by David Perry
Lee stared with Adriano at Brian’s makeshift altar in silence, less grief than an excuse not to talk about what had happened in Bagnoregio. After all, that’s what traditions were designed for, what religious liturgy was all about. Scripted processions to help people get through the inexplicable. Baptisms. Weddings. Communion. Funerals. All of them connect-the-dot formulae of human interaction to give pattern to the ineffability of life and love and to keep uncontrollable emotions at bay. Exactly what they were both doing this morning.
Yesterday, they had taken the bus to Orvieto from Civita di Bagnoregio in almost complete silence and spoken little since their return. The previous day’s dawn had broken cold and rainy, perfect for their mood. Neither relished a soggy schlep home. Lee had lain next to Adriano, side by side, fully dressed where they had collapsed after the previous evening’s drama like the couple in On the Beach, waiting for the silent invasion of a radioactive breeze. They didn’t bother to change or shower, and were up and out the door of La Torre dei Segriti before Clarissa Bernardone’s breakfast surrogate could arrive. They had left a note of thanks and a saucer of milk for Clemente as they exited like escaping burglars, which is exactly what they were. When they got home, Lee discovered the crumpled envelope of petitions stuffed into the pocket of his jeans. Adriano just shook his head. In the rush to leave La Torre dei Segreti, Lee had forgotten that he had it. Of course, while that had been an accidental crime, the real theft of the evening was all too purposeful. The purgatory box from San Donato. Supposedly alone in town, they had been side by side with the thief himself. Lee could not shake the thought that someone had watched them go into the church. Had stalked them. Had feared that they had discovered some secret better left undiscovered and then stolen the box before they could return. Adriano, ever the logician, had a simpler explanation: “The priest came at night and took the box away for the night, to pray or something.”
Knowing that Adriano was close to one of his epic temper tantrums, Lee didn’t extrapolate that San Donato, a town with fewer than a dozen inhabitants, was too small to have a regular priest living in it. And, even if the priest from Bagnoregio wanted to gather the box of petitions for Mass the next morning, they would have heard him driving into town. Or, even walking up the steep, cobblestoned ramp that connected Civita to the town beyond. No, Lee was certain of one thing. Whoever had stolen the box of prayers—or clues, as Lee was now more and more convinced—had seen them enter the church, had watched them rifle through the box, and then when given the opportunity had stolen the evidence before it could be better and more fully contemplated. Whoever that was, he had been hiding in the church all along.
“Maybe it was Clarissa, Andrea’s mother,” Adriano had reasoned, but even he had backed away quickly from that. Both of them had heard her speed away in her mini three-wheeler, a contraption whose noise and speed precluded any return that would not have been noticed.
Their clothes lay where they had dropped them last night, a pile of discarded garments that might have been a memory of earlier debauches, but not this time.
“So, what happened in Bagnoregio?” Adriano asked.
Lee looked up from where he was quietly shuffling the pile of purgatory cards in front of him on the table. He had awoken before Adriano, and had laid out the petitions like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle awaiting assemblage. Next to it, the map lay unfolded, the photo of Andrea and Grigori leaned against the sugar. Adriano had most purposefully ignored the display as he prepared their breakfast. Lee noticed his husband’s not-noticing and pretended not to notice. He wasn’t happy about either.
“I have no fucking idea,” Lee spat out with cool and uncharacteristic venom. He wanted to add, don’t ask questions you don’t want answered, but he stayed silent. Adriano retreated into the kitchen for another cup of coffee.
But, thought Lee, I do know what it’s all about. Andrea. The photos they had found in the office of Il Torre Segreti, Clarissa’s weird flight into the night, the strangely tantalizing deck of prayer-ridden cards, and the box stolen right under their noses. They all had one common thread: Deacon Andrea Bernardone and his leap from the cliffs of Orvieto a year ago on his birthday after the Vatican ended his vocation before it got started.
