The Delight of Being Ordinary

by Roland Merullo

  A nod of agreement; another deep bow, to the Pope, to the Dalai Lama; a small wave in my direction; a kiss on both cheeks for my wife; and, repeating aloud the phrase “the delight of being ordinary!” Mazzo turned from us with an elegant spin and performed one last grand exit.

  We ate quietly for another few minutes, then gathered things from our rooms and descended the sweeping marble stairs. Giacomo was waiting at the front door with the packages of food. We thanked him. He said, “Signor Mazzo hopes you will be able to attend the winter party, which, if anything, will be even more…elaborate.”

  With a straight face, Rosa told him we’d be sure to try.

  And then we were in our silver-striped Maserati again, heading down the long driveway and out the gates. I glanced in the side mirror, wanting one last glimpse of Mazzo’s villa. Beside me, Rosa had a wide grin frozen on her beautiful mouth, and I couldn’t hold back any longer. “What’s this,” I asked quietly across the front seat, “about a kiss?”

  My good wife didn’t answer that question—not that it deserved an answer. I’m not sure she even heard it, or that anyone else in the car heard it. As we passed through the wrought-iron gates and turned onto a narrow road that was lined on one side by a canal and on the other by a row of eucalyptus trees, I felt a new mood settling around us. Perhaps our immersion in Mazzo’s world of artificiality and decadence had worked a kind of magic on the four of us, because there was something different in the air. I’d felt it when I’d gone to awaken them, and now I felt it even more clearly. Antonio Mazzo had earned his fame and fortune by inhabiting roles, by creating a life on the screen that resembled real life but, in fact, wasn’t. He understood, in his bones, the reason behind the Pope’s and the Dalai Lama’s decision to slip away. In the minds of his legions of fans, Mazzo was a certain kind of man—a sex symbol, rich, suave, perpetually confident, forever young. But inside that shell of celebrity there lived an actual human being, with actual problems and fears, and it must have been a terrible burden to carry that shell around with him wherever he went. It wasn’t so different, in a way, from the celebrity of the Pope and the Dalai Lama. Complete strangers believed they knew who those men were. They felt a kinship, even an intimacy. Maybe the contribution Mazzo was making with his parties, the gift he was giving his friends, was the thing he most desired for himself: the chance to be someone else for a while.

  At that moment, the Dalai Lama announced, quietly and almost apologetically, “Today is my birthday.”

  We cheered at his news and congratulated him, but inside our celebratory voices I sensed another note: we weren’t going to be the same when we returned to our places. The Pope would be the Pope and go about his weighty duties, yes; and that would also be true for the Dalai Lama. But I was beginning to see that these few days would leave a mark on them, and also on Rosa and me. Maybe it was the magic of the stage: by pretending for a while, we had learned, at a new and deeper level, how not to pretend.

  “I know just the place to celebrate,” I said.

  “Where?” my famous cousin asked, at first, but then, “No, no, don’t say, Paolo. Just take us there. We’ll put our fate in God’s hands, where it always lies in any case. We’ll trust the kidnapper to show you a good birthday, won’t we, Tenzin?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” the Dalai Lama said. “So far he is been the most excellent kidnapper!”

  “I bet I can guess,” Rosa told them.

  But my cousin said, “No, Rosa. Please don’t. Let it be a surprise for my new friend. A birthday gift from our Creator.”

  35

  I’d like to step aside from our story for a short moment here, as we drive away from Mazzo’s villa, and explain something that might seem to make little sense to the reader of this account: why Benito Mussolini has found his way so persistently into a story about two holy men.

  First of all, I want to make it abundantly clear, if I haven’t already, that I do not consider Mussolini in any way a good or admirable man. Because of the cult of violence he fostered in Italy in the 1920s and ’30s, my mother’s own brother was killed. My father couldn’t mention his name without snarling, and their political views—and mine—were, and are, separated from fascism by oceans of compassion and common sense. Nothing would have pleased me more than to be able to write the account of this adventure without once mentioning the name Benito Mussolini. But that would have kept me at arm’s length from the truth, and the Pope and the Dalai Lama and Rosa, I know, would not have wanted that.

