by David Perry
As he walked out, La Madrina, as Lee had decided to dub her, looked up, briefly, from her cash register.
“Buonasera!” Lee called out cheerfully in his best “I so wanna be a local” tone.
La Madrina just stared. “Ciao,” she offered coolly, and returned to her euros.
Well, Lee thought, it was a start. Somehow, he really didn’t want to get on her bad side.
CHAPTER IV
Upon This Rock
December 10, 1527 (Julian Calendar), Orvieto
Clement couldn’t decide.
“Your Holiness wears our collective grief in a most distinguished fashion,” offered the nearby cardinal, bowing low to the cold marble floor of what passed for Orvieto’s papal bedchamber.
“Hmmm,” grunted the Pope, stroking his beard and contemplating his visage in the mirror. “I don’t know.” After six months, the whiskers were getting scraggly. Plus, they itched. Also, their advancement across his face revealed a distressing propensity for gray. His privileged Florentine youth was obviously long passed. This job will kill me, thought the Pontiff as he regarded his begrizzled chin. He had spent his forty-ninth birthday as a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor and was about to spend Christmas as a refugee in this hilltop hovel. So much for being Pontifex Maximus.
“Being unshaven is against canon law,” said the Pope, turning from the glass to find the cardinal still prostrate before him. He motioned impatiently for the Prince of the Church to get up. As a Medici, Clement was accustomed to genuflections, but the last six months, especially, had made him tired of all such gratuitous displays, especially here in this dismal fortress retreat of Orvieto. Orvieto wasn’t Rome. That much was certain. Of course, after this past May, Rome wasn’t Rome either.
“But you write canon law, Your Holiness. You are the Church,” offered the cardinal, with only slightly less obsequiousness than before. “Plus, there is precedent. Pope Julius II wore a beard, briefly, as a sign over his grief at the fall of Bologna. His portrait by Raphael shows it clearly.”
“He did?” Clement perked up. A precedent—that was good. He liked precedents. His was not a papacy to court controversy. Well…that had been the plan. Before Luther and his so-called “Reformation.” Before King Francis. Before Emperor Charles. Before the sixty of May. “Where is the portrait now?”
The cardinal blushed and shrugged, with a slight but noticeably sad downcast of his eyes.
Clement had his answer. “The Sack.”
“Yes, Your Holiness. The Sack. I believe it was taken from the Vatican in the first wave of looting by Charles’s troops.” Then, in a lower voice he said, “Evidently it was subject to some minor desecrations, as were the bones of the Blessed Julius himself.” The cardinal crossed himself.
The Sack of Rome, Redux. Pope Clement VII shook his head and sighed. His complete and utter failure as temporal and spiritual ruler of the Papal States already had a name. It was an obvious one, a repeat of Rome’s earlier dismemberment at the hands of the Huns in 410, over a thousand years previous. But that had been the barbarians—godless savages! What would one expect? Clement’s Eternal City had been raped and pillaged by the Catholic troops of The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V!
Charles. Clement ground his teeth. The very name rankled just to think of it. Some protector of Christ’s vicar on earth he had turned out to be. It’ll be a cold day in Bologna before I lay my holy hands on his head in coronation, thought Clement, and that seemed to please him. No matter who they were or from what noble line they had coerced a twisted pedigree, they all wanted the Pope’s blessing.
“It stays,” Clement pronounced, and the cardinal nodded and crossed himself again, instinctively, as if the Pope had just issued a papal bull. Clement was good at bulls. His Intra Arcana was a classic, authorizing violence in evangelizing—no pain no gain! He had the voice for it, so when he did finally decide something, always preceded by much cerebral dancing, it rang with authority. Since most of his decisions got re-decided, there had been a lot of authoritative-sounding pronouncements over the four years, thus far, of his papacy. Decisiveness was not a Clementine virtue.
“Yes,” he repeated with a final tug on his beard before turning away from his reflection. “It stays.”
