“Maybe the jokes got edited out,” I suggested. “Probably it wasn’t Christ and Buddha who were humorless, but the people after them who wrote down what they said. Those people had a message they wanted to get out to the world, an agenda, for lack of a better word, and they believed it was a matter of life and death, spiritual life and death at least. Eternal salvation, enlightenment. Maybe they didn’t feel it would be right to keep the funny parts in. And humor never gets passed down through history, in any case, does it?”
The Dalai was nodding and smiling, the Pope looking at me with his blond eyebrows lifted, his head tilted a few degrees to one side, as though I’d said something far above my usual level of intelligence. “I laugh,” he said, somewhat defensively. “Tenzin is always laughing, he’s famous for it.”
“I know. But I agree with Rosa. Where’s the divine humor?”
The question remained unanswered, but it put me in mind of my father in his last days, lying in bed in the house at Lake Como, drifting in and out of consciousness. “My dad laughed when he was dying,” I said aloud.
“You never told me that, amore.”
“There were moments of struggle and pain, too—discomfort mostly, not agony. But he never seemed afraid, and sometimes at the end, when he was in a coma, he’d chuckle. As if he was watching a comedy or remembering some old joke.”
I felt the Dalai Lama looking hard at me across the table. “Dying like this is sign of particular good man,” he said. “He was seeing then that life isn’t what we think.”
“ ‘For now we see through a glass darkly,’ ” the Holy Father quoted. “ ‘And then we shall see face-to-face.’ ”
“I’ve always liked that.” Rosa met my eyes and her lips twisted to one side as if in spasm. “I hope I can laugh a little…at the end.”
“I’ll do what I can, if I’m there,” I said, watching the emotion play on the muscles of her face and trying, with a bit of awkward humor, to sweep away the sadness. “I’ll do my Elvis imitation.”
“That should work, amore. Thank you.”
Our waiter brought plates of sliced pears and gorgonzola to the table, eyed the still-half-full carafe of wine and our still-full glasses. “Coffee?” he inquired, a bit guiltily, it seemed to me. Where he came from, no doubt, only prisoners with no ’Ndrangheta connections were fed meals like this.
Rosa was alone in asking for coffee. To calm her down, I supposed. When the waiter brought the small espresso cup and set it in front of her, she said something to him in what I knew to be the impenetrable dialect of Naples: uaglione and skutchamenza and chidrool and all sorts of sch and aiei sounds, music of the streets, a rough-and-tumble symphony. The man grinned and answered in kind, ran his eyes across the rest of us, wondering if we’d understood, then went off to attend to his tables of guffawing fascisti.
“What did you say to him?”
“I told him the food was good. We just weren’t hungry.”
“You didn’t!”
“I did. Why hurt his feelings? He didn’t cook it. And the man who gave me the ride down the mountain said the hotel is owned by the provincial government, and chronically underfunded. They don’t know, one year to the next, if it will even survive. That’s not his fault, not even the cook’s fault. I’m leaving a huge tip.”
The Pope reached across and put a hand on Rosa’s wrist. “Your kindness makes me miss my sister,” he said. “And you are like a sister to me. Thank you for coming with us.”
“Paolo invited me,” she said shamelessly. “In the way a husband invites a wife. Without words.”
The Dalai Lama looked at me and exclaimed, “Good man!”
“The best!” the Pope agreed. “Just like his father!”
In the midst of this charade Rosa’s phone rang—she must have changed her ringtone, because usually it was something from Andrea Bocelli and this sounded like Elton John. She took the phone out of her pocket, looked at the screen, at me, said, “It’s Anna Lisa—I called her earlier and left a message,” then stepped out into the foyer.
“I’ve never told you this, Paolo,” the Pope said, once the company was wholly masculine, “but when I was in the novitiate I had a pet parakeet.”
“What is this mean?” the Dalai asked. “Pair of keet?”
“Parakeet. A very small bird. Colorful. Tropical. You can teach them to repeat a few words.”