  The truth is that Mussolini’s shadow still falls across the people of Italy. Yes, there are some—like the men we saw at Campo Imperatore—who idolize him. That shouldn’t be surprising, given the fact that Hitler and Stalin are also still admired in certain small circles. But even many politically moderate Italians will say that before his alliance with Hitler, Il Duce was somewhat of a mixed case. He had his thugs beat, torture, and assassinate opponents, and he instituted insurance programs for widows and orphans. He imposed bitter racial laws but stopped short of sending Jews to the camps. He invaded Ethiopia—a genocide, really—and brought clean water to Italian towns that hadn’t seen it since the Romans. He had his own son-in-law executed for challenging him, and he set up dozens of sanatoria for sick children. He’d throw female admirers to the floor and have sex with them in animalistic fashion, then stand up and serenade them on his violin.

  I could go on, but this is a history of four people in the twenty-first century, not all of Italy in the mid-twentieth. Still, Mussolini cast his shadow over those days, that’s simply a fact. Part of that shadow had to do with the Pope’s bizarre dreams—some sense will be made of them, for some readers at least, a little farther along in this story. Part of it was the fact that before she left college to marry me, Rosa had been majoring in modern Italian history and knew more about Mussolini than about her own grandfathers. Part of it was my own family’s sad connections to the war Mussolini had brought to Italy. And part simply the fact that our story involved the Italian countryside, and it’s all but impossible to travel in Italy without touching places on the map that were touched by Il Duce during his twenty-two years on the Italian stage.

  That was especially true of our last full day of travel, a day that took us past Salò, at the southern tip of Lago di Garda, and then to Mezzegra.

  I didn’t plan that route because it more or less followed the route of Il Duce’s last days. It was merely a coincidence—if coincidences actually exist (and after this trip I’m not so sure). I wanted, for whatever reason, to show the Dalai Lama the beautiful place where I was raised. I wanted to end our adventure there. Yes, I knew my cousin had been dreaming of mountains and Mussolini, and I’m sure that was on my mind at some level as I steered the Maserati north and west. But I wasn’t a believer in dreams and signs then. I told myself I was just an Italian Catholic trying to be a good host, hoping to show a visiting Buddhist a place I thought he’d enjoy on his birthday. Consciously or otherwise, I had no idea what awaited us.

  36

  If you drive the Autostrada—Italy’s version of the Autobahn, a three-lane racetrack with exorbitant tolls—you can make it from Padua to Lake Como in under three hours. But with its surveillance cameras and police checkpoints, the Autostrada was a prescription for capture on that day, and we weren’t yet ready to be captured. The Pope and the Dalai Lama had their odd dreams to pursue; Rosa loved risk so much that she could have gone on and on for months, spiriting the holy men across Europe, inventing new disguises, calling on wealthy friends to lend us a different sports car or rooms in their various villas for a night. And I didn’t want it to end yet, either. I didn’t know why. Because I was finally starting to let myself relax and enjoy the company, maybe. Or maybe for more mysterious reasons.

  In any case, eschewing the highway, we zigzagged across northern Italy on two-lane back roads—consulting a map we’d purchased when we stopped for gas—following my country’s famously misleading signs, and slipping through places like San B
onifacio and San Gioannino, forgotten little hamlets that sleep in ancient pastures far from the world’s sophistication and frenzy. Still, even passing through such places, and even traveling on those country roads, it wasn’t hard to sense that the search had entered a new and more desperate phase. Accounts of the holy men’s disappearance were on the TV when we stopped for coffee, on every single radio station we tried; the gas-station attendant who took our payment—in cash, from Rosa—was talking about it with his other customers, arguing about the authenticity of the recording, speculating on a motive, spreading rumors and half truths that she was in no position to dispute. Twice, when we were close to the Autostrada, we heard army and press helicopters thumping overhead, and it seemed we couldn’t go ten minutes without seeing a phalanx of military trucks or police vehicles racing in the other direction. “There are thousands of Maseratis in Italy,” Rosa said, with her typical optimism. “Even if Tara did turn us in, and I have my doubts that she did, it will take them a while to find us.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I hope God gives us a little more time together.”

