by John Domini
Naturally Barbara tried talking to her priest. A couple of days later, in the kitchen with the old man, she had to ask: “Is that all this is? You know what I’m saying?”
Cesare met her look, something he hadn’t done much since he’d arrived.
“Think about it, Father. Cesare. This family goes through six time zones, three miracles, three thousand years of history, and one walloping, super-size self-delusion. That’s the short list, you know? But then, what’s the big diff? I lose a little and the kids gain a little. Is that all this is, the same as would’ve happened anyway?”
The priest was barely with it. He made a faltering mention of things she couldn’t have expected to happen, like living with twenty-four hour security.
“But even that—today when the boys went out, all they had was the driver.”
“Well, one can see the logic in that. There’s little threat of kidnap.”
“So it’s just like I’m saying. We might as well be back in Bridgeport.”
His crumpled eyelids drooped again, and he glanced away again, looking out the kitchen door. The man might’ve been some fleshy-faced animal, sniffing round an unfamiliar space. Between them she had out the garlic and onion, the cans of crushed tomatoes and tomato paste.
“I was thinking, signora.” Now he was addressing the crimson show-biz lettering across the larger can. “About your boy’s idea for his film, don’t you know. I was thinking about the wanderer’s return, to the—the home ground.”
Barbara began with the garlic. If the old man wasn’t going to pay attention, she didn’t want to be working on the onion and maybe breaking into tears.
“What your boy seems to be up to, it strikes me as peculiarly Italian. Italian-American, I would say. The very idea of ‘home ground,’ don’t you know, of keeping the old country close. As if a person needed to take communion at the ancestors’ table.”
“Cesare.” Barbara left off peeling the first clove. “Did you bring the handout for this lecture?”
“I do realize, it’s irresponsible to generalize.” The way that beak of his shifted directions, the priest looked like he was trying to screen out the makings for the sauce, to catch a subtler scent. “But I must say, I’ve seen it a good deal of this by now. Seen my share of the families, asking how they might find where nonna was born. Or they tiptoe into the rectory and request all the birth records between 1914 and 1921.”
“Huh. Do you remember what happened when I had a chance to visit where my mother came from?”
“It’s got me thinking, don’t you know. Do immigrants from the Punjab need this sort of thing? Some nan out of the old ovens? Or let us say some transplanted Dubliner, some man now happily producing memorial videos for a mortuary in Texas…”
Barbara slapped down the knife. “Memorial videos? A mortuary?”
The old man’s chin dropped into his robe, and he crossed his legs the other way. He offered a mumbling apology and a scrap of justification: only thinking of the boys. Didn’t want the boys to waste time reinventing the wheel.
“Father, Cesare. So what if they are? So what if Chris and John Junior are out there doing the same thing as everyone else?” Barb got her hands back on the garlic. “It’s still new to them, isn’t it? Everyone they run into, everyone who’s just like them, they’ve still got something to teach the boys.
“Listen,” she went on, “Chris and JJ showed us rushes last night. They actually used that word, ‘rushes.’”
At a noise outside the apartment, on the stairway landing, the priest put his back to her. The walk from the church, Barbara saw, had soaked him through the robe.
“Not that they showed us anything,” Barb went on. “They were out all day and all they showed us was five minutes. Another lecture, Chris at the Sibyl’s Cave. Now, what do you think, Cesare? You think, it’s time Jay and me asked a direct question?”
The noise in the hall had disappeared. Cesare swung round again, slumping, eyes on the floor. If he was so unhappy here, Barb thought, she could easily have made the trip to the church. These days she could climb the Vomero stairs without risk, taking along the guard assigned to her. And Barbara’s man was the least impressive on the crew. He was the youngest, with curls that hung in his eyes. He liked to read a comic books, her bodyguard, and he liked to pile on the gelato. But why not let the boy eat? Anyone could see that Mama Santa was no longer at risk. So what if some underfed clandestino trailed her a while, seeking a long-distance blessing? So what if some white churchgoer held up a crucifix? Barbara took care of them with a nod and a word. Even Maddalena had backed off, lately. The morning before last, Barbara had allowed the girl ten minutes with the family, a Q-&-A down on the stoop. The priest had shown up that day too, and the pretty young media climber had also caught Barb and Cesare bent together over the rosary. Good TV, that prayer—Barb and Cesare were getting wider play than Barb and the interviewer. Latest word on Maddalena was that she’d been offered a position on a national digest.
