The Delight of Being Ordinary

by Roland Merullo

  “What, then? You want me to join you for lunch? To what, convert me?”

  “Never,” the Holy Father said. “Just lunch. What would your fee be?”

  “For two hours,” the woman said, “two hundred.”

  The Pope nodded at me and held up three fingers. I took a wad of bills from my pocket, counted out three hundred euro, and handed it over.

  “Now,” the Pope said, passing the bills to the woman. “Let us break bread.”

  We ate on the lime-green hood of the Maserati, the cold cuts, cherries, and bread laid out on wax paper, the five of us forming an uneven crescent around the car. From time to time a vehicle would slow down as it passed—one even made a brief detour through the gravel turnout—but the drivers saw us eating and sped away.

  When the Dalai Lama asked the woman her name, she said, “Marta,” at first, and then, after a few seconds, in capable English, “Tara, really. Marta is my work name.”

  “Ah!” the Dalai said happily. “In Tibet, Tara is the name of the female Buddha! We call her the Mother of Liberation. A bodhisattva.”

  “What’s a bodhisattva?” she wanted to know.

  So did I.

  “The being who lives for others. The person of most greatest compassion!”

  “That’s me,” the woman said ironically, but she was eyeing the Dalai Lama almost gratefully, as if kind words sent in her direction were rare as rubies. She ate some of the food, but tentatively, warily, as if one of us might snatch it away at any minute, or as if she worried it had been treated with a drug that would knock her unconscious. The Pope stood there with half a mortadella panini in one hand and a bottle of water in the other and, like the Dalai Lama, he was absolutely natural and nonchalant about it. He might have been eating with anyone, a queen or a pauper, another cousin, his sister, a nun. We followed his lead, Rosa and I, trying not to look at each other, thinking of what we might say and coming up with nothing.

  Tara turned to me again. “Why did you do this? What do you have to win from it? Not stopping for me—I mean the kidnapping. Money? You selling them to somebody?”

  “The holy men asked me to do it, as a favor. I work for the Pope in the Vatican and he said he wanted a break, wanted to be treated like an ordinary man for a while. The Dalai Lama was visiting and he felt the same way.”

  “And you just took off?”

  “Rosa here, my wife, has makeup and hair shops. One of her employees did the disguises.”

  “They’re not bad. Now what?”

  We looked at each other. “We’re going to see a friend tonight,” Rosa said, “and then, tomorrow, we don’t know.”

  “I wish I didn’t know,” Tara said, and she laughed in a self-mocking way I found heartbreaking. “I wish more than anything I didn’t know what I’m doing tomorrow.”

  She shifted her eyes back and forth between the two holy men. Most of the food was gone. A red sports car had driven by once, then again, then driven away, and Tara looked after it, not longingly but out of habit, perhaps. She’d tucked the money we’d given her into the top of her shirt, where a black bra was visible under the thin material. She wiped her mouth delicately with a paper napkin. The Dalai Lama asked if she’d like to come along with us, and for just a moment I thought she might say yes and squeeze herself into the small space in the middle of the backseat. “Going with you,” she said, then for some reason looked at Rosa, “would be a good way to make me killed.”

  Hearing those words, the Pope asked me for a pen. He wrote something on one of the unused paper napkins, then handed it to her. “There’s a reward for information that leads to us being found. A very large sum. After we’re gone, wait a little while, please, until darkness falls, and then call this number and tell them we stopped to ask directions and you recognized me. Say we were headed northwest. Don’t tell anyone else, though, or I’m afraid you’ll be cheated.”

  The woman tilted her head to one side and studied him.

  “The reward is five million euro,” Rosa told her, and Tara’s eyes shifted, sharpened.

  “Come see me,” the Pope told her. “Afterward. After you get the reward. Call that number and say your name and that we met near Ferrara and tell them I told you to come see me. I’ll tell the people at that number to expect a call from Tara.”

  “I don’t have no phone now anyway.”

  “My God! How can you not have a phone?” Rosa said. “Out here. Like this.”

  “I don’t, that’s all. I can borrow one, though, probably. Later.”

  “Take this one, then,” Rosa said, handing over Mario’s phone.

  Tara hesitated.

