“And then I say to myself, in the dream, no, Tenzin, you are the monk. The pleasure of being with woman is not for you in this life.”
But Rosa would not be deterred. “I just really and truly don’t see the point,” she persisted. “If something is good, then it must bring you closer to God, or to the Divine Intelligence, or whatever. Either that, or it’s not good. Sex is like eating to me. A natural urge, a need even, though I guess some people can live without it.”
No response from the backseat. An ecclesiastical silence. Rosa moved her eyes from road to mirror, twice, expectantly.
And then at last the Dalai Lama said—somewhat timidly, I thought, as if he were afraid of causing an argument—“For us, the birth control not something bad.”
“Really?”
“For us, family love is very very important part of the spiritual path. When monks asked Buddha if it could be that ordinary people—they called them ‘householders’—could be enlightened, the Buddha said, ‘Not one householder, not one hundred householders, but an unlimited number of householders are enlightened.’ ”
“And they have sex,” Rosa pressed on triumphantly.
“Buddha, I think, didn’t talk too much about sex.”
“And neither did Jesus! When I was a teenage girl I looked for it everywhere in the Bible. Other people talked about it, but he didn’t. Other people went crazy when they caught the woman having adultery, but he didn’t!”
“Calm yourself, Rosa.”
“This is important to me, Paolo. I think it’s important to Anna Lisa. To about fifty million women in Italy. To about a billion Catholics. If you can’t use birth control, and you already have one or two or six children and you don’t want any more, then, really, you can’t have sex without worrying. I don’t get that. Plus, if you want to avoid abortions, isn’t birth control the natural first step?”
Another wave of deafening silence from the backseat. In truth, I missed sex at least as much as Rosa did. Gone was the fiery, logic-demolishing urge I remembered from my younger days, but the desire was there—not just for the physical part of it but for something else, for that kind of intimacy with another human being, for that great weapon against loneliness. “Could it be,” I said, to no one in particular but hoping my cousin would answer, “that if you’re celibate you cultivate a different kind of intimacy? With God?”
“Exactly,” the Pope said.
“But can’t you have both at the same time?” Rosa asked. “Intimacy with God and that kind of intimacy with another person?”
We stopped at a red light. Two children in the car next to us slapped the windows and made faces. They seemed to be mocking us. The Pope coughed. At last the Dalai Lama said, “Maybe if you have enough lifetimes with sex, there comes to you a lifetime where it doesn’t matter so much as before. You feel the way that after big meal the person feels about eating. Maybe then you have the celibate life and you are content. Like me.”
“That more-than-one-lifetime idea explains a lot,” Rosa said.
“Yes, very much…And maybe, also, it is true.”
The Pope had fallen silent. It felt to me like an uneasy silence, exactly the type of thing I’d hoped to avoid. I waited a full minute, hoping against hope and history that my wife’s noble pursuit of Catholic sexual logic had been temporarily exhausted. I agreed with her, of course—it was just her choice of audience, her timing, that troubled me. “Who’s hungry?” I asked.
“I am,” Rosa said. “The coffee made me hungry.”
“I would like to go to where the earthquake was,” the Dalai Lama said, rather suddenly. “I have seen this place in my dreams but I do not know the name.”
“L’Aquila,” the Pope said. “We’re close, aren’t we, Rosa?”
Rosa nodded. “It’s off this road, not too far. Paolo and I had a fantastic meal there on our anniversary, remember, amore? I think I could find that trattoria, unless—”
“What is this L’Aquila means?”
“The word means ‘eagle’ in Italian,” the Pope told his new friend. “It’s a famous place. Ancient. I’ve been meaning to go and pray with the suffering souls there. It’s curious that you mentioned it, Tenzin.”
“No praying in public this time, Your Holiness,” I reminded him.
“Call me Giorgio, please. But yes. I understand. I’d like to go, in any case. I can pray in private, but I would like to see it.”
“No you wouldn’t,” Rosa said. “Believe me. I was there recently, on a weekend business trip to the Abruzzo. It’s not something anybody would like to see.”
