The Delight of Being Ordinary

by Roland Merullo

  “Time for a swim,” I said, because when my mind got to working like that, a good cool dip always brought me some peace. I dove in without checking the depth and scraped the tip of my nose on the bottom. “Shallow,” I warned, just as Rosa was making an elegant dive in a one-piece bathing suit three sizes too large for her. The Pope held the railing and walked in—knees, waist, chest. Once I saw that he was safe, I flipped onto my back and floated, studying the stars, unworried about the disguise. But in a moment I realized there were only three of us in the pool. I stood and saw the Dalai Lama frozen at the top of the steps, ankle-deep in water. Rosa saw it, too, and climbed up to him. “I’ll hold your arm,” she said. “Nothing bad will happen.”

  The Pope and I paddled over to the bottom of the steps, and as the Dalai made his slow, terrified descent, we were both there to meet him, each of us taking hold of an arm. He was tentative at first, a look akin to panic showing in the light from the Japanese lanterns; but once his feet touched bottom he smiled, ducked down unexpectedly, and came up spluttering and laughing. We gave him a quiet round of applause. He glided forward in a dead man’s float and windmilled his arms. I thought: Piero should see this.

  Just then we heard a klaxon, and then another, the sound and then the sight of two police cars. Lights flashing, they sped in through the gate and glided past the line of parked luxury sedans to the main entrance, where the sirens quieted but the lights still spun. We saw uniformed officers stand up out of the front seats, their silhouettes revealed in blue strobe. “Stay low,” Rosa said.

  We crouched with just our faces out of the water and waited. The music went silent and I had the sense that the partygoers had been frozen in mid-revelry, or perhaps they’d thought the carabinieri were in disguise, too—there for show, another ingenious Mazzo touch. Maybe he’d arranged for a staged arrest, Gorbachev or Queen Elizabeth taken out of the villa in handcuffs! Pretend paparazzi snapping photos. It was so eerily quiet that we could hear wavelets lapping the edge of the pool. Maybe the officers had already been tempted to go upstairs with the two faux prostitutes, or been offered oysters and cognac by the dancing slaves, or dusted with gold and lured into a fistfight.

  “Someone recognized the Pope,” Rosa said.

  We waited, chilled but wary of climbing out. I looked over at a metal poolside table, our disguises piled there in a haphazard bundle—nun, policeman, therapist, king. Despite the party’s sour residue, I suddenly wanted our adventure to go on. After what seemed a very long time the main door opened again, the officers emerged, and we heard Mazzo’s crackly voice: “Ciao, ciao! Ci vediamo!” he was saying. Bye, see you! Another few seconds and car doors slammed. We watched the flashing blue lights make tight half circles and head back out the gate.

  We climbed up into the air, dried ourselves, then took turns changing back into our disguises. In the cabana’s lighted mirror I noticed that my newly touched-up artificial coloring had faded badly. I’d ask Rosa for a more professional touch-up. The small scrape on my nose was bleeding.

  “Shall we leave?” Rosa asked, when we were sitting on the edge of our chaises. “Shall we surrender?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Not now. The Pope has something to say to you. They both do.”

  “Was it something I did at the party? He kissed me, amore. I didn’t kiss back, I swear it.”

  I said nothing.

  “It’s not that,” the Pope said.

  “What, then?”

  “Our dreams.”

  “What dreams?”

  The Pope coughed. “Tell her, Tenzin,” he said.

  “We been having dreams,” the Dalai Lama said. “The same dream. Or very almost the same.”

  “Of women?”

  The Holy Father shook his head. “A child. Children.”

  “In my tradition this is not uncommon, dreams like this,” the Dalai Lama said. “When an important lama has been incarnated, we are sometimes made aware by the dream. Now the Pope and I think there is young child, here or near here, in Italy. Important child. Born maybe few years ago.”

  “Another Dalai Lama?”

  “I believe it was a Christian birth,” the Pope said.

  “And I believe Buddhist.”

  “And?” Rosa pressed them.

