze. If you thought about it carefully, you understood that everything they were, everything about them I missed, really had nothing to do with their titles or looks or even their habits and quirks. What they said and did was all a kind of code, the surface expression of a deeper Self, radio signals sent out through a static of appearances. In my own case, it wasn’t so much that I felt trapped or false in my role as nurse and unmarried daughter. I was more comfortable with myself than I’d ever been. But almost always it felt as though another self deep inside me had not yet found its truest means of expression, the correct code through which to communicate clearly and effectively with the outside world. It seemed—seemed—that God was telling me the proper manifestation of that true inner self was the priesthood. But what if, as Archbishop Menendez had suggested, I was getting the message slightly wrong? What if there was some other purpose to my little life?

  At that point, though, wrong as I might turn out to be, there was no choice but to go forward, to try as energetically and as honestly as I could to do what I believed God was asking of me. If it turned out that I’d misread the code, I’d be forgiven, I was sure.

  BEYOND THE FACE THE CURIA showed the world lay a skylight-topped courtyard, invisible from the street. I could see it as I stepped through the door. Just before reaching it, I came upon a small office on my right-hand side, probably ten feet by ten, an open door, photos of the pope and cardinal on the wall, a religious calendar, a painting of Mary drawn on a wooden slab, and, sitting there like bored security guards, two men. One was a gray-headed layman stationed behind a metal desk. The other was a priest with a Buddha belly, a cascade of chins, and small, chubby hands folded peacefully in his lap. I’d brought with me the letter from Archbishop Menendez, hoping it might at least show me to be something other than a mentally unstable foreigner who’d wandered in off the street. But somehow I wasn’t surprised when I handed it to the man behind the desk and it had absolutely no effect. I made a polite, succinct argument as to why I should be allowed to have an appointment with the cardinal of Genoa, but he only squinted at me as if I were a nuisance, an interruption to his busy day, a deceitful beggar with a doll against her breast. Even when I took the liberty of mentioning the meeting with Cardinal Rosario, twice, there was no movement.

  All during this one-sided conversation I could feel the old priest watching me. Sitting there a few feet to my left, he studied me at first, really studied me. I could sense it out of the side of my vision, and when I turned to meet his eyes he smiled and looked away. Just at the point where I was giving up on trying to communicate with the man behind the desk, the old priest broke his silence.

  “Il cardinale sta a Roma,” he said. “The cardinal is now in Rome.” He lifted one hand lazily and let it fall. The gesture indicated the complete impossibility of doing anything to rectify the situation. Hopelessly great distance. The iron whims of fate.

  “But I was just in Rome,” I said. “I came here thinking I might have the opportunity for a brief meeting.”

  The priest let his eyelids close and lifted his shoulders an inch. In another moment, it seemed, I would be told to leave.

  “Would it be possible,” I asked him, “to see the cardinal’s office, perhaps leave him a note?”

  The priest studied me for another few seconds, then smiled, showing a row of false teeth. There was a peculiar stillness about him, as if he hadn’t moved from the chair in months or as if he’d come there to that tiny office expecting a visit from his heavenly mother and was willing to wait years for her arrival. He spoke a few words to the gray-headed man in a tone of gentle authority, and the man, reluctantly it seemed
, led me out of the office, into the courtyard, then across to a doorway at the base of a set of marble stairs. Instead of accompanying me, he pointed up the stairs, mumbled something that sounded like “Secondo piano,” “Second floor,” and left me there. It was a strange way of doing business.

  I climbed a flight—white marble everywhere—then another (as I’d discovered in the Albergo delle Mura, in Italy the first floor isn’t counted), and then I saw, cut into a narrow wall, a door upholstered in crimson cloth. I don’t know why, since I’d been told the cardinal wasn’t there, but I felt one bump of excitement in my chest, a thump of hope, perhaps, or a dim recognition that belonged to another world. I approached the doorway and had almost reached it when another gray-haired man sitting at another desk stood up and stopped me. Before I could say a word he greeted me in English, as if my American passport were open on my chest. He nodded as I spoke, showing that he understood perfectly. I was a Catholic, come all the way from America. I’d had a meeting with Cardinal Rosario in Rome and had come to Genoa to speak with Cardinal Zossimo or at least see the office where he worked and leave him a note.