  “Take it, please. Even if you just save it for emergencies. It will work until the end of the month.”

  The woman accepted it at last and flipped the plastic creature back and forth in her palm. The red sports car cruised past again, and there was nothing left to do but pack away the food, ask Tara again not to tell anyone for a while, then bid her good day.

  She was still staring at us as we clicked our seatbelts into place. When we were pulling out of the parking area, I turned around to look. She had the napkin in one hand, flapping in the breeze, Mario’s phone clutched in the other. I waved. She only raised her eyebrows and turned to watch the road.

  29

  From the Alps in the north to Sicily in the south, the Italian countryside is dotted with magnificent old villas. Red-tile-roofed, stucco-walled, sitting amid orchards or vineyards or surrounded by fields of grain and rows of olive trees, these marvelous structures stand as reminders of the not-so-good old days when the noble family lived in luxury while dozens, sometimes hundreds, of peasants worked the land and slept alongside their animals in unheated outbuildings. Great Italian films like Bertolucci’s 1900 and Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs give a good sense of this era, a lesson in history that lingers in the Italian consciousness to this day.

  In time, as the peasants’ oppression went on and on and their lives became more and more onerous, millions of them immigrated to North and South America. Those who remained grew restive. The old order began to crumble; there was widespread unrest, violence on the streets, strikes, demonstrations, gangs, a tilt toward anarchy. Inspired by the examples of the Bolsheviks in Russia, a workers’ movement emerged—Italy would ultimately have the strongest Communist Party in Western Europe—and then, in reaction to the Communists, perhaps, or simply out of a desire for any change at all, anything resembling order, the backlash and chaos brought forth a charismatic egotist named Benito Mussolini. The rest, as they say, is history. Mussolini brought a kind of order, yes, but through violence and the threat of violence, and by appealing to Italians’ basest impulses. A few important civic improvements, a number of grandiose debacles. Then military adventurism, Hitler, the war years, and the dire poverty that followed. It’s a miracle Italy survived. Even more of a miracle—a Marshall Plan miracle—that the nation found its way back to something like sanity.

  Now, some of the old villas are abandoned, rotting by the side of the road with caved-in roofs and tree branches growing through windows. Others are inhabited, in somewhat more humble fashion, by the descendants of the noble families, or by well-off foreigners who want some Italian dolce vita. Or by men like Antonio Mazzo, who made fortunes without the help of a peasant underclass, and who keep the fine old estates with a few hundred olive trees or grapevines as a kind of hobby, a place where they can leave behind the stresses of fame and live, without too much guilt, the luxurious life of lord of the manor.

  We arrived at Mazzo’s villa in late afternoon, just as a golden July sun was touching the old iron gate at the side of the road, and giving a last embrace to the long sweep of his fields. Ocher-washed stucco, three stories, almost as long as a soccer field, the villa looked like nothing so much as a slightly tattered palace. In fact, as we approached, I heard the Dalai Lama, who was sitting behind me, say, “Which kind of king lives here?”

  “An old movie star, not a king,” Ro
sa said. She was happy, almost giddy, at the thought of seeing her friend. And I have to admit that, though the party idea concerned me, I was very much looking forward to a comfortable bed, a nice bath, and food with more taste to it than what we’d eaten at Campo Imperatore. There weren’t any other cars in the gravel drive, and as my wife pulled the Maserati to a stop I found myself hoping the party had been Mazzo’s idea of a practical joke, or that Rosa had heard wrong and the event would be held on the following evening, long after we’d left town.

  The main doors were made of wood, painted green, arched at the top, and guarded to either side by stone lions with open, toothless mouths. As we stepped from the car the left side of the doors opened, and a very old man appeared. He put me in mind of a chestnut—tiny, somewhat lumpy, tightly built. He was dressed in a gorgeous light-brown suit, his white dress shirt open at the collar, his face showing the polished flesh of plastic surgery and his hair as black as the rubber on the Maserati’s wheels. Mazzo was so small compared to what I remembered from the silver screen, so old, so harmless-looking, that my smoky vapor of jealousy evaporated instantly. He spread his arms in delighted welcome, said, “The woman of my dreams!” hugged my wife close, and it didn’t bother me at all.

