The Last Cato

by Matilde Asensi

  Pierantonio, Lucia, and I were the priest and nuns of the family. I always had a sinking feeling when I compared my mother’s expectations for her children with what we did with our lives. It’s as if God granted mothers the clairvoyance to predict the future. Or, and this is most worrisome, God adapts his plans to that of our mothers.

  Mysteriously, Pierantonio, Lucia, and I had taken our vows as my mother always yearned for. I still remember her saying to my brother when he was seventeen or eighteen, “You can’t imagine how proud I’d be if you became a priest, a good priest. And you’ll be a good priest because you have the perfect character to lead with a firm hand. A diocese, at least.” Or combing Lucia’s beautiful blonde hair while she whispered in her ear: “You’re too smart and independent to submit to a husband. Marriage is not for you. I’m sure you’d be much happier living a life like one of the nuns at your school: travel, study, freedom, good friends…” And then there was what she said to me: “Of all my children, Ottavia, you are the most brilliant and the proudest… You have such a strong character only God could make you the person I’d like you to be.” She repeated this with the conviction of a soothsayer. She did the same with all my brothers and sisters. Their occupations, studies, or marriages fit her predictions like a glove.

  I spent the whole day with little Isabella in my arms, going from one end of the house to the other, talking to family members, greeting aunts and uncles, cousins and acquaintances who came by to wish my father well and to bring him gifts. I was reunited with so many people; no sooner had I hugged and kissed someone than I’d lose sight of him again. All I remember is that my father—in a gesture of infinite weariness—looked proudly at me and caressed my cheek with a wrinkled, weathered hand before being abducted by the surging crowd. More than a home, the whole thing seemed like a fair.

  By midafternoon, I had terrible back pain from carrying Isabella all day. She took no pity on me, and refused to let go of my neck. Whenever I tried to set her down, she wrapped her legs around my waist like a monkey. When it was time to fix supper, we women headed for the kitchen to help the maids while the men gathered in the hall to discuss family matters and business. Moments later I wasn’t surprised to see the tall figure of my brother Pierantonio among the baking dishes and frying pans. I couldn’t help notice that the way he moved was similar to Monsignor Tournier’s elegant mannerisms. The differences between the two were vast, of course. For starters, one of them was my favorite brother. Still, they shared that radiant self-assurance and charisma.

  My mother was obviously captivated as she watched him approach.

  “Mama,” Pierantonio said, kissing her cheek, “will you lend me Ottavia? I’d like to take a walk with her in the garden and catch up before dinner.”

  “Does anyone care how I feel?” I called from the other side of the kitchen, deftly sautéing some vegetables. “Maybe I don’t want to go.”

  My mother laughed. “Now, now! What are you even talking about?” She joked as if it were inconceivable I wouldn’t go for a walk with my brother.

  “And the rest of us—are we just invisible to the two of you?” protested Giacoma, Lucia, and Agueda.

  Pierantonio, the flatterer, kissed each one, then snapped his fingers as if he were summoning a waiter. “Ottavia, let’s go.”

  Without missing a beat, Maria, one of the cooks, took the skillet I held from my hands. It was one big conspiracy.

  “In all my life,” I said as I took off my apron and set it on a bench in the kitchen, “I’ve never seen a Franciscan priest less humble than Father Salina.”

  “Guardian, Sister,” he replied. “Guardian of the Holy Land.”

  “And so modest!” guffawed Giacoma. Everyone broke out in a chorus of laughter.

  If I could have been a spectator and watched my family from a distance, one thing would have stood out: The Salina women adored Pierantonio. No one ever enjoyed a more fervent, submissive flock of honey-tongued sweet talkers. Like a god, his most trivial wishes were carried out with the fanaticism of the Greek Bacchae. He knew it, enjoying like a child playing the part of a capricious Dionysus. My mother was completely to blame. She had infected us with her blind worship of her favorite son like a virus. Why wouldn’t we indulge the little god in every whim when he bestowed his wit and kisses upon us? He was so easy to make happy!

