She is everywhere in this raking daylight. Ever since she left us, I’ve felt Mona’s presence mostly in the early hours, in the silence that blankets the world, where dreams linger in the borderlands of the night.
“Honey Smacks, please,” Peter says, rummaging in the drawer of utensils for a spoon and then plopping down in a chair to await service.
I get it myself. There were never foods like this in the palace until Peter was born. At his age, I remember asking Lucio for a slice of panettone for breakfast on the second day of Christmas and being told that it had all been thrown away. While I sip my espresso, I stare at the carton of milk beside Peter’s bowl. Fresh from the papal pastures at Castel Gandolfo. The first pangs of reality are returning. I wonder if Leo has tracked down Simon. The distant sound of church bells means it’s half past seven. Two and a half hours until our meeting with Mignatto.
“Can I go kick with the boys?” Peter asks when he finishes his bowl and buses it to the nuns for rinsing.
The pre-seminary boys normally let him join their games of pickup soccer, a perk of being the teacher’s son, but Peter doesn’t seem to realize how early it is.
“There’s somewhere we need to go,” I say. “We can kick the ball together on the way.”
* * *
BELOW THE PALACE, IN the flower beds shaped like John Paul’s coat of arms, teams of papal landscapers are at work early, trying to finish before the midday sun. The head gardener, who has kids himself, smiles to see us dribble down the steep paths. It’s a cruel place to teach a boy soccer. The grade is so steep that on stormy days the stairs that connect the paths become waterfalls. Learning to control a ball here is like learning to swim by treading upstream in the Tiber. But Peter is stubborn, and like his uncle he seems to prefer his foes implacable. After months of losing the war against gravity, and chasing runaway balls down to the foot of the basilica, he is now able to hop down the slope on one foot, tapping the ball with the other to slow its momentum. His facility makes another gardener give a hand gesture meaning “excellent.” Soccer is the other thing we all have in common here.
“Where are we going?” Peter asks, buoyant.
But when I point at the building, he groans.
The museums don’t open until nine, but since Vatican offices open at eight in order to close for the day by one, I have only half an hour to see the exhibit in private before the curators show up. I need that time to prepare myself for Mignatto’s questions.
The main doors are locked. So are the doors from the curators’ quarters, which are also guarded. But Ugo showed me a convoluted back way, down to the art restorers’ underground laboratories, around a bend, then back up through a service elevator. Soon Peter and I are traveling down a line of galleries I didn’t see yesterday. He’s immediately mesmerized by the sight of an empty boom lift that has been used to hang a giant painting of the Deposition. Nearby is an even bigger canvas, wide enough to block a highway underpass, showing the disciples staring at Jesus’ shroud in an empty burial cave. Gospel verses are stenciled on the wall here, parts of them in bold, and something catches my eye.
Mark 15:46: Joseph bought a linen shroud, and taking Jesus down, wrapped him in the linen shroud.
Matthew 27:59: Joseph took the body, and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud.
Luke 23:53: Joseph took the body of Jesus down and wrapped it in a linen shroud.
Then an extraordinary finale. The sight of it stops me midstep. This is surely the first time any such idea has ever been advanced in the pope’s museums. Across the gallery is a huge reproduction from the Diatessaron page describing Jesus’ death and burial. The smudges have been removed, so the full Greek text is visible, but a haze remains, showing that the Alogi censored John’s version of events. It is here, far from the other gospel citations, that John’s text is stenciled on the wall. Ugo has separated the black sheep of the gospels from the other three. And to drive home the point, he has bolded very different words: