All this was part of why I’d fallen in love with Rosa, because she wasn’t obedient, wasn’t mild mannered, wasn’t a safe girl who went to Mass wearing a head scarf and kissed on the fifth date with a chaste timidity. She came from a family where people shouted and swore, cursed each other one minute and hugged and kissed each other the next, talked about sex the way other families talk about the weather. The small apartment in Naples where her parents lived with her grandmother and two younger siblings was a three-ring circus of emotion, the farthest thing from sedate.
In the early years I’d loved all that, loved her feistiness, loved taking the train to Naples to be part of that tempest of affection and argument. But then, little by little, and especially after Anna Lisa was born, I began a gradual retreat into my younger, safer self. The small risks Rosa took—riding her Vespa alone after dark, taking Anna out to splash in puddles in the rain—spawned a nest of worry in me. I felt, I supposed, that I might be punished for any lapse of parenting etiquette. In that flash, in that one sweaty epiphany as we turned, side by side, into the frutti vendolo store that had boxes of cherries and wild mushrooms for sale out front, I saw that my childhood obedience had metamorphosed into an adult default setting of neurosis. Maybe it was that gnawing fearfulness that had spoiled my business. Maybe I gave my clients the sense that I was nervous—the last thing a traveler needs. Certainly it was part of what had taken the zest out of our marriage.
Something else occurred to me in those seconds—all part of this one flash of understanding: I’d always believed that the Pope’s decision to hire me as his assistant had been intended to bring me into a more secure environment, financially, socially, spiritually. But at that moment I wondered if maybe the exact opposite might be true. Maybe the risks he himself took—in a position where the stakes were so high, where the scrutiny was uninterrupted—were meant as a lesson for me. “Break some rules, Paolo,” he was trying to tell me. “Blend some risky creativity into your life. God won’t punish you for it.”
And then I thought: maybe this escape from Vatican propriety and from the expectations of his flock is the biggest lesson of all…and here I am spoiling it again with worry and fear.
I took hold of Rosa’s elbow, excited to tell her, to make her understand, to apologize, to promise that I’d change. “I’ve been an ass,” I said.
She gave me a strange look—we were in the vegetable aisle and she was feeling up a tomato—and said, “You’re just figuring that out?”
“No…I mean yes. I mean I’ve been so nervous about getting caught and getting in trouble that I’ve been spoiling the whole grand adventure, haven’t I?”
“The three of us are way ahead of you, amore. That’s all I’ll say.”
“But I did that with our marriage, too, right?”
She put the tomato back in its place and turned down her lips. A woman behind us was listening with great interest. Rosa’s smirk, her lifted eyebrows—that was all the response I received.
“I’m going to change,” I said. “Starting now.”
“Good, great. Molto bene.”
“We’re going to be grandparents, after all. How awful would it be to have a neurotic grandpa!”
I could see the woman behind Rosa—at the word “grandparents” her face lit up. She was leaning forward. Any second now she was going to congratulate me, or offer advice.
“Listen,” Rosa said, “focus. Go grab a pound of cherries, they look fresh. I’ll get the bread and mortadella from next door. You get cherries and something to drink, and if you see something else, just grab it and meet me outside. We don’t want to keep them waiting. We’ll talk about all this tonight, okay?”
Six minutes later, the food from both stores had been bagged up and paid for, and Rosa and I were on the sidewalk, hurrying toward the car. I felt young, happy, hopeful. I was going to be a grandfather! I was going to change! Then, just at that moment, we passed a corner tobacco shop where newspapers were set on a display rack out front. The headlines read like this:
PAPA RAPITO
ANCHE IL DALAI LAMA SCOMPARSO
SOSPETTO UN CUGINO DEL PAPA
POPE KIDNAPPED
DALAI LAMA ALSO TAKEN
POPE’S COUSIN SUSPECTED
On the left side of La Gazzetta’s front page was a photo of my so-called note, the signature looking exactly like mine. On the right side I saw a very small item, apparently unrelated to the big story: Carlo Mancini was suspected of having an affair with a champion female mountain biker, because one of his Maseratis had been photographed near a chairlift in the Abruzzo National Park. Full story on page 6.
