“No, Your Holiness,” Cinzia told him in that same tone, interrupting him, too. “I don’t mean to seem rude—I have the greatest admiration for you both. But I believe this child, these two children, have been born outside religion for a specific reason.”
“Outside religion? But your husband was a devout Catholic, a cardinal, and—”
Cinzia’s face hardened slightly. The Pope saw it and stopped in mid-sentence. She smiled then, softening her mouth, but there was still a quiet force to her words when she spoke. “Who am I quoting,” she asked, looking at the Pope, “when I say: ‘The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ, all of us, not just Catholics.’?” She turned to the Dalai Lama. “And who am I quoting when I say, ‘My religion is kindness’?”
At that, Rosa downed her limoncello and motioned for me to pass the bottle. Through the house’s open windows we heard a burst of laughter, a pause, the start of an Italian song. Rosa waited a moment, then: “Can I say something here?”
“Of course,” the Pope told her.
I thought: When have you ever asked?
“Those things you’ve just quoted are the comments of great men,” she said. “Not good men, great men. The history of the world is all about separating people. Dark-skinned from light-skinned. Catholic from Protestant. Believers from nonbelievers. Christian from Jew from Muslim from Hindu from Buddhist. Northern Europeans from southern, northern Italians from southern. And the result of that isn’t godliness, it’s murder! Hatred, war, and murder! Finally and at last we have two incredibly courageous spiritual leaders, alive on earth at the same time, who try to unite, not divide.”
“And we make enemies by doing it, Rosa,” the Pope said. “Some Catholics think I’m trying to bring the Church to its knees.”
“And also for me,” the Dalai Lama said. “Many Tibetans want that I should say, ‘Make war with China! Throw bombs! Shoot guns! Do more to save Tibetan culture!’ Many people upset with me now.”
“What I think about,” Cinzia said, addressing Rosa in her measured way, in a voice that seemed to hold suffering and hope in a delicate balance, “and what my husband and I often spoke of when he was alive, was exactly that divisiveness. We didn’t see any exclusivity in Christ’s message, except in his condemnation of evil. Christ wasn’t Roman Catholic any more than Buddha was Buddhist. He was born to a Jewish family, yes, but in his adult life he attended no services. He had no name for himself. No label. Not even any real title beyond the Son of Man, which, really, could include everyone on earth.”
The Pope shifted in his seat. “True, but he also said, ‘No one goes to the Father except through me’.”
“Yes, Holy Father. I know the Bible well, I grew up reading it, hearing it at Mass. But I believe that his “through me” meant through the place where he was, spiritually. Along the path he had taken, interiorly. Not through him as an individual. Not through one faith. ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,’ he said, and that comment can be applied to every soul on earth, can’t it?…And those people from parts of the world where they could never be baptized, should they be condemned simply by virtue of where they were born?”
“Buddha was from the Hindu family,” the Dalai Lama admitted, and again it seemed to me he was sensing an escalation, an imminent confrontation, and wanted to defuse it. “The last words he said weren’t ‘Worship me!’ They were ‘Work hard to attain your own salvation.’ ”
“Still,” the Pope said, turning from the Dalai Lama back to the head of the table, “we can’t just dissolve the differences between faiths. They are very real and significant. The Dalai Lama and I have discussed this at some length.”
“Important differences in what you believe, yes,” Cinzia said, moving her eyes from one man to the other. “But in what you do, in what you ask people to do—be compassionate, kind, nonviolent, generous—I would say the differences are so small as to be nonexistent. Can’t we emphasize that?”
“We try,” both men said at once.
“Couldn’t we build a common faith from those common ideas and include every good soul on earth?”
The men were silent.
Something had been happening to me over the course of this after-dinner theological debate. A strong emotion was rising up, an urge to come to my Pope’s defense, the defense of my faith. If I understood Cinzia correctly she was saying that Jesus Christ was just another Buddha, that there was no difference between the two. Both were sons of God. That was unacceptable to me. It went against everything I’d heard since I was four years old, so in a less than perfectly sober tone I said to her, “What do you suggest, then? A world with no religion? Is that what you believe Tommaso and Shelsa are called to do, bring us into a future like that?”
