The Delight of Being Ordinary

by Roland Merullo

  We loved Pazzo, in spite of all this. However, one sad day Pazzo’s mad curiosity got the best of him. He burrowed under a broken piece of the front gate and raced into the street, where he was immediately crushed by a truck delivering a refrigerator to the house next door. We found the body there, flattened. The driver was inconsolable. We told him not to worry.

  My mind, in that twenty-minute meditation, was a Pazzo mind. It leapt and scurried after imaginary worries: How long would it be until we were tracked down? What would happen then? Why wasn’t I the kind of man who could just let events unfold without worrying? Why did I spoil things that way? Is that what had ruined our marriage? How long would the Pope be patient with Anna Lisa’s Buddhism? From there it flew to totally unconnected ideas: the sound of the breathing of the woman next to me. Was she ill with something I might catch? Had I embarrassed my daughter somehow? Who was this Piero? The boyfriend? What was Rosa thinking right now? We’d have a conversation about it afterward, a debriefing. No doubt, whatever our impressions of the meditation, they would be diametrically opposed. Why couldn’t we stop fighting? We were the Palestine and Israel of the married world. It seemed that the brown polish, or whatever it was that Mario had applied to my skin, had started drying out and cracking in a few spots. How much longer would it last? Was Rosa infatuated with Mario? Was something going on? Why did I care so much?

  This continued for twenty minutes that seemed like twenty hours. Yap-yap-yap. When I heard a tiny bell, a stirring at the front of the room, and then Piero saying, “Okay now, just a last couple of slow breaths and we’ll talk a bit,” I wanted to jump to my feet and applaud. Instead, a sigh escaped my lips. I felt the woman to my right turn and look at me. Apparently, I’d made a faux pas: one wasn’t supposed to sigh in these places. I could already hear Anna Lisa’s exasperated “Pa!” And I was sure everyone else in the room had a Cielo mind, while I had a Pazzo.

  But my introduction to Buddhist meditation was over, and for that I raised a Catholic prayer of thanks.

  Piero, I have to say, had a nice way about him, neither pretentious nor apologetic. The robe put me off, as Buddhist robes tended to do. On the Dalai Lama it would have been as natural as a three-hundred-euro silk necktie on Berlusconi, but Piero looked like the kind of young Italian guy you’d see studying in a café outside the University of Bologna, or having a glass of wine and a dish of pasta with his girlfriend in Trastevere.

  “Dirò alcune parole…I’m going to say a few words, food for thought, and then I’ll hope to see you tomorrow.” Piero took a breath, looked down into his hands, then up again. I saw that my daughter was leaning close and whispering in the Dalai Lama’s ear.

  Piero began to speak. “I was thinking today, I was wondering how we would act if, for example, the Buddha was in this room right now. If he was walking along with us in our daily life, there when we lay down in bed, when we ate breakfast, when we were at work, making love, taking a swim, paying a bill. Would we act any differently, sensing that presence beside us? And what message would his presence give? I was thinking that the message would be that we should pay careful attention without being too self-conscious about our attentiveness, without thinking all the time, Now I’m paying attention. Just fall into the habit of doing that, the way most of us have fallen into the habit of checking our phone every few minutes when we’re waiting in a doctor’s office.”

  The Dalai Lama nodded; all was well.

  “I’ve heard the expression ‘Make every breath a prayer,’ ” Piero went on, “and I wonder if we could try doing that even for a few minutes every day outside of this room. A prayer of thanks, maybe. An awareness of the miracle of the breath going into and out of us and keeping us alive. If we could hold on to that kind of awareness, for example, when we’re about to have an argument with our lover, or when we’re irritated by someone or something. If we could just shift our attention to the bare fact of our anger or irritation and watch what happens…I think it’s worth a try.

  “The same thing with fear. I’ve heard it said that the Dalai Lama is afraid of water. Maybe that’s not true, but I think I heard it or read it someplace.”

  At that comment I looked at the Dalai, who seemed even stiller than he had been. If it wasn’t true, I imagined he’d leap up and complain: “No, no! I love water!” Or, if it was true, he’d be as embarrassed as the Pope on the ski lift.

