The Fifth Gospel(233)
Yet Vitari lifts the file in his hand and asks if I realize I’ve been working at the pre-seminary for five years. “Five years,” he repeats, and then smiles. “That means you’re due for a raise.” I leave with a handshake and an appreciation card signed by all my boys. I leave, also, trembling and almost sick. That night, the dreams begin. I’m a boy again, watching the crate of blood oranges fall on Guido at the train station. Watching the jumper in Saint Peter’s fall through the air to the floor. I feel a pinch in my chest, as if a finger is nocking an arrow on my heartstrings. Before long, even in daylight, it comes to seem as if something is rattling inside me, a bass note of anxiety like the far-off vibration of an approaching train. I’m afraid. Whatever’s coming, I fear it.
* * *
ONE MORNING, THE DIRECTOR of the museums announces that the exhibit will end ahead of schedule. Someone, possibly Lucio, slips word to the press that Church politics are to blame. A journalist at l’Espresso develops this into an article saying John Paul pulled the plug because he feared the Orthodox would take umbrage. After all, we can’t continue to make money off the relic we promised them. So on the show’s final day, I return to say good-bye. The crowds are astonishing. The exhibit will set records beyond even what its creator could’ve imagined. I can barely see the walls through the oceans of people. Ugo is fading away.
That night, the Shroud leaves the Sistine Chapel. John Paul’s spokesman announces that for reasons of security the cloth’s location can no longer be disclosed. This seems to mean we’re preparing to send it east. But when I ask Leo if the Swiss Guards have seen a major shipment leaving any of the gates, they haven’t. I repeat my question every day until he’s just as puzzled as I am that the answer never changes. After a while, a reporter at a press conference asks for an update and the papal spokesman explains that the logistics are complicated and the negotiations private. In other words, don’t expect news about the Shroud or the Orthodox for a while.
Soon the other priests at my Greek church in town begin to ask me if the rumors are true. If John Paul’s health has become an obstacle. If he’s dying too quickly to navigate the next steps with the Orthodox. I tell them I wouldn’t know. But I do know. The rumors are true in a way my friends can’t understand: this has surely become, for John Paul as it once was for Ugo, a matter of conscience. He would sooner die than base a reunion on a lie. And so, with time as his ally, that is exactly what he plans to do.
There’s a parable in the gospel of Matthew about an enemy who comes in the night and sows weeds in a man’s field of good wheat. The man’s servants ask if they should pull up the weeds, but their master says to wait, or else the good may be lost with the bad. Let everything grow until the day of harvest, he says; then the wheat will be reaped and the weeds will be burned.
I didn’t mean to sow those weeds. Not in Ugo’s life, not in John Paul’s. But in the silence that surrounds the Shroud now, I hear the master telling his servants to wait. Not to reap yet. And I wait for the day of harvest.
* * *
MONA SURPRISES ME BY asking to join Peter and me again at a Greek liturgy. Then, two days later, she suggests we go back for another. The third time, she finds a way to ask when I last confessed. She thinks it will do me good.
My wife doesn’t understand: I’ve tried. Yet never in my life have I felt more immune to the power of forgiveness. A nurse always believes in a cure, but unlike Mona’s patients at the hospital, I have brought this on myself, and there is no medicine.
Slowly, though, I find that the woman coming to my aid is no longer the woman I married. Rather, she is the wife and mother who left behind husband and son, who lived for years in tortured solitude, and who stands before me now as a virtuoso of the self-recrimination I’m only beginning to learn. She is helping me because she loves me, because she knows this darkness and has its map. There is indeed no medicine. But there is a journey I no longer have to make alone.
In mid-November, the sampietrini begin raising scaffolding in the middle of Saint Peter’s Square. Each year they build a nativity scene bigger than the last, veiled with fifteen-foot curtains until a revealing on Christmas Eve. Peter walks the perimeter like a detective, inspecting debris, eavesdropping on workmen, searching for holes in the tarp he can peek through. When the Greek forty-day fast before Christmas begins, Roman Catholics have already filled the markets with holiday sweets, cheeses, and cured meats, none of which an Eastern Catholic can eat. This year it comes as a relief to me. While Mona and Peter go shopping in Piazza Navona, I continue on alone to visit Simon.