Vatican Waltz

by Roland Merullo

  In her right hand she held a cream-colored envelope. She greeted her guests with a cheery buongiorno, then came over to my table and handed me the envelope, keeping two fingers on my shoulder and smiling in a playful way. “Very early this morning a mysterious stranger stopped by and left this for you,” she said quietly. She seemed amused, as if enjoying her role as a matchmaker. She gave my shoulder a gentle squeeze and went back inside.

  The cream-colored envelope reminded me very much of the letter I’d received from Cardinal Rosario, except that my name, “Sig. Cinzia Piantedosi,” was printed in pencil in block letters on the front, not typed, and there was no return address. I thought Claudia had been joking about the mysterious stranger and that what I held in my hand was only a gesture she was making to soften the shock of the hotel’s high rates. A ticket to a show or a museum. A coupon for a half-price dinner. I thought for some reason that I might be going to hear Andrea Boccelli perform—something Father Bruno had set up as a way of taking the sting out of the previous day’s rejection.

  I slid the blade of a clean butter knife under the flap. Inside was a single sheet of stationery, folded in thirds. On the top half of the page someone had printed three words in pencil, all the letters lower case:

  martino zossimo genova

  It made no sense.

  I set it on the table and puzzled over the words. Claudia reappeared, pouring coffee, and, after hesitating a moment, I asked her what they meant. She glanced at the sheet of paper for all of two seconds before telling me, “Martino Zossimo. A cardinal in the Church. Famous man.”

  “And Genova?”

  “That is the city. ‘Genoa,’ you say in English.”

  “Who brought it, do you know?”

  She shrugged, smiled, a socialite used to romantic intrigues. “A young man,” she said. “He came very early and sounded the bell.”

  “Very tall?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Brown glasses? Heavyset?”

  She shook her head a second time, pleasantly, noncommittally. She squeezed my shoulder again, in encouragement it seemed. “Young men can be very attentive here.”

  When Claudia left me, I took the letter into my hands and pondered it. The writing was irregular and ungrammatical enough to have come from the man who’d been following me—he seemed, somehow, to know my name—but what kind of message was he trying to send? If it was from Father Bruno, he would have written a regular note or spoken to me in person. I thought for some reason of the priest Father Clement, who’d been translating for the cardinal. I knew that he’d wanted to say something there at the end, but how had he found out where I was staying? Why was he writing in code? And the description of the mysterious stranger didn’t fit him.

  I wondered if it was Father Clement’s way of going behind the cardinal’s back. Or if it was the cardinal’s way of doing what he felt he couldn’t do in public. Or if it was some kind of trick.

  Martino Zossimo. Genova.

  Martino Zossimo. Genova. So strange, that name seemed half familiar, I couldn’t say why.

  I CALLED BRUNO AND, WITHOUT telling him about the message, asked if I could take him to lunch. I owed him for all his help with the hotel situation, I said, for driving me around the city, for introducing me to his family and treating me to such a fine supper. The least I could do was buy him lunch.

  “Of course,” he surprised me by saying. “That would be very nice. After last night I thought you’d never want to see me again.”

  WHEN BRUNO PULLED THE VAN up in front of the gates, I told him I wanted to take him to his favorite restaurant, no matter how expensive it was. “I have plenty of money,” I said, “and no one to spend it on but myself.”

  He paused only a moment before saying, “Vecchia Roma, then. It’s in a neighborhood we still call the Jewish Ghetto, though there haven’t been a lot of Jews here since the war.”

  “Did Mussolini send them to the camps the way Hitler did?”

  “Not with so much enthusiasm. There was no shortage of bad Italians in those days. Still, Mussolini refused to send them to Germany, and even later, after he was gone, many Jews were saved.”

  “I was interested in what your father said about the years of fascism. My father never talks about it.”

  “They were young boys,” Father Bruno said. We were stopped at a red light, and two men had rushed out to wash the windshield, sponging and drying it in seconds and accepting a tip with an accented grazie. Father Bruno said two words to them in what I assumed was Albanian. As he zigged and zagged in the traffic again, he said, “Young boys, but they saw and heard many things. About Mussolini, the Germans, the war. Mussolini twisted so many minds.” He paused, hit the brakes, tapped the horn, went on as if there had been no interruption. “That seems to happen in different places at different times, don’t you think so? It’s as if an idea infects a population and the infection is spread by some charismatic man with an enormous ego. My father was right: not everyone in the population gets sick, but enough people do to change the direction of a country, and sometimes of the whole world.”

  He nodded as if agreeing with himself. He reminded me of Franco then—the passion, at least, not the anger. “A country, a family, a Church,” he went on. “Sometimes I think about all the thoughts in all the minds of everyone on Earth. It seems to me it’s like the air around us. The weather can change from sun to rain, from calm to windy. No one knows why that happens. A bad wind blows through the minds in a country, and everything turns bad. One wonders why God allows it.”

  He surprised me by pulling the van up to the gate of a construction site and parking on a patch of dirt next to the entrance. There were NO PARKING signs everywhere.

