Chapter Fourteen
After an unsettled night of sweats and many trips to the bathroom—but no more visits from on high, thank (so to speak) God—I did what any man in my situation would do: I went to see my mamma. I had no classes to teach that day and no urge to do anything else. Mamma was now a hale eighty-one. She lived in Confignon, in a new house with a view from one window of the Saleve and from another of the city that twinkled at night like ships’ lights on the sea.
I drove out in a pelting rain. She answered the door. We kissed.
“Ciao, mamma.”
“Ciao, Tavo.”
In the living room Ferruccio, her old pug, waddled over to inspect me, barked hoarsely, then returned panting, with many a dubious backward glance, to the comfortable concavity of his hassock. Mamma handed me an espresso and a grappa. I bolted the latter and sipped the former and sat back in the damask-patterned wingchair I remembered from the old apartment, from the days of my youth when I was small and slim enough to sit reading in it on the cushion of my tucked-under legs. Across from me now were, side by side in metal frames on the bookcase, mamma’s two men, cranky Papa glaring through his shades from a sun-chair on the balcony of the chalet, and me at age twenty-five or so, obnoxiously kitted out in some kind of Scottish university scarf and blazer, with the Camus-like touch of a cigarette dangling from my lower lip and Edinburgh Castle behind. Who did I think I was? Or rather, who did I think I would be? Not a damned mystic, that was certain. I averted my eyes from that arrogant innocent and stared at the Salève.
Our conversation meandered around mamma’s gout, my indigestion, her reading (all Italian authors now—Sciascia, Levi, Bassani), my writing (nil). She delicately avoided mentioning my job and inquired instead after my car.
“Running well, mamma. But a little uncertain in third. I’m going to change out the water pump next week.” She nodded enthusiastically, as if keen on water pumps. She wasn’t, but it was diplomacy, not senility, that caused her to inquire; thank God, her mind was still sharp. When I finally nudged the conversation around to problems at work, after another long lull in a conversational byway devoted to last night’s TV movie on TSR6 (Unterkampf, with Bettina Faustus) she interjected,
“But you have some personal problem, don’t you, caro? What is it? Che c’é? Una donna? Sei malato?”
I took a deep breath.
“No, I’m not sick—well, not really. I have a mild case of something or other. Not that I can tell, most days…and yes, mamma, I have met a woman. But that’s not it.”
“Tavo!” she exclaimed. I sat up. “That’s not it? You meet a woman after fifty-three years and it’s not important? You’re making no sense. Oh, dear. I hope she doesn’t turn out like that Françoise of yours. Dai, dai. Tell your mamma what’s going on.”
So I did. Sitting straight-backed in her chair, she listened with appropriate gravity, sipping her coffee, ignoring my cigarette smoke, spasmodic throat-clearings, spurts of nervous flippancy and digressive tendencies, to all of which she had long been accustomed. When I was done she asked,
“Have you spoken to a priest?”
“Oh come on Mamma, when was the last time I or anybody in this family went to see a priest?”
“Oh come on yourself, when was the last time a Termi or a Caldecotto went about having visions of the Archangel Michael?”
I admitted to having consulted a doctor and a psychiatrist, and told her in detail of the Le Cluyse debacle.
“OK, so you got that far then you ran away because you thought he insinuated you were finnochio? Tavo, Tavo.” She heaved a deep, very Italian sigh that despaired of sense in this universe of fools. “You know the psychiatrists think sex is at the root of everything. They are narrow-minded, like the communists your papa loved blindly, or the bad priests who want to make us all feel guilty about life. But a decent priest like Padre Sanzio who baptized you, and I say this as a non-believer for more than fifty years…”
“Ever since I was born, as a matter of fact.”
“Ma si, you know that. After you were born, even though we had you baptized
I never believed. In a God who gives me one child in His image, then tears apart my insides so I can never have more children? Then gives other women who don’t use contraceptives dozens of children in Africa, only to kill them all off? Basta cosi. But I respect the best of religion. I believe it answers a need. Didn’t St. Augustine say that God has placed a longing in our hearts? And the heart of a fifty-three year-old unmarried man is full of longing, carissimo, and I don’t care how many poems and books you publish. And a decent Italian priest like Padre Benedetto can understand these things. He’s half-retired now, I think, but they still keep him on at St. Martin’s, over in Onex, you know, that ugly modern church on the left as you go toward town…? He can listen to stories of visions and spirituality without laughing at you, and he can even offer you a glass of Chianti.” Ah, mamma mia. “And speaking of all that, who is this woman you mentioned?”
