And yet, I have to say that from the moment I’d seen him together with the Dalai Lama in the Room of the Blessed Mother, something had changed in my perception of our surroundings. There in the front seat of the Maserati, I felt it again. A clarity infused everything, a sense of trembling precariousness, as if the atomic particles around us had been gripped by an electronic excitement and were moving at faster speed. I’ve been known to babble when I’m in a nervous mood, and I was certainly nervous then. But at the same time, I wanted to bathe in this new feeling, and I worried that breaking the silence would spoil it.
My wife, my good wife, had no such reservations. “If we’re going to be traveling together,” Rosa said, glancing at the rearview mirror as she shifted into fifth gear, “I should tell you, Holy Father, that I’m no longer a practicing Catholic.”
Boom! The glistening air inside the car shattered into a thousand shards. I turned my head to look at her. I thought: Why are you like this?
Rosa paused, as if to let her great revelation sink in, or as if waiting for the Pope’s response. When none was forthcoming, she added, like a handful of mud thrown through a window that had just been broken by a stone, “And, Your Other Holiness, I have to tell you that, beyond a few phrases I’ve heard from our daughter, I know exactly nothing about Buddhism. Zero. Niente.”
An extremely awkward silence replaced the sharpness and aliveness that had filled the interior of the car. I was biting down hard on the insides of both cheeks, looking straight ahead. At that point we were climbing steadily, the pavement running between rows of eucalyptus trees with a few villas beyond them, widely spaced. A stream of morning traffic moved downhill in the opposite lane, headed for the capital. I looked at the tops of my hands, at the wedding ring I’d never quite been able to remove. What kind of comedian God, I was thinking, brought together two people as different as Rosa and me? Of all the billions of men on earth she might have married, of all the intelligent, attractive Italian women who might have come through the door of my travel agency on the second day it was in operation…
Behind me the Pope coughed. “What does it really mean to be a practicing Catholic?” he asked. His tone was sincere: he really seemed to want an answer, or to be thinking aloud.
“Attending Mass every Sunday,” my wife replied in her perfectly doubtless way. “Receiving Holy Communion. Going to confession. Observing the Holy Days of Obligation. Lenten fasts. Saying the Rosary.” She laughed—a bit uncomfortably, I thought. Although, in his infrequent visits to our home, she and her cousin-by-marriage had always gotten along splendidly, they’d instinctively steered clear of religious discussion. Now he was Pope and she’d decided not to hold back. “On all those subjects, I receive the failing grade.”
“Yes,” the Pope said, warming to the conversation, leaning his newly blond head toward the opening between the front seats and putting a hand on Rosa’s elbow. He had taken off the expensive suit jacket, folded it carefully in half and laid it across his lap. “But really, on a deeper level, what does it actually mean, this idea of ‘being a Catholic’?”
“I just told you,” my wife said. Kind and generous as she could be, Rosa was not a woman of deep patience. In that “I just told you” I could hear that she was already close to the bottom of what had always been a shallow well of tolerance for those who didn’t understand her—immediately. On occasion she seemed not to grasp the fact that what was obvious to her might not be obvious to everyone else on earth. “Remember who you’re speaking to,” I wanted to say, but in her next words she seemed to do just that. “I mean, you’re the Holy Father now. The Boss of Catholic bosses. A stand-in for Jesus. That’s what we heard growing up. You should know what a Catholic is better than anyone, shouldn’t you?”
“The question was rhetorical,” the Pope told her.
“Fine, but now I want you to answer it, Holy Father.”
“Rosa, call me Giorgio, please, as you always did. I beg you. Dalai Lama, Paolo, at least during this trip or adventure or exploration or whatever it is, please call me Giorgio.”
“Then I am Tenzin,” the Dalai Lama said agreeably. “And this question make me interested very much. What is the Catholic? What is the Buddhist? Is very interesting questions!”
“Right—then answer it!” Rosa said, in an exasperated voice.
“Calm down, Rosa.”
“I am calm, Paolo. I couldn’t be calmer. I’m just dying to know. Here we are with the bosses of two of the biggest religions on earth and I have a million questions for them! Don’t you? This isn’t just your cousin who used to come visit us, this is the Pope, for God’s sake! And the Dalai Lama!”
I nodded, simply for the sake of making peace.
Rosa looked in the mirror again, expectantly.
“I think,” the Pope said, “that I’ll need more coffee before making you a decent answer.”
“Also for me, but tea,” the Dalai Lama said.
Rosa laughed, but the edge, the expectation, remained in her face: she wanted an answer! “There’s a place up along this road another few minutes. We can stop there.”
I felt the Pope squeeze my shoulder warmly, something he’d done a thousand times. “But as a start,” he said, “let me just say that I think all those things—the attendance at Mass, the Blessed Sacrament, fasting—don’t exist for their own sake. Christ doesn’t love you more if you give up wine or chocolate for forty days.”
“Exactly,” Rosa said. “That’s why I stopped doing it.”
