That is how I celebrated my Good Friday. With lots of blood. Fake blood. On the third day, Easter Sunday, I wanted to go and attend Father Edoardo’s mass, but because of some confusion over the timing (daylight savings time had just gone into effect), I missed it.
ANOTHER YEAR WENT BY as I wrote this book, and Easter rolled around again, a late Easter, almost at the end of April. No one understands why it is that Easter wanders like that through the springtime.
And roughly a week before Easter, Father Edoardo appeared once again at my door, about seven thirty in the evening, when the street door downstairs is closed, so that if someone rings my doorbell they’re already in the building, someone else has let them in, the way it happens with salespeople from the phone company, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and volunteers for UNICEF. Seeing Father Edoardo’s fine honest face I suddenly realized that a year had passed, a year had passed (good God, what have I done in the past year?).
“Good evening, my dear sir, I’m here for the Easter benediction. Do you mind if I come in?”
“Certainly, come on in,” I said to him, stepping aside, and I felt a surge of happiness at his arrival. We lingered in the front hall, just like the last time. For someone who’s carrying out a pastoral mission, Father Edoardo still appeared rather embarrassed about what he was doing. More embarrassed than me, even though I was the target of it. I got the sensation that he didn’t remember me, while I vividly remembered our meeting of a year ago: for that matter, you really can’t say that his visit, as much as it struck me at the time, had pushed me to be much more involved with his parish: in truth, I had gone to Sant’Agnese—the church of Sant’Agnese—many times, but always to the little café inside that wonderful complex, adjoining the catacombs, the boccie and basketball courts, beneath the trees, surrounded by retired men talking about politics in the accents of their home town or playing cards, and where the manager is an exceedingly civil old man with blue eyes.
I had only been once to mass at Sant’Agnese, for my father’s funeral, many years ago . . .
(Those fragments of liturgy don’t count, the ones you witness when, meaning to tour a church, you discover that a service is under way when you go in, so you sit down in one of the pews all the way in the back . . .)
At any rate, never once to mass with Father Edoardo.
How old could he be? I wondered, thirty-five? He looks like a student, even if his hair is gray . . . or that kind of ash blond that’s so delicate and faded that it seems gray.
Ash, a dead, pale, chilly thing, and yet the sign that here, once, a fire blazed.
Wait though, wasn’t his hair red a year ago? Could I be getting mixed up? Or had he suddenly aged? “If you like, I’d be glad to say a benediction.”
“I . . .”
“Only if you’d like . . . you tell me . . .”
“I . . . Father, I’m not a believer. But maybe . . .”
It wasn’t clear even to me whether that “maybe” applied to my claim not to believe in God, which is something of which I’m by no means certain. So I wonder whether it is possible to maintain at the same time that you don’t believe, but also that you don’t believe you don’t believe, in other words, that you are by means convinced that God exists, but neither are you convinced that He does not exist: I’m not talking about the thing itself, whether or not He exists, but only whether I believe or disbelieve.
And so? Do I or don’t I believe?
Father Edoardo smiled, his pity aroused by the lack of brashness with which I’d proclaimed my atheism.
“Listen, if you don’t care to do it, there’s no need,” said the priest, “we’re here strictly out of friendship . . .”
“You tell me, Father . . .”
“Tell you what?”
I wanted him to . . . I wanted him to tell me . . . I wanted him to be the one to decide whether or not he should bless the apartment. After all, isn’t it enough—for a thing to be done—that the person doing it believe in it deeply?
“I mean to say . . . whether you think it makes sense . . . that is, to bless the home of a nonbeliever . . . let’s just go ahead. But you ought to tell me if it’s right . . . maybe it’s absurd.”
“Absurd?”
As he asked me this question, Father Edoardo’s gaze was angelic, and I feel no shame in saying so. Seriously, he seemed to me to be the first good, serious, honest, simple, and straightforward person I had met in years, unshadowed, without ulterior motives, devoid even of that slight hypocrisy that emanates, like a pungent and slightly sickening perfume, from those who devote themselves exclusively to the good. To the good of others.