  She stared across the leather front seat. “That’s the man I married.”

  A glance in the mirror told me that our captives were buried in prayer. Each of them had a string of beads in his hands. Eyes closed. Lips working. It seemed to me that they filled every empty minute that way, checking in with God, or the Divine Intelligence, the way teenagers check in with friends on the newest electronic device. I wondered if the God who presided over the universes would, on Judgment Day, make any distinction at all between our captives. It occurred to me that, before I’d gotten to know the Dalai Lama, he’d been just another figure in the news—kinder and more compassionate than other celebrities, yes, but somehow, for me, not a person who fit in with my view of faith and meaning, not quite on the level of the Pope. Glancing back again at the two of them—so similar in their devotion—I could feel how much of that old prejudice had eroded.

  In order not to disturb them, Rosa and I abandoned the radio and spoke in the quietest of tones.

  “If we keep going this way, we’ll pass right by the southern tip of Lago di Garda,” she said, looking down at the map spread across her thighs.

  “I know it.”

  “Close to Salò.”

  “Right. My parents took me there once. One of our road trips.”

  “Should we go there for lunch?”

  “Too risky.”

  “Everything’s risky now, amore…unless we go up into the mountains and camp.”

  “That’s not an option, Rosa. I’ve now officially entered the post-camping stage of my life.”

  She laughed in a way I remembered from years before: tender and warm, the laugh of a lover.

  “I’m a mattress man from here on in.”

  “Where, then?”

  “I want the Dalai to see Lake Como.”

  “I knew that was what you had in mind. I remember the first time you took me there. I remember sitting out on the concrete patio and looking down at the lake at sunset. I remember those beautiful green hills on the far bank, and the mountains behind the hills, the way they went from gray to pink for a few minutes just as the sun was setting. I’ll remember it as long as I live. I wish you still owned that house, Paolo. Anna Lisa and Piero could take their child there for vacations.”

  I grunted, remembering, too.

  Rosa was quiet for a bit. We saw a turn for Salò—the town where, after the daring rescue at Campo Imperatore and on Hitler’s orders, Mussolini had set up his absurd “Social Republic.” He’d presided there for the better part of two years as, death by death, Italy was reclaimed from its Nazi occupiers. Salò was the place from which he fled at the end, in the spring of 1945. His final road trip. He was finished by then, a wounded rabbit chased by hounds. Still, he took his young mistress with him, and millions in cash and gold, as if he actually believed he deserved those things—a younger woman, a lavish life in exile. As if he imagined another chance for himself, a palace in Switzerland, a castle in Bavaria.

  “You wanted to be a photographer in those days, remember?” Rosa said.

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to that idea, amore?”

  “I didn’t have my parents’ courage or talent. I was afraid. I opted for the security of a travel business. Ha!”

  Silence from her side of the car. The stink of old regrets between us. Another few miles and the Dalai Lama opened his eyes and said, in an unusually authoritarian tone, “Go someplace now to rest for lunch, Paolo!” It was the first time he’d called me by name, and the first and only time, in those days together, that he issued what sounded like an order. I pulled into a gravel turnout—larger, easier to hide in, no prostitute this time—and not a minute later a police car sped past, lights flashing.

  “Chasing for us, maybe,” the Dalai Lama said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Long time ago the Chinese chasing for me. I’m in disguise then, too.”

  “The world is grateful they didn’t catch you, Tenzin,” the Pope said.

  But the Dalai Lama didn’t seem to hear, which was strange for a man who was always so present. “Going because of a dream that time, too,” he said. We’d gotten out of the car by then, and he was staring across the road at an abandoned building—an old stable, it looked like—with vines crisscrossing the brown stone walls.

  “Is it true what Mazzo said about the Buddha?” my cousin asked, as we were opening the bottle of wine and the packages of food. It was another al fresco feast. Never in the history of the world had holy men eaten more meals from the polished hood of a Maserati. “Was he really the son of a king? That is so different from Christ’s humble origins.”

