The Fifth Gospel: A Novel Read online

  “Word could’ve gotten out. People hear things. The same way we just did from Leo.”

  It would’ve taken a team of men to load the new Shroud reliquary onto a truck. Priests to open the chapel. Then more men and more priests to unload it here. If just one of them had mentioned the news to a wife, a friend, a neighbor . . .

  “Ugo was on the truck that night,” I say. “Anyone else who was involved would’ve seen him. Maybe that’s why they came after him.”

  “But they didn’t see you or me. Why come after us?”

  “What do you think happened, then?”

  Simon flicks an ash off the tip of his cigarette and watches an ember tumble through the darkness. “Ugo was robbed. I think whatever happened at the apartment had to be different.”

  Yet there’s the slightest wobble in his voice.

  My phone rings. I check the screen.

  “It’s Uncle,” I say. “Should I take it?”

  He nods.

  On the other end of the line, a deep, slow voice says, “Alexander?”

  Uncle Lucio always seems discommoded by people who answer their own phones. He can’t understand why the rest of us don’t have priest-secretaries.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Where are you right now? Are Simon and Peter safe?”

  He must already know about the break-in. “We’re fine. Thanks for asking.”

  “I’m told you were both at Castel Gandolfo earlier tonight.”

  “Yes.”

  “You must be very upset. I’ve had the guest rooms prepared for the three of you to stay here tonight, so tell me where you are and I’ll send a car.”

  I falter. Simon is already shaking his head, whispering, “No. We’re not doing that.”

  “Thank you,” I say, “but we’re staying with a friend at the Swiss Guard barracks.”

  There’s no answer, just a familiar silence, the courier of my uncle’s displeasure. “Then I want you to meet me at the palace tomorrow,” he says finally. “First thing. To discuss the situation.”

  “What time?”

  “Eight o’clock. And tell Simon, too. I expect to see him as well.”

  “We’ll be there.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Good night, Alexander.”

  Unceremoniously, the line goes dead.

  I turn to Simon. “He wants to meet us at eight.”

  The news makes no impression.

  “So,” I say, “maybe we should get some sleep.”

  But Simon announces, “You go ahead. I’m going to sleep right here.”

  Here. In the open. Under the pope’s window.

  “Come on,” I say. “Come inside.”

  But it’s hopeless. The refusal to sleep in a bed is a common self-deprivation among priests, and healthier, at least, than cinching a rope around his thigh. Finally I give in and tell him I’ll come get him in the morning. He needs to be alone. I’ll say a prayer for my brother tonight.

  LEO AND SOFIA ARE in bed when I return. This is their way of giving me the run of the apartment. I’d hoped to talk to Leo about what he heard at the cantina after we left, but it will have to wait. A set of sheets lies on my old companion, the sleeper sofa, veteran of ancient benders. Its former geography of stains is gone, victim of a woman’s touch. From beyond the distant bedroom door I make out faint sounds that can’t possibly be lovemaking; my friends are too considerate for that. But like most priests, I’m not one to gamble on human nature.

  When I check on Peter in the nursery, he’s entwined in his sheets. His Greek cross, which he’s found some reason to remove from his neck, is slipping from his hand onto the floor. I scoop it up and place it in our travel bag, then kneel beside the window. There’s a Bible here, the Greek one I packed, which he and I use as he learns to decipher words. Placing it between my hands, I try to bury my emotion. To master the fear that lurks in this darkness and the rage that burns when I think of Peter threatened in his own home. Wrath runs deep in a Greek heart. It is the first word of our literature. But what I’m about to do, I’ve done hundreds of times for Mona.

  Lord, as I pray forgiveness of my own sins, so I pray forgiveness of theirs. As I ask You to forgive me, so I forgive them. As they are sinners, so am I. Kyrie, eleison. Kyrie, eleison.

  I repeat it twice, wanting it to stick. But my thoughts are a muddle. I know there’s a good reason why the Swiss Guards have posted more men outside the barracks. A reason why Lucio is calling us to his apartment. When I told Peter we were safe, I wasn’t even being hopeful. I was lying.

  As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I look at the animals Sofia has painted on the nursery walls. Dangling from a hook on the door are hangers of baby clothes she’s sewn herself. Even more than usual, I feel the ache of Mona’s absence. Her family still lives here. A handful of cousins and uncles, most of them plumbers, used to brandish lengths of pipe at boyfriends they disapproved of. If I asked for their protection, they would probably take shifts watching over Peter and me. But I would sooner leave town with Peter than put us in their debt.

  In the darkness, I unbutton my cassock and fold it. Lying down beside my son, I try to imagine how to distract him tomorrow. How to erase his memory of tonight. I rub his shoulder in the dark, wondering if he’s really asleep, hoping that he could use my reassurance right now. Since Mona left, there has been no diminishment in my number of lonely nights. Only a fading in their sharpness, which has a sadness all its own. I miss my wife.

  I wait for sleep. I wait, and wait. But I feel I’ve been waiting all my life.

  The gospels say Jesus prepared his followers for the Second Coming by speaking a parable. He compared himself to a master who leaves his estate in order to attend a marriage feast. We, his servants, don’t know when the master will return. So we have to wait by the door for him, with our lamps kept burning. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival. I remind myself that if I have to wait a lifetime for my wife to return, it’s no longer than any other Christian has waited these past two thousand years.