14
On April 6th, 2009, four years before my cousin was elected pope, a massive earthquake struck the medieval city of L’Aquila, killing more than three hundred people and leaving sixty thousand without a place to sleep. Our prime minister at the time, the billionaire media magnate Silvio Berlusconi, famously announced that the homeless would be taken care of, they shouldn’t worry, they should consider themselves to be on a camping weekend, or just go to the beach for a bit and pretend they were on vacation. The government would put them up in temporary shelters and build them new places to live.
Thousands of families, their homes destroyed or damaged beyond hope of repair, moved to a tent encampment on the northern edge of L’Aquila or abandoned the marvelous medieval city altogether. Thousands of jobs had disappeared overnight; scores of roads had been rendered impassable. Six years later, as we approached the city, only a tiny percentage of the promised homes had been made available to the survivors.
Strange and disturbing events had accompanied the disaster, the kinds of things that made you lose faith for a while in the sanity of the country you loved. For example, a group of six government seismologists were charged with negligence…because they hadn’t predicted the quake! They were tried, convicted of manslaughter, and sent to jail, only to have their cases overturned a year later. Official inquiries were started into shabby construction practices and inadequate materials, and there were rumors—probably true—of Mafia involvement in the vast sums of relief money that changed hands. At the same time, though, the Italian public and Italian corporations responded with a magnificent compassion. Berlusconi himself offered survivors shelter in several of his many homes. Mobile-phone companies suspended billing. For many months no tolls were collected on the nearby highways, students were given free railway passes, and Aquileans were exempted from federal taxes and mortgage payments.
In a nation so defined by the rites and practices of Roman Catholicism, it seemed an eerie coincidence that the majority of the dead were buried in a state funeral on Good Friday. There were Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim services, too, and for a little while a sense of national unity triumphed over our petty squabbles.
In short, the L’Aquila quake showed Italy at its very best and very worst, but the horror of it stayed with us, a deep, deep wound.
The four of us drew close to the ruined city in another of our silences—more reverent, less awkward—gliding on serpentine roads through the hills of the Abruzzo region. Things were still so bad that private vehicles weren’t allowed into L’Aquila’s center. We parked a kilometer away and walked into the city, uphill, in search of the restaurant where, in better days, Rosa and I had eaten a fabulous anniversary meal.
It so happened that, going along the narrow sidewalk there, Rosa walked side by side with the Pope, and the Dalai Lama and I fell into step behind them. I was surprised again at how powerfully built he was, how limber and energetic for a man his age, and I wondered, as I often did in the Pope’s presence, if there might be a link between a life of prayer and vibrant health. He was stepping along slowly, trying to get accustomed to being without his robe, and he was working prayer beads through his fingers in a way that made me worry he’d be recognized. Even with the sad spectacle before us, and even with his slightly awkward gait, his body language had a delighted ease about it, a peacefulness that radiated from his hands and arms and shoulders.
I was intimidated by his presence, of course. Who wouldn’t be? After trying, for half a block, to find something intelligent to say, I came up with this: “L’Aquila has special memories for me, Your Holiness.”
“Tenzin, please.”
“Yes, sorry. Tenzin. My father was American—Italian-American—but my mother was Italian, and I was born in this country and raised here. Up north. They took me on a trip to L’Aquila for my sixteenth birthday. And then Rosa and I came here on our wedding anniversary, not long before we had our child.”
“Family love,” he said.
“I had a great deal of it.”
He reached across the distance between us and squeezed my upper arm. It was the gesture of a loving uncle. “We believe family love is most important part of spiritual life!”
“I’m a little surprised to hear you say that. I mean, you’re a monk—no offense—I’d expect you to be emphasizing meditation, fasting, the memorization of ancient texts. Things like that.”
He turned his head to me but, with the crazily oversized dark glasses covering half his face, it was difficult to guess what he was thinking. He laughed, suddenly. At me, I suppose. “I had the family, too.”