All around her, people were going through changes. But here in Barbara’s kitchen, this afternoon, she was getting nowhere even with her priest. Likewise the old man looked as if nothing short of another earthquake could move him.
Once more the mother banged on the table. “She isn’t here,” she said.
That brought his eyes up.
“Aurora. She thought today she’d help JJ and Chris.”
Apparently the Jesuits hadn’t taught him how to handle getting caught. The priest blushed with such heat that for a moment he might’ve been a stranger, a blistered stranger, here at her table. But then Barb had never known him, had she? She’d been clueless, hadn’t she, when it came to his cranky old heart? She’d completely misread the stillness that had fallen over the man during his first meetings with Aurora.
She didn’t understand his first words either, some bitter dialect. Then: “Oh, my.” The priest appeared to test his joints, his legs toggling around beneath the robe. “There’s, there’s a cliché, don’t you know,” he stammered. ‘“No fool like an old fool.’”
She went to the fridge, yanking the handle and the drawer, pulling out a bell pepper. “Father—Mother of God! Of all the women in the world.”
“I, I realize how you feel about her, signora. What am I to say?”
A good big bell pepper, she could use the chopping.
“What would you like, Mrs. Lulucita? Shall we put an end to our talks?”
“Oh sure.” She couldn’t sit yet. “That’s just what I need, more sneaking around.”
The man’s wrinkles multiplied around an uncertain squint.
“If I say you can’t visit”—Barb pointed at him with the pepper—“then I’ll have two pairs of lovebirds sneaking around.”
Cesare didn’t quite nod.
“Do you know what that’s like, Cesare? Do you know what it’s like, living with doubletalk? If I say you can’t visit, I’ll never be able to think straight again. If it’s not JJ and Romy sending signals, it’ll be you and Aurora.”
The old man plucked at his sweat-stuck shirt, and the gesture unexpectedly softened her. With that Barbara could see how he lonely he’d gotten, caught between a comfortable parish and radical dreaming. For years and years, his own heavy-knuckled hand must’ve been the only touch he’d known.
“Plus,” she said more evenly, “I won’t even have a priest to tell about it.”
“Perhaps then we should do as the Romans do.” He too was regaining control. “We should say Dio boia, ‘hangman God,’ don’t you know. An apt blasphemy.”
She sat and attacked the garlic again.
“Apt,” he went on, “when everyone’s got their neck in a—”
“Cesare, don’t. Don’t give me that Irish wit, pseudo Irish, can you imagine how it sounds? Your lying pretend Irish? I mean, I am trying to understand. I’m trying to tell myself, a priest is as human as the rest of us. That’s sort of the point, isn’t it?”
“The point, oh my. The point.”
>
“Please.” Her wrist was burning; she set down the knife. “Cesare.”
“Signora Lulucita, it’s high time we stopped this charade. You call me your chosen priest, as if I were some boy at a dance.”
“Can I help you here, Father? Can I try? Aurora, you know, she didn’t—”
“Fa-ther, oh my. Really, signora, this has to stop. You’re more than bright enough to have realized, long since, just what a miserable excuse for a proper Catholic father I’ve become.”
Barbara’s turn to pluck at her clothes. Whatever she hoped to accomplish by staying in town, she’d counted on her priest to help. When the guard downstairs had announced the man’s arrival, she’d taken a moment with her hair and exchanged her frayed slippers for her best flats. Jesuit, Dominican, whatever, he still carried a communion kit. He still conducted the Mass. The old man even held a weekly service for the head cases, down at DiPio’s clinic.
