“Zen monks also say this,” the Dalai Lama put in.
“And that’s enough for you both?”
“It has to be, doesn’t it?” the Pope said. “I feel very small in God’s world. I do what I can and I accept what is.”
“Buddhists, same.”
“That’s where our faiths overlap, Tenzin. One of the places. We accept what is, even as we try to make things better.”
“I don’t see things changing for the better,” Rosa said. “I see no evidence of that at all.”
“Mussolini is gone,” the Pope said. “Hitler is gone. Stalin.”
“North Korea,” Rosa countered. “Syria.” She looked at the Dalai Lama. “China.”
“Should we give up, then, my Rosa?”
“I never give up,” she said. “I’ve never in my life given up on anything.”
Your marriage, I thought, but I didn’t say it.
At that moment the Dalai Lama pointed to the windows. Rain and hail drummed and ticked there, a meteorological symphony.
“Maybe somebody could give us a ride down to the car,” Rosa suggested. She was one degree calmer now, but I knew she’d ponder the discussion for hours. She’d fall asleep thinking about it, searching for an answer that made sense—intellectually—when both of us knew, at some level, that a logical explanation for the mystery of human suffering simply did not exist.
The Pope turned to me as if I were the one making the decisions. “What if we stayed here?”
“In this nest of fascists?”
“It’s exceedingly strange, Paolo,” he said. “I dream about the man—Mussolini—and then I walk into this place and see his photo everywhere. He was held prisoner here, the newspaper articles said. Rescued by Hitler’s commandoes. They crash-landed in gliders and spirited him away in a small plane.”
“Too bad the plane didn’t crash, too.”
“Yes, cousin, but I have to think God is pointing me toward something. I’ve been having other strange dreams lately. Hidden messages. Faces. I feel I’m being led…”
“Women and helicopters,” I said. “Lakes and mountains.”
“How did you know?”
“You told me…But sometimes dreams are just dreams, no?”
“Dreams never accidental,” the Dalai Lama put in, but he said it quietly, pronouncing the word “assidental.”
I’m ashamed to say now that I basically ignored that remark. I’d remember it later with some poignancy, but a cloud of worry had overtaken me then. “I don’t like the looks of this place. I don’t like the feel,” I said. “I think it has bad karma.”
Rosa turned her smirk on me. “How would you like the feel of going all the way back down the mountain in a hurricane on that chairlift, amore?”
“It should stop any minute.”
“I say we spend the night. You have cash, don’t you?”
“Yes. Almost enough to pay Carlo Mancini back if the nephew absconded with the car.”
“What are you talking about?!”
“Nothing.”
“We’re all exhausted and this is as safe as anyplace else. We should get rooms and stay.”
“And use what for identification, Rosa? They’ll never let us check in without passports.”
For any ordinary person, that would have been the end of the discussion, a trump card, an insurmountable obstacle. But Rosa, as she accurately claimed, did not give up as easily as most people: it had always been one of the things I admired about her. “Let me see if I can charm the man at the desk,” she said. “I’ll tell him we left our passports in the hotel, that we would have been able to get back to Rome tonight if it hadn’t been for his faulty damn ski lift. And the damn rain. I’ll go while the rain is still pounding and see if he’ll make an exception.”
She stood up, smoothed her dress, put a hand on my right shoulder as if for luck, then strode away.
There is an aspect to Italian life—a beautiful and maddening aspect—that isn’t always apparent to people who come to my country as tourists: Italians do not like rules. You can see it in the double-parked cars on any Naples side street; in the fact that something like 40 percent of our citizens don’t pay taxes; that here, in a supposedly Roman Catholic country, the birth rate is among the lowest in Europe; even in the fact that most small villages put their efforts into worshipping a patron saint instead of the grand figures one finds in the Vatican. You can see it most clearly on the national highways and roads, where the posted speed limit appears to indicate the minimum rate of movement, and where drivers habitually slip deftly into the wrong lane and pass on treacherous curves. Men and women, both, make a game of cutting in line at the train-station ticket windows (there’s even a word for such people—furbi, the sly ones); waiters forget to charge you for the second and third glasses of Vernaccia; road signs lead you into dead ends, or out into the forest.
