“He seems to, yes. The conversation was brief. I was given my orders and dismissed, but I have to say the Dalai Lama seemed excited…in a Buddhist way.”
More laughter. “Can you sneak them out?”
“No, of course I can’t sneak them out,” I said, but at that moment I had an epiphany, a small enlightenment. It occurred to me that the Pope’s choice of the Chapel of St. Francis for their private prayer was not accidental. “Wait,” I said to Rosa, recalling something my cousin had told me after his initial orientation. “There’s supposed to be a tunnel. From the Middle Ages. When they had to get popes out of the way of marauding heathens. I think it comes out near Castel Sant’Angelo.”
“Good. I’ll meet you there. Pick a time.”
“Four a.m.,” I said, though God alone knows why I chose that hour.
“Done,” Rosa said, and then, just before she hung up, “I’ve always loved this side of you.”
“What side?” I wanted to ask. “The fool? The person who rises to a certain level and then sabotages himself?”
But by then it was too late.
6
I’d been invited to the formal dinner, but of course I couldn’t go. I spent those hours locked in my office, pondering the crazy idea. The Pope had provided me with a first step: he and the Dalai Lama would say they wanted some time alone for early-morning meditation. This was somewhat believable, because both of them were known to rise before dawn and begin the day with prayer. But the security forces—Vatican and Tibetan both—would surely insist on remaining close by, and that presented a problem. The Pope received a death threat every other day. And I was quite sure, given the Chinese government’s violent occupation of Tibet and hatred for all things religious, that the Dalai Lama was in at least as much danger. Somehow I’d have to convince their security details—teams of hard-faced karate experts and sharpshooters, the most suspicious men on earth—that the religious leaders wanted complete solitude for those two hours, and that there was zero risk of them being harmed in the bowels of the Vatican. And somehow I’d have to get these same two religious leaders from the Chapel of St. Francis to the streets of Rome without anyone knowing about it.
Impossible as this might have seemed, I realized, after thinking about it for a few minutes, that history was working in my favor. The papal escape wasn’t exactly a modern notion. Popes had been the object of death threats since the time of St. Peter, and wise assistants and aides of old had developed various strategies to protect them. There was a famous aboveground escape route, the Passetto di Borgo, which linked St. Peter’s Basilica and the Castel Sant’Angelo, but that wouldn’t work for us: too hard to access in secret; too well-known; and it was probably impossible, even at four a.m., to hide men in robes scurrying across an elevated walkway. But, according to what my cousin had told me after his orientation, there was another route, subterranean, top secret. “I was given two keys,” he’d said, in an amused voice. “They look like they’re a thousand years old. I use them as paperweights.”
The Holy Father wasn’t sure he remembered correctly—he hadn’t taken the idea of escape seriously then—but he seemed to think there was a door at the back of the Chapel of St. Francis that led down a set of stairs to a tunnel. The tunnel ran beneath Vatican City all the way to the Castel Sant’Angelo, a famous landmark near the river, and a place that was supposed to be impregnable. Even the Mongol hordes would have had a difficult time assaulting the Castel Sant’ Angelo. It was a circular building with eighty-foot stone walls and an elevated walkway from which the Pope’s defenders could fire arrows, shoot bullets, and throw heavy stones down on the crazed invaders below.
There wouldn’t be any crazed invaders chasing the Pope this time, no Goths or Visigoths, only the aforementioned karate experts. Simple, then: I’d get the Pope and the Dalai Lama into the private chapel, sneak them down the back stairs, lead them along the tunnel to the Castel Sant’Angelo, meet my estranged wife, and we’d all have a nice trip to the hairdresser’s. A brilliant plan…with approximately the same chance of success as a helicopter trip to Saturn.
Not to mention other likely possibilities: that the Pope had remembered wrong, or the door to the stairway was rusted shut, or the old keys didn’t work, or the tunnel—if there actually was a tunnel—had been blocked by a cave-in three hundred years ago, or one of the security men followed us, or Rosa slept through her alarm for the thousandth time.
