Before he knows it, he is crossing another river—the Tevere, the Tiber—and then walking beside it going south, always south. He carries a map but does not consult it, preferring to let the world surprise him. The river will bring him to the city, because it is the mother of Rome. The valley curves this way and that, and now great pine trees increase in number, their bare trunks soaring all the way up to wide-spreading black canopies. At their feet are a litter of seed-cones. He rests in the shadow of one such tree and is narrowly missed by a missile from a lofty branch, thumping to the ground only centimeters away. Picking it up he twirls it in his fingers, noting the spiral symmetry. He sniffs its sap, which is like incense, then puts the cone into his knapsack and continues on his way.
Memory will bring forth from its storage house things both old and new. Of that day’s context, he will remember dust and stone, blindingly-white marble, and noise such as he has never before experienced. Streets are crammed with automobiles that speed and screech and honk and brake and lurch from stable positions at traffic lights into a blur of motion—all with the manic pace and the demonic roars of dangerous, unreliable slaves. The drivers’ faces are the worst aspect. They are as intense as any he has seen in his life, even the guards on the island, certain interrogators, or various prisoners who would bolt from their chains in a hopeless run toward the sea.
He inquires of a pedestrian where he might find the American embassy and is told that he must continue into the heart of the city and cross over such and such a bridge—the Ponte Margherita—and then keep going till he reaches a park, the Villa Borghese. You can’t miss it; it’s very big. The embassy is below it, on Via Veneto.
So, he continues along the banks of the Tiber, preparing to cross over to his left, when he sees the dome of St. Peter’s rising above the rooftops on the right. Of their own will, his feet take him in that direction. They bring him to a street that leads into a vast open piazza in front of the basilica. He takes a few steps forward and comes to a halt, gazing about with wonder and a certain unease. He has seen pictures of this place since earliest childhood. This is the center of the world.
Because he cannot enter the church, he turns to go, feeling the deepest sadness that he must leave. He recalls that his parents once desired to make a pilgrimage to this place. Now their son is here without their faith, and they are dead.
He pauses and goes back into the piazza. He will wait a few minutes in memory of his mother and father. He will look up at the sky, and perhaps his thoughts will shape a little prayer, like a clay bird formed in the hands, warmed there too, and he will breathe into its mouth. Perhaps the dead clay will quicken and shake its feathers and spring up from his fingers into the wind and rise toward heaven. Do not break us—do not break us, it will cry, as its wings beat against the force of gravity, its small eyes seeing for the first time the secret shape of the world.
He smiles, walking about the piazza, shaping the wet clay in his mind.
I do not know if what I have lost can be found again. I would ask you for help, if I believed, but I send you this bird instead, for it carries my request. It may be that you are there and will receive my messenger.
He throws his arms into the air, and the bird rises and disappears. He laughs to himself and turns away, intending to leave the piazza now.
There are many people here today, walking about, taking photographs, kneeling, talking, courting, praying, pointing, going into the basilica and coming out of it. Here and there along the pillared colonnade, a few priests sit on portable chairs. Some wear religious habits, some, black suits—all with purple stoles about their necks. Moving toward each are lines of pilgrims waiting to confess.
As he is leaving the piazza, he notices a priest in brown robes, alone in the shadows of the colonnade, where the sun cannot burn him, near the last pillar. He is seated on a box, his head bowed, fingering a rosary. He is a Franciscan of some kind, because his robes are like Fra Anto’s. His head is tonsured in the old manner, a ring of white fuzz around the crown of his skull. His long beard is white, threaded with gray strands. His feet are shod in rough sandals. Only the movement of his fingers indicates that his lined face is not asleep.
Josip approaches, lingering another moment in memory of Fra Anto.
The friar whispers something. Thinking that the priest has called to him, Josip approaches. “Please, I did not hear.”
“I said, welcome”, whispers the friar with closed eyes.
“Thank you.”
“Come closer.”
“I must be on my way—good day to you!”
“Come closer, and do not be afraid.”
“I am not afraid, good Father.”
“You are afraid, good son, but your message is heard.”
“What did you say?”
“Your messenger has delivered its word.”
Josip smiles indulgently. Poor old priest.
“Will you not hear my messenger?” the friar whispers.
For a moment Josip hesitates, and then, without knowing he is going to do it, he falls to his knees before the man.
“Wh-why do you speak to me this way?” he stammers.
“Do not be afraid”, murmurs the friar, “Oh, do not be afraid of love.”
“I-I am not afraid of love.”
“The words you send to me are heard. Always they are heard. Now I speak to you, my son, from my heart. Bring your sorrows to me and give them to me, for no longer will you call yourself forsaken.”
“I-I do not understand. Who are you and what are you saying to me?”
“Welcome”, whispers the priest once more.
“I must go!”
“The door opens before you. Walk through it now, and everything else will follow.”
“I cannot,” he chokes, “I cannot.”
“You can if you choose. You are free to choose. You are afraid of the pain.”
“Yes”, he whispers.
