In my mind, at least.
Rosa was squeezing her hands together in the front seat. “What does that have to do with anything, Paolo?” she said, as if she wanted to say something else.
“Nothing. Sorry. I like it when you talk about history. It reminds me of—”
“But what does it have to do with being superstitious?”
“Nothing, Rosa. I’m trying to watch the road now, that’s all. I keep looking in the mirror for police cars. I’m a bit on edge. Let’s focus on the scenery.”
“You were looking for a fight.”
“Honestly and truly I was not.”
“Yes you were, admit it.”
“I was not. I will not. You’re too sensitive.”
“And you’re too insensitive!”
We fell into one of our bad silences. I stared at the scenery, tried to concentrate on the pleasure of coming home. I could hear my wife breathing through her nose.
Lake Como is shaped like a wobbly upside-down Y, with the stem of the letter pointing north. As we drove past the city of Como’s small harbor, the lake came into view, its narrow western branch sparkling like sapphire in the warm afternoon. Steep green hills rose to either side of it, folding over and against each other, with shadows in the valleys, and evidence of humanity—stone houses, tile roofs, the bell towers of churches—showing themselves in clusters here and there. In a moment, over the tops of those hills, we saw the faces of much taller mountains to the northeast—the peaks stand at 2,600 meters there—the same stony cliffs Rosa had seen turn pink at sunset so many years before.
“Beyond those mountains is the Valtellina,” Rosa said to the men in back. “That was the place Mussolini swore he’d make his last stand. In this city, Como, on his next-to-last day, he waited for the thousands of fascists who were supposed to join him. They were going to fight to the death in the Valtellina, supposedly. But when the courier finally arrived, he had exactly twelve fascists with him, twelve men willing to die for the cause. So Mussolini decided to make a run for the Swiss border…which is probably what he intended to do anyway, the bastardo.” She paused a second or two, and then: “Was that ‘superstitious,’ Paolo?”
“On his part, probably. On yours, no.”
We curled deeper into the city and the view opened up.
“Ah, tremendous!” the Dalai Lama exclaimed. “Ah, very beautiful!”
“Italy’s birthday gift to you,” I said, rather grandiosely. But I couldn’t help myself. Whatever disappointments and sorrows had touched my life since then, my years at Lago di Como had been marked by contentment and warmth. I had been happy there, and loved, and my early life had been rich with promise. The contentment had faded, the promise was never fulfilled; but I still associated this lake with a better Paolo dePadova. As we left the city and followed the statale—the state road—that wound through the western shore’s small towns, a battalion of pleasant memories slipped out like partisans from the stony alleys and saluted me. On that hot July afternoon, driving along that familiar road, I felt for some reason that I might be given another chance at wholeness.
I’m sure that as we went through the small villages of Cernobbio and Argegno, dodging the tour buses and delivery trucks that roared south in the opposite lane, we all expected, at any moment, to be caught. The view softened that worry. Turn by turn the lake offered different views of itself, hiding behind a hillside tunnel for a kilometer, then bursting into sight again, opening out, glistening its magnificent blue. Two passenger ferries churned across ahead of us, one headed east, one west. Here and there white specks of sailboats bobbed and glided.
“I just opened a new shop near here, in Menaggio,” Rosa said as we twisted and turned through the town where George Clooney—another artist who could have lived anywhere on earth—made his home. “We could have another go at fixing the disguises.”
But nobody wanted that. My coloring was faded and splotched, the hair losing its curl. The Dalai Lama had kept his toupee and sunglasses in place, and the Pope still wore his facial hair. The holy men weren’t recognizable—I was fairly sure of that—but the heat and travel had taken a toll on Mario’s work. We were three tattered men, halfway back to our former selves.
Just past Lenno, with the water close by on our right and the lime and emerald hillsides seeming to lift themselves right up from the edges of the road to our left, we came upon the village of Mezzegra. Hardly anything had changed there in the past twenty years, and not so much even since the April day in 1945 when Il Duce had been machine-gunned to death by Communist partisans a few hundred meters up in the hills. The town center was still only a cluster of stucco-sided commercial buildings pressed tight against the two-lane road. A market, a fruit store, a café, two bars. The growl and buzz of motorini engines echoed in the alleys. Light-haired, neatly dressed tourists—German or Dutch, I guessed—stepped down from a blue tour bus, single-file, and huddled on a corner, awaiting guidance. A little ways beyond them, opposite the place where my mother used to make her daring leaps, I turned left. The road climbed due west, steep and unlined, modest houses to either side with fenced-in yards, a dog or two, a few chickens and goats. Up and up we went. In front of a brick home with a patio facing the lake, I pulled to the side of the road and idled the car for a minute. A Danish couple had bought it as a vacation place, but there was no sign of life there now, not so much as a shirt drying on the clothesline or a pile of child’s toys on the grass. Across my inner eye flashed the image of a man and woman standing there, side by side. They were watching me, it seemed, studying me, seeing me through the curtain of death that separated us. “We raised you to be free,” they seemed to be saying. “Are you free, Paolo? Are you happy?”
“Almost,” I answered quietly.
