The Fifth Gospel

by Ian Caldwell

  I sit in the first pew and offer my prayers. Then, to fill the silence, I talk to him. I tell him about his exhibit. I tell him what a success it was. I look at the coffin when I speak, but in my mind I am talking to the still-living Ugo, in whatever place he now finds himself.

  Just before dark I hear someone enter the church. I turn and see Ugo’s assistant, Bachmeier. He takes a middle pew and prays for almost a quarter hour. When he’s done, he comes forward and puts a hand on my shoulder, taking me for the bereaved. Ugo thought this man never cared for him. Before Bachmeier goes, I thank him.

  When he’s gone, the parish priest comes up to me. “Father,” he says, “you know you’re welcome to stay as long as you want. But if you’re waiting out the storm, I’m happy to lend you my umbrella.”

  I explain that I won’t be leaving. That my brother will be here soon. The priest keeps me company a moment, asking how I knew Ugo, admitting that he didn’t know Ugo well himself. A funeral silence is so different from the silence of a baptism or wedding, so unlike the hush that builds with hope and expectation. To fill it, the pastor asks about my Greek rite, about the ring on my right hand. And though I don’t want to talk about it, we are all ambassadors for our churches and traditions. Married six years, I tell him. Eighth-generation Vatican priest, and my son’s only dream in the world is to be a professional footballer. He smiles. “Your cassock’s still wet,” he says. “May I dry it for you?”

  I decline and let him drift away.

  Midnight comes. The candles around the coffin burn their brightest. Suddenly the air behind me changes. The noise of the rain is dampened. Something large is blocking the sound. I recognize the way it makes the air part; I recognize the long strides of the quiet footfalls as they approach.

  He kneels beside me. His silhouette is gold in the candlelight. My fingers grip the coffin rails. With one stabbing breath, he reaches his hands across the casket, as if to hold Ugo in his arms. Then he lowers his head against the wood and moans.

  I watch his hand reach into his collar. His fingers remove the chain from around his neck. On the end of it, beside the Latin cross, is a ring. A bishop’s ring. He closes his palm around it and puts it on the casket. Then he turns and puts his hands on my shoulders. We clasp each other.

  I whisper, “What did they do to you?”

  He doesn’t hear me. His only answer is, “I’m so sorry.”

  “Did they dismiss you?”

  From the priesthood. From the only life we have ever known.

  He answers, “Who gave Ugo’s eulogies?”

  “No one. Nobody even knows he’s here.”

  He clamps his fists together and presses them against his jaw. He rises and peers at the wood of the coffin. His gaze seems to stare down through it.

  “Ugo,” he murmurs.

  His voice is thin, the volume of a prayer, not a eulogy. I step back, giving him space. But the silence is so pure that I can hear even his shallow breaths, even the dry rasp before his words.

  “You were wrong,” he says. “God didn’t abandon you. God didn’t let you fail.”

  He bends over, almost stooping, the way I imagine he did long ago, finding our father on the floor after his heart attack. Wanting to cradle, to give comfort even in death. His words are stern but his hands reach out into the darkness tentatively, tenderly, seeming to find this wooden box so unyielding and cruel. Mighty the boundary that even these mighty hands can’t shatter. And I think, as I watch his great form lower itself to the edge of the coffin to whisper to his friend: how I love my brother. How impossible it will be to think of him as anything other than a priest.

  “Ugo,” he says, so severely that I know his teeth are clenched, his emotion barely willed back, “God put me there to help you. I am the one who failed you.”

  “No,” I say. “Simon, that isn’t true.”

  “Forgive me,” he whispers. “O God, forgive me.”

  Unsteadily, he makes the sign of the cross. Then he hides his face in his hands.

  I put my arm around him. I pull him against me, holding him there. His massive body shudders. The flames of the candles bow low and rise again. I look down at those giant hands now balled up in fists, digging into his thighs, and silently I join in his prayer. I beg forgiveness for us all.

