Four Seasons in Rome

by Anthony Doerr

  Three days after the pope’s funeral, Henry takes his first unaided steps. He pulls himself up by the front of the couch, stands a moment, rocking on his toes, then lets go. His little body staggers in a slow arc to the handle of a kitchen drawer six feet away. He hangs on, eyes wide, astonished at himself.

  “Good!” Shauna shouts. “Good boy!”

  All morning we sit on the floor in our pajamas and he walks between us, a sailor staggering across a deck in high seas, Owen watching from his blanket, smiling a confused smile.

  The city slowly empties. Posters of John Paul saying Grazie or Santo Subito (Sainthood Now) remain pasted over Trastevere, but many of the Romans, at the market, in bars, are talking about l’elezione. The newspapers print diagrams of the Sistine Chapel, seating charts, profiles of all 134 voting cardinals. Our friend Steve Heuser, an editor for the Boston Globe living here for six months, starts sending home articles that include strange words such as curia (the Papal Court) and scrutineer (overseer of the ballots).

  Black smoke, no pope. White smoke, new pope. Are those bells the bells? At the Academy, scholars host late-night seminars on papal succession. A betting pool to pick the new pope circulates. Myke Cuthbert, a musicologist, posts NCAA-style brackets on his apartment door. Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi of Italy is a high seed. Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras is an underdog. On the line marked winner, Myke has penciled Duke.

  Non-Catholics seem as interested in the conclave as anyone: agnostics, Jews, gays, a Hindu friend writing e-mails from back home—all beguiled by the screens of secrecy, the eccentric vocabulary, the pomp and pageantry. In 1274, Gregory X had the idea to lock all the cardinals in a room. Sleep there, relieve yourself there, eat there. One plate of food and one bowl of soup per day per man. After five days of stalemating, this would be reduced to bread, water, and wine. They couldn’t draw an income, couldn’t communicate with the outside world. The protocol has hardly changed in 730 years.49

  “If cameras were allowed,” our friend Janna says, “it’d be the ultimate reality show.”

  Candlelight, a slow zoom on the host, a fresco rippling with muscled ignudi out of focus behind him. “When we come back, the most dramatic confrontation yet…”

  Think of the political wrangling, the thousand inferences reverberating beneath even the most simple exchange. Whispers and fidelities, alliances, orthodoxies, crimson robes sweeping down hallways and the swell of the world’s media straining against locked doors. Two cardinals pause in a courtyard: a handshake, a sniffle, even a half second of eye contact, and the mantle of power drifts invisibly from one pair of shoulders to another.

  Before his afternoon shift, Lorenzo the gatekeeper sits with us in the garden behind the Academy, smiling at the boys, letting Henry hold his finger as he walks laps around his wooden chair. Henry cackles. Lorenzo says there is an old Italian saying: “Always follow a fat pope with a skinny pope.”

  Does that mean they’ll follow a skinny pope with a fat one? In the betting pool I pick a sixty-nine-year-old German long shot named Karl Lehmann. I’ve never heard of him, but his photos display some serious jowls.

  The boys fall and get back up, fall and get back up. Shauna takes a taxi to a doctor’s appointment and I watch the babies alone. An hour into it, I’m ready to faint myself. There is a metaphor in all this standing up and falling over, I’m sure, but I’m too busy trying to keep their heads from smashing into the corners of tables to contemplate it.

  The day the papal conclave meets for the first time, seven days after Henry took his first steps, Owen takes his. It is the most lovely afternoon I have seen in Rome, maybe the most lovely afternoon I have ever seen. Mounds of flowers perch atop trellises—dense racemes of wisteria hang everywhere. The lawns swirl with bees and the sky is radiant and flawless and resounds with gold; I feel as if I could tap it with a fingernail and set it ringing. “Look what sunshine,” the nineteenth-century Roman poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli wrote, probably looking up into the sky above Trastevere on a day like this one. “Look: it’s splitting the stones.”50

  A cat sharpens his claws on a welcome mat. Sheets of miniature violets bloom in the garden walls, thirty feet above the ground.