  “He’s a human being,” Piero went blindly on. “He has fears like the rest of us. But I imagine him being asked to swim. I picture him sometimes—maybe you’ll think this is odd—but I picture him at the beach here, in our city, and someone suggests he take a swim. The fear would rise up in him, but he’d be watching that fear, which would be the first step in overcoming it. I imagine it would have a minuscule effect on his life. The fear, the shame of being afraid, maybe a bad history connected to water. From this life or a past life; it wouldn’t cripple him.

  “We all have such things, don’t we? Sources of fear, anger, irritation. Triggers that knock us out of the present moment. Let’s try to be aware of them, okay?” Piero ran his eyes around the room in a compassionate circle. “Va bene. Okay. Good. Thank you for coming, for listening. I’ll hope to see you all again soon.”

  He made a small bow to the audience and we bowed back. People stood up, gathered their belongings, made for the door. I noticed that the Dalai Lama stayed seated. Anna Lisa turned to us, her face lit up but slightly troubled. “Did you like it?”

  “Loved it,” I said, drawing on many years of fatherly diplomacy. “Life-changing.”

  “Really, babbo?”

  “Absolutely. Seems like a good guy.”

  “You like it, Mom?”

  “Wonderful,” Rosa said, in what sounded like a sincere way.

  The Pope was silent, either to keep his voice disguised or because he was upset about having attended.

  “Piero wants to meet everybody,” Anna Lisa bubbled on. “There’s a little room in back. He’s making tea. He wants us to go back there.”

  “I’m not sure that’s—” I started to say, but I became aware of Rosa shooting me a steely glance. The four of us were alone in the room by then. The Dalai Lama was stretching his legs and getting to his feet. “Holy Father, do you mind?”

  “Why would I mind?”

  “Dalai?”

  “Good, good,” he said, but something was wrong. I could sense it. It must have been the fear-of-water comment. The Dalai’s ordinarily serene face was crinkled up in an expression of mild irritation—or so it seemed behind the dark glasses. Anna Lisa led her mother and the two disguised holy men to the back room and I brought up the rear, dragging a heavy sack of worries.

  Piero, bathed in innocence, had taken off the robe and set a plate of cheese and fruit on a small square table. “Making tea,” he said over his shoulder as we walked in. “Please sit.”

  We sat. With the new awareness I’d gained from the meditation session I sensed a massive discomfort in the room. It was clear to me that Piero had no idea who his guests really were. We heard the tea water hissing. People weren’t looking at each other.

  “That was really interesting, Anna,” I said.

  She smiled at me, looked anxiously at the Pope, and completely avoided the shaded eyes of the Dalai Lama.

  Piero brought tea to the table and poured five cups, carefully, attentively, gratefully. Despite the mild torment he’d put me through a short while earlier, I found that I liked him. Liked him to such a degree, in fact, that I worried that if he found out who was sitting at the table with him, he’d feel not so much that he’d put his foot in his mouth as that he’d eaten a boot factory.

  “Allora,” he said cheerily, “Anna, introduce us, please.”

  Anna Lisa coughed, cleared her throat, looked at her mother in a pleading way.

  “Just the truth, I guess,” Rosa said.

  “Well,” my daughter began, “this is my mother, Rosa. And this guy here is my dad, Paolo. In disguise.”

 
; “Ah, the kidnapper!” Piero said.

  He’d meant it, I could see, as a joke, but it hadn’t worked. He was nervous around us for some reason. Just wait, I thought.

  “And this,” Rosa said, pointing to the Pope, “this is, well, this man is actually the Pope, also in disguise.”

  “Ha, ha!” Piero said, smiling broadly. I noticed at that moment that he had a pair of eyeglasses hooked over the collar of his shirt. Thick lenses. He must have taken them off for the ceremony, or because of the steam from his tea-making. He moved his eyes, innocently, from Anna Lisa to the Pope to me and then back again. “Thees must mean,” he said, playing along like the good guy he was, trying out his English for a few seconds, and then gesturing to the as-yet-unintroduced member of our odd group, “that thees long-haired fellow here is the Dalai Lama! Ha ha ha!”