  Pierantonio put his arm around my waist and steered me out to the back patio toward the garden door. “Tell me how things are going!” he exclaimed bombastically the minute we set foot on the soft grass around the house.

  “You tell me!” I replied, looking at him. His hairline had receded a bit; his wild eyebrows gave him a savage air. “How can the important guardian of the Holy Land abandon his post when His Holiness is set to arrive in Jerusalem?”

  “Wow! You shoot to kill!” he laughed, putting an arm around my shoulders.

  “I’m so happy you’re here, you know that. But I’m puzzled. I know the pope leaves tomorrow for your jurisdiction.”

  He looked at the sky distractedly, acting as if the point weren’t important. But I knew him too well. That gesture conveyed just the opposite.

  “Well, as you know… Things aren’t always what they seem.”

  “Look, Pierantonio, you can fool the priests, but not me.”

  He smiled, still looking at the sky.

  “Okay, okay! Are you going to tell me why the illustrious guardian of the Holy Land leaves when the sovereign pontiff is about to arrive?” I persisted before he could start talking about how beautiful the stars were.

  “I can’t tell a nun employed by the Vatican the problems we Franciscans are having with the high prelates,” he said, regaining his cocksure attitude.

  “You know I spend my life locked up in my lab. Who am I going to tell?”

  “The pope?”

  “Yeah, sure!” I uttered, stopping in my tracks in the middle of the garden.

  “Cardinal Ratzinger?…” he hummed. “Cardinal Sodano?…”

  “Come on, Pierantonio!”

  Something must have shown on my face when he mentioned the secretary of state, because he opened his eyes and arched his eyebrows maliciously. “Ottavia… Do you know Sodano?”

  “I was introduced to him a few weeks ago,” I admitted evasively.

  He took me by the chin, lifted my face, and pressed his nose to mine. “Ottavia, little Ottavia… What are you doing hanging around with Angelo Sodano? What are you not telling me?”

  It’s awful for someone to know you so well. And it’s awful to be the second youngest in a family of brothers and sisters so highly skilled at manipulating.

  “Well, you haven’t told me the problems you Franciscans are having with His Holiness, and look what you’ve asked me,” I hedged.

  “Let’s make a deal,” he proposed happily, taking hold of my arm, urging me to walk again. “I’ll tell you why I’m here and you tell me what you know about the all-powerful secretary of state.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes you can!” he fussed, cheerful as a child. You’d never guess that that exploiter of little sisters was fifty years old! “In secret confession. I’ve got the vestments in the chapel. Let’s go.”

  “Listen, Pierantonio, this is very serious.”

  “Great! I love it when you’re serious!”

  What made me maddest was knowing that if I’d concealed just a little bit more I wouldn’t have been in that situation. I was the one who let the cat out of the bag right in front of this insatiable gundog, and the more discomfort I showed, the hungrier he was going to get. I had to put an end to it.

  “That’s enough now, Pierantonio. Get serious. I can’t say anything. Especially to you. You, more than anyone, ought to understand that.”

  My voice must have sounded really severe, because he backed off and drastically changed his attitude. “You’re right,” he conceded, a repentant look on his face. “There are things you can’t tell. But I never imagined that my sister would get mixed up in
Vatican intrigues!”

  “I’m not. They just needed my skills for a strange investigation. Very strange. I don’t know.” I murmured pensively, pinching my lower lip. “I do find it disconcerting.”

  “Some strange document? Some mysterious code? Some shameful secret from the church’s past?”

  “I’ve seen all that. I wish I could tell you! No, it’s something even more out of the ordinary. What’s worse, they’re keeping information from me.”

  My brother studied me, a determined look on his face. “So, go over their heads.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, stopping to poke at the grass with my shoe. The night was cool. Soon the lights in the garden would go on.