The Dalai flexed his forehead upward so that the toupee shifted like a small tectonic plate. I worried it had come loose during his nap and would now fall off. He wasn’t wearing either his regular glasses or the oversized sunglasses, and he was squinting at the world.
“What did you train it to say?” I asked.
“I trained it in both Spanish and English. Several things. ‘Buenos días!’ ‘Buenas noches!’ ‘Cómo estás?’ ‘God loves you, Giorgio.’ ‘It’s time to eat!’ I loved that parakeet very much, actually loved it, but the point is, I’ve wondered since then, very often, if human beings are trained in a similar way. We hear certain things—as a child, perhaps, from our parents; or as an adolescent from our friends, or as an adult from co-workers—and they become etched into the brain. Later, we repeat them, and etch them into the brains of our children, our friends, the people in our parish. ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear,’ Christ said, but I wonder sometimes if we actually hear, if we actually see, or if, like my beloved parakeet, someone comes into the room and we say ‘Buenos días!’—even though it’s not day at all, but night. I’m thinking about this in regard to Mussolini and the men around him then, and some of these people now. He said things, they repeat them.”
“So you’ve been listening.”
“Cousin,” he said, “they’re shouting like deaf grandfathers.”
I laughed. The word “grandfather” made me wonder if, like me, he was secretly sad about not being one. I made a last attempt to drink the horrid wine. No.
“I think,” the Holy Father went on, “I think that perhaps it is the practice of regular prayer that erases this old etching from the walls, that lets us use our minds in a fresh way, with a clear awareness.”
An explosion of fascist laughter erupted at one of the nearby tables.
When it was finished, the Dalai Lama said, “Our monks, sometimes, they make retreat, three years, no speaking.” He reached over to the unoccupied table beside us, where the waiter had left a menu—printed on a single sheet of paper, encased in plastic. The Dalai held it in front of him, printed side up; then he squinted and turned it over so there was only a blank page. “The mind become like this.”
“Okay,” I said. “But if you clean the mind like that, by meditation or prayer or three years of not speaking, then what do you do with it? You don’t want to have nothing on the walls, do you? What new words do you etch there?”
“This my answer for you,” the Dalai Lama said. “When Jesus Christ, they ask him which commandment most important, what he say?”
I caught sight of Rosa coming toward us across the room, phone in one hand, a splash of maternal pleasure on her face. I hoped she’d hurry, because I sensed the Dalai Lama was about to instruct me, the Christian, in the scriptures of my own faith. I remembered that Jesus had been asked which commandment was most important, yes. But I’d forgotten his answer. I ran through a list of possibilities: “They’re all about the same”? “ ‘Thou shalt not’ is the key phrase”? “They were given in order of importance”? “That was the Old Testament, I have some new ideas”?
I turned my eyes to the Pope, sheepishly.
He grinned. “I know you know this, cousin.”
“In principle, I know it. At the moment, I seem to have forgotten.”
“Matthew has Christ saying: ‘Love the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself’…That’s all you have to write on the walls of the mind. No other rules, just that.”
“Yes,”
I said. “Exactly. I’m glad you remembered.”
The Pope and the Dalai Lama both laughed at me. I didn’t mind. But I was thinking: No other rules? Really? Divorce? Birth control? Sunday Mass? Premarital intercourse?
Rosa plopped down in her seat and announced, “We’re going to see Anna Lisa tomorrow. She’s taking the day off. I told her we had two foreign friends traveling with us and she’s all excited.”
“Their daughter,” the Pope explained to the Dalai Lama.
“Oh, very nice,” Dalai said. “She has some news about her life.”