I started forward again. Soon we came to a T. I turned left, riding parallel to the shore, and after another minute pulled the Maserati into a four-space parking area next to a church of white stucco with a gray stone bell tower.
“The Church of Sant’Abbondio,” I said, in a tour guide’s voice. “I was baptized here. I thought we could go in and say a prayer and then find a place to celebrate in earnest.”
“A prayer of being grateful to be alive,” the Dalai Lama said. “On this day.”
As we walked across the gravel, Rosa put her hand on the small of my back for exactly two seconds. I knew it was her way of apologizing for snapping at me in the car, and I was trying to think of a way to explain the “superstitious” remark in ten words or less when I decided it was better, for once, to say nothing, rather than take another bite from my shoe. I’d pray for wisdom and patience. I’d try to be a better man.
The door was unlocked—as is often the case in Italian places of worship—the church’s interior lit only by sunlight bleeding through colored glass. The pews were of dark wood—only a few rows of them with folding chairs behind. Those pews and chairs, the square columns along the side aisles and the white arch over the altar, marble floors, marble saints along the walls—all of this was exceedingly humble by the standards of Italian ecclesiastical décor, and all of it completely familiar to me. Freethinkers in most respects, my mother and father had remained devout Catholics until their final hour. This little church had been a way for them—eccentrics and artists—to fit themselves into the community, and the Catholic faith had given them solid footing in a life riven with unpredictability. When would the next print or painting sell? For how much? I had another vision then—of our blessed friend and parish priest, Don Claudio—“Doncla,” everyone called him—standing at the altar, raising the host.
Perhaps because we’d spent so much time together, the four of us wandered the side aisles separately, then sat in different pews.
I sent warm thoughts to Anna Lisa and Piero, tried not to worry about our daughter’s health, about the kind of world our grandchild would inherit, tried not to think about any disappointment my mother and father might have carried to the grave or be holding on to in some limbo for disgrun
tled parents. The only son of artists, a failed travel agent now, separated from his wife, rescued from unemployment by his famous older cousin. It wasn’t exactly a résumé to make a mother and father proud.
From that happy thought, my mind leapt and skittered. I grew restless. Something was nagging at me, some internal itch. I stood and stepped out quietly into the late-afternoon sun. Just then a very old man walked past, leaning on his cane. Our eyes met, and we held each other’s gaze for two seconds before he went on his way. A few steps more and he turned and looked over his shoulder, trying to see backward through time, maybe thinking he recognized the nose and eyes of the boy who used to stand outside this church with his parents on a Sunday morning after Mass, looking down at the lake and imagining a happy future for himself.
38
Among the descriptive terms that should never be applied to me, “athletic” and “coordinated” would be at the very top of the list. I tried as a youth, truly I did. I spent many hours watching soccer on TV, kicking a ball back and forth in our yard, playing informal matches with my school friends. Nothing good ever came of it. I tripped over myself, let easy passes roll by my feet, missed goals from close range, and generally made such a mess of even something as simple as running a lap around the field that, unlike most people I know, I was actually relieved to grow too old to be asked to play. Still, calcio, as we call it, is our national sport, and I’ve always secretly held to the hope that one day, by some miracle, I’ll be able to kick a soccer ball in a neat, curving arc into a net. Like Pirlo, like Cannavaro, like the great Roberto Baggio, Italy’s most famous Buddhist. Even a net with no goalie defending it would do.
Set at a level a few yards below the Church of Sant’Abbondio was a soccer field where I’d played among friends as a boy. On an optimistic impulse, and hoping to clear my thoughts, I grabbed Piero’s black-and-white ball from the Maserati’s trunk and walked downhill a few steps to the chain-link gate. Let the others pray, I thought; I’m going to conquer old demons.
It was not to be. The field—cut into the east-facing hillside and surrounded by a tall fence—was empty. Good thing, too. No witnesses. I set the ball on the turf and tried to jog slowly forward, kicking it gently from foot to foot as I’d seen my heroes do. But my first kick was too hard. The ball got away from me, rolled down the slope, and came to rest against the base of the fence. I retrieved it and tried again, but this time I didn’t kick hard enough, tripped over the ball, and fell to one knee. I gave up on the dribbling idea and tried a straightforward shot from ten meters in front of the goal. The ball stayed stubbornly on the ground, banged into the goalpost, skipped sideways, and sat there like a disobedient puppy, mocking me. I ran over and blasted it into the net—impossible, even for me, to miss from that distance.
But trying to take the ball out of the back of the net, I somehow became entangled in the ropes. My left shoe had gotten caught. I sat down to free it and heard, “Amore?” in a worried voice. “Are you all right?”
“Fine, I’m fine,” I called back grimly.
There, walking onto the field, were my three companions, refreshed from their prayers, eager for some exercise.
“Kick it here, cousin!” the Pope yelled. Still entangled, I grabbed the ball with one hand and shoved it out to him.
The Pope tipped it expertly over to the Dalai Lama, who sent a hard shot soaring into the top of the net. It dropped down beside me. I shoved it back out, managed at last to free myself, stood up, and jogged a few clumsy steps just in time to miss Rosa’s pass. The ball rolled down to the fence again. Rosa was laughing, not in a mean way, but still…
“Here, to me!” the Dalai called.