“Yes, of course, I didn’t—”
“I was oldest one. My mother and father had nine children, and in our home we had great harmony. My mother, especially, was the woman of compassion and warm feelings. A warm mother very important to the spiritual life!”
“Rosa was like that. With our daughter. A supermother.”
“You and Rosa are married, yes?”
I nodded.
“But something between you now, yes? Some troubles?”
Another nod. “A long history of arguing over nothing, basically.”
“Ah,” he said. “Stories.”
“Pardon?”
“We make up stories about the other person. In our minds we build these stories—she is this way, he is that way; look, she always do this, he always do that—and then these things keep us from seeing this person full as they are in present moment.”
Coming, as it did, with the vision of wreckage and disaster looming in front of us, this mini-sermon slipped into my thoughts like a stiletto. I had my old stories about Rosa, of course I did: that she was illogical, careless at times, that she liked to argue, that it was impossible to go on living with her. And I was sure…almost sure…that they were absolute truths. I didn’t really like the idea of trying to see her only in the present moment, cleansed of history. It was too difficult just then. Some petulant little part of me resisted…so I convinced myself the Dalai Lama knew next to nothing about being married, and probably shouldn’t be giving advice on the subject.
We walked along, slowly, peacefully, the Pope and Rosa pulling farther ahead—he in the elegant business suit, she in a silvery, knee-length dress. Watching the shift and flex of her calf muscles, I wondered if she was talking to the Holy Father about her neurotic husband, complaining, criticizing, telling stories about me. The Pope didn’t know much about marriage, either, I told myself, but still, there was a knife in my thoughts then, courtesy of my new Tibetan friend, a thin, sharp blade of doubt that couldn’t quite be shaken loose. See her in the present moment, I was thinking. See her in the present moment. Had my parents been able to do that during all their long years of marriage? Had they known something about love that Rosa and I never learned?
“I remember how beautiful the center of the city was,” I said, “block upon block of five-hundred-year-old buildings, churches, cathedrals, rows of small shops. Now, look.” I gestured ahead of us to where, even from a hundred meters away, we could see what was left of L’Aquila: a nightmare landscape of construction cranes looming over piles of rubble. Some of the less severely damaged buildings were held together by steel beams and cables, as if they were Christmas presents wrapped in construction paper and tied in metal ribbons. In places huge banners hung from the scaffolding: “L’AQUILA’S RENAISSANCE” and “A MODERN RESURRECTION” and “WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER.”
I rambled on about the charitable efforts—Madonna had raised a huge sum, did he know who Madonna was? He did—and tales of corruption. “But as far as the money goes, who really knows what the truth is? We’re a nation of storytellers and rumormongers.”
“Very sad,” he said. “So much suffering.”
We were just then entering the closed-to-traffic center of the city.
“Give me one piece of spiritual advice,” I said suddenly, without intending to say it.
The Dalai Lama squeezed my shoulder again, then let go, but he kept his eyes fixed on me. Through the dark lenses I could just make out his irises—steady, untroubled, caring.
“You maybe sometimes get angry, yes?” he said.
“Yes. Sometimes. Not too bad, really, or too often. I’m not—”
“When you get angry, those times, maybe look to see if ego shows up, okay?”
“Okay, sure, but—”
“Lot of times anger grows out from ego like the weed from dirt, okay? Like the snake come out in the sun sometime, the anger come out when the ego working, the hot sun of the ego, see?”
“Yes.”
“Snake always hiding, still there, you maybe can’t see it. But then”—he shot one arm forward—“comes out with the ego, okay?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Good student.” He chuckled, patted me on the shoulder.