“But it’s possible that if you spend an hour each week at a holy service; if you mark certain days as special, in the religious sense; if you pray; if you give up some earthly pleasure for a period of time—then I think it helps you to feel Christ’s love more clearly. To believe that it’s there, always, warming you like the sun.”
Rosa was pursing her lips and shaking her head in small movements. “I don’t really get that, Giorgio,” she said. Her eyes jumped in quick movements from the road to the mirror and back again, and I worried, now that she’d finished offending the holy man behind me, she’d drive the borrowed Maserati into a ditch.
“I have always appreciated your frankness,” the Pope said.
“Thanks. But nothing you’ve said—forgive me, Holy—forgive me, Giorgio—nothing I’ve heard you say makes me want to go back to the Church.”
“I’m not hoping for that, my Rosa.”
“You’re not?”
I had half-turned so I could watch the Pope. He moved a strand of yellow hair off his forehead. “I want you to be happy and grateful for life, that’s all.”
“I am, mostly.”
“Then I’m at peace in your company.”
“And I’m at peace in yours. I always have been. When you were a cardinal and you used to come visit us, I always thought you were a special man. You washed the dishes, for God’s sake! What man ever does that? And I loved the way you played with Anna Lisa, like she was as precious to you as she is to us. She’s not a churchgoer, either, by the way, just so you know.”
“I love her exactly the same as always,” the Pope said. He leaned back in his seat.
Rosa swung her eyes to me, once, quickly, then back to the road. “What?” she hissed. “What, Paolo? You’re giving me one of your looks.”
I tried to hold the words in my mouth, but they pushed their way out, little puffs of old trouble singeing my lips as they escaped. “You’re being borderline irreverent,” I said quietly. “This is the Pope you’re speaking to about your problem with the Church!”
“Who else should I speak to about it?” she said, beneath the noise of the engine. “You? Even now that he’s Pope, he likes to be treated like an ordinary human being, can’t you see that?”
“I think I know him a little better than you do.”
“You think you know everything a little better than I do.”
I bit the inside of my cheek again. I heard the Pope and the Dalai Lama making conversation behind us, something about the
scenery, the road—a quiet exchange.
“I don’t think you get the big picture here, at all!” Rosa went on.
“You must be right. You’re always right, so this time can’t be an exception.”
“Exactly.”
“ ’Scuse me,” the Dalai Lama said from the backseat.
Rosa looked in the mirror again. The car veered into the breakdown lane, then back. “Sorry, Tenzin. You’re a man of peace. My husband here is a pain in the royal culo, though, so I’m sorry we’re fighting in front of you.”
“What is this ‘royal culo’?” he asked innocently.
“Culo means ‘rear end,’ in Italian. But this ‘royal’ part comes from an American expression. Paolo taught it to me, ironically enough.”
“All people argue sometime,” he said.
“Thank you.” Rosa half-turned to me and whispered, “Another human being!”
“You didn’t ask about Buddhism,” the Dalai Lama said.
“I’m not a Buddhist, Tenzin. I told you. I don’t know the first thing about Buddha except we always see him as a smiling fat guy. I’m sorry if that offends you, I’m just being honest. My daughter dabbles, I think, but I’ve never asked her about it, because I’m more the ex-Catholic type of person. Not a big believer in God anymore in any case. I’ve seen too much bad stuff for that.”
“A lot of bad stuff, yes. A lot of pain on the royal culo.”
“Right. But Buddha seemed—sorry again, no disrespect—I mean he did a lot of sitting around. Not my style one bit.”
The Buddhist’s famous laugh filled the car. “Sit, sit, a lot of sitting! Yes!”
“Hard way to make a living these days.”
Now it was the Dalai Lama’s turn to lean forward between the seats. “He was teaching a lot of time, too. Not just sitting.”
“Teaching people to sit,” Rosa said.
“Ha, yes! But very important thing, this sitting in quiet mind. Can you do it?”
“Not in a million years.”
“This sitting brought him to enlightenment. You would say ‘to understand God,’ or maybe ‘to see clearly the true purpose of life.’ ”
“Another thing I don’t exactly get. How does sitting help you understand anything?”
“When you sit in meditation, after some time, the mind become calm. When the mind become calm, you see clearly. When you see clearly, more easy to believe in something larger than you. More easy to love.”
“Easier to stop fighting with your husband?”
The Dalai Lama laughed again and patted her on the shoulder. “Yes!”
“And you can feel that God loves you? I mean, really feel that?”
“We don’t say ‘God.’ We say sometimes ‘Divine Intelligence.’ ”
“Some people don’t see a lot of intelligence up there on certain days.”
“Yes, yes. Some days hard to see.”
“But the two of you basically believe in something bigger, correct? Kids die, people suffer with cancer, wars, plagues, and still there’s a God up there running the show. Jesus or Buddha or whoever, he’s up there?”
“Yes,” the Pope said.
“Not a man,” the Dalai Lama said.
“Something, though. Something or somebody running the show?”
There was a moment of blessed silence, and then the Dalai Lama said, “It would be the big show to have nothing running it.”
“Rosa, there’s the coffee place.”
