I tried to breathe calmly, telling myself—and mostly believing it—that nothing bad could possibly happen to me there. I ran my eyes over the room—all dark wood, elaborately carved. There were no pictures on the walls, no religious figures painted there, only the plain wooden desk that looked like it weighed a thousand pounds, a plain wooden cross, the hard-backed chairs, the bench, and one pair of polished black shoes beneath it.
It was several minutes before the door opened again. The man who entered was dressed like a beggar or street person in shabby, stained brown pants, running shoes, and a tan sweatshirt that looked twenty years old. He held out a hand and said, “Martino Zossimo,” and I stood and bowed my head to him. He was older than I’d expected, his face round and deeply lined but handsome, the hair thick and gray, the eyes steady, the nose sharp and bent to one side as if it had been broken years before, the ears protruding a bit. It was the face, I thought, of a person at peace. He gestured for me to sit and then sat opposite me.
“I am sorry for all the drama,” he said, and, unlike Father Bartolomeo’s, his English carried only the smallest trace of an accent. “And especially for the late hour. The situation now, here, is difficult for me.”
Though I had no idea in what way it might be difficult for him, I said I understood. I thanked him for meeting with me.
“I have been expecting you for a long time,” he said.
“I came as quickly as I could, Your Eminence.”
“I don’t mean tonight. I have been expecting to meet you for a long time. I have seen you in my prayers. In dreams. I have seen you exactly as you look now.”
When he said those words, it was as if a long, sharp sword pierced up through the middle of me, stirring something there, as if the point of it had touched the bottom edge of my heart. I suddenly remembered Father Alberto telling me, more than once, not to be falsely modest. I’d had no idea what he meant. Whatever modesty I possessed seemed to me absolutely grounded in reality, not false at all.
But somehow, and it was very strange, when I felt that piercing it was as if an eggshell, made of thin metal, cracked, broke apart, and fell into pieces at my feet. I had turned my eyes away, but when I looked back at the cardinal, I felt—so surprising—that we were in some way equals. Still, his equal or not, I felt raw and skinless there in the small room.
“You were not afraid to come here on Via Prè?” the cardinal asked.
“A bit.”
He smiled in a way that seemed sad to me. “It can be not so safe there in the night, though mostly the people would not want to hurt you but only to steal from you, to get money for drugs or to drink.”
“We have those places also,” I said.
“I knew that you would not be harmed there. I wanted a blessing for that street,” he said. “I walk there often, sometimes three or four nights a week. Often at this hour. Sometimes with Father Bartolomeo and sometimes alone. I wanted you to pass along that street because I knew it would be a blessing for those souls.”
For once I had no urge to question or dispute him. I was wonderfully at ease.
“You are here in some danger,” he said calmly, “but not from the people like those on Via Prè. Within the Church you have made powerful enemies.”
“People have been saying that to me almost from the moment I left the airport,” I said. “It’s a hard thing to believe.”
“You are not afraid about that?”
“Not for myself, no.”
“You are sure?”
“Yes.”
“It would always be this way, I think,” he said. “People who are like you will always make certain others uneasy. If in this life you are warm, you are kind, your heart is open to the full love of Christ without reservation, then you must always invite hatred. I think sometimes of the mob calling for Barabbas to be let to go free and Christ to be crucified. There is always such a crowd. Always.”
He turned his eyes away for a moment, as if experiencing a familiar pain in his body. Then he said, “You have come to tell me something.”
“Yes, Your Eminence.” In as concise a manner as I could, I told him the whole story as it is set down here—the visions, the certainty I had that God was calling me to the priesthood, and that the Church, the American Church at least, was dying. I told him briefly about my meetings in Revere and Boston, the trip to Rome, the cryptic message that had been delivered to me at the Old Palace Hotel. He listened without surprise and with great care, like a good priest in the confessional, with his eyes to the side and down, but not missing a word or anything behind the words. When I finished, he looked at me directly. “I have people in the Vatican who are my friends,” he said, so quietly it seemed he worried there were spies outside the door, listening. “From one of those friends, I knew you had come. I knew about the meeting with Rosario. He is a sincere man, perhaps, but of the old ways. When Christ came to Earth, the old ways, which had been set in place to help and guide people, those ways had become tired and rigid and no longer so helpful. I do not mean the true, ancient spirit of Judaism. I mean the rules, the structures of power, the way the spirit of Abraham and Moses had become corrupted. Christ came exactly to break those things apart and show us again the true path. Now, I believe, now in our Church we have a time like that also.”
“It’s frustrating, Your Eminence. I’ve felt caught at moments between the possibility that I’m committing a great sin and the other possibility—that the Church is wrong.”
“You could not make a sin of any kind,” he said. He looked at me a long time, and it seemed to me that in his silent gaze and in that strange remark he was telling me I should know something that he knew. He said, “I receive messages also, in prayer. If I had the authority to change the Church, I would help you in this, yes, of course. But I cannot.” He held out his arms and crossed his wrists in front of him. “I am tied like this,” he said, “even in this high office.”
