The Delight of Being Ordinary

by Roland Merullo

  She listened attentively, not blinking, and when no more words were forthcoming, she said, “Bene, fine. But the question is: what do I do with that?”

  “You serve.”

  “Fine. How?”

  “By example. By being genuine. Simply by being your absolute, most genuine self in every interaction of every hour, you provide a great and rare service on this earth.”

  She stared, appraising me. She pushed out her closed lips. She nodded, once. “The exact opposite of this, then. No charades. Ever. I mean, in real life, no apologies for who I really am, no games.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Grazie,” she said, and she stood, fixed a last look on me, turned, and made straight for the golden door. If she had arrived with someone, that someone was now being abandoned. People stepped aside for her. I could see the back of her head, and then only the headdress. I saw the door swing open, glimpsed her bare brown shoulders, and then she was gone and as if by some chemical reaction, the hilarity in the ballroom went up another notch.

  Almost immediately two more women approached the table. They didn’t sit, but crouched, so that only the tops of their almost bare breasts and their elegant necks and faces showed. “Ciao!” one of them giggled. I saw that they were wearing only lingerie on top, one red, the other black. The black-bra-wearing one handed me a full glass of champagne. I thanked her and gulped eagerly.

  “Ciao, ragazze. What are you here as?”

  “Whores,” the second one said. “We’re offended you couldn’t tell!”

  “Yes, we want to take you upstairs to one of the rooms and ravish you, both of us at once.”

  “I’m afraid I have to remain here until the dancing starts. There are people here who need me.”

  “We’re serious,” the first one said, and I could see that she was, and the offer set off a small, vile spark in me.

  “Yes, we can’t wait until the dancing starts. We’ll find someone else if you say no. This is your chance, signor terapista.”

  “I saw a nun in the crowd,” the other one said. “She’s our second choice! We’ll take the nun upstairs and corrupt her if you say no.”

  “Yes, brilliant!” her partner added. They saluted each other with a drunken high five.

  “The nun has to help me in a bit,” I told them. “You’ll have to take a knight or an astronaut, or one of the Berlusconis.”

  They stared at me in tandem, drunkenly. “You’re afraid,” the first one said. “I can see it. What kind of man is afraid of going to bed with two women?”

  At that point no clever remark came to my lips. At that point the resolve I’d carried into the room, the idea that I could somehow play along and learn something about myself, began to desert me. They watched me. One of the women slipped and fell sideways, then righted herself and laughed. It was the laugh I’d heard through the window of the Pope’s room. They waited a few more seconds, giving me a chance to change my mind, to go upstairs with them and bury myself in pleasure. The smallest swirl of temptation did indeed spin in the air around me like smoke from a too-strong cigar. “Come on!” the one who’d fallen said. “You look like you could use some fun! That’s why we picked you!”

  After watching them for another second, I shook my head.

  “Let’s go find the nun, then,” the second one said, and they stood so abruptly that their tiny skirts shifted up to the bottom of their buttocks and had to be tugged back down.

  I watched them stumble away, then caught a glimpse of Rosa in the crowd. A very short man, dressed, apparently, as Julius Caesar, was leaning in close to her and shouting something, glass in hand. Another proposition, no doubt, and perhaps some momentary spark was lit in her, as well, to forget herself, forget her past, slip away for an hour from the role she played in the world. I saw the two whores stumbling drunkenly toward my wife, but partygoers moved between us—Elvis and the astronaut holding hands. Another woman approached the desk and sat. Plump, fortyish, with dark brown hair in braids and magnificent, un-made-up eyes, she was dressed like a Swiss milkmaid in a laced bodice, but I could see, a second after she took the chair opposite me, that there were real tears about to spill over.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No!” she replied, in a voice that was almost a shout. “My husband has already gone off with someone, another man, or a woman, or two women. It’s unbearable. Every year it’s the same, and I truly, truly, truly don’t believe I can bear it any longer!”

  “You’re not acting, are you.”

