“Instantly.”
“A little weird, no?”
The Pope—sitting with the confident posture of a man of wealth and power—brushed at his lapel, tightened the knot of his tie, and craned his neck to see the statue. The woman behind the counter caught him looking and smiled in an evil way. She made a point of going over to the bust and dusting it with a dishrag.
“So strange,” the Pope said in a barely audible tone. He hesitated again. Pursed his lips, finally said, “I’ve been having dreams of him lately. One of our uncles was killed by his thugs, Rosa. I’m sure I told you.”
“You did,” she replied. “Paolo told me, also, a thousand times. Paolo’s father was obsessed with Mussolini. ‘The Grand Benito,’ he used to call him, in the most sarcastic way. He thought it was ironic that the house he and my mother-in-law bought near Lake Como, the place where Paolo was raised, stood only a few hundred meters from the spot where Mussolini had been executed. Paolo’s mother liked to say their happy life there was her brother’s posthumous revenge.”
“We believe,” the Dalai Lama put in quietly, “that people are sometimes drawn to certain places on this earth because of what happened there in previous life, or to those people they love.”
The Pope nodded, as if the idea of reincarnation suddenly made sense to him. “I’ve been trying to understand something, and I will confess it to all of you now, openly, though it’s embarrassing to me.” He swallowed, looked at each of us in turn. “For the past few months I’ve been having especially vivid dreams—they are part of the reason I wanted to make this trip, to try to understand the messages in them. Often, Mussolini appears in these dreams. He’s pointing or saluting in that strange way he had. He never speaks. There are other people, too, people I don’t know, but they appear and reappear, night after night. Women, men in robes. There are helicopters and police cars and soccer balls, and a feeling—it’s difficult to explain—of something blessed in the air. I wake up sensing a powerful spirit in the room. I’ve been praying and praying, hoping to understand. There are other things, too, strange things. I—”
“We believe dreams have great power,” the Dalai Lama said. He stopped there, abruptly, but I had the sense he’d wanted to make a confession, too.
The Pope was nodding at him, and it seemed to me he also wanted to say something more, to elaborate on his revelation. I watched him. I heard him say, as if trying to take the spotlight off himself, “There are so many important dreams in the Bible. Countless dreams. Zechariah dreamed of John the Baptist before that son was born to him, for one example. Joseph had a dream that Mary’s child was from God. Pilate’s wife had a dream that he should free Jesus.”
“These are the mind sending signals,” the Dalai Lama said.
The Pope was nodding again, but there was another strange moment then, a pregnant pause, a sudden awkwardness just as we’d been feeling so relaxed. “God,” he said at last, “trying to tell us something.”
“Yes, we must to pay attention.”
“My stomach is sending me signals,” Rosa said. “I hope the food is better than the service.”
The waitress, or owner, or whatever she was—the Mussolini polisher—brought bread and oil and our salads to the table, then left and returned with two glasses of wine. Rosa offered one of her gorgeous smiles and tried to charm the woman out of her sulk: “We’re sad to see the city like this. It used to be such a beautiful place.”
“Sure,” the woman said. Certo. “And what makes it worse is that all the illegals come here now, all the immigrants. They come from Libya. Albania. Ethiopia. Now the Arabs, too. And Syrians. They get free medical care, did you know that? Just like we do. Only they don’t work like we work. Free schools for the kids, free doctors, free food. Naturally they come here, because they find out there’s free housing in L’Aquila. We’re giving everything away in Italy now. We’re giving away our country.”
“I haven’t seen many people who look like illegals,” Rosa said pleasantly.
The woman glanced at me pointedly, then turned her eyes back to my wife. “You don’t live here, though, do you.”
It wasn’t a question. She returned to her place behind the counter, leaving us in air that seemed to have been filled with acrid smoke.
“This person, I think,” the Dalai Lama said, “holds little bit to being angry.”
