Who knows why such things stick out from the long wash of memory? But we were all three of us linked tight to each other at that moment, so aware of being alive, so grateful, so at peace in each other’s company.
“Did you do it?” Rosa asked.
I nodded, grunted.
“And?”
“And what, Rosa?”
“What were you remembering?”
“Anna Lisa on the beach at Viareggio. The first time she touched the sea.”
“I was remembering making love with you.”
I looked away. I didn’t want to remember that. Anna Lisa was still alive; our love for her was still alive. What had once existed between Rosa and me had perished.
“Embarrassed?”
“No,” I said. “Sad.”
“Well, at least you admit it. I was remembering the way you kiss.”
I kept my head turned away from her.
The chair swung gently in the breeze. It dangled there only a few hundred meters from the top of the lift, but we might as well have been light-years away, because we were, at that point, totally at the mercy of the engineers who’d built the highly unnatural structure, or the men who maintained it, or the nephew down below—God only knew what he was doing with the Maserati and the Pope’s suit jacket! Calling his friends to come take his photo in the elegant car, searching for the gas pedal or the shift, scratching the fenders with a jackknife to see how many coats of paint had been applied…who could guess?
Clasping one hand to the inside of my left thigh, Rosa pulled us even tighter against each other. She left her hand there. “This will be romantic,” she said, “if it doesn’t last too long.”
It lasted too long. Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty, and nothing but the chair swinging in the cold breeze. “Aiuto! Aiuto!” I yelled at one point. Help us! I thought my voice might reach someone in the hotel, but there was no movement there. Blind windows. Deaf walls. We could see, a hundred feet below us, the last stretch of the gravel road—empty of cars—and then nothing but fields of boulders and tall grass. I wondered about the possibility of jumping.
“It reminds me of pictures of Scotland,” Rosa said.
“Only colder.”
“They’ll have to get it going again soon, won’t they?”
“Absolutely.”
And she said, “I love you when you’re optimistic. And I have to say you look good in that disguise. I love the new nose, and the tan is very sexy.”
“The polish or cream or whatever it is keeps me two degrees warmer than I would have been.”
“Two degrees might be the difference between life and death.”
“Funny.”
Twenty-five minutes. Thirty minutes. Nothing. I noticed an angry-looking bank of dark clouds moving toward us from the west. Rosa had begun to shiver, so I put an arm around her shoulders. I looked at the chair ahead and wondered how long it would take for the two old bodies there to succumb to hypothermia. I’d survive, go to jail. The other inmates would know me as the pope killer and I’d endure regular beatings. If there happened to be a Buddhist or two among them, it would be even worse: beatings plus the silent treatment.
Then, without warning, the chair bumped forward a couple of meters…stopped…and started steadily forward again. “Mary, help us!” I prayed.
“We have to get off,” Rosa said, in a tone—very familiar to me—of absolute certainty. She squeezed the inside of my thigh, once, then removed her hand.
“What do you mean? Won’t the chairs bring us back down to the car?”
“Sure. If they don’t stop again, Paolo. It’s too risky. And our guests”—she lifted her chin toward the chair in front of us—“are not as young as you and I. They must be even more frozen than we are. We should get off. We’ll have something hot to drink at the hotel and ask someone to drive us back down the road. You were right, this was a foolish idea. I’m sorry.”
For two musical beats I sat in stunned silence. “You apologized.”
Rosa kept her eyes forward and said nothing.
“You apologized,” I said again.
She nodded once, swung her eyes to meet mine, then away. “I’ve been trying to change. You haven’t noticed. You don’t notice those things.”
“I do, I do…Or at least I want to. Apology accepted. Look at that cloud!”
“We might have to jump for it at the top,” Rosa said, but to our great relief, as we crested the last rise and drew close to the station at the summit of the lift, a man in a quilted jacket stepped into view and hailed us.
“Scendete o rimanete?” he yelled. “Get off or stay on?”
“Off, off, off, off!” Rosa and I yelled back in unison.
