“No…listen to me. Stop joking.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Listen, please, for once. Stop giving orders and looking for a fight. Simply listen.”
“I’m listening, Paolo. I’m trying.”
“I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God. And I believe his birth was miraculous. And I believe he rose from the dead. I’ve always believed those things, and I still do. But I realized tonight that I don’t know things happened that way.”
“That’s why they call it faith.”
“And I also realized I don’t know there can’t be other miracles, of every kind, in every era, and in societies that aren’t Christian. I don’t know that. It suddenly occurred to me to ask myself the question: Why do you think you know everything? For some odd reason, just at that moment, right in the hottest part of my anger, I saw the link between being angry like that and the fact that I just wanted to be right and wanted her to be wrong. I actually saw it. It was so simple, so clear, a kind of vision. And then that girl came outside with the beads and I wanted to laugh, and the anger was like a balloon with a hole poked in it. It just shrank away to nothing.”
“A miracle,” she said.
“Stop being sarcastic.”
“I’m not. I thought I saw something change in you, in your face. I was watching you. The old woman—Agnese—saw it, too, and touched you. When Shelsa held up the beads you made a certain expression—you squeezed up the right side of your cheek and the corner of your right eye—that I’ve never ever seen you make before. I thought you were having a stroke or something.”
“I was changing.”
“Yes, at last, and it was because of the presence of that boy and that girl and that strange woman. They worked a kind of magic on you, on all of us.”
“I don’t believe in magic.”
“You don’t believe in it because you’re the most stubborn man who ever lived. From the second she came up to us on the soccer field I saw something in that girl. It made me think of the old religious paintings where Jesus and Mary and the saints have a circle of light around their heads. I doubt very much that those people had actual circles of light around their heads. Nobody would have crucified Jesus if he was walking around with a circle of light around his head. But I think there was something about them that was different, special, and certain people could see it and certain people couldn’t, and the people who could see it had no way to describe it, so the painters put these circles of light around them. They were…what do you call it?”
“Metaphors?”
“Right. Exactly.”
“I didn’t see any circle of light,” I said. “But I’ve seen some paintings of Buddha in museums and there was that same circle, or a very similar circle. Blue, sometimes. And sometimes red.”
“You’re completely not understanding me, as usual.”
“Fine, I’m sorry. If you want to believe my anger disappeared because of that woman and those two children, I can’t stop you. But she seemed a bit too forceful, and they seemed like mainly ordinary kids to me—extra polite, maybe. Smarter than most kids at those ages. More loving, even. But not exactly kids who would invade the dreams of holy men.”
“You think it was ‘mainly ordinary’ that the girl recognized the Dalai Lama when none of the hundred or so other people who’ve seen him over the last few days recognized him in that same disguise?”
“I don’t know. Mazzo recognized the Pope, didn’t he?”
“You think it was ‘mainly ordinary’ that the three-year-old boy could steal the beads out of the pockets of two grown men without them knowing it?”
“Maybe his uncle was a pickpocket and taught him the tricks.”
“Be serious, Paolo.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it enough. It’s not easy for me to believe in things like that.”
“You? The Christian who believes in the Immaculate Conception and Christ’s Resurrection? Not easy to believe in miracles?”
“Those things are different.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why, they just are. They’re unique. They’re what makes Christ special, what makes him God. Or part of God.”
“And so Shelsa can’t be part of God? Tommaso can’t be? We all can’t be?”
“Rosa, I’m trying to say one thing and you’re talking about something else, as usual. It simply occurred to me that I was so upset at what Cinzia was saying because I wanted to be right. I wanted her to yield to the authority of the Pope, to the holiness of the Dalai Lama.”
“She was perfectly respectful.”
“She was challenging them.”
“And that’s what, Paolo? A sin? For a woman to challenge a man?”
“For an ordinary woman to challenge those two holy men. In that way. Yes.”
“She’s not ordinary.”
