At one point after the pasta course and before the arrival of the meat, while some of us were quietly belching, little Tommaso grew restless, as little boys are wont to do. He clambered down off his mother’s lap and walked around the table, touching each guest with a flat palm to the spine at first, almost ceremoniously, and then wrapping his little arms around our waists. It seemed a peculiar ritual. Given what Ringling had told me, and the young girl’s mysterious intuition, I thought I might feel a jolt of spiritual electricity, but it was just a child’s game. Tommaso, I was coming to believe, was, as the cynical voice argued, just a child—nothing more or less miraculous than that. And that’s what I wanted him to be. I wanted an ordinary, good, festive Italian meal to mark the Dalai Lama’s birthday. I wanted to find a place to spend the night—perhaps Agnese had extra rooms—and then, in the morning, to arrange a riskless surrender.
By the time someone said the word “dessert,” we’d been at the table two hours and eaten what felt like a hundred kilos of food.
“It’s the Dalai Lama’s birthday,” I announced, because I was quite sure he wouldn’t say it.
Ringling’s sister—Cecelia of the long skirt—cocked her head and looked at me as if I might have failed ninth grade, twice. “We know,” she said. “Rinpoche told us before we went down to the soccer field. He celebrates it every year. The Dalai Lama’s birthday, Buddha’s birthday, our birthdays—every birthday but his own. Agnese made a delicious cake!”
A chocolate-frosted cake was carried out, rich, in the Italian style: too much whipped cream. We sang the birthday anthem in Italian—“Tanti auguri…”—and then the same tune in its English version. Ringling sliced, his daughter passed the plates. Agnese, who’d said very little, raised her coffee cup in a classic Italian toast, “Cent’ anni!” A hundred years! And I can say that if there was one thing both voices in my head and everyone at that table agreed upon, it was that the man with the toupee and oversized glasses should live and live and live. The world would not soon see another like him, I thought. Nor another Pope like my cousin.
The Dalai Lama himself was mildly embarrassed. He nodded and grinned, put his palms together and bowed to each of us, one at a time, but you could see he didn’t want a fuss made. We made it anyway. There were more toasts—to a free Tibet, to world peace, to another spontaneous trip—all of them as full of hope and goodwill as they were absent of likelihood.
At last, Tommaso, curled up in Shelsa’s lap, yawned and said, in Italian, “Posso andare a letto, mamma?” Can I go to bed?
That alone, in my experience, made the boy exceptional. At that age, our Anna Lisa would no more have volunteered for bed than she would have volunteered to drive our Fiat to the market for a half kilo of ricotta while her mother was at the stove making lasagna.
“A kiss first,” Cinzia answered quietly.
The boy went tiredly to the head of the table. His mother kissed him on the mouth, held him tight against her for a long moment, whispered something in his ear. “You stay and talk,” he said, in a boss’s voice, and this, too, made him laugh. At himself, it seemed. Shelsa stood up and took his hand. “Say ‘Sim-jah nahng-go,’ ” she said.
“Sim-jah nahng-go,” the boy replied sleepily.
Only the Dalai Lama and the man they called Rinpoche answered in kind. “Good night” in Tibetan, I supposed.
Tommaso sported a tired pout. “Please, can they sing for me in American?”
In answer, Ringling and his family stood and followed both children into the house, leaving my three traveling companions with Agnese, Cinzia, and me, out under the stars. Abysmal cook that I am, I nevertheless yield to no one in my aptitude for washing dishes. I volunteered; Agnese seemed offended. “Assolutamente no!” she said, and she shuffled tiredly inside and reappeared a minute later with a bottle of limoncello and a tray of mismatched small glasses. She poured some for each of us and sat. A difficult silence hovered over the table. I thought Rosa would break it. I could sense from the way she kept tucking her hair behind one ear that she was anxious or irritated and, knowing her as I did, I expected her to say something like “Can we talk about this?” She turned her eyes to me once, then away, a pained expression on her features. The Pope and the Dalai Lama weren’t touching their drinks. My chill had disappeared, but my stomach hurt, and I was mildly drunk.
From inside the house came the sound of quiet song, some kind of American lullaby.
It goes without saying, I’m sure, that I know the Pope well. I’d known him since he was a boy, I could almost always read his moods. And what I read on that night, even through the remains of the disguise, was an intense curiosity the likes of which I’d never seen from him. Though he’d eaten well and had a few sips of wine, and though he’d participated in the conversation like the rest of us, I could sense that a piece of his attention had remained, not on the children, but on the woman at the head of the table. I sensed this from the Dalai Lama, too. After the American family and Tommaso went into the house, I could tell beyond any doubt that the Holy Father wanted to engage Cinzia in conversation. It was there in the way he glanced at her, the way he turned his head, lifted his eyebrows, pursed his lips. But then he seemed to be smitten by second thoughts. He was, after all, a man whose every public utterance was parsed and dissected for secret meaning, for indications as to where he might lead his followers. He was accustomed to being attacked from every direction—his actions too conservative, too liberal, too mild, too provocative. Because of that he’d learned to consider his words carefully before putting them out into the air. He was doing that again; I could see it. I waited.