The beard was the result of the six months Clement had spent hostage in Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo without a razor or his regular chamberlain to shave him. With an eye toward legacy, Clement would pick up on the tale of his illustrious predecessor, the “Warrior Pope” of fourteen years previous. Like Julius, Clement had grown a beard as a sign of grief for the loss of Rome and the pain of its populace.
He liked that. Made him sound humble, sincere, wracked with anguish but still tough. Also, as loathed as he had become, there was no way he was going to let anyone near his neck with a razor, not after the year he was still having. Who knows, he thought with a smile and one final look at his whiskers, I might even start a trend.
The second Fall of Rome. He had presided over the second Fall of Rome. His good humor faded. Well, he had hoped that his reign would be memorable, and not just that of a second-rate Medici, overshadowed by the memory of his more illustrious, more legitimate, and more popular cousin, Leo X, née Giovanni de Medici, Pope before last.
Dear Gio, how I miss you. He reminisced about his cousin, mentor, and best—perhaps only—friend. It was hard to believe, just a few weeks ago on December 1, he and his fellow prisoners in Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo had offered up a Mass on that the sixth anniversary of the great Pope’s death. Yep, the Sack of Rome just might get bigger play than Leo’s art-and-sex-filled procession through papal history. Truly, Gio/Leo had been the master Medici—with all deference to his father, Lorenzo Magnifico. He himself, on the other hand, was fast becoming Il Medici Mediocrito. A week after their imprisoned Mass, he and his coterie were on the run, having bribed the guards to let them out. Then, dressed up like two-bit befanas, they had made a dash for every pope’s favorite escape hatch, Orvieto, seventy-five miles north of Rome.
“The City that has taken the world has herself been taken.” Clement remembered the words penned by St. Jerome after the first Sack of Rome. What a pompous, quote-happy ass he had been. He wondered what penniless penitent destined for beatification was even now sitting in some monastic cell already gleefully penning the obituary of his papacy.
Clement shivered. It was cold here in Orvieto, and every bit of ermine, fox, and bear fur that had hitherto warmed his illustrious body had been left behind in Rome. He had barely escaped with his life, much less the Vatican bed sheets. No, now was not the time for self-recriminations. He would regroup, rethink, and relaunch his papacy here in Orvieto. He’d need help—and money. Charles was certainly out of the question. He shuttered once again at that dreaded, treacherous name.
Francis, King of France, was a possibility. He despised Charles even more than the Pope did. But, then again, he had not been the most loyal guardian of Francis’s imperial aspirations, so maybe now wasn’t the time to ask for a favor. Though no one had given him credit for it, he had tried to broker peace between the two rival monarchs and the English king early in his papacy, but such diplomatic niceties had now been long forgotten. The Sack was a dirty cloth that wiped away every other previous beneficent effort.
“Fool that I was,” he harrumphed to himself. Why would they want to make peace when it was so much more advantageous to do battle in the hopes of taking all of Italy one day, including the Vatican and Papal States? Well, Emperor Charles seemed to have wrapped that up—for the moment at least.
Clement paced around the grim and dilapidated “Papal Palace.” His predecessors had spent and built lavishly in the past to make it pontifically ready. Even that hideous Borgia, Alexander VI, had left his mark on Orvieto, had the nerve even to make his son, Cesare, podesta of the town! At least I’m not a Borgia. Even I am more popular than those blood-soaked papal pretenders.
Clement let his gaze circle the room full of rot, decay, and freezing bre
aths of Umbrian wind whistling in through chinks in the masonry. Temporary or not, if this was to be the home of the papacy in exile, some improvements would have to be made. All the faith-induced fruits of papal labor (and the papal purse) had seen better decades. Orvieto was a dump. It had never recovered from the Plague and the intervening centuries hadn’t been kind. Now, one day into exile, he paused to look out the ice-glazed window. The monstrous and gaudy hulk of the still unfinished Duomo across the plaza loomed to fill his view. God, it was ugly—big, blocky, and plain. The front was nice, if they ever finished the mosaics, but that seemed unlikely. True, it did house some admirable frescoes by that Goody Two-Shoes, Fra Angelico. More to his liking, he thought, were the wickedly profane works by Luca Signorelli in the Cathedral’s side chapel. Cousin Leo would have loved those, all those virile, naked, oh-so-male bodies clawing their way out of the earth toward a muscular heaven. Even the morose Michelangelo had made the trip to Orvieto a few years back to admire their naughty and gloriously detailed nudity just across the nave from the body of Orvieto’s patron saint and the relics of the “Miracle” of Bolsena—
Henry!