She turned to me slowly, and I noticed for the first time that there was something almost physical in the force of her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “They’re children now. I want Tommaso to have a normal childhood, and I know that Cecelia and Rinpoche have already had big problems with people stalking and trying to harm their daughter. They want, more than anything, for Shelsa to have a normal childhood. In my own prayer life I’ve been getting what I feel is a consistent message that we must wait. From the other side of the ocean Shelsa found my son, and I knew, from the instant she appeared at this door, that she was supposed to find him. I knew, from the instant I saw the four of you, that you were supposed to be here. I know, in that same way, that there is something these two children are called to do, but that we must all wait and not force them into roles we don’t understand. I want, for a time at least, to keep them safe from the eye of the world. Will you all help me?”
“Of course,” Rosa said immediately.
The Dalai Lama nodded.
“Yes, fine, yes,” the Pope said. He seemed uncomfortable—almost embarrassed that his friend the Cardinal of Genoa had impregnated this young American and disappeared because of it. At the same time, though, I could sense that the woman intrigued him. He couldn’t stop looking at her. He seemed angry, or at least upset, but also trying very hard to keep his emotions from showing.
I am not as diplomatic. Over the course of the conversation one of the voices in my head had been steadily gaining ground. By then it had grown too strong to silence. “I’m sorry,” I began, and then I couldn’t turn off the faucet. “I’m very sorry. They do seem like wonderful children, even special children. Very kind and sweet. But suggesting that they’re destined to bring humanity together in some postreligious era…simply because his father was a former cardinal and they let birds land on their shoulders? That seems, I’m sorry, like wishful thinking to cover over a difficult circumstance…I’m sorry, I—”
“Difficult circumstance?”
“Your pregnancy.”
Rosa kicked me under the table. Hard.
Cinzia stared at me for a moment in such a kind and gentle way it made me feel like the demon who’d visited Eve in Eden. She hesitated, weighing her words, deciding on something. At last she said, “I became pregnant with Thomas without being intimate with any man. The cardinal married me and brought me here to protect me. He was not Tommaso’s father…Those were the ‘complications’ I mentioned a few minutes ago.”
“That,” I said, confident by then, sure I was listening to the true voice, “is simply not possible.”
“No,” the Pope corrected, and then I did hear a stirring of anger. He’d finally been pushed beyond the edge of his legendary patience. “It was possible, but only once. Only for the mother of Christ. To claim otherwise, really, is blasphemy.”
Cinzia tried to smile at him, but I saw that her eyes were brimming with tears.
“My husband believed me,” she said. She took a breath. “But I don’t expect you to, Holy Father. Or you, Paolo. Or anyone, really. It’s strange, besides my husband and Agnese, I’ve never told anyone what I just told you. Not even Rinpoche or Cecelia. I’m sorry I mentioned it.” She blinked, wiped a tear, turned to the Dalai Lama.
“But tell me something, Your Holiness. Explain something to me. Before we sat down to eat, Rinpoche told me that Shelsa knew it was you, on the soccer field, from a hundred meters away, even though you look…like that? Please explain.”
“She saw through his disguise,” I blurted out, before the Dalai Lama could answer. “It’s just a bad wig and dark glasses.” Rosa kicked me a second time. I blundered on. “And she’d heard it was his birthday, so naturally he was on her mind.”
“Then how was it that she and her family found their way to us here, in the Italian mountains? In this house? All the way from North Dakota?”
“Extrasensory perception.”
“How did Agnese know four guests were coming tonight?”
“The same,” I said. “Some people are actually psychic. It doesn’t prove—”
“And the dreams?” Cinzia said. “The dreams of these two men? Mussolini, of all people! Mere coincidence?”
“No,” Rosa said. “No, amore.”