“All four of you?”
“Sì!” the Pope shouted, in a voice that might be described as the quintessence of panic. The syllable echoed against the hillsides. “Sì! Sì! Sì! Sì!”
The jacketed man pulled a lever and slowed the chairs. I saw the Dalai Lama lift the safety bar, and the worker help him and the Pope make their dismount. Then Rosa and me. We handed over our blankets and thanked him profusely. Rosa planted a kiss on the side of his face.
“Weather coming,” he said, pointing with his free hand to the approaching cloud bank, which was the color of eggplant skin, bubbling, swelling, venomous. “Go inside for a while.”
We needed no further encouragement. I asked the Pope if he was all right. “Fine, fine,” he said, but he was shivering violently. He’d hooked his arm inside the Dalai Lama’s and they were walking along like that, practically vibrating, best of frozen friends. I expected to see the aftermath of trauma on his face, but what I saw there, what I sensed, was something very different. Not relief. Not victory, exactly, but a tiny, triumphant smile visible in the blond brush of facial hair. We walked a few more steps toward the hotel before he said, “Rosa,” reached out with his other arm and caught her inside the elbow, “what a wonderful idea that was! What a gift! I’ll remember it all my days!”
19
In Italian, Campo Imperatore means “the Emperor’s Field” or “the Emperor’s Camp,” but…well…the polite way to say this is that the hotel’s name conveyed a grandiosity the building itself did not match. Five stories of mud-brown stone with one rounded side, it squatted there on the summit looking more like a place that had once housed the criminally insane than like any kind of emperor’s summer residence (though it occurred to me that the two were not mutually exclusive). A handful of parked cars sat in the tar lot behind. We saw a tiny side building with a cross over the door—a chapel, perhaps, where the local nuns gathered on Thursday mornings to pray for the souls of those who had perished on the chairlift—and a pair of hikers, dressed for Everest, making their way along a path. To one flank was the top of the ski lift, to the other the terminus of the gravel road, and, in between, the Imperatore’s scarred back door, through which the four of us stepped, still shivering, hoping for nothing more than a cup of hot tea and a ride down the mountain.
But two things happened as we moved across the threshold. First, there was a tremendous crash of thunder over our heads and a sudden burst of rain against the windows. Second, and more peculiar, we found ourselves in a musty, poorly lit foyer of stone and worn linoleum, where the walls were decorated with framed photos of Benito Mussolini and framed newspaper pages bearing his image. Passing us on the way out, a man—unshaven, smelling of the soil—burped loudly.
It seemed to me that we’d wandered into a neo-fascist bunker, one of history’s latrines. The Pope and the Dalai Lama were examining the newspaper pages, one translating for the other. Rosa leaned close to me and whispered, “I forgot, Paolo. That was the other reason I thought of coming to this place: the Pope’s Mussolini dreams! Il Duce was held here for a month or two in 1943, after the king kicked him out. It’s a long story, but that was in my mind. There was a whole chapter about this place in one of my textbooks.”
“It’s a fascist nest,” I said. “A nightmare for someon
e of my political persuasion.”
“The man behind the desk looks friendly. Let’s ask if we can sit and get something hot.”
Surrounded though he was by Mussolini memorabilia, the clerk was indeed a friendly and apparently open-minded type (meaning he did not seem upset by two other-than-white-skinned men entering his establishment). He greeted us warmly, saw immediately that we were cold—“You rode the lift? In this weather? It was open?”—and told us to have a seat in the dining area, he’d send someone out with hot tea.
On a decent day, the first-floor dining room with its curved wall of east-facing glass must have offered a fine perspective on the view, but at that moment the windows were obscured by a silvery deluge. Another crash of thunder, great sheets of water coursing down the glass, a shrieking wind. “Imagine if we were still stuck out there,” Rosa said.
“I’m trying not to.”