Lee looked across the room to see their clothes, piled next to the boots, lying where he had shrugged them off last night after their trudge back from Bagnoregio. “Diacono A. Bernardone” stared up at him in rubberized accusation. One of the neighbors could be heard moaning through their ceiling, a woman. I guess someone’s morning was off to a good start, Lee smirked to himself. He felt numb. Tired from three days of hiking, tired from his brain that could not be shut off, tired and more than a bit frightened from the strange theft of a container of prayer intentions whose bizarre markings and random numberings left him with a foreboding sense of déjà vu.
“We should have told Clarissa Bernardone about what happened in the church, and we should tell her about taking the envelope. Actually, we should never have taken the envelope or even broken into her office,” Adriano said, sitting down at the table and offering more coffee to Lee, who motioned away the effort.
“We didn’t break in,” said Lee, ashamed of himself for the semantics of a lie. It was like Bill Clinton saying “It depends on what the definition of is is.”
The file cards from La Torre dei Segriti were spread out between them, a no-man’s-land both tempting and prohibiting conversation. Adriano wasn’t going to go there. Not today, not quite yet. He would make Lee make the first move; make him suffer a bit. This was Lee’s freak show. Adriano wasn’t going to engage. Almost immediately, he felt dirty for thinking such things, but he still pretended that the cards weren’t there. He looked over at Lee, who was doing his best not to return the gaze. Although it often drove him crazy, Adriano longed for a bit of his husband’s usual caf-feinated morning perkiness. It was most decidedly not in evidence today. Lee’s demeanor was positively dark.
“Maybe we should report it to the carabiniere,” Adriano said, stronger than he had intended.
“Oh right,” Lee said with a nasty bite. “Hi, we’re a couple of faggots from San Francisco who snuck into a church to make fun of the Catholic voodoo, and then we found some prayer cards with a secret code penned by superstitious wing nuts—”
“I never said Catholics were superstitious wing nuts.”
“—and then we snuck into the office of the mother of a boy who killed himself, ransacked her office, and stole an envelope marked ‘Purgatory is the key.’ Oh yes, then we left our hotel without paying. Isn’t that about it?”
“You need some more coffee.”
“I need my husband to fucking take me seriously for once in our goddamn life.”
The outburst came so quickly that it stunned both of them, Lee hurling the accusation across his husband’s face like a slap and Adriano’s retort of flinging the teacup across the room. It shattered against the bookcase. A residue of strong Italian coffee bled down Brian’s urn and puddled onto the cover of the birthday present book from Magda, 41.43 N; 49.56 W.
They both said it at once. “I’m sorry,” and then dropped to the floor in tears followed by other things.
Afterward, they lay in the nest of their wrinkled and muddy hiking clothes from the last four days. Adriano picked up a T-shirt and started to wipe off Brian’s urn. Lee found his one sock not caked with mud and did the same to the Titanic tome.
“I guess we’re both pretty brave,” Lee said, caressing his husband’s neck and kissing his naked back.
“What do you mean?”
“Brian’s advice, remember? ‘The first person to apologize is the bravest. The first person to forgive is the strongest. The first person to forget is the happiest.’”
“I’m sorry, honey.” Adriano returned his husband’s kiss. The floor was now a mountain of clean and dirty clothes, postcoital proof of the power of love after a fight brought on by pent-up stress. “I do take you seriously, just…”
“I know,” Lee said, putting a finger to his partner’s lips. “I know. I’m not very good at the last part. Forgetting. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just that I know I’ve become obsessed with Andrea’s death, his suicide, and it’s brought up a lot of, a lot of…”
“A lot of painful memories.”
“Yes.” Lee’s eyes were brimming pools, threatening to overflow. “You know I don’t like to talk about it, but I think about it, about them, all the time.”
Lee’s silence lingered.
“Your suicide attempt?”
Lee felt blood drain from his face. They had never talked about it. “Yes.” Lee turned and faced his husband full-on and grabbed his hands hard—harder than he had ever grabbed anything—anything except the railings of the Golden Gate Bridge. “Yes. I tried to kill myself on my eighteenth birthday. Andrea succeeded on his twenty-ninth. It’s just so weirdly serendipitous, us being identical in age and my being here in Orvieto, arriving here on his birthday, our birthday. It’s been too much. That, and thinking of my parents, of that…that…horrible day.”