“Maybe not. But I’m talking about my anger. You’re talking about circles of light and people who do strange things.”
“You’re focusing on yourself, as usual.”
“Let me finish, would you kindly?”
“Fine, finish all you want. But you’re an ass.”
“And you’re as bossy and impatient as you ever were, and still not listening!”
“Go ahead, then, talk.”
“I’m saying I wanted to be right and that overwhelmed all other considerations. I recognized that fact. I wanted God and my parents to be looking down on me and saying, ‘You’re right, Paolo, and she’s wrong.’ I saw that something like that is how wars start, wanting God to look down on you and think you’re right. And then, after I saw it, I realized that all the fights we had, you and I, all those hundreds of thousands of arguments, came about because I wanted to be right, to know, and you wanted to be right. And neither one of us could simply let go of our ridiculous stubbornness and make a decent peace.”
“It’s not so simple.”
“No, it isn’t. But we never tried very hard. Most of the fights we had were about nothing, about who knew the right time to put Anna Lisa to bed, eight or eight-fifteen. About should we spend forty euro on groceries or forty-eight euro.”
“It was lire then, not euro.”
“Stop, Rosa. You know what I mean. I think it was connected to fear. I didn’t want you to take over the relationship and make me see and do everything the way you see and do it. Especially with Anna Lisa.”
“We fought before Anna Lisa was born.”
“Right, but the same principle applies and if you would listen to me for once instead of thinking you know everything and constantly interrupting me, you’d see what I’m trying to say!”
“Don’t yell! I’m trying to listen. I’m trying as hard as I can.”
“All those times I got angry and you got angry, on some level we were both minor fascists. Insecure dictators. Minor Mussolinis. There’s a little bit, a tiny bit of the tyrant in me. Or the wish to be a tyrant, to be right, to control.”
“In us, not just in you.”
“Thank you. And if you multiply that by seven billion you get the human predicament. I thought about how brave the Pope and the Dalai Lama are. They’ve let go of so much in the name of unity, of truth. Even this trip…for a few days they even let go of being bosses.”
“And look at the trouble it caused. People want a boss, amore. Most people like to have responsibility taken away from them. They might want to control their wife or husband or child in their own home, but in the larger picture they want to be led. All those screaming Italians in Piazza Venezia. They wanted a god up there on the balcony. At the end they hated the Grand Benito with a passion, but for about twenty years they were perfectly happy to consider him a god. And by the way, amore, how do you explain the fact that the Pope dreams of Mussolini and we end up sleeping in the house where he spent his last night?”
“I can’t.”
“Maybe our wicked Benito is trying to atone for his sins from some other plane of existence.”
�
�Sure, maybe.”
“Plus, Agnese told me that ever since that fateful night, this place has been haunted by ghosts. Which is why she was so apologetic about putting us in the barn.”
“I’m not afraid,” I said.
“Yes you are. And I am, too.”
We were both quiet for a while. I felt something new between us, though. Something fresh, an underground stream beneath the surface squabbles. It felt as though Rosa and I had been thrashing around in a polluted harbor for two decades, and we’d suddenly realized we could simply swim over to where the water, fed by this stream, was much clearer. The clear water had been there all along but for some reason we’d kept swimming around in circles in the poison. “What’s your secret fear?” I asked her. “Yesterday…you never told me. Ghosts?”
She hesitated so long I thought she’d fallen asleep. I thought I heard bats flapping about in the loft. Bats or swallows. Or rats fighting, maybe. Or the ghosts of disgraced Italian dictators twisting in the air. I tried to ignore them.
“I’m afraid,” Rosa said at last, and then she hesitated again and shifted position, “of growing old alone.”
“You never told me that.”
“I was ashamed. The successful business owner, the woman of the world. The strong Neapolitan with rich and famous friends. I was embarrassed.”
“You’ll have a grandchild now, for company.”
“That’s not what I mean, Paolo.”