  This remark was greeted by an absolutely brutal silence. Absolutely brutal. Anna Lisa looked down at her pear slices, then up into Piero’s face. She reached out, very kindly, I thought, and put a hand on his arm. I watched his eyes and mouth, watched the understanding come over his even features like sunlight brightening a sky at dawn, second by second, centimeter by centimeter. A brutal understanding. He looked, for some reason, at me.

  “I don’t really look like this,” I said.

  He glanced at Rosa, wondering, I suppose, what she actually looked like. He turned his eyes to the Pope, seemed, at last, to notice the too-even edges of the goatee, the familiar eyes, nose, and facial shape. I could see him working up the courage to look at the Dalai Lama. I watched the movement of his eyes, the hesitation there. He shifted them halfway, then looked fully, checked out the toupee, the oversized glasses, the famous cheeks and mouth. A pause, two seconds, four seconds, and then “Oy…as my parents used to said.”

  I saw Anna Lisa squeeze his arm. “Piero was raised Jewish,” she said nervously.

  Piero’s hand fumbled for the folded eyeglasses. Eventually he lifted them to his face and set them on his nose.

  The Dalai Lama was smiling at him, but it was impossible to tell what was behind the smile, because we could barely see his eyes through the tinted lenses. “Little surprise now,” he said. He reached up and slowly, dramatically, removed the big sunglasses.

  “I feel very, very, very stupid,” Piero said. “Eye em sorry, Your Holiness. I didn’t mean a disrespect—”

  The Dalai Lama held up one hand, palm outward, fingers pressed together, in what was apparently a Tibetan gesture of absolution. “Everything you said was truth,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “We cannot be afraid of truth!” The Dalai Lama made his famous laugh. “Even if truth is about being afraid! Ha! And what you said about Buddha—not so bad teaching. Pretty good. But now you need to come to Dharamsala and study with monks!”

  He went on for a minute—giving Piero time to recover, it seemed—talking about the various kinds of instruction Piero might receive, the texts he should memorize, the different visualizations he could try. When he finished, there was a moment of hope-infused silence—I thought all was well—until Anna Lisa slanted her eyes to me and then to her mother and I could feel a new tsunami curling up over us, about to crash ashore. “Piero and I…” she began, then she seemed to lose her nerve. I saw a twitch at the corner of her lips. “We’re…well…” She looked at Piero, who looked at me. “We’re pregnant. We’re lovers. We’re the same thing as engaged.”

  At that point the stress became too much for her and she burst into tears. Rosa stood up and hugged her, giving me the “Say something, Paolo!” evil eye. I was, for an instant, frozen. In shock. And then: “Honey, that’s incredible!!” I said. “We’re so, so happy to meet him. We’re happy that you’re happy! It’s a beautiful thing and we love you!”

  I went over and hugged her, too. I started to reach out to shake Piero’s hand, but that somehow seemed un-Buddhist to me, like the act of a cliché future father-in-law. I thought of bowing, but didn’t, and found myself stuck between standing up straight, leaning over and hugging my crying daughter and my wife (now also crying), and shaking hands. “Great! Incredible! We’re so happy!” I kept saying, in English and Italian both. “Siamo felici!” And then, out of some primeval instinct, I grabbed my wife’s shoulders and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  Rosa stepped back, an expression of the purest astonishment on her face.

  “Do you mean it, Pa?” Anna Lisa asked me. “You’re happy?”

  “What’s not to mean? Of course I’m happy! Are you going to baptize the child?”

  It just flew out of my mouth, that phrase, and it was the equivalent of going up onto a stage at my daughter’s wedding, where the band was playing a happy dance number, and kicking my polished shoe, full-force, through the skin of the bass drum, then smiling idiotically. I tensed all my muscles, hoping against hope that I might suck the words back into my body, or that someone, one of the kind and holy people in the room, would rescue me by making a joke, or even just saying a single word. Nothing. “I was kidding,” I said. “Half kidding. It’s up to you, naturally. We don’t care.” I could feel the Pope looking at me. “I mean, it would be nice, but you two should do what you’re comfortable with. You’ll be fine. Piero, I’m happy. We’re happy!”