22
Late that night I was roused from sleep by a quiet tapping on the metal door of my room. In the unfamiliar darkness I thought, at first, that it might be a death dream: God knocking. My time had come. Then, slightly more awake and remembering our moment of intimacy on the chairlift, I thought it could be Rosa wanting to come in and sleep with me. I got up, eagerly, unarmored, pulled on a pair of pants, unlocked the door, opened it. No one. Neither God nor wife nor anyone else. The hall, lit by a bare ceiling bulb at each end, was as silent and still as a monastery at midnight. Rosa had the room next to mine, and for a few seconds I entertained the fantasy of knocking there and asking if I could climb into bed with her. But no, the armor had already slipped back into place. She’d refuse and I’d feel foolish. Or she’d accept and we’d be drawn into an old pattern of argument and turmoil, the hot fires of marital love. Why those fires hadn’t burned out over the years, I didn’t know. There remained a heated attraction, absolutely, but also a firewall of argument and stubbornness. Something like war and something like love.
I locked the door and went back to bed. There was no longer any sound of rain tapping on the windows, no creak and bang from the elevator well. In the few minutes it took me to settle into sleep, I thought of Anna Lisa, and for that little while there were no complications to the spiritual search, no questions about karma and humor and judgment and sin, or which commandment was most important. Whatever my faults and failings—and they were legion—from the moment of my daughter’s appearance on this earth I had loved her with a love so absolute that it washed our small disagreements aside like the sea tossing flotsam onto a jetty. I’d sacrificed for her without complaint, held her continually in my thoughts, done everything in my power to give her a life and a mind that would lead her toward happiness.
Could it be, I wondered, could it really be that we were loved that way, too? Could there be some Essence, some Father or Mother or Divine Intelligence that felt about me, about us, the way Rosa and I felt about Anna Lisa? Could our love for her be some kind of metaphor for a larger relationship, God to humankind? If that were true, if that were really true, then it would be as the Pope said it was: our sins didn’t make God love us less; they only blinded us to that love. Our sufferings were temporary, as puzzling and passing as a twenty-four-hour flu to a toddler. If the metaphor held, then our task would be—as the Dalai Lama had suggested to Rosa—learning to forgive and love the way I forgave and loved Anna Lisa, only more widely.
My mind leapt and sprinted and gradually settled. Just on the rim of sleep I remembered the Dalai Lama saying, “She has some news about her life,” and I wondered what it might be—a new job, a lover, a diagnosis—and how he could possibly know.
Day Three
23
I am, as I may have mentioned, a late sleeper. By preference, at least, if not always in practice. But that morning I was awakened at first light by more knocking on the metal door, louder than what I thought I’d heard in my sleep: God or Rosa being more insistent, maybe. I wrapped the thin blanket around myself, mouthed a prayer, and pulled at the slab of metal that separated me from the rest of Campo Imperatore. There on the threshold stood the Holy Father. He looked sleepy and aged, his blond goatee was pushed to the side as if he’d taken a long walk with the wind blowing hard off one shoulder; his hair, real and not real, was matted and tousled. The eyes were alert, though. That was the thing about this man: the soul or the spirit or the essence or whatever you want to call it shone out from him like a lighthouse beacon. I’d seen him angry and calm, joyous and sad, tired and energized, quiet and voluble, but the eyes were always the same: milk-chocolate brown with this beacon of energy and goodwill shining out through them. That light had been there since boyhood.
The Bearded Blond Pontiff surprised me by stepping into the room and closing the door behind him. “I rose early to pray in the chapel,” he said excitedly. “Do you know that it’s actually dedicated to John Paul? Do you know he used to come here, regularly, to ski?”
I shook my head no to both questions.
“It was closed—five a.m.—but the kind clerk at the desk unlocked it for me. I told him I was visiting from Honduras—I forgot you’d said Alsace-Lorraine—that my brother was a priest and I wanted to say a few prayers. A fib…for a good cause. I disguised my voice, pretty well, I believe, and the accent convinced him. Can you hear an accent when I speak Italian? I’ve never asked you.”
“Absolutely not,” I told him. A fib…for a good cause. I looked at my watch. “It’s six-twenty.”
“I’m sorry to wake you, cousin, but the television above the registration counter was on and I happened to see the news. A dramatic headline: Pope kidnapped! Army and police searching everywhere! Interpol notified. The American FBI involved. People were talking about it in the foyer.”