  Shauna sets Owen in the grass and stoops to pick up a toy, a few yards away. Suddenly Owen is there, having hauled himself up on the stroller and walked to her, his hands on the backs of her legs.

  He grins. “Mo, mo?” he says. More, more. All afternoon we roam the lawn with our sons, stooped, our arms in a circle around their midsections, their little frames wobbling forward. They fall, they land on their palms. They stand up again.

  Henry carries a bottle cap in each fist. Owen grins and grins. They rush headlong.

  On the nineteenth of April, Shauna leaves the apartment to attend a talk at the Academy. I am helping the boys stack blocks. Across town, the cardinals tally their ballots and realize they have successfully elected a new pope. Smoke ascends from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. “Bianca, bianca,” shout people in the piazza.

  I know none of this—only that I need to change Henry’s diaper, and Owen has given up on the blocks and is playing with the electrical cords beneath the diaper table. He has pulled the lamp onto the floor and has a section of the cord stuffed into his mouth when the sound of hundreds of clanging bells comes through the open window.

  I check my watch: 6:08 p.m. Not a normal time for church bells.

  I replace the lamp, change Henry’s pants, pour milk into bottles, and wrestle the boys downstairs to the stroller. I wheel past the gate and call to the gatekeeper, Luca, “Is there a new pope?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is it?”

  “There have only been the bells.”

  Only the bells. Stranded inside the Academy, poor Shauna, who has missed all the papal fanfare because she has been hospitalized, too busy with the boys, or too tired, is told the same thing. But the talk goes on, and she does not come down the front stairs.

  I pivot the stroller and head past the Porta San Pancrazio and along the rim of the Janiculum. There is a faint, almost negligible rain. To my right the city is in shadow but off toward the west the sky is a rich yellow, and it feels as if any minute a half dozen rainbows will spring up.

  I cut the switchbacks and plunge toward the Vatican. A bus passes, crammed full of nuns. The boys sing along with the bouncing of the stroller. I’m hurrying, but not too fast, and I don’t see anyone really running. There seems to be more traffic than usual, speeding north, but it’s hard to say for sure.

  At one point, by the children’s hospital, the traffic lets up and the boys stop singing and in the quiet I can hear bells ringing—thousands of them. It is a sound like every slumbering corner of the city waking up. And it’s beautiful: the silvered light, St. Peter’s dome wet and gleaming above the pines, the tiny drops of rain, Henry and Owen beaming, their hair flying back from the speed.

  I wheel down the steep alley of Salita di Sant’Onofrio. The stroller thunks down the stairs. Now I see the people—all of them running in the same direction—slipping into the throat of via dei Penitenzieri. Literally a dozen people charge, without the usual Roman genius for jaywalking, right through the traffic. Brakes screech; no one pays any mind. Many are smiling big, authentic smiles. Men in suits, ladies holding hands—all of them are running. Several motorini squirt past us.

  I, too, begin to jog, pushing the stroller. People walk out of restaurants, office buildings. It is not like the funeral—there are no cops, no civil service, no helicopters. There is no organization at all, yet everyone seems happy, peaceful.

  When we reach it, St. Peter’s Square is only perhaps half full. If I were alone, I could easily slip past the obelisk to the front of the crowd and put my hands on the railing beneath the main steps. Instead I end up positioning the stroller beneath the southern colonnade, between two of Bernini’s massive pillars. I can peer around the end of a line of portable toilets and see big maroon curtains hanging in th
e central balcony on the façade of the basilica. I dig in the backpack we use for a diaper bag and find two stale quarters of a roll and hand them to the boys and hope I’m not too late. The crowd fills in behind us. Flags wave, people whisper. A toddler passing in front of us, towed by his mother, asks, “Che cos’è, Mamma? Che cos’è?” What is it, Mom?

  Every minute the piazza packs in tighter. Over my shoulder is the now familiar sight of hundreds of lights on the media scaffolding just off the Largo del Colonnato. Men in suits face the glare, holding microphones, their backs to the piazza. Rows of men in darker suits stand on top of the colonnade itself, below the papal apartments, security probably. A whole retinue of Swiss Guards stands at attention in their harlequin colors at the base of the basilica steps.