A knot of people stood there with newspapers in their hands, arguing the facts of the case: where the Holy Father might be, what the motivation could have been, what this evil cousin looked like. I heard the word “Satan!” I heard someone say there was a photo of the evil cousin on page 2. And then that the radio had just broadcast news of a recording—obviously fake or forced—supposedly made by the captives.
Rosa and I hurried past, but half a block closer to the car was an open-air osteria with a TV playing too loudly. She grabbed my arm and made me stop. I saw Anna Lisa’s face on the screen, Piero beside her. “He was here, yes,” she was saying into a reporter’s microphone, “but now I don’t have the faintest idea where my father could be.” It was my turn to be proud of her. Instead of being upset or intimidated, she was looking directly into the camera, a note of defiance in her voice, unmistakable. One day she’d be able to tell her son or daughter that nonno had kidnapped the Pope!
The reporter said, “When he’s caught, your father will likely go to prison for life. Yet you don’t seem worried.”
We turned away, but over my shoulder I heard Piero’s voice. “A good man. A good Catholic. It will all be explained, I’m sure.”
Another notch up the son-in-law scale he went.
We hurried on. The joy of my epiphany had abandoned me as quickly as it had arrived. Yes, the Pope and the Dalai Lama would exonerate me, but what if the mob reached me before the situation could be explained? Look what they’d done to Savonarola, to Mussolini when he was finally caught!
PAPAL COUSIN KILLED BY MOB IN CENTRAL FERRARA
was the headline I imagined.
TORN TO SHREDS, KICKED, SPAT UPON
GRIEVING WIDOW CLAIMS HE WAS INNOCENT,
TAKES REFUGE ON ANTONIO MAZZO’S YACHT
Rosa was silent, atypically. Her heels clicked out an anxious staccato on the concrete. Another block and at last she spoke. “They’re gone.”
“Who?”
She lifted her chin at the Maserati.
I saw that the backseat was empty. I lost my grip on the bag of food, barely grabbed it before it hit the pavement.
“They’ve been caught,” I said. “Taken to police headquarters.”
“I don’t think so. The police would have waited here for you.”
I swiveled my head in a slow circle. A tour bus letting off its cargo of Asian tourists. Four schoolgirls with backpacks. Buzzing Vespas, cars glinting sunlight, a boy on a bicycle, a carabinieri vehicle. No Pope. No Dalai Lama.
“I’m going to turn myself in,” I told Rosa. “There’s the carabinieri.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Before the mob tears me to bloody pieces.”
“What mob?” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Maybe I am a kidnapper. Evil. Maybe I—”
“Paolo, stop it! Look!”
She turned me by the shoulder. Two familiar figures—a German businessman and his wealthy rock-star friend—had appeared in front of the cathedral’s round-topped middle door. They started walking toward us, surrounded by an aura of calm that was almost palpable, almost visible, and exactly the opposite of what I was feeling. That, I thought, is faith.
Unconcerned, unhurried, the two fugitives waited for a gap in the traffic and made their way across the street, conversing in a serious way, nodding in agreement.
“Sorry, sorry!” the Dalai Lama said when they were close. “The car very hot! We saw the beautiful church and I asked that the Pope could take me inside to see, to pray. We’re late, yes?”
We all climbed in. “No problem,” Rosa said, “but let’s take our lunch out into the country, if you don’t mind. Something about this city has me worried.” She turned all the way around so she was looking at our passengers. “What’s wrong?” she asked them. “You both have the same strange expression on your faces. What happened?”
There was a momentary silence, five or six seconds, before the Pope said, “Nothing,” in a tone so false and so unlike him that I took my eyes off the road to look in the mirror.