It makes us a nation of great artists and less-than-great soldiers, and, ironically enough, given where we were seated, it was the same national trait that had blunted Mussolini’s efforts to turn his people into German clones. Most Italians scoffed when he tried to institute a nationwide exercise routine modeled on Hitler’s. Foolishly proud as we were of him at first—his outthrust chest and Roman salute, his promises to bring Italy back to some imagined glory by stunts like invading Ethiopia—once he aligned with the Northern Demon and drew the nation into war, his popularity plummeted. By the time the Allies landed on Sicily in July of 1943, the king and even Mussolini’s own Grand Council of Fascism had had enough of Il Duce. They stripped him of his powers, brought him here to Campo Imperatore for safekeeping because everyone was after him, everyone—the partisans, the Allies, ordinary peasants whose sons had frozen to death on the Russian front. Later, the king would recall Mussolini saying, at their difficult last meeting, “I am the most hated man in all of Italy.” And that wasn’t far from the truth.
The last thing, the very last thing, I wanted was to spend the night in the place where Mussolini had been rescued by Hitler’s thugs. The man had no appeal for me; he’d killed my uncle; my parents had despised him. Rosa, who knew more about his life than most scholars, made a spitting sound whenever she said his name. But I could read the tiredness on the Pope’s face, and I sensed the Dalai Lama had enjoyed more than enough adventure for one day. Rosa was right—it wouldn’t kill us to spend a night here. Maybe, in the grand Italian tradition, the man at the counter would bend the rules for her. She was, after all, a woman of substantial charm…and we were paying in cash.
While we waited for her to return, the Pope chewed absentmindedly on a stale cookie, the Dalai Lama watched it rain, and the unshaven, burping man I’d seen at the entrance, soaked to the skin after his foray into the parking lot, stumbled into the room and stood near the kitchen door, giving me the most malevolent look imaginable. For a minute I thought he’d recognized someone in the group. But no, that wasn’t it. I was an unwelcome guest, nonwhite, an intrusion on his imaginary world of fascist homogeneity. Along with Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, socialists, union organizers, and soft-handed intellectuals, I carried an imaginary disease diagnosed by Dr. Hitler. Mussolini had given a concurring second opinion…and fifty million people perished.
I stared back at him, trying to see Buddha there beneath the confident hatred, to see Christ.
I couldn’t manage it.
Rosa returned to the dining room bearing a brilliant grin and a handful of keys. “Four singles on the top floor,” she said. “I told him we were hosting foreign tourists and had come on a day trip all the way from Rome to see the place where Il Duce had been rescued. I mentioned the chairlift. The rain. I gave him my best smile. We’re all set.”
20
The walls of the fourth-floor hallway were painted floury white, the floor covered with chipped linoleum. The rooms themselves seemed to have been designed to replicate a monk’s cell, so I supposed the Pope and the Dalai, at least, would be comfortable. Each room had a tiny bath with a shower you
could squeeze into as long as you hadn’t eaten in the past week, a good, firm bed, and a window looking out on an Italian version of a tropical monsoon. I couldn’t remember seeing anything like it, really, and I couldn’t stop myself from wondering what would have become of us if we’d been stranded up there on the chairlift in the storm.
The four of us had agreed that we’d allow some time for hot showers, naps, and prayer, then meet at eight-thirty in the dining hall for the evening meal. I shed my clothes, showered carefully so as not to remove Mario’s magical polish, then crawled under the cool sheets. Tired from the long day, drifting toward the kingdom of sleep, I found myself going over the unfinished dining-room discussion. “Karma” was the Buddhist term. People tossed the word around carelessly, but the real meaning, as Anna Lisa had explained it to me, was linked to an expression my father had used when he was in a mood to talk like an American: “What goes around comes around.”
