The Delight of Being Ordinary

by Roland Merullo

  The Pope was wearing his plain black priest’s pants and a black sweater to which a few spidery filaments still clung. The toothbrush poked its bristly head out of his pants pocket. Close beside him, in a dust-smudged maroon robe, stood the other great holy figure of our era. For a few seconds, as they studied the framed faces, I had the sense of time standing still. It was as if we’d been caught in a surreal photograph—the two of them looked so out of place there, in a room dedicated to superficialities. And yet it occurred to me that, in a way similar to what had been done to the people on the walls, we’d overlaid the humanity of the holy ones with a garment of fame. We looked at each of them and saw something more than a human being: a reflection of our own potential for greatness, maybe, spiritual greatness. We made them larger than life in order to remind ourselves that some part of us existed beyond the petty meanness of the ordinary day.

  I turned my eyes to Rosa. You could see the tiredness on her face—she hadn’t slept at all—but she was happy. She offered me a smile I didn’t deserve. Old love, it was. Scarred and imperfect and fine, not airbrushed at all.

  The place smelled of coffee and chemicals. I’d been in Rosa’s salons before, of course, many times. Generally speaking, the men who worked there fell into a certain category—sensitive, creative, slim, dressed in a style all their own. But the man who walked toward us from a front room might have played rugby or American football, or been a star of the Bulgarian national weight lifting team. Rosa introduced him as Mario. He bowed to the holy men and gave my hand a crushing shake. Mario looked like one of the Pope’s bodyguards—a head taller than I am, forty or fifty pounds heavier, with enormous shoulders and biceps pushing against the sleeves of a blue T-shirt. His head had been shaved, the skin of his face was as tanned as Berlusconi’s, though more natural looking. Everything about him was big—big eyes, big nose, big mouth, big neck. “I thought you were maybe gonna be tired,” he said in a deep bass voice and butchered Italian that did not betray a vast intelligence, “so I made the espresso.”

  Before I could tell him that neither the Pope nor the Dalai Lama indulged in caffeine, he’d handed out four cups on saucers. I gulped mine. The Pope and the Dalai Lama took a polite sip, then another polite sip, then another. All dietary rules, apparently, had been suspended.

  “Who first?” he asked Rosa. Chi va per primo?

  She pointed to the Pope. Arm muscles jumping like the thick tails of excited baby alligators, Mario motioned for the Holy Father to sit in one of the chairs, removed the golf hat, then stood behind him, hands on the papal shoulders in a posture that seemed to me less than perfectly respectful, his head tilting this way and that as he decided what kind of magic to work. “Biondo, penso,” he said, apparently to my wife. Blond, I think. “Blond wig wovened in with his hair. A blond goatee and mustache, maybe some sideburn. I want him to look like some kind of a tourist, maybe coming down from Belgium or Swedish, on the hunt for the young Italian girls.”

  “Mario,” I said, “this is His Holiness the Pope of Rome. Kindly steer clear of the sacrilegious.”

  Mario pinched his eyebrows together; he hadn’t understood the word.

  “It’s fine, it’s fine, Paolo,” the Pope said. “It’s all in the spirit of our adventure. I know what he means…And besides, he carries the name of my own father. Mario. It must be a good omen.”

  “And for the other one,” Mario went on, unfazed, “I think he needs a brown wig, maybe, you know, a little on the shaggy side. Or long, anyways. He should look like a rich guy who’s trying not to show his fat wallet, you know? Rock star, maybe. Maybe we can do something with the skin colorating, so if you go south he’ll blend in, right?” He laughed at his own bad joke. “You going south, boss?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “Well, in any cases, we have to lose the cool glasses. Too unrecognizable. We’re gonna have to fluff out the lips a little, work the cheekbones down. Round out those eyes.”

  “No glasses means I cannot see,” the Dalai Lama said. But he said it in a pleased way, the way of a man who wanted to take a little break from seeing, who’d seen enough.

  The Dalai Lama took the second chair. Mario squeezed his shoulders warmly then moved back to the Pope and set to work. I retreated to one of the leather couches. After a while, Rosa came and sat beside me.

  “He’s a master,” she said happily. “Watch.”

  “Smart, too,” I muttered.

