by Timothy Egan
I slip out into the rain and head for the largest structure in town, the hulk of the Cathedral of Santa Margherita. It’s on high ground of this hill town, topped by the third-largest dome in Italy—behind only St. Peter’s in Rome and the Brunelleschi structure in Florence. You can see it for miles around. Normally, I’d be enthralled. But I skip the architectural masterpiece and head down side stairs, to the crypt of Saint Lucia Filippini, at the base of the cathedral. The door pushes open. I’m alone in an octagonal cellar. Alone, except for her. In the center, under lights, is a glass reliquary with a full body inside. It’s just me and Lucy. She died in 1732, at the age of sixty. Her life work was building schools for girls and young women, to uplift their dignity, she said. If men were to be the rulers of the church, women would be the heart. Orphaned at the age of seven, she never forgot what it was like to be alone in the world. In helping girls find God, she tried to show a way to independence of mind and spirit. Every school was designed to send out graduates who would go forth and found other schools for women.
She is not known for doing anything miraculous, or for affecting some historic event. Rivers did not leap out of their channels at her command. Wolves did not lie down. She was not roasted at the stake, dropped into a lake, dismembered, or beheaded. She exuded goodness; she gave off an aura. In life, she was saintly—that was her miracle. And in death, something improbable happened: Lucy did not decay. Normally, a body swells, eyeballs turn to liquid, the skin goes green after it chills—the gruesome, inescapable process of decay, from dust to dust, as Scripture and science have it. None of this happened to her. After several years, Lucy was pronounced “incorruptible,” an occurrence later certified by the church in the twentieth century, though incorruptibility is not by itself a guarantee of sainthood. A pontifical commission relied on an examination by pathologists for this classification.
I walk past a knee-high gate and inch my way toward the body. I expect something hideous. She is lying on her back, head turned to the side, wrapped in black. The face is visible, and though alabaster pale, it is clearly fleshy and not decayed. She’s 285 years dead and she looks, well—extraordinary. The skin is not dark or mottled, but is somewhat smooth. Her eyes appear to be half open. Half open. I take another step and start to reel off a series of pictures. When I zoom in, I observe a slow but discernible movement: the eyes are opening wider, to a half oval. This can’t be. It jolts me. I feel a direct connection to the corpse, this saint, and maybe her link to God. For a long moment I’m frozen, and look around for other witnesses. I take dozens of pictures. I want proof. And then I back away, very slowly, behind the gate, out the door, hastening up the stairs, trotting back toward the hotel through the rain.
* * *
—
“YOU’RE SAYING she winked at you.”
“She did, Jones. Maybe not a wink, or maybe not specifically directed at me. But I swear: there was movement in her eyes.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Please don’t doubt me.”
“Maybe you saw what you wanted to believe.”
“I don’t think that’s what happened. I didn’t go in wanting to believe anything. Italy has so many mummies, you have to laugh at these displays of the dead. I went there like, ‘O.K., what fresh caca is this?’ But I saw it. Come with me tomorrow, I’ll show you.”
We’re at dinner, in one of the few restaurants open in Montefiascone on a dark and miserable Sunday night. It’s in an old cave that gives off an inviting glow. Over in a corner are the Germans. We heard them before we saw them—the laughter. I ask the women if they’ve been to the cathedral yet, which is just across the street, to the crypt, hoping to find a corroborating witness. No, they were busy drying their clothes, plotting tomorrow’s route.
Joni thinks I’ve been too long on the pilgrim trail. She knows me for the skeptic I am. My bullshit detector is not flawless, but it’s in fine working order. And here I am babbling about a centuries-old corpse who opened her eyes to me. It could be fraud, and woe to the Cathedral of Santa Margherita if they dare perpetuate such a thing. It’s easy to make a doll’s eyes open and shut. How hard would it be to do that to a mummy? As for the skin, maybe it was embalmed, or injected with some fluid, made to look fresh for the faithful. A good undertaker can do wonders for the departed. Again, if that’s the case, eternal shame on the bishop of Montefiascone.
“Have some wine,” says one of the Germans. “It’s as good as the legend.”