There were moments when that equation seemed so true. You saw giving, selfless people—the Pope came to mind—and they were happy and at peace, as if all the good they’d put into the world had circled around like some kind of celestial body, a spiritual meteor, and come back to wash them in a soft tail of golden dust. You read about murderers, rapists, and dictators getting their comeuppance: jail, assassination, a black, bloody page in the history books.
But what about the saints who’d been tortured and killed? Drawn and quartered, burned at the stake, shot with arrows, crucified? What about Jesus? What kind of karma was that? Why had someone like Joseph Stalin died a natural death, apparently after living a healthy life with little suffering in it? Why were all those Tibetan monks and nuns tortured by the Chinese heathens? And why were children suffering with cancer, or born deformed, or dropped from heaven into a place ravaged by hunger and disease?
There in the building where Mussolini had slept—had he felt guilty at all? Would he be made to pay for his transgressions?—these questions, unoriginal as they may have been, swirled in gray clouds across the landscape of my thoughts. People were given free will—that was the Catholic explanation. But I knew what Rosa meant about platitudes, because explanations like that weren’t enough for me. What kind of free will caused a child to be born with no arms or eyes or lips? What had he or she done to deserve that? What footnote to the law of karma explained it?
Jesus died for our sins—how many thousands of times had I heard that? Then why hadn’t sin ceased to exist on the earth after his crucifixion? And why had his Father sent him to die like that? And why hadn’t Buddha—or any of the other holy figures I knew about—died like that?
I listened to the rain drumming on the windows and thought of the people still living in tents in L’Aquila. Had they somehow angered God? All of them? Together? The Jews of Europe, the Cambodians and Angolans and innocent North Koreans, the Hutus and Tutsis, the victims of terrorism, all the millions of men and women who’d been tormented and slaughtered over the millennia of human existence, who’d died in horrible ways—were all of them paying for somehow causing pain in a previous life? Or was this God’s harsh way of teaching us to go to the place beyond what the Dalai Lama called “bodily sensations”? And if so, where was the road map? Catholicism, with its sacraments and rosaries and rites? Buddhism, with its focus on the interior world? Rosa, with her brand of blunt, loving agnosticism?
I let these questions run back and forth in my mind like frantic zoo animals in a cage; then I surrendered and simply offered up a prayer to the Blessed Mother, one line of hopeful spiritual verse, a petition to mystery.
21
I’ve had some bad meals in Italy, exceptions that prove the rule. But I don’t know that I’ve ever had a worse meal than the dinner we suffered through in the dining room of Campo Imperatore. Rosa had awakened from her nap before the rest of us and had charmed one of the drier guests into driving her down the mountain so she could bring the Maserati up to the hotel parking lot. At eight-thirty, as agreed, the four of us met in the lobby. We sat around for a few minutes on the couches there, waiting for the dining hall to open. The rain had turned from a driving torrent to a steady drizzle, and the ground-floor lobby was peopled with an esoteric crowd, a recently moistened mix of valiant hikers in outdoor gear, a few ordinary tourists, and what seemed to be an international cadre of fascist sympathizers on pilgrimage. We watched them amble through the door—men, mostly—ogle the Mussolini memorabilia, and buy copies of the books being sold at the registration desk, biographies with titles like The Late Great Hope of the Italian People and The Noble Man. There was a certain proud, defiant, besieged air about these pilgrims, as if they could barely keep themselves from proclaiming, right there in the puddled lobby, how much better things would have been if the Noble Man had survived to lead Italy toward the twenty-first century. If only the fools had let him live! If only those twin idiots Churchill and Roosevelt had kept their tanks and soldiers off this golden peninsula and let the great social experiment of fascism have time to succeed! If only we had leaders like Il Duce now, men who were truly men, who stuck out their chests and cheated on their wives and sent boys to die in far-off lands.
It turned my stomach, truly it did. The Pope and the Dalai Lama—or the German businessman and the long-haired, casually rich, nicely tanned rock star/tourist—were sitting across from me, dressed in dry clothes Rosa had brought them, refreshed by a shower, solitary prayer, and perhaps a bit of sleep. I watched them watching the other hotel guests and wondered what they thought of it all.