“And the blood in which you drowned?”
“Yes.”
“I am with you, do not fear. Now you may confess and be cleansed, if you choose.”
For some moments, Josip wrestles silently. His hands are by his side, his head bowed, and he sways on his knees. Still the priest has not opened his eyes, though his fingers continue to move on the beads.
“It has been—it has been—many years since my last confession—”, Josip begins. He breaks down sobbing as the priest makes the sign of the cross over him.
“How many years?”
“I think I was twelve years old then, before—”
“Before the men of darkness came, and the blood.” Startled, Josip stares at the old man’s face. Instinctively, he moves backward on his knees.
“Do not be afraid. See the door is opening.”
“I can’t see it.”
“Just begin. You know how it must be, for you are one who walks. First a step, then another.”
So begins his confession, his first since the world ended. How long does such a confession take when a lifetime of sin is remembered. The storerooms open one after another, the cellars too—though not all at once. The sun soars across the sky, and the shadows of the pillars move with it. Pigeons land nearby, strut about, then fly off. Sometimes people line up behind Josip, but his confession does not cease—it stretches into a suspension of time. They leave and find lines that move.
How is it so, all this sin he has committed? Why is there so much when he thought he was good? His youthful errors had been minor, his moments of great darkness had been both few in number and swift in passing. So, he had thought. Now, as he and the priest fall silent together, he knows there is more.
“Once, long ago,” Josip whispers, “I desired to kill a man. And if I had not been a boy at the time, if I had been stronger, I would have killed him.”
“With the hatchet.”
“Yes”, breathes Josip, astonished again.
“Yet you did not commit this act, and so it is the heart alone that sinned, and the
guilt is lessened because no man died.”
“But he did die. Later he took his own life, or it may be that another killed him. And I felt I had a part in it too, for I greatly desired his death and hated him.”
Telling him what the eyes of wisdom see in events that occurred twenty years ago and in the conscience of a child caught up in them, the priest speaks to Josip’s heart. Then he reaches into Josip’s damaged thoughts with truth and grace so that the penitent begins to understand the measures of guilt and innocence concerning his own life. And so a burden is lifted from him.
“There are two more”, says the priest.
“Two more?”
Then Josip sees the faces of Zmija and Goran. Yes, there are two more.
“The stone”, the friar prompts. “And iron in the fist.”
Josip is becoming accustomed to this priest knowing things that no man could know without witnessing them. Who is he? He glances at the friar’s hands. They are ordinary hands, wizened and dry. There is no stigmata, no unnatural transparency. The blood pulses normally within a vein. He is neither an angel nor a saint revisiting the earth. An ordinary man, an ordinary priest. But why is he speaking this way, and how does he know these things?
“The stone”, the friar prompts again.
Josip confesses his attempt to murder Zmija. On that day, he had become like Cain again, and only the hand of another priest had stopped him from becoming Cain in his act.
Once more the friar speaks to Josip with anointed words, words that will remain forever. Another burden is lifted.
“And the third”, says the friar. “The iron in your hand that would have struck. Though it was not murder, it was the threat of murder, and the full rage of it was in your heart. You must bring this to the Lord, too.”
And so he does, exposing what happened when he stood over Goran in a dark alley and was seized by a passion to smash his skull and destroy the evil within him, but blinded to the evil that would have leaped like a snake from that dying body into his own.
Now he sees it in the light of day and confesses it. There is more to tell, and it all comes out: his despair, the time he tried to take his own life—to murder himself. When he is finished, he is emptier than he has ever felt before, but there is peace in this emptiness and a sense of profound rest.
“For your penance, pray a Rosary for the soul of each one whom you desired to kill. Three souls, three Rosaries. Will you do this?”
“Yes”, Josip whispers.
“Good”, says the friar. “Yet more do I ask of you. Not as your penance; rather, this is for the strengthening of your soul. It is what Christ asks of each of us. For the remainder of your life, do good to those who harm you. Bless your enemies, and do not hate them. Pray for them, and do not hold them to account.”
“I will try.”
“In Christ’s grace, you can do this. Though the sins committed against you are most grievous and would test the greatest of souls, you have been given a cross and a blessing that few can receive. Will you ask each day for the grace to forgive?”
“I will ask—for without God’s help it is not possible. Each day of my life I will ask for the impossible.”
“He is Master of the Impossible.”
The priest hears Josip’s act of contrition and absolves him, making the sign of the cross over him. “You are free. The Lord is with you.”
“Thank you, Father”, whispers Josip, rising on trembling legs.
“Now, my son, go to the house of the Lord, to God, the joy of your youth.”
Falling silent again, Josip turns and faces the wide-open doors of St. Peter’s across the piazza.
“I-I do not know if I have the strength to enter.”
“You do not need strength. You need the heart of a child. See, one comes to you now. He will show you the way.”
Though the old man still has not opened his eyes, he points, and there at the end of his fingers, standing a few paces away, is a twelve-year-old boy in white shirt and white shorts, with sandals on his feet. When Josip meets his eyes, the boy smiles and extends his hand.