“Cesare,” she tried, “you said yourself, it’s Christ who calls you.”
“But what if I no longer hear him, signora? What if my faith has become, as you say, mere lying and wit? I daresay you could see the truth the moment we met.”
The garlic had been reduced to crumbs, and the onion and pepper looked overwhelming, far too much to start on.
“Signora, my faith—it’s dwindled to nothing. A heap of offal.”
Barbara shook her head. “Cesare, please. Can you understand, Aurora’s not worth it? You know how many men have fallen for the merry widow?”
The man flushed again. This time the red-and-white contrast, cheeks and hair, suggested one of the local cameos.
“Sorry,” she said. “You understand, I’m angry? I’m still angry.”
She could’ve avoided this, she thought. Five minutes ago she could’ve made believe that she hadn’t guessed who it was that Cesare had been hoping to find, on this visit. She could’ve avoided any mention of the grandmother.
“Signora,” the old man was saying, “I’ve come to think I’m eavesdropping on a life in Christ. I’ve been at it for years really. One long evening after another, I’ve stood up at the front of the sanctuary and I’ve eavesdropped on the liturgy. It’s my own liturgy, yet it’s chatter from another room, don’t you know. It’s nothing but bits and pieces. Whoever designed that awful business above the altar, it’s awful indeed, oh my yes. But he knew what he was doing, with his broken bits and pieces.”
Barbara could’ve let the time pass harmlessly, here in her kitchen.
The priest, if you could still call him a priest, went on to explain how he’d tried to sustain his faith by his work with the homeless and the illegals. “I believed that among the lost sheep, the least of His children, I’d hear Him plainly again, my Christ. I hoped and prayed that out in the streets, I’d hear it again. Clear as a shout.”
If this man knew how he got to Barbara, how raw he scraped her, he wouldn’t have these doubts. “Father…”
“And it’s not as if the Christ has gone anywhere, don’t you know. He’s still out there, isn’t he, calling for our hands and hearts. If anything, these days—”
“Cesare, please. You talk as if you’ve turned into Silky Kahlberg.”
Something of his former tartness returned. “Well, signora. If you don’t see how the Holy Roman Church can seem as perverse and greedy as NATO, you’re something less than the bright woman I’ve taken you for.”
“Did I say Church wasn’t—wasn’t perverse? Sometimes? The Church and NATO, they’re both of them the Mafia, sometimes. I know that. You should’ve gone to some of the fundraisers back in Brooklyn, Cesare.”
“No, I shouldn’t have. I’ve seen too many abuses of Christ’s teaching as it is.”
Barbara’s hand had dropped from the table, the fight gone out of her. Quietly, she admitted she’d always wondered about the priest. “But still, whatever we talked about—we always talked about Jesus.”
“Witchcraft. Incantations. One speaks the name hopefully.”
When the man turned a phrase like that, his look displayed something a lot like righteousness, and Barbara told him so. “Really, Cesare, what does it matter if you sound like Che Guevara? Better that than Kahlberg’s thing, playing the saint to line his pockets.”
The old man, too, appeared to be softening. He revealed that the last vestiges of belief had left him only a day or so before Barb had first stopped into his church. “It was that pair of refugees, don’t you know, the clandestini down in my cellar.” A day or two before the mother showed up, these two young men had come banging on the door, off-hours. “Banging, yes, quite literally. The bruises on one of them, bruises all over his knuckles. I found him some ibuprofen.”
For Cesare, to have a couple of shadow-citizens come begging for help was nothing new. “They know how to find me, to be sure. Word of mouth, word of the insatiable Neapolitan mouth. Do you realize there are miracle stories about me?”
His smile was like the vein in a dead leaf “Stores about your ‘chosen priest,’ yes. A woman comes to the prete coi Settebelli—the priest with the condoms, don’t you know—and then her brother in the Ogaden eludes the search-dogs. That sort of thing. Some of their stories, you’d think I walked the streets draped with ojetti.”