At last he cleared his throat and turned his eyes squarely on the woman from the Bellini painting. “I would like to ask you something, Cinzia,” he began. “May I address you by your given name?”
“Of course, Holy Father.”
More throat clearing. A flex of his fake goatee. The quickest of glances in my direction. “I don’t know why,” he began, “but I have the sense that you might be able to shed some light on this question. Please forgive me if it seems odd.” He glanced at the Dalai Lama now, for support, then interlaced his fingers as if in prayer and looked back to the head of the table. “I think I won’t be breaching any confidences if I say that His Holiness and I have been having similar and rather unusual dreams for the past two or three weeks. Let me speak for myself. I’ll be frank. I’ve been dreaming of, among other things, the late Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator.”
Cinzia held the Pope’s eyes for a second or two and then laughed. The laughter was quiet and gentle, like everything else about the woman, but at the same time it seemed to me a somewhat less than perfectly respectful response. The Pope had made himself vulnerable, and she was laughing. His face knotted up in small spasms, as if he felt he’d made a mistake. “Is it funny?” he said at last.
“No, no. Forgive me, Holy Father. It’s not that you’re funny, or that the question is funny, it’s just that lately the workings of the world have been so amusing to me. I’ve finally come to understand that so much of what happens to us has roots in mystery, and yet we go along believing we can think our way to every solution to our own problems, or the world’s. Sometimes we can, and we must try, but other times we’re moved this way and that by forces so mysterious—I want to say so sacred—that it’s almost a sin to analyze them.”
“I agree,” the Pope said. “But I’m not sure how that relates to what I asked you.”
“It relates because this is the house where Mussolini spent his last night on earth. Agnese was a little girl; her mother and father were the hosts.”
“You’re kidding.” The Pope glanced at Agnese, then back.
“I wouldn’t do that, Holy Father. After his capture—”
“Just up the lake in Dongo,” Rosa couldn’t keep herself from saying. I gave her a gentle kick under the table, hoping to prevent her from showing off.
“È vero,” Agnese said. It’s true. “After he was caught, the p
artisans weren’t sure what to do with him. Some wanted to kill him right away. Others wanted him to go on trial, or to be handed over to the Americans. While they were deciding, they needed a place to keep him, so they brought him and his mistress, Clara Petacci, to this house. As you can see, it’s a hidden house, and my father was close with those partisans, he’d grown up with many of them. Mussolini and Petacci were given food and beds in one of the upstairs rooms—I was seven years old; I remember hearing her weep from my own room; she wept until very late—and in the morning they were taken a little distance away and shot in the street. My mother and father and I heard the sound of the machine gun.”
The Pope sat in a stunned silence. I thought of my mother telling me almost exactly the same story: Il Duce caught, held for a night not far from our home, then executed in the street, with his lover at his side. I wonder if she’d known Agnese’s father, and I stretched my mind into the past, reaching for memories.
“I grew up very close by,” I said. “I know the spot, the plaque. I’ve walked by it hundreds of times. I knew other people who said they’d heard the shots, too.”
“You’re in disguise now, yes?” Agnese said, peering more closely at my face. “Sei italiano?”
I nodded.
“You’re a dePadova, yes?”
“Yes, Paolo. Michael and Luisa’s son, how did you know?”
Agnese shrugged and waved fingers in front of her face. “The nose, the eyes. I knew your lovely mother. She used to swim in the lake in December. She and my father did some work together, in the war. She brought you to this house once when you were very small. Tommaso’s age. Do you remember?”
I shook my head, but there was something, some wisp of memory twisting along the edges of my thoughts and, combined with what Cinzia had just told us, it set another row of ice cubes on my spine.
“I don’t know very much about Mussolini,” Cinzia admitted. “My father left Italy for America when he was twenty. He’d occasionally talk about Mussolini, but the truth is I don’t have much interest in war and the history of war. I just know that he slept here, and since you were dreaming about him, Holy Father, it must be that something, some greater intelligence, was giving you signals in a kind of code. Leading you to us.”
“And there are other dreams, too,” the Dalai Lama put in. “For me.”
“Of children,” the Pope said. “Both of us have dreamt of a child, or children.”
“I am thinking,” Tenzin said, “that maybe one of these children here could be another Dalai Lama. Someone to take my place when I go.”
“And I was thinking,” the Pope said, “that the child in our dreams could be a saint or some kind of prophet…I don’t know, I—”
“And you expected Tommaso and Shelsa to perform miracles,” Agnese said, with a pleasant bluntness.
“Not really, no,” the Pope told her. The Dalai Lama shook his head in small movements, too, but you had the sense, for once, that they weren’t being entirely honest.
“The miracles are small,” Agnese said. I miracoli sono piccoli. “So far. Birds come to them when they sit out in the yard. They are so still, these children, the birds sit on their arms and shoulders. These children wake up early in the morning, before anyone else, and sit in the yard together and pray until the sun comes. They see things before they happen, small things, like a snake in the yard or the arrival of a guest.”