There were twenty circular tables, each covered in white cloth and set with silverware for six, but they were empty of patrons at that hour. Still shivering, we chose one near the front wall, all of us turning our chairs so we could watch the storm. After a bit, a waiter with skin almost as brown as my own came out of a back room carrying a tray with a teapot and four cups. He greeted us in solid, if accented, Italian—a southerner, for sure—and set the cups and saucers before us with a practiced dignity that would have been at home in the Vatican dining rooms. He poured the tea and asked us how we’d gotten so cold.
“We rode up on the chairlift,” Rosa told him.
“Sta scherzando,” he said. You’re kidding.
She shook her head.
“The fool! He’s not supposed to send people up yet. We’re just testing it to make sure it works.”
“Well, keep testing,” I told him. “We were stuck out there for the better part of an hour.”
He shook his head, kept staring at me. “You speak Italian better than I do.”
“I’ve lived here a long time.”
“Ah. And your friends?”
“This beautiful woman here is a napoletana. The other two are visitors whose Italian embarrasses them…hikers from Alsace-Lorraine.”
“Well, welcome. Get warm. Say a prayer of thanks to God that you survived.” He smiled at Rosa and just before turning away told her, “I’m a southerner, too. Napoli. Here to make money. No jobs where I live. None.”
A minute later he returned with a plate of less-than-perfectly-fresh pastries and cookies. We sipped our tea and waited for the rough weather to pass, but it went on and on—rain, booming thunder, then a steady hard ticking against the glass.
“Hail,” Rosa said.
“This reminds me of home,” the Dalai Lama said quietly. “In the winter, snow. In the summer, sometimes, like this.”
“Do you miss Tibet?” Rosa asked him.
“So much!”
“Think you’ll ever be allowed to return?”
“I think so, maybe, yes. I want to walk again, one time, into the Potala Palace. I want to see my people again smiling and not afraid. I pray for that, and for Chinese leaders. That they stop bringing so much terrible karma on themselves.”
Rosa studied him, squinting her eyes the way she did when something bothered her. I thought it must be the toupee—it resembled the hairdo of a sixties rocker, and His Holiness could not quite pull off the look—but then she said, “Do you really pray for them? I mean, religious people say that all the time, but aren’t you angry? Don’t you hate them even a small bit?”
What you saw in the flex of the Dalai’s big cheeks then was a ripple of the most profound puzzlement. He hesitated a few seconds, watching my wife, waiting, it seemed, for her to amend the question so that it made some sense. “Hate them?” he asked, his voice spiking high into a note of incredulity.
“I would. Most people I know would.”
“But I see what they are bringing onto themselves in the next many lifetimes.”
“You’re sure?”
He turned his eyes to me, trying to comprehend. He’d just said that the sun was hot—wasn’t it obvious?—but Rosa was resisting. Couldn’t it also be cold sometimes?
“Rosa focuses on this life,” I said. Generously, I thought, but—
“And you don’t, Paolo?”
“Of course. Yes. I just—”
“I want us all to be honest!” Rosa exclaimed, so forcefully that I was grateful for the empty room. She was about to have—I could sense this—one of her moments. These moments weren’t always ugly or angry, but they were always intense, a kind of orgasmic explosion, the release of a huge backup of Neapolitan emotion, as natural to people in that part of the world as heated water coming to a boil at the appropriate temperature. She shifted her eyes—once, twice—from one holy man to the other and back again. “I ask that of you both. I ask respectfully—really, I have nothing but the greatest reverence for you both. But please! No pious…stuff! Excuse me. Forgive me. I wanted to swear but I held myself back. I swear all the time, I admit it. I think swears are just words, that’s all. I simply couldn’t bear it if I had the gift of this time with you and we wasted it on a kind of phony, pious…”
“Yes, good!” the Dalai Lama put in happily when she hesitated. He smiled at her, a beacon of acceptance, and added, “One monk I know—the soldiers were torturing him with the electricity in his teeth, his guns, yes?”
“Gums.”
“Yes, and he was all the time praying for them.”