Rosa broke a slice of bread in half and dipped it into a shallow bowl of oil. “She’s angry at immigrants, Tenzin. There’s a lot of that in Italy now. First it was the Albanians, after the Soviet Union broke up. Now it’s North Africans, and Central Africans, and refugees from the hell in Syria. Sometimes they get tricked into coming by people they pay, people who promise them jobs that don’t exist, and then they end up on these boats that capsize off Sicily or Malta and they drown. Those who do arrive safely, a lot of the time they’re unwelcome. Most Italians are generous souls, but the job situation isn’t exactly wonderful here, so some of us aren’t very happy to see thousands of job-seekers coming ashore. There are racists, too, of course. Racists and haters. And some of the immigrants are good people, some aren’t. It’s not a simple situation.”
“I should have said more about this,” the Pope told her when she’d finished. “When we get back I’m going to make a point of addressing this issue—the war, the hatred, this economic system that gives us so much comfort and yet carries suffering in its womb.”
“It’s everywhere,” I said. “I’ve heard that America has the same problem with people coming from the horrors and poverty of Central America. Even China has North Korean refugees trying to sneak in. Turks in Germany. Moroccans in France. Syrians in Hungary and Croatia and Turkey…all over Europe, in fact.”
“The poor want to eat,” the Dalai Lama said.
The poor want to eat, I thought. Such a simple thing. And then, in practice, it became so complicated. “If you have two cloaks, give one away,” Jesus had said. Also simple. But who lived like that? What person in one of the world’s rich countries, who among the world’s billion Catholics, gave away half of what he or she had? Who gave away even a tenth?
The woman brought our pasta and it was, indeed, very well prepared. Out of the tops of my eyes I watched the holy men eat, noticing how they prayed over the meal before lifting a fork, how they chewed slowly, contemplatively, really tasting, really feeling and appreciating the food in their mouths. I found myself wondering what it felt like to be truly hungry, not for an hour, but for days, weeks, a whole life.
Partway through our lunch the front door slammed open. A man, clearly drunk, staggered in. Such a sight is blessedly uncommon in Italy, where children are served wine from the time they’re in grade school and teenagers can buy a glass at a restaurant or bar without any questions being asked. My parents had adopted that custom: I’d been drinking alcohol since I was ten. Seeing wine on the dinner table was as natural as seeing water, and so, by the time I reached adolescence, there was no urge to show the world, by drinking to excess, that I’d come of age.
This man, however—square-built, raggedly dressed—seemed never to have gotten the message. I half-expected the owner to chase him out the door. Instead, the man went up and leaned against the counter and the two of them conversed like old friends, glancing at our table once, laughing, muttering.
We finished our pasta and decided to order coffee and a bowl of tiramisu. Why not? We’d been up most of the night. We were on vacation. At that point my lovely wife was kind enough to bring up the story—commonly heard in Italy—that tiramisu (in Italian the word means “pick me up”) originated in the bordellos, where the working women needed a dose of espresso and a measure of liqueur in order to make it through the long nights. Rosa went into some detail. Neither the Pope nor the Dalai Lama could think of anything to say in response.
The drunk staggered out. The owner brought our pick-me-up—delicious!—and then took up her post again by the Grand Benito, watching us as if we might run out the door without paying. It wa
s lunch hour now, but no other customers appeared. We finished in a silence painted darkly around the edges by the woman’s bitterness. I asked for the check, paid, and, after my three companions had waved to her in thanks or apology or forgiveness and gone out onto the street, the woman handed me the change.
“Homosexual friends?” she asked, raising her chin in the direction of the door. “Another mixed couple?”
It took me several seconds to understand. I held my eyes on her. I’m not one who believes in auras and such things, but there was a kind of vapor surrounding this woman. Her long, thin face, topped with a mop of badly cut gray hair, seemed cloaked in a spiteful mist. She was working her lips as if she might spit. “Sai,” I said in Italian, using the informal address, a mild insult in this case. “You know, you should be careful what you think about people. You never know who they might be.”
“And that’s what?” she spat back. “A threat?”