  She hit me with an elbow, smirked. “And we have tons of stuff here. Tons. Makeup, wigs, clothes, shoes, you name it. All the costume people come here and leave their props, sometimes for years. Sometimes they forget them entirely. That’s where I got the golfers’ hats.”

  After a few seconds she leapt up, made us each another espresso, and carried them back with her.

  Mario had a blond wig in his hands and was setting it gently on the Pontiff’s bald spot. He moved it this way and that, combed through it. “We have to dye the white hairs around in the edges, Your Holiness. Do I have some permission?”

  “Of course, Mario. Anything you want.”

  The Pope was spun around, his chair tilted back, what was left of his real hair washed in the sink and then colored to match the wig. Beside him the Dalai Lama watched, entranced, his fingers working a loop of brown beads he’d pulled from the pocket of his robe. The blond wig was glued on, a goatee and mustache applied, combed, trimmed so that they fit naturally on the famous face. While the glue set, Mario went to work on the Buddhist half of the escaping duo. “We can leave the glasses, I guess, if we cover over them with these here,” he said. He lifted into view a ridiculously oversized pair of sunglasses engraved with the name of a famous designer. The Dalai Lama’s shaved head was then covered with a salt-and-mostly-pepper wig, rock-star-length, his medium-brown skin powdered so that it looked like my own after a month at the beach. Mario worked on the hands and forearms to match the skin color there. He put a clip-on earring in one ear, then changed his mind and took it off. “A little could be over the top,” he said.

  Within ninety minutes the mirror showed what appeared to be a happy pair of traveling friends, one from Northern Europe, one from the sunnier climates, both past their physical prime, but healthy-looking, ready for the discos and the beaches.

  “Unbelievable,” I said to Rosa.

  “Isn’t it?” She was on her feet again, one hand on Mario’s broad shoulder. I wondered—may God forgive me—if they were lovers. “I have several changes of clothing set out in the other room,” my wife said. “I threw some outfits together last night after you called me, Paolo. I guessed at the sizes but they should be more or less okay. The two of them will be in the car a lot of the time, we’ll try to keep them out of view. But we should all have some changes of clothes, too.”

  “Bathing suits,” I suggested, because I love to swim outdoors. “Shaving supplies.”

  Rosa nodded and ducked into an adjoining room.

  The Pope and the Dalai Lama got up out of the chairs, gazed at themselves in the mirror and erupted in laughter. They stood side by side, smiling beatifically, arms around each other’s shoulders. Rosa reappeared and took a photo with Mario’s phone. “Now you,” she said, turning to me.

  “Yes, yes!” the Pope said. “Paolo, get up here!”

  “Why? Why can’t I just stay as me?”

  “Because someone might recognize you,” Rosa said. “Once the Pope is declared missing, and you’re missing, they’ll put two and two together and figure you spirited him off someplace, looking for ransom money. Your enemies in the Vatican will target you. Your picture will be on the TV, in the papers: ‘Kidnapper dePadova Sought by Authorities in Pope’s Disappearance.’ ”

  She was grinning as she said this, but my empty stomach was coated with espresso, and the joke did not sit well there.

  “We’ll have to do you, too, amore. Mario will work on you and I’ll take the holy ones into the other room and see what we can do in the way of clothing and shaving suppli
es and so on. Mario will give me some extra makeup because I’m going to have to do touch-up work on all of you after you shave. Your Holiness, do you mind wearing pants?”

  “Since when I was a boy, I never tried it once,” the Dalai Lama confessed.

  “Well, the robe would be a dead giveaway.”

  “Lose some of the beads, too,” Mario said.

  More laughter. The three of them disappeared. I sat and looked at my face in the mirror—gray hair, the bent nose, the eyes that seemed either very tired or very kind. I liked things well enough the way they were. But Mario took up position behind me, his massive hands on my shoulders, contemplating, pondering. It seemed either that his voluminous mental energies had been exhausted by that late hour or that something about my face presented an unsolvable disguise puzzle.

  At last he spoke: “You mind being turned into a boat-people?”

  What Mario referred to as “boat people” were the poor suffering souls who were fleeing starvation and war and risking a hazardous trip across the Mediterranean in the hopes of finding, in Europe, something that resembled a decent life. Those who did not perish in the crossing came ashore in southern Italy to something less than a hero’s welcome. They arrived in open boats from Libya, often enough; sometimes Tunisia or Morocco or Syria, sometimes from the Sub-Sahara, and they wandered the streets looking skeletal and terrified.