  “We have spoken to each other about this, in the cathedral in Ferrara, and now again, here, this afternoon, before the…party.”

  “And?”

  “And then, like a figure from my dreams, I saw Mussolini at the party,” the Pope went on. “He came up to me and said, ‘We have to make the peace, King, you and I.’ ”

  “That’s real history,” Rosa said. “That actually happened…The king—Vittorio Emanuele III—had Mussolini arrested in 1943. Most Italians know that. But before the Allies landed on Sicily, both the king and the Church had supported him.”

  The Pope shifted uncomfortably in his seat. I imagined stinging ants, carrying bits of Vatican history, crawling up his legs. “We have made a god of science now,” he said sadly, tugging the conversation away from the Grand Benito. “In Christ’s time, before science ascended to the throne, people believed in signs and miracles, in dreams.”

  “Tibetans still believe those things,” the Dalai Lama said.

  The Pope scratched at his wet fake hair. “But now they have been relegated to the province of charlatans and fakers.”

  The Dalai Lama said, “In the West.” And I sensed, for the first time, a ripple of disagreement between them.

  “In Naples we still believe in those things,” Rosa boasted. “And the rest of Italy considers us heathens. My parents talk constantly about their dreams. They carry the medals of saints in their pockets; they can’t pass a church without making the sign of the cross; the boys wear gold peppers around their necks to ward off the evil eye.”

  “Superstitions,” I said.

  “Sure, amore, but Tenzin told us before going to Rimini that Anna Lisa had news. Do you remember? How do you explain that?”

  “How did you know, Dalai?”

  He shrugged. “There are different ways of knowing. Sometimes if you meditate many years you have kind of—how you say it?—clairnoyance, yes?”

  “Clairvoyance,” Rosa corrected.

  For a bit no one said anything else. We could hear strains of music from the villa, and then a couple arguing on the patio. “Shithead!” the woman was yelling. “Cazzo!” And then, when there was no response from the man, she yelled, “You woman, you!”

  “I have an idea,” I said.

  “As if ‘woman’ is an insult!” Rosa muttered. She turned to me. “What idea? Surrender?”

  “Not yet, no!” my cousin said, before I could speak. “I feel…Both Tenzin and I have come to believe what I’ve been sensing all along, that this bit of traveling is more than a vacation or an escape. We’ve come to believe it has a purpose, a spiritual purpose—that there’s something we must learn, or see, someone we must meet.”

  “Yes, maybe, or two someone,” the Dalai Lama added—another remark I would later have cause to ponder.

  “Here?” Rosa asked.

  “It’s too late to leave here tonight,” the Pope said. “Unfortunately. But I don’t think this is the end point, no.”

  “Where, then?”

  “I believe the answer will be shown to us, Rosa. Perhaps as we sleep.”

  “We should give it one more day,” I suggested. “Not here, but somewhere. One more day, and then, I think, if I may say so, we should turn ourselves in.”

  “Agreed, amore.”

  “Agreed, cousin.”

  “Yes, very good,” the Dalai Lama said. “We had our vacation now…And I have learn to swim.”

  We retired to our individual guest quarters with strains of music still floating up from the ballroom and through our windows. Exhausted as I felt, more than an hour passed before I was able to sink into sleep. During that hour, images from the party whirling in my head, I thought about the question Rosa had raised: what
happened to a soul like Mazzo—a person who lived purely for pleasure—when he left this earth? I wondered if the old Catholic idea of three major options—heaven, purgatory, hell—was actual or metaphorical. Reincarnation by a different name. Good behavior led to a heavenly next life; evil led to trouble. I wondered why I was so reflexively opposed to the idea of being born many times in different bodies when at least a third of the world believed in that model. Why should we be given only one shot to get it right? And why should some of us be born into circumstances that made getting it right so much easier: good parents, good health, a safe bed and a full belly?

  Even after those questions had released me into the arms of sleep, it was a sleep battered by scraps of disturbing dream: a cavalcade of faces dancing past; police cars and weeping women; gold dust on the windowsills.