We crested a small rise and moved, a few steps behind Rosa and my newly blond cousin, into the sad heart of L’Aquila’s ruins, all dust, cranes, dump trucks, and devastation, medieval doorways turned into crooked boxes, ancient walls veined with cracks. All four of us walked in silence, hypnotized. After a few turns—the tortured new face of the city was playing with her memory—my wife pointed in front of her to a head-high pile of rubble and declared that she’d found the place where we’d eaten one of the best meals of our lives. We were celebrating our marriage on that happy afternoon, expecting a child. The food had been magnificent. Now we were staring at a pile of dusty gray stones, bent metal bars, broken glass. As Rosa ran her gaze over the devastation, a tear broke loose and traced a line down one cheek. The Pope, standing close, reached over and wiped it away. I thought she might say something like “Remember how happy we were on that day, amore?” Or “This makes me think of our marriage. Glorious once, now in shambles.” But she only stood and stared, crying quietly.
15
From the ruined restaurant, hungry now and in need of a respite, we turned, four abreast, onto what had once been a main street but was now a pedestrian walkway smelling of cement dust, diesel exhaust, and garbage. A trattoria perched on one corner like a triumphant survivor. Dark woodwork inside, six tables. To my surprise—and I noticed it the second we stepped through the door—a small brass bust of Benito Mussolini stood on a shelf above the cash register, occupying a place of pride there, the way, in Italy, statues of the Virgin Mary or St. Anthony sometimes do. We had a history, Il Duce and I: any mention of the man gave me a touch of agita. Any image of him immediately caught my eye. I remembered that Rosa, student of history, had planned to write a thesis on what she’d called “Mussolini’s Witchcraft,” and I remembered my parents’ informal history lectures, the pain in their voices, the bitterness, the horror of war.
Wearing a pinched, taciturn expression and seeming less than pleased to see us, the owner, or waitress—a woman of late middle age—moved out from behind the counter and offered a tepid “Buon giorno.” It was just after eleven a.m., and I wondered if we might be too early for the actual lunch hour, if we’d disturbed her rest or the cook’s preparations.
We were shown to a table at the window. Since the holy men had been reminded not to speak, I took the liberty of ordering for all of us: simple dishes—pasta al pomodoro, bread, a salad, a glass of wine for Rosa and me.
“Per un’immigrante, parla abbastanza bene,” the woman said. For an immigrant you speak fairly well.
“I’m not—” I sta
rted to say, but she rather rudely cut me off.
“Where are you from? Morocco? Syria? We have more and more of you people now.”
“Mezzegra,” I said, “near Lake Como.”
“You’re Italian?”
“Sì, sì,” I told her, hoping both that her mood might thaw and that my disguise might not be too closely scrutinized. “Do you know Mezzegra?”
“Of course. A famous place. A place of tragedy. You were born there?”
“In a hospital in Milano, but that’s where I was raised.”
She hmphfed, as if, given my brown skin and plain clothing, my short biography stretched the borders of believability. “And you travel around now with a beautiful Italian woman.” We Italians are famous for our compliments—another manifestation of our generosity—but I can say with complete certainty that this remark, “Lei va in giro adesso con una bellissima italiana,” wasn’t offered as anything like a compliment. Not to me, at least. Rosa smiled, but I knew she felt the hidden message, too. When the woman turned away, my wife met my eyes and said, quietly, “A little nastiness there, no? Toward my immigrant husband?”
I nodded.
“And what’s so famous about Mezzegra?” the Pope asked.
“It’s the place where Mussolini was killed.”
I watched his face twist into a crooked frown. He started to say something, stopped, and then: “Ah, yes. I remember now. Your mother and my father mentioned it, more than once. I’m getting old, cousin.”
“Never,” I said. “The two of you look and move like you’re in your late thirties. I feel twice your age.”
Both holy men let out a modest chuckle. We’d decided it would be best to eat the meal, as much as possible, without conversation, so as to reduce the risk of the Pope or Dalai being recognized by their voices. But there weren’t any other diners at that hour, and—perhaps this seems strange, given my earlier bout of nervousness—a kind of ease had come over us then, almost as if we were four longtime friends. The echo of suffering—ruptured walls and piles of debris—had molded us together in that present moment. “Did you notice Mussolini on the counter?” Rosa asked me.
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 8