  WE WAIT TWO DAYS for punishment to be handed down. Then four days. A week passes. No phone call. No letter in the mail. I become unable to get Peter out the door for school on time. I burn dinner. My distraction is becoming total. Each new day of waiting changes the scale of waiting yet to be done. It may be weeks. By October, I realize it may be months.

  I visit Ugo’s cemetery plot often, keeping out of sight of the mourners at other headstones, not wanting to scandalize villagers with the sight of Simon or me by Ugo’s grave, not knowing what they might have heard. After so many days of praying from afar, the distance begins to feel symbolic. When Ugo abandoned me, I kept him at arm’s length. I never let him reenter my life. And though this is a small sin in the world of laymen, it is a significant one for a priest. The Church is eternal, proof against all setbacks, so whatever may happen to the Turin Shroud, I know in my heart that Catholics and Orthodox will someday reunite. But the life of a single man is precious and brief. Guido Canali told me once about an old man at Castel Gandolfo who has no other job but to collect eggs from the henhouses without breaking them. A job, Guido said, you might figure anyone could do, except it takes special hands. I often think of those words as I stand in the graveyard. They seem equally true for priests.

  During breaks in my workday I visit the exhibit. It satisfies an appetite that gradually comes to feel like an addiction, the need to see people interacting with Ugo. He remains here, some part of him intact. These galleries are a reliquary, holding the best of a good man. And yet it causes a churning uneasiness in me to see these thousands of innocent people staring at the walls, reading the placards and stenciled letters, following Ugo’s timeline of Christian art. The relic they’ve come for isn’t the memory of a dead friend but the cloth of Christ, still mounted in the Sistine Chapel, so in their eyes this exhibit is a reliquary of a different sort. A vessel so ornate and impressive—paintings so grand, manuscripts so old, a confession so frank that we stole the Shroud from the Orthodox—that it convinces them the relic is authentic. Droves of them react the same way, with nods of understanding and agreement, then gradually with tongues clicking and even hands clasped over hearts as if to say, I knew it. The exhibit has given the world permission to believe again. So has the news that the Holy Father is returning the Shroud to the Orthodox, which most of Rome seems to have absorbed not as a milestone in Church relations, but as proof that Ugo’s exhibit is the gospel truth about the Shroud. If only John Paul could see the people in these galleries, he would know what I know. I will miss having Ugo so close by. But this show can’t go on.

  On October the twelfth, I am called into the office of the pre-­seminary rector, Father Vitari, for the only unscheduled meeting I have ever had with my boss. Vitari is a good man. He rarely complains that I have to bring my son to work sometimes or ask for days off when Peter’s sick. Even so, there’s something oddly hospitable about the way he sits me down and asks, right off, if he can get me anything to drink. I notice that my personnel file is on the desk. Sadness settles over me. The small but insistent fears that have hovered around me like flies, the uncertainties about the future, now go quiet with expectation. So this is how it will happen. Mignatto said the verdict would come in the form of a court document, but I see now that it would be easier to sweep the problem away quietly. It couldn’t be difficult, in a country of priests, to find a replacement gospel teacher.

  Yet Vitari lifts the file in his hand and asks if I realize I’ve been working at the pre-seminary for five years. “Five years,” he repeats, and then smiles. “That means you’re due for a raise.” I leave with a handshake and an appreciation
card signed by all my boys. I leave, also, trembling and almost sick. That night, the dreams begin. I’m a boy again, watching the crate of blood oranges fall on Guido at the train station. Watching the jumper in Saint Peter’s fall through the air to the floor. I feel a pinch in my chest, as if a finger is nocking an arrow on my heartstrings. Before long, even in daylight, it comes to seem as if something is rattling inside me, a bass note of anxiety like the far-off vibration of an approaching train. I’m afraid. Whatever’s coming, I fear it.

  * * *

  ONE MORNING, THE DIRECTOR of the museums announces that the exhibit will end ahead of schedule. Someone, possibly Lucio, slips word to the press that Church politics are to blame. A journalist at l’Espresso develops this into an article saying John Paul pulled the plug because he feared the Orthodox would take umbrage. After all, we can’t continue to make money off the relic we promised them. So on the show’s final day, I return to say good-bye. The crowds are astonishing. The exhibit will set records beyond even what its creator could’ve imagined. I can barely see the walls through the oceans of people. Ugo is fading away.