  This to the background music of weeping. Rosa had both hands on Anna Lisa’s shoulders. The Pope and Dalai were smiling, but the smiles seemed strained to me, forced. Piero, who had been so genuinely and humbly confident at the head of the meditation room, now wore the expression of a man with a glass of wine in one hand and the other in a pot of boiling water. He was happy, you could see it. And, at the same time, he must have thought, as recently as half an hour ago, that life was very simple. Now, suddenly, his future father-in-law and the grandfather of his child was a kidnapper disguised as a hungry refugee and spouting stupidaggini, and his girlfriend and girlfriend’s mother were weeping uncontrollably and holding each other as if they were sliding across the tilted deck of a ship that was sinking off the coast of Greenland. And the Dalai Lama and the Pope of Rome were sitting right there in the room, staring at him.

  “You know,” the Pope said at last, “I’ve been having strange dreams lately.”

  I was terrified, at that moment, that he was going to add Mussolini into the mix. The air in the room could not have carried such a cargo.

  “I’ve been dreaming about a child—not yours, my dear niece—but some special child who has already been born, a holy child, perhaps. One I may never meet. It’s very strange. These dreams—” he stopped and glanced uneasily at the Dalai Lama—“are actually what prompted me to ask my dear cousin to help me, us, make this unusual trip.”

  You’re strange, I wanted to say, but, of course, that would have been another faux pas, and disrespectful besides, and not once in my tenure had I been disrespectful to the Pope in any way. But dreams of a child, women, helicopters, soccer balls, the famous dictator? What kind of subconscious was that? What was going on there? And what kind of Dalai Lama was afraid of water?! As far as I knew there wasn’t even any water to be afraid of in Tibet! I wondered, then, if they were both in on it, two mystical dreamers who’d tricked me into thinking all they wanted was a short vacation, a break, some relief from the burden of fame.

  Rosa looked at me. “Go out and buy champagne,” she said, in a tone of voice that did not admit the possibility of refusal.

  “Mamma, I shouldn’t drink alcohol.”

  “You can have half a glass. I drank a little when I was pregnant with you.”

  “Yes, and you both turned out fine,” I hastened to say.

  “The Pope and the Dalai Lama don’t drink, do they? Do you, Your Holinesses?” Anna Lisa raised her head and looked at them…“expectantly” is the word I would use.

  “A little wine,” the Pope said. The Dalai started to shake his head, then stopped, shrugged, scratched at his toupee.

  Rosa had her hands on her hips, a danger signal. “Paolo,” she said forcefully, “go get somethi
ng. I’ll drink it all myself if I have to.”

  “There’s a store not far that sells wine,” Piero said, in Italian now. “May I come along?”

  26

  Somewhat shaky in the knees, for different but related reasons, the young Buddhist and I stepped out of the wreckage of the moment and into the hot noonday sun. We turned in the direction of the city center, went along a little way in an uneasy mood, and then he practically wailed this sentence: “I can’t believe I said that in front of the Dalai Lama!”

  “I don’t think he minded much.”

  “You can’t tell with him.”

  “Exactly. Equanimity.”

  “Still, I feel horrible.”

  “I’d let it go. I am richly experienced in the art of putting my foot in my mouth, as you might have noticed. The best strategy is to let it go. Forget it. Don’t replay the moment in your mind,” I said, even as I was doing exactly that with my baptism remark.

  “Va bene, grazie,” he said. “Fine. Thanks,” and then: “I would like to ask you for your daughter’s hand in marriage.”

  “No,” I said, and for a minute I didn’t say anything else. My mind was mainly on other things—my stupidity, being a grandfather, the wrath of the Catholic and Buddhist worlds, having my daughter and grandchild visit me in jail, the look on my wife’s face when she’d heard Anna Lisa’s news. Our kiss. Equanimity. The divine sense of humor.

  “I think that’s unfair,” Piero was saying, but I heard those words as if they were being mumbled in the next province. “I don’t think religious differences—not that Anna Lisa and I have those differences—but I don’t think they should interfere with you giving me permission to—”