But Cesare supposed that there must also be talk that was closer to the truth. “Some of them must have some idea what I’m doing in there. Or should I say, what I’m not doing. There must be some who’ve noticed how I avoid saying prayers.”
Barbara figured it was time to risk slicing up the onion. She had the thought that the man might reveal some way to keep him out of Aurora’s clutches, and so return to God. The priest meanwhile explained that, though he’d wound up allowing these two clandestini to bed down in the church, they hadn’t come to him looking for a roof over their heads. They hadn’t come for food or some other kind of handout, either. “Signora, they were there seeking Christ.”
Again Cesare rearranged his knees and elbows. “They were seeking absolution, no less. These two actually believed that a few words, words alone, and out of my own unclean mouth…” The old man needed a moment, his baggy fingers extended towards his face. “That I could wash them clean.”
She waited, her knife in the middle of the white bulb on the cutting board.
Cesare firmed up his expression. “They’d committed a crime, you see. Nothing so terrible really, not in this city. Your classic scippo, come up behind someone and hit him. Take his money. In this case, it did sound as if they’d hit the man rather hard.”
“But you’re saying, these two had faith? And that’s when you knew, you didn’t?”
“You understand, signora, there are things about these two I can’t reveal. I no longer believe in the sacraments, but I daresay you know better than most, I still have—”
Barbara didn’t want to hear any more posturing. “Cesare, what? What’s the big secret? They got a little rough on their latest victim, okay. So, what, were they hustlers too? Hustlers, I mean, the sex trade? One of them had AIDS or something?”
His face screwed up in a wizened and approving pout.
“So, okay. There they were, dying and ashamed. Hey.” She shouldn’t talk like Jay, it made her sound shrewish. “And once you heard that, everything you’d lived by was gone. These two were the thing in the street, not Christ, not your call, but just a pair of crooks. They were full of disease and, and looking for a saint to kiss them.”
He’d never heard about her vision of Naples either.
“You could even say this killed your faith. Just another hit in the street, and for you, it killed Christ. Am I right?” She sounded far too much like Jay. “Okay, Cesare. Okay, for the sake of argument. But, I mean. What has all this got to do with Aurora?”
The man’s hands startled up. “Signora! Surely you can see.” He sketched coils in mid-air. “I’m a man losing every least thread of light and meaning, and then your mother laid her hand on mine.”
“She’s not my mother.”
“Boh. My apologies, I’m sure.” His hands dropped back across his knee. “Signora, are you a woman of faith or aren’t you? A woman of faith should have no trouble at all understanding what I feel for your Aurora.
“Now, let us say, my church had collapsed around me,” Cesare went on, “and an angel reached down through the rubble. It’s a radiant energy your Aurora has, nothing short of numinous. And don’t you go getting all shifty and uncomfortable on me, Mrs. Lulucita. Don’t you go fishing out some expression you learned in therapy. That woman laughs at our puny ideas of personality, don’t you know. We fish out a word like ‘neediness,’ so threadbare in its concept of the soul, and she laughs. She puts her fingers to her neck, the base of her lovely neck—I do love to see her touch it, signora. She touches her neck and she lets loose that chuckle. A dart of purest joy.”
“Cesare, give me a break. You talk as if she was Paul.”
He shrugged. “About the boy, as ever, I refuse to speculate. But that woman, her laying-on of hands, it’s a power beyond any cheap attempt at psychoanalysis.”
“Cesare, how can you say that? Whatever power Aurora’s got, it’s money.”
“Signora! Surely you can see, money isn’t the point, for this woman. Money and the comforts, that’s not it at all. Rather she herself is the comfort, the cup that runneth over. She’s the very embodiment of abbondanza.”
Barbara got back to work on the onion, noisily.
“Signora, I’ve never met anyone like her.”
“Maybe not, but you’ve read about them. Caligula, Nero.”
The priest gave his first real smile of the visit. “I believe I know better…”