“You could find somebody. You’re beautiful, rich. Some men are attracted to women who yell at them all the time.”
Silence.
“That last part was a joke.”
“I don’t want to find somebody,” she said in a voice that was as pure and true as a flute note.
I listened to those words, really listened to them. What I heard there was something that had gotten lost over time, drowned out in the symphony of daily living. I thought of Cinzia telling the holy men that they could open their minds still farther, and I tried to do that. I tried to shove all my old assumptions and resentments and bad memories to one side, my stories, as Tenzin had called them, all my old insistence on knowing. After a minute I felt an emptiness there, where that acidic pile had been—not an emptiness, exactly, but an openness. A new plot of land that might be tilled and planted. A clear ocean that might be sailed across. A view of the sky that had been obscured by a mountain of bitterness. I felt words rising up out of that clear place and into my mouth, and when I parted my lips they flew out. “Are you saying we could live together again?”
A long silence. Suddenly the pleasant openness was covered by a cloud of toxic smoke. Rosa could say two words—“No, amore”—and crush me forever. I felt the fear around me as if it were a herd of a thousand spiders. They’d realized I was there, in the barn, in my underwear, in the dark. They were marching on me like an army, from all directions.
But then Rosa said, “Sì,” and I could hear her crying very quietly. I reached across and took hold of her hand and she moved it and placed my hand palm-down on her belly and kept it there. She sniffled, took a long breath and let it out. “When you called me from your office that day, about helping the Pope and the Dalai Lama escape…I thought you were calling to ask the question you just asked. Could we try living together again. I had a feeling.”
“You believe in ghosts now, miracles, special children. Feelings.”
“I always believed in those things.”
“A true napoletana.”
“When we were first together, when you first brought me here to this beautiful place, you used to say you were glad you found a napoletana, remember? You said the northerners were sane and orderly and hardworking and maybe more honest, but that without the south, Italy would have too many brains and not enough heart. It would be like Europe having only Germany and Austria—no Spain, no France, no Italy. It would be a world of scientists without singers. I thought it was romantic. What happened to the man who said those things?”
“His various fears ate him up.”
“What fears?
“Could I make a living? Would Anna Lisa get sick, or hurt? Would you take over the relationship? Would I fail again?”
“What if you let all that go now?”
I couldn’t speak.
“What would you say if I told you this trip feels like it was intended by God to bring us together again, Paolo? I even think the Pope might have had that in mind all along. Maybe all this was for us, too, amore, not only for him and his visions. What if the magic those children are supposed to bring to earth has already touched us?”
“I would say one of two things: either you’re completely crazy, or I’m getting a second chance. A reincarnation without dying.”
She let go of my hand. For a moment I thought she was angry because I’d mentioned reincarnation. I heard her moving in the darkness, and then she said, “I’m disgusting and sweaty, but I’m taking off my underwear. I want you to make love to me. Now. We’ll make peace between us. It will be the start of making peace in the world.”
“I’m not sure I remember how to do it.”
“I’ll remind you,” Rosa said.
Day Five
43
After Rosa and I made our beautiful peace—the details of which shall remain private—I slept a sleep of the deepest contentment. I dreamt of nothing, or nothing I can remember, and probably would have remained in that state of perfectly satisfied empty-mindedness until noon if Rosa hadn’t awakened me with a gentle shake. “Amore!” I heard. I pried my eyes open and saw that the barn’s complete darkness had begun to soften in the direction of day. It must have been four-thirty or five in the morning. There was no real light yet, just the hope of light, the suggestion of it, the promise of light sifting down through the loft window and dusting the edge of Rosa’s face. She was leaning over me, one hand on my left shoulder, shaking it gently. For some reason her hair was wet. I remember that because a drop of water fell from one dark strand onto my cheek. “Amore! Quick! Get up, get up. We have to go! Now! They found the car!”