“Does anyone live here besides you?”
I shook my head. He’d asked me the same question the year before. Maybe the priest imagined that I wanted to be consoled in this loneliness of mine, and it might well be that the meaning I wanted to convey by shaking my head was in fact this. I was confused and subjugated by that angelic presence. I almost couldn’t stand finding myself standing next to a virtuous person, I was hypnotized by him.
“My children come here, but not even all that often . . .” I added, to make it clear that I didn’t live like a hermit, “a few friends . . . my girlfriend . . .”
I thought that with these last few bits of information my portrait as a bad Christian was now complete. But I know perfectly well that it is precisely this figure that good priests, good shepherds, go in search of—find, so to speak, especially delectable. Could Father Edoardo make an exception? Yes, he made it. In fact, he said nothing, neither to bring me over to the right side nor to leave me where I was.
He smiled sweetly.
“Well, in any case, a home has a personality . . . and it mirrors the person who lives in it. It has the same spirit . . .”
“Listen, whether I’m here or somewhere else, it’s all pretty much the same to me.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I feel like a guest.”
The diminutive priest gazed at me in astonishment.
Perhaps he thought that I was in such bad shape that I had taken advantage of that unannounced visit to appeal to him, to issue a cry for help. Perhaps he thought it was normal for someone like him to live in the solitude of his religious vocation, but not for someone like me, who had no calling, no vocation. Why didn’t these children, why didn’t this woman live with me? Come to think of it, why didn’t they? I wondered the same thing. What could the reason be?
And why is he telling me this?—this priest who shared my first name might perhaps have been wondering—why is he telling me that he feels like a guest in his own home, that he has felt like a guest in every home he has ever lived in?
“It’s strange,” he said, “you’d think that you have no attachments to anything . . . that’s so strange . . . and if you ask me, it isn’t true, either.”
“No, in fact, it isn’t true,” I replied, shaking my head again. He smiled faintly.
“And in any case, this apartment, as you told me, does have some passing occupants, from time to time . . .”
“Yes, certainly . . . passing occupants.” A perfect description.
That’s when I exclaimed, with a sort of sudden cheerfulness, that it made perfect sense to bless my apartment, after all, if it wasn’t me in person, still someone could receive that benediction, even if they spent just a few hours there, where I lived like a Fascist official in retirement, or a professor too taken up with his abstract studies for other human beings to have any desire to cohabit with him.
“Well then, let’s bless this home, shall we?” asked Father Edoardo, with that ritual question that had already been answered before he posed it, the way it is when you get married, and still it’s necessary to answer it, the affirmative reply has to leave your lips as a clear and specific sound . . .
“Yes, I’d like that,” I said, and I was truly happy that he was doing it, that he was going to bless me. A benediction, that’s what the place needed, yes, a benediction.
&
nbsp; Father Edoardo reached into his slender bag, which until then he had carried under his arm like an office clerk carrying his documents with him from one office to another, and pulled out what he needed: a sheet of paper with an ancient image printed on one side, which he handed to me, and the aspergillum. Then, staring at a certain corner of the front hall in my apartment, between a small red velvet armchair and the massive cabinet with the Treccani encyclopedia, he made the sign of the cross, reciting, “In the name of the Father, the Son . . . and the Holy Spirit,” with that brief pause before naming the third, ineffable mystical personage. I couldn’t say whether it was because he was so close to me, side by side, or else because I would have just felt like a worm if I’d let him recite the formula all by himself, or else it was the gesture itself, which these days almost no one employs except soccer players running onto the field to substitute an exhausted or injured teammate, but I crossed myself too, with broad gestures, murmuring, “In the name of the Father, the Son . . . and the Holy Spirit,” with just a half-second delay behind the other Edoardo.
“YOU KNOW, my name is Edoardo, too . . .” I said, once the priest was done.
