“You think I’m stupid,” Rosa said, very quietly, without looking at me.
“Never.”
“Yes you do. You’ve always thought I’m stupid, just because you speak English better than I do, because you have a college degree and I never finished. But I know the world of people better than you, and if you can’t tell that these two men just want to be ordinary for a while, then you’re the stupid one, amore.”
“You’re irreverent with them, too casual.”
“I’m perfectly respectful. They don’t want any fuss, can’t you see?”
“These are—”
The short man looked up; some piece of the conversation had caught his ear. On the TV over his head, a news update had replaced the soccer match. I watched carefully, but there was no urgent report from Vatican City. It seemed so peculiar: by that point the security people must have realized the Pope and the Dalai Lama were missing. There had been an official breakfast scheduled for seven-thirty. The word certainly would have gotten out by now; there would be alerts, search parties, police vehicles racing across Rome. Something wasn’t right.
The man finished making the juices, and Rosa carried them over to the table. When she returned, the espresso machine was giving off its happy shushing sound. We ordered four sweet pastries.
“I know who they are just as well as you do,” she whispered hoarsely, keeping her voice beneath the noise. “I know it perfectly well!”
Another minute and we were fighting about who should pay. The one thing I’d thought of in advance was to take a lot of cash with me; I pulled a thick wad of it from my pants pocket. “I’m rich,” she said, pushing the money away. “I’m paying.”
“I’m making a good amount now.”
“I don’t care. I’m paying.”
She slapped two ten-euro notes down on the counter and, leaving the change for the short man, strode back to the table. I lagged behind, pulling napkins from a container, and in that moment the man said, “È forte quella donna.” She’s strong, that woman. He was studying me now, not unkindly.
“Fortissima!” I told him. The strongest.
He raised and lowered his eyebrows as if conveying the unspoken opinion that being with a strong woman had certain advantages in this life, and perhaps certain disadvantages as well.
I nodded as if to say “I know. Exactly.” And I did know: before meeting Rosa I’d had a series of docile girlfriends, so sweet and amenable, so willing to let me lead in all things, so afraid to say or do anything that might cause the slightest confrontation, that it had been like walking around with a puppet. I didn’t want a woman like that. My mother had been strong, daring, brave, full of life and argument. She’d raised me to want an equal partner, not a servant.
I joined my traveling companions, and noticed that the Pope was eyeing the display of candy bars.
“Odd,” I said quietly, after making sure the other tables were empty. “No news about you not being there. And there was a formal breakfast scheduled for half an hour ago.”
“Not odd at all,” the Pope said. He had a crumb of pastry on the new hair near his lower lip. Rosa reached out and brushed it away, and he thanked her. “They’ll keep it quiet at first, so as not to create a panic. They’ll hope to find us wandering down in the tunnel or something, lost there, passed out from the fumes of methane gas, stuck behind a door that had slammed shut. They’ll make it public only when they’re truly desperate.”
The Dalai Lama was nodding, the large dark glasses sliding down his nose, the hideous wig ruffled. “Hard practice,” he said.
“What’s that, Tenzin?” Rosa asked. “What do you mean, ‘practice’? Our daughter uses the word that way sometimes. ‘Love can be a hard practice,’ she told me the other day.”
The Dalai Lama scratched the top of his forehead, where the toupee had been glued on. “ ‘Practice’ is what we call all things. If you have family to be raising, this is practice. If you are married, also practice. If you are sick, old, or rich or poor, have some trouble or pleasure—all practice. So now the people who are worried about us, they have very hard practice. They are maybe afraid. They worry they will have big troubles.” He laughed, as if the idea of hard practice amused him.
“Practice for what, though?”
“For the strong mind.”