Yes, yes, yes, there was no shortage of potential obstacles; but didn’t every dream in life, every ambitious notion—a happy marriage, successful fatherhood, eternal salvation—require a kind of crazy faith? Didn’t one have to go forward, always, fueled by a mystical optimism, hoping for the best? I stepped over to the cupboard, poured myself a glass of limoncello, sent up a prayer to the Blessed Mother, and went off to catch a few hours’ sleep.
Day Two
7
At three-forty-five on a morning I shall always remember, I went to the Pope’s office, found him asleep on the couch, and awakened him. He dressed quickly—in plain black clothes, as I suggested—handed me two heavy, rusty keys that looked like factory seconds from the Iron Age, and put a toothbrush into his pants pocket. Taking more than that—even a small shaving kit—would have tipped off the security forces. Together, we went to the guest quarters to awaken the Dalai Lama (though in fact he was already awake and sitting in meditation). Passing through a series of checkpoints and using our flimsy excuse on a series of bodyguards, we then made our way to the private chapel. In the pews of that room, while the two holy men sat side by side in prayer, I locked the door to the hallway as quietly as possible. That part was easy. I’d thought to bring along a flashlight, hidden in the sleeve of my sweater, but had rejected the idea of a change of clothes for any of us. How was one to explain a suitcase carried into the Chapel of St. Francis at four a.m.?
I cleared my throat to get their attention, then waved the two men toward the locked metal door at the back of the room. I tried the first of the two keys. No luck. The second key fit. I turned it in the lock, gingerly, worried it would snap in half as easily as a piece of Belgian chocolate. The lock clicked—a miracle. Through the door and down the extremely narrow stairs we went, three no-longer-young men guided by a single beam of light and spurred on by what can only be described as the spirit of the little boys within us. The stairway was only a meter wide, with uneven stone steps that had borne the shoes, boots, and sandals of escaping popes and pursuing heathens a thousand years ago. Cobwebs, loose gravel, air so musty it was like breathing the dust of dust. My cousin and the Dalai Lama were spry for their age, but even so, I led the way, heart thundering, hoping against hope that one of them didn’t trip and fall forward, sending all three of us tumbling down in a bone-cracking heap.
“Coraggio, coraggio, cugino!” the Pope said behind me, as if he could read my mind. But it wasn’t only encouragement that I heard in his voice. What I heard was the tone of the teenage Giorgio as we slipped through the alleys of the barrio toward the sound of faint guitar music and song. Then and now it was the tone of a person who felt absolutely beloved and protected—in the midst of a world bathed in hatred, anger, and every imaginable danger. According to Catholic legend, popes were actually chosen by the mysterious workings of the Holy Spirit. Over the centuries there had been a number of pontiffs who made you wonder about that idea. My cousin wasn’t one of them.
We made it safely down the stairs—at the pace of an ant—to the stony floor. There we came upon an ancient oak door, slightly ajar. I yanked on it and it made a hideous creaking sound, its bottom scraping across stone in what seemed to me the voice of Fatherly warning. There, just at the mouth of the tunnel, I turned and faced my companions, shone the flashlight at their ankles so as not to blind them, and said, “Are we sure, Your Holinesses? From this point it will be difficult to turn back.”
I looked from face to face, anxiously, humbly. They were old men, they’d risen at an ungodly hour, and the grayish light ac
centuated the age and tiredness around their eyes and mouths. Beneath those thin masks, however—and even before they spoke I could see this clearly—an impish electricity sparked. “Unless you become as little children,” Jesus had said, “you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” The faces I looked at then weren’t the faces of little children, but something of the child had survived in both men, some lively spirit, some thrill at not being able to control the world around them. It shamed me, I have to admit. And it made me wonder, just for a few seconds, how a person like me, son of adventurers, progeny of artists and warriors, had become so maddeningly dull.
As if bestowing a benediction, the Pope reached out a hand and placed it on my shoulder. “My dear cousin,” he said, and though he spoke very quietly I could hear his words echoing into the tunnel and up the narrow stairs, “of all the kind favors you have done me in my life, this stands at the summit, do you realize that? The apex. This is the ultimate good deed.”