“Ah! Really . . .!” Perhaps he’d remembered me, from his visit the year before. He pointed to the little sheet of paper that I’d transferred from my right hand to my left when I’d crossed myself, and which I was still clutching in a childish manner, as if awaiting further instructions. “There you have the schedule for the preparatory get-togethers for Easter . . . and, of course, for the Easter services.”
“Why, certainly . . . thank you . . .” and I looked at the sheet of paper, turned it over: on the back was stamped an Easter oration, and all the rest.
“Well, maybe I could come . . . that is, we’ll see you . . . at one of these . . .” I replied, eager to participate, to really go, but at the same time careful not to overdo it, like when they invite me to a cultural event of some kind, a book reading, an exhibition. “If I can, if I’m not out of town . . . I’ll certainly make sure to come.”
“I’ll try to swing by . . .”
With the charming diligence of a seminarian, an annotation that melted my heart a little, he pointed to the bottom of the sheet, where there was a line of print, “. . . And in any case, just in case there are any changes in scheduling, or to make sure,” Father Edoardo suggested conscientiously, “you can always go to the parish church’s website.”
Of course, the website . . .
“I think I really will.”
Something told me I wouldn’t go.
AND IN FACT I REMAIN virtually paralyzed through all the days leading up to Easter, I don’t even notice that it’s Good Friday and that the day is going by, in spite of the countless movies about Jesus on television, and when Sunday finally comes and it stops raining, instead of going to one of the services listed on the printout, I get in my car and I head out of the city, I get onto the highway for L’Aquila, I take the Lunghezza exit, I turn onto the Via Polense at Corcolle, I continue along the magnificent road that runs toward Poli across a ridge flanked by brilliant green ravines.
Somewhere along the road, roughly between kilometer markers 26 and 28, the African prostitutes are staked out, as always, in their skintight brightly colored dresses, even today, Easter Sunday. Usually, they extend their rounded asses toward the road and those who are driving along it, and every time that a car goes by, and especially when a car passes slowly enough that it might be reasonable to believe that a potential customer is aboard, they hoist their scanty skirts (in the winter, instead, they lower their pantyhose), bend over, and shake their bare asses in the direction of the motorists. Some of them do it to the rhythm of a dance that they were already subtly hinting at, gyrating to, even before the car came even with them, and which they continue evoking after it drives on, other prostitutes in contrast stand motionless, backs to the road, busy talking on their phones, and these bend over and put their enormous black buttocks in motion only when they reckon that the motorist has a real chance to appreciate the sight, let’s say, fifty or so yards before the car rolls past and then, as you can see by glancing in your rearview mirror once you’ve passed them, they stop all at once, though their asses still wobble up and down with the momentum. I only recently learned that this movement is known as twerking, and it’s an invitation to penetration from the rear. Aside from the specific position, I assumed that the African prostitutes were offering themselves to their potential customers for two reasons, one positive and the other negative, that is, to display what is objectively the best portion of their physiques, in fact, I’ll go so far as to call it seriously surprising, almost surreal in shape, volume, and elasticity, while simultaneously concealing the least attractive aspect, because their faces are ugly, extremely ugly, bad enough to drive away anybody. So I’m accustomed to driving this road, which is enchanting and deserted, punctuated every hundred or two hundred yards by the stunning naked buttocks of African women, nearly all of them diminutive in stature, in their skimpy red or purple dresses, and with their leggings down around their ankles.
But today, Easter Sunday 2012, I notice a difference.