  Day Four

  34

  In the morning I awoke, again, to persistent knocking. I stumbled to the door in a state of weary undress and found Giacomo there. The last thing I wanted at that moment was more orders, or any reminder of my enforced identity of the night before, but this was a different Giacomo, kinder, gentler, more relaxed. Still, there were orders. “I’m sorry to wake you, signore,” he said, running his eyes over my pale chest and mottled bronze face and arms, “but I have knocked on the doors of your compatriots and no one answers. Signor Mazzo wishes to breakfast with you. He asked me to call all of you to the table as soon as is convenient.” From his great height, with a last look at my chest, Giacomo gave me directions to the dining area and left me to wash up, dress, ask Rosa for some makeup assistance, and wake the others.

  Half an hour later we walked into the second-floor breakfast room in our original—and somewhat tattered—disguises. Mazzo stood up from the head of the table to greet us, waited until two servants had poured coffee and uncovered silver tureens of pastries and fresh fruit, then sent them away. The Viagra woman was nowhere to be seen, but Mazzo looked as if he hadn’t slept at all. You could trace the footprints of a wild night on the skin of his face. The blue tuxedo had been exchanged for a pressed white shirt, open at the collar, and a pair of gray linen pants. His black hair had been combed straight back, and he had water and fruit in front of him. But his eyes said he’d been poisoning himself all night and had barely survived.

  As soon as the last servant left the room, closing the door softly behind her, Mazzo walked over to the Pope, took hold of his right hand, and kissed the place where the papal ring would have been. Rosa and I stood just to one side in a little knot of astonishment. “I hope,” our host said, “that on top of a lifetime of grievous sins, I have not committed another. I hope my hospitality, such as it is, will to some extent act as a counterweight. Please say you forgive me, Holy Father. Some bizarre intuition must have been acting in me, because when I first met you I thought: He should have been a member of the clergy, a bishop, a cardinal! And then, midway through the party, when I saw you dressed as a king, I suddenly remembered the news stories about your disappearance, and the fact that Rosa had once mentioned something about her husband working at the Vatican, and I realized immediately that you must be—that you are, in fact—the Holy Father. Short of ushering you back upstairs and thereby drawing more attention to you, I saw no option but to hope and pray that by some ironic alchemy, the disguise would actually protect you. I spent the rest of the night worrying that someone else would see what I saw…which, in fact, is precisely what occurred. Clearly,” he said, shifting his eyes to me and then back, “you’re not being held against your will.”

  From the moment Mazzo kissed his hand, my cousin had been unfazed. It was almost as if he’d been waiting for the disguise to fail; as if, after years of being instantly recognized, he now simply expected it to happen, goatee and all. “There has been no crime,” he said calmly, “no kidnapping. Those reports are false. I simply wanted, for a short while, to experience the delight of being ordinary.”

  When Mazzo heard that phrase, a youthful smile blossomed on his old man’s mouth. The doctored lips stretched tight; the perfect false teeth shone. He seemed less old, less worn, more vibrant. “Those words make me gloriously happy!” he exclaimed. “They confirm my already extremely high opinion of you, Holy Father. When the world learns of this, you’ll be even more beloved.”

  “Or widely hated. I’ve caused so much worry.”

  “No, no, you’ll be adored, you’ll be revered, I’m sure of it,” Mazzo beamed. “The Delight of Being Ordinary! I can see it as the title of a film made by one of our eminent directors, a film that changes everything, everything! The Pope choosing to act as an ordinary man—it’s the height of holiness! In fact, wasn’t that Christ’s intent, on taking human form? To feel what ordinary people feel? To suffer as we suffer?” Without waiting for an answer, Mazzo turned to Tenzin. “And you, sir, according to the news reports, you must then be His Holiness the Dalai Lama, also partaking in this delight!” He made a deep bow, keeping one spotted hand on the chair for balance. “Didn’t Buddha do the same? Wasn’t he, in fact, a prince who left his father’s palace in order to experience the pains and joys of ordinary life? You see, despite my sins, I know my religious history. How wonderful both of you are! How perfect!”

