The Fifth Gospel(47)
* * *
CASA SANTA MARTA is the only hotel on Vatican soil. It’s where the Holy Father puts up his official visitors and where bishops stay during their required visits to see him every five years. It’s also a home base for Secretariat priests in their comings and goings. Simon would be staying here if he had no family in town.
The building is almost Amish in its plainness, with six rows of identical windows, inside of which are a hundred-odd rooms slightly bigger than monastic cells. On one side, the view from the windows is of the Vatican gas station. On the other side, guests can stare at the towering border wall that runs only an arm’s length from the hotel. All of John Paul’s building projects are this way. The only luxuries that interest a pope who was forced to shovel limestone in Nazi-occupied Poland are four walls and a roof.
The apologetic nun at the front desk says they can’t give us our hotel room yet because the special part of the hotel reserved for us is still being cleaned. She seems not to have heard that keeping religious minorities in their own ghettoes went out of style while John Paul was shoveling limestone. We just want the first available room, I explain. But her response, after sizing up my cassock and beard, is, “Father, your Italian is very good!” I pull Peter out the front doors before I can say something I’ll regret.
“Where are we going now?” he asks. “Can we get something to eat?”
I never fed him a proper breakfast. If he ate at all, it was whatever Sofia gave him back at Leo’s apartment.
“Soon,” I tell him. “But there’s something important we need to do first.”
* * *
IT’S BEEN WEEKS since I came to Ugo’s apartment. When we stand dumbly in front of the lintel, Peter stares at me, wondering why we don’t knock. He can’t see what I see. There are pry marks on the door.
Someone tried to break in. But Ugo kept two padlocks on this entrance. Unlike the door at our apartment, this one refused to give in.
I unlock it with the keys Ugo gave me so that I could watch over the place while he was in Turkey. Peter bursts inside, and I race after him, but there’s no one here. The place looks just the way it did when I last saw it.
“Doctor Nogara?” Peter calls out in a singsong tone.
“He isn’t here,” I say. “We’re just looking for something that belongs to him.”
There will be time to explain later. I ask him to stay here, in the living room, until I return. I don’t know what emotions I’m about to feel.
The modest space where Ugo Nogara slept is beyond a wall of oriental screens. The makeshift room is heavy with the kind of sadness that seems peculiar to this country. Priests are encouraged not to accumulate property, so even the most urbane cleric usually lives in a featureless room with borrowed furniture. For Roman priests, it’s even worse. Photographs on walls have no wives or children to populate them. Floors are not littered with bath toys and fist-size shoes. Closets seem underfed with no colorful jackets and miniature umbrellas making their doors bulge open. Instead, Roman priests keep newspaper clippings and postcards of the landmarks they visit and the pilgrimages they make during their mandated weeks of vacation. It shouldn’t have been this way with Ugo. He was a layman. But you would never know it, to see this room.
Bottles of Grappa Julia have piled up in the trash can. There isn’t even a veneer of private joy in the pictures on the walls, just monuments in Edessa with no trace of Ugo standing in the foreground. The only sign that a vibrant, living force once slept here is the wreckage of books on his desktop, where the chair isn’t even tucked in. It’s as if, engrossed in his work, he stepped away to answer the door and could be back any minute. Beneath the desk I make out the canted edges of Ugo’s iron safe. But before I kneel to open it, I close my eyes and feel the tidal pull of a familiar emotion. My father left behind a life like this, warm with unfinished business.