We toast to Joni’s arrival, to being together again, to the wonders of the V.F., and to the Laughing Germans. We’re drinking Est! Est!! Est!!! It’s a vino bianco, the house wine in this little trattoria run by a couple and their grown son. When we lived in Italy, one floor above a man who made Chianti out of his four-hundred-year-old villa, I learned that nothing is worse than a wine without a story. The story of Est! Est!! Est!!! begins in the year 1107, with a German bishop making a pilgrimage to Rome, hoping to see the pope and get a promotion to cardinal. This man, Johann Fugger, was a bon vivant, Falstaffian in the telling, who made sure he always ate and drank well on his journey. To ensure that he was getting the best of the countryside, he sent his servant, Martin, ahead, with instructions to mark “Est” on the door of an inn with good vino. It was shorthand for the Latin vinum est bonum—the wine is good. In Montefiascone, the servant was so taken with the quality of a white wine that he scribbled Est! Est!! Est!!! on the door. When the bishop arrived and settled in to sample his servant’s discovery, he was overwhelmed; until that moment, he’d never tasted the perfect expression of a grape. He ended his pilgrimage then and there, and spent the rest of his life in Montefiascone. He died, prematurely, from drinking Est to excess. And every August, the townspeople stage a parade to Bishop Fugger’s tombstone and splash his favorite drink on the grave.
We eat focaccia fresh-baked over wood in the Etruscan style, tagliatelle with pecorino, and tiramisù for the caffeine and brandy laced throughout the sponge layers. It’s biting when we step outside the warmth of the cave, the wind throwing rain at us. We link arms as we pass the cathedral where Lucy sleeps, and hurry down the corso past buildings of shuttered windows, where the lights are out and all of Montefiascone sleeps. We’re the only guests in the chill of an old inn. It’s too early for Italians to turn the heat on; most wait until October. We have a key to the thick wooden front door. We go up steps of worn marble, the click of our shoes on the stairs, to our tiny room, to our small world, to have and to hold in the cold as before, but fresh and familiar, the best of times.
THIRTY-ONE
THE WOMEN WHO LIVE FOREVER
Let’s start by doing what is necessary, and then hope for the impossible. We need to see Lucy. For nine hours, Joni was lights out. I couldn’t shut down my mind. I tried watching imaginary leaves falling in slow motion, my sheep-counting technique. I replayed tossing a fly-fishing line in the Kootenai River of Montana, the perfect cast, the slow three-count, the strike. Nothing worked. It was because of her, the 345-year-old woman in the crypt. I tried to give the ghosts along this trail a night off, but this one was too close. I went down a hallway to a den with books and Wi-Fi to read about Lucy, her good works, and her death—she was taken by cancer. It was in 1926 that her body was uncovered and found to be still undecayed, except for minor deterioration. I clicked through pictures I’d taken on my phone, zooming in on the image of her face. It was unclear, but through multiple frames there appeared to be movement of her eyelids. It made me tremble, staring at the ashen face of a corpse in the middle of the night in an empty hotel.
Breakfast is in a drafty room. Outside, it’s grim and gray, the snarling tail of the storm moving through. We bundle up and walk the corso. I get my credential stamped, a very stylized print of a medieval V.F. wanderer inside “100 km to the Tomb of St. Pietro” letters. My pilgrim passport is nearly full: Canterbury, Dover, Calais, Saint-Omer, Arras, Laon, Reims, Épernay, Langres, Besançon, Lausanne, M
ontreux, Saint-Maurice, Vernayaz, Bourg-Saint-Pierre, Great Saint Bernard, Aosta, Ivrea, Pavia, Piacenza, Fidenza, Passo della Cisa, Pontremoli, Carrara, Lucca, San Miniato, San Gimignano, Siena, Buonconvento, Bolsena, Montefiascone. The names are transportive, each a memory capsule. I started as a hesitant wayfarer, afraid to tell anyone my true purpose. I was just a curious traveler, emotion in check, my soul in a jar. No more. I am the twenty-first-century version of the medieval man who adorns the signs along Sigeric’s way. I want to finish and I want resolution, though I’m ready to accept neither.
