The Delight of Being Ordinary

by Roland Merullo

  “Julian of Norwich said that.”

  My wife nodded in a solemn way.

  “They burned her at the stake, didn’t they?”

  “That was someone else. She was the one who believed God was both man and woman, so the Church refuses to make her a saint.”

  24

  The ride from Campo Imperatore to Rimini carries one through the hills of four provinces: Abruzzo, Molise, briefly into Le Marche, and then to the southernmost part of Emilia-Romagna. At one time the cities along this route—Civitanova, Ancona, Pesaro—were Adriatic ports with a measure of status in the Roman Empire. Now, Ancona serves mainly as a jumping-off point for the ferry to the Dalmatian coast, and the cities north of it are famous beach resorts, choked with tourists in summer and all but abandoned the rest of the year. I remembered being at one of Rosa’s company Christmas gatherings, just after Anna Lisa told us she was moving to Rimini to take a job there, teaching school. Rosa and I were separated by then, and I’d gone to the party only out of some misplaced holiday spirit. I was standing around awkwardly, drink in hand, chatting with one of Rosa’s wealthy clients. The woman looked across the room at our daughter and scoffed. “Rimini,” she said, reaching up to finger her pearls. “Rimini is not one of our important cities.”

  Perhaps not, but it is one of our finer places to live—a long strand of sandy beach, a small but picturesque town two kilometers inland with clothing shops and a pedestrian center, an arch and bridge that date to Roman times. Anna Lisa loved it there, and both Rosa and I loved to visit.

  On our way to Rimini on that second morning, Rosa suggested, wisely, that we avoid the Autostrada with its tollbooths and surveillance cameras, in case the man at the base of the ski lift had been someone other than a Maserati lover with a camera. I agreed. It was an exquisite pleasure to drive that four-hundred-horsepower machine along the two-lane back roads, where the insouciant creativity of Italian drivers meant that absolutely anything might happen at any moment. Clutching, shifting, accelerating into the turns, watching for espresso-fueled macho men wandering into our lane while passing a bus on a blind corner—it was a whole-body, whole-mind experience, a kind of meditation. An Italian man’s prayer.

  At one point Rosa turned on the radio. Word of the Pope’s disappearance was not just out, it was being shouted in a chorus of a billion voices all across the world. Every channel had a report about the kidnapping of the Pontiff, and now speculation was rampant that the Dalai Lama had gone missing as well. As was so often the case in the Italian media, exaggeration and rumor were the order of the day. The Holy Father was being held by a Mafia chieftain in Sicily. He was already dead. The government had paid a hefty ransom, and his return was expected at any hour. A band of Chechen separatists had been seen hanging around the Vatican for the past month; they’d spirited him away in a helicopter. “It’s the Chinese,” one commentator announced with absolute certainty. “The Dalai Lama, not the Pope, was the main target. The Pope was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.” A reward of 5 million euro had been offered for information leading to the kidnapper’s arrest.

  As Rosa shifted the dial from station to station, from one piece of absurd speculation to the next, I kept waiting for word of the devious First Assistant and, not hearing it, began to think that the story about the ransom note had been the idea of one delusional reporter. But then, a new channel, another voice: “Quello dePadova…That dePadova, sources tell me, has been trouble from the beginning. He’s been the one responsible for leaks of false information from the Vatican halls, for the Pope’s supposed sympathy for gays, his supposed respect for Eastern religions. My sources say the Pope felt obliged to bring him on because they’re distantly related, third or fourth cousins, but that he’s actually a radical Communist—”

  “First cousins!” I yelled at the radio, idiotically. “Democratic Socialist!”

  “Calm yourself, cousin. Let the fools chatter. We know you’re providing a holy service. Let faith carry you.”

  “It’s too much. Turn it off, Rosa, please. I can’t bear it.”

  “One more minute, amore.”

  “Cousin,” the Pope said from behind me. “Remember our conversation of this morning. Let faith carry you.”