“Were you recognized?”
“No, cousin.”
“What, then?” Rosa pressed.
Another silence. At last, as we broke free of Ferrara’s outskirts and headed into the fields, the Dalai Lama said, too loudly, “Beautiful, beautiful place, this church! The windows! The paintings! Beautiful!”
I checked the mirror again and saw a fake grin plastered on the Pope’s face. He was sweating. “Grace inspired all that,” he said. “Even the design of the building. Grace.”
“What this word means?” the Dalai Lama asked, but as if he already knew, which I was sure he did. “Exactly what?”
They were putting on some kind of weird act.
“Ah, you tell him, Paolo. You’re better with English than I am. Think of a definition.”
“Divine inspiration,” I said, suspiciously.
“God’s creativity,” Rosa said. “God’s creativity passing through certain special human beings.”
“Ah. We have this, too,” the Dalai Lama said. “Statues, paintings, temples. Very beautiful. In Buddhist tradition we have this. Buddha said he does not want images of him for worship, but now we have them! Statues, many statues and paintings. Very beautiful!” He launched then into a long speech—almost a lecture—on artists and their place in human society, how they were similar to monks, standing off to one side, observing, not quite caught up in the melee of ordinary life, how they contributed so selflessly to humanity with their great gifts. And then how true it was that beauty mattered a great deal on this earth, how monasteries all over the world were usually set in beautiful places, how it was believed in some schools of Buddhism that people who were beautiful or handsome in this life were being rewarded for exceptional patience in a past life, how their beauty was a gift to others, but how at the same time it could be a trap, an attachment.
He said more, in that ten-minute oration, than he’d said since he’d told us about Kali when the flashlight died in the tunnel. Interesting though it was, his speech sounded forced to me, as false as the Pope’s smile, and as surprising. Something was going on. Something had happened in the cathedral, and I was about to ask what it was when, traveling just under the speed limit along the two-lane country road, we came upon another kind of beauty, one less traditionally associated with the spiritual life.
28
In Italy, where prostitution is of course illegal, and where the laws are of course ignored, one often comes across women standing in provocative poses by the side of roads like the one on which we were driving that day. The women are African, Russian, Eastern European, almost always young and attractive, and very often dressed in short skirts or very short pants, with the skin of their midsections showing and their lips painted in garish shades of purple or red.
“Stop, please,” the Pope said.
“Holy Father, she’s—”
“I know what she is…a child of God.”
This particular child of God was sitting on a lawn chair in a gravel turnout large enough for three cars. There was a small camper behind her, clearly the place where she entertained her clients. When I braked to a stop, a puff of dust rose from the tires. The Pope was out of the car before it settled, the Dalai Lama close behind. As the woman stood up to greet them, her large breasts swayed beneath a flimsy half shirt, and the expression on her face metamorphosed into one of professional welcome. After the tiniest hesitation, Rosa and I saw no option but to get out, too, and try to limit the damage.
“All four of you!” the woman exclaimed, in thickly accented Italian. “Tutti i quattro! A party! And a foreigner and a woman, too! What fun! But I charge extra for parties!”
What I expected then, what I suppose anyone would have expected in the face of that salacious greeting, was that the Holy Father, in a kind and loving way, would tell the woman that if she accepted Jesus Christ into her heart, she could turn her life around and save her soul. I have to say I even half expected the Pope to do something like offer her employment cleaning the Vatican offices, if only she’d abandon her sinful ways. That type of gesture would have been perfectly in keeping with the man I knew him to be. Compassionate in the extreme, unorthodox on a regular basis, hewing close to the faith that had sustained him his whole life, but nevertheless the Pope of Sacred Surprises, a man who sometimes seemed to want to shock his followers into a deeper understanding of Christ’s message. It was what made him so widely admired, so beloved, so special.
