The big brother thumped him on the back and winked.
He found Anna sitting behind a pillar near the front of the nave.
“I’m sorry this has taken so long. There has been a mix-up. My friend has been transferred, and it has taken me all this time to find out. Do you think we could extend our drive and go search for him?”
“I don’t see why not. Where is he?”
“At Rieti.”
They had driven halfway there when it struck him that the worry lines had disappeared from her face. “I apologize for all that lost time.”
“It wasn’t lost time. I enjoyed it. I just sat. It was so quiet in there after the tourists left. I looked at the art and it lifted my spirits.”
“I’m glad.”
“I had a lovely chat with one of the friars. A funny old fellow.”
“What did you talk about?”
“About life. He was quite a character. He seemed to know who I was.”
“Really?”
“Yes, and he knew you also.”
“What did he say?”
“Something about a lion. He wasn’t all that coherent, but he really was very sweet. I felt so reassured by his presence. They must have a few senile friars still living there. They live to quite an old age I hear.”
“Yes, they do.”
“He said he was praying for you. How did he know you were there?”
“Anna, did he have bandages on his hands?”
“I don’t know. He kept his hands inside his sleeves. Wait, he did pat me on the shoulder at one point and. . . why yes, you’re right, the hand had a bandage on it. It crossed my mind that he had cut himself. It was stained.”
“Did he limp badly?”
“Yes. Why.”
“That was my friend.”
“Let’s go back, then, if he’s at Assisi.”
“He may not be at Assisi.”
“You’re not making much sense. He’s at Assisi but he’s not at Assisi? You’re sounding ever so slightly irrational, Father Elijah.”
“I know. Let’s go to Rieti.”
She raised her eyebrows and drove on in silence.
Fifteen minutes later they found the road leading to the Franciscan houses in the area. They followed it until they reached a lane marked by a wooden sign that said Hermitage.
They parked the car at the end of the lane and walked up to a stone building surrounded by a wooden fence. Two friars were bent over weeding a flower garden in the yard. When Elijah and Anna went through the front gate they stood up and stared.
“Pax et bonum, brothers, we are looking for Don Matteo.”
The friars looked at each other.
“Signore, Signora. This is a private convent. I regret we don’t receive visitors here.”
“We know Don Matteo is inside.”
The friars looked strained, at a loss for what to say.
“Guests must have an appointment”, one stammered.
“He is a close friend. I believe he is expecting us.”
“It’s not permitted.”
“Would you kindly tell him that I’m here. You can let him decide.”
“That won’t be necessary”, said a voice from the front door.
Don Matteo stood there, smiling sheepishly, holding onto the frame with a bandaged hand.
The friars rushed over to him and held him up, one on either side. They began to chide in rapid Italian.
“Don Matteo, you know what the doctor said!”
“Now, now, now”, he admonished them tenderly. “Don’t fret. I was expecting them. You can leave us.”
“You are not supposed to get out of bed. You must go back and lie down.”
“A few minutes won’t hurt. Let me just sit here on the bench. We will talk for a bit. Go on, now.”
The friars went away, leaving Don Matteo resting in a pool of sunshine. Elijah and Anna sat down on the porch steps.
“Hello again, young lady.”
“Hello. How did you get back here so quickly?”
“I travel fast”, he said, his eyes twinkling.
Elijah reached up and took one of Don Matteo’s hands in both of his. He held it without pressure. He did not let it go.
“Father Elijah, you look good. How are you?”
“There is so much to tell you I don’t know where to begin.”
“So! Tell me, how are the gates?”
“The gates?”
“The gates of your heart.”
“Battered but holding firm.”
“As I thought. Very good. How is the fear?”
“Some victories, some losses.”
“Yes, yes, that’s normal. Now listen, I have a message for you.”
“A message? From whom?”
“From our King. He wants me to tell you this: By day and by night my gaze is fixed upon you. I see how much you suffer for me.
“He wants you to know that he permits these adversities to increase your merit. All merit lies in the will. No other sacrifice compares with the immolation of your heart. He doesn’t reward for success, but for patience and hardship undergone for His sake. No success matters as much as perfect obedience, for it is this which prepares the way for the action of divine grace in your soul. It is through your weakness that He will work most powerfully to bring mercy to mankind. He knows your fear, and He wants you to come to Him and lay your head against His heart. He asks you to talk with Him as friend to friend. He says that there is much opposition and deception coming. You must expect this and not be dismayed by it. He will console you at certain times, but the greater work is to do His will in the darkness of faith. Faith is of utmost importance.
“Know this, He says, know this: I am always in your heart, and My love is released to others when you trust in Me completely. You are My son.”
Elijah closed his eyes. All thoughts, all emotions, all impressions faded. He plunged deep into his interior and rested there, motionless, suspended in being, in perfect peace.
Anna had listened to the foregoing with amazement. She stared at the two priests, trying to comprehend what she had observed. It made no sense.