I looked at the Dalai Lama, who was nodding, his clean-shaven cheeks stretched by a long, thin smile. “What good man you are!” he said, in his singsong, delighted, fearless way. “What wonderful karma you bringing on yourself in this moment!”
“Your Holiness,” I said to him, “promise me this: if something goes wrong, promise me I won’t be torn to pieces by your security detail. Cousin, promise me I won’t be charged with kidnapping.”
“Ignore the cold wind of fear,” the Dalai Lama said, and, this coming from a man who had lived the life he’d lived, I have to say that those words carried a certain weight.
“Trust in God’s protection,” the Pope added.
We stepped into a narrow, dark, low-ceilinged passageway that I suspected would lead us in one of two directions: toward a grim, lonely death or the adventure of a lifetime.
8
Ignore the cold wind of fear.
Trust in God’s protection.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to live every minute of every day according to advice like that! I was two steps into the dark, dusty tunnel and filled with spiritual envy. To be free of fear! To believe—to really believe—that you were always watched over and protected by a kind and all-powerful spirit. That death opened a door onto something better than this eighty-year marathon of disappointment and decay!
In my own life I tried, really I did. I believed there had to be some kind of God presiding over the millions of universes, the “Father” Jesus was always referring to. But my faith in his absolute kindness flickered like a candle on a dinner table with the windows open in summer. The Syrian slaughter, North Korean torture, ISIS, Boko Haram, rape, addiction, murder, vitriol and violence—on some days doubt swelled up over my faith like a dirty flood.
And doubt, it seemed to me, had its own propaganda apparatus in the modern world. The hourly news reports from every corner of the map seemed designed to breed an ongoing paranoia, a sense that we had to cling to this body in desperation because there were still pleasures to be had, at any age, and beyond them only darkness. We could shoot chemicals into our face to pretend we weren’t aging; we could transplant organs and, not defeat death, but at least hold it at bay. In our time, the flimsy notion of Trust in God could be placed far back in line behind more tangible allies like Novocain, morphine, penicillin, and NATO’s tanks. But my two companions had somehow learned to keep that candle from going out. And look where they’d come from! Tibet and Argentina, two places where the memory of atrocity was fresh. How did they manage it?
We went forward on pure faith and the light from flashlight batteries, feeling our way along the uneven floor with the toes of our shoes, step by cautious step, the Pope’s hand on my shoulder, the Dalai Lama’s hand on the Pope’s shoulder, the tunnel winding, twisting, steadily descending. “In life,” the Pope mused at one point, “we can see only a short distance in front of us, eh, cousin? We never really know what awaits.”
This was his idea of a good-humored parable—taking a legitimate worry and making a lesson out of it. The Dalai Lama laughed. I said nothing, in silent protest. On and on we shuffled, down and down in a gentle descent, a quarter of an hour, twenty-five minutes, half an hour. At last the floor of the tunnel flattened out. One final turn, a dozen steps, and ahead of us I could see another round-topped door, wooden, with metal bracing. In front of it hung a massive cobweb. I stood still and stared. I could feel the men close behind me, and my terror of spiders like a cold steel rod in my spine. And then the good Pope—who knew of my fear—stepped in front of me and, with one straight arm extended, swept away the silken fibers as if he were a sacred knight sweeping sin from the world. He did a thorough job, spent a moment removing the gluey threads from his sleeve, then stood aside and let me approach the door first.
At that point our flashlight died.
One second after the world went dark, I heard the Dalai Lama’s laughter echoing along the tunnel. Another lesson. More worry crushed under the boot of faith. It was chuckle more than guffaw, almost a giggle, and, it seemed to me, given the circumstances, completely out of place.
The laughing went on and on, a string of sunny notes, an unself-conscious symphony echoing back on itself like the sound track from a documentary on joy.
What a time for the flashlight to die—ha, ha!