At Santa Margherita, we descend the stairs to the basement, Lucy’s lair. Joni is hesitant to move toward the casket. I shuffle closer and stare. The face still looks pliable and—yes, incorruptible. But the eyes are closed. Yesterday, they were half open. I’m sure of that. I show her my pictures. Joni shrugs.
“Inconclusive.”
“What?”
“If you’d like me to believe you I will.”
* * *
—
THREE MILES down the Roman road the rain stops. We shed our shells. We started on hard surface, two of us on a Monday morning, dodging puddles, waiting on a rainbow. No sign of the Laughing Germans or the Sardinians. Joni is ready to walk the full thirteen miles to the next town, Viterbo. She’s been training. She’s wearing turquoise running shoes, and her pack is fairly light. I’d advised her to be minimalist. We’ll buy clothes in Rome. I sometimes stride a few steps ahead of her, which is rude. By midday, we need a siesta, but the ground is too wet for napping. We find a roadside bar and have double shots of espresso.
Joni has a question: Suppose Lucy did open her eyes for me. “What was the point?”
“To get me to believe.”
“So you need a miracle to believe in God?”
“I looked this up last night: There are more than three hundred preserved bodies on display in Italian churches. It seems like most of them are women.”
“A lot of mummies.”
“Saints, Jones. They’re saints. And it’s not the same as mummification.”
She has me thinking: What’s the point of Lucy’s incorruptibility? Miracles are an integral part of the faith of the Catholic Church. But miracles are also supposed to be rare, and put to maximum good use. So why the inexplicable in the cellar of Santa Margherita? It seems like a wasted miracle, a sideshow of the supernatural. Lucy is long gone to cancer. My sister-in-law is alive, but dying, with hers. If anyone could use an intervention, it’s that suffering member of our family. So I decide to bundle whatever happened in Montefiascone, whether gimmick or miraculous, into a prayer for Joni’s sister. And when I tell her, she’s grateful, but still doubting, and I press her:
“Don’t Jews believe in miracles?”
* * *
—
WE PASS THE HOT SPRINGS of Bagnaccio, the thermal waters that drew wealthy Romans to build their villas here on the tufa rock plateau. The translation is “nasty old bath,” a series of pools in an open field. Bagnaccio is one of the great body restoratives along the pilgrim route, a place to braise away the grime from months of travel. A muscle soak is tempting. But if we marinated in hot mineral water, we’d never get back on the trail again today. Is that German-accented laughter I hear behind a cloud of steam? Indeed, it’s them. Most of the people lounging in these springs are unclothed. Germans have a reputation for being militantly nude, as one writer put it, and as we learned in spring months living in Chianti. We keep walking. Better to remember those fellow pilgrims as high-spirited and fully clothed.
We push on, arriving in late afternoon in the stupendous maze of Viterbo, population almost seventy thousand. The streets are curled ribbons of cobblestone. I’m intrigued, at the open-air archaeological park, by a statue of the Goddess of Abundance, a dual-gendered figure with numerous breasts and testicles. Another statue is mighty Emperor Augustus, who hasn’t lost a smidge of national esteem, situated in a grove of perfect pomegranates. The city’s monuments to the embedded cultures here are mostly functioning. People live in homes built on foundations of Etruscan stone, draw water from the Empire’s fountains, and pass under arches ordered up by the Vicars of Christ who lived here when Viterbo was called the City of Popes. As Rome crumbled, falling to thieves, rot, and civic unrest, Viterbo grew as a healthier home for the papal seat. At least nine popes lived here in the thirteenth century.
Just before dark, we take a room in a small hotel run by a woman of incandescent friendliness. She says we are lucky to be in town today. It’s our great buona fortuna. And why is that?
“Funghi!” Her exclamation rattles the rafters. After the long dry summer, the storm has jolted the forest floor to life, delivering enough rain to bring forth an abundance of mushrooms. She scribbles the name of a restaurant and says we must eat there, but don’t wait long to get going, every table will be taken. She starts in with the number of popes who lived just a few blocks away, her civic duty. I politely cut her off. She also talks up Saint Rose of Viterbo, another incorruptible, who died just before her seventeenth birthday in 1251, a story that I encourage. I no longer care much about dead popes—the crooked, the corpulent, the ass-grabby conjugal. But I’m obsessed with well-preserved dead women. Am I the worst pilgrim on the Via Francigena?
