Vatican Waltz (20 page)

The hotel in Genoa would turn out to be shouting distance from the train station, an easy walk for me, even with the umbrella and two bags. For a few seconds, as I asked directions from a station worker, I had the eerie sense—a slight shadowy weight against my back—that someone was following me. I didn't turn around to look until I'd left the station and headed out into what had become a sunny day. No one.

I cut across a small park with a few red-faced, raggedly dressed men and one woman lying in it, bottles of wine half hidden against their hips. The hotel, one block beyond the park, was called the Savoia, and it had a modest presence on the street, just a four-story brick face with a set of steps and a doorway bracketed by two windows. Inside it was so spectacular I began to worry immediately about the cost.

“Your account has been taken care of,” the clerk at the desk informed me when I asked what the rate would be.

“By who?”

The clerk was a young man but dressed in a suit and tie that made him seem like a middle-aged accountant who'd been too long on the job. He checked his records. “Someone who wished not to be named,” he said primly.

A cold draft of paranoia touched me then. For a moment, before I remembered that Father Bruno had chosen the hotel, I wondered if this was another part of some elaborate trap.

“A person? An institution?”

“I'm not allowed to say. The manager comes in again tomorrow morning. You may speak with him then if you'd like.”

I was chaperoned through the tiled lobby—it was surrounded by reading rooms with leather-covered tables, leather armchairs, dark bookshelves, gilded mirrors, and small stone sculptures behind glass—and into the elevator by a man who introduced himself as Mabu, who said he was originally from Morocco and who must have been six and a half feet tall.

“Could you check with me first,” I asked him, “before you send outside phone calls or anyone up to the room?”

“Certo,”
he said solemnly, the word emerging from behind his large jaw as if it had been spoken in a barrel. Of course.

The fourth-floor room he showed me to was an embarrassment of riches, three or four times as large as my room at home. It had enough floor space for an aerobics workout, an enormous bed—not round, thank you—a writing table, a coffee bar, a beautifully tiled bath, and two tall windows looking out over rooftops to the port. I decided Father Bruno must have been so embarrassed by the incident at the first hotel that he wanted to make sure nothing close to that would happen again, but even so I couldn't imagine him paying for this out of his own pocket. Mabu set down my bags as if they were as light as boxes of Kleenex. There were, he informed me, Jacuzzis on the top-floor veranda, and a breakfast buffet would be served each day in the dining room on that same floor, starting at seven a.m. “How long will you be with us,
Signorina
?”

“I don't know. One or two nights at least, maybe longer.”

“Very good,” he said, and when I tipped him he made a dignified half bow in my direction, closed the door quietly behind him, and left me there feeling like I'd accidentally been given a room reserved for visiting royalty.

I spent a little while standing at the windows, looking out at the port from which Christopher Columbus was supposed to have sailed. It wasn't the prettiest of views, but it was new to me, another door opening onto another piece of life, and after all those years of not traveling very far, every view from every new angle—through train and hotel windows, from the street—held a dancing thrill inside it. To the right the buildings of the city stood along a curve of seashore, pinched between a range of dry hills and the water. A traffic-choked elevated highway came sweeping in from the direction I was looking. West, maybe, though geography had never been my strong suit. West or northwest. Toward France. On the far side of the highway I could see two huge white cruise ships at anchor and then, farther left, an intricate jumble of old rooftops and pastel apartment buildings. The yellowish afternoon light on the hills and housefronts—it was almost golden—and the blues, purples, and grays that daubed the undersides of a parade of puffy clouds reminded me exactly of the colors in the coffee-table book Father Alberto had given me for Christmas so many years before. “I know you'll go there one day,” he'd said, and of course I hadn't believed him.