“Not at all. You just have no idea who they are, or who I am. You should really stop making up stories about people in your mind, and putting human beings into boxes.”
“And you and your queer friends should really stop coming in here,” she said. “In fact,” she punched a button and the cash register door slammed open. She flipped up the metal bracket that held down the bills, removed the three twenty-euro notes I’d just given her, and slapped them down on the counter in front of me. “We’re not taking your money.”
“Please keep it,” I said. “I only meant—”
“No. We don’t need your money here. We don’t need people like you coming in here. Go back to wherever you came from. Take it now. Leave. Prendilo e vai via!”
I took it and left, thinking, as I walked out, that Il Duce would have been proud of her. Thinking: No wonder your place is empty at lunchtime.
My companions had wandered a few meters down the ravaged street. Broken buildings stood at odd angles to either side of them, forming a valley of devastation. I tried to imagine what it had felt like to be walking here when the earthquake struck, and what it had been like to live through the aftershocks—days of them, buildings breaking apart and crashing to the ground, even as the search for bodies and survivors went on. Rumor had it that bands of kids roamed these streets after dark now, drunk or high, having nothing to do and nothing to hope for. People want to eat, I thought. Yes, and they want to feel they have value in the world. They want to work, or go to school; they want a share of the pleasures they see around them.
Ahead of me Rosa, the Pope, and the Dalai Lama turned a corner, and when I turned the same corner I saw that the two men were leaning down, talking to a woman in filthy clothes. A Gypsy, perhaps. She was sitting with her back against a stone doorjamb, a beggar’s bowl on the sidewalk in front of her. The Pope had his hand on the woman’s shoulder, and as I drew closer I could see that she was looking at him, surprised, maybe recognizing the voice, maybe not. The Pope turned to me, “Paolo, do you have money?”
“Yes, Papa,” I said. That is the actual word for “pope” in Italian, and it slipped from my mouth before I could stop it. The angry fascist, the drowning Africans, the homeless woman, L’Aquila’s ruination—they had knocked me into a dream space, pushed all my petty worries to the side. I reached into my pocket and handed over those same three twenties. The Pope placed them in the bowl, then bent down and, holding the woman’s head in both hands, kissed her on her filthy, matted hair. She stared at the bills as if they were living creatures, then raised her eyes, offered him a toothless smile, and said, “Dio ti benedica.” God bless you.
And we went on.
16
We toured what was left of the city in a silence so complete it was a kind of Christian-Buddhist-agnostic prayer. At one point we stopped before a series of enormous photographs that had been taped or pinned to the metal staging around a construction project. The photos gave us L’Aquila in the days immediately following the quake—the ruined buildings, streets choked with rubble. One of the photos, the most powerful, showed a whole field of caskets with mourners wandering down the rows, trying to find the wooden boxes that held their dead. It seemed to me that, in those minutes, we were all four of us acknowledging something larger, some power—merciless it seemed—that insisted on forcing upon us what we least wanted to believe: that things were not stable. Even the earth beneath our feet, the stability we most depended on and took for granted, wasn’t immune. In truth, we could count on nothing.
“This,” the Dalai Lama said, when we’d agreed to head back toward the car, “is why sometimes our monks sit many days only paying the attention on their breath.”
He seemed to be speaking to Rosa, seemed to be answering her question about Buddha and the point of all that “sitting,” seemed to be telling us that there was nothing we should take for granted, nothing at all, not our breath, not our life, not the next minute of existence, not our ideas about right and wrong, not even the solidity of the ground beneath our feet. A larger intelligence ruled all that, and we’d been given this time on earth, these millions of breaths, to ponder it. We’d been sent teachers—Jesus for me, the Pope, and a billion others; Buddha for the Dalai Lama and his many followers. Socrates. Moses. Mohammed. Einstein. Those teachers pointed us in a certain direction, but we didn’t want to go there. We didn’t want to worry about breathing, or the earth splitting apart, or a million whirling universes composed of unlocatable electrons. We wanted to think we understood, that we had some control, when in actual fact we made our way through time on the thinnest film of ice over a lake that was unfathomably deep and utterly mysterious, knowing all the while that one day we’d fall through and drown. We’d seen loved ones disappear like that, one after the next, again and again and again. Still, a sly part of us mouthed a proud “Not me!”