  She shook her head no, and a droplet of misery swung off sideways and landed with a plop in my champagne. She choked out a sob, hideous and real, that was eaten up by the roar of happy voices behind her. A Roman slave, dressed only in a twist of gold cloth, stopped by to offer us oysters from her tray. Both the woman and I shook our heads.

  “You should talk to someone who can help, a real someone,” I said stupidly.

  More head shaking. Tears flying this way and that. “I can’t leave him.”

  “Of course you can. Do you have children?”

  “Twins. Eight years old. I’d be condemning them to a life of near-poverty.”

  “But you’re married. You’re wearing a ring.”

  “Married, yes, in the Church.” A syllable of horrible laughter burst from her lips.

  “There are laws. He’d have to support you.”

  “Not the way we live now. The children would be devastated.”

  “You’re allowing yourself to be tortured,” I blurted out, because by that point there were no more barriers between me and the truth, no more cleverness, no games. I felt like a man whose soul had been cleaned by being scraped with muddy sponges and washed in an ice-cold spray. “Your own need for luxury is torturing you.”

  A burst of sobbing. She leaned forward and rested her head on the tabletop, one braid flopping there like a wounded snake, the other hanging straight down just beyond the table’s edge. I put a hand on the back of her head and held it there while she wept. I could see the top of her backbone, an even line of bumps beneath perfect skin. She was another stunningly beautiful woman, in the heart of middle age, and I couldn’t help imagining what she must have looked like, what a rare beauty she must have been, when her rich husband proposed to her.

  “Eventually it might pass,” was all I could think to say in the face of her suffering. “Eventually he’ll probably get tired of it and be faithful again.”

  She shook her head underneath my hand, and lifted her face to me. “Mai,” she said. “Never. He’ll go on and on. Like Mazzo. I have to absorb it. I have to bury myself in it for the sake of the children.”

  The woman stood and hurried away, and I was about to follow to make sure she didn’t harm herself. I’d had enough, more than enough, much more than enough, and had already pushed back my chair and was about to stand when a Mussolini stepped out of the crowd, swung one leg over the other chairback, and sat at attention.

  Like everyone else in that room, this man wasn’t adorned in a cheap, store-bought costume. Some real thought, work, and expertise had gone into his getup. He was wearing what looked to be a precise replica of the uniform Il Duce had ordered tailored specifically for himself, a uniform that corresponded to no known Italian tradition, to no actual branch of the military or government, but that was festooned with medals as a kind of testament to the falseness of the sycophants around him and his own desperate need for approval. I knew these things because of Rosa’s studies, and because, in an attempt to soothe her grief, my mother—the resistance-fighter-turned-printmaker—had made herself into an amateur historian, at least as far as Mussolini was concerned. It was, as my father often told her, a morbid fascination: she wanted to know everything she could about the man who’d caused her brother’s murder. As I grew older, she’d share some of her knowledge with me. Because of the location of our home, we practically couldn’t go out for a walk or take the car into town without passing the small black-and-gold plaque that marked the pl
ace where Mussolini had been executed. In my high-school and college years my mother would tell me bits about Il Duce’s life: his genuinely heroic World War I service and wound, his early attraction to socialism, a philosophy he’d later denounce; his rise to power via the use of violence, intimidation, threats, treachery, Machiavellian strategies. His mass appeal—a hundred thousand Italians staring up at him as he stood on the balcony at the Palazzo Venezia, promising to remake an Italy that had never in fact existed. There had been, especially in the early going, some mottled good in the man, an inclination toward public service. He’d instituted insurance programs to aid the widows and children of soldiers killed in the First World War; he’d famously made the trains run on time, drained the Pontine Marshes, brought fresh water to impoverished southern hamlets, tried to set up model agricultural communities.