  “I’m not really comfortable with that idea,” I said, as soon as it was raised. “It feels vaguely disrespectful, as if we’re using the poorest of the world’s poor for our own lighthearted purposes.”

  Mario gave me a blank look in the mirror.

  “Just exactly the opposite!” Rosa said, as I somehow knew she would. “You’ll be getting a sense of how those people are treated, hour by hour. It will make you more compassionate, amore.”

  “I’m already compassionate. So are a lot of Italians. I buy them food whenever I see them on the streets. I give them money. Just the other day I bought—”

  “I think, cousin,” the Pope weighed in, “you could use such a disguise as a spiritual lesson.”

  “Yes,” the Dalai Lama put in. “Yes, very much. A lesson!”

  “But I’ll be stared at, mocked. Some people will hate me on sight, for no reason other than the way I look!”

  “Exactly,” the Holy Father said. He nodded at Mario, and the muscleman set to work.

  11

  By 6:45 a.m., after a ninety-minute ordeal of washing, cutting, curling, coloring, and having some kind of mysterious lotion rubbed onto the skin of my face, neck, arms, and hands, I was a sleepy and slightly nicer-looking Muammar Gaddafi doppelgänger, my hair all black for the first time in decades, my skin a natural-looking almond brown. Somehow, though, Mario had made me look thinner and weaker than the notorious dictator, pitiable rather than fearsome. Powerless. Frail. Staring in the mirror at my new self, I did, in fact, feel a wave of compassion. For once in my life, I would stand out from the crowd…and not in a good way. I’d be a magnet for anger, an easy target. There were few good jobs to be had in the bel paese in those days; our beautiful standard of living was slipping away by the month. People would blame me and the people who looked like me, instead of blaming Silvio Berlusconi and his corrupt and decadent Parliament pals. Thinking about it was enough to wrap me in a blanket of fear.

  By then the Pope, his famous chin and famously high forehead hidden behind swatches of blond hair, had been dressed elegantly in a lightweight blue suit and sparkling gold tie, with expensive-looking black loafers polished and shining like gems. Rather than a happy Dane, he now looked like nothing so much as a businessman down from Frankfurt, ready to work a deal. I wondered how he felt about all these strange goings-on, about being transformed this way, and I wanted to ask him, but it seemed to me he was caught up in a rushing stream of happiness. It had started with a thought, and the thought had somehow, magically, produced an idea, and the idea had produced a river, and he was contentedly riding the river now, down the narrow stairs, through the tunnel, into this back room of a hairdressing shop in the south of Rome. For once, his hours weren’t scripted and scheduled; and strangely, now that he didn’t have to worry about what he said, he was saying very little (though, at one point, he did step off to the side of the room with his rosary and mouth his morning prayers).

  The Dalai Lama seemed caught in the same river, as if they were boyhood friends on a forbidden rafting adventure. Rosa had dressed him in designer jeans, almost-new running shoes, a collared short-sleeve jersey and a cashmere cardigan the color of the Adriatic—soft gray-green. She was snapping photos, laughing, making jokes about men being forced to wear pants. Mario was sitting in one of his chairs, sipping coffee, flexing his arm muscles, and beaming like the director of a hit play on opening night.

  “Marvelous, marvelous!” the Pope said, breaking his silence. When he turned to me, he burst into laughter. “Look at you, cousin! Your wife is a genius! Mario is a genius! No one will ever guess who we are!”

  Before I had a chance to say “I hope not, Your Holiness,” and to suggest that Rosa wear a disguise as well, she announced: “It’s already light. We can stand here congratulating ourselves all day or we can set off.”

  “Right,” the Pope said. “I have some ideas.”

  “Wherever you’d like, Holy Father.”

  The Pope met my eyes, then Rosa’s, looked at the Dalai Lama, paused for a moment, and then confidently spoke a single word: “East.”