The Pope was nodding, pondering, musing. I thought he might add something from the Christian point of view, but he only pressed his lips together and kept his hands in the pockets of his pricey suit coat. I wanted some alone time with my cousin then, wanted to ask him to talk more about the dreams he’d been having. I wanted to suggest that when we were back in Vatican City, when things had settled into their familiar routine, he make a trip here to L’Aquila and pray with the brave survivors and the mourners and the haters and the drunks. But we were at the car by then, and the skin of my neck was itching from the disguise.
Rosa had a hand on my arm. She asked if I wanted to drive—I didn’t. Even sitting in a borrowed Maserati felt sinful after what we’d seen. She asked if either of the holy men wanted a front seat—no, they were fine. She worked the car free of the tangle of traffic around the closed-off city center, and when our smooth progress was stopped again by a traffic light, she said, “Unless one of you has some place particular in mind, I have an idea about where we could go.”
This worried me, I have to admit. Whenever Rosa said, “I have an idea,” a nest of wasps stirred and buzzed in my brain. But the Pope leaned forward and told her, “Show us the country, dear Rosa. Let the Lord guide us now. Take us where we wouldn’t ordinarily go.”
I thought: Yes, exactly. That’s what we ask of our teachers and holy ones: take us where we wouldn’t ordinarily go. And I had a moment’s peace.
Rosa nodded, looked at me as if I could read her mind. I couldn’t. Another few blocks and we reached a highway entrance. She turned the car onto it and headed north.
17
We drove along the highway only a short while—fifteen minutes or so—and during that time the memories of what we’d seen in L’Aquila hung across us like a shroud. A series of sorrowful visions played in my mind’s eye, but it was the photograph of the caskets that occupied center stage. What if my own daughter had been one of the dead? What if Rosa and I had been one of those couples wandering down the lines of wooden boxes with a bouquet of flowers in hand, looking for the name Anna Lisa dePadova scrawled on a square of cardboard? What would our foolish marital arguments have amounted to then? Our stubbornness and pride? What would have
become of my belief in a loving God? And why had those people been there in the photograph, there in that city at that hour on that particular day, and I had been elsewhere? Which great spiritual tradition, which agnostic genius, had an explanation for that?
It was almost two p.m. by then, hot and dry. I was sure all of Vatican City must be in panic mode, Swiss Guards and black-robed monsignors hurrying here and there, sweating through their collars, making urgent phone calls, tourists weeping and reciting the Rosary in St. Peter’s Square, security chiefs pouring cups of hemlock for themselves. It was not, I have to say, a pleasant vision, and I rode along in a small cloud of guilt.
Soon enough, Rosa left the highway, made a series of turns onto smaller and smaller roads, following, it seemed to me, either a map that existed only in her mind or signs for the Parco Nazionale d’Abruzzo. I’d never been to a national park—in their postwar lives my parents were artists, not outdoorsmen. They liked museums, not mud. We went past an entrance—unmanned—and then onto a road—unlined—that slanted gently uphill between high, grassy shoulders. My mind was running, running, running, leaping from one image, one hope, one worry to the next, searching, I suppose, at the deepest level, for stable ground, for an absolute sense of meaning that could carry me through my worst fears.
In the midst of all this I began to think about where we’d spend the night. There was one huge problem: as is the case in many countries, hotels in Italy require all guests to present some form of identification. Passports, usually. I hadn’t brought mine along. I doubted very much if any of us had brought a passport along. What were we going to do, then, sleep out under the stars? Call friends and say, “I wonder if you might have four extra bedrooms, because we’re traveling secretly with the Pope and the Dalai Lama and we need a place to stay”?
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 9