  We have been there maybe three minutes when the curtains shift. A murmur rolls through the crowd. A man steps out in a red skullcap and leans into a microphone and says, “Brothers and sisters,” in Italian. Then he says, “Habemus Papam.” We have a pope.

  I clap, along with everyone, and the applause dies down and he says something else, maybe more Latin, and the crowd roars—absolutely roars—and the twins burst into tears.

  The cardinal retreats and some helpers show up and drop a gilded carpet, big as an Olympic swimming pool, over the railing and secure it and move back inside. The curtains fall still once again. I take the boys out of the stroller one at a time and try to calm them. The drizzle remains faint. The swirling cloudscape behind St. Peter’s flushes with light.

  Ceremony is story. Blood beats in the temples, eyes stop blinking, a delicate silence rises and stretches, and the white-hot center of the world’s attention pauses momentarily along its insatiable sweep. All the faces around me—a man standing on the pedals of his bicycle, a middle-aged woman with gigantic pearl earrings, a touch of empire about her shoulders—are strikingly earnest. Are we here because we want to know who will become pope? Or are we here out of vanity—because we want to be able to say we were here? Both, of course. The Church is making narrative, and this is the story’s climactic moment. Right now we’re here mostly because we want to know what will happen next, because we’re most of the way through a rich and complicated story. The curtain is up, the orchestra is playing; this is the thrill of drama and the Catholic Church is the most experienced dramatist in the world.

  Before any outcome, before cynicism, or disappointment, or exultation—there is hope, and the promise of change. The joy is in the expectancy, in the swelling potential of it all. The last-second shot hangs above the rim; the final ballot box is upended onto the counting table. It’s the admissions envelope in the mailbox, the corner of the telegraph slip sticking out from under the door. It’s Christmas morning, it’s holding the pregnancy test to the light. It’s springtime.

  Not-knowing is always more thrilling than knowing. Not-knowing is where hope and art and possibility and invention come from. It is not-knowing, that old, old thing, that allows everything to be renewed.

  I whisper to Henry what I see: the halberds of the Swiss Guards, the heavy tapestries. A pigeon lands on the rim of a fountain and rests, panting. Dozens of cardinals in brilliant scarlet emerge on two flanking balconies on the façade of the basilica. Then the maroon curtain shifts on the central balcony and the crowd howls and the boys start screaming again: screaming into the roar, the future, the unknown. The noise is such that, two feet away, I cannot hear their cries.

  “Here he comes,” I tell Henry.

  A man steps out. His arms are raised. A blessing? A sign of victory? He is tiny beneath the towering curtains. He wears white, with a black stole, and seems to be bareheaded. Indeed, by far the most striking thing about him is his hair: it is a dazzling, beautiful white.

  He is the 266th pope since Simon Peter took the reins from Jesus in AD 32. A cardinal holds out a microphone. The new pope licks his lips, the light sets his hair on fire. He turns his head a few degrees to his right, and my sons—their little stroller, wedged between two pillars—are directly in his line of sight.

  His arms drop; the roar dies. He says a sentence or two that includes John Paul II’s name and the roar surges back up, loud enough to set the old pillars reeling, a roar that is the sum of thousands of individual voices but somehow more than that, too. By now the twins are inconsolable.

  Who is it? I tap the shoulder of a man with the ear-buds of a portable radio in his ears.

  “The German.”

  “Ratzenburger?”

  Carefully, and clearly annoyed, he says, “Ratzinger,” and puts his earphone back in.

  “Ahhh,” I say, but this means little to me. For now it doesn’t matter, anyway. I squeeze the stroller through the crowd and back onto the street and unstrap the boys beside the entrance to a restaurant and hold them until they’re calm.

  People are still rushing past us, hurrying toward the show, many looking deeply happy, as if they have escaped the weights of their bodies, a nun running with a pigtailed girl holding each of her hands, three small priests jogging behind them, smiling immensely. From here, a block away, the church is soaked in light. Rays of sun sift past the cupola. The crowd is a field of color through the fat, white stripes of the colonnade.