Rose was a teenager who came from the poorest of the poor and spent her short life trying to help those like her. She owns Viterbo. Every year in her honor, people parade a ninety-foot portable tower through the streets, held aloft by the strongest men. Her preserved body follows. Rose’s heart, kept in a separate reliquary, was autopsied a few years ago by a team of doctors, who wrote up the report in The Lancet. It’s not clear to me, nor was it to them, what they were looking for in an eight-hundred-year-old organ. “We have to ask: Does this answer any burning questions in medicine or history?” said one of the authorities. “I’m not sure this does.”
Still, I know what it’s like to hold on to a loved one who dies young. When I was twenty-two, my two best friends were killed—a few months apart, in separate, violent auto accidents. My friend Dick, who always said you should never hold back when you see something wrong, was hit head-on by a drunk driver. My other friend Bob was a runner, much faster than me, and quiet. He fell asleep at the wheel, after driving through a long night on the interstate, and flipped his car. I’d never known death of any kind; suddenly, two guys I loved as brothers were gone at the dawn of their adult lives. I would not let them go. For a time, we talked in dreams, and they were the same as they’d been in life—funny, daring, full of insight and comfort. These visits were random, something I could not affect, and I always felt renewed by them. Yet something was missing: never, in life or after death, did I get to say goodbye, for you can’t control a conversation in a dream. As the years passed, the appearances became rare, until sometime after my thirtieth birthday, when my friends left me for good. They would always be twenty-two. I would have memory, the part of me shaped by those lost lives, and a resolve not to put off the things that need to be said until later, because later may never come.
The restaurant is full. We beg, cajole, and charm while sniffing the steam from passing plates of mushroom-laden magnificence. The owner gives in, allowing us to sit at a small table by the door. It’s drafty and chilly every time someone exits or enters, but we don’t care, for it’s also cozy and romantic. We begin with a mushroom bruschetta, follow that with a divine soup made with funghi, and land the ’shroom trifecta with pappardelle con porcini freschi. After an hour, I feel like the Viterbo pope known as Martin the Glutton, but we have one more dish still to come: a slow-cooked rabbit quarter, with a sauce of what-else.
I mention a story about an island in Lake Bolsena. At one time, instead of having to stop in at the seven major churches of Rome, a pilgrim could get a plenary indulgence from the pope by praying at each of the seven chapels on the island.
“A . . . plenary . . . indulgence?” says Joni, drawing
the words out. “And this will keep you out of hell? Or get you into heaven?”
“You don’t have to worry, Jones, since Jews don’t believe in life after death.”
“That’s not entirely true. By my training, we don’t believe in such specific places.”
“So what happens?”
“Do you think you know?”
“I don’t.”
“Does anybody?”
“Not with certainty.”
“In the Jewish tradition, the afterlife can take many forms. You can live on through others who were affected by you. If you were a decent human being, kind, sharing, charitable, and loving, you’re remembered.”
“I like that.”
“Yeah?”
“But just in case, I’ll hold you a place.”
“And what about Lucy? She’s in heaven. That comes with being a saint?”
“That’s the rule.”
“She’s a miracle on earth, but if she were alive today, she couldn’t say Mass. She couldn’t be a priest.”
“True.”
“At least among Reform Jews, women are rabbis.”
“Progress.”
It’s my Jewish wife who encouraged me to see the pope the first time we were in Rome, years ago. I wanted to go for a run. It’s my Jewish wife from Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh who urged me to take this pilgrimage. It’s my Jewish wife who loves the Christmas season—her father was in retail and would have gone under without it. It’s my Jewish wife who reminded me, when my views of the Vatican were at low ebb, that Pope Francis went to Auschwitz, spending a day there in silent prayer. I often tell her she missed the boat, that Jesus was not a minor prophet. When I say she should consider how the short life of a poor man in a distant land changed the world—a Jew, at that—she reminds me of the awful things people do in this man’s name. So it goes, back and forth, each chiseling away at the other’s theological foundations, but each adding to them as well—ultimately creating something new between us. We will never settle it; life would be boring if we did.