I got out of answering that question by inventing an appointment—well, almost got
out of it. As I was leaving she put her hand on my shoulder and said,
“Call me, Tavo. Come for dinner some day. And bring the lady.”
To appease my conscience, as soon as I got home I made an appointment to see the old priest.
“Termi? Who? Ah, Tadzio’s boy?” said Father Benedetto, who’d picked up the phone with the alacrity of a man with time on his hands. “Ah yes. To see me? But of course. Time? I have nothing but. Who needs me? Everyone is an atheist now. Or a Muslim.”
Father Benedetto Sanzio was a Ligurian priest from Savona who would no doubt have been our family confessor if any of us had ever had an inkling of standard Catholic belief. He’d always been welcome in our house, though, even when Papa was alive; no other priest would have been permitted to baptize me, certainly. For one thing, he liked cars and used to drive a red Alfa Giulietta that he always dutifully had serviced at my father’s garage. For another, he was a people’s priest; he’d been in Nicaragua, and Honduras, and had led strikes against Agnelli back in Italy, and this drove up his stock with the commies. For a third, as I recalled, he was a jolly sort, a bit Friar Tuck-ish with hints of Pope John XXIII. In fact, he looked a bit like mamma’s pug Ferruccio, I thought on meeting him later that day for the first time in a decade or so, with the pug’s image fresh in my addled mind and no after-image of Father Benedetto at all after all those years. He even looked slightly Chinese, as do many old Latins. He exuded a cozy pong of cigarettes and armpits indifferently scrubbed. He extended a warm, plump hand and we shook, gravely. Like him, his office was small and dark and smelled of Caporal smoke. It occupied the toe end of the L-shaped parish hall of St. Martin Catholic Center in Onex, that vapid suburb best half-seen in pouring rain, as I saw it that afternoon through the Citroen’s wildly flailing windscreen wipers. Somewhere across the highway was the actual church, a circular 60s-modern effort with a stubby open spire. It could as easily have been a post office or the headquarters of a shoe factory in Zambia. Still, Father Sanzio had managed to endow his office with the appearance and exiguity of a traditional priest’s sacristy. It gave off a faint air of ancient sanctity. Jesus smiled down at me from one wall and writhed on the cross on another. The pale faces of saints gazed upward, hands clasped. In an evocation of the ancient darkness inside many an Italian church, the shutters were half-closed against the dull daylight, and my mind supplied me with memory’s scents: incense, mustiness, floor-polish…
“A real professore, eh?” said the priest. “I used to call you professore out of irony, in the Italian way, but now you really are one. Dio it’s strange to meet like this. How many years? Didn’t I see you about twenty years ago, at someone’s wedding? Do you speak Italian?”
Twenty; and yes; and yes. The wedding was my cousin Alfredo’s, now as then a boring civil servant in one of the UN agencies.
“And how can I help you, professore?”
Well! Strange was the reason that had brought me here, I averred, casting jumpy glances at the squirming figure on the crucifix above the yellow-paned window that reminded me of the institutional windows in Freddy Girardet’s sublime restaurant in Crissier. Through the gap in the shutters I saw a car park and cars, including a red Alfa…
“Yours?” I welcomed the diversion from my purpose.
He turned, swinging his entire upper body around like a machine-gun turret. He was dressed in standard left-wing priestly casual: a black polo shirt buttoned up to the neck, a dark gray jacket, nondescript trousers, an ensemble of blacks and grays. Then, paradoxically, like the unexpected flashes of gold in Matthias Grunewald’s gloomy tryptich, or Calvin’s hideous beast-visions of Alfas and Citroen-Maseratis past and present…
But it wasn’t his.