  I had wondered how Rosa would handle the introductions and was happy when she presented us simply as three good friends, Fabio, Andrea, and Domenico. Mazzo shook our hands with great warmth and style, but he seemed to be living behind a wall of thick glass, the face frozen in what looked like a sincere grin, but eyes that were dull and distant. I guessed he was medicated, ill, or both. “Have you eaten?” he asked, which is the first thing Italians ask their guests after they say hello. “Are you hungry?”

  We shook our heads. Rosa said, “No, we had lunch a short while ago,” but Mazzo didn’t seem to hear her, or to understand. “Something small,” he said. “Small, at first, and then, later, la festa, the party!”

  He ushered us into the building and very slowly up a sweeping set of white marble stairs to a second-floor dining room that looked out on neat rows of grapevines. He’d clearly made preparations for our visit, and on short notice. The circular table had been elegantly set, and we’d been seated no more than ten seconds when a man and a woman appeared and poured wine and water and another couple carried in silver trays with caviar on crackers, chocolates, grapes, sliced pears, a selection of cheeses, miniature loaves of bread.

  “Eat and drink, please, make me happy,” Mazzo said. “The wine comes from my own land here, my own vines.” Before sitting down with us, he paused a moment with his hands on the back of a chair, still catching his breath. He surveyed the offerings, our faces, the level of water and wine in the glasses, and then, saying, “I’ll join you for a moment,” he sat, tucked a napkin into his collar, and took a long sip of red.

  “How are you?” he asked Rosa after he’d wiped his puffy lips. “Tell me. Provide all details, as long as they are happy ones.”

  “Well, my daughter just told us she’s pregnant with our first grandchild!”

  “Aha!” Mazzo exclaimed. He raised his glass again. “Maschio? Femmina?” Boy? Girl?

  “Not yet known!”

  “May it be a beautiful girl,” he said. “And may she grow into a lovely woman with fine breasts to which she one day holds children of her own. May she be happy and healthy for a hundred years. May I be allowed, as an honorary godfather, to bequeath one of my homes to her on her wedding day!”

  He raised a toast and we joined him—Rosa and I with wine, and the Dalai and Pope using water. We picked at the food, politely. It was impossible not to like Antonio Mazzo, but the glass wall behind which he lived seemed to have a line of sight only to Rosa. The rest of us might as well have been invisible, which, given the circumstances, was a welcome development.

  “As for me,” he said, without being asked, “I am not at peace with old age. Not at peace with infirmity. With death. Though I’ve had many good things in my life—women, wine, food, travel, fame, money—it still seems to me, my Rosa, that something is missing. I reach for that something and I am like a man waving his arms in the air as he falls from the top of a cliff. What is it? I ask myself. Another beautiful woman? Another spectacular meal? Another summer on my yacht at Costa Smeralda? Yes, a part of me answers. Yes and yes and yes, all those things. And then another part speaks words in a language I do not understand, in a voice I cannot quite hear. I strain forward to listen to the voice, and, falling, I wave my arms, I call out in my sleep. But the answer is hidden from me, Rosa. Hidden.”

  It was almost like a recitation, a soliloquy from an old film role, Shakespeare perhaps, or Fellini. Finished with it, Mazzo swiveled his head and at last seemed to see the men at the table, however vaguely. “This is the human condition, is it not?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “We all feel it.”

  But the words tasted false in my mouth: it wasn’t quite true. The Pope and the Dalai Lama didn’t seem to feel it at all. In my many years with the Holy Father I’d never heard him say anything remotely like that.

  “It doesn’t seem fair, does it,” Mazzo went on. “I feel sometimes that we’re living a cruel puzzle arranged by a spiteful god. We’re given these sublime pleasures. We work for them, yes, in part, but in part we are simply fortunate. We spend nights in bed with glamorous lovers, unforgettable nights, we drink wine that tastes as if it were grown in Eden and harvested by angels, we consume meals we remember for twenty or thirty or forty years, and then all this is taken away. Bit by bit, year by year, decade by decade, our ability to enjoy physical love is diminished, and in some cases—not mine—extinguished. Our ability to drink, to digest, to run and swim and climb mountains! To work! All taken away. There’s something so tragic about all this, my Rosa, it seems to me now. You’re young, still. These pleasures are still available to you. And now, a grandchild, the greatest blessing. For me, however, there is nothing left but the cold grave, the end of things. A vast and inexpressible loneliness takes hold of me on certain evenings. No matter where I go in this beautiful nation—and I have houses everywhere—it takes hold of me and won’t release its grip!”

