I’ve often wondered whether there was a trauma in her life that she never told me about. There’s only one surviving picture of Mona when she was training to be a nurse, and she’s very thin, with sunken eyes. She explained to me that the work came as a shock after the ease of high school. I always understood this as a request not to pry. I wasn’t the first man she’d slept with, but even so, our marriage night was awkward. I had underestimated the psychological toll of making love to a priest-in-training. Accustomed to the company of other men, I was never ashamed of nakedness, or of walking around our home half-clothed. I thought it would demystify the cassock for Mona to see that I was human underneath it. Yet it was almost a week before we consummated the marriage. I began to fear, after the days of false starts, that our love would be mechanical and cringing.
It was not. Once she had exhausted her own defenses, she became eager. My lips bled from where she’d bitten me. From the way certain neighbors avoided my eyes, I knew they were offended by the sounds they heard from upstairs. We both looked forward to meeting each other again each night. It was, in a life of discipline, an opportunity for freedom and pleasure.
A life of discipline. That was what should’ve worried me. Some of our neighbors had misgivings about a priest with a wife, no matter what we did in bed. Mona felt their disapproval keenly. Every social event introduced more problems. Gatherings of priests are designed so that single, celibate men will be surrounded by other single, celibate men. Priests drink and eat together, play soccer and smoke cigars together, visit museums and tour archaeological sites together. To bring an attractive woman to a priestly gathering is a cruel faux pas. Yet to decline invitations because one has a wife is a sure way to stop receiving them. Mona and I agreed that I must go to a certain number of events, just to stay on the list. I encouraged her to spend these evenings visiting friends in Rome, or with other Vatican housewives. I was aware, though, after a time, that she spent the nights alone.
It’s unfair to blame the culture of our country. We could’ve lived outside the walls, in a Church-owned apartment in Rome. Certainly we had no illusions about what Vatican life entailed. But there was one great difference between us, and I discovered it only after we were married. Namely: that my parents were dead, and that her parents were pretending not to be.
Signor and Signora Falceri lived on the next street over, in an apartment building near the gendarme barracks. They had been supportive of our marriage and made no fuss when Mona left the Roman Catholic church for the Greek Catholic one. But I hadn’t known, until the marriage began and the pretenses ended, how miserable Mona’s mother was. Mona’s father was a Vatican Radio technician who’d made the mistake of marrying a woman he didn’t respect. Signora Falceri was a passable cook with a gentle sense of humor whose failings weren’t immediately clear to me. Only later did Mona explain that her father came from a large family and wanted many children. Her mother had nearly died in childbirth with Mona, and the doctors had discovered a defect in her womb that made it dangerous for her to bear again. Now, when they came to visit us, they visited separately. Mona didn’t cherish seeing her father. But it was visits from her beloved mother that left my wife in ruins.
A Greek doesn’t need to be told that tragedy runs in families. I knew Mona harbored a certain fear of becoming her mother. When Peter’s first two trimesters went peacefully, we took it as proof that the curse had been lifted. Then, in the final trimester, we almost lost him twice. The doctors reassured us that Peter was far enough along to survive, but it seemed as if Mona’s body had begun to reject him. In the end, she was rushed to the delivery ward because the umbilical cord was strangling him. When our son was finally delivered, the obstetrician called him Hercules because he had survived a noose snaked twice around his neck. Mona would later cry that she had tried to kill her son.
In the months that followed, the woman I married disappeared. I have more memories of my mother-in-law nursing Peter with a bottle than I have of Mona nursing Peter with a breast. Signora Falceri kept Mona company while I was at work, and to this day I can’t see that woman’s face without thinking how she tortured my wife. While Mona sat on the couch, eking out some desperate happiness from the madness in her brain, her mother, as if offering loving advice, would announce that our present struggle was nothing compared to what would come later. That we must not delude ourselves. That sadness was a flower. I have searched whole libraries for the source of that proverb—sadness is a flower—and in all the world there is no rabbinic gloss to uncoil it. She meant, I believe, that Mona’s new temperament had a dark beauty, which we must come to accept. Also: that it would only grow. I’m sickened to think of how many days I let mother and daughter sit on the couch, watching television, while that miserable woman, seeing her own child slowly dying, poisoned her anyway. Peter doesn’t see his grandparents today. He asks why. I lie to him, and think to myself that someday I will explain.