Lee stopped talking. Adriano just sat. In ten years of marriage, they had never discussed it, Lee’s family’s death. Of course, Adriano knew. There were passenger lists. Newspaper articles. The internet. Relentless reporters doing stories about victims’ families, especially two years ago on the tenth anniversary. Lee never discussed it. Some things, even in marriage, were better off left unsaid. The title and numbers of that day when the world seemed to careen out of control hung in the air, no need to be spoken.
9/11.
“My family was on that flight that crashed into the Pentagon.” Lee spoke simply, with the words and the emotion of someone for whom anything other than simplicity is an obscenity. “I was going to fly down to LA to meet them, and they were going to spend three months with me in California and then celebrate my birthday before heading home. I graduated early from high school in Richmond, and had been accepted at the Catholic Seminary in San Francisco. I was supposed to take my preliminary vows on December first, the day after my eighteenth birthday.”
“It was around then that you met Brian?”
“Yes,” Lee stated, wiping his eyes. “Brian was at the Pacific Divinity School, Anglican, Episcopal. We met at some interfaith conference that summer. I knew I was called to the priesthood but there was something wrong, I just didn’t feel right being ordained Roman Catholic…”
“…being gay.”
“Exactly,” Lee said. “Yes. I remember, Brian gave the sermon at Grace Cathedral. I’ll never forget the opening lines. ‘We must reinvent Christianity.’ Some of the Catholic priests sitting around me almost plotzed. The Anglicans just looked, well, smug.”
“I imagine so.”
“That’s when I decided,” Lee said, reaching into the tangle of clothes around them for something approaching wearability. The apartment was suddenly very cold. “I wasn’t going to be a priest…not a Catholic priest. I was going to reject Catholicism, convert, and become an Episcopal priest.”
“What did Brian say?” Adriano’s mouth was ajar. This part he had never heard. And while Lee might have kept a decade of secrets, during the death-rattled weeks leading up to Brian’s death, many confessions had been made at the dying deacon’s bedside. If Brian had known, he would have shared this with Adriano.
“He never knew.” Lee smiled, pulling on a pair of underwear and searching for his pants. “I had made the decision the week before my family arrived. I was going to tell them, and Brian on September eleven. Ta-da.”
“Oh.”
“Yes,” Lee sighed. “Exactly. My family took the train up from Richmond the night before and stayed at a hotel near Dulles Airport in Northern Virginia, just across the Potomac from the Pentagon. They called me from the hotel to tell me good night. That was the last time I ever spoke with them. I was getting up and heading to the airport to fly down to LA to meet them and then take a long drive up the coast when I turned on the TV. They had never been to California. They had never been on a plane before. They were so excited. Especially my grandmother.”
“Oh.” Adriano started to say more but couldn’t find the words.
“Afterward, I was pretty depressed, pretty angry. Brian stayed with me a lot. I drank a lot. He let me. I crashed on his couch a bunch of times, actually, the night before my birthday. Then, that morning, my birthday, I popped awake early and I knew what I had to do. So, I walked to the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“And Brian followed you and kept you from jumping.”
Lee just nodded.
“I’m glad he did.”
Lee looked deep into his lover’s eyes as he pulled on his pants. “I am too. I am too.”
They sat there on the floor for a while, just holding each other. Outside, the Tower of the Moor chimed eleven. Finally, they got up. The candle next to Brian’s ashes started to smoke in punctuating surrender.
“You think I’m crazy?” Lee asked.
“No,” Adriano said, pulling Lee toward him. “I don’t. I really don’t, I just…” His voice trailed away and his eyes grew moist. “It’s just that, ever since we got to Orvieto it seems like the ghost of Deacon Andrea is everywhere. And then these cards, prayer cards last touched by a man who threw himself from the cliff, it was like…like, you were trying to tell me that you were getting ready…”
“…to kill myself?” Lee took Adriano’s face in his hands. “Is that what you thought?”
Adriano just nodded.
“Don’t worry, husband. I have everything in the world to live for. I have you. I promise. Cross my heart and hope not to die.”
The woman’s moaning upstairs grew a bit louder. The couple laughed.
