The Delight of Being Ordinary

by Roland Merullo

  40

  Before any other confusing and disturbing things could be said, the black-haired girl took the Dalai Lama by one hand and began leading him, with some urgency and without any resistance from him, back up toward the road. The Pope and the red-robed man fell into step with them, a few paces behind. The three women followed—I could tell they were trying to communicate in at least two languages—and the short-haired man and I, each carrying a soccer ball and a belly, brought up the rear.

  “You must be the kidnapper,” he said in pure American English, the tone wry and unthreatening.

  “Hardly. The Pope’s my cousin. He had the completely innocent wish for a few days off, incognito. The Dalai Lama was visiting and came along, that’s all. From that one harmless impulse all kinds of trouble seems to have grown. We’re not quite ready to go back, but you can turn us in and get the reward if you like.”

  “Not looking for that,” he said. The man had a kind laugh, and seemed genuinely uninterested in money.

  “Five million euro?”

  He shrugged.

  “You’re American, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “A circus troupe?”

  Another friendly chuckle. “Sometimes I feel like we should be. I have the name for it—Ringling—but it’s a common enough name where I come from.”

  “Where’s that?” By this point we’d reached the road and turned left, away from Sant’ Abbondio, away from the car.

  “North Dakota, originally,” he said. And then: “We’re here on account of my sister’s mystical visions.”

  This last comment was spoken casually, lightly, in the way someone else might have said, “We’re here on vacation,” or “We’re here for the wedding of a friend’s son.” But at the sound of the words “mystical visions” I felt as though an ice cube had been placed against the base of my spine. I shook my head to chase away a passing dizziness. I worried I’d caught the flu from one of the guests at Mazzo’s party. The fake prostitutes had probably breathed on me. I suddenly wanted to change the subject, to tell my new friend I needed to go and get the car, or put the soccer ball back in the trunk. But the parade had turned left, so I followed dutifully and said nothing.

  Ringling pointed ahead of us. “That’s my sister there, the middle-aged blond beauty in the long dress. Cecelia. And she’s married to Volya Rinpoche—the strong bald guy in the red robe, a famous Buddhist teacher. Have you heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m sure the Dalai Lama knows him, or at least knows of him. Their child is the lovely creature who’s holding the Dalai Lama’s hand and prancing. Shelsa is her name. My beloved niece. In certain circles, she’s thought to be some kind of holy child or prophet, and she was told, by another famous Buddhist teacher, that another special child had been born in the Italian mountains and that we should go find him. Which, at last, after a trip across the Atlantic, a long stretch of searching in various places, and some unbelievably terrifying moments, we have done. It looks like we’re taking you to meet him now.”

  With each sentence in this confounding history I felt as though another cube of ice had been set in place on my spine, a cold line of influenza moving up the vertebrae one by one, hip to neck. The illness could very well have been psychosomatic, because I didn’t like this kind of talk. The Pope’s dreams. The Dalai Lama’s oracle. Famous Buddhist teachers telling a family to go to Italy and find a “special child.” I don’t mind saying now that it threatened me at some deep level. Almost repulsed me. It wasn’t my cup of tea at all.

  “Not your cup of tea, I’m guessing,” Ringling said, just as I was thinking that, and a last cube was set at the base of my neck; another shiver went through me. I felt my forehead for a fever. When I didn’t answer, he added, “Brace yourself, then. The woman who owns the house we’re going to—we’ve been there four days, welcome guests, it seems, though she didn’t know us from Adam—is an interesting old character. Uneducated, half her teeth gone, but very kind and wise, and she seems to know things she shouldn’t know.”

  “For instance?”

  “For instance, she set four extra places at the table an hour ago, before we left her to go and kick the soccer ball around. We asked her about it and she wouldn’t answer.”

  “And the boy? Does he seem…different?”

  Ringling lifted his chin toward the happy dark-haired girl. “He’s like Shelsa. Ninety-nine percent of the time just a kid.”

  “And then?”