“No, no,” he said. “I gave up driving. I had a bad accident two years ago. It’s a pity. As a good Italian I enjoyed driving. Pardon me.” He could barely contain himself, taking a pack of Murattis out of a desk drawer. “Smoke?” I accepted. He coughed loosely, contentedly, as we exchanged lights and inhaled. “I was driving to Valence, in the Rhone valley, where there is a retreat run by the Church for depressed priests, alcoholic priests, sex maniacs tout court…you name it. Quite a zoo, eh? The church opened it after the scandals of the nineties. I was looking forward to it, professore. I hoped to spend a month or so down there, as my duties here are light—I am the curate in solidum of St. Martin’s, but they rarely call on me…anyway, I never made it, because just outside Vienne this drunken testa di cazzo took a turn too fast and hit me broadside, wam! Like that,” slapping the back of one hand against the palm of the other, “and making me a very depressed priest, I can assure you. I was in traction at the hospital down there for three weeks and, as they say, ‘my life was despaired of.’ So now I take the bus, taxis, trains, even sometimes,” he grinned, “I walk.”
It didn’t take long after that for him to take a walk over to his cabinet and extract a bottle of —as mamma had predicted—Chianti; not the best by any means, drinkable table plonk I’d seen for ten francs on the shelves of Co-Op, but it was the middle of a rainy afternoon and somewhere the sun was over somebody’s yardarm and there was a warm and fuzzy Italianness in the air which never fails to make me sentimental and prone to Chianti-tippling (of course, Barolo, Nebbiolo, Valpolicella, Montepulciano, Dolcetto, Brachetto, or Moscatowill do at a pinch). Father Benedetto motioned me towards a pair of well-worn leather armchairs in the corner of the office. We sat and sipped.
“Well,” he said.
I shrugged.
“It’s hard to know how to begin. I feel like a pazzo.”
“Ah. Never mind that. I’ve heard it all.”
“Well, Father, I don’t know if you’ve heard this. I don’t believe. I haven’t gone to church, except to admire the art, in forty years. But I’ve started to have religious visions.”
“Visions!” His face lit up and he hunched eagerly forward. “Bene! Bene! I haven’t talked to anyone who had visions since, well…since the seventies, back in Italy, a retired doctor who saw St. Peter hovering over his dining table upside down as he was during his crucifixion, a detail the doctor, a lifelong atheist, couldn’t have known…but come, professore. Tell me.”
So I did, without mentioning the porphyria. He was, after all, a doctor of the soul, not a physic.
Then, that night, musing over what he’d said, I took up Martine’s book with renewed interest, for when I’d brought it up (having told him everything else), the old priest said, “Sister Stefanie von Rothenberg? La tedesca? Si, si. I met her once.”
I drove out in a pelting rain. She answered the door. We kissed.
“Ciao, mamma.”
“Ciao, Tavo.”
In the living room Ferruccio, her old pug, waddled over to inspect me, barked hoarsely, then returned panting, with many a dubious backward glance, to the comfortable concavity of his hassock. Mamma handed me an espresso and a grappa. I bolted the latter and sipped the former and sat back in the damask-patterned wingchair I remembered from the old apartment, from the days of my youth when I was small and slim enough to sit reading in it on the cushion of my tucked-under legs. Across from me now were, side by side in metal frames on the bookcase, mamma’s two men, cranky Papa glaring through his shades from a sun-chair on the balcony of the chalet, and me at age twenty-five or so, obnoxiously kitted out in some kind of Scottish university scarf and blazer, with the Camus-like touch of a cigarette dangling from my lower lip and Edinburgh Castle behind. Who did I think I was? Or rather, who did I think I would be? Not a damned mystic, that was certain. I averted my eyes from that arrogant innocent and stared at the Salève.
Our conversation meandered around mamma’s gout, my indigestion, her reading (all Italian authors now—Sciascia, Levi, Bassani), my writing (nil). She delicately avoided mentioning my job and inquired instead after my car.
“Running well, mamma. But a little uncertain in third. I’m going to change out the water pump next week.” She nodded enthusiastically, as if keen on water pumps. She wasn’t, but it was diplomacy, not senility, that caused her to inquire; thank God, her mind was still sharp. When I finally nudged the conversation around to problems at work, after another long lull in a conversational byway devoted to last night’s TV movie on TSR6 (Unterkampf, with Bettina Faustus) she interjected,
“But you have some personal problem, don’t you, caro? What is it? Che c’é? Una donna? Sei malato?”
I took a deep breath.
“No, I’m not sick—well, not really. I have a mild case of something or other. Not that I can tell, most days…and yes, mamma, I have met a woman. But that’s not it.”