I had thought that they were made-up colors, meant to suggest Heaven, but I saw now that they were real, specific to Italy, maybe, or to moments when you had a particularly strong yearning for the presence of God. As sometimes happened, as I ran my eyes over the view, it began to seem that I was linked to everything I saw. All of it—cars on the roadway, plants in the rooftop gardens, clouds, sea, harbor cranes—shared something with the innermost part of me. I don't know exactly what to call it, an
isness,
maybe, an atomic essence, divine breath. The drunks in the park and the brioches under glass in the train station, the leather handles of the suitcase and the young man at the reception desk, we were all part and parcel of the fabric of existence, God's tapestry. How could anyone who felt that ever hurt another soul?

After a time I sat in one of the upholstered chairs, the blue arms embroidered with lines of gold thread, and I closed my eyes and prayed for the soul of my friend Alberto Ghirardelli. It seemed undeniable to me that such a spirit—particles that had taken the shape of someone so generous, funny, and
alive—
had to continue to exist in some other dimension after it left the body. What form it took there I couldn't possibly imagine—not as a middle-aged man, I knew that; the idea of a static Heaven had never made much sense to me—but I had a strong feeling of his presence then, so strong it almost felt like he was actually in the room. It seemed natural to speak to him as I had once spoken to him in the confessional, so I did that. “It was you who started me on this journey, so if things go bad, Father, you're catching the blame. If you're in a place where you can hear me and help me, please don't let me make a fool of myself by coming here, by failing miserably, by being conceited enough to think I could change something so much bigger than me. Please let me have understood correctly the message in my prayers and not have mixed it up out of stupidity or egotism. I love you. I hope you're at peace.”

He didn't answer, of course. And yet simply remembering our conversations helped. I sank down into a quiet space, and in that space all doubt evaporated. It slowly came to seem obvious to me that I was doing what I should be doing. There were no visions, just a quiet room that seemed painted in the same blues and purples I'd seen through the window. I rested there for a long time, simply feeling the fact of my own aliveness and the energy of life around me. It would be too easy to describe that energy as the presence of God. I believe that's what it was, but those words somehow can't match the perfection and mystery any more than the actuality and mystery of time can be captured by numbers on a clock face.

Slowly, in a way that felt absolutely unhurried, I found myself returning to awareness of the hotel room. I moved my eyes over the window trim—the corner seam where two pieces of wood met, a tiny chip in the beige paint there—and then slowly the world of nameable, separate shapes reasserted itself. I said a prayer for my father and mother and grandmother, as I always did, and realized I was hungry. Either something about being in Italy made me want to eat all the time or I was having a late-in-life growth spurt.

I showered and changed clothes and, after a short conversation with Mabu—who held the door open for me—went out in search of a place to have dinner. It took all of a block to realize that Genoa didn't feel anything like Rome. There were fewer of the loud motorbikes, no legions of tourists, no one juggling in traffic, no river running through neighborhoods that still carried the architectural marks of the time of Christ. I soon realized, also, that it was too early to eat dinner. Restaurants in Italy don't open for the evening meal until seven or seven thirty at the earliest, so I stopped into the first church I passed, an old gray hulk of a building, set on a busy corner, that leaned toward the street as if it might fall on its face at any moment. It wasn't my favorite place, large and bland, gray stone inside and out, dim light, a sense not of hope but of past suffering and pessimism. I didn't stay long.

The city itself had a pleasant, understated personality, as if it were suffused with the knowledge that it had been an important metropolis centuries before, in its adolescence, and had grown tired of all that fuss and bother and was content now to be just an ordinary adult. Its squat
palazzi
were half hidden behind clacking trolleys and sidewalk cafés. One grand, tarnished building, dirty with roadway soot, sucked students in and spewed them out again as if it were a huge set of lungs and the young men and women were particles of oxygen.

I wandered and wandered, soaking in the newness, still washed clean, inside and out, by the memory of my long quiet prayer. In that state of mind it was all but impossible to worry or be afraid, ridiculous to look behind me to see who might be following. Franco's tales of Vatican intrigue felt as though they belonged to a different orbit in the spin and whirl of atoms. Nothing could hurt me.