  “And then, well, and then he’ll do something a three-year-old shouldn’t be able to do. He’ll say, “The bells will ring now, Mommy,” ten seconds before the church bells ring. Or he’ll look at you in a certain way, it’s hard to explain, but it’s not a child’s look. You’ll see. Just watch the two of them carefully, then tell me if you think we’re all crazy. Your English is perfect, by the way. Tiny accent but really perfect.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and then, only to be polite in return: “What’s the boy’s name?” I asked. I thought it was all crazy, of course I did. From the moment I’d heard the Pope tell me about his dreams I’d thought it was crazy, but I’d wanted to humor him; it was a rare vacation for him, after all, and the last thing he needed was cynical commentary from a sinner like me. By that point, a bit out of breath from the climb, I had little faith in Ringling as a rational man, though he was out of breath, too, and seemed to have a sense of humor, so I liked him well enough. In answer to my question about the name, I thought he’d say “Jesus” or “John the Baptist” or maybe “Benito”—to complete the absurdity of the day—but he said, “Tom. His mother’s American, father was Italian.”

  “Opposite of my situation.”

  “ ‘Tommaso,’ I think, is the actual name, but everyone calls him Tom when we’re around.”

  It wasn’t until we’d gone another thirty steps, yours truly carrying his disbelief like a fifty-pound stone inside the soccer ball, that I remembered Thomas was the name of the disciple who doubted Christ’s resurrection and demanded proof. Christ let him put his fingers into the crucifixion wounds, and only then did his doubts finally disappear. I shivered, thinking of it.

  From that moment on I was two people. There was the frozen-spine man, my insides reacting to the things Ringling was telling me as if they might be true. And then there was what I thought of as my “real self” or “regular self,” which wanted to get into the car, drive until I found a nice place to have dinner, drink a good bottle of Barolo, and go to bed.

  “I know how all this sounds, believe me,” Ringling went on. “I’d advise you to withhold judgment for a while. We’re past the dangerous part of the trip, I believe.”

  “That’s comforting,” I almost said.

  As our ragged group turned from the paved road onto a smaller road—little more than a gravel path, really, with a grass stripe down its center, I started to feel slightly unsteady on my feet. I stopped, turned, and gazed below me at the magnificent blue lake set like a gem in its ring of mountains, a sight that had always soothed me.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of, now, really,” Ringling remarked. “We’re basically normal.”

  “Not afraid,” I said. “Just need a minute.”

  He laughed, said, “I needed about eight years,” and we continued along the path to the place where the peculiar dreams of two holy men seemed to have led us.

  41

  Tucked away at the end of the dirt track, invisible until you were almost upon it, the house was a dignified but weathered structure, something straight out of nineteenth-century rural Italy, with walls of uneven brown stones, a roof of cracked and chipped red tiles, a second-floor turret that—I guessed—offered a view down onto the lake, and a large stone barn behind. Instead of going in through the main door, the black-haired girl led us along one side of the farmhouse and around a corner, past the entrance to the barn, past a grape arbor and a garden with staked tomato and pepper plants, to a flat piece of lawn on the south side
of the house. A long table had been set up there—white cloth, wineglasses, flower-patterned ceramic plates—and the apparent hostess, a semi-toothless, short, thickly built woman, introduced herself as Agnese and greeted us as if we were cousins. There was no child that I could see, but from the garden came another woman, thirtyish and very calm, who said a few words of welcome to us in American-accented Italian and then English. She had a pretty, angular face straight out of a painting—Bellini, maybe—that you’d see in the Vatican museums. When I asked her how she’d come to live in Italy, she smiled mysteriously and changed the subject. I was in the grasp of a full chill by then, almost shivering, clearly unwell. Or at least that’s what I told myself.

  There was an abundance of strangeness to that summer evening in the hills, but the strangest part of all was the absolute matter-of-factness with which the Pope and the Dalai Lama were welcomed. A warm greeting, yes. Friendly. But matter-of-fact in the extreme. Neither of them made any attempt to pretend they were anyone but who they were, and they were treated with the appropriate respect. At the same time, though, no great fuss was made over them, no elaborate bows, no excited gasps or shocked faces. No one mentioned the headlines, the frantic search, or the reward. Agnese offered them cold drinks with a courteous familiarity I’d never quite encountered before, a perfect balance of reverence and ease, as if the Dalai Lama and the Pope of Rome had been guests in her old house scores of times in the years she’d lived there. It seemed that, at last, the two men had gotten what they wanted: they were ordinary.