  The announcer went on. “Other reports say he’s an atheist. Jealous of his third cousin’s fame and popularity, desperate for money to pay for his sex addiction. He’s been seen frequenting the bordellos in France—”

  At that bit of fantastical imagining, Rosa finally snapped the voice into silence. “I always knew you preferred French women,” she said. She swiveled in her seat so she was facing back. “Holy Father,” she said. “He prefers French women. Their cooking, their sense of style, their lighter coloring. This has been the problem all along.”

  “There’s been no problem all along,” the Pope told her. “That’s been the problem.”

  “All along,” she agreed.

  “Dalai,” I said, risking a glance in the mirror on a straight stretch. “Do you see the craziness I have to put up with?”

  “We have tradition in Tibet. Sacred craziness. Men and women who act a strange way. People think they are fools, but their wisdom, in fact, is often more than those we call normal.”

  “The holy fool,” the Pope said. “We have the same tradition.”

  “What about the unholy fool?” Rosa asked. “The unholy, foolish husband?” But before anyone could continue the revelry she pointed to the right and practically shouted, “Coffee!”

  “I see it. I know,” I said, hitting the brakes hard and swinging the Maserati into a parking lot. “I saw it all along.”

  All the roadside coffee bars in Italy had televisions, it seemed, and on that hot summer morning all the televisions were broadcasting the same basic story we’d just heard. The Pope and his famous guest had disappeared, along with the Pope’s First Assistant. Most likely it was a kidnapping. The police, the army, the Vatican guards, every law-enforcement agency in Europe—all were part of the frantic search. The American FBI had been called in to help. People all over the world were praying for the holy pair’s safe return, and even confirmed atheists were coming to understand that these men were human treasures. What would life be like without them?

  The guilt was upon me again, all tooth and claw. I looked from one kidnap victim to the other. One word then, a single word, and I would have made a phone call and turned us in. “Sometimes we have to risk offending,” the Pope had said. But my thoughts swirled and shouted. I did not like upset and confrontation. I did not deal well with guilt. And I did not at all like the idea of going to jail.

  We ordered coffee, pastries, orange juice, and, to escape the TV screen, sat outside at a patio table, where the sun was just peeking over the roof of the building.

  “Now,” Rosa said, “I think we should keep our profile very low. I wonder if it’s even wise to visit Anna Lisa. They may be watching her.”

  “We have to see her,” I said. “It will mean everything to her to meet the Dalai Lama, and the Pope is practically an uncle.”

  “I’m actually her father’s third cousin,” the Pope quipped.

  “Still…” Rosa said.

  “I miss her too much, Rosa. I need to see my daughter. Now, especially, I need to see her.”

  “You can see her next week, next month. Anytime. Why risk ruining the adventure before we’ve really gotten started?”

  “There might not be a next month for me. I’m the Pope’s kidnapper, remember? A Communist radical. The next time I see her might be on visitors’ day at the Volterra Prison.”

  “You’re paranoid.”

  “Two hours ago you said I was right.”

  “Paolo, seriously. The Pope of Rome is sitting next to you. Do you really believe he’d let you go to prison for kidnapping him, when this was his idea all along?”

  “I’m here against my will,” the Pope announced. His mood was particularly festive on that morning. “Tenzin, aren’t we here against our will?�
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  “Completely!” the Dalai Lama said, and the two of them went into a fit of laughter that caused people on the sidewalk to turn their heads.

  “What kind of ransom are you asking for us, Paolo?” the Pope asked when he’d calmed down a bit.

  “Keep joking, cousin. I’m about to leave all of you here and take Carlo Mancini’s Maserati for one last, fantastic drive into the Alps before I’m sent to jail.”

  “I’d also like to see Anna Lisa,” the Pope said. “I’d like Tenzin to meet her.”

  “Rosa, give me your phone,” I said. “Or Mario’s phone, or whatever.”

  I dialed my daughter’s number and heard her sleepy voice. “Anna, did I wake you?”

  “No, Pa. I’ve been up. I didn’t sleep very well.”

  “You and me both. Listen, have you heard about the kidnapping?”

  “You can’t not hear about it, babbo.”

  “Have you heard that I’m a suspect?”

  “Just now.”

  “Has anyone tried to contact you?”

  “Not yet. Have you…did you really kidnap the Pope? Are you having one of your moods?”