“Tavo!” she exclaimed. I sat up. “That’s not it? You meet a woman after fifty-three years and it’s not important? You’re making no sense. Oh, dear. I hope she doesn’t turn out like that Françoise of yours. Dai, dai. Tell your mamma what’s going on.”
So I did. Sitting straight-backed in her chair, she listened with appropriate gravity, sipping her coffee, ignoring my cigarette smoke, spasmodic throat-clearings, spurts of nervous flippancy and digressive tendencies, to all of which she had long been accustomed. When I was done she asked,
“Have you spoken to a priest?”
“Oh come on Mamma, when was the last time I or anybody in this family went to see a priest?”
“Oh come on yourself, when was the last time a Termi or a Caldecotto went about having visions of the Archangel Michael?”
I admitted to having consulted a doctor and a psychiatrist, and told her in detail of the Le Cluyse debacle.
“OK, so you got that far then you ran away because you thought he insinuated you were finnochio? Tavo, Tavo.” She heaved a deep, very Italian sigh that despaired of sense in this universe of fools. “You know the psychiatrists think sex is at the root of everything. They are narrow-minded, like the communists your papa loved blindly, or the bad priests who want to make us all feel guilty about life. But a decent priest like Padre Sanzio who baptized you, and I say this as a non-believer for more than fifty years…”
“Ever since I was born, as a matter of fact.”
“Ma si, you know that. After you were born, even though we had you baptized
I never believed. In a God who gives me one child in His image, then tears apart my insides so I can never have more children? Then gives other women who don’t use contraceptives dozens of children in Africa, only to kill them all off? Basta cosi. But I respect the best of religion. I believe it answers a need. Didn’t St. Augustine say that God has placed a longing in our hearts? And the heart of a fifty-three year-old unmarried man is full of longing, carissimo, and I don’t care how many poems and books you publish. And a decent Italian priest like Padre Benedetto can understand these things. He’s half-retired now, I think, but they still keep him on at St. Martin’s, over in Onex, you know, that ugly modern church on the left as you go toward town…? He can listen to stories of visions and spirituality without laughing at you, and he can even offer you a glass of Chianti.” Ah, mamma mia. “And speaking of all that, who is this woman you mentioned?”
I got out of answering that question by inventing an appointment—well, almost got
out of it. As I was leaving she put her hand on my shoulder and said,
“Call me, Tavo. Come for dinner some day. And bring the lady.”
To appease my conscience, as soon as I got home I made an appointment to see the old priest.
“Termi? Who? Ah, Tadzio’s boy?” said Father Benedetto, who’d picked up the phone with the alacrity of a man with time on his hands. “Ah yes. To see me? But of course. Time? I have nothing but. Who needs me? Everyone is an atheist now. Or a Muslim.”
Father Benedetto Sanzio was a Ligurian priest from Savona who would no doubt have been our family confessor if any of us had ever had an inkling of standard Catholic belief. He’d always been welcome in our house, though, even when Papa was alive; no other priest would have been permitted to baptize me, certainly. For one thing, he liked cars and used to drive a red Alfa Giulietta that he always dutifully had serviced at my father’s garage. For another, he was a people’s priest; he’d been in Nicaragua, and Honduras, and had led strikes against Agnelli back in Italy, and this drove up his stock with the commies. For a third, as I recalled, he was a jolly sort, a bit Friar Tuck-ish with hints of Pope John XXIII. In fact, he looked a bit like mamma’s pug Ferruccio, I thought on meeting him later that day for the first time in a decade or so, with the pug’s image fresh in my addled mind and no after-image of Father Benedetto at all after all those years. He even looked slightly Chinese, as do many old Latins. He exuded a cozy pong of cigarettes and armpits indifferently scrubbed. He extended a warm, plump hand and we shook, gravely. Like him, his office was small and dark and smelled of Caporal smoke. It occupied the toe end of the L-shaped parish hall of St. Martin Catholic Center in Onex, that vapid suburb best half-seen in pouring rain, as I saw it that afternoon through the Citroen’s wildly flailing windscreen wipers. Somewhere across the highway was the actual church, a circular 60s-modern effort with a stubby open spire. It could as easily have been a post office or the headquarters of a shoe factory in Zambia. Still, Father Sanzio had managed to endow his office with the appearance and exiguity of a traditional priest’s sacristy. It gave off a faint air of ancient sanctity. Jesus smiled down at me from one wall and writhed on the cross on another. The pale faces of saints gazed upward, hands clasped. In an evocation of the ancient darkness inside many an Italian church, the shutters were half-closed against the dull daylight, and my mind supplied me with memory’s scents: incense, mustiness, floor-polish…
“A real professore, eh?” said the priest. “I used to call you professore out of irony, in the Italian way, but now you really are one. Dio it’s strange to meet like this. How many years? Didn’t I see you about twenty years ago, at someone’s wedding? Do you speak Italian?”