  I could smell food cooking and discovered, suddenly, that the chill I’d felt while Ringling was telling his odd tale had all but disappeared. Not the flu, after all. But I was ravenously hungry. It occurred to me that we hadn’t had a true meal, a true Italian feast, for the whole of our trip. How had I allowed that to happen? Agnese guided us into the house to wash up in the bathrooms there. As we emerged and moved, in a loose herd, toward our designated places at the table, Rosa sidled over to me and whispered, “Something’s very different here, amore, no?”

  I answered with a short nod, then, without planning to, held the chair for her as she sat, a gentlemanly gesture she liked, and one I hadn’t offered in at least a decade. My eyes swept the scene, looking for I don’t know what—angels, demons, a child who resembled Christ—though, really, who knew what Christ had actually looked like? My cousin and the Dalai Lama were seated opposite us, the stocky, red-robed monk between them, the others spread out to either end. I noticed, with a bit of surprise, that the mysterious thirty-year-old American woman was given the seat at the head of the table. Agnese’s visiting daughter, I guessed—though they bore no resemblance to each other, and one was clearly a native English speaker, the other Italian.

  I heard a screen door slap shut, and saw a light-haired boy come toddling across the grass on chubby legs. He was three or four years old, barefoot, dressed in stained gray shorts and a white T-shirt with PACE—peace—written on its front in large letters. He churned his way toward the head of the table and leapt onto the woman’s lap like a koala. His blond mane against her long black tresses, his round face against her angular one—it seemed impossible that she could have borne him, but she held him tenderly and smoothed the hair off his face in the way a mother would.

  “Di hello, Tommaso,” she said. Say hello, Thomas.

  The boy refused with a pout and an exaggerated shake of his head. His eyes were coffee brown. They made a slow circuit of the table, then fixed themselves on the Pope with an unblinking intensity you’d expect to see from a champion chess player studying his king. The Pope stared back for a second, then grinned. The boy laughed and was a boy again, and then Agnese carried out a large plate of melon slices wrapped in prosciutto—the opening salvo in a fusillade of food.

  Before we started eating, the woman at the head of the table asked us to bow our heads in prayer. I expected the typical Catholic grace—“Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts…”—but all she said was, “Great Father and Mother who give us life, help us not to be afraid.”

  “Amen!” Rosa said, with a bit too much exuberance.

  “Amen!” the little boy yelled, mimicking her, and then bursting into an infectious laugh. Everyone at the table grinned.

  What has happened to me all my life when I’ve been upset or anxious is that I eat like a man who’s been denied food for five days. This gluttony causes my manners to suffer; it isn’t a pretty sight. I consume twice or even three times as much food as I should, and I do it with a single-minded ferocity that has something in common with a starving jungle animal over recently killed prey. That was the way I ate at Agnese’s house on that hot evening. Whatever was served—the prosciutto and melon, the mozzarella balls rolled in spinach and basil, the sardines lightly dusted in flour and fried, the white beans in oil, the grilled eggplant—I waited to see that those around me had been served, and then I took everything that was left. Everything. All of it. At one point, when the girl about Anna Lisa’s age—Ringling’s daughter, it appeared—and Agnese had brought to the table platters of fried lake fish in a gorgonzola sauce, I took three of them—they really weren’t that large—and happened to look at my wife. She was staring at me, her eyes full of what must be called pity. “Che cavalo fai?” she mouthed. What the hell are you doing? I simply turned back to the food. I didn’t know what I was doing. It was a reflex, deep beyond subconscious. I would have needed a decade of therapy to answer the question in any truthful way.