  The great tragedy was this: he was, for a stretch of years, almost unimaginably popular in Italy. Wherever he went people lined up to see him. Men and women would have done anything for his approval. And how had he used that power and popularity? For a little while he mocked Hitler, called him a clown, a lunatic. But Hitler wooed him like a lover, kept inviting him to Germany, kept being refused, kept inviting him, until, at last, Mussolini acquiesced, and dressed in this exact uniform—made specially for his visit—traveled to Munich. There, Hitler put on a show for him, a stunning parade of military might and Nazi precision. And the weak little boy inside Mussolini was won over. That moment of power-envy sealed his fate, and Italy’s. He went back to Rome and tried to institute racial laws (under his direction and despite many individual acts of Italian heroism, Jews were mercilessly harassed, stripped of savings, property, titles, and jobs, though none were sent to the camps until Mussolini’s demise and the full German occupation). He suggested Italians get up early and exercise (people laughed at him). He invaded Albania, then Greece (Hitler had to send troops to rescue the Italian army from complete disaster). By the time the Allies landed on Sicily in July of 1943, Mussolini was broken, despised, physically ill, and often depressed to the point of paralysis.

  But the Benito who sat in front of me held himself like the Mussolini of 1932 and 1935 and 1938. The man bore some resemblance to the real Duce—short and powerfully built, with a square face and protruding chin—and he’d obviously spent some time studying the old films, because he’d mastered the body language, the clownishly overdone posture, the flip of a Roman salute, the self-serious gaze…with which he now skewered me. Apparently, the fact that I no longer wanted to play along didn’t show on my face, or the man was too high or drunk or deep in his role to notice, because the first thing he said after appraising the brown tint of my skin was, “You know, you belong to an inferior people!”

  “No, actually, I do not know it,” I said. “I belong to the human race.”

  He shook his head manfully. “If I have to do it single-handedly, I will clean up this great nation!”

  “Your kind of cleaning we don’t need.”

  “Therapists will become extinct! Crime will disappear! Religion will disappear! And in its place we will have the worship of the state!”

  “Another false god,” I said. “The state, the flag, you. All false gods.”

  “The state,” he went on, “the family. Manhood.”

  “The husband who was famous for cheating on his wife. The valiant leader who promised to fight to his last breath but was caught leaving his beloved country with millions stolen from the national treasury. The little boy who idolized Hitler, sent thousands of Italians to their death on the Russian front, and brought his nation to ruin. And for what? To fatten his own ego! That’s manhood?”

  By that point I could feel the muscles in my neck. I was leaning across the table at Il Duce, speaking in a loud voice, and it seemed that through the haze of his drunkenness he was actually hearing me.

  “You understand nothing,” he said weakly. “I shall purify—”

  That was as much as I could bear. I stood up: my chair went over backward. The sound of it falling was lost in the general melee. I left Mussolini there, waiting for his therapy, with an old man in line behind him, another actor, eager to play along. I looked for my people in the crowd. Just then the band started playing Michael Jackson’s “I Want You Back.” It was almost impossible to move in any direction, because at the first note, as if on some invisible signal, people started dancing wildly, throwing their arms about, crashing into one another. I saw a man on the floor on his hands and knees—a heart attack? A woman saw him at the same time; she climbed onto his back and began slapping him as one would slap a reluctant horse. The black cat raced past them. People danced in threes and fours and singly, swirling like mad dervishes. One senior guest, dressed as a sailor, sat on the floor with his back against a column, holding an empty champagne glass in one hand and fingering the toe of his loafer. The Roman-slave servers had ceded the central territory now and skipped along near the walls with trays held high, or tossed what appeared to be actual gold dust into the air. It lay on the shoulders of nearby dancers like pricey dandruff.

  A desperate urge for normalcy seized me. I wanted to find my wife. I worried about the holy ones. In the corner farthest from the golden door I saw that two men had started to shove each other and were shouting, and at that point I finally located the Dalai Lama in his police uniform. I worked my way through the crowd, took him by the shoulders, swung him gently around, and headed back toward the door. I would herd them out, I decided, one by one. I would find my three colleagues and bring them and myself to safety. Ahead of me I caught a glimpse of a king’s robe. My cousin. I saw Rosa approaching him. The Dalai Lama and I joined in and made a protective circle, and the four of us floated sideways through the crowd like a jellyfish, moving closer and closer to each other so that by the time we reached the golden door we went through it in a tight group, just as we had come.