  Every story seeks, in Emerson’s words, the “invisible and imponderable.” Faith, loss, emotional contact. But to get there, oddly enough, the storyteller must use the visible, the physical, the eminently tangible: the reader, first and foremost, must be convinced. And details—the right details in the right places—are what do the convincing. The ringing mouth of a 9-ton bell, green with verdigris, shows itself, then sweeps away again. A gilded carpet unfurls from a balcony. Two three-story curtains ripple, then part. A man steps into the light.

  The glory of architecture, the puffing chimney, the starched white robe—these details are carefully chosen; they are there to reinforce majesty, divinity, to assure us that what is said to be happening actually is happening.

  And doesn’t a writer do the same thing? Isn’t she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe.

  As I work on yet another draft of my story, I try to remember these lessons. A journal entry is for its writer; it helps its writer refine, perceive, and process the world. But a story—a finished piece of writing—is for its reader; it should help its reader refine, perceive, and process the world—the one particular world of the story, which is an invention, a dream. A writer manufactures a dream. And each draft should present a version of that dream that is more precisely rendered and more consistently sustained than the last.

  Every morning I try to remind myself to give unreservedly, to pore over everything, to test each sentence for fractures in the dream.

  Five days after Cardinal Ratzinger is elected, he is installed as Pope Benedict XVI. Shauna and I push the stroller through Trastevere in the drizzle. The old pope is buried, the new one is draped in gold, and meanwhile the city looks like an empty theater, uniformed ushers walking about with their dustpans, quietly sweeping up.

  In overcast light, on a Sunday afternoon, Rome can look especially bleak, storefronts shuttered and tagged with graffiti, iron bars across ground-floor windows. On via Ippolito Nievo, near a toy store we sometimes visit, a burst water main has floated trash across an entire block: plastic bags, banana peels, shredded paper, a million colorless scraps of cardboard. Trash is clotted over storm drains, slung limply across the gutters, collected in puddles under parked cars. A mechanized street sweeper howls in front of us.

  In the Forum archaeologists crouch in their pits with their buckets and trowels and brushes, tweezering away the clay. Nearby, restorers clamp scaffolding to yet another church façade. Try for a moment to understand how overwhelmingly many dimpled and cracking surfaces
this city must try to keep clean: fonts, flower petals, pediments, railings, hieroglyphics on obelisks, the furrowed robes of ten thousand solemn Madonnas, and the plump cheeks of a hundred thousand grinning cherubs. We all fight our daily battles with entropy—deadhead the tulips, pick up the fallen Cheerios, carry out the used diapers—but Rome has it the worst. It is a Metropolitan Museum of Art the size of Manhattan, no roof, no display cases, and half a million combustion engines rumbling in the hallways.

  If you average it out over the millennia, the detritus has piled up over Rome at somewhere near an inch a year. Hadrian would have entered the Pantheon by climbing stairs. Now we have to brake the stroller as we coast down toward it. The four smashed temples in Largo di Torre Argentina, once on pedestals in the open light, are now about thirty feet below the level of today’s sidewalk. You need a permesso and a stepladder to descend to them. By the fifteenth century, Nero’s monstrous pleasure palace, the Domus Aurea, had become a series of underground caverns lived in by shepherds. Supposedly Raphael and Pinturicchio would rappel into the rooms and study the frescoes by torchlight.

  All around us the streets continue to rise imperceptibly: chewing gum, bird droppings, leaf litter, skin cells, gelato spoons, particles of exhaust, bits of buildings, shreds of insect wings, the exhalations of lovers and the castings of earthworms—a ghostly compost raining ceaselessly onto the city. Ancient Romans stripped the Apennines of trees, and Renaissance Romans did it again, and ever since the spring rains have pulled the soil off the mountains and spread it across the plains. Every minute here the graves of the dead sink a fraction deeper. You can’t help but wonder what frescoes, what stonework, what sconces and dinnerware, lie entombed beneath your shoes.