  I ate, yes. I enjoyed Agnese’s food thoroughly—after the fish came squash ravioli in a sage and butter sauce, then pork in a light tomato cream sauce, then a bit of seasoned polenta—small course after small, succulent course. As I ate I watched, and when she wasn’t sending her disdain in my direction I could feel Rosa watching, too. If Mazzo’s party had been an exercise in ego, then this gathering was humanity’s opposite pole. Small conversations flared, merged, and separated again. Ringling filled us in on the circus troupe’s strange journey: they’d been led across the ocean (on the Queen Mary, no less) by signs, symbols, dreams, visions, wise women speaking vague instructions in four languages—the kinds of things that made me shiver again…and want to eat. Someone, he said, had tried to harm his young niece, but he offered no details. His daughter, hearing that Anna Lisa was pregnant, asked how old she was, and when I told her, she said, “See, Dad, I’m ready.” The man across from me—“Rinpoche,” they called him—laughed and chuckled almost constantly, made goofy faces at the boy and the girl, spooned food onto the Pope’s plate as if trying to fatten him. But—how can I describe this?—while there were distinct personalities at that table, there was also a certain smallness to everyone there. Rather than being separate and superior, controllers of all they could see, the humans in that group fit in with the surrounding trees, the farmhouse walls, the grass and grape arbor. No one took over the conversation. No one was obnoxious or loud or hiding behind a fake personality. The boy and girl—Tommaso and Shelsa—were happy and peculiarly well behaved, but otherwise almost ordinary. Almost. At one point between courses Tom left his mother’s lap, went over to Shelsa, and they looked at and whispered to each other with a seriousness you’d expect to see from two executives conferring at a board meeting, or two convicts plotting a crime.

  As I continued to eat too much of Agnese’s food and drink too much of her wine, I observed and studied, and heard two very different voices—I want to say two very different spirits—carrying on a running argument in my head. I believe now that it was this interior debate I was trying to suffocate with food. One voice said something like: “There are no accidents here, no coincidences. You were led to this table by the dreams of the two most important holy men on earth, dreams of Mussolini and mountains and a sacred child. If it hadn’t been for those dreams, you most likely would have taken them to see Venice, had some pizza and gelato, and driven them back to Rome. Your future son-in-law lent you a soccer ball, and if it hadn’t been for that ball, you would have said a pr
ayer in Sant’Abbondio and then treated the Dalai Lama to a birthday dinner in Menaggio and never met this crowd. Something’s different here, subtly but clearly different. You feel it. Look at the Pope: he senses it. The Dalai Lama was fingering his beads like mad before the food was served. Rosa noticed. Pay attention, Paolo, this is no ordinary night.”

  And the other voice went like this: “Paolo, be a grown-up. You were led here by complete accident, by a family you mistook for a Gypsy caravan or a circus act, for God’s sake! What’s going on here is that you’ve stumbled onto a household of people who tell themselves how special they are because they can’t deal with being an ordinary family up in the Italian mountains. They have their ‘visions’ because they can’t bear the hard truth of reality. The Americans have fallen for it because they want to be special, too. Look at the woman in the long dress: she smiles all the time, as if she’s from a planet where nothing bad ever happens!”

  I watched and listened and ate, torn between the two voices, aware, even though I tried to embrace it, that the more cynical argument was a weak one, made weaker by the fact that the people seemed so quietly and humbly sure of themselves that “special” was the last adjective you’d apply. Agnese was acting more like a servant than like the owner of the house, hustling back and forth between table and kitchen, ferrying plates and filling glasses. The family asked to hear more about our adventure, and Rosa gave them the details, embellishing a bit, making it sound like we’d traveled from Campo Imperatore to Padua at high speeds, the sound of police sirens shrieking just behind us. Agnese and the woman at the head of the table—Cynthia was her name, she told us, though she preferred the Italian version, Cinzia—and the Ringling family listened, rapt. For whatever reason, they were particularly interested in the meal at Campo Imperatore and the fascists there. But they also wanted to know more about the roadside prostitute and Piero, the cathedral in Ferrara, Mazzo’s party: and, as the sun fell behind the hills to the west of us, on the Swiss border, we took turns enlightening them, Rosa in the lead. In fact, she talked so much, and so excitedly, that she hardly paused to eat. Her stories were interrupted only when Agnese went into the kitchen—Rosa followed her to help—and it seemed even more difficult than usual for her to sit still. All the while, though, an elephant sat silently on the grass beside me, and no amount of wine and pleasantries, no amount of pork and pasta would shoo it away: the fact was that, at the key moment, we’d been drawn to this abundance of food and hospitality by the mysterious intuition of a ten-year-old girl who had somehow seen through the Dalai Lama’s disguise. No one was saying a word about that. My cynical side had no comment on the subject.