  Except for one young woman vomiting quietly in the corner beneath a large vase, the marble lobby was empty, the bar abandoned. I saw a set of exterior doors and steered us toward them, and in another moment we were all of us out in the warm air. The doors closed behind us and muted music—the Rolling Stones now, “Brown Sugar”—drifted out through the glass.

  Full darkness had fallen. In the middle of Mazzo’s vast lawn, a hundred meters from the house, we saw the pool—huge and L-shaped, lit at its corners by Japanese lanterns. We made our way toward it through rows of parked Jaguars and Mercedes, black stretch limousines, a sunflower-yellow Lamborghini. At one end of the pool two couples sat talking quietly. We chose the other end, collapsed into four chaise longues there, and let out a collective breath.

  “Everyone all right?” Rosa asked wearily.

  “Okay.” The Dalai Lama set the nightstick down beside him with a small tapping noise. It rolled to the edge of the water, as if trying to drown itself, and stopped.

  “Holy Father?”

  “Fine,” the Pope said in a barely audible voice.

  “Amore?”

  I had shrugged out of my tweed jacket and tossed it aside. The pipe, hat, and glasses had long ago been abandoned and lay somewhere on the lawn. “I’m here,” I said. “Present. Breathing. You?”

  “I’d like to apologize to all of you—Holy Father, Your Holiness, Paolo. This was an absolutely stupid idea, and I’m sorry.”

  “Forgiven,” the Pope said instantly. “You were only trying to find us a place to stay.”

  The Dalai Lama was nodding in a way that made me think he was replaying scenes from the ballroom.

  “I need to swim,” I said.

  “We all need to,” Rosa said. “But won’t it ruin your disguise? It’s already looking a little thin.”

  “Only if I scrub. I won’t scrub.”

  Rosa stood and took the nun’s veil and wimple from her head, shook out her hair. “As part of my penance I volunteer to go back to the costume room for bathing suits and towels, and I’ll fetch our own clothes, too. Please wait. We’ll change in the cabana.
We’ll have a group baptism.”

  “Don’t, please, get in fight there,” the Dalai Lama said.

  The two couples at the far end of the pool followed Rosa back toward the villa at some distance. They were speaking quietly, taking turns, almost like rational human beings. I heard, “That recording was definitely a fake. Heavily edited, you could hear it. They’re in trouble, probably dead by now.” And then their voices faded away.

  “Dalai,” I said, “Holy Father, please say something.”

  The faint strains of music mixed with notes of tinkling laughter from one of the women on the lawn. For a moment those were the only sounds. I could see, around us, the dark shadows of Mazzo’s vines and olive trees.

  And then I heard a familiar voice say: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.”

  “Amen,” the Dalai Lama said, and then, “I am hoping those two fighting men not hurt. I could not be able to stop them.”

  “No one could have stopped them,” I told him.

  “Is this the typical entertainment?”

  “Not even close to typical, Your Holiness.”

  We sat for a while, looking up at the stars, a great stillness there, a great peace and order, a sanity that was separated from our craziness by millions of miles. When Rosa returned, she had an armful of clothes, and one by one we went into the cabana and changed. The bathing suits didn’t fit well. Both the Pope and the Dalai Lama seemed uncomfortable showing that much skin, even in darkness, but I was thinking mainly of myself then, I admit. I felt as though I’d been pushed so close to the edge of a polluted lake that I might have been sucked in and drowned. I wanted my ordinary life, my office, my duties, the simple pleasures of my breakfasts with the Pope, conversation with my daughter. And at that, like a constellation swinging back into view, I remembered she was pregnant, and I said a small prayer for the child in her womb, that he or she would live out its years, not too poor or too rich, surrounded by a hardworking wholesomeness, in a relatively nonviolent period of history. But then I thought: When, really, had we seen such a period? Now, with widespread terrorism and wars in the Middle East? A generation ago, with the hell in Yugoslavia, genocide in Rwanda, torture in Uganda? The generations before that, with apartheid in South Africa, napalm in Vietnam? Korea and World War II and the Spanish Civil War? The Inquisition? The conquistadors? The Crusades?