  “You won’t get a ticket here?”

  He smiled, a rare sliver of joy on his square, sad face. “No,” he said, “it’s the Italian way. We all break the rules. But we break them only to a certain extent. Look, see? If people really need to get through this gate, they can. They’ll only have to drive slowly for a few seconds, and that’s not too painful even for Italians. They’ll squeeze between the side of the van and the far gatepost. Even a truck could go in or out. Right now everyone is eating lunch anyway, even the police are eating lunch. But this is the way we are.”

  “I noticed it in the way people drive,” I said. “Crazy, breaking every rule, ignoring lane markers and speed limits.”

  “Yes,” he said, and there was another spark of joy. “But I think we are very good drivers, very courteous in some eccentric way. We are not a people who follow the rules, or maybe it is better to say that we are creative with the rules.”

  “Even the rules of the Church?” I asked as we got out of the van and walked shoulder to shoulder along a torn-up, dusty sidewalk. I felt something different with him then. The visit to his family, awkward as it had been, seemed to have pushed us into a new kind of friendship. He was a notch more relaxed, less formal; I want to say younger.

  “Yes,” he said, “even the rules of the Church. Maybe especially the rules of the Church. If you go to Mass here on Sunday, in almost any church you will see a group of men standing at the back, talking to each other. They carry on a conversation that lasts from the beginning of the service to the ‘Andate in pace,’ though sometimes they’ll fall silent just as the host is being raised.”

  “That must make it hard for the priest.”

  “It does, it does.” He laughed a short, quiet laugh. “But that is our way. Sometimes if you go into a restaurant, the people will overcharge you. Other times they’ll pretend to forget you had three glasses of wine instead of two and they won’t add that onto the check. Everything here is done that way. We have a happy chaos. We’re not like the Germans and the Austrians. Everything there works perfectly, but there is not so much fun, not so much joy in being alive.”

  “Maybe,” I said, as we walked into a restaurant that had a dozen or so outdoor tables elegantly set with white tablecloths under a pale white canvas te
nt, “maybe that’s why the Lamb of God people came to be…in reaction to that happy chaos.”

  “Yes, maybe,” he said, “but there’s something about those people that most Italians instinctively dislike. We give respect to the pope and the Vatican, yes, naturally, but then we will go home and do what we please. Look, we have the lowest or second lowest birth rate in all of Europe. Do you really think all those married couples are using the rhythm method? Or abstaining?”

  At that point the conversation was interrupted by a waiter, who seated us at one of the outdoor tables. For a moment Bruno—who was wearing, as he had every time I’d seen him, his black pants and short-sleeved black shirt, open at the collar—for a moment, in spite of the clothing, he seemed to me not so much like a priest but like an ordinary young Italian man sitting down to lunch with a friend. In the way he opened the menu, in the way he ordered for both of us, pasta and wine and then a meat dish for what Italians call il secondo piatto, the second plate, the weight of sadness and formality seemed to lift away from him. I felt much closer to him because of it.

  When we’d sipped our wine and taken the first bites of a delicious and perfectly cooked spaghetti with tiny yellow clams and baby octopus mixed into it, I said, “I received a very strange letter this morning at the hotel.” I could see that the news had his full attention.

  “Claudia brought it to me at breakfast.” I took the envelope out of my purse and handed it across the table, and he set down his fork, unfolded the letter and read it, then handed it back to me.

  “Eat, please,” I said. “This food is too good to be allowed to grow cold. Do you have any idea what it means?”

  He swallowed before answering, sipped his wine, picked at one of the miniature octopuses with the tines of his fork, and then raised his eyes. “Do you remember a few years ago, when there were the G8 meetings in Genoa? Do you remember that the young people rioted?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I don’t pay much attention to the news.”

  “Well, they rioted in the streets because they felt that the powerful people who run the world were making these giant economic arrangements with each other, trade deals and so on, that benefited them, that increased their wealth, but at the expense of the working people. Because of their greed, they were driving the world economy into the mud. The young people lit cars on fire, broke windows. There was wildness in the streets. They fought with the police and many people were hurt, and some, a few, were killed. Well, this man”—he pointed toward the letter—“Cardinal Zossimo, went out into the streets and spoke to them. Not as a representative of the powerful but as a human being. He spoke to them about violence and how rarely it succeeds in bringing any good change to the world. He said he agreed with them in principle, but at the same time he spoke as a member of the Church hierarchy, the elite, the powerful, asking them to be calm. Some people hated him for that, called him a hypocrite. But many many people, myself included, have a great admiration for him. Think of it, a cardinal going out into the wild streets like that, unprotected, to speak to the youth. Who else has done that in history? Can you think of anyone?”

  “There was an archbishop in Central America,” I said. “I don’t know which country. Nicaragua, maybe. Or El Salvador. I remember he was assassinated saying Mass.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Archbishop Romero. A few brave men and a few brave women do things like that. Cardinal Zossimo, they say, walks through the worst neighborhoods of Genoa at night, speaking to the prostitutes and drug addicts and the boys in gangs. Not trying to convince them to go to church or change their lives, just speaking to them, seeing them, which is what the rest of the society refuses to do. He would make a wonderful pope, that man, though the chances of him ever being elected are nonexistent. More likely, I think, he’ll someday be killed.”