  “Not possible,” the man said, when I was finished. He was bald, bespectacled, pushing seventy, and, even with the padding of a tailored suit, rail thin.

  “I’d just like to have a peek at his office,” I said, though at the time I had no idea why that meant so much to me.

  The man shook his head. “The cardinal is now in Turkey.”

  “Not Rome?”

  He shook his head again. “I cannot let into the office anyone.”

  “May I leave a note?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the man said, but with about as much enthusiasm as if I’d asked to borrow plane fare back to America. “Yes. Sì. Okay.”

  He handed me a pad of paper and a pencil, and I wrote a short note. My name, my room number at the hotel, the fact that I’d met with Archbishop Menendez of Boston and Cardinal Rosario at the Vatican and had come to Genoa to have a conversation with His Eminence about an important matter. I folded the note in half and handed it over. The man said he’d be sure to pass it on.

  And that was as close as I believed I’d ever get to Martino Zossimo, Cardinal of Genoa. There was nothing to do but leave, carrying my disappointment back down the marble steps, past the small office—the heavyset priest lifted his hand in farewell—and out into the city.

  For a while I walked the streets under another cloud of pessimism, a mood very similar to, if not as intense as, the one that had taken hold of me as I left the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. I saw a fountain that I’d been told at the hotel marked the center of downtown, the place where the huge demonstrations had been held. I tried to imagine the cardinal walking out into the melee to speak to the young people there. A few blocks farther along, I came to the stone ruins of what was said to have been Christopher Columbus’s house. I stopped for a cappuccino on one of the wide, slanting avenues that was lined with water-stained pastel palazzi, row upon row of elegant facades, impenetrable, stoic, perfectly regular. I thought of heading down to see the port—my new friend Mabu had recommended it—but the disappointment lay like a sack of stones across my shoulders, so I headed back in the general direction of the hotel, looking for a place to pray.

  After wandering the streets of the old city center—a labyrinth of shuttered windows and closed doors—I came upon a church in the middle of a square where vendors stood in booths selling herbs, honey, and oil. The square felt like a secret place, shadowed and quiet, insulated from the city noise. Strangely enough, the church sat up on a kind of platform, twenty or thirty feet above the pavement at the east end of the piazza, as if it had been propped up there as a protection against the next great flood. On its columned porch hung a plaque saying it was the Church of San Pietro, built in the sixteenth century. Inside, it was all stone and smokiness, with an altar carved from brown-and-white marble and, on the right-hand wall, a painting that depicted the head of St. John the Baptist being carried to Herod’s daughter on a plate. I knelt in one of the pews and had a long, quiet prayer, and when that was finished I sat there admiring the marble edging at the tops of the walls and the way the light caught swirls of paint on the canvas. I wondered why it was, in Christian history at least, that the good people, the best people, were the ones who seemed to suffer most. Why was it set up that way? Why couldn’t it be that goodness in this life had a reward, not later but now? Why couldn’t it even be neutral? Why did Father Alberto have to be struck by a car, John the Baptist beheaded, Jesus and later Peter crucified, St. Sebastian shot with a hundred arrows, and Mary forced to watch the execution of her only child? What kind of coded message was that? Surely evil people suffered, too. But why didn’t goodness offer any protection? Was God trying to blow up our neat castle of logic? Was He always doing what He did to Job, forcing us far, far out of anything that resembled a comfort zone, pushing us into a corner where all we had left was a blind faith in Him, utter, naked acceptance of a path we couldn’t see?