Rosa tore her soft pastry—a cornetto con crema—in half. “I like that. I’ve had a lot of hard practice in my life, being married to this guy.” She knocked her forearm sideways against me, gently. This was the part of the pattern I’d almost forgotten. Fight, fight, fight—yes, we were experts at it. But we’d always been able to reconcile. It had made Anna Lisa uncomfortable at first, when she was a little girl. Then, later, it made her laugh. “The two of you,” she liked to say, “are better than a circus act.”
I tried to smile but couldn’t quite manage it.
Rosa noticed. “Oh, stop worrying, amore,” she said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“The worst that could happen is as follows: I lose my job and go to jail for kidnapping.”
“Most hardest practice,” the Dalai Lama said cheerily.
“The Pope would never allow that,” Rosa said. “Would you, Holy Father?”
The Pope shrugged in a noncommittal way, one of his jokes. Everyone but me was grinning. “Many of the great saints spent time as prisoners. Perhaps that, too, would advance your spiritual life, cousin.”
More laughter. I couldn’t join in. A small smile; a look at the man behind the counter—he seemed to be studying all of us now, watching, wondering. On the screen above him I saw the face of Silvio Berlusconi, embroiled in yet another investigation, a scandal, a scam. Certain people cruised through life leaving a wreckage in their wake but remaining mostly untouched, free, successful. And then there were people like me.
“You were going to tell me,” Rosa said to the Holy Father, “what makes a good Catholic.”
He looked at her in the tender way he had, pondered a minute, twitched his lips so that the fake goatee jumped sideways. “A good Catholic,” he said, “lives so that he or she feels the love of God the way you feel the warmth of the sun on your arm right now.”
“I don’t qualify,” she said.
“Then, in the time God has given you, put your efforts toward that, the way you have put your efforts toward raising your beautiful daughter and building your successful business.”
“Which means going back to church every Sunday,” she said.
“Not first on the list,” the Pope said.
“What, then? Prayer?”
“There are many kinds of prayer. One kind would be simply to allow yourself some quiet time every day to contemplate the mystery of being alive.”
“Hard practice,” she said, smiling. “For a busy woman like me.”
“Yes, but maybe try,” the Dalai Lama put in.
At that point more customers came through the door—a man and a woman holding hands—and we fell silent and concentrated on our food until the espresso machine started up again.
The Dalai Lama was gazing at Rosa through the dark glasses—I could just make out his eyes behind the lenses—and you could see the love in the way he was leaning toward her, the intense compassion. “What is more important,” he inquired in a low voice, “that you are so busy, that you make lot of money and have many things, or that you move toward enlightenment in this lifetime?”
Just as Rosa started to answer, the loving couple came and sat down close to us, so the issue of enlightenment was set aside for the time being. We finished our food in silence.
The Dalai Lama’s question seemed to hover in the air around us as we stepped out into hot sunlight, as we arranged ourselves in the Maserati and headed back onto the road, eastward, and as we began to climb. Thinking about what he’d said, I felt, for a few good minutes, that the world I knew held us in a kind of hypnosis: money, status, things, comfort, so-called security. Somehow we’d made a god of all that. We put all our tal
ents and energies toward worshipping that god. With their questions, hints, speeches, with the way they themselves lived, the Pope and the Dalai Lama kept warning us about the downside of that kind of worship. We half-listened.
13
Italy’s spine is a long, crooked band of upthrust stone, a range of mountains—some of them reaching beyond nine thousand feet—that makes any kind of west-east travel complicated or impossible, depending on the season, on where, exactly, you want to go and where you’re starting from. I knew this in part because of early travels with my mother and father, and, more recently, because our daughter had moved to Rimini, a city on the Adriatic, some four hours north and east of Rome. In order to visit her there we had to navigate the sometimes treacherous curves of Italy’s interior, or, in winter, drive hours out of our way to find a route that hadn’t been closed by snow.