  Bruno snorted bitterly and pushed his empty dish a few inches to the side. The waiter came and removed it and took my dish away, too, and asked if we wanted more wine. We did. After he was gone, Bruno said, “You heard my father last night, didn’t you? They killed John Paul I. Poison, probably. But of course there was never an autopsy or any investigation. Think of it. Corruption reaches that high up into the Church. It is that difficult and that dangerous to try to change things. Small changes, yes, of course. Mass on Saturday night in addition to Sunday. Confession face-to-face. And so on. Even those things met with resistance, and it was only the charisma of John XXIII that enabled such changes to be made, and now they are slowly being reversed. But the big things? Those things threaten the powers that be. And when people have power and money, within the Church, within the State, they’ll do almost anything to hold on to it.”

  “Including murdering a pope?”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “Murder is as human as going to the toilet. Why shouldn’t it exist within the Church?”

  The waiter brought the meat dishes, sausage and veal. I touched my finger to the envelope. “What does this mean, then?”

  Bruno shrugged. “I am not sure. It could be a trick to get you to go there. Perhaps they want to hurt you, and want you to be away from Rome when that happens, so it attracts less attention. Perhaps they want to do some damage to Cardinal Zossimo’s reputation by having him meet with an American radical.”

  “I’m hardly a radical,” I said. “And no one knows me here.”

  “Not yet, no. But Lamb of God has a huge influence on certain newspaper writers. It would be a simple matter to place a few articles there, saying you are an American, a foreigner, who has come here to destroy the Church.”

  I watched him cut and chew a piece of meat. I’d always had a not-very-respectful feeling about conspiracy theorists. I could feel that disrespect rising up between us, and I tried to push it back down.

  “It could also be,” Bruno went on, “that Cardinal Rosario—he’s not Grossetto, after all; he has no link to Lamb of God, none that we know of anyway—it could be that he actually wanted to say something different to you than he said but that he couldn’t be seen to do that in front of anyone else. He couldn’t risk your going and announcing, in public, ‘Rosario thinks women should be ordained.’ ”

  “Or it could be Father Clement.”

  “Yes, perhaps that is the most likely. I know him a bit. We worked together out of the same office for a few months when I was first ordained. A good man.”

  “He seemed upset in the meeting. I had the feeling he wanted to say something to me but couldn’t.”

  “Yes, well, then probably he brought that note to the hotel or arranged for someone else to bring it. Either he had a sense you should make your case to Zossimo or he reports to Zossimo in secret—or both.”

  “But how would he know where I was staying?”

  “Not difficult. First, in Italy, you must always register your name with a passport when you check in, yes? Second, someone could have followed us there when I took you. Not difficult.”

  “All this intrigue over a person as small as me,” I said. “I can’t believe that.”

  “Small in some ways, yes,” Bruno agreed. “In other ways, not so small. I have been thinking about this, Cynthia. Do you really believe the archbishop of Boston would have written a letter recommending you to a cardinal in Rome if he thought you were just an ordinary parishioner, a young woman, a nurse, who happened to be upset about one of the rules of the Church and came to him claiming to have been given messages from God? Are you that naive? Or are you just being disingenuous?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes I feel I live in my own little shell, set apart from the real world of men and women. I’ve felt that way ever since I was a girl. My friends would be talking about boys, and then later about careers and marriage and money, and it seemed to me that that shell separated me from them. I felt bad about it, plenty of times. Lonely. Isolated. Wondering if I wanted to feel superior to them as a kind of defense, and not join in with them and have an ordinary life.”

  Bruno nodded as if he understood, and told me
to eat and drink.

  “I was followed when I went to Santa Maria,” I said. “I didn’t want to upset you. It was the same man who came to the hotel.”

  “Wonderful! How well you’ve been greeted here in our country!”

  I showed him the picture on my phone and he looked at it a long time, then shrugged and said, “Albanese,” as if he’d known as much all along.

  “I confronted him. I asked him why he was doing it, who was sending him. He was the one who said, ‘Grossetto.’ ”

  “Wonderful, perfect,” Father Bruno said, with a biting sarcasm that surprised me. “And you confronted him. Excellent!”

  “Yes. Men, I’ve found, don’t like to be yelled at in public.”

  He threw back his head and laughed, and for just a moment I could see the happy, handsome boy he’d been long ago, before his mother ran off and his father turned bitter and he made certain decisions about his life. “You,” he said, “are either crazy or touched by God or both.”

  “Crazy, probably.”

  “If He needed somebody to change His church, He would choose a person like you. Brave. Stubborn. A bit of a pazza. Am I correct?”

  “About the stubborn part, yes.”

  After we’d eaten another bite or two, he asked, “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to have come all this way, had one meeting, heard one refusal, and then go home. I’m not made like that. I don’t like to quit things once I start them.”

  “A good trait.”