“Many terrible hours were endured here,” my cousin said. “Popes hid in terror, conquerors ransacked and slaughtered, heretics were imprisoned, no doubt tortured.”
“Spiders bred.”
“Legend has it that the archangel Michael was seen sheathing his sword at the top of this building, five hundred and ninety years after Christ. It signaled the end of the plague. Imagine!”
“I don’t want to.”
The Pope put his hand on my shoulder. “Onward, my friend. Let us not dwell upon the errors and horrors of the past.”
Right, I thought, because we have so many present errors and horrors to dwell upon.
Guided only by the light of my phone, we climbed that first flight of stairs, then another, and at last, all of us breathing heavily, came into a massive, circular room with one window and one door on each side, an enormously high ceiling, and a flotsam of litter—stones, old tools, and scraps of cloth—against the base of the walls. I shone the light there. A shovel, a shard of pottery, a pair of iron cuffs attached to a short chain, worm-eaten lengths of firewood, one black boot, mostly eaten through by rats or mice. It was a museum of the useless and damaged, a menagerie of the out-of-date. The windows admitted a frail light from the street, so I thought it prudent to switch off my phone and save the battery. We tried each door in turn—all locked tight.
“Now we are in need of divine assistance,” the Pope quipped. And then he added, mysteriously, “Paolo, when we’re free of this place, remind me to go into more detail about the bizarre dreams I’ve been having.”
“Certo,” I told him. Of course. But, at that moment, the Pope’s dreams were the last thing I cared about.
Though I tried and retried the keys, and the Dalai Lama tried his gentle, safecracker’s magic, we couldn’t make either of the doors budge. The Dalai Lama started to chuckle again, and despite my newfound respect for the man, may God forgive me, I didn’t think I could bear it. I went over to one of the junk piles, grabbed the heavy iron cuff, and slammed it against the door handle until we heard a noise like the cracking of bone. I kicked the door with the sole of my shoe, twice, and it opened.
We caught the scent of the nearby Tiber. We heard the throaty growl of a bus engine. The three of us stepped across the threshold into a cement-and-brick oblong box. Twenty or thirty meters beyond the doorway we were able to look up and see a sliver of the star-strewn sky, and I understood that we were in a stone enclosure, ten meters below street level. Ingenious, really, because the way the walls of the enclosure had been built, the way the stone ceiling mostly covered it, the entranceway was hidden from the street. A few more steps and the circular bulk of the castle came into view behind us, streetlights along the Tiber raking it in a soft yellowish light.
At that point the Dalai offered this memorable line: “Now we are escaped.”
We crept along like soldiers in defilade, staying in the shadows. A grassy area separated us from the nearest road. I ran my eyes back and forth across the sparse traffic there, looking for a parked van, my wife in silhouette, but seeing nothing besides two pesky motorini buzzing along, carrying couples away from late-night discothèques. A delivery truck, the occasional car. A police vehicle, blue light flashing, scooted away from us. I wondered if the alarm had already been sounded at the Vatican, but no, it couldn’t be. We’d been gone only a little over an hour. The security detail would still be standing outside the door, respectfully, dutifully, waiting for the holy men to finish their prayers. Soon enough, though, they’d grow impatient. They’d knock, timidly at first, then more anxiously. Someone would have the courage to try the door; they’d find it locked. They’d summon the necessary equipment, a crowbar, a heavy pole, a battering ram, an old iron prisoner’s cuff, and at that point a surge of panic would be washing over the twin security details. Once the door was smashed open, they’d rush into the empty chapel, see the door there at the back—we’d forgotten to close and lock it! They’d descend the stairs, make their way along the same tunnel but much faster than we’d traveled, running, tripping, pushing past each other.
We had, I guessed, roughly another hour.
“Now what?” the Pope said at my right shoulder.
“Now either Rosa appears out of the blackness or we take a taxi back up to the Vatican and turn ourselves in.”
“There—I see her! Eccola!”
The Pope’s arm stretched over my shoulder. A woman who bore some resemblance to my wife was standing on the sidewalk a hundred meters from us. I whistled two notes, an old signal. She turned, waved both hands above her shoulders. We hurried toward her.