But, of course, I loved seeing my daughter, and had loved my childhood travels, and so I associated trips into the high center of my country with pleasant feelings and family warmth, the sense that I belonged on this earth, that good things and good fortune awaited me. During the darkest days, just before and after Rosa and I decided to separate, I’d sometimes get into the car on a Saturday morning and drive into the mountains with no destination in mind. I’d have lunch in some out-of-the-way trattoria, take a walk, and drive back home again. A mountain therapy.
I was hoping for a similarly uplifting feeling on that day, because, as we entered the high country, I realized I was in the grip of a kind of malaise I’d never really known before. Part of it was the worry that we’d get caught and bring a premature end to the Pope’s great adventure; part of it was a related worry—I couldn’t afford to be fired; part of it was the reawakened troubles between Rosa and me, something I thought I’d pushed far into the past. And part of it was something else, a cold, mysterious river of thought winding through my subconscious, silently eroding the stone of certainty there. I badly wanted to relax, enjoy the scenery, the adventure and good company, the perfect early-July day, but I could feel this chilly, serpentine movement deep inside me, as if I were being carried along toward some encounter or event that would change me forever, and in a way I wasn’t sure I wanted to be changed.
For a little while, though, I concentrated on the view and did my best to relax. On either side stretched vineyards and groves of olive trees, and beyond them were small villages, hamlets really, just clusters of brown stucco homes with red-tile roofs, a bridge, a church, a factory chimney. Cottony clouds drifted past above us, and there was a quiet ease to the sunlight, as if the only purpose of being alive on such a day was to enjoy each breath, soak in the beauty, sit around a table drinking wine with friends and feasting on food that tasted the way food tasted nowhere else on earth.
Rosa seemed at peace. Instead of making my wife more energetic and excitable, caffeine always had the opposite effect. Her free hand sat lazily in her lap, not tapping or twisting dials or running like a comb through her long, dark hair. She guided the car with two fingers and went along at a reasonable pace. There was no conversation in the seat behind us. The one time I glanced back, the Pope and the Dalai Lama were gazing out their respective side windows at the view, buried in prayer, perhaps, or just taking refuge in what the Pope had called a “contemplation of the mystery of being alive.”
I seemed to be the only one carrying a cargo of worry. Whenever we saw a police vehicle going by in the fast lane, or traveling downhill in the direction of Rome, I half-expected to see the blue lights go on, and hear the klaxon.
But then something occurred to me, a happy thought. “They won’t be able to trace the car,” I said to Rosa.
“What?”
“They won’t be able to trace the car. Even if they suspect me of being the mastermind, and even if they then connect me to you, they’ll be looking for your car, not this one.”
“You’re a little slow catching on, amore.”
“You thought of that ahead of time?”
“I thought of it three seconds after I hung up with you.”
“Who lent it to you?”
“Carlo Mancini.”
“Carlo Mancini! The Carlo Mancini! The guy whose picture was on the wall at Mario’s shop? The greatest Italian sex symbol since Marcello Mastroianni?!”
“We do his hair.”
“His hair is colored?”
“Who said anything about coloring? I never said it.”
“Is it colored, though, really? Is he going gray?”
Rosa looked over at me and let out a one-syllable laugh. “If Carlo Mancini gets old it means we’re all getting old, right, my love? And we can’t have that, can we. Ten million Italian women would be unable to have orgasms beneath their loving husbands.”
“Will you please not talk like that on this trip?”
“Why? You used to like it when I talked like that. And, anyway, I’m talking about our obsession with staying young, not sex. But so what if I was? Sex is part of life. And I haven’t made love in…how long since we lived together?”
“Six years.”
“In six years, then. Have you?”
“Of course not.”
“You haven’t cheated on me?”
“No,” I said, though the conversation was bringing up another faded memory: my wife’s fiery jealousy. Even in my best days I’d never been a particularly handsome man, but, for whatever reason, women seemed to find me attractive. I had many female friends, and Rosa had never appreciated that, or completely trusted me.
In truth, though, I was at least as jealous of her friendships with men, probably more so. It was another of the ways in which our marriage had seemed destined to fail.