Puzzled, Josip takes the hand in his own and lets the child lead him across the square. Neither the man nor the boy speaks. No questions are asked. It is as if they have always known each other. They are father and son, yet, as they approach the staircase, he sees the body of a mutilated man lying there exposed on the top, and his heart beats hard with horror, and he no longer knows who is the father and who is the son.
Step by step, the child leads him upward toward the entrance, pulling gently, looking back with an encouraging smile. Now they are standing on the stone porch of the basilica; now they are moving forward, and the little hand is glowing like a small sun in his own.
Fra Anto’s body is blocking the entrance, as it does on the steps of every church. But now a white robe floats down from the sky and covers him. Only his damaged face is visible, as well as his hands with their holes, and his feet with their holes. Josip can step over him, and he knows that he must step over him. He moves forward, but in that step he dies. Pitching headlong into those wounds, he falls and falls and falls—into terror and despair. Then, the little hand pulls him up. Now he is standing again and going forward past the body, and at last he enters the house of God, the joy of his youth.
28
The boy remains silently beside him throughout that first Mass. When Josip opens his mouth to receive Communion, peace flows through his body, like a current of warm oil. He closes his eyes as he kneels on the floor of the basilica, near the main altar, above the place where it is said the Fisherman is buried.
Later, when he opens his eyes and gets up off his knees, he looks about and sees that the boy has gone.
For three days, he resides in a pilgrims’ hostel a few streets from St. Peter’s Square. Silence is one of the house rules. Silence, plenteous simple food, and prayer. Several men sleep on cots alongside him in the attic dormitory. Many of them fall asleep each night whispering prayers, with rosaries in their hands. Wordlessly, an old man gives Josip his rosary, a cord of knotted string. Its cross is made of tin with five holes in it.
“From Rieti”, the old man whispers, and goes away.
People come and go in the hostel, and none of them does Josip meet again in this life.
When he is able, when he is ready, he leaves that place and crosses the Tiber and makes his way through the streets to the Villa Borghese. Strolling on its pathways, he is like a man in a dream, carrying peace within and carried by peace as well. He is in no hurry to meet his future now. When time no longer exists, the present contains a new fullness, in which both past and future dissolve.
There comes an hour, however, when he knows it is time to leave the park and to resume his search for Via Vittorio Veneto.
Within minutes, he arrives at the grounds of the embassy. After showing his letter to a guard at the gate, he is permitted to enter and is led to the office of the day laborers. There an Italian foreman reads the letter and nods.
“Well, you’re three weeks late”, he grumbles. “But you have friends higher up, and they say to let you in and show you the ropes when you arrive. So, come this way, and I’ll teach you your duties.”
It is not much. In fact, it is not like work at all, simply a continuation of what he has been doing for the past two or three years. He sweeps the walkways in the back garden, gathers the leaves and dog droppings, scrubs the front steps with a brush and bucket of water, washes the exterior windows, and paints the iron railings. It is much the same for ten hours a day, five days a week, except that he will be paid in cash every Friday afternoon.
The foreman finds him a room in an old house near the city’s rail terminal. The padrona di casa is a widow who takes in boarders, and she will give him low rent if he helps clean the building on Saturdays and fixes broken things now and then. His room is a dark cubby at the back of the house, with a private entrance off the alley. There is a cot, a wooden chair, and a cold-water tap that drains into
a hole in the floor. Beside it is a washstand with a metal pitcher and bowl. Above that hangs a faded print of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Josip is quite pleased with the place, though it is noisy night and day with the sound of trains and cars and yowling cats. The alley is crawling with cats, slinking in and out of crannies and between garbage cans, chasing birds and rats. There are a lot of cats in this city, and it seems that most of them have no owners. The foreman tells Josip that Romans respect the wild cats and never harm them because during the war the city was very hungry—many people were starving, yes, right here in Rome, and they ate cats to stay alive. Now the poor creatures have a special status, because people remember this.
One whole day Josip prunes the ancient olive in the embassy garden, a tree older than any he has ever seen. This excites the foreman’s anxiety, because the tree was planted by a member of the Italian royal house a long time ago, when the embassy was a palace.
On his next day off—his first Sunday in Rome—he attends Mass at St. Peter’s again. The boy does not appear, and Josip is able to enter through the front doors with only a little trepidation. Though the body of Fra Anto remains where it was, it is now possible to pass him with a prayer and a respectful bow of his head. Later in the afternoon, he writes a letter to Slavica and Emilio, telling them that he has arrived safely and is settling into his new life quite well. He mentions that he has been to the sacraments and is at peace. He prays now; yes, he has begun to pray a lot, and he is sorry that it has taken him so long to return to the practice. Among his prayers, he promises, are petitions for the patients at the clinic and the hospital in Venezia. He does not forget each member of their family and thanks them again for all they have done for him. He begs their continued prayers that he will find his path. Perhaps, if they keep praying for him, he will be able to stay permanently in their country.
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