Though he’d removed his oversized sunglasses—there seemed no need of disguise now—the Dalai Lama’s expression was inscrutable. Perfectly attentive, but impossible to read. I could see that the Pope was uncomfortable. He grasped one hand in the other, and he felt with his fingers for the papal ring—which, of course, wasn’t there. Cinzia and Agnese watched them and waited. Rosa met my eyes.
“You know,” the Pope said at last. He paused and manufactured a small cough. Cinzia hadn’t yet tasted the limoncello, but she’d kept her long, thin fingers on the glass and was twirling it in front of her, watching my cousin closely. “Some time ago, about a year before I became pope, there was a story circulating in the halls of the Vatican about an unusual American woman. It was said she had come to Rome in order to advocate for the idea that women should be allowed to be ordained.” He paused again, waiting for Cinzia to respond, but she only studied him with the same calm attentiveness that had emanated from her all evening. “That in itself isn’t so unusual. People come to Vatican City all the time asking for one favor or another. But it was said that this woman had somehow arranged for a private meeting with a veteran member of the College of Cardinals—Cardinal Joseph Rosario—and for a laywoman who wasn’t representing any particular group, that was rare indeed. I have no idea why Rosario agreed to meet with her. Apparently, he’d been in communication with her beforehand, but when she appeared at the Office of the Doctrine of the Faith, he spoke with her only for a short bit and then sent her away. Rather brusquely, perhaps. The cardinal’s assistant and translator, Father Clement, is a friend of mine, a North American, and he told me in confidence that this woman seemed highly unusual to him, some kind of unrecognized saint, perhaps. He felt somewhat badly at the way the cardinal had treated her.”
The Pope coughed, reached for the missing medal that used to hang from his neck, and went on. “Shortly after this meeting, the Cardinal of Genoa, a man named Martino Zossimo, another friend of mine, abandoned his office. This, in my experience, perhaps in the history of the modern Church, was unprecedented. And he was a famous cardinal, a man whose name was often mentioned as a possible successor to Pope Benedict, a very good and holy man. Exceptionally so. In fact, I’m quite sure that if Cardinal Zossimo had stayed in his position, he would have been selected instead of me to be Pope. But he left a note saying he was leaving, for, of all reasons, to be married, and then he simply disappeared! One note left in his office, then nothing. And this from a man who had devoted his life to the Church. And he was seventy years old!”
The Pope looked at me as if I might contribute something, but I had nothing to add. I’d heard the Cardinal Zossimo story only through the Vatican gossip pipeline—it was unprecedented, yes, and bizarre, but apparently true. He turned back to Cinzia and continued.
“Zossimo was famous for working with Genoa’s poor and downtrodden, for walking alone in some of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods late at night, counseling, comforting, giving away money and blankets and food. So, naturally, there were those who believed he’d been kidnapped or killed. There were all sorts of stories and hypotheses. The Genoa police searched for him for months without finding a single clue. The harbor was dredged. Eventually they gave up and a new cardinal was appointed.”
The Pope paused again, studying the woman at the end of the table. She kept her eyes on his but said nothing. Just as the silence was turning unbearable, he went on, hesitantly, it seemed: “This same friend, Cardinal Rosario’s translator, told me that the mysterious American woman had traveled to Genoa and met with Cardinal Zossimo a few days before his disappearance. Some said she was pregnant. There were, as you can imagine, disturbing rumors. Unfortunately, as my cousin Paolo can attest, certain people in Vatican City are not above spreading gossip. It sounds like a mystery novel, I know, or a scandal, and, of course, both the Vatican and the Curia in Genoa went to some lengths to keep the rumors from getting out of hand. But I’ve been wondering, Cinzia…all during this meal I’ve been wondering, if you might know anything about those events.”
The woman lifted the shot glass to her lips, but before drinking she made the smallest of smiles and set the glass back down again. “You found me,” she said.
“I wasn’t looking for you. Frankly speaking, given the way rumors and stories circulate whenever something unusual happens, I wasn’t sure you even existed.”
“I do.”
“And is Tommaso…the child?”
“Yes, though there are…complications. The story isn’t a simple one, but this much is true: my husband, Martino—the former Cardinal of Genoa�
�was Agnese’s brother. He brought me here so we could live quietly, at least for a time. He passed away in December, two days after Christmas.”
“I’m sorry. I knew him to be a good man.”
“He was.”
“If I had been made aware of this then, if I’d been in a position to do something, I might have been able to keep him in the Church, at least, though not—”
“I don’t think so,” Cinzia said, and there was suddenly something different in her tone—not coldness, exactly, not disrespect, but an edge. A quiet force. She’d said those four words respectfully, politely, but with such absolute certainty that, given who she was speaking to, it might have been taken as offensive. Impossible as it had previously been, I was suddenly able to envision her traveling from America, arranging a meeting with a cardinal, pleading the case for female priests. It was somewhat more difficult, however, to imagine her marrying a seventy-year-old ex-cardinal on three days’ notice, and then bearing his child.
“Maybe meant to be Buddhist child,” the Dalai Lama suggested in what sounded like a strained attempt to soften the sting. “Maybe—”
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 28