“Un gruppo strano”—a strange crowd—I whispered to my wife.
She nodded uneasily.
“What’s wrong?”
A shrug, a glance over one shoulder at the desk. “Someone was taking pictures of the Maserati.”
“In the parking lot?”
“At the base of the ski lift.” She ran her eyes over three men moving toward the bar beside us. A cacophony of loud voices came through the doorway there, a species of hilarity you’d expect from pilsner at midnight, not Campari at the dinner hour. “We drove up and there were two guys out in the rain. One of them had a camera, the other an umbrella.”
“Maserati lovers, maybe. Car fanatics.”
“Maybe. But when they saw me get out they hurried away.”
“I heard a rumor that there’s a Mafia capo hiding in this park. Maybe they were federal police who thought they’d found their man.”
“Why, Mr. Logical, would policemen run away from me?”
Before I could mount a sarcastic defense—“Because all men find you frightening” or something along those lines—we were summoned to our table. The menu of the evening consisted of three courses—risotto, pasta, and chicken—and there was something wrong with all of them. Sure, it must have been difficult getting provisions to that isolated spot—one didn’t expect a garden-fresh salad—but there was no excuse, in Italy, for tomato sauce that tasted like old juice, or for an oily risotto, a tough chicken breast, a glass of white wine that should have been used to lubricate the chairlift.
The holy men ate very little. Rosa tried two bites of everything, then pushed the plates away. I saw her try to take refuge in the wine and bread, but even that wasn’t working.
“At home, sometimes,” the Dalai Lama said, “monks don’t eat after noontime.”
“A good strategy, in this case.” Rosa fiddled with an earring—a gift from her loving husband, some ten years earlier. “I feel like I should apologize to you all for the food, for taking you here in the first place. I just thought, you know, the historical angle, the natural beauty…”
“I hope you’re joking, Rosa,” the Pope said quietly, when her voice trailed off. “I can’t speak for Tenzin or Paolo, but for me this is the adventure of a lifetime. To mix with real people, without having them come up and kiss my ring or otherwise make a fuss. To be able to eat a meal that isn’t served on antique silver and the finest porcelain, with someone watching me every second to see if I’ll fall ill. To have a day that i
sn’t scheduled to the quarter hour. Up in the room just now I had the most wonderful prayer session. I could truly feel the presence of Christ.”
“And you don’t feel it at St. Peter’s?”
“Of course, of course. But in the Gospels, Christ, the actual Christ, is never seen in a church. There were no churches built in his memory then, obviously. And after his early years, you don’t even see him in the synagogue, do you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Trust me, you don’t see him that way. You see him out among the people, eating and drinking, walking through the crowds, visiting the homes of friends, preaching, healing, rubbing shoulders with saints and thieves and betrayers, with humanity. Churches are fine, of course. We have to remember him, and it’s helpful to have a certain organized way of worshipping him—buildings, prayers, sacraments. But, at the same time, with all our rites and symbols, we tend to lose sight of the actual way he lived, a divine spirit among the people, eating with friends, talking with sinners.”
“What I wonder,” Rosa said, after the same friendly waiter had come and taken away our dishes, “is why, in the Bible, we never see him laughing. I know he was here on serious business, and maybe he knew the fate that awaited him, but you’d have thought that at least once in the Scriptures you’d see him laughing. All of it is so serious. Even the wedding at Cana—it must have been a good time, there must have been music, right? But even there you only see him performing the miracle of turning water into wine. There’s no sense of joy, of celebration.”
“Buddha, the same,” the Dalai Lama said. “Not too many jokes.”
I worried that all the talk about Christ and Buddha would give us away—it wasn’t exactly the topic of the hour in that place. But our conversation was drowned out by raucous laughter from the nearby tables, talk of days gone by, of what might have been, the word “he” (lui in Italian) resonating in the room like a curse word. He would have, he could have, he should have. If he were still alive…
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 12