“Let’s have a two-on-two.”
I hustled after the ball, thinking: Let’s make it fair, three on my side.
We started up a harmless little game, sweating and laughing in the late-afternoon sun. My cousin Giorgio stood in goal, Tenzin and Rosa took turns shooting. I was the self-appointed fetcher of errant shots, a task I accomplished without falling. I was enjoying myself; we all were. In fact, the truth is that from those days together, the one image I cherish most is a scene of the Pope standing on the goal line in his tattered disguise, wearing loose pants and a short-sleeve shirt from Mazzo’s storehouse, hands on knees, awaiting a shot from the Dalai Lama—who had a look of fierce concentration on his face and a striped dress shirt on his upper body—with Rosa clapping happily to one side.
During these festivities I was vaguely aware that a group of other players had taken possession of the goal at the other end of the field. I glanced at them twice as I fetched. For some reason—and this might seem perplexing to non-Italians—I thought they were Gypsies. “Romany” is the polite term; zingari, the word in my language. One often saw them in my country—sometimes in large encampments outside cities; more often in less flattering poses, begging in front of churches, or rushing up close to tourists near the Colosseum or Forum and distracting them with a photo or magazine page while a colleague reached for an unguarded wallet.
Our fellow soccer players made an unusual group. One of the men—stout and tanned—wore a maroon robe not unlike the Dalai Lama’s and ran around kicking the ball with great gusto and some skill, laughing as if he’d had too much wine at lunch. Another man—taller, with a small pot of belly and very short hair—was playing goal. Though her hair was light-colored, the older of the two women must have been the reason for my first impression, because she wore the type of ankle-length skirt favored by Romany females and had a colorful scarf tied around her hair. There was a black-haired girl, too, and an athletic younger woman about Anna Lisa’s age.
I did notice—hard not to—that they were having as much fun as we were. There were shouts and laughter and then, in American English: “And a beautiful corner kick, right on goal! Ringling with the save!”
Ringling, I thought: they were part of a circus act, then. So much for the Romany idea.
Rosa dribbled in and fired a shot off the Pope’s right thigh. He made a sound like “Oof!” but seemed unhurt. I trotted over to fetch and, turning, noticed the ball from the other group bounding down the field toward us. My first thought was: Someone else is as inaccurate as I am, but kicks harder.
The young black-haired girl—eight or ten years old, I guessed—came running after the bouncing ball. I went over, expecting only to help her—and after that moment nothing would ever be the same for any of us.
39
Her ball had come to rest a few meters away from us, near one corner of the field. I jogged over and—God knows why I had an urge to show off for a ten-year-old stranger—instead of picking it up and carrying it to her, I tried a deft little kick. My idea was to lead her with a soft pass, something professional players did with a tap of the instep. Miracle of miracles, it actually worked: the ball went skimming across the grass in a neat line aimed just in front of her. The girl saw me kick it, I’m sure she did, and she must have seen the ball coming toward her. But she ignored it. I was mildly offended. As the ball rolled past, she stopped running and walked straight at the long-haired South Asian tourist in the striped shirt, halted just before reaching him, put her hands together palm-to-palm in front of her chest, and bowed deeply from the waist. Reflexively, it seemed, the Dalai Lama bowed back.
My first instinct, also reflexive, was to turn and look up at the street to see if anyone else was watching. No one there. The only people who’d seen the exchange of bows were Rosa and I (the Pope had leaned over and was rubbing his bruised quadriceps). She met my eyes and made a classic Italian expression—lips flexed, ends of the mouth turned down, eyebrows lifted. In English it might be translated as “So there you have it” or “Well, how about that?!” or “Hmm!”
I would have tried to make sense of what I’d seen, but I didn’t really have time to process the moment, because the bizarre circus troupe at the other end of the field was coming toward us en masse. For a moment I had the horrible thought that they were going to suggest a pic
kup game—I was planning to plead a pulled hamstring and offer to referee—but the Dalai Lama and the girl were involved in an animated conversation, in English, and the Pope was walking over to them, curious. The girl’s bow seemed to have taken the disparate movements at both ends of the field and united them into one calm group. There was nothing to do but join in and fake some introductions.
They proved, however, unfakeable. Somehow, mysteriously, the girl had known exactly who she was honoring with her bow, and when my cousin held out his hand and introduced himself as “Francis,” all hope of throwing up a smoke screen was lost. The Gypsies or the circus troupe or whoever they were, now in the presence of the famously missing holy ones, seemed surprisingly unsurprised. I shook hands all around, forgot every name instantly, and waited for the acrobats to ask for autographs or tell the twenty-five-year-old to get on her cell phone, quick, and turn us in for the reward.
Instead, the bald, stocky, brown-skinned man—why was he dressed like a monk on a soccer field, and why was he so effervescent?—pronounced these memorable words in troubled English: “We been waiting for you three days now! We founded the person you looking for!” And the house of sanity and logic in which I’d lived to that point in my life fell to pieces.
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 26