Earthquake I.D. (33 page)

“Sorry,” she said. “You understand, I'm angry? I'm still angry.”

She could've avoided this, she thought. Five minutes ago she could've made believe that she hadn't guessed who it was that Cesare had been hoping to find, on this visit. She could've avoided any mention of the grandmother.

“Signora,” the old man was saying, “I've come to think I'm eavesdropping on a life in Christ. I've been at it for years really. One long evening after another, I've stood up at the front of the sanctuary and I've eavesdropped on the liturgy. It's my own liturgy, yet it's chatter from another room, don't you know. It's nothing but bits and pieces. Whoever designed that awful business above the altar, it's awful indeed, oh my yes. But he knew what he was doing, with his broken bits and pieces.”

Barbara could've let the time pass harmlessly, here in her kitchen.

The priest, if you could still call him a priest, went on to explain how he'd tried to sustain his faith by his work with the homeless and the illegals. “I believed that among the lost sheep, the least of His children, I'd hear Him plainly again, my Christ. I hoped and prayed that out in the streets, I'd hear it again. Clear as a shout.”

If this man knew how he got to Barbara, how raw he scraped her, he wouldn't have these doubts. “Father…”

“And it's not as if the Christ has gone anywhere, don't you know. He's still out there, isn't he, calling for our hands and hearts. If anything, these days—”

“Cesare, please. You talk as if you've turned into Silky Kahlberg.”

Something of his former tartness returned. “Well, signora. If you don't see how the Holy Roman Church can seem as perverse and greedy as NATO, you're something less than the bright woman I've taken you for.”

“Did I say Church wasn't—wasn't perverse? Sometimes? The Church and NATO, they're both of them the Mafia, sometimes. I know that. You should've gone to some of the fundraisers back in Brooklyn, Cesare.”

“No, I shouldn't have. I've seen too many abuses of Christ's teaching as it is.”

Barbara's hand had dropped from the table, the fight gone out of her. Quietly, she admitted she'd always wondered about the priest. “But still, whatever we talked about—we always talked about Jesus.”

“Witchcraft. Incantations. One speaks the name hopefully.”

When the man turned a phrase like that, his look displayed something a lot like righteousness, and Barbara told him so. “Really, Cesare, what does it matter if you sound like Che Guevara? Better that than Kahlberg's thing, playing the saint to line his pockets.”

The old man, too, appeared to be softening. He revealed that the last vestiges of belief had left him only a day or so before Barb had first stopped into his church. “It was that pair of refugees, don't you know, the
clandestini
down in my cellar.” A day or two before the mother showed up, these two young men had come banging on the door, off-hours. “Banging, yes, quite literally. The bruises on one of them, bruises all over his knuckles. I found him some ibuprofen.”

For Cesare, to have a couple of shadow-citizens come begging for help was nothing new. “They know how to find me, to be sure. Word of mouth, word of the insatiable Neapolitan mouth. Do you realize there are miracle stories about me?”

His smile was like the vein in a dead leaf “Stores about your ‘chosen priest,' yes. A woman comes to
the prete coi Settebelli
—the priest with the condoms, don't you know—and then her brother in the Ogaden eludes the search-dogs. That sort of thing. Some of their stories, you'd think I walked the streets draped with
ojetti.”

But Cesare supposed that there must also be talk that was closer to the truth. “Some of them must have some idea what I'm doing in there. Or should I say, what I'm not doing. There must be some who've noticed how I avoid saying prayers.”

Barbara figured it was time to risk slicing up the onion. She had the thought that the man might reveal some way to keep him out of Aurora's clutches, and so return to God. The priest meanwhile explained that, though he'd wound up allowing these two
clandestini
to bed down in the church, they hadn't come to him looking for a roof over their heads. They hadn't come for food or some other kind of handout, either. “Signora, they were there seeking Christ.”

Again Cesare rearranged his knees and elbows. “They were seeking absolution, no less. These two actually believed that a few words, words alone, and out of my own unclean mouth…” The old man needed a moment, his baggy fingers extended towards his face. “That I could wash them clean.”

She waited, her knife in the middle of the white bulb on the cutting board.