He walked up to the woman and held out his hand in greeting. She took it in a languid, flirtatious way, shook it up and down once, then put her other hand over his and held them there.
“We’d like to share our lunch with you,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment. Her professional smile wavered, her eyes narrowed, crinkling the mascara there so that it fell in small dried dots on her cheeks. It seemed to me she suspected a trick, or that she was trying to understand what kind of new sexual game might be inferred from an offer to share lunch with another woman and three men. She peered at the Dalai Lama, at me, turned her head to Rosa, and, though she didn’t seem the least bit afraid, it was that cautious curiosity that made me understand, in a way I really hadn’t before, the risks inherent in a life like hers. Here she stood, alone at the side of the road, ten miles outside Ferrara. Anyone might stop and take her into that camper. Any brute or rapist, any criminal or just-released convict, any man with a knife in his pocket and a burning hatred in his brain. And after a day of that she’d be picked up by her handler, raped again perhaps, or just given food and a place to sleep so she could be used, day after day, like some kind of ATM with breasts and a vagina. This would go on for a year or a few years, and then she’d be discarded or perhaps even killed.
Her hair was dyed a reddish blond, the work poorly done, but even with that, and even with the purplish lipstick and ridiculous outfit, “beauty” was one word that came to mind. “Grace” was another. In my travels around Italy and, indeed, around Europe, I’d seen plenty of roadside prostitutes. Most of them were attractive by one definition or another. How could they earn anything otherwise? It’s not at all true that I harbored some kind of sentimental notion about their profession. Theirs was a harsh, brutal life, the free market at its most animalistic; the men who kept women like this were, to my mind, the worst kind of criminal, and the things these women did with their clients could not by any stretch be filed under the heading of “love.” But this woman had a measure of grace to her, an obvious bodily dignity, an obvious courage; she was, or seemed, beyond worry. It shamed me.
“I’m not sure what you have on mind,” she said to the Pope in a sly voice and poor Italian.
He gestured toward the car. “We’ve just bought some food for our midday meal. We want to share it with you. Paolo, take the bags from the car, would you?”
“Eh,” the woman said, unimpressed. “Thanks for a invitation, but lunch with you people could cost me pay.”
“We’ll pay you two hours,” the Pope said. “How much would that be?”
“You’re joking, correct?” the woman said, but some of her edifice of dignity had begun to wobble around the edges. She released the Pope’s hand and took half a step back.
“Not at all. Give us a sum. We’ll pay. We’ll stand near the car. Bring your chair over, and w
e’ll have a meal.”
The woman cocked her head to the side, but kept her eyes focused on the man in front of her. “That’s a fake beard, isn’t it?”
“It is, yes.”
“What’s your game? Did you all rob the bank or something? And what’s for your friend’s bad toupee? You guys on the run?”
I tried to quickly think of an answer, and I came up with one: we were a theater troupe, on our way from Rome to Venice to take part in a play there, a play about tolerance and open-mindedness. Before I could get out the first word, however, I heard my cousin say, “I’m the Pope. And this”—he put his hand on his friend’s shoulder—“is the Dalai Lama. Have you been listening to the news?”
The woman laughed in an uncomfortable way. “I’m not the big news person,” she said, “and not so religious. But my last guest he said something about that. He said the Pope was kidnapped by Muslims and was being held on a ransom. A inside job. He said the Muslims had a friend who worked in the Vatican. But he thought the other person was President Obama.”
“Not President Obama…the Dalai Lama,” Rosa said. “The Pope of Buddhism. A great man.”
“Ho sentito parlare di lui,” she said. “I heard of him.” The woman looked from one of us to another. “And you’re who?” she demanded, pointing at me.
“I’m the kidnapper,” I said, in what I hoped was a joking way.
“You look like it. Didn’t you come visit me one time before? You seems familiar.”
“No, never. This isn’t how I really look!” I raised up one pant leg. “It’s a disguise.”
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 19