The Delight of Being Ordinary Read online

  Everything went smoothly with the official aspects of the Buddhist’s arrival. The Pope’s staff had been through these high-profile visits many times; they were professionals, experts. The photo opportunity on the steps of St. Peter’s, the tour there—no translator needed: the Dalai Lama seemed to understand all languages intuitively, and the men conversed in accented but capable English, with a few words of Italian and Spanish thrown in for good measure. A press conference, a sumptuous lunch, then some private time for the two of them before another lavish meal. Even with all their decades of experience, however, the staff never seemed to understand that this pope—unlike some of his predecessors—had no need for extravagant meals. He ate very little, in fact. I assume the Dalai Lama was the same way, a monk, after all. They were men of discipline and asceticism; and yet the staff prepared them dinners fit for a gluttonous prime minister and his coterie of overweight aides: five courses, from gourmet soup to flaming desserts. It was the equivalent of hiring an interior designer to decorate a nun’s cell.

  Before the second of these inappropriate meals, during their precious hour of private time, the Pope called and asked me to pay him a visit. He was with the Dalai Lama, he said, in the Room of the Blessed Mother, one of the most hidden-away places in the vast architectural maze that is Vatican City.

  Another gauntlet of security types, more signing in, checkpoints, and so on. Loyal and unthreatening though I am, I had, as mentioned, a number of enemies in the Vatican bureaucracy. First Assistant to the Pope is a job that carries a great deal of prestige, and my unexpected appointment had lit the fires of jealousy in certain quarters and earned my cousin few friends among the Church’s hierarchy. DePadova isn’t ordained—the first charge against me. Not experienced—charge number two. A Catholic of dubious standing, not living with his wife, not even, as far as anyone could be sure, a regular communicant at Sunday Mass—charge number three.

  Filled though it is with holy souls, the Vatican has its factions and treachery. I sometimes think of the bureaucracy there as a long, heavy, slow-moving train, with the Pope in the engineer’s seat. In the lavish cars behind him sit the members of the Curia—an old Latin word for “court”—and behind them, priests, deacons, and one-point-two billion ordinary Catholics. Yours truly occupied a seat somewhere near the caboose, so imagine the robes that were ruffled when I was called forward. Imagine the fits of jealousy. The Pope paid my detractors little mind. He told me he wanted a friend he could turn to in difficult times, someone he could trust absolutely. “On this earth,” he said more than once, in public, “no one is closer to me than my cousin Paolo.”

  And so, while I worked harder and with more devotion than most of my predecessors, rumors about my reliability and loyalty wafted through the halls of Vatican City like a sour smell that occasionally reached my nose. Certain of my colleagues “forgot” to invite me to important meetings. My somewhat nervous nature and lack of political skill resulted in a few embarrassing faux pas. Because of these kinds of things—rumors, missed meetings, small lapses in etiquette—a pall of suspicion was cast across my name in some circles; and so, on that afternoon, as always, even my rather special credentials couldn’t protect me from the stares of the security types. At last I entered the Room of the Blessed Mother, and I have to say that, as accustomed as I was to being in the presence of the Pope and his important visitors, there was something special in the air around those two men. They sat near each other at the ends of a matching pair of sofas, only a few feet separating them, paintings and icons of the Virgin Mary on the walls. All their various aides had been chased away. I walked across the carpet and bowed to the Pope first, and then to the world’s most famous living Tibetan. My cousin motioned for me to sit in an upholstered armchair, facing them. “My beloved friend,” he said, in English.

  “My Pope.”

  He smiled, turned to his guest, and went on in a surprisingly informal tone, “Dalai—as you’ve asked me to call you—this is my cousin, closest friend, and key advisor, Paolo dePadova, an American Italian, son of artists. As you may know, my parents fled to South America to escape the horror of Mussolini’s fascism. Paolo’s mother—a brave woman who gave aid to the resistance fighters during the war—married an American soldier. Our families stayed in contact and visited each other often, and Paolo and I have been close since our youngest days.”