Cesare firmed up his expression. “They'd committed a crime, you see. Nothing so terrible really, not in this city. Your classic
scippo
, come up behind someone and hit him. Take his money. In this case, it did sound as if they'd hit the man rather hard.”

“But you're saying, these two had faith? And that's when you knew, you didn't?”

“You understand, signora, there are things about these two I can't reveal. I no longer believe in the sacraments, but I daresay you know better than most, I still have—”

Barbara didn't want to hear any more posturing. “Cesare, what? What's the big secret? They got a little rough on their latest victim, okay. So, what, were they hustlers too? Hustlers, I mean, the sex trade? One of them had AIDS or something?”

His face screwed up in a wizened and approving pout.

“So, okay. There they were, dying and ashamed. Hey.” She shouldn't talk like Jay, it made her sound shrewish. “And once you heard that, everything you'd lived by was gone. These two were the thing in the street, not Christ, not your call, but just a pair of crooks. They were full of disease and, and looking for a saint to kiss them.”

He'd never heard about her vision of Naples either.

“You could even say this killed your faith. Just another hit in the street, and for you, it killed Christ. Am I right?” She sounded far too much like Jay. “Okay, Cesare. Okay, for the sake of argument. But, I mean. What has all this got to do with Aurora?”

The man's hands startled up. “Signora! Surely you can see.” He sketched coils in mid-air. “I'm a man losing every least thread of light and meaning, and then your mother laid her hand on mine.”

“She's not my mother.”

“Boh. My apologies, I'm sure.” His hands dropped back across his knee. “Signora, are you a woman of faith or aren't you? A woman of faith should have no trouble at all understanding what I feel for your Aurora.

“Now, let us say, my church had collapsed around me,” Cesare went on, “and an angel reached down through the rubble. It's a radiant energy your Aurora has, nothing short of numinous. And don't you go getting all shifty and uncomfortable on me, Mrs. Lulucita. Don't you go fishing out some expression you learned in therapy. That woman laughs at our puny ideas of personality, don't you know. We fish out a word like ‘neediness,' so threadbare in its concept of the soul, and she laughs. She puts her fingers to her neck, the base of her lovely neck—I do love to see her touch it, signora. She touches her neck and she lets loose that chuckle. A dart of purest joy.”

“Cesare, give me a break. You talk as if she was Paul.”

He shrugged. “About the boy, as ever, I refuse to speculate. But that woman, her laying-on of hands, it's a power beyond any cheap attempt at psychoanalysis.”

“Cesare, how can you say that? Whatever power Aurora's got, it's
money.”

“Signora! Surely you can see, money isn't the point, for this woman. Money and the comforts, that's not it at all. Rather she herself is the comfort, the cup that runneth over. She's the very embodiment of
abbondanza.”

Barbara got back to work on the onion, noisily.

“Signora, I've never met anyone like her.”

“Maybe not, but you've read about them. Caligula, Nero.”

The priest gave his first real smile of the visit. “I believe I know better…”

“Cesare, don't. Father. How can you fail to see that Aurora is the worst kind of bourgeois? How can you fail to get it, she's one of the ones who's keeping down the two poor creeps you've got stashed in the church?”

The man's joints were quiet. The way he stared, thoughtful under a white shock of hair, unexpectedly called to mind Barbara's mentor Nettie.

“I'm angry,” the mother said. “I'm still angry.”

The movies got it wrong, she thought. What happened to foreigners in Italy wasn't a mere hotting-up of the love life. It was crazier than that, a roiling makeover, the ingredients chopped and cooked into another kind of pasta altogether. The movies got it wrong, the mythology got it right: everybody turned into something else.

“I think,” she said, “I'm the one who needs to get out of the house.”

When Cesare nodded, she wasn't watching. She only heard the scraping, his hard-to-shave neck against the confining collar.

