The Fifth Gospel(142)

            “What happened at your meeting?” I asked.

            Nobody could’ve overheard me—there was a coffee grinder whirring, an air-conditioning unit moaning on the wall—but he led me away from the coffee bar as if we were trading secrets now.

            Bar Jona is a play on words: Saint Peter’s last name in Hebrew. But the place, like all of Lucio’s creations, was humorless. Posters taped to walls, trash cans half-filled with soda cups. The all-important Vatican mailbox standing by the door like an alms box beckoned tourists to write postcards and cover them with lucrative Vatican stamps.

            “I know,” Ugo said, lowering his head toward me and bringing his voice down to a whisper, “what you’ve been doing. And I can’t tell you how betrayed I feel.”

            I blinked in confusion.

            “How could you do this?” he added. “How could you abuse my trust?”

            “Ugo, what on earth are you talking about?”

            He glared. “You knew your brother had been to visit the Holy Father. You knew it was because of my work.”

            I nodded. “So?”

            “I won’t have my work stolen away. This is my exhibit, Father Alex. Not your brother’s. Not yours. How dare you transform it into some cheap negotiating chip behind my back? You know I don’t give a damn about your Eastern politics. This is over. You and I are finished.”

            I was cold in my own skin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

            “Go to hell.”

            “What did the Holy Father say to you?”

            Ugo rose from the table. “The Holy Father? Ha! Thank God he isn’t the only one who cares about my work.”

            I never made enough of those words. In retrospect, they told me everything I needed to know about who he’d really met with. Instead, the words that lingered in my memory were the ones that hurt most:

            “Alex, don’t say another word. I don’t want to hear your lies. Respect my wishes and stay away from my exhibit. Good-bye.”



* * *



            I CALLED HIM A dozen times that afternoon. A dozen more in the week that followed. He never answered my messages. I stopped by the restoration lab, but the guards kept me out. So I waited outside the museum one night and confronted Ugo when he emerged from the door. No matter where I followed him, though, he refused to speak. I never understood, and he never explained. We never spoke again.

            The morning after our meeting at Bar Jona, I phoned Simon at the nunciature in Turkey. He was away on business and took three nights to get back to me. When I told him the news, he was as upset as I had been. Now, though, my own feelings had turned to anger.

            “He didn’t tell you anything more?” Simon asked. “He didn’t say what they’d told him?”

            “Nothing.”

            “Is he still in Rome? Can you try to talk to him about it?”

            “I did try, Simon.”

            “Alex, please. It matters a lot. He’s . . . a very important person to me.”

            “I’m sorry. It’s done.”

            I don’t know why Ugo’s silence hurt me so deeply. Maybe because his final accusation rang true. I had claimed ownership of work that wasn’t mine. I had flattered myself that his exhibit was our exhibit, and he had seen through me.

            But there was another reason. The work I did with Ugo made me feel, briefly, that I was a partner in something meaningful. The most thrilling thing about it wasn’t that I found our work so urgent and heartfelt, but that we found it so urgent and heartfelt. I never envied Simon his travels and negotiations. To be a father and a teacher always suited me fine. But to have a partner in life who sits in a booster seat and only recently graduated from a bib is to crave a daily chance for adult companionship, to feel a pathetic gratitude for a short conversation with a bank teller or the man at the butcher counter. Walking into that restoration lab with Ugo each morning and wondering what the manuscript held in store—or sharing phone calls at the end of the day, with no purpose except to vent the day’s frustrations and marvel at the little book that owned us—was the closest experience I’d had in years to walking into Peter’s bedroom with Mona and wondering what the baby was about to teach us about being parents. Without realizing it, I’d let Ugo enter my life through the open door she left behind. And when he abandoned me, with no explanation, all of it returned. The old dreams. The weird pangs of solitude in the middle of walking to work, or dialing a phone number, or reading alone after Peter’s bedtime. The sensation of having an anchor hung around my neck, dangling into an emptiness that seemed to have no bottom.