  That night, the Shroud leaves the Sistine Chapel. John Paul’s spokesman announces that for reasons of security the cloth’s location can no longer be disclosed. This seems to mean we’re preparing to send it east. But when I ask Leo if the Swiss Guards have seen a major shipment leaving any of the gates, they haven’t. I repeat my question every day until he’s just as puzzled as I am that the answer never changes. After a while, a reporter at a press conference asks for an update and the papal spokesman explains that the logistics are complicated and the negotiations private. In other words, don’t expect news about the Shroud or the Orthodox for a while.

  Soon the other priests at my Greek church in town begin to ask me if the rumors are true. If John Paul’s health has become an obstacle. If he’s dying too quickly to navigate the next steps with the Orthodox. I tell them I wouldn’t know. But I do know. The rumors are true in a way my friends can’t understand: this has surely become, for John Paul as it once was for Ugo, a matter of conscience. He would sooner die than base a reunion on a lie. And so, with time as his ally, that is exactly what he plans to do.

  There’s a parable in the gospel of Matthew about an enemy who comes in the night and sows weeds in a man’s field of good wheat. The man’s servants ask if they should pull up the weeds, but their master says to wait, or else the good may be lost with the bad. Let everything grow until the day of harvest, he says; then the wheat will be reaped and the weeds will be burned.

  I didn’t mean to sow those weeds. Not in Ugo’s life, not in John Paul’s. But in the silence that surrounds the Shroud now, I hear the master telling his servants to wait. Not to reap yet. And I wait for the day of harvest.

  * * *

  MONA SURPRISES ME BY asking to join Peter and me again at a Greek liturgy. Then, two days later, she suggests we go back for another. The third time, she finds a way to ask when I last confessed. She thinks it will do me good.

  My wife doesn’t understand: I’ve tried. Yet never in my life have I felt more immune to the power of forgiveness. A nurse always believes in a cure, but unlike Mona’s patients at the hospital, I have brought this on myself, and there is no medicine.

  Slowly, though, I find that the woman coming to my aid is no longer the woman I married. Rather, she is the wife and mother who left behind husband and son, who lived for years in tortured solitude, and who stands before me now as a virtuoso of the self-recrimination I’m only beginning to learn. She is helping me because she loves me, because she knows this darkness and has its map. There is indeed no medicine. But there is a journey I no longer have to make alone.

  In mid-November, the sampietrini begin raising scaffolding in the middle of Saint Peter’s Square. Each year they build a nativity scene bigger than the last, veiled with fifteen-foot curtains until a revealing on Christmas Eve. Peter walks the perimeter like a detective, inspecting debris, eavesdropping on workmen, searching for holes in the tarp he can peek through. When the Greek forty-day fast before Christmas begins, Roman Catholics have already filled the markets with holiday sweets, cheeses, and cured meats, none of which an Eastern Catholic can eat. This year it comes as a relief to me. While Mona and Peter go shopping in Piazza Navona, I continue on alone to visit Simon.

  He is staying in a small church just outside Rome. The pastor has taken him in like a stray cat. The Secretariat has placed Simon on temporary leave, and guilt has driven him out of the Vatican walls, so he serves food at a community kitchen in the evenings and helps at a Catholic shelter most nights. I assist him sometimes, and in the small hours that follow, when the bars have closed and Rome almost sleeps, we return to his little church and sit side by side on a pew.

  At first we keep ourselves to the familiar topics. But one night at a time, the tap opens wider. He seems to be undergoing a second priestly formation here, stripping off the coats of Secretariat varnish and sanding down the grain of our father’s old ambitions to see what remains. I listen, mainly. I sense he’s bracing me to hear some conclusion he’s come to about his life. On this spot, long ago, Saint Peter was fleeing the persecution of Emperor Nero when he had a vision of Jesus. “Domine,” Peter asked, “quo vadis?” Lord, where are you going? And the vision replied, “Romam vado iterum crucifigi.” I go to Rome, to be crucified again. At that moment, Peter understood God’s plan for him. He accepted martyrdom, letting Emperor Nero crucify him on Vatican Hill. There is a church in Rome for every station of a man’s life, and this one is the church of turning points. Some night soon, I keep telling myself, I will share news of my own with my brother.