“Really? You haven’t slept around?”
“No, never.”
“We’re still young enough, though, aren’t we?”
“Stop, Rosa. I’m thinking about Carlo Mancini.”
“I can fix you up with him if you’d like. He’s been known to—”
“Stop it. Please. You’ve been keeping company with decadent movie stars. They’ve poisoned your thoughts.”
“You cheated on me,” she said. “I can feel it.”
“Stop.”
“Tell me again that you didn’t.”
“I didn’t.”
“Swear on your soul.”
“I swear on my soul. You’re the one who’s lost her faith, not me. You’re the one who can’t seem to stop talking about sex, no matter who’s in the backseat. You’re the one who socializes with movie stars and the fabulously rich.”
“Some of them are very fine people.”
“I’m sure.”
“We had fun, though, didn’t we? You and I?”
“Stop.”
But instead of stopping, Rosa shifted her eyes to the mirror for a second, then back to the road, and said, “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting, Giorgio, but, given what’s going on in the front seat here, I’d like to return to our previous conversation, if you don’t mind. About being Catholic and so on.”
“Of course, Rosa. Please.”
“I’m puzzled about the celibacy issue, for example. When I…when Paolo and I were living together, I used to enjoy sex very much. Very much. You don’t mind me saying that, I hope.”
“Not at all.”
“It made me feel alive. Made me feel loved sometimes, and other times it just relaxed me after a hard day of work or child-rearing.”
“It is the act that made your child come into being in the first place.”
“Right. Exactly. The love of our lives, a beautiful creature, as you know. So tell me, why would God look down on something like that?”
“He doesn’t look down on it at all. Sexual love between husband and wife isn’t evil. That’s not doctrine.”
“Right, but priests have to be celibate. Why is that? It sends a certain message—that in order to be close to God you have to give up sex.”
“No, no!” the Pope said with some force. “It’s just that t
he pleasures of this earth—sex, especially—are so intense, so all-consuming, that they leave less space for attention to God.”
“But in my case I think it made more space for attention to God. I never felt closer to God than when Paolo and I were making love. Or sometimes after we finished. And yet, if it wasn’t intended for a pregnancy, I was made to feel sinful about it. If we hadn’t been married, I would have been a condemned woman. That’s the kind of thing that pushed me away from the Church.”
There was another awkward silence, more biting down on the inside of my cheek. Once she got started, Rosa would go on and on like this, I knew it. I found myself imagining ways I might escape: go into a roadside café…sneak out the back door, and hitchhike to Rome; plead carsickness and sit in a field for a few hours; take a ferry to Albania and work in a tavern there, pouring beer; turn us all in.
“I hear these things often,” the Pope said, and I could tell from his voice that the conversation was upsetting him.
“You’re not a lawyer,” I whispered to my wife. “Stop harassing him. He’s with us to relax, not to be tormented.”
“Nonsense,” Rosa whispered back. And then, at normal volume, “It’s chasing people away from the Church, if you don’t mind my saying so. In the modern world, you know, the birth-control issue, well, it seems like an anti-sex stance. Has anyone else ever said that to you?”
“Not in so many words,” the Holy Father told her.
“But you understand, yes?”
“On many issues,” the Pope said, after another pause, “I find myself torn between the ancient traditions of the Church I love, and these kinds of modern questions. Maybe God has brought us together in this way to force me to confront them more directly, more personally.”
“See,” Rosa said across the seat, no longer making any attempt to keep her words only between us. “Maybe God sent me on this trip so I could talk to the Pope in an honest way. What about that idea, amore?”
“I dream sometimes about women,” the Dalai Lama said suddenly from behind her.
“Hallelujah!” Rosa said. “No offense to either of you, but hallelujah! Yes, I remember now. I believe I read that in one of your interviews—that you dream about women. How wonderful is that!”
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 7