She had alternatives to working at DiPio's clinic. A number of alternatives, in fact, including a couple that Barbara and Jay had rejected as soon as they'd left the meeting with Roebuck. The family could've moved, for instance, taking a place more under American protection. NATO housed most of its people at a base in Aversa, an old mozzarella town north and inland, not far from the old Borbon playground at Caserta. According to Cesare, according to Silky, the base was a transplanted California suburb. San Fernando Mediterraneo. The Lulucitas could've transferred to one of those ranch-style prefabs, walking distance from a PX with ten movie screens. Or they could've moved down into the Consulate compound. The Attaché herself kept some sort of executive apartment in one of the attached palazzi, with a gun-toting doorman and steel-shuttered windows. Telecommunications hookups linked the houses with both land bases and carriers, the Sixth Fleet, and the nuclear presence beyond the Suez was just fifty minutes away. Down in the Consulate or out at Aversa, the family could've holed up like Crusader princes in Castel dell'Ovo. The new monsters imitating the old monsters.

But they'd all gotten enough of that with the late Lieutenant-Major. Nor did the parents waste time with Aurora's loose talk about “the Grand Tour.” The in-law suggested that the family jaunt all over the NATO-lands. They could take in
Hamlet
at the Stratford-on-Avon; they could visit the grave of Jim Morrison. “Quite the spree,” so the grandmother put it. And all the family would need to do in return was make the occasional stop for Public Relations. A hospital here, an orphanage there.

Aurora, however, surprised Barbara with the restraint she showed about raising the possibility. The old playgirl never suggested the Capitals-of-Europe business directly to the kids, she wasn't so nefarious as that, and so the daughter-in-law had kept her head as well. She'd dismissed the grandmother's proposal out of hand, but she'd been polite about it. Besides, Barb figured the children wouldn't have wanted to leave town. Hadn't they asked to stay? Hadn't JJ announced that here, he and his brothers and sisters had found fresh ground for the spirit, an inner
Nea Polis?

Barbara, on the other hand, couldn't get unstuck. That's what she'd intended to talk about with the fallen priest, today, before the old man had let her know just how fallen he was. So ten minutes after Cesare left the apartment Barb found herself ranting again. She upbraided the old man in the sort of fury that, a few short days before, would've been reserved for the Jaybird and her marriage.

“You're a wolf in priest's clothing!” she cried. “This is just another oily
Latin-lover
thing, another…”

The empty room had an echo; that stopped her. She'd been railing at the blue-bordered map of Naples, open on the family table. What had triggered her outburst, the mother realized, was that she couldn't find DiPio's clinic on the map.

She tugged at an armpit and turned to the door. Her bodyguard was across the piazza at the gelateria, but once she caught up with the overgrown boy, he assured her he knew “the asylum.” In half an hour Barb was down in DiPio's office, and in another half an hour the place began to feel like just the change she'd been seeking.

Though a stopgap measure with Byzantine funding, the clinic meant business. The disaster had left behind a considerable spectrum of situational disorders. Even as the goatee'd
medico
finger-walked Barbara through the building directory, it sounded as if she'd stumbled on a transatlantic annex to the Samaritan Center. Here was a counselor who handled phobias, there a pair did group work on socialization, and a third specialized in dissociative episodes. Barbara saw post-traumatic stress, family-of-origin issues, and dual diagnoses. The tune was so familiar that she could sing the harmony right there across DiPio's desk. Between what she'd learned over the winter and what he needed this summer, Barb had no trouble arranging another of those jobs-in-quotes. She didn't have to mention reimbursement from the Consulate either, not with her husband already at work in the kitchen. For the next four or five days, until one of the doctors called Mrs. Lulucita into his office for a chat, she arrived at the clinic each morning at ten, with Jay and the boys.

Chris and JJ, though, never hung around the downtown
studio
for long. The boys were good for a chore or two, and if DiPio could think of some drug or other supply that didn't need to be rushed back to the clinic ASAP the two teenagers were glad to handle the pickup. But for the few days that Barbara played at having a Master's in Social Work, or the Italian equivalent, John Junior and Chris didn't linger at the old palazzo much past the time Mama was assigned a client. As soon as DiPio had someone for her, JJ would throw the camera bag over his shoulder. He'd hook the canvas pouch to his belt as well, an extra precaution against
scippatori
, and the later some staff member would let Barbara know which of the security team had gone off with the boys. She and the Jaybird wouldn't lay eyes on their two filmmakers again till dinner.