Don Matteo looked at her.
“I have a message for you too, little sister. The Lord asks me to tell you that your martyr is with Him.”
“My martyr?” she murmured.
“He who shares the name of the first martyr. He who was the companion of your soul.”
“Stefano?”
Don Matteo nodded.
Elijah slowly raised his head. He saw first the tender expression of the old friar and then the bewilderment in Anna’s eyes.
At that moment the two friars returned with a highly agitated third, who brusquely announced that the meeting was over.
Don Matteo got up painfully and hobbled back inside, escorted by the friars. Anna did not move. Elijah took her arm and drew her to her feet. They walked slowly back to the car and returned to Foligno without further conversation.
* * *
That afternoon she took him up the mountain behind the farmhouse. A thin veil of cloud covered the sky and a cool breeze swayed the pines. She led the way on a path that wound between old vineyards fallen into disuse, invaded by tangled brambles and brushwood. The land became steadily drier as they climbed, and the path thinned. At the crest of a hill topped by an outcropping of rock, they came to a patch of grass from which one could see the entire valley. Cut into the rock was a grotto. A plaster statue of the Mother of Christ stood there, its white paint discolored and peeling, its head crowned with a circlet of crumbling plastic flowers. Birds had built nests in the crevasses between the stones.
Anna sat on the grass at the base of the image and looked up into its serene face.
“Seven swords pierce her heart”, she said. “I used to come here with my grandmother when I was a girl. We prayed beneath the image. She taught me the Rosary. My parents didn’t like that. They were educated. They thought of themselves as liberated from the old superstitions of
country people.”
“Our Lady of Sorrows.”
“Yes, that’s what Nonna called her. It used to frighten me when I was little, but my grandmother loved her so much. She told me that the Madonna watched over the valley, interceding for everyone who lived below. The Lady was weeping over our sins, she said.”
“She is still here.”
“Decade after decade she has stood here, unmoving, unchanging. My great-grandfather built this in the eighteen-nineties. I never met him; he was gone long before I was born, but the memory of him was kept alive in the family. They told us that on his deathbed he asked the family to pass on a message to each generation that would follow. He told them he had seen a vision of the Holy Father kneeling, all alone, weeping over the Church because it was in ruins, and soldiers coming into the Vatican and hitting him with rifles. But it was a different Holy Father, he said. Rome was in flames. A vision for the future. He foresaw a time when everyone would be tempted to lose faith. They say my great-grandfather cried, a tough old man like that. He was inconsolable. He cried because he didn’t want his family to go to Hell, and he thought that many of them, the ones who would be born in another century, would go there.”
“What does the family think of this now?”
“I don’t suppose any of them know, or if they know they’ve forgotten. I heard it only because my grandmother told me about it once when we were praying here. Even then I doubted it. When I told my parents, they laughed and said it was the ravings of a dying peasant, a poor old man full of fear. But Nonna said there never was a man as fearless as her father. He died in peace, looking at the picture of the Sacred Heart—the one above the bed where you slept last night. There are so many mysteries, aren’t there?”
“Many. And yet, sometimes a mystery is really quite simple.”
“Yes, you said that last night. A man is what he loves.”
“Also, such a man may see things that others do not see. Faith opens certain doors.”
She looked out across the valley.
“Anna,” he said eventually, breaking her reverie, “we have not talked about Rieti. What happened in your heart while we were there?”
“I don’t know. I can’t talk about it now. I need time to think. Maybe it was an illusion.”
“Did Don Matteo strike you as an illusion?”
“I’m not sure what I think”, she said angrily.
She stared at a mountain across the valley. “You mustn’t push me”, she said fiercely. “I don’t want this. I don’t. . .”
She stopped herself and stood up abruptly.
“This mountain is a place of refuge for me. It’s a memory, a heritage, that’s all, a piece of my past. I can’t let it turn into something else. As long as it stays what it was I can always come here and find peace. But don’t make me say it’s more than it is!”
“I am not trying to make you believe anything you don’t want to. I am merely asking questions.”
“There is still a lawyer in you, Father Elijah. You have been asking some very leading questions. Please, do not lead the witness.”
He smiled at her, and her face relaxed. “I’m sorry”, he said.
“I’m sorry too. I’m a bit jumpy. Hearing Stefano’s name from the lips of a stranger. . .”
“I assure you, I have no idea how he knew you, nor how he knew Stefano’s name.”
“Another of your mysteries?”
“It must be.”
She shivered.
“Let’s go”, she said and led the way back to the head of the path. She turned once and looked back at the statue, then went down.
After supper that night, Gianna and Marco drove off to an end-of-summer party at the house of a cousin who lived in Spoleto. Elijah and Anna went out onto the kitchen porch and watched the sky above the mountain turn from rose to violet to deep blue-black. Stars appeared one by one.
“She’s up there”, she said wistfully and pointed. “There on the peak. You can’t see the grotto from here, but I know she’s always watching, standing guard.”