  Mazzo seemed afraid to give either man a chance to speak. He stepped back and motioned to the table. “Sit, please—eat. You must be famished, and annoyed with me. Please sit.” He turned. “And you must be Rosa’s husband, in a brilliant disguise, absolutely brilliant! A refugee. Homeless. Terrified. Despised. A broken soul—you play the role like a screen icon! Bravo! Of course it’s you, a man about whom I’ve heard so many wonderful things over the years. How fortunate you are to have found such a woman! The Buddha would say it is your excellent karma!” He laughed at himself and shook my hand in a weak grip. “Please, all of you, sit, eat, drink!”

  When we were in our places and passing the food, Mazzo joined us at the table and continued his elaborate mea culpa. “One of my more sober guests must have recognized you, Holy Father. I can’t guess who it was, but when I saw the police at the door I knew instantly what had happened. I let the officers gaze in at the party for a moment—which, I can assure you, made certain people in that room extremely uncomfortable—and then, when they didn’t glimpse their missing Pope, I quickly escorted them back outside, assuring them it would have been absurd for the Pope to visit a tarnished soul like Antonio Mazzo. Why on earth, especially if he’d been abducted, would he come to one of Mazzo’s parties—a kind of Sodom and Gomorrah of the Italian countryside? I mounted, if I may say so, a splendid argument…it may have been my finest role! The capitano in charge—a friend of mine, actually—told me they’d had hundreds of tips just in Padua alone, and that every man and woman on the force was working overtime, all of them hoping to be the hero who finds and rescues our abducted spiritual fathers.”

  I waited for Mazzo to mention the reward: he could have made a phone call and collected 5 million euro—no small sum even for a wealthy man. “No one else knows,” he went on, “not even Giacomo. But I would advise you all now, with the greatest respect, to leave as soon as you’ve breakfasted, so that you may continue your adventure undetected. Your car has been brought around front, washed and polished. I’ve taken the liberty of putting extra clothes in the trunk—bathing suits, hiking gear, something a bit more formal, too. Attire for any possible occasion. For you, Rosa, and for the men. It’s the very least I can do to atone for my carelessness. And I’ve arranged for some fruit and bread and cheese and my own wine to be packaged up in case you fall prey to hunger on the road. If there is anything you need, my Rosa, anything at all, please say the word and I will make it available to you as part of my penance.”

  Rosa smiled and thanked him profusely. Between bites of food and sips of coffee we all thanked him. I even managed to compliment him on the party.

  Mazzo bent his lips inward and lowered his eyes in a gesture of studied modesty. “Besides a week or two on a yacht off Costa Smeralda, these parti
es are all I have to offer my friends now.”

  “You have many friends,” the Dalai Lama said.

  “Yes, Your Holiness, I do. And some of them even like me!” Mazzo laughed at himself, keeping his sad, worn eyes on the Dalai as if asking for a benediction.

  The Dalai Lama smiled kindly at him. “To be famous is very hard karma! Many desires will be exhausted in this life for you! You will make great progress!”

  “I really hope so, Your Holiness. I hope in my next life I shall be an anonymous monk. A celibate man, fond of fasting and spending long hours in prayer…But not yet!”

  Mazzo grinned, stood, wiped his lips delicately with the tips of his fingers, and, leaning with both hands on the back of his chair—a bit unsteadily—addressed the Pope. “Holy Father, tell me, please, that by creating such a spectacle I have not committed another grave sin. I understand the ungodliness of excess, believe me. I have enjoyed decades of such excess, but I meant only to indulge my need to be hospitable. Despite my reputation, I’m actually a reverent man. I—”

  “Christians believe,” the Pope interrupted him, “that it is the motivation of any particular act that truly matters. Your motivation was generosity, and besides, you did us a great kindness by not turning us in to the police. Say a prayer for yourself, Antonio, and for your guests. And as your penance, make a contribution to the poor equal to the amount spent on your party last night, and I’ll leave you with my blessing.”