  The Dalai Lama’s famous glasses, his famous shaved head, his famous smile and excellent posture. He nodded, said, rather generously, “What fine man you must be! Very great pleasure to meet you!” and made a small bow in my direction with the palms of his hands pressed together. It was all very polite, the epitome of courtesy—I felt truly blessed to be in their presence, truly part of history on that day. A quiet, half-invisible part, but a part all the same.

  All was well, in other words…until my cousin turned to his guest and spoke this disturbing sentence: “Paolo is the one who’s going to help us make our escape.”

  For a few seconds I held a plastic smile on my cheeks. The Dalai Lama was looking at me with his thin eyebrows raised, expectantly, pleasantly. Overestimating me, it seemed. We were all enjoying a light moment, breaking the tension that came from the difference in our faiths, the various stresses involved in our holy work.

  “My cousin likes to joke,” was the only reply I could manage.

  The Pope made a little fake cough. “Your cousin isn’t joking,” he said, bluntly. “Have you come up with a plan?”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  The Pope pressed his lips together. “We’ve talked it over,” he said, “my new friend and I. He’s having dreams as well. Messages. Strange signals. Plus, we’re both feeling constrained. We’re both men of adventure—the Dalai escaped the Chinese, as you may know, on the back of a donkey, no less, crossing the Himalayas dressed as a soldier and then as a peasant!”

  “I know, yes. I’d heard. We—”

  “And, in our youth, you and I…we had some enjoyable times, yes?”

  “Absolutely, Your Holiness.”

  “Then please do as I suggested earlier. We’ve decided on a four-day trip. An escape, yes, but also a mysterious search of sorts. I want him to see this beautiful country, and I want to try to understand what God is whispering in my ear.”

  “Where? How? The security people, the schedule…”

  Though he more often takes on the persona of the kindly follower of Jesus, when he wants to my cousin can make his face into a stern mask, a reflection of the wrathful Lord we grew up reading about in certain biblical passages. “Don’t make me ask you a third time, Paolo,” he said quietly. “We’ll have our official dinner, and then, after dinner, please present me with a thoroughly thought-out plan. Our only window of opportunity is tonight, or very early tomorrow morning. Begin with this: His Holiness the Dalai Lama and I will say we want some time together for meditation. We’ll meet in the St. Francis Chapel, no guards, no other attendants. A two-hour Buddhist-Christian meditation. Please take things from there. I’ll sleep in my office tonight, not at the hotel.”

  I studied my cousin’s face, guessing this was just his idea of a prank. Among his closest aides, the Holy Father was well known for that kind of thing: he had a reputation as a joker, a man who laughed as much as he prayed.

  I turned my eyes to the Dalai Lama, hoping I might see him burst into his familiar chuckle, but the Buddhist only held his steady gaze on me for a few seconds and then said, in his lovely accent, “Tank you.”

  4

  As long as I am on this earth I will remember the feeling of walking out of that room, down the long corridor, and back to the main office building. I moved like a hypnotized man. I wrestled with the stark and shocking reality of our conversation, going back over the Pope’s words again and again, as if I’d get the joke only by repetition. He can’t mean it, I thought. He can’t be serious. The dreams are just dreams—stress-related, perhaps. No doubt the Dalai Lama is only pretending to have had these messages, too, out of p
oliteness, hoping to get through the formal meal, have some time for prayer, and enjoy a solid sleep before leaving in the morning for wherever his schedule draws him.

  What operated against this line of logic was a bank account of happy memories. In his youth, my cousin the Pope had been known to do things just like this. “Pulling stunts,” my parents had called it, as in “I wonder what kind of stunt Giorgio’s going to pull on this visit. Last time we were here the two of you ‘borrowed’ bicycles, rode to the next village, and spent half the night dancing and singing in the barrio. The year before that you hitchhiked two hours to the beach without telling anyone.”