The longer it lasted, the more irritating I found it. We stood there in absolute darkness, in the musty air, ten or a hundred or a thousand feet belowground—who knew?—so close together I could smell the Pope’s body wash and a hint of what must have been incense from the robe of the Dalai Lama. When the merriment finally ceased, the Dalai Lama said, “Ah,” in a voice that was still lit with the shine of amusement. For another half-minute we stood there in the dark, in a terrible silence. “I know little bit about other traditions,” the Buddhist said quietly. “For Hindu people, goddess Kali is symbol of blackness, of death sometimes. And in Bengali Tantric tradition she doesn’t give you what you expect!” He chuckled. “Here we have blackness and not what we expect! Here we have Kali!”
Right, I thought. All we need to complete the picture is death.
I reached forward and felt for the door handle, found it, found the opening below it, inserted the second key, turned it, yanked hard on the handle. Nothing. A bolt of pain from an old shoulder injury. Another of Kali’s bad jokes, apparently. I tried again. Different key. Same result. The door seemed to be cemented in place, and I wondered if the entranceway had been sealed off from the Castel Sant’Angelo side as protection against people sneaking into the Vatican. I yanked at the handle one more time and the shoulder pain sliced up into my neck and left ear. From my lips slipped a word one probably shouldn’t say in the presence of the holy ones. The Dalai Lama touched me on the arm. “What means this ‘shit’?” he whispered across the darkness.
I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t tell if he was making a joke.
“An American curse word,” the Pope explained. “Paolo’s upset because the door won’t open. He’s worried we’re going to be stuck down here for all eternity.”
The Dalai Lama laughed again. Stuck for all eternity—what an amusing idea!
“ ’Scuse me, ’scuse me,” he said. He squeezed past, and just then I remembered that my new phone had, among other miraculous properties, a flashlight accessory. I turned it on. The Buddhist Holiness was manipulating the doorknob, turning it this way and that, working the key, tenderly, the way a safecracker works the dial on a bank vault. I remembered someone telling me that the Dalai Lama liked to take apart and repair antique watches. A nice hobby, for sure, but this was a hundred-kilo door, not a timepiece. I could feel the irritation puffing up inside me like smoke from a fire. What we needed now, I wanted to tell him, was a small explosive device, not tenderness. What we needed was someone who took apart aircraft carriers, not watches. He tugged the handle up a centimeter, down a centimeter, pushed it forward, tapped the door a few times with his knuckles, touched it once with the tips of his fingers. Then he stepped back in what I as
sumed was a pose of surrender. “Now try,” he said.
I did. The door opened.
Strange as this might seem, it was only then that I started to take the man seriously. I don’t mean to sound irreverent—I’m not at all—but there was, by Western standards, something a bit goofy about him. He found material for humor in places most people would not. He talked funny, his voice rising every few seconds into a high squeak, his sentences full of drawn-out vowels and exclamation points. He shaved his head. He wore a robe. He put on the caps of American baseball teams and let his picture be taken and splashed all over Facebook. What holy man did things like that?
But when he opened the old door that way—after keys and yanking hadn’t worked—I started to watch him surreptitiously, to look beyond his goofiness. I started—just started—to wonder if my Western conceit was blinding me to something important, and I made a mental note to discuss it with the Pope.
We stepped across a knee-high pile of debris and found ourselves in a windowless room with stone walls and a stone staircase, half-hidden in shadow, that led upward into blackness.
“The basement of Castel Sant’Angelo,” my cousin said hopefully.
“What is?” the Dalai Lama wanted to know.
“A castle, a fortress, a prison—it’s been many things over the centuries,” the Pope told him, as I moved the thin beam of light here and there along the walls. “It was built for an emperor of Rome—Hadrian, he was called. He wanted a mausoleum that would hold his ashes, and those of his wife and child.”
“Very big place to hold ashes,” the Dalai Lama said, and even in that simple comment I sensed a nugget of spiritual wisdom: didn’t death trump even the largest egos?
“I don’t like it,” I whispered. “I’ve never liked this place, never even liked driving past it.”
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 3