“Tigers?” Peter cries.
“Remember Doctor Nogara?”
I send him a high-voltage stare, but he ignores me.
“He let me feed the birds,” Peter says.
For the briefest moment, Simon smiles. “A long time ago, near the city where Doctor Nogara and I met, there was a saint named Simeon Stylites. He sat on top of a pillar for almost forty years and never came down. He even died up there.”
His voice seems to come from far away, as if he finds something entrancing about this detachment. About the thought of retreating into himself like a monk rather than embracing the world like a priest.
“So how did he go pee?” Peter asks.
The one, timeless question.
Simon laughs.
“Peter,” I say, trying to muster a serious look, “do not repeat that at school.”
He swings higher, grinning. There are few greater joys than to make his uncle happy.
Little by little, the hour slips by. We see nobody we know. We hear no news. There’s a distinct impression, as we peer down over the Vatican walls, that nobody in Rome this morning is paying close attention to the facts of our lives.
When we’ve nearly reached the doorstep of Lucio’s palace, Sister Helena calls to say she can’t watch Peter later today. Then, sounding as if she’s nearly in tears, she rushes to get off the phone. As we hang up, I wonder if there’s something she didn’t tell me. Something she may not even have realized until she got home last night. Sometimes she takes Peter to visit with neighbors in the building. She might’ve left the door unlocked.
* * *
THE GOVERNOR’S PALACE IS a young building by local standards—younger than John Paul. It dates to 1929, when Italy agreed to make the Vatican an independent country. The blueprint was for a seminary, but the pope, finding himself in need of a national government, converted it to an office building. Today it’s where Vatican bureaucrats come and go, planning postage stamps of Michelangelo. We call it the Governor’s Palace in remembrance of the days when a layman ran this town, but there are no more governors anymore. The new sheriff wears a collar. Lucio lives in a suite of private apartments on the top floor with his priest-secretary Don Diego, who answers the door when we arrive.
“Come in, Fathers,” he says. “And son.”
He bends down to welcome Peter, mainly so that he can avoid looking at Simon. They are the same age, two priests on the fast track, and to Diego this means competition. Behind him, gloomy classical music fills the air. Lucio was an accomplished pianist before the onset of arthritis, and he used to keep a framed newspaper article here describing a performance of Mozart he gave in his youth. Now the piano goes unplayed, and the soundtrack is macabre Russians and Scandinavians. This particular work by Grieg sounds like the theme music of Calvinism.
Diego ushers us into my uncle’s private office. Instead of facing Saint Peter’s, it has a northern exposure that keeps it clammy. One of Lucio’s predecessors was a plain-talking American archbishop who kept a bearskin rug on the floor and Westerns playing on the television. That was an apartment Peter would’ve enjoyed visiting. But my uncle’s taste runs to oriental rugs and claw-footed chairs because they’re available free of charge from the Vatican warehouse, where the stockpile of baroque furniture grows each time another prelate dies.
“Forgive me,” Lucio says, raising his arms, “for not being able to stand and welcome you.”
This has been his greeting since he suffered a small stroke last year. In its aftermath he has given up wearing the scarlet skullcap and scarlet-trimmed cassock of a cardinal because his balance sometimes fails and his hands can’t manage the buttons or sash. Instead he dresses in a loose-fitting priest suit, and a nun drapes a pectoral cross over his neck every morning. Simon and I come forward to clasp his outstretched hands, and Simon, as always, gets a longer squeeze than mine. The longest, however, is reserved for Peter.