“You speak of her as if she were real to you.”
“She is real, but not in the way you think.”
“In what way is she real to you?”
“She represents a world that’s gone. It was a simpler time in history, but it had a certain beauty that no longer exists.”
“Are you so sure it no longer exists?”
“Look at the world, Lawyer Elijah. Look at it, my friend.”
“I see it continually.”
“I too see it continually.”
She got up and went in, returning a few moments later with two small glasses of wine.
“You find me a difficult convert, don’t you?”
“That is not how I think of you.”
“How do you think of me?”
“As a friend.”
“As a young friend.”
“Yes.”
“A young friend poisoned by the toxic wastes of the twentieth century?”
“What kind of a friend do you want, Anna? One who lies to you?”
“Of course not. I think you have answered my question.”
“The entire world is infected. This century has bludgeoned the perceptions of man with so much horror that the mind recoils. Evil of this magnitude shakes existence to its very core. One either believes or he doesn’t. We choose. My wife told me something surprising once. She knew many survivors of the Holocaust. She said that for some, their experience destroyed their faith in a good God. Others believed more deeply than ever.”
“The psychology of that is unfathomable.”
“It’s quite simple.”
“For you, everything is simple.”
“Not so. Remember that for many years I was far more poisoned, as you call it, than you are.”
“And so you ran away into the world of religion in order to keep from going insane.”
“Now, who is being simple?”
“I apologize”, she said, rubbing her forehead. “That was insensitive. Forgive me.”
“The ones who didn’t lose faith found a meaning beneath the horror.”
“What was the meaning?”
“They understood that the powers of evil must have felt threatened to unleash such malice against people of faith.”
She pondered that. “You call it evil. I call it the irrational.”
“But the designers of the Shoah were quite rational. Some of them had degrees in philosophy; some were masters of logic.”
“Your presupposition is that the powers of evil actually exist.”
“They exist. I assure you they exist.”
“That is a statement of faith, not empirical knowledge, the kind of evidence that I as a judge must base my decision upon.”
“I am not an attorney in this case; I am a witness.”
“You must let me catch my breath. Too much is being condensed into too short a time.”
“There is not much time left.”
“Then let me settle the matter once and for all. If you want my definitive judgment, I will tell you: the human mind is largely subjective. Religious systems are the result of man’s need to have hope. He projects belief onto the cosmos. It’s as simple as that.”
“Tell me, Anna, if man is capable of projecting his belief onto the cosmos, isn’t it possible, by the same token, that he can project his unbelief onto the cosmos?”
She thought about that. “All right. You have a point. But it’s entirely theoretical.”
“Is it? I think we are continuously bombarded by a multitude of real evidence that bears witness to the invisible realities. Most people don’t want to see it, and thus they gradually shut down their faculties of perception, one after another.”
“You must consider us a cynical generation!”
“Not at all. I don’t think it is a conscious refusal to accept truth. Disbelief is rooted in an inability to trust. It takes an effort of the will to have confidence in the ultimate goodness
of life, and the experiences that mankind has been enduring for more than a century do anything but encourage trust. Above all, this is the age of fear.”
“There we go again. Round and round”, she sighed. “Abstractions within abstractions. As you said, our time is short. Let’s go inside, shall we? There are still some solid facts you must know.”
She directed him to a rocking chair by the stove. She started a fire crackling and made espresso. When they had steaming cups in their hands, she sat down on a bench across from him. She crossed her legs, made her mouth firm, and looked him full in the eyes.
“I haven’t been completely honest with you.”
“Oh?”
“Not that I would lie, you understand. That would be abhorrent to me. But there is something else afoot in which I’m involved. It’s not pretty.”
“Can you tell me?”
“We have become close this weekend. We are friends. I admire you and I believe in your integrity. You are what you are. That can be said of few people these days.”
“What are you getting at, Anna?”
“I want us to remain friends. I need you as a daughter needs a wise father. She may not always agree with him, but she knows he has her best interests at heart.”
“But of course.”
“I’m afraid to tell you about it. Perhaps you won’t like me anymore.”
“Anna! You know me very little if you are afraid of that.”
She looked down at the floor. “Do you remember what I said last night about my relation to the President’s circle, about my position being unique? After Stefano’s death I stayed there because I needed that social life as a defense against madness. I coasted along on the surface of his society for years, unthinking, unaware of the circles within circles that are the true composition of his world. Then last year, when I saw that look on his face and it unlocked the memory of his feeling against Stefano, I began to watch in earnest. I began to catch glimpses of the large number of concentric rings that surround him, the vast network of his contacts. It frightened me. I saw that I might be one of those deluded people who revolve around him like satellites, who think they are free, but who are really in effect owned by him.”
“But he has no claim on you. And if you are right about him being involved—in some way that we don’t understand—with Stefano’s death, wouldn’t you be a threat to him?”
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