  12

  The makeup made me hot, and psychologically uncomfortable besides. I could feel a rivulet of sweat running down my spine, but Mario had told me not to worry: the tinted skin polish was water-resistant and would last probably a week if I didn’t scrub too hard in the shower or if I didn’t perspire, as he put it, “like the wild boar.” Rosa had what I took to be a victorious smile on her face as she worked the car free of the alley. I tried not to look at her. This, it seems to me, is the way it works between people who’ve known each other a long time: every gesture and expression is familiar, anticipated. A certain kind of smile is like a spark thrown on dry leaves; in a second you have a bonfire of memories—sweet or acrid. On the negative side, history works against you in those moments: there’s no cushion around your patience; one smug smile and you’re assaulted by a hundred old, painful scenes.

  The first rays of sunlight were enlivening the sky, but Italians like to sleep in, and so we were still early enough that the roads hadn’t yet been choked by the usual assortment of delivery trucks, speeding Vespas, and European driving machines. Working the leather steering wheel and the shining stick shift, my wife took us through the heart of Rome’s Centro Storico with all the confidence of a veteran taxi driver.

  “What is, for me, most interesting,” the Dalai Lama said as we swept past the Colosseum, “is that this building—how you say it?” He waved one hand in a circle.

  “The Colosseum.”

  “Yes. I am thinking that, how many years ago—two thousand?—in the West, people could build something so amazing like this. Even now you have the roads, the machines, the medicines, that we don’t have. You have used power of the mind to make all these things, yes? In the East we have not so good roads, not so beautiful buildings, not so much medicine like you have.” He paused there, sadly, it seemed, but then added, “All those same years we have used power of the mind to go into the deepest parts of meditation, to learn not to be afraid of death and suffering, to learn that we are not really this body, to raise consciousness toward another level of life. Maybe someday the two worlds come together, West and East.” He laughed happily, thinking of it. “Good medicine and big buildings, but also the deep meditation. This is my dream.”

  “A beautiful idea,” the Pope told him. “An idea Christ himself would admire.”

  “Maybe this is why we are together here now,” the Dalai Lama suggested. “Why we escaped.”

  At that moment a delivery truck cut in front of us, and Rosa slammed her hand down on the ho
rn and cursed under her breath in Neapolitan.

  We went along those ancient streets through the craziness of Roman traffic. I loved the Eternal City, loved its urban landscape and messy architectural grace. Everywhere you turned you encountered monuments to the early Romans—a people of genius and excess. Here was the Colosseum, there the broken pillars of the Forum, up ahead the Pantheon, where men in robes had argued about which new law to make and which new nation to conquer, then gone off to their feasts and orgies. Modern Italy had been built on that legacy. There was still a touch of genius to the people, I thought, running my eyes over the Maserati’s interior. There was still a lot of eating and sex, too; and though the conquering was long behind us, the robes gone—except in churches—the politicians were still arguing and strutting around. Surrounded as we were by aqueducts and temples, by museums filled with some of the finest art on earth, we Italians lived in a soup of history, the past whispering to us even as we hurried down a city street with a cell phone pressed to one ear, or as we zoomed along in a race car so new and unscratched it felt like a creature from space. We were chained to that history, buoyed by it, the Neros and Caesars and Mussolinis watching us wherever we went.

  History had been Rosa’s college specialty until she left school to marry me, and I’d always enjoyed listening to her talk about Italy’s painful and glorious past.

  We needed only a few minutes to work our way free of the historical center. We turned onto Route 533, which carried us due east from the capital, through a stretch of shops, billboards, and cheap hotels—Roman suburbia—and then toward the foothills of the Apennines. I occupied the passenger seat, separated from my wife by the stick shift and an armrest of the finest leather, on which her bare right elbow rested. It might have been the espresso or the lack of sleep, but I felt almost electrified, hyper-aware. My eyes and ears and even the artificially tanned skin of my arms and hands had been tuned to some new frequency, and I couldn’t help wondering if this was the way the Pope and the Dalai Lama always made people around them feel. I’d seen visitors tremble in the presence of the Holy Father, grown men and women who looked like they were about to faint, simply because he was standing a few feet in front of them, or had reached out to touch their hand or kiss their child. A few, in fact, actually had fainted. Much as I admired him, however, much as I enjoyed his company, the Pope was still my cousin; I’d known him when he was a boy in a pair of tattered shorts on the sands of Mar de Ajó. It wasn’t exactly a sacred shock to sit down across from him at the breakfast table on a Thursday morning and eat Belgian chocolate and pears.