“Nothing about the Dalai Lama?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I pretended I wasn’t that interested. I just glanced at it and came up here immediately.”
“I had a moment of guilt about it yesterday,” I told him. “All this worry and trouble, the whole world upset. It seemed reckless and wrong, somehow. I hope you—”
He stopped me by reaching out and putting hands on both my shoulders. The powerful eye contact, the sense of calm. “My good cousin,” he said, “blood of my blood. I feel the same reservations, the same doubt, the same concern.”
“Then we should turn ourselves in before it goes any farther.”
The Pope was shaking his head. “The same concern,” he repeated. “But it is overwhelmed by something else, a louder voice. I can’t be specific just yet, but I’ve had a sense from the first that there’s something larger involved.”
“Larger how?”
“I don’t know. It’s as we were discussing earlier—a mystery, an intuition I feel I should follow. I was praying for understanding just now, in John Paul’s chapel. He seemed to be urging me on.”
“Okay,” I said, but without much conviction.
“Sometimes we have to listen to such things. Sometimes we have to risk offending, risk hurting someone’s feelings, risk allowing them to worry about us if we feel deeply that we are doing the right thing.”
“As you wish, Holy Father.”
“Stop with the ‘Holy Father’ nonsense! Please! Now, go and wake Rosa. Never mind, I’ll wake her. I’m going to pack up and explain to Tenzin. We’re going to see Anna Lisa! I can’t wait. And touch up your skin color, it’s spotty.” He pointed to his own Adam’s apple. “Here.”
When he was gone I shaved, packed, reapplied the facial color with some of the extra polish Mario had provided us, left a tip for the cleaning people—sufficient for all four rooms—and went next door to consult with my wife. On her face I could see the same excitement I’d heard in the Pope’s voice. It was as if the muscles around her lovely mouth were exclaiming: “Yes! First we embarked on an insane adventure, and now the army is searching for us! What could be finer than that!” But my own chorus of doubt sang louder.
“We need to go, Paolo,” she said breathlessly. “Right now!”
“What about breakfast?”
“On the road,” she said.
“Fine, good. You’re right, as usual. Do you mind if I drive? Do you think Mancini would mind?”
“Be my guest. I’m tired of it anyway. And regarding Mancini—there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Unless the people t
aking photos yesterday were from the army or the FBI. In which case—”
“I considered that. I don’t think so. I don’t see how they could have traced the car to me.”
“Your cell phone,” I said.
She shook her head. “Before I left I traded phones with Mario and told him to tell anyone who asked that I’d gone to Monte Carlo for a week. And besides, the Pope told me they were talking about you on the news. Not a word about your wife.”
“Me?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“No, I—”
“You were right about that part of it. The news report claimed they’d found a note from you, handwritten, saying you’d taken the Pope and were holding him somewhere in the south, asking a ransom. Five million euro!”
“You’re joking. Or the Pope was joking. He—”
“I don’t think so, amore.”
“But the note…I didn’t write any note, Rosa. I never would have written such a note.”
“Your enemies,” she said.
At the sound of those words, the chorus of doubt was replaced by a symphony, a cacophony. A cloud of bad feeling engulfed me. This, then, was the variable I hadn’t factored into the equation. This was the ultimate revenge. Instead of hiring from within, appointing one of the horde of cardinals, bishops, monsignors, aides, functionaries, and ambitious young priests who surrounded him, the Holy Father had chosen me, his inexperienced younger cousin. Unordained. An outsider. Feelings had been hurt, egos bruised, ecclesiastical careers shifted onto a side track. Now, one or more of the Vaticanites had sensed an opportunity. I’d been summoned from the caboose to stand beside the engineer, yes; but now the door of the speeding locomotive had slipped open. Someone had me by the neck, from behind, and was about to shove me out the door.
I said, “Oh.”
Rosa laughed, hugged me. “We’ll watch over you, don’t worry, my love. The Holy Father will tell them the truth and they’ll believe it. ‘All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.’ ”
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 13