  But the waiting, on nights like this, feels like an ache that rattles from an infinite emptiness. Mona was shy and coy and dark. She echoed some uncertainty within me about who I was and why I needed to exist after my parents already had Simon. I didn’t pay her much attention when we were kids because I was two years older than she was. But then, she was also too self-conscious to be noticed much. Growing up a girl inside these walls probably contributed to that. The pictures in her parents’ apartment show a cheerful, round-faced child who became more attractive each year. At ten she’s nondescript: dark shaggy hair, watery green eyes, thick cheeks. By thirteen that has changed; it’s clear that she’ll be something someday. By fifteen, just as I’m preparing to leave for college, the metamorphosis is beginning. And she knows it: for the next three years, there are new hairstyles and experiments with makeup. It’s as if she’s peered over the walls into Rome and has seen what a modern woman looks like. Her parents’ photographs are carefully cropped, but Mona herself once pointed out to me the low necklines and high skirts still visible in some of them. She told me about the secret excursions into Rome to buy high heels and jewelry, the excursions during which she discovered that the whistles and catcalls weren’t aimed at other women.

  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 de
mystify 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.

  When word spread that Mona had left us, families at our church reached out. They cooked us meals. They organized a babysitting schedule so that I could return to work. Eventually Sister Helena took over many of these duties, but even now, no priest at our church receives more generous Christmas gifts than I do, and it would embarrass the most hardened pirates to see the booty Peter receives on his name day. I’ve always detected an undercurrent of pity and inevitability in this kindness, as if a Greek boy who married a Roman girl was taking a certain risk, and now my life has become the honorable aftermath. The parishioners don’t mean anything by it. All Christians believe the business of human life is to pay down the debt on old sins. These good people helped support me until the day came when I could shoulder my debt myself.

  I had a fantasy once, which I thought I would carry with me always. It was the fantasy of my wife’s return. I would encourage her to take shifts at the hospital again. I would take care of Peter full-time until she was ready to know him better. Then she would discover that our son is not an omen, not an emblem of her failures. He is precocious, conscientious, and good-hearted. Teachers praise him. He is invited to many birthday parties. He has my nose and Simon’s eyes, but he has Mona’s thick, dark hair; her round face; her cheerful smile. He will be grateful someday that he looks more like his mother than his father. In my dreams Mona would discover, through him, that she had never completely left. That we could rebuild what we once had, since the foundation we set together continues to rise.

  But I’ve lost that fantasy, as surely as I’ve sloughed my old skin. To my surprise, I’ve discovered I can be whole without it. Only one part of it stubbornly remains: I want Peter to understand that his mother’s love for him isn’t a fiction I’ve created. I want him to understand that there are sources of himself that lie outside of me. From Mona come his deep intuitions of difficult truths, his fondness for jokes and riddles, his magical love of animals. His mother would fascinate him. I want nothing more than to share them with each other.

  Wherever Mona is today, I imagine her full of regret for the life we shared, or else for her decision to end it. It would’ve broken me to feel regret on that scale, but I never did. Every time I looked back, Peter pointed me forward. I am still midstream in the voyage I began with my wife. Every night I thank God for my son.

  CHAPTER 7

  WHEN I WAKE, the floor beside me is empty. Peter’s gone.

  Fumbling into the hallway, I find Leo and Sofia looking up from their breakfasts at the kitchen table. Leo points to the balcony, where a tiny body is hunched up like a cricket, bent forward over squatting legs, coloring with a crayon.

  “He’s making a card for Simon,” Leo explains.

  I smile. “I’ll take him up to the roof.”

  Sofia whispers, “Father Simon’s not there.”

  The look on Leo’s face supplies the rest. They don’t know where he’s gone.

  When I dial my brother’s mobile, he picks up on the fourth ring.

  “Where are you?” I say.

  “At the apartment.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Couldn’t sleep. When I get back, I’ll take you and Peter to breakfast.”

  Leo and Sofia are both watching me. Sofia must’ve been tending to Peter since he woke up. The poor woman is still wearing her bathrobe.

  “No,” I tell him. “Don’t go anywhere. We’ll meet you there.”

  * * *

  IN THE LIGHT OF day, it seems eerie that the apartment is unchanged. The wreckage hasn’t all burned off like the darkness. Peter’s hand is clamped to mine as we enter. He
steps over toys as if they’re poisonous mushrooms. In the kitchen, the broken plate is gone, the spilled food cleaned up. All the windows are open. Simon is sitting alone at the table, pretending that he hasn’t been smoking.

  Peter dashes away from me to give Simon the handmade card. There are four stick figures holding hands: Mona, me, Peter, and Simon. On closer inspection, however, Mona is wearing a habit. My heart sinks. It’s Sister Helena.

  Simon lifts Peter onto his lap and squeezes him. After admiring the card, he presses his lips into the thicket of wild hair. “I love you,” I hear him whisper. “Babbo and I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  The sink is empty. Dishes washed and cleaned. The sponge looks as if it’s been wrung dry with an industrial winch. I’m surprised Simon was able to stop himself from cleaning the whole apartment.

  “What time does Sister Helena come with the laundry?” he asks.

  I’m too distracted to answer. Now that the mess in the kitchen is gone, what remains is more obvious.

  “Earth to Alex,” Simon says.

  “Peter,” I say, “before we get breakfast, could you go wash your hands?”

  Nervously he traipses down the hall.

  “What’s wrong?” Simon asks.

  Surely he has noticed it, too. I point to the areas where the damage is concentrated. The credenza by the door; the bookshelves; the side table where the phone is kept.

  Simon shrugs.

  “He was looking for something,” I say. “He opened everything with doors. Except that.”

  Eastern Christians keep a special corner in their homes where icons are arranged around a book of the gospels. In our apartment the icon corner is modest—just a dressed-up curio cabinet where Peter and I pray. But in the attack it wasn’t touched.

  “He must’ve known what that was,” I say.

  Nothing but sacred objects are kept in an icon corner. The intruder knew there was no need to look there for whatever he wanted. Almost no Italian layman would’ve known so much about our rituals. Last night’s ideas about a deranged intruder inspired by religious madness already seem impossible.