It came to him in a flash: England’s Catholic King. He snapped his fingers. “Why didn’t I think of that before! He wasn’t as rich as Francis, but he did have resources. Plus, Henry’s wife, Catherine of Aragon, was Charles’s aunt. That might come in handy. “Defender of the Faith,” he whispered, remembering the sobriquet that his cousin, Leo X, had bestowed upon the devout English prince, now Henry VIII, King of England.
“What did His Holiness say?”
Clement jerked around to find the forgotten cardinal still shivering by the door. He must’ve spoken out loud.
“Send me a Switzer,” Clement commanded with a clap of his hands, for a second his old pre-Sack Medici self. Nothing invigorated him more than finally coming to a decision, even one as mundane as arriving at an excuse not to shave, much less finding a new source of revenue.
“Right away, Your Holiness,” the cardinal said, then bowed and backed out of the room, closing the door behind him, which locked with a loud, echoing bang.
Hadn’t Henry even written Assertio Septem Sacramentorum—Defense of the Seven Sacraments—a ponderously purple and in-perfect-Latin endorsement of Rome’s supremacy over all earthly monarchs? Naturally, Henry was doing his best to suck up and become Holy Roman Emperor. Wasn’t everyone whose blood was blue under God’s arc of heaven? Nonetheless, it was appreciated and Rome took notice.
Even his cousin, Leo X, had taken notice. The brief interregnum papacy of Adrian VI (God rest his tired soul, Clement prayed between plotting) had continued the notice. So now it seemed time for him to offer his own signs of appreciation—along with a subtle request for money—to England’s Most Catholic King, Henry VIII, a rock of Christian manhood in an age of waning faith.
I will, secretly of course, send one of my guards to Henry’s court, he thought. I don’t want any official chroniclers preserving this little foray into fundraising. It must seem as if the idea were Henry’s, not mine, Clement stewed. Henry would want something in return, probably one of the lesser Papal States or a cousin-created cardinal. That would be easy—the worthless Woolsey couldn’t live forever—a promise none too soon to be realized if I had my way. If only cousin Gio and I had crossed the English Channel when we were on our Borgia-forced tour of France and the north oh so many years ago, we might have made better, more personal connections with Prince Henry during his youth.
Oh well, no use weeping over spilled claret. We must deal with the moment, the reality in which we find ourselves. Now, we will appeal to Henry, to his generosity, to his mortal soul, to his treasury.
Clement smiled, quite pleased with himself. It was the best he’d felt since before The Sack. Well, I’m not done yet, he thought. I am still pope and Rome still lives, although greatly diminished, to be sure. I will get it back. Perhaps if I can return to Rome in triumph, the people would forget how I lost it and fled in terror. I might even commission that disagreeable Michelangelo to do something in commemoration.
Yes, and here in Orvieto, upon this rock, high and impregnable above the Etruscan plain, I will rebuild my church…and my reputation.
CHAPTER V
A Crooked Cross
Saturday, November 30, 2013, evening, Orvieto
Lee splashed himself with holy water as he entered Sant’Andrea, once the site of an Etruscan temple and even older cave system. Adriano rolled his eyes and wondered if his husband would genuflect when he hit the main aisle. That’s what comes from marrying someone who had actively considered the priesthood.
Bingo—it’s a good thing I didn’t bet against that, Adriano thought. I’d have lost. He loved Lee, very much, but for ten years had been perplexed, and more than occasionally troubled, by his husband’s fascination with all things Catholic. By even Spanish standards, it was a bit much.
“The day that nasty old bishop slapped me across the face during my confirmation, I was done,” Adriano said quietly. He had often repeated the story throughout their marriage, generally the punctuation to a dinner with friends. “Thank you very much, but the Church ain’t done me any favors.”