  Those questions had been part of Father Alberto’s favorite theme in the pulpit. “Life always brings us to the idea of humility,” he said. “Don’t you think so? We have these remarkable brains—capable of curing illness, making spaceships that fly to the moon, building roads across the face of the planet. All good things. But at the same time there is a way in which being able to manipulate and control our surroundings so much better than the animals can, there is a way in which that puffs us up with conceit. We begin to feel we have the right to control everything. That everything should be explainable according to our human logic. Well, fine, but maybe there’s another logic. God’s logic. And maybe the only way we begin to come close to understanding it is to let go of our insistence that things should make sense to us. What do you think?” he’d ask his silent, obedient congregation. “Give this some thought, and get back to me.”

  I smiled, thinking of him. But at that moment, sitting alone in the Church of San Pietro, I missed him terribly.

  Afterward, I took a seat at an outdoor restaurant in the square—only a Caprese salad this time—then walked back to the hotel. I’d been there just a short while when I heard a knock on the hall door. I opened it and saw Mabu holding a sheet of paper in his hand. “This person, he call for you,” Mabu said, “but we don’t know, should we pass the phone to you or wait?”

  For one or two heartbeats I thought it might be the eccentric cardinal inviting me for a meeting. But I looked at the note and saw the name there: Father Bruno Piantedosi. I thanked Mabu. He gave a short bow and left me alone.

  I called Bruno right away, apologizing for not having let him know earlier that I’d arrived safely and telling him that the hotel was absolutely wonderful.

  “Troppo caro?” he asked. Too expensive? And I understood from the question that, as I’d suspected, he had not been the one who’d paid.

  “Fine,” I said. “Just right.”

  “Have you been able to speak with the cardinal?”

  “I’ve been trying. You’re right, it’s like trying to speak to a man on a mountaintop.”

  “How long will you be staying?”

  The question touched a sore spot in me. A little bruise. Part of me felt so at home in Genoa, and in Italy, that I wanted to stay and stay, to keep trying for a meeting with Cardinal Zossimo or someone else with the power to bring about change. But another part, a saner part, knew clearly what was going on: I was indulging a fantasy I should have abandoned the minute I left the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, if not back home in Boston. I was a tourist now, nothing more. I was spending money that could have been better spent elsewhere and using up time that should have been used studying for my nursing Boards. I could excuse that for another few days, I supposed. I could go on riding a roller coaster of hope and despair, acceptance and bitterness, telling myself the note at the Old Palace Hotel had been a sign from God, that the Savoia bill had been taken care of by some progressive benefactor, a Church insider
who knew what I was up to and completely supported it. Soon, though, it would be time to face facts.

  I told Bruno I wasn’t sure but that I’d let him know, and I thanked him again for all his help.

  “That was a nice lunch,” he said in a tone that had so much loneliness in it I promised him we’d do it again in Rome, probably within a day or two.

  “Except I pay this time,” he said, and I told him I’d look forward to that, said good-bye, and hung up feeling almost as if I’d agreed to go out on a date.

  I DECIDED THEN TO CALL my father. I’d been thinking of him and praying for him every hour since I’d arrived in Italy. Twenty-two years old and I’d seen him every day of my life, so it felt strange to be away from him even for that small amount of time. I knew he was perfectly capable of taking care of himself. He was strong, tough, in good health. He knew how to cook and shop. He’d spend his days playing cards or walking to Rigione’s Market for coffee, doing small repairs to the car or lawn mower engines, watching television. I missed him, and I suspected he missed me, too, so I placed a long-distance call through the hotel operator and was glad when, on the fourth ring, my father picked up.

  I asked him how he was. Everything fine. And then, to fill the empty air, I told him about Rome and the things I’d seen there, the ruins, the river, the beautiful churches. “I went once when I was a boy,” he said. “My uncle had a little money, and he took Franco and me there on the train. The buildings were bombed out and burnt, the people were standing in line for bread, and all over the place we saw the American soldiers with their rifles and dirty helmets and chocolate. Some of them spoke Italian. It’s hard for me to think that people go there now for vacation.”