9
From twenty-one years of wedded bliss, I recognized the signs of excitement in my wife: she was making small hops in her fashionable high heels, waving happily, her long, dark hair swinging left and right. This was, it occurred to me as we approached, exactly the type of escapade Rosa had always loved. I realized, too, that it was the kind of somewhat risky fun that had leaked out of our marriage, mysteriously, sadly, as time passed. When we were dating, when we were just married and still young, even after our child was born, some blessed spirit of adventure had lived in us. Early on, we’d drive all the way to the beach at Agrigento and make love on the sand at two a.m. On our wedding night we danced with friends until the sun came up, then ran a made-up jogging race around the Colosseum in our fancy clothes. We ate midnight meals by candlelight on our apartment’s tiny balcony. We kissed for no reason, in clothing stores, outside church after Mass. Later, in a way similar to what my parents had done with me, we’d pack up Anna Lisa and jump on a slow train to Calabria, no reservations, just trusting that it would work out. And it always did. We had very little money then, but that didn’t matter. We’d find a room in a small agriturismo or inexpensive hotel, buy food in the town markets, and make ourselves simple meals. We’d hike through the dry Calabrian hills and have midday picnics of fruit and cheese and bread and wine, propping our little girl up between us and feeding her bits of peach and sips of water, teaching her words, changing her diaper, swinging her in happy circles, singing songs. We’d ride a bus to the beach in summer and play in the waves; we’d take a train to Trento in winter and sled down the slopes. Once, after I’d made a bit of extra money, we took our ten-year-old daughter to Ancona and booked passage on a ferry to Croatia for a long weekend.
And then, somehow, we began to forget to do those things. Anna Lisa grew. There were school functions, doctors’ visits, dance recitals, meetings with friends, all of it scheduled, programmed, predictable. With the increasing popularity of online travel arrangements, I began to have to struggle to keep my business afloat, which meant working more hours. Rosa started a simple haircutting shop and within a month it was thriving. Within a year she’d opened another shop; the business grew and grew and we were now a constantly busy, two-career couple who did nothing more adventurous than going out for dinner, having a glass of wine or two, then staggering home to sleep.
Some of that was natural—life changes, responsibilities intrude, passion cools: long-married couples don’t spend a lot of time kissing in clothing stores. But Rosa and I had clearly failed to water the garden of our love, and it had withered.
This bit of sorrowful musing was soon replaced by something else: a familiar wash of irritation. As the three of us approached her, I saw that my wife, an otherwise intelligent woman, had not come in a plain van as I’d suggested, hadn’t driven her rather ordinary Fiat SUV, but was standing beside a Quattroporte, the largest Maserati sedan. An elegant racecar. Something more suitable for a rich young bachelor than a pair of holy men. I couldn’t be sure, but in the streetlight the car appeared to be lime green, with swooping, sensuous fenders and silvery stripes along each side. I’d asked for something inconspicuous, so what had Rosa done? Arrived, stubbornness intact, with the most inappropriate vehicle in all of central Italy!
Instead of a grateful greeting, a harsh whisper escaped my lips. “Rosa! Ma che stavi pensando?” But what were you
thinking?
“Not now, love,” she said calmly. Too calmly, I thought. Her excitement at seeing us had given way to a meditative efficiency. I wondered if, like so many of her wealthy clients, she was under the influence of medication. She hugged me, warmly, quickly, and said, “Please introduce me to your handsome friends.”
“You know the Holy Father.”
Rosa made a half curtsy and held out her hand. The Pope hugged her hard against him, as if she were his sister and he were returning from war.
“And this is His Holiness the Dalai Lama.”
Rosa put her palms together and bowed from the waist. The Dalai Lama bowed back.
“Give me your phone, Paolo,” she said, when the introductions were complete. She’d taken a small plastic bag from her purse.
“What for?”
“Because it has a GPS chip in it. I’m hiding it right here.” She slid my phone into the bag and pushed it in against the roots of a bush at the edge of the sidewalk.
“It’ll be ruined. How can I call anybody if—”
“Think, sweetheart,” she said.