  As he spoke, Mazzo took a marking pen from an inside pocket of his jacket, searched briefly for a scrap of paper, and then, not finding one, lifted a white silk napkin from the table and began to scribble on it. I thought for a moment that he’d lost his mind.

  “But you have your parties,” Rosa said kindly, pretending not to notice the ruined napkin. “Your legions of friends and admirers. Your body of work.”

  “Yes, yes,” Mazzo said, looking at each of us in turn. A self-satisfied smile played along his famous lips for a few seconds, then vanished. “And tonight’s party is going to be one of the absolute masterworks of my career. I’ve secretly been studying all of you since the moment of your arrival, watching you, deciding what costumes will suit you best. I am making notes, you see?” He held up the napkin, which was covered with ink. “Listen to me now.” He wet his lips once more with the wine and seemed, momentarily at least, to have forgotten his angst. “We have crates of costumes here, whole rooms full of costumes. I don’t want the four of you to merely put on a mask and dance and drink. I want you to dress up! To assume a new identity, the way all actors do! I will hand these notes to my Giacomo and he will instruct you in the correct costumes to choose. And you must do as he asks, you must! Otherwise I shall be gravely offended.” He swung his eyes around the table, spraying us with droplets of attention but, it seemed to me, not truly seeing any of us. “Giacomo will show you to your rooms now,” he said. “Rest. Use the swimming pool if you like. I must nap in order to have the energy to perform my duties as host, and, who knows, perhaps something more, later. But please, be at home here. Be absolutely free…Maria!” he called to one of the serving women. “Call Giacomo. Tell him to take exquisite care of our guests, of my Rosa and her friends!”

  Getting to his feet, Mazzo struggled a bit. When he was upright, he took a last sip of wine, n
odded to us each in turn, and, like a great stage actor, strode out of the spotlight and through the door. We heard his feet on the hallway tiles, and then he was gone.

  30

  “An amazing man, isn’t he?” Rosa remarked to the Holy Father, when we were alone again.

  The Pope was nibbling a cracker with caviar and eyeing a plate of chocolates. He moved his eyes to my wife, chewed, swallowed, wiped the silk napkin carefully across his lips. There was a certain wrinkling around his eyes, a signal that he was about to be diplomatic. “Yes, but I feel there is something sad about him.”

  “He’s been a generous man all his life,” Rosa said, somewhat defensively, as if she expected the holy duo might judge Mazzo harshly for his love of excess. “I wonder sometimes, what does God do with a soul like that when it is finished here on earth?”

  “His kindness will be remembered,” the Pope said. “If he asks, his sins will be forgiven.”

  My wife pressed her lips downward in the smallest sign of impatience. I hoped the Holy Father didn’t notice, because I could see that for Rosa, his explanation hadn’t been enough. The Catholic platitudes had stopped working for her many years earlier, stopped working for Anna Lisa, as well. I’d broached that subject with my cousin once, before his election. “Paolo,” he said, “they are platitudes, yes, but within them lies a mystical meaning. ‘God is love,’ for example. Or ‘Christ died for our sins.’ It takes years of devotion and prayer to penetrate to the heart of that meaning. It’s like the parables. Christ told simple stories to reveal the most complex and mysterious of truths. You can ponder them for decades.”

  But even that hadn’t been enough to quiet a certain restless skeptic who lived in one corner of my house of faith.

  Rosa turned to the Dalai Lama and asked, “In your religion, in Buddhism, what happens to a man like my friend after he takes his final breath?”

  “His desires and attachments call him back into another body,” the Dalai Lama said without the slightest hesitation, as if that conclusion were as obvious as the slices of cheese on his plate, as if this cause-and-effect karmic law were as clear to him as God’s love was to my cousin. “Again and again he will be called back. Life after life. Then, one day, he understands that no physical pleasure can satisfy him in deepest place. At that moment, in that life, he turn in the direction of liberation.”