“What then, Your Eminence?”
“I am being asked, I believe, to help you in a different way.”
“What way?”
He held his eyes on me, and I had the sense that there was something he wanted to say. He broke eye contact, started to speak, hesitated, then said, “We must wait a little more time,” he said at last. “We must trust in God.”
“I do,” I said, perhaps too loudly. By then I was leaning a few inches toward him in the small room. “But God is pushing me to do this, I feel it. I believe that with all my heart. Pushing me always to do this thing, and nothing comes of it for me but more and more disappointment.”
He watched me. He tucked his hands into the tight sleeves of his threadbare sweater. It was a gesture only a priest would make. “I am the cardinal,” he said, a strange waver of pain in his voice. “But I see in you what I would want to see in me.”
I told him, and it was true, that the life I was living was such a quiet life, of benefit to so few people, that at times it made me ashamed. It wasn’t that I wanted to do great things and be known for them. It was more a feeling I had that some mysterious ability was going to waste, a spiritual ability, and I hadn’t the slightest idea how to change that.
He surprised me by saying “Many women now feel as you do. And some men also. But I think, it will sound to you perhaps typical to say this, I think that there has been lost in this time the understanding of what is not seen.”
“You mean the traditional things: women having children? Loving their husbands? Keeping their homes?”
He was shaking his head in disagreement. “For women and for men,” he said. “The discussion now, in the Church and outside, has become—” He turned his eyes sideways for a moment, searching for the right word, it seemed, and then said, “has been made too solid…too concerned with exterior things. The value of the interior world has been lost now in society, even in most parts of the Church. It is seen as a waste, not productive. But think of what did Christ do. Not so much. Not so very much in the exterior world. A small number of miracles in
all his years on Earth. A small number of months of talking here and there. A short life, and look. His message was a very large message, but mostly an interior one, I think.”
“But he was Christ. He changed the world so much.”
“Of course, yes. But there were the good people before him, and the bad also. And after him good and bad, the same.”
“You seem to be saying I should let this go, then, the idea of the priesthood.”
“I think,” he said, again, with what seemed to me that same subtle reluctance, “I think God is asking of you something else…something larger.”
“What then? Asking what? Forgive me, Your Eminence, I’m confused.”
“You encounter, constantly, every day, many people. Walking now on Via Prè, you touched the people there.”
“I gave one sweater to cold children, that’s all.”
He was shaking his head. “Because of what is inside yourself,” he said slowly, “you change the life of every person who sees you.”
I was tired then, confused, worn out. Thinking of how I might have changed the lives of the prostitutes on the corner, I very nearly laughed.
“When the priest says Mass,” the cardinal went on, “everything inside of him says this Mass. To the extent that he is good, the goodness is passed across to others not only in his words but in the motions of his body, the tone of his voice, the light in his eyes. When a husband and wife make the love, everything that is inside them makes the love. Their history. Their thoughts and the record of their thoughts. Everything they have ever been is joined, and if their lovemaking produces a child, all of that is passed along to that child. When a mother touches her son, everything of her as a person lies inside that touch. Because of it the atoms change in the son.”
“But the external world matters, doesn’t it?” I said. “If a woman can’t be a priest, if a priest who wants to can’t marry, the atoms change in them, too. What they do from then on, the effect they have on people, is changed.”
“Exactly,” he said, as if we’d been agreeing all along.
“What are you saying I should do, then? Tell me.”
Instead of answering, he said, “I watched my sister die. From the cancer. A holy woman. We were very close always. She had a great patience. She prayed, she suffered. She felt despair. I think we see those same things in Christ’s life and in the life of his mother and of others close to him. We have Christ’s own words, ‘My Lord, my Lord, why have you forsaken me?’ and we have him then rising in the glory. At the very last, after a great torment, my sister left this world in peace.”
“I’m sorry for her suffering,” I said. And then, when he just kept looking at me: “So I should wait?”
He nodded, as if I’d finally understood what he’d been trying to convey. “I believe we must both of us wait…but not so long now.”
“I feel like I’ve done all the work I can do in terms of what God is asking of me.”
“I feel that also, in one way, yes,” he said. “But I think that now God will send you a new task.” He looked away and back, and for the third time I had the feeling there was something he was keeping himself from saying. “And to me a new task, also.” He sighed, as if the vision of the difficulty of these coming tasks was already burdening him. He said, “You have seen this beautiful church?” And it was clear that he didn’t want to say any more.
“Only for just a few moments, when I came in.”
“Then let us go and pray together before the Holy Mother. That is what we can do now. If you would.”
We went back out into the smell of candle smoke and old stone. I started to kneel at the altar rail, but the cardinal took hold of my elbow, opened the silver-leaf gates, and led me through them to the place where the priests stood when they were saying Mass. It was as if, for those moments, in that one place, he was fulfilling the visions I’d been having for so long, allowing a woman into the inner sanctum of the faith, as an equal. If he foresaw some other destiny for me, then at least my visions had been correct to this one extent: I was on the altar, praying. “Here,” he said, and we knelt side by side on the cool tile, beneath the swirling marble Mary. “Just a few minutes here we will pray,” he said quietly.