I thought. I said, “Okay,” and then, “Now let’s go! In a car that is absolutely unforgettable. Silver stripes! A Maserati! What were you thinking? What kind of craziness is this?! Your Holiness, get in, please, quickly!”
“I like this car very much!” the Dalai Lama said, which only made it worse.
The holy men in back, yours truly muttering in the passenger seat. “Unbelievable! I wanted a van, something—”
“My sweet man.” Rosa turned to me with an exaggerated patience, and in the wash of a streetlight I could see the beauty in her still, a refined, middle-aged, imperfect beauty—large nose, dark eyes, sensuous mouth—but it was there all the same and it took my heart, as it always had, and twisted it up. She had not yet put the Maserati in gear. “My sweet, innocent, naive man, who has been kept apart from the world by his new position, let me ask you this: Which one of us, you or I, knows more about disguise?”
“You, by a factor of one thousand.”
“Exactly. And if two famous men, ascetic, simple, humble, holy men, were making an escape, what is one of the very last vehicles they would choose?”
“A sexy Maserati Quattroporte,” I said, “which costs a hundred thousand euro.”
“A hundred and fifty thousand,” she said proudly. “And in case you’re wondering, it’s borrowed, not mine. From a good friend, also famous, but in a very different arena. I have it for a week.” She produced two golf caps from between the seats. “Ecco,” she said, passing them back to the holy men. “Please, each of you, put one on. For now. Soon we will have some better way to hide you.”
“Hats keep the head warm!” the Dalai Lama exclaimed.
I couldn’t look at him.
Rosa waited until first the Pope and then the Dalai Lama had turned themselves into golfers—it struck me as vaguely sacrilegious—then, casting her glorious smile across the top of the leather seat, she said, “And now, Your Holinesses? What is your pleasure?”
“Escape,” the Dalai Lama said, as if repeating a word he’d just learned.
“Yes, a small vacation,” the Pope added. “Four days. I want my guest to see the beautiful Italian countryside. I want to see it myself. We desire only to be normal for a while. Ordinary men. I have some ideas about where we must go, but please, no aides, guards, photographers, or reporters. And no formality!”
“No formality!” the Dalai Lama chimed in.
“Excellent!” Rosa said in an excited voice. “May I come along?”
“Rosa!”
“Of course, of course,” the Pope said. “Without question. In fact, when Paolo first suggested this idea to me I knew he was secretly thinking of taking you with us. Beneath his disguise of pious humility, he’s a sly man.”
Rosa shot a smirk across the front seat and in the next second was zooming out of the parking space and through the streets of Rome like a woman intent on attracting the attention of hordes of traffic police.
I was running the Pope’s words through my mind: “when Paolo first suggested this idea,”…“disguise of pious humility,”…“sly man.”…Honest soul that he was, honest and good, I had the sinful thought then that the Holy Father might be hedging his bets. If things turned sour, really, brutally sour—if, for instance, the Curia decided that because of this irresponsible vacation or his crazy dreams, their pontiff was no longer quite sane, and if they then took some kind of unprecedented impeachment vote—the Pope could always claim he’d simply had a moment of weakness and had given in to his cousin’s irreverent suggestion. And then his aide, the soon-to-be-notorious Paolo dePadova, would appear on the cover of tabloids around the world, wrists cuffed in front of him as he was hauled out of Vatican City under police guard.
We raced along the Lungotevere, the Tiber just to our left. There was little traffic at that hour, but, for reasons known only to her, Rosa felt obliged to show off for the holy men, switching lanes as if dodging cars and motorcycles on all sides, pumping the clutch and shifting gears with a vengeance. She went through traffic lights just as they turned red, zoomed past delivery trucks parked at the curb as if there were no chance a driver would throw open his door, smash it through the windshield, and slice my head off as we passed.
I should explain at this point that my Rosa was the product of Neapolitan parents. She’d come to Rome to study history, fallen in love with me after her junior year in college, and never left, never finished her education, never looked back. At home, she wanted to speak English. “It will be good for Anna Lisa to be bilingual,” she argued. I agreed. In fact, I wanted to keep my own American English sharp. But despite the calming influence of that utterly logical tongue, she remained Italian to the core. Or Neapolitan, I should say.