SOMETHING HAS CHANGED, whether permanently or perhaps just for this holiday, for this special day, I couldn’t say. The prostitutes who are lining the Via Polense in great numbers, as if around here we had this custom of sanctifying the holy feast (before heading home for the family supper and sharing a banquet of lamb with relatives, children, or friends, first a quick fuck along the way), this time don’t have their backs turned to the road, no, now they’re turned toward the traffic, and every one of them in their skimpy dresses made of stretchy fabric scrutinize the motorists, few and far between it must be admitted, as they drive past, but then they make a new gesture, a different one, which I notice only after passing two or three of them: they hike up the hem of their skirt nine or ten inches, and then they swivel their hips no longer back and forth, as if in a sex act, but side to side, sashaying. As usual, they’re wearing no panties, and what they’re showing off this time is the pussy, but driving along lost in thought as I was, I have a hard time making it out, it’s only after a little while that I really notice: black pubic hair against dark black skin. I slow down and now I look at them more closely, and as I do, they assume that I’m interested and am considering whether or not to stop for some sex. The former is in fact the case, while the latter is not. Now I’m rolling along at about 20 m.p.h., instead of 45 m.p.h., and the young women have time to notice my relaxed rate of speed, as well as the fact that there is just a lone man at the wheel of the car, so now they strike up their obscene dance with true conviction, displaying their pussies and swiveling their hips. A couple of them even point to their pussies with an extended finger, as if the message weren’t already sufficiently clear. After passing a dozen or so of these girls, I notice another new twist: there must have been an influx of new blood sometime recently, because these girls, and I’m talking about the ones I’ve had a chance to observe not just between the thighs, are less ugly, in fact a few even have pretty faces, though the obscene gesture tends to push that into the background.
WHILE I WAS DRIVING TOWARD POLI, a big box was clanking in the trunk; it contained a number of oversized combination wrenches. I had bought them online at a discount price when a famous brand of tools was having a sale, but I must have got the order wrong, or they’d made a mistake filling it, and instead of a normal set of combination wrenches for household use, that is, in sizes ranging from an 8 to a 16, I had received four long and heavy chromium-vanadium steel wrenches, in four sizes: a 24, a 26, a 28, and a 30, which is practically a foot and a half in length, making it useful for only one thing, as a weapon, and in fact I thought I would take it with me to the countryside to leave it under the bed in case some ill-intentioned person happened to break into the house, and I had thought of what the effect of something like that would be on the skulls of my political adversaries.
This stuff dates back forty years, but it’s famil
iar to me, proof that I’m an old man now, but also that those street demonstrations really were something terrible and portentous.
When I was twenty-two years old, I had a short—too short, as far as I was concerned—relationship with a young woman, an adorable blonde, who called herself Lou, like Lou Salomé, or perhaps it was me who imagined this learned reference and that was just her nickname; mere suppositions given that I never knew her full name, and this Lou, who took me to bed roughly three hours after we met, in one of the few breaks during the night we spent together making love, when I ran the tip of my finger over her exquisitely pert little nose, which was, however, marked by a blemish about halfway down, a tiny bump that didn’t look natural, before I could even ask a question about it she replied, somewhat shamelessly (I was to discover in the days that followed just how shameless she really was, which is fine for a single night, except that our time in bed together was seasoned by her succession of absolutely gratuitous “I love you, I love you,” while we were fucking, which had deceived me, leading me to believe that who knows what might blossom between us, while instead it ought to have been obvious from the very start that to her this was a hookup like any other, a one-night stand like any other, seeing that one time I’d overheard her talking on the phone and she was talking about a girlfriend of hers who had gone on a hitchhiking trip and had fucked seven men, seven different men, in seven days, one a day, or maybe more than one if on other days of the week she had rested), and so, as I was running the tip of my finger over her pert little nose, she smiled in a wry, mocking fashion and said, “So you noticed it, eh? They did a bad job with the stitches, there, at Niguarda Hospital,” she said, “and I was so stupid . . .” I was ready to hasten to say that she was by no means a stupid young woman, I find you to be not only pretty but intelligent, and so on, but she me beat me to the punch with a cynical smirk meant to show that she was much older than her eighteen years, “Eh, I wanted to show him, that asshole, that I knew what I was doing with a fixed-head wrench . . .” and she acted out the mechanics of whipping a Hazet 38 wrench over her head. Right then and there, I decided that with her short blond hair she really did look like a medieval knight, a woman-warrior like in the old poems, Joan of Arc leading a charge as she whirled a sword, on the saint’s face the same fanatical, defiant smile that Lou was wearing at that moment, petite and audacious, and I wondered who the asshole could have been, the asshole who had had the temerity to doubt her courage.
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