I leaned forward and spoke a little too loudly. “Ghosts and dreams and visitors and psychic powers—none of that equals the birth of another savior, another Christ.”
“I never said ‘savior’ or ‘another Christ.’ I would never say something like that. I’m not worthy of it in the first place, and it’s just not what I feel, not at all. But Christ also called himself the Son of God, didn’t he? What if God lends pieces of himself—or herself—in different places at different times, when the world requires it? Sons and daughters. Some of them relatively minor—say, a woman whose loving influence extends only to her spouse, her own family. And some more major—a saint, a guru, a king or great leader. And some like Moses or Abraham or Christ or Buddha or Mohammed, spirits who change lives and inspire millions of people over a thousand generations.”
“Buddha never used the word ‘God,’ ” the Dalai Lama put in. “We do not see the world this way.”
“And Christ was God’s only son,” the Pope said. “To mention him with those others is considerate but incorrect.”
Cinzia looked at them as if she were disappointed. “You are the most wonderful and kind men,” she told them calmly. “But with those comments I wonder: have you reached the limits of your openness?”
“That’s disrespectful,” I said, perhaps too forcefully.
“I mean no disrespect at all.”
I looked at the Pope. His face was twisted into a tight knot. There was a terrible silence then, broken by my wife. “What should we do?” Rosa asked Cinzia, as if looking for direction from a great spiritual teacher, while sitting at the same table with two real, actual, certified and well-known spiritual teachers.
“I don’t know,” Cinzia said again. “But I don’t believe we have to be condemned to repeat history. I’m not suggesting we’ll have some kind of paradise here on earth. But I would ask you to consider the possibility that these two children could bring about a change. Not the end of war and hatred and poverty and hunger, but maybe less of those things. Not the end of our ruining the planet, but maybe the beginning of doing less damage. Maybe they’ll continue the unifying process that the two great holy men at this table have begun with their open-mindedness and generosity. Or they’ll inspire them to speak out more forcefully or in a new way against unfairness in this world. As I said, I don’t know the specifics. I don’t feel like I have to know. But I do know that the two of you, His Holiness and the Holy Father, weren’t brought to this house deep in the Italian mountains by some purposeless coincidence. I would ask you, even if you find me to be a fool, or a blasphemer and a great sinner, I would ask you to consider that and to give your blessing to Shelsa and Tommaso.”
The Pope and the Dalai Lama couldn’t look at her, or at each other. They were staring off in different directions. I felt angry at Cinzia, that she would dare challenge them in this way, that she would claim what she seemed to be claiming—another virgin birth, a sacred child. Even if she was simply delusional, I was angry at her. And my anger extended to Rosa as well. I’d been feeling closer and closer to her during the trip, even entertaining thoughts of a reconciliation. But now I understood why we could never be together again: there was a gullibility to my good-hearted wife, a childishness. She wanted the world to be what it was not.
I was host then to a fierce run of thoughts. My mind was a small gas flame burning at that table in the beautiful mountain night. Cinzia, Rosa, Ringling—they were all of them wishful thinkers, illogical, out of touch with scientific reality.
At that precise moment we heard the door open and hushed, grass-softened footsteps. I turned and saw Shelsa coming toward us. She’d changed into a peach-colored nightdress, and it hung like colorful vapor from her small shoulders and floated around her knees. She stopped, as if our silence were a solid creature, a cold wall. Two things happened then. First, I remembered the Dalai Lama telling me, as we walked toward the center of L’Aquila, that anger was a snake brought into view by the ego. And second, I was visited by a terrible memory, a time when Anna Lisa, six years old, had slipped out of her bedroom after overhearing a particularly ugly exchange between Rosa and me. On her face we could see—not fear, but an enormous sadness. I have never in my life felt farther from God than I did at that moment.
Shelsa stood there with a similar expression: sadness, almost pity, as if she knew the adults had been disagreeing, and knew they didn’t understand something they should have understood, something she knew, something they’d forgotten.