  The Dalai Lama nodded, accepted some cheese, shook his head when Rosa offered wine. “The stories say so, yes. His father tried to keep from him the difficult parts in life—to be sick, to be old, to die. But one day the Buddha go out and he see those things, and that day he decide to go into the forest with the ascetics. ‘Ascetics’ is right word, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “For a long time he doesn’t eat, he doesn’t sleep, he almost die. Then he decides for the middle way: enough food and sleep to live, but not too much. In the legends he says is important to be like the string on the lute: too tight, sound no good; too loose, sound no good also. Middle way works.”

  “I like that man,” Rosa said.

  “There’s a famous passage in Scripture that’s similar,” the Pope said, “where Jesus is quoted as saying, ‘For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, “He has a demon.” The Son of Man has come eating and drinking and you say, “He is a glutton and a drunkard.” ’ ”

  “I know this John Baptist?”

  “Yes, Jesus’s cousin,” the Pope said. “A special relationship in Scripture.”

  We left the discussion there and took our nourishment.

  37

  Once, in the days when I still had my travel business in Rome, I saw on my office TV an interview with a famous American writer. He was an essayist, primarily, someone who’d traveled to eighty-five countries and all seven continents, and who’d written about everything from cooking classes to correctional facilities. At one point during the interview the host asked, “What’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever been?” (a typically Italian question)—and without having to think about his answer for even a second, the writer said, “Lake Como.”

  I don’t know that it’s the most beautiful place on earth. I don’t know that a question like that even makes any real sense, other than as a way to fill airtime. But I do know that my parents, who were people with a sensitive aesthetic radar, and widely traveled, chose to buy a house on a hillside overlooking Lake Como’s western shore and to spend the last two-thirds of their lives there, when they could have lived and worked almost anywhere on earth. Part of their choice could be attributed to my father’s Italian-American heritage, and part to my mother’s
love of all things European. But the main part was something else—the beauty, yes, but also the feeling evoked by that beauty, a feeling essential to every artist, and every monk, too: the understanding of what a gift it is to be alive.

  As we went along, Rosa offered historical commentary. “This route we’re taking now,” she said over her shoulder, “west from the southern tip of Lake Garda, is close to the route Mussolini took on the last days of his life.”

  “It’s always surprised me, Rosa,” the Pope said, “that a gentle soul like you would choose to study such a man.”

  I coughed.

  “It’s what brought Paolo and me together. Did we ever tell you that?”

  “Never.”

  “I wanted to take a trip before I started my senior year in college, and I walked into his travel shop. Instead of giving me information on cheap hotels in Switzerland, he started making small talk, asking me what I was studying. ‘History,’ I told him. ‘Really?’ he said, ‘What kind of history? What era?’ ‘World War II Italian history,’ I said. ‘Mussolini, to be exact.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘my mother’s brother was killed by Mussolini.’ I was sure he was making it all up, you know, but I decided he had a cute face, and that he seemed harmless. And believe me, cute and harmless was rare in the men I’d known to that point in my life. So when he asked me to dinner I said yes, and that was the start of things. I never went back to college at all.”

  “That is love,” the Dalai Lama said. “That is small kind of the big love we can have for humanity.”

  “It wasn’t that small, actually,” Rosa said.

  In the awkward pause that followed, I did what I often do in those situations: I searched for something, anything, that I might say. “Rosa is superstitious,” was what emerged, but those words were greeted only by a terrible silence. I wasn’t even sure what I’d meant—or what she’d meant. The remark had come from the same general part of my brain as the famous “Are you going to baptize the child?” I offer no excuse, only that I was trying, in my own clumsy way, to smooth over an awkward moment. Rosa was superstitious, and from a superstitious people. The Pope’s dreams, and then the visit to Campo Imperatore, and now the proximity to Salò and the fact that what might be our last day was apparently going to be close to the route of Mussolini’s last day…well, it wasn’t hard for me to see how all that might make for a resonance in my wife’s mind. So I’d said “Rosa is superstitious” not to demean her, but just because there was an obvious linkage.