  “Go over their heads. Don’t they want a miracle? Well, give them one. Look, I have a lot of problems in Jerusalem, more than you can imagine.” He started to walk again, slowly, and I followed him. More than ever my brother seemed like an important head of state weighed down by responsibilities. “The Holy See has entrusted us Franciscans in the Holy Land with very diverse, very difficult tasks, everything from reestablishing Catholic worship in our area to protecting pilgrims, to getting biblical studies and archeological excavations up and running again. We run schools, hospitals, dispensaries, nursing homes, and above all the guardian is involved in a multitude of political conflicts with our neighbors of other religions. My biggest problem right now is the Holy Cenacle where Jesus instituted the Eucharist. These days it’s a mosque run by Israeli authorities. The Vatican keeps pressuring me to negotiate a sale. But do they give me any money? No!” he exclaimed angrily. His forehead and cheeks turned bright red. “Right now, I have 320 religious people from thirty countries working in Palestine-Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Cyprus, and Rhodes. Don’t forget that the Holy Land is a region in conflict, where they fight with all manner of guns, bombs, and disgusting political maneuvers. How do I hold up this house of cards built of religious, cultural, and social work? Do you think my order can help? They haven’t got a lira! Do you think your rich Vatican has given me anything? Nothing! Not one cent! The Holy Father diverted money from the church: Millions and millions slipped under the table through figureheads, fake businesses, and bank transfers in fiscal paradises to prop up the Polish Solidarity Union and bring down Communism in his homeland. But how many liras do you think he’s given for our projects? Nothing! Nada! Zip!”

  “You can’t be serious, Pierantonio,” I whispered, pained. “The church takes up an annual collection all over the world for you.”

  His eyes flashed in anger. “Don’t make me laugh!” he shot back. He turned and headed back to the house.

  “Okay, but at least finish telling me how to get the information I need,” I begged as he took giant steps, putting a lot of ground between us.

  “Be smart, Ottavia!” he exclaimed, not turning around. “The world is full of ways to get what you want. You just have to prioritize, figure out what’s important and what’s not. Figure out at what point you’re willing to disobey or act on your own, on the fringe, even…” He hesitated. “Even going against your own conscience.”

  My brother’s voice had a distinctly bitter tinge to it, as if he had spent his entire life disregarding his own conscience. I asked myself if I would be able to do such a thing; if it would be worth it to go off the reservation to get the information I needed. But before I could articulate these thoughts, I already knew the answer: Yes, of course I would. The only question was how.

  “I’m ready,” I said, right there in the middle of the garden. It would have been a good time to recall the expression “be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.” But I didn’t.

  My brother turned around.

  “What do you want?” he bellowed. “What is it that you’re looking for?”

  “Information.”

  “You can buy information. And if that doesn’t work, you can get it yourself.”

  “How?” I asked, unsettled.

  “Investigate, make inquiries, ask the people who are in possession of the information you need. Interrogate them wisely, search the archives, the boxes of files, the offices, computers, and even the wastebaskets… And if you find something valuable, take it.”

  I spent a restless, sleepless night, tossing and turning in my childhood bed. Lucia was sleeping next to me, her leg exposed by a tug of the sheet, and she was snoring softly. Pierantonio’s words were still ricocheting around in my mind, and yet I still couldn’t see how I could do the things he suggested: Was there any good way to get information out of that rocky cliff of a man, Glauser-Röist? How could I get into the offices of the secretary of state or Monsignor Tournier? How could I search the Vatican’s computers if I didn’t have the slightest idea of how those machines worked?

  I fell asleep out of pure exhaustion as daylight seeped in through the blinds. I dreamed about Pierantonio. That I recall. But it wasn’t a pleasant dream. I was so happy the next morning when he looked refreshed, his hair still wet from a shower, celebrating Mass in our chapel.

  My father, the honoree that day, was seated in the first pew next to my mother. I looked at their backs; my father’s was more curved and fragile. I was proud of them, of the wonderful family they had created, of the love they had given their nine children and now were giving to their numerous grandchildren. I thought about how they’d spent all their lives at each other’s side. They’d had quarrels and problems, sure, but also an indestructible, inseparable union.