  Those words were spoken in a tone closer to admiration than censure. By then, the war years far behind them, my parents were fairly settled bourgeois artists, if such a thing exists. They had a car, a home, bills, a child to raise. Still, they lived with creative flair, educating me themselves rather than sending me to the local school, setting off by train to Berlin or Barcelona on an hour’s notice. My father painted our old Fiat in red, green, and white swirls, with two small American flags near the headlights. My mother grew her hair to her waist and was fond of swimming in the lake as late as the first week of December, jumping off the stone wall in Mezzegra: I have a vivid memory of her striding up the hill to our house, her hair wrapped in a towel turban and her teeth chattering. They were, in a word, eccentrics, and Cousin Giorgio’s happy eccentricity amused and pleased them. I only wished they had lived to see him sitting on the papal throne.

  So it was the memory of the way my cousin had behaved as a boy that convinced me, as I made that walk and ascended the familiar flights of marble stairs to my office, that he was, in fact, serious. My task, should I choose to accept it, was to make both of them disappear. The Pope and the Dalai Lama. Two of the most recognizable men on earth. Disappear, not for a few hours or an afternoon, but for four days! Surely, I thought, even if I somehow managed that Houdini trick, nothing good would come of it. The security forces, the entire world, would mount a frantic search. If anything went wrong—if one of them was hurt or, God forbid, killed—a certain Paolo dePadova would pay a brutally heavy price.

  But, back in my neat third-floor office, as I stood at the window and looked out on an austere gray building known as the Office of the Doctrine of the Faith, the place where the Church’s laws were made and enforced, the fingers of another emotion began to take hold of me. I recalled my mother telling me how it felt to leap from the fifteen-foot wall into the icy waters of Como, with a few bundled-up locals watching, aghast. “There’s a freedom in it like nothing you’ve ever known, Paolo,” she said. Un senso di libertà. “It’s a victory over fear, over the constant need for physical comfort, over the urge to polish one’s social reputation. Someday, when you’re a little older, I want you to try it with me.”

  I never had the courage. On that July afternoon in my Vatican City office, however, I did have an inkling of what a freedom like that might feel like. I understood why my cousin would want to break the bonds of tradition and duty—if only for a few days. By nature I’m a nervous and overly cautious man, but beneath my hypnotic dread, and, really, against my better judgment, I began to sense the first awakenings of a new possibility. That possibility—one wildflower sprouting in a bland lawn—carried the sweet fragrance of youth.

  Soon, however, a logical, middle-aged sobriety choked the excitement into silence. The wildflower was crushed under a plain brown shoe. I sat at my desk, staring blankly out the window. It was one thing to escape the Chinese as a teenager—the Dalai Lama had been safeguarding his faith and traditions, fleeing a vicious enemy. It was one thing to borrow a couple of old bikes and ride to the next town for an evening of singing and innocent fun. It was something else entirely to shake off the heavy cloak of papal responsibility and make an unauthorized, four-day trip. It would be the equivalent of an American president sneaking away with the First Lady for a romantic weekend—not to Camp David, not with a Secret Service detail, not after notifying the press, but like an ordinary couple jumping on a bus, refugees from the world of status and propriety. That world—so fixed, inflexible, and proud—could exact vengeance in terrible ways. And the physical dangers were obvious.

  Still, I’d been given an assignment—by the Pope of Rome, no less, the Vicar of Christ on earth. What kind of cousin, what kind of neurotic First Assistant, what kind of Catholic, would be foolish enough to disobey?

  After considering the logistics for the better part of an hour, I came to see, with a sudden clarity, that only a mind far more calculating than my own could hope to be successful with such an escapade. For another few minutes I sat and pondered, but it was as if I could feel time ticking by, as if I could hear the tone of my cousin’s voice, see the look—“mischievous” isn’t the correct word, but it’s in the right general area of the thesaurus—on the Dalai Lama’s face. I pulled my phone from my pocket and sat there, looking at the screen. My thumb moved to the phone icon. To Contacts. I saw the name ROSA there and a tendril of doubt took hold of me. I’d worked so hard to keep a blanket of peace between me and my estranged wife, to preserve a sort of demilitarized zone, to minimize any joint involvement in potentially troublesome activities. Ten seconds. Twenty. I thought of my mother, leaping from the stone wall into a cold lake.