For those who don’t know Italy well, Neapolitans are almost another species. They bear as much resemblance to Romans as Romans do to Berliners. That is, they are a wild people. Even their cuisine is wild—spicy, saucy, a mix of culinary traditions from Greek to Middle Eastern to African, everything thrown into the pot and eaten with warm bread and unsubtle red wine. They speak too loudly and are prone to bursting into song at inappropriate moments. Their dialect, filled as it is with schs and wahhs and words whose endings have been chopped off and dropped down the funnel of Vesuvius, makes them sound as if they’re speaking with mouths full of food…which is often the case. Neapolitans are a happy people, yes, but it’s a happiness that dances along the border of chaos. Having known you for three minutes, they’ll invite you to sleep in their home, eat their food, drink their wine, act as godfather to their new grandchild. They will, literally, give you the shirt off their back. But try getting them to make a train run on time, or stand in line in some kind of orderly fashion, or avoid parking in no-parking zones, or show up for a one o’clock meeting before a quarter past two!
This Neapolitan side of her was part of the trouble between Rosa and me, part of our bad history. I was raised in northern Italy and, like many northerners, I was punctual, orderly, semi-Germanic, mostly soft-spoken and sober, and my wife, with her hot southern blood, was chronically late, messy in a beautiful way, owner of the first voice you heard when you walked into a crowded room, and a woman who enjoyed wine with lunch and dinner and had been known, on occasion, to overdo.
She was also a woman who, in the great Italian tradition, believed that the rules of the road existed only for the purpose of being broken.
“Are we going to Naples?” I asked, noticing that we were headed south and hoping the question, drenched in sarcasm, might encourage her to ease back on the accelerator.
“Naples!” she practically shouted. “Hah! My parents would tell everyone about their special guests. Half the city would be in their living room.”
“Where, then? Monte Carlo for the Formula One races?”
“Nowhere, Paolo! Nowhere—at least until we make the two Holinesses invisible!”
The Dalai Lama leaned hi
s head forward between the bucket seats and said, “Is very interesting to me, this idea to not be visible.”
“Egoless!” Rosa shouted.
“Yes, yes, wonderful. Very good!” the Dalai Lama said, and another peal of laughter escaped him. Satisfied, he sat back in his seat, hands folded in his lap. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He reached forward again and patted me on the left shoulder. “Your wife is a very advanced spirit,” he said. “Almost enlightened.”
“I’ve always known that,” I said.
“A stream entrant.”
“Yes, Your Holiness,” I said, though I hadn’t the faintest idea which stream he was speaking of. I turned my head further and met the Pope’s eyes. He wrinkled the corners of his mouth at me, winked, showed the thumbs-up. It occurred to me then that both of them might have been pushed a short distance beyond the boundary of sanity by the weight of their responsibilities. Maybe there was such a thing as too much prayer.
“We’re going to one of my shops,” Rosa announced. “My most skilled associate is waiting there. Mario. There’s a secret entrance, a hidden room in the back where we do big stars. It’s perfect for this.”
“What does the doing entail?”
“You’ll see, amore mio,” she said, as we careened around a corner on what felt like two wheels. “Trust me.”
10
Near the southernmost edge of the city Rosa made a sharp right turn into a narrow residential street, then, halfway along it, a not-as-sharp left turn into an alley choked with parked cars. At the far end the alley widened out like the head of a mushroom, offering a three-space parking area. My nearly enlightened wife pulled the Maserati into one of these spaces, led us to the rear of an apartment building, unlocked a door there, and motioned us inside. The back hallway opened into a room with large mirrors, two hairdressing chairs, and a trio of comfortable-looking red leather sofas along one wall. Above the sofas hung framed posters of Italy’s most famous film stars: Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni and Carlo Mancini and Alessandra and Giuliana Sardegni—saints of a very different faith, and faces every Italian knew and loved. For a moment my cousin and his guest stood in the center of the room, golf caps forgotten on their heads, and ran their eyes over the airbrushed portraits.
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 4