And we did that. I bowed my head. After a time I could feel an actual, literal weight slipping off my bones, as if the question I’d been struggling with all those years had at last been answered. In place of that worry and struggle, something much larger than myself and my catalogue of wants seemed to take hold of my mind and carry me up and up. Such a sense of fullness came over me then, a joy much stronger than the joys I’d felt before in prayer. In my arms and legs and hands it was as if I could feel the individual cells singing in celebration, and I understood it to mean that I was in a holy place, in the presence of a truly holy man, and that he had passed on to me some great, mysterious gift. I raised my head and opened my eyes and looked above me at the mural. In the center of the cupola—something I could not have seen from any farther out in the church—was a globe of golden light, a golden quietness amid the swirl of bodies. I felt as though I were being absorbed into it.
When, much later, the light released me and I came slowly out of what I can only call the ecstasy of that prayer, my eyes were closed, my head bowed, and the cardinal was no longer beside me.
I looked left and right, then turned and saw him sitting in the front pew. Walking through the silver gates and down the three marble steps, I felt a twinge of embarrassment: I had no idea how long I’d kept him waiting. He stood, looking, it seemed to me, like a carpenter or stonemason who’d wandered into the church after leaving his labors and now was about to fall asleep. He did the strangest thing then: he took my right hand, leaned over, and kissed it, almost as a lover would. I resisted the urge to pull away. “Give to me,” he said, as if asking for my hand in marriage, “your blessing.”
“I have no blessing to give, Your Eminence. That’s not right. It should work the other way.”
“Give to me your blessing,” he repeated, very calmly, as if I hadn’t objected at all.
“I am not worthy to give anyone any kind of blessing.”
“Give to me your blessing,” he said a third time.
And then it was as if there were a completely different Cynthia Clare Piantedosi standing there. That name no longer fit; my actual past seemed no longer to drag behind me like a tattered sack of memories. I took hold of his hand in both my hands and I said, “Whatever good I have in me I give to you. May God bless you.”
“And you,” he said. “And protect you now, and give us both courage.”
Then he was leading me to the door. We stepped outside, where it was cool but no longer nighttime. The old priest was standing there, waiting as patiently as if it were midday and he were expecting a friend for lunch. I would calculate, later, that he’d been there almost two hours. He smiled at me tiredly. The cardinal said just what Mabu had said: “You should go back by the way of Via Arsenale. Father Bartolomeo will walk with you as far as that street, then it will be safe.”
I thanked him. He touched me on the shoulder with the fingertips of his right hand, held them there for a long moment, held his eyes on mine, then turned and went back into the church. I had an urge to follow him and ask if we could see each other again, but for some reason I did not do that.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
As Father Bartolomeo and I stepped away from San Luca and out into the small piazza at the end of Via Prè, I was surprised to see that the sun had already risen, there, behind us, behind the range of hills. I was surprised, too, that, as we turned left and began the short climb toward Via Arsenale, Father Bartolomeo walked behind, not next to me. At first, I’m ashamed to admit, I was barely even aware of him. Still caught up in the magic of my meeting with Cardinal Zossimo, walking along in a spell of self-involvement, I realized only after we’d gone a block and a half that Father Bartolomeo had fallen behind and was laboring for breath. The trip along Via Prè had been slightly downhil
l, but now we were moving in a different direction, away from the water, climbing a steep rise, and he was struggling.
I stopped and waited for him. Strangely, he stopped, too—in order to catch his breath, I thought at first. But then I understood that, like a bodyguard or acolyte, he was purposely keeping a distance. I motioned him up; he smiled and shook his head. It was a peculiar dance, but I was suffused then with such a profound peace that almost nothing else mattered to me. I turned and went along happily in the morning light, uphill another two blocks until we crested the rise. At that point I looked back at the old priest and I said, “Please walk with me. I’m not in a hurry.” Still breathing hard, Father Bartolomeo moved up even with me, and together we turned left onto Via Arsenale. I asked him then if he or the cardinal had been the one who’d paid the hotel bill, and he only lifted and lowered his shoulders, once, chest heaving, face calm.
The air smelled of bus exhaust and baking bread. It must have been only five or five thirty in the morning, but already there were a few cars and motorcycles on the street, the sound of their engines echoing against the buildings’ stone faces. We had to wait a moment in order to cross. When we were on the other side, Father Bartolomeo caught his breath and said, “I think it is safe now, from here,” and reached out to shake my hand good-bye.
I thanked him for waiting all that time, and he said, “My life is waiting,” in a laconic manner that was touched with the gentlest humor. His face was a collection of pouches with two sleepy blue eyes set among them. “The cardinale,” he added, “a special man, yes?”
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