Twenty; and yes; and yes. The wedding was my cousin Alfredo’s, now as then a boring civil servant in one of the UN agencies.
“And how can I help you, professore?”
Well! Strange was the reason that had brought me here, I averred, casting jumpy glances at the squirming figure on the crucifix above the yellow-paned window that reminded me of the institutional windows in Freddy Girardet’s sublime restaurant in Crissier. Through the gap in the shutters I saw a car park and cars, including a red Alfa…
“Yours?” I welcomed the diversion from my purpose.
He turned, swinging his entire upper body around like a machine-gun turret. He was dressed in standard left-wing priestly casual: a black polo shirt buttoned up to the neck, a dark gray jacket, nondescript trousers, an ensemble of blacks and grays. Then, paradoxically, like the unexpected flashes of gold in Matthias Grunewald’s gloomy tryptich, or Calvin’s hideous beast-visions of Alfas and Citroen-Maseratis past and present…
But it wasn’t his.
“No, no,” he said. “I gave up driving. I had a bad accident two years ago. It’s a pity. As a good Italian I enjoyed driving. Pardon me.” He could barely contain himself, taking a pack of Murattis out of a desk drawer. “Smoke?” I accepted. He coughed loosely, contentedly, as we exchanged lights and inhaled. “I was driving to Valence, in the Rhone valley, where there is a retreat run by the Church for depressed priests, alcoholic priests, sex maniacs tout court…you name it. Quite a zoo, eh? The church opened it after the scandals of the nineties. I was looking forward to it, professore. I hoped to spend a month or so down there, as my duties here are light—I am the curate in solidum of St. Martin’s, but they rarely call on me…anyway, I never made it, because just outside Vienne this drunken testa di cazzo took a turn too fast and hit me broadside, wam! Like that,” slapping the back of one hand against the palm of the other, “and making me a very depressed priest, I can assure you. I was in traction at the hospital down there for three weeks and, as they say, ‘my life was despaired of.’ So now I take the bus, taxis, trains, even sometimes,” he grinned, “I walk.”
It didn’t take long after that for him to take a walk over to his cabinet and extract a bottle of —as mamma had predicted—Chianti; not the best by any means, drinkable table plonk I’d seen for ten francs on the shelves of Co-Op, but it was the middle of a rainy afternoon and somewhere the sun was over somebody’s yardarm and there was a warm and fuzzy Italianness in the air which never fails to make me sentimental and prone to Chianti-tippling (of course, Barolo, Nebbiolo, Valpolicella, Montepulciano, Dolcetto, Brachetto, or Moscatowill do at a pinch). Father Benedetto motioned me towards a pair of well-worn leather armchairs in the corner of the office. We sat and sipped.
“Well,” he said.
I shrugged.
“It’s hard to know how to begin. I feel like a pazzo.”
“Ah. Never mind that. I’ve heard it all.”
“Well, Father, I don’t know if you’ve heard this. I don’t believe. I haven’t gone to church, except to admire the art, in forty years. But I’ve started to have religious visions.”
“Visions!” His face lit up and he hunched eagerly forward. “Bene! Bene! I haven’t talked to anyone who had visions since, well…since the seventies, back in Italy, a retired doctor who saw St. Peter hovering over his dining table upside down as he was during his crucifixion, a detail the doctor, a lifelong atheist, couldn’t have known…but come, professore. Tell me.”
So I did, without mentioning the porphyria. He was, after all, a doctor of the soul, not a physic.
Then, that night, musing over what he’d said, I took up Martine’s book with renewed interest, for when I’d brought it up (having told him everything else), the old priest said, “Sister Stefanie von Rothenberg? La tedesca? Si, si. I met her once.”