  At the end of the Mass, the youngest children went to play in the garden, tired from sitting still during the ceremony. The rest of us went inside for breakfast. At one end of the large dining table, grouped away from the adults, sat my oldest nieces and nephews. When I got the chance, I grabbed Giacoma and Domenico’s fourth child, Stefano, and drew him into a corner.

  “Are you studying computers, Stefano?”

  “Yes,” the boy looked at me with concern, as if I were about to attack him. Why were teenagers so weird?

  “Do you have a computer hooked up to the Internet in your room?”

  “Yes, Aunt,” he smiled with pride, relieved that his aunt wasn’t going to hurt him.

  “I need you to do me a favor.”

  Stefano and I spent the whole morning locked up in his room, drinking Coke, glued to the monitor. He was a bright boy who moved around the Internet and handled search engines with ease. By lunchtime, after giving my nephew a handsome sum of money for the terrific job he did (didn’t Pierantonio tell me to buy information?), something inside me had suddenly clicked. All those hours of my poring over research, of searching for meaning in the scars on that poor dead Ethiopian’s corpse, had finally paid off with the clarity I had suddenly been blessed with.

  And just like that, as though a light had been turned on within me, I knew who my Ethiopian man was, how he had died, and why the various Christian churches were so interested in him. It was so serious a matter that my legs were beyond trembling as I descended the stairs for lunch.

  ____________

  * Eusebio (260–341), bishop of Cesarea, Hist. Eccl.; De Mart. Palaestinae.

  * The giudiziarie prison, located near the port of Palermo, is the most sophisticated and bestguarded prison in Italy. Members of the Mafia serve their time there.

  CHAPTER 2

  I got back to Rome Monday night, plunged into a sea of confusion and fear, for I would have never imagined I was capable of disobeying. Against the wishes of the church, I’d retrieved important data by unorthodox means. It made me feel uncertain and intimidated, as if at any moment a divine bolt of lightning would strike me. Following the rules is always simpler: by doing so, you avoid the remorse and blame and uncertainty that comes with disobeying them. Above all, you feel proud of your work. In my case, I felt no satisfaction with myself or with my wretched snooping around. How was I going to face Glauser-Röist? Blame was written all over my face; and he, of all people, was sure to notice.

  That night I prayed for conso
lation and forgiveness. I’d have given anything to forget what I knew and get back to the moment when I’d said to Pierantonio, “I’m ready.” I wanted to simply reverse that phrase and recover my inner peace. But that was impossible. The next morning when I closed the door to my office and saw the sad silhouette taped up, so deliberately covered with notes and scribbled labels, I recalled the Ethiopian man’s name: Abi-Ruj Iyasus. Poor Abi-Ruj, I thought to myself as I slowly approached the table where the terrible photographs of his battered body lay. He’d died a horrible death you wouldn’t wish on anybody, though surely in keeping with the magnitude of his sin.

  My nephew Stefano, his index fingers poised at the keyboard and his brown hair falling into his eyes, had asked me what I’d been looking for when I forcefully asked him for help, and I responded, “Accidents… Any accident in which a young Ethiopian man died.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where did it happen?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “Sounds like you don’t know anything.”

  “That’s right.” I had shrugged.

  With only that to go on, he began scouring thousands of documents. He had several windows going at the same time, each one displaying a different browser: Virgil, Yahoo Italia, Google, Lycos, Dogpile, and others. We ran searches using words like accident and Ethiopian, taking advantage of the vast number of Web pages. We did so in English, too. Thousands of documents turned up on Stefano’s computer. He rejected them as soon as he verified that the accident in question had nothing to do with the Ethiopian man mentioned several paragraphs into the article, when he found out that the Ethiopian was eighty years old, or when he read that the accident and the Ethiopian that popped up were actually from the days of Alexander the Great. None had anything to do with what I was looking for. In a virtual folder called “Aunt Ottavia,” he saved only those pages that held some remote tie to what we felt may be useful in our search.