  “One of my moods?”

  “Yeah, you know.”

  “Do you think I kidnap popes when I have a bad mood?”

  “It’s weird news, babbo, that’s all. I mean, the Pope!”

  “He’s with us. We’re in disguise, at least I am, and he is, and the Dalai Lama.”

  “What?! You’re with them now? The Dalai Lama’s there with you? Oh my God! Are you in trouble?”

  “Yes. No. The whole thing was your mother’s idea. Listen, carissima, we want to see you. We’ve done nothing wrong. I’ll explain. We’ll be in Rimini in an hour and a half. Meet us on the beach, in the forties section someplace. We’ll be walking along the edge of the water, south to north. You’ll recognize your mother and then there will be three men with her that you won’t recognize. But don’t let anyone follow you, okay? If someone follows you, call this number and let us know. If anyone asks if I called, I didn’t. Say your mother called, from Monte Carlo, worried. Okay?”

  “Totally confused, babbo.”

  “Just meet us at the beach in ninety minutes. In the forties. Take evasive measures.”

  I hung up and looked across the table.

  Rosa was staring at me, twisting up one side of her mouth. “Evasive measures, amore?”

  25

  In order to find a legal parking place along the beach in Rimini in summer, you have to be living the sinless life. Fortunately, two members of our group fell into that category. As we were driving slowly along, with the Adriatic to our right and a long row of restaurants and shops to our left, we saw a car pull out just ahead, a spot opening up not far from where we were to meet Anna Lisa. A miracle. We parked and stood up into the hot sun like some kind of offbeat theater troupe, three odd-looking men and a beautiful woman. Any club owner in need of a warm-up act would have thought we’d arrived in town looking for work. We put coins in the meter and crossed to the beach side unmolested.

  Like many beaches in Europe, Rimini’s is dotted with thousands of lettini—“little beds” in Italian—canvas-and-wood contraptions on which you can lie comfortably enough and read or sunbathe. You pay a small fee to rent these lettini by the day, month, or season; they sit in pairs beneath large umbrellas absolutely indistinguishable from the hundreds of thousands of other umbrelloni on that strand. With the fee, you get access to the changing rooms and showers at the top of the sand, near the sidewalk. Each sector of beach, probably a hundred meters wide and stretching from sea to changing rooms, is under different management. Each of them is numbered. Rimini’s strip of beach—one of the most famous in Europe—is so long that the numbers start at one, near the school where Anna Lisa taught, and stretch into the high nineties, all the way up in North Rimini, some ten kilometers away. When we visited her we always ended up in the forties. We knew and liked one of the caretakers there and, though it probably wasn’t, the water seemed a bit cleaner in that section.

  The problem, of course, was that none of us were in beach clothes, and we hadn’t thought to bring any along. And it was a particularly hot day. We could have purchased what we needed in the endless string of clothing and souvenir shops that stood shoulder to shoulder on the other side of the road, but we weren’t planning to stay long, and, as Rosa pointed out, swimming might have caused trouble with the disguises—my untinted chest and legs would look ridiculous.

  Still, the thought of being at the beach and not going into the water was almost physically painful for me. I’d grown up, as I mentioned, near Lake Como, and we’d often made trips to Italy’s western shore—Genoa or Viareggio. I loved being in the water almost as much as my mother had. It was a baptism for me, a cleansing—another way, perhaps, of erasing some of the mental etching the Pope had talked about. I thought it might be fun for the two holy men to take a dip, too, but Rosa convinced me it was really out of the question. So we walked onto the sand and started north, already sweating and scratching at our toupees, goatees, and painted skin.

  We hadn’t gone more than half a kilometer when Rosa said, almost in a whisper, “They’ll be looking for groups of three men so I’m going to fall back with Tenzin. You and the Pope go forward. When you see Anna, don’t wave or anything. Make sure there’s no one following her. It’ll be a test to see how good the disguises work!”

  She and the Dalai fell back. I couldn’t resist—I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my pant legs, and waded along in the shallows. Yes, if someone cared to look, they’d notice that my ankles belonged to a northern Italian, and my face, neck, and hands to a Libyan or Tunisian. So what? Would that mean I had a pope walking beside me and a Dalai Lama behind?