  I tapped Rosa’s number and listened for her voice.

  5

  My wife (I would say “ex-wife,” but the truth is, Catholics don’t accept divorce, and so we were technically still married) has, among many other fine qualities, a beautiful speaking voice. In our more tender days, I’d often told her she should have been a singer, or a radio announcer. In actual fact, just after turning forty, she started a new career as a hairdresser, discovered a knack for it, widened her scope to makeup and nails, happened to do some work for a famous director—who was probably half in love with her—and by age forty-six she owned a chain of haircutting and makeup shops from the Dolomites to Sicily and was on a first-name basis with many of the great Italian film stars of our era.

  Let me admit before going any further that her success, especially compared to my own business failure, was a bruise to my ego. I tried my best to fight this. I supported her in every possible way. But the fact was, in front of our daughter and our friends, I was the failed travel agent, my business crushed by the advent of online commerce, and Rosa was the spectacularly successful hair-and-makeup artist. In her defense, she never threw this in my face. Our arguments took a different shape, small firefights bred of stubbornness and the need to be right. Even so, with the benefit of hindsight I see now that a sense of my own inadequacy (why do we judge ourselves by professional success? Is there no more accurate gauge for the worth of a human life?) lay beneath most of my foolish stubbornness. If I could go back and rewrite our history, I would. Maybe Rosa would, too. But marriage is an intricate dance. Each partner is moving, moving, constantly moving; you hold your love—a precious vase—between your bodies. A single clumsy step and the vase crashes to the floor in a hundred pieces.

  In the end, despite our troubles, Rosa and I had remained friends. The love of our daughter united us. Twenty-one years of living together united us. A lively physical connection, or the memory of that, united us. Every week or two we got together for coffee, lunch, or a walk in the Borghese Gardens, and while there was no talk of actually living under the same roof again, we enjoyed each other’s company. As far as I knew, at least, there had been no infidelity, during or after our time together. We suffered from no deep scars like that. Still, Rosa Pesca and I were like chemical elements that can coexist in harmony if kept at a distance, but when placed together in a test tube boil over into a poisonous mess.

  So it required a certain amount of swallowed pride for me to dial Rosa’s number on that afternoon. I half-hoped she wouldn’t answer, but she did. “Ciao, amore mio,” she said, the usual greeting. This “my love” was a blade in my heart, though I don’t think she meant it that way. “I was thinking of you just now.
”

  “Ciao, Rosa, listen,” I said, and without wasting time on preliminaries I gave her a description of the impossible task. When I finished, there was a pause, and then a peal of the most joyous laughter.

  “You’re in a spot, aren’t you,” she declared happily.

  “Yes, I need help. Advice at the very least. Where can I buy a couple of wigs, a fake mustache, some kind of enormous sunglasses?”

  “Sei proprio pazzo,” she said. You’re truly nuts.

  “Yes, I know, but the Holy Father asked—”

  “I mean, you’re nuts to think you can buy a couple of fake mustaches and get away with this. These are the two most recognizable men on earth.”

  “I know, I know. I was thinking the same thing a few minutes ago.”

  “I’ll have to do them,” she said.

  “Do them? Do them how?”

  “The full treatment,” she said. “Hair, makeup, clothes. The works.”

  “Bene,” I said, soaking the word in sarcasm. “Molto bene! Very good! I’ll bring them in tomorrow morning. Do you have any availability in the shop near the Spanish Steps? Can you cancel the appointment of some famous star and squeeze us in?”

  Rosa was laughing. At me, it seemed. This was a situation with which I was familiar, and one I did not particularly enjoy. “It’ll be fun,” she said. “Bring them out to me and I’ll make some calls, set everything up. How much time do we have?”

  “Tonight. The Dalai Lama is scheduled to leave tomorrow after breakfast.”

  “And the Pope wants him along?”