“I guess someone else had the same idea.” Adriano laughed, and Lee joined him.
Just then, a scream pierced the plaster between the apartments. The woman screamed again, and not in pleasure. This was the sound of agony, of someone in pain. Adriano and Lee jumped up and headed for the door, Lee thinking as they dashed into the hall, We don’t have neighbors.
CHAPTER XLIX
Camorena
Monday, December 23, 2013, 11:45 a.m., Orvieto
Soon, it would be over. For now.
Don Bello sat quietly in the front row of San Giovanale, waiting and wondering. Tomorrow, the church would be full of parishioners, lighting candles, making offerings, heading out the ancient portal to the garden below to take part in the annual living Nativity, his favorite event of the year. Andrea’s favorite too.
He liked thinking about Andrea, and he smiled. Better than crying. That is my cross, Don Bello thought, allowing himself a luxurious moment of self-indulgent pity. I must always be smiling. Always be jovial. Always be Christian. Don Bello must never be sad, or unsure, or unprepared. I must be a rock. My congregation depends upon it. My sanity depends upon it.
Who am I kidding? He grimaced. My sanity depends upon the myth of my own fortitude.
Well, it had lasted him lo these almost ninety years. It had gotten him through the Depression, and the rise of Mussolini. More to the point, it had gotten him through the fall of Mussolini. It had gotten him through Mussolini himself when Il Duce came to Orvieto and ripped down part of a church to build a new barracks for his Fascist recruits. That had been the Dominican monastery where St. Thomas Aquinas had written a special Mass in honor of the Miracle of Bolsena. It had been rumored that the dictator had designs upon the strategic cliff where stood San Giovanale, but even he would not stand up against Don Bello. He had been a new priest then, and Mussolini could certainly have found some crime with which to charge the young cleric, something for which to arrest him. But, he did not. Even in his early twenties, Don Bello was formidable.
So, Don Bello had survived the war, the Nazi occupation of Orvieto, and, of course, its liberation in June of 1944.
If only he could liberate himself from his memories. Those were their own war and held their own prisoners, their own concentration camps. And, o
f course, Orvieto, and the Orvietani, were not innocent. Official histories and seventy-plus years had a way of painting everyone upon this rock as an antifascist freedom fighter, as an enemy of Mussolini, an opponent of Hitler. Prophets who knew what was coming—who would win, who would lose. Who would live, and who would be dragged away to die because they chose the wrong political party, or sometimes, just because they fed young and idealistic rebels in the woods surrounding Orvieto.
The Camorena.
The road leading up the hill from the train station in Scalo bore the name Via Sette Martiri. The Street of the Seven Martyrs. The sign on the wall of the building where they were condemned by the local fascist leader of Orvieto bore witness. The names of the seven on the plaque above their graves just outside of Orvieto marked the spot where Don Bello had found them, too late. Holy water and prayers did little to bring back those with a bullet through the brain. Lazarus was a nice story, but nothing with which to comfort the shredded life of a mother, a lover, a wife, a son. The painting in Café Volsini was a daily reminder. As if he, or Velza Volsini, needed art to remember.
Don Bello had pleaded for their lives. The German commandant had argued for mercy. But, officially, Mussolini’s second government was the law—officially at least—and the Fascist mayor of Orvieto wanted to make a point. And so, the seven partisans—no, children, most no older than nineteen—were herded into the back of a pickup truck, sitting on their own freshly carved coffins, and driven to the forest of Camorena to be executed.
I should have done something, he thought, but I did not. I was helpless. Bullshit. I was complicit. After the execution, he and La Donna Volsini—Velzna then a very young girl—had gone to find the graves. The same young Catholic German officer had driven them to Camorena to find the bodies. Don Bello blessed them. They dug fresh graves, one for each victim, instead of the mass pit rapidly prepared by the Italian Fascists. Velzna fainted.
Five months later, the war was over. Over for Orvieto. The Germans left. The British freed the city, but not without cost. The meticulously groomed British War Cemetery just across the river confirmed the price: 188 marble gravestones. Afterward, of the Fascist Orvietani who had overruled the Germans to kill their own neighbors, many left, but others…