  It’s four miles from Simon’s church back to the Vatican gates. Four miles is a long way to walk, but a pilgrimage should not be driven. The walk home takes me by the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, all in the dead hours of dark. There are still a few tourists and young couples in the piazzas, but they’re as invisible to me as the pigeons and night traffic. What I see is the Academy where Simon once studied, the square where Mona and I met on our first date, the hospital in the distance where Peter was born. At each milepost, I make a small prayer. In each neighborhood along the way, my eyes linger over the clotheslines strung over the narrow streets, the soccer balls left on doorsteps, the holiday lights in the shape of La Befana or Babbo Natale and his reindeer.

  Four miles on a December night cuts like a river between penance and prayer, and when I reach home, my own feelings of foreboding are more muted. I check the answering machine in case there is word of a verdict. But the verdict is always the same: Peter is asleep and barely moves when I kiss him on the forehead, and when I crawl into bed, Mona whispers, You’re freezing, don’t touch me with those feet. She smiles and slides over, nestling against my chest, and fits herself into the emptiness that only she can fill. For a second, on those nights, I am tense with amazement all over again. I reach out to hold her. Is he doing better? she murmurs. Because she has found a new place in her heart for the brother-in-law who used to fill her with misgivings. Then I kiss the back of her neck and I lie to her. I say that Simon seems better every time I visit him. He needs to know he’s forgiven, she says. And she’s right. But to make him believe those words takes a higher power than mine.

  The last thing Mona always says, before falling asleep, is, Did you tell Simon the news? I touch her bare back. The soft unguarded slope of her shoulder. For years I have lived with one foot in yesterday. Now I can barely sleep for thought of tomorrow. Did I tell him the news? No, I did not. Because I believe I will have more time.

  Not yet, I tell her. But soon.

  * * *

  ON THE TWENTIETH OF December, just before dawn, I get a text on my phone. Leo.

  Baby boy born at 4:17 AM. Healthy, 7 pounds 3 ounces. Alessandro Matteo Keller. With thankful hearts we praise God.

  I stare at the screen in the dark. Alessandro. They’ve named him afte
r me.

  A second message appears.

  We want you to be godfather. Come visit. We’re downstairs.

  Downstairs. Sofia delivered at Health Services. They have a Vatican baby.

  When Peter and Mona and I arrive, Simon is already there. He is holding the newborn, enveloping it in his immense hands the same way he used to do with Peter. In his eyes is the fragile vigilance I remember so well, the protectiveness snowed over with awe. He looks like the big brother who once raised me, the boy disguised in a man’s body. When Mona comes up to run a tender finger across the blue cap on the little child’s head, I am suddenly choked by the sight of them both. I watch as Simon gently lowers Alessandro to let her hold him. But first she reaches out her hand and puts her palm on Simon’s chest, in the space over his heart where a bishop’s pectoral cross should be. He stares down at it, and his eyes are big and searching. I hear her whisper, Whatever you did, Ugo forgives you.

  The words crush him. As soon as she takes the baby from him, Simon murmurs his congratulations to Leo and Sofia, then finds his way to the door.

  I find him upstairs, in the hallway outside our apartment, sitting numbly among the packing boxes. I should have told him. I should have, but I knew he wasn’t ready.

  Simon stands. He says, They can’t do this to you. He says, They can’t make you move out.

  I explain. No one is making us. We want to be a family again. There are just too many ghosts in this place.

  He stares at the door to the apartment, the door to which his key no longer works, and he listens as I describe the new place we’ve found. On the way back from visiting him at Domine Quo Vadis, I tell him, I fell in love with one of the neighborhoods. Two of Peter’s school friends live in the same building. It’s Church-owned, which means rent control. And with two incomes now, Mona and I can afford it.