I had Father Bruno's map, with the cardinal's office—the Curia, it was called—clearly marked, but I decided to savor the feeling of being a carefree tourist for a little while and save my business for the next morning. On a bending lane a twenty-minute walk from the Savoia, I found a restaurant to my liking. It was just opening its doors: ten tables, a hundred bottles of wine in shelves against the walls, and a waitress so calm and attentive she seemed to have been set down there from another happy dimension of the universe. Another fine meal, more nervous overeating, a few minutes of prayer for my father.

Afterward, in the first darkness, I walked back along Via Arsenale, the busy street that led to the hotel. It was a narrow-sidewalked thoroughfare enlivened, even at that hour, by a carnival of cars, buses, motorcycles, students, and two-chair tables in front of crammed cafés. Via Arsenale wasn't the straightest route back. I had to climb a steep hill and make a left turn rather than cutting the corner and going more directly, but Mabu had told me in the hotel lobby that Via Prè, running parallel and closer to the water, was a place to avoid. At night absolutely, he said, but even during the day.

When I returned to the hotel, full-bellied and tired from the long afternoon, Mabu was there to greet me. He said someone had come inquiring, asking when I'd gone out, where I might be found. I thought it might be one of the friends of the friends of Father Bruno, with advice about how best to make an appointment to see the cardinal. “A short man,” Mabu said, “with a tattoo here.” He pointed to the side of his neck.

“Italian?”

“Yes.”

“Did he leave a message?”

“Check at the desk.”

There were no messages at the desk and nothing on my phone when I went upstairs. I lay down in the luxurious bed and within two minutes was buried in sleep. I had a dream then, just a piece of a vision of a dream, that seemed to have my mother in it. I'd seen pictures of her, of course. And in my mind's eye, thousands of times, I'd imagined her. But the sense of her in that dream carried no visual image. She was there, for a moment, an instant, one beam of selfless love, and then she was being torn away from me.

THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER BREAKFAST
on the top-floor patio and a quick peek at the Jacuzzis, I went out into the city again and soon found the Curia—a slim, three-story gray domino of a building standing between a travel agency and a bank. If it hadn't been for the cardinal's seal high up on the facade and the
X
Mabu had made on Father Bruno's map, I might have walked right past it. I stepped in through a small wooden door cut into a larger door and realized that, like so many other buildings I'd seen in Italy, the street view was only a tiny piece of the picture, an illusion, a disguise. It made me think of the way the human condition pretended to be one thing but was actually something else. Like Santa Maria in Trastevere—worn, almost shabby on the outside but spectacular within—and like the city of Rome itself, an ancient architectural miracle surrounded by a thick ring of modern mess, it seemed obvious to me at that moment that the life we lived was a kind of stage play. We walked around in costume, a flimsy disguise of titles, status, possessions, personality, and looks that masked an enormous interior universe. On the surface my grandmother had been an old woman with aching hands and teardrop-shaped glasses; an inch beneath that she'd been a giant of a soul, a furnace of love, constantly giving off heat. Father Alberto had been a priest, but beyond that title and those vows and the plain black shirt and pants, his true self shone like a gem in gauze. If you thought about it carefully, you understood that everything they
were,
everything about them I missed, really had nothing to do with their titles or looks or even their habits and quirks. What they said and did was all a kind of code, the surface expression of a deeper Self, radio signals sent out through a static of appearances. In my own case, it wasn't so much that I felt trapped or false in my role as nurse and unmarried daughter. I was more comfortable with myself than I'd ever been. But almost always it felt as though another self deep inside me had not yet found its truest means of expression, the correct code through which to communicate clearly and effectively with the outside world. It seemed—
seemed—
that God was telling me the proper manifestation of that true inner self was the priesthood. But what if, as Archbishop Menendez had suggested, I was getting the message slightly wrong? What if there was some other purpose to my little life?