“Who?” I said. “What car?” But even before she said, “The police! The Maserati!” I was awake enough to know where I was and to remember what had happened. “Come back to bed,” I said, which was something I had enjoyed saying to her on certain Saturday mornings in our youth.
Those words did not seem to raise the same good memories in her that they raised in me. “Get up, Paolo!” she said in a harsh whisper. “Right this second! I’ll explain, but get up and get dressed!”
I clambered to my feet, strands of hay caught in my hair and clinging to my sticky disguise. I was naked. My knees and lower back ached badly. I missed my mattress.
Rosa took hold of my shoulders and shook me until I was completely awake. “Look me in the eyes, Paolo. Listen to me! They found the car. Tara must have called them. The police and the army are all over the town, from Sant’Abbondio’s down to the lake. Cinzia and Agnese don’t want them to come here, because the press is crazy with the story, and if the reporters get word that the Pope and the Dalai Lama came to this house, and if they get a look at Shelsa and Tommaso, and if Rinpoche or Ringling or one of the women tells them the whole story, then the children will be famous, and hounded by every newspaper and TV station on earth. That’s already happened to Shelsa once—a newspaper story—and it was awful for them. We have to go. Now!”
“Your hair’s wet.”
“I took a shower. I smelled like you smell, except you look even worse than I looked. The disguise is ruined. It’s all coming off, see.” She peeled from my forearm a stamp-size piece of the hardened, faded polish. “Go inside and shower. I’ll give you exactly four minutes.”
“I’ll wake up everybody.”
“Everybody’s awake. GO!”
I found my clothes and dressed in the half dark, then hurried across to the main house. Agnese was there, holding out a fresh towel. She pointed me toward the downstairs bathroom, and I showered as quickly as I could, given that
the color Mario had applied was peeling from my face and arms in large flakes. I tried to scrub it off, but a splotchy film remained. Eight minutes and I was dressed and being hurried out the back door with Agnese’s palm against my spine.
There, on a patch of lawn, the entire group from the night before had assembled, the children sleepy-eyed, Rinpoche grinning and holding Piero’s soccer ball like he was ready for a game (“Please keep it,” I told him), the other adults looking weary, birds chirping in the trees and the first streaks of gray showing in the east. I noticed that the Pope was dressed in a different suit—one of Ringling’s, it might have been—and that he’d removed his goatee, though there wasn’t much he could do about the blond color in what was left of his hair. The Dalai Lama had his regular glasses on and a new pair of pants and a clean shirt, and he seemed, without the long hair and jet-set getup, utterly recognizable. I realized, at that point, that we were going to walk into town and turn ourselves in and be scolded or cheered, hated or loved, and taken back to our ordinary lives.
There were hugs and bows all around, arrivedercis and goodbyes. At Cinzia’s request—she had tears in her eyes again—the Pope and the Dalai Lama gave a blessing to the assembled group. And then, without being asked, each of them in turn bent over and held Shelsa and Tommaso for a moment in a warm embrace. I watched them closely, waiting to see if there would be some momentous exchange, some sign from God that this odd encounter was part of his greater plan. But it seemed we’d had all the signs we were going to be given.
We thanked Agnese for the marvelous meal and hospitality. We took a last look at the children, made a final wave to the eccentric Americans. Promised we’d say nothing to the press.
It would have been a fittingly gentle and loving farewell, a kind of ecumenical reconciliation after the previous night’s tension, except that, just as the four of us turned and headed onto the dirt road, Tommaso ran over and kicked me in the back of my left calf, fairly hard. His mother gently reprimanded him. Rinpoche’s laughter echoed in the hills. Shelsa took him by the hand and pulled him back. I said, “It’s fine, not to worry, normal behavior,” or something along those lines, but I limped after my traveling companions wondering if it had been meant as some kind of celestial signal. The little angel had picked out the sinner in the group, the doubter; he’d known exactly which one of us needed to be spurred onto the spiritual path. Maybe he was special, after all.
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 30