Before Rosa’s questions had heated up, the Pope had seemed distracted. Now he leaned closer, fully with us again. “On the cross,” he told Rosa, “Christ called out, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.’ ”
Rosa was leaning forward now, too, both hands on the tablecloth, fingers spread and pressing down hard, hot southern blood at full boil. “But are those stories real? And if they are real, isn’t that level of forgiveness so far beyond the ability of the ordinary person that it’s a kind of lie to imitate it?”
“Your husband, maybe hurt you little bit one time?” the Dalai Lama asked in an innocent way.
“Many times. Yes, we both—”
“But you forgive him now, yes?”
“Now I do. But it took a long time…and he never put electric prods in my mouth or nailed me to a cross!”
“In deep meditation, person can go beyond feelings of pain, do you see?”
“Not really, no. Plus—”
“And we believe that every person has nature of Buddha inside. Very same nature as Buddha. Friends, enemies…same. So, therefore, we must pray for their liberation, do you see?”
“It doesn’t feel that way,” Rosa said sulkily.
“You can forgive your daughter all the time, yes?”
“Yes, easily.”
“And you can forgive your husband now. So now you have to see daughter and husband in every person! That’s all! Very simple!”
“That’s what you do?”
“That what I try to do. Every day I try this. To see Buddha in everyone.”
“And you, Holy Father?” she asked the Pope, pronouncing the last two words quietly.
The Pope turned his eyes to her with a quick movement, as if he’d been snatched from the depths of thought. “Sorry, ask again?”
Rosa repeated the question, and the Pope scratched in an absentminded way at his goatee. By that point I’d already stopped being surprised by his getup, already stopped paying much attention to the strange hair and beard and street clothes. Once, long ago, he’d said to me that we were all in disguise, always. We went through the world as men or women, old or young, rich or poor, good or evil, but beneath all that, beneath the aspects that could be described with words, there lay some “essence,” as he’d called it. “That’s what is meant by ‘the soul,’ I think, Paolo,” he said. I remembered the conversation so well. We were walking through the Borghese Gardens on a windy fall afternoon. He was in Vatican City for some kind of retreat or colloquium, visiting from his homeland, and h
e came to see Rosa and me and our beloved daughter on a free Saturday, had lunch at our home, insisted on washing the dishes, played with Anna Lisa until it was time for her afternoon nap, then asked if he and I could take a stroll through the city. “If you think of a loved one who has died,” he said, on that walk, “if you close your eyes and think of your mother or father, for instance, you can feel their essence, can’t you? Yes, it might be associated with a face, a body, a particular memory, but there’s something else, isn’t there? There’s something that makes them exactly who they are, a conglomeration of memories that goes beyond the looks and personality. Their energy, we could say. Their unique spirit in the world. You can feel it, can’t you?”
I said that I could, and I had thought about it many times since. The body, the face, the personality…and then this something else beneath all that. “Buddha nature,” the Dalai Lama would probably call it. The soul. The place beyond pain.
I felt it at that moment, too, looking across the table at my cousin in his blond wig and blond mustache and goatee, his white shirt collar sticking up over the neck of the expensive sweater. The disguise changed his appearance, yes, but not his essence. I imagine he felt it, too, looking at the wife of his immigrant cousin. I wondered if he even saw Rosa as a woman, and I mean that in the very best sense: that he saw her as a soul first, and only then filled in the details.
“For me,” he answered Rosa, “the question of suffering is constantly in my thoughts. I see Christ in every person, and so the great challenge on this earth is to watch people suffer, to be aware of the massive amount of suffering, and be unable to help.”
Rosa was frowning—in a more or less respectful way.
“You’re frowning,” the Pope told her. He smiled.
“I believe you mean it,” she said. “I do. But I want to hear something else. I want to hear the explanation you give to yourself, in your heart of hearts. For torture. For evil. For terrorism. And, forgive me, but if you say ‘original sin’ I’ll never speak to you again!”
The Pope held his eyes on her. “The explanation I give to myself is this, Rosa: I don’t know.”
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 11