  I splashed in the edge of the gentle surf, doing battle with an urge to dive in. The Pope went along on slightly higher ground. Beyond him, milling and strolling, lying and sitting, were thousands of sun worshippers—Italians and Russians (who liked Rimini for its shopping and its menus printed in Cyrillic, and who loved to bake their pale skin in the sun until it was the color of a Siberian beet) and a few English-speakers. The usual mix. The only other nonwhite people on the beach were the African men selling trinkets, but Rimini was an international place; you heard a dozen languages in the space of half an hour’s stroll, and I didn’t stand out there in my disguise as much as I might have on another Italian beach.

  “My cousin,” the Pope said quietly, “aren’t you having the time of your life?”

  “I’m trying. I’m the nervous type, always have been. The news reports about ransom and so on haven’t made things easier.”

  “I disagree,” the Pope said.

  “What, they’ve made things easier?”

  He shook his head and laughed. “I disagree with the statement that you’ve always been the nervous type. That wasn’t my experience of you in our youth.”

  “Most youth aren’t nervous.”

  “I disagree again. There’s an epidemic of anxiety in the Western world now. Anxiety, depression. In some places, adolescent suicide. It bruises my heart.”

  “Because so many young people have abandoned religion?”

  “I prefer to think, my cousin, not that the young people have failed us, but that we have failed them. They have a nose for hypocrisy—even in matters of the Church. Sometimes especially in matters of the Church. We go on and on about the poor; meanwhile we dress in gold vestments, lift golden chalices to the sky, and perform our rites in cathedrals that cost millions of euro to heat and are more splendid than the homes in which the vast majority of the population of the earth will ever set foot. We talk about the love of God, and yet we make too many people feel like sinners, unlovable. Look at your own daughter, raised a good Catholic, with an uncle who was a bishop, an archbishop, a cardinal, and now the Pope, and she thinks of herself as a Buddhist!”

  “It embarrasses me in front of you. I apologize.”

  “Don’t waste your ener
gy. Guilt is the last thing Christ wants of us, the very last thing. I’m looking forward to talking to her about it. I want to hear what she has to say. I want her to speak openly.”

  “No worry there. Anna Lisa has never in her life failed to say what’s on her mind. She takes after her mother in that way.”

  “There she is! Look at the beautiful being she’s become. She’s positively glowing.”

  I saw my daughter a hundred meters ahead of us—tall like her mother, dark-haired and dark-eyed and built more like the classic beauties of old than the reed-thin models of modern fashion runways. She was wearing a flowered shirt and loose white pants that reached halfway down her calf. There did seem to be a light to her. She loved the beach as much as I did, maybe that was it, or maybe she was excited about being reunited with her parents, or seeing the Dalai Lama and the Pope on the same day. Who wouldn’t be? I thought. And it was that thought, and the sight of my daughter, that knocked a hole in my gray ceiling of worry and let in a bit of sun. “Don’t greet her,” I said. “Let’s see how the disguises work.”

  From fifty meters away she didn’t recognize us. I checked to see if someone was following her. No.

  Twenty-five meters, still no reaction.

  There were other strollers and bathers between us, a gaggle of loud Russian kids punching each other in the shallows. Anna Lisa was distracted by them, maybe. Ten meters, only open space between us now, and still she didn’t recognize us. The disguises worked perfectly, I thought…until she said “Ciao, babbo!” and ran the last few steps to hug me.

  “I knew you by your walk!” She made a sort of half bow, half curtsy in the direction of the Holy Father, then reached out to take his hand.

  “None of that!” he said, and he hugged her tightly against him.

  “Look at the two of you! No one would know.”

  “Shh, Anna!”

  “Dov’è la mamma?”

  I hooked a thumb over my shoulder and she smiled. “We have to go someplace where we can talk, Pa, we have to! There’s a morning meditation I go to sometimes. Would you mind?” She leaned in very close to the Pope’s ear and said, “Holy Father, would you mind? It’s Buddhist, but…we could pray together. Would it be wrong?”