“I know it, Paolo!” she said angrily, as if she’d seen it. But I knew she hadn’t. This was one of Rosa’s many quirks. In the days when we were together, we’d be driving along someplace, headed, say, for Bologna. I’d see the sign BOLOGNA; she’d be thinking about her work, admiring the scenery, lost in a memory or a dream. I’d say, “This is our exit,” maybe a little too urgently. And she’d say, “I know, Paolo! For God’s sake, will you stop? I just like to put on the blinker two seconds later than you do, that’s all.”
She swerved so fast into the entrance to the roadside bar that, not having the benefit of something to hold on to, her three passengers shifted to the left like stalks of corn leaning in a wind. The people in front of the little place—two young couples standing beside a pair of motorcycles—swiveled their heads to stare.
“Probably we shouldn’t all go in,” I said. “Their voices are recognizable.”
“Oh, let them stretch their legs!” Rosa said.
“I didn’t say they shouldn’t get out. I said they shouldn’t go in, shouldn’t speak.”
“You implied it.”
We all climbed out into the warm morning, an old, bad feeling souring the molecules between Rosa and me. I loved her, really I did. And I knew there would have been no chance of making a successful getaway without her. Left to my own devices, I would have given the Pope and the Dalai Lama a hat, sunglasses, and a set of clothes and driven them off in a rented van. I’d never have thought of the phone GPS, never have arranged for the elaborate disguises. Son of artists though I was, I seemed to be completely missing the gene for creativity. I admired Rosa’s business sense, her work ethic, her unfailing optimism in the face of life’s many difficulties. She’d been an absolutely spectacular mother—present, attentive, affectionate, supportive. A loving partner in the bedroom. A friend. I thought she was beautiful, still; that she’d always been beautiful. But from almost the hour we’d met, there had been places in which our personalities ground against each other like gears in a ruined transmission. Fighting had become as regular as lovemaking, and then more regular. In time, like some kind of cancer, it took over so many of the cells of our relationship that when Anna Lisa was out of the house and we were left alone with each other, the tension became unbearable. To my last breath I will remember the night we sat down and, after talking for three and a half hours, decided we should try living separately. The enormous sadness of that, the immense relief. The bitter loneliness.
Since then, we’d made lives for ourselves, buried our sorrows in the routine of work. We met often for a friendly lunch or a walk. But something between us remained wounded, unresolved. And something about the presence of the two holy men—so calm, so at peace with themselves and each other—something about being around them had cast Rosa and me down into this familiar dirt pit, where we snarled and sniped. It was embarrassing, yes, but worse than that. I don’t really like the word “sin,” though I know sin exists. I just don’t like it applied to myself. I was the Pope’s First Assistant, after all; I was praying more, in church more; I was bathed in his presence ten or twenty hours every week. Over the past couple of years I’d held on to the hope that those hours had been working like some kind of spiritual antibiotic, eating away at the bad bacteria within me, making me a better man. And now, from literally the minute I’d seen Rosa outside Castel Sant’Angelo, the old disease was flourishing in me, in us. With the motorcyclists still watching us, I found myself wondering if that extra prayer had done me any good at all or if it had merely been a silk cloth thrown over the same old scarred and wobbly kitchen table.
We decided, after another quick, nasty exchange between Rosa and me, that we’d all go inside for a snack. Tenzin and Giorgio wouldn’t speak, that’s all. It would be the first test of their disguises. And mine.
I offered up a silent prayer. I shot a sideways glance at my wife, held the door open for her as a kind of apology. We stepped into a sparkling-clean bar.
In Italy the word “bar” has a different meaning than it does in some other parts of the world. Coffee, not alcohol, is the specialty of the house. You’re more likely to see a customer standing at a granite counter downing sugary shots of espresso than hunched over a table with a glass of beer, though some types of alcohol are served. There are often pastries for sale, too, and sometimes panini or candy, and almost always what we call a spremuta d’arancia, a fresh-squeezed orange juice.
Behind the usual polished counter of the bar on Route 533 stood a very short man in a posture of attentive w
aiting: eyes up, hands clasped in front of him. Beside him was a brass espresso machine. Above it, near the top of the wall, a small TV was showing clips from the previous day’s soccer games. One of the teams was from Algeria, and the complexion of those players caused me to realize that I wasn’t presenting my usual face to the world. How strange that was: a lifetime of being white, in the majority, easily ignored by police and fellow citizens alike, and here I was suddenly conspicuous, a boat person, an intruder, an alien! The immigrants one typically saw in Italy were selling trinkets on the beach or in the train stations, scraping a semi-illegal living from Italian society as best they could. Some people treated them decently, others did not; some were in fact criminals, others were not. But they had no chance, none, zero, of blending in. Wherever they went, whatever they did, eyes followed them.
The holy ones took a seat at a table farthest from the counter, told us what they wanted—glasses of orange juice, it turned out, instead of tea and coffee—and Rosa and I walked back and ordered due spremute, and due cappuccini for ourselves. A familiar sheet of ice had formed between us, palpable, translucent, blurring the way we saw each other. The short man glanced at me and began slicing oranges in two and feeding them into a juicer.
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 6