Adriano looked around for signs of underground entrances and to his delight found none. His optimism was short-lived. If they were above an ancient anything, Lee would find it eventually. Anything ancient or cramped with history, and Lee practically swooned. Not me, Adriano thought. Dark, dank spaces are not my favorite things. I’ve certainly crawled through enough of them for him. Let’s hope he doesn’t find too many here. Adriano shivered at the thought.
“It won’t kill you to be respectful,” Lee said with a disapproving glare. “Plus, I’m curious.”
“And I’m an atheist.”
It was Lee’s turn to roll his eyes.
For all of his protestations, Adriano had an almost disconcerting mysticism not based in any religion. It would have horrified him to think of it as “religion.” That was Lee’s thing, not his. Not with my parents, Adriano thought. I’ve had quite enough of religion, thank you very much. His pre-sleep hobbies bounced between books like The Holographic Universe, with computer games along the lines of Knights of the Old Republic thrown in for good measure. The closest he came to anything “churchy” was a book called Faith Without God. Adriano knew that Lee found that a “hopeful sign,” but he always emphasized to Lee the “without God” part of the title. It was one of the things that had drawn Adriano to his husband, a mutual fascination with figuring things out. But, for Adriano it was an interest. For Lee, it bordered on fetish.
“Soul mate” they called each other, complete with secret names and a personal pantheon of influences that would have shamed a shaman. For all his cynicism, Adriano shared Lee’s interest in most things mythological and historical. Brian always used to say, “Hire people smarter than you; they make you look good.” Lee had done it one better, often telling Adriano he was glad he had married someone smarter than he was, and a computer whiz to boot.
Many times, Adriano reflected on how Lee’s PR skills, added to his own technological prowess, equaled a partnership in life and business. Adriano knew that Lee loathed the term “PR,” as public relations was only a hair above carnival barker in most people’s minds. “I’m not in public relations,” Lee would often huff. “I’m in communications. My job is to take the ponderous and make it palpable. To turn mush into messaging.” Whatever he called it, Lee had—to Adriano’s mind—a skill for figuring stuff out and making the complex comprehensible. It was a gift Adriano sometimes wished he had—and the patience for. Certainly, Adriano thought, patience is not one of my virtues. Plus, Adriano’s fluency in several languages made trips such as this one ever so much easier. There were few earthly languages beyond Adriano’s gifted tongue.
“Give me a break, you’re practically as hippie-dippie as I am,” Lee said, offering his best dimpled smile, the one Adriano had first fallen in love with.
“Yes,
” said Adriano, with a subtle squeeze of his husband’s arm, “but I don’t need all the trappings of the Church.”
Adriano hissed the word as if it were synonymous with all that was evil in the world. To someone whose family had suffered through Europe’s last and longest-lasting dictator, Spain’s very Catholic Francisco Franco, Adriano’s suspicion of any and all things religious was deeply embedded. And, of course, given Adriano’s family, he had plenty of reasons to despise organized religion. It hurt him sometimes that Lee couldn’t see that.
“I don’t need it.” Lee interrupted Adriano’s thoughts. “I just find it intriguing the same way I find an ancient Greek temple or an Egyptian tomb interesting.”
“You’re obsessed.” Adriano shook his head. “They don’t pass the hat in Grecian ruins or the desert of Cairo and claim religious tax exemptions.”
“Shhh,” Lee warned. “Here comes the procession.”
Adriano kept it to himself. He wasn’t going to fight back on their first night. He’d bide his time.
The congregation rose stiffly to their feet, a group of about 150 mainly elderly, mainly female, and almost entirely Italian locals. A smattering of men accompanied wives, mothers, and cousins. Two teenage Chinese tourists, looking completely lost, hovered at the back of the thousand-year-old edifice clutching cameras and folded tour maps. A good-looking twenty-ish young man clad in jeans and a sleek leather jacket stood next to the rear side door, as if not quite sure whether to enter.
“Wow,” whispered Adriano. “It’s a bishop.”