The Fifth Gospel(3)

CHAPTER 2





I DRIVE TO CASTEL Gandolfo in the teeth of a north-riding storm. The rain is angry, hopping off the cobblestones like fleas. By the time I reach the highway, the windshield is just a drum the sky is beating. On all sides, cars slow up and pull onto shoulders. As the constellation of red lights vanishes, my thoughts turn to my brother.

            When he was young, Simon was the boy who would climb a tree in a lightning storm to fetch a stray cat. One night, on the beach in Campania, I watched him swim into a school of glowing jellyfish to bring back a girl who got caught in a riptide. That winter, when he was fifteen and I was eleven, I went to meet him at the sacristy of Saint Peter’s, where he was an altar boy. He was supposed to take me for a haircut in town, but on our way out of the basilica, a bird flew through a window in the dome, two hundred feet up, and we heard the thump of it landing on the balcony. Something inside Simon needed to see it, so we ran up those six million stairs, and at the top we reached a fingernail ledge of marble. It looped in a circle over the high altar, with nothing but a guardrail between us and thin air. On the ledge was the dove, flopping in circles, coughing little ink-spots of blood. Simon walked over and picked it up. That was when someone shouted, Stop! Don’t come any closer!

            Across the dome, leaning on the rail, was a man. He was staring at us with red eyes. Suddenly, Simon went running at him.

            No, signore! he shouted. Don’t!

            Then the man lifted his leg over the rail.

            Signore!

            Not even if God had given Simon wings could he have gotten there in time. The man leaned forward and let go. We watched him drop through Saint Peter’s like a pin. I heard a tour guide down there saying bronze stolen from the Pantheon, and still the man was falling, smaller than an eyelash now. Finally there was a scream, and a little starburst of blood. I sat down. The joints in my legs had buckled. I can’t remember moving again until Simon came to pick me up.

            All my life, I’ve never understood why God sent a bird through that window. Maybe it was to teach Simon the feeling of something slipping through his fingers. Our father died the following year, so maybe it was a lesson that couldn’t wait. But the last image I have in my memory of that day, before the workmen hustled everyone out of the church, is of Simon on that ledge, arms outstretched, frozen, as if trying to put the bird back into the air. As if it were just a matter of getting a vase back on a shelf.

            That afternoon, the priests reconsecrated Saint Peter’s, the way they always do when a pilgrim jumps. But no one can reconsecrate a child. Two weeks later, our choirmaster slapped a boy for being out of tune, and Simon jumped out of line and slapped him back. For three days they canceled choir practice while my parents tried to knuckle Simon into an apology. The soul of obedience he had been, all his life. Now he said he would rather quit than apologize. In the blueprint of how we became the men we are, that is where I locate the foundation. Everything I know about my brother rises unwavering from that point.

            The decade of Simon’s life between the beginning of college and the beginning of his diplomatic training were hard ones in Italy. The bombings and assassinations of our childhood had mostly ended, but there were volcanic protests in Rome against a bankrupt government that was collapsing under its own corruption. During college, Simon marched with the university students. During seminary, he marched in solidarity with the workers. By the time he was invited to enter the diplomatic ranks, I thought those days were behind us. Then, three years ago, in May of 2001, John Paul decided to travel to Greece.

            It was the first trip by any pope to our homeland in thirteen centuries, and our countrymen weren’t happy to see him. Nearly all Greeks are Orthodox, and John Paul wanted to end the schism between our Churches. Simon went there to see it happen. But hatreds are something my brother has never understood. From our father he inherited an almost Protestant immunity to the verdict of history. Orthodox blame Catholics for mistreating them in every war from the Crusades to World War Two. They blame Catholics for luring Orthodox away from their ancestral Church for a new hybrid form of Catholicism. The mere existence of Eastern Catholics is a provocation to some Orthodox, yet Simon couldn’t fathom why his own brother, a Greek Catholic priest, wouldn’t join him in Athens for the trip.