“Tom wants you to come,” she said to Cinzia. The boy’s mother hesitated all of one second, then stood, tried to smile at us, said, “Please forgive me if I’ve upset you. Agnese will show you all where you can sleep. We have room,” and went quietly away.
After we heard the door slap closed, Shelsa stood there for a moment, assessing the situation, studying the bad air. Then she lifted both arms. In the lamplight I could see a string of beads dangling from each hand. “Little Tom took these from your pockets,” she said. “He’s a funny boy.”
I watched the Pope and the Dalai make identical movements, thrusting a hand into jacket and pants, reaching for the missing rosary and prayer beads. The anger just leaked out of me then. I wanted to laugh, in spite of the feelings that had hung around that table and the bitter fire that had been burning in me, because the shock on their faces was something right out of a cartoon. Rosa did laugh, and she had a laugh that could make you fall in love with her all over again. Something broke inside me then. Some hard shell of judgment cracked open. For no good reason at all Agnese reached over and put a hand on my arm like an aunt comforting a grown nephew who’d just realized he’d made a mistake.
Shelsa said, “He told me I should give them back to the special men or they would be mad at him.”
42
My cousin and the Dalai Lama were given an upstairs bedroom to share—not Mussolini’s, Agnese assured them. (The Pope would tell me later that the room was hot but otherwise comfortable; that he and Tenzin had both been somewhat upset by the things Cinzia said, but that they’d had visitors and enjoyed “a healing conversation, really a remarkable conversation, with the man called Rinpoche” before retiring to their narrow beds. He declined, out of a surprising shyness, it seemed to me, to provide any details.) And then our hostess, full of apology, sent Rosa and me to the barn with an armful of sheets and pillows. “La casa è piena,” she told us in a penitential voice, the house is full, and though I assured her it was fine, no problem, we understood, of course, I was sorely tempted to walk back down to the Maserati—less risk of being bitten by spiders—and sleep there, sitting up.
There were no animals in the barn, at least, or none I was aware of. The air was humid and close but sweet-smelling, the darkness broken only by the thinnest film of starlight filtering through one small window in the loft. Rosa and I spread our sheets side by side on a bed of fresh-cut hay, took off most of our clothes in the darkness, and lay down. From far below, near the town, we heard the sound of a police siren, but when
that passed there was only a deep country silence in the air, something I remembered from my childhood. A world emptied of noise.
“We should have brought the car up here,” she said, after a time. “I feel sweaty and disgusting and I hate to go to bed without brushing my teeth. Plus, the Pope and the Dalai Lama are still in the clothes Antonio gave us at the villa.”
I said nothing.
“You’re angry, Paolo.”
“No. Aside from the fact that I ate and drank too much, and that I think a poisonous spider just crawled into my underwear, I’m fine.”
“Stop lying. You’re angry at that woman, and you’re angry at me for not being angry at her. And you didn’t eat ‘too much,’ you ate like a wild boar!”
I heard her rustling around in the darkness and then a tiny snapping sound. I tried to remember the last time I’d heard a woman take off her bra.
“Don’t you dare fall asleep on me,” she said.
“I’m not sleepy.”
“And tell me what you’re thinking. Be honest.”
“I was angry with her, Rosa. I’m still a practicing Catholic. Maybe not the best Catholic who ever lived, but I’m Catholic, and, besides, I’ve always felt a particular devotion to Mary.”
“I know.”
“From the time I was a boy until now I say an Ave Maria every morning when I first wake up, and every night before I go to sleep.”
“I know that, too. I lived with you for twenty-one years, remember?”
“So how am I supposed to not be angry with a woman who claims she became pregnant and gave birth without having sex?”
“I don’t know why, but I believe her. Strange, though, for sure.”
“Rosa, listen, please. I have no idea why this happened, but at some point, just when I was really starting to boil over, I remembered that the Dalai Lama told me that ‘anger grows out of the ego.’ And I saw something in myself.”
“That you can be an ass,” she said.
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 29