I’m planning on taking the Metro from Tiburtina station to Termini, where the 7:15 train from Rome to Reggio Calabria is waiting for me. I don’t have much baggage so it will be easy.
Mistake. It would be easy if I had a ticket. But I don’t have one. I don’t even have a one-euro coin, and in any case all the ticket machines are out of order. Only a child, a madman or a German could hope for a ticket window open at 6:38 in the morning on Easter Sunday. I may be ethnically Germanic but my region has been part of Italy for too long for me to harbor that illusion.
I go up from the Metro to the floor above and look for a newsagent. The first one I come across is open but has run out of tickets, the second one is closed because, as we said, it’s now 6:43 on Easter morning, and the third one is at least a mile away, as I am told by the sleepy Ukrainian behind the counter of a café.
Never mind, I’ll take a taxi. I come out of the station as the Roman sky starts to assume a thousand different colors, and stop to look at it. Impalpable swooshes of orange, grey, acid green and pink expand against a turquoise background. Delicate, dreamy colors you wouldn’t expect to see above this cruelly ugly part of the city, with its overpass as high as the windows of the third-floor dining rooms and kitchens. And yet even above this flaky gray, even I, accustomed to mountain sunsets, am struck by the magnificence of the Roman sky. Then I look down again and go on my way.
Next to the sign that says TAXI, whose only aim is to fool the masses, there’s a dozen or so passengers, survivors of sleeper trains, disheveled and dazed, scowling at one another. Because, despite an almost sleepless night, it’s not hard to estimate the waiting time: at a twelve passengers to zero taxi rate, it’s not going to be short.
Welcome to Rome.
When I manage to get to Termini, the train to Calabria must already be near Latina. The next one is at eleven something. I’ve got almost four hours to wait.
It’s no longer dawn and the station is animated as though it were a weekday. Flat screens all over the place are broadcasting ads, the same ones over and over again. A woman of indefinable age, with thin gray curls like rat tails stuck to her head, stops me with a friendly smile. She asks me where the supermarket is. I can’t tell her and apologize. She thanks me as though I’ve just saved her life. I go to the ATM, buy a newspaper, and see her again. She is now leaning over a baby in a carriage, and is making a coin appear and disappear before his eyes, except that the trick doesn’t work very well. The baby and his young mother, both with smooth black hair and features from the Andes, neither encourage her nor send her away: they look at her silently and patiently, waiting for her to stop. Once she’s finished her trick, the woman says goodbye and leaves with the contented smile of someone who has a place in the world. The mother and child don’t even look at her.
I sit in a café. Coffee, croissant, fruit juice for the vitamins that keep your skin young, newspaper. I peruse everything from beginning to end, even the page about Rome, the letters from readers complaining about the potholes in the roads, the complaints about illegal parking, the real estate section. I decide to take a walk in that large shopping mall that Termini station has turned into. Even though it’s Easter, many shops are open, especially the many lingerie boutiques: there seems to be one on every corner. I loaf around, trying to kill time. I’m traveling to see a man whose absence marked my life and my mother’s, I’m not here to shop. Then I hear someone singing.
On the deepest underground level of the shopping mall, outside the umpteenth male-female lingerie shop, there’s something that looks like the door to a car mechanic’s. The inside glass doors are open on what leads to a kind of long, narrow garage, without windows, illuminated by a graceless neon light. At the end, there’s a table covered with a white cloth and a large bronze crucifix on top of it. A group of people are singing together, led by a man dressed in white. It’s neither a store room nor a garage. It’s a church.
I used to like going to church when I was a girl.
I remember Christmas masses in the Pfarrkirche.13 My mother wasn’t there: the holidays were right in the middle of the hotel high season. As a child, I always spent Christmas with Sepp and Maria. It was they who explained to me that Jesus was a very good person, the best person that ever existed, who left a wonderful, faraway place to come here and teach us to love one another. I believed in this message, especially since it was passed onto me by my almost adoptive grandparents who really looked like they loved everyone.
The entire, huge Schwingshackl family attended the mass that celebrated the birth of this person who was so good: thirteen children, countless sons and daughters-in-law, hordes of grandchildren, as well as an appendix without a specific label—me. There were also the Hubers, my mother’s cousins. Uncle Wastl played the clarinet in the Musikkapelle.14 Dressed like that, in the satin waistcoat he wore for official concerts, he looked more beautiful than the trumpet-playing angels on the hut. When it was time for his solo, I don’t know how he did it, but even with a clarinet in his mouth and his cheeks full of air, he always managed to smile only at me. Christmas Mass was beautiful.
Then there was the question of Jesus’s daddy. It really wasn’t clear to me if his real father was the Holy Ghost, the Angel, or God, but in any case it was Joseph who held the Child in his arms when Mary was tired, told him stories before he went to sleep, and protected him from Herod’s fury. When Vito came into our lives, as I stood between him and my mother, I felt as though I was baby Jesus’s secret little sister.
Easter was a little more difficult to understand. There was that cross and all that blood, then three days of death and darkness, and finally the resurrection: very complicated for a little girl. What I couldn’t understand in particular was why, when Jesus was resurrected, he didn’t want to be hugged by all those who had cried over him and were now obviously happy to see him alive again. It seemed somewhat strange and impolite, coming from a person who was so good and kind, but I didn’t dare ask for explanations. In any case, I liked the bells that announced the triumph of life over death, and even I understood that was a beautiful thing.
The last time I recited the Lord’s Prayer was on the day of my confirmation. Vito had just left us and my mother had started attending church again: she was no longer living more uxorio, so no longer in sin. In honor of my sacrament, she was wearing her most beautiful dress, one of many Vito had given her. A navy shirtwaist with white lapels. She’d had to take it in at the waist with safety pins: she practically hadn’t eaten anything for weeks. She had a scarf over her head to conceal the bald patches she still had after her illness, and two purple rings under her eyes. She’d stopped crying, but for me her dry eyes were even more terrible than when they were all red and swollen. I would have done anything to put an end to her pain, but I couldn’t.
The parish priest stood smiling at the door to the church, congratulating her on her life that was over. And so never again did I pray to that merciless God who allowed Gerda Huber back into His house on condition that she arrive ravaged.
I’m sitting on one of the polished wooden benches of the garage-church. We’re in Rome, the city of a thousand churches, a hundred basilicas, each of them a treasury of art, history and beauty. This one must be the ugliest of them all. Standing before the altar is a thin, no longer young priest. He has the face of an ant: wide at the top, narrower at the bottom, eyes that are already large made huge by thick glasses to correct his myopia. He has very long fingers and large rubber-soled shoes that squeak with every step. He’s right in the middle of his sermon and is speaking with great passion, in his audience there are many women—Filipino, South American, Polish—elderly people alone, homeless, the odd traveler with a suitcase leaning against the wall, African street vendors. There’s also the elderly lady from before, the one with hair like rat’s tails. There are forty of us at most but we take up almost all the seats.
“Christ is truly risen,” the priest says, underlining every word with hands that are almost too elegant. He walks up and down the aisle between the benches, his shoes squeaking at every step: squeak, squeak. He’s commenting on the section in the gospel where they find the empty tomb. He explains in detail how the corpse was wrapped, of what kind of fabric the bandages were made, and how long they were. He mimes, squeaks, waves his hands.
It’s important for him that his audience follows him.
“Are you following?” he asks the faithful, staring into their faces.
They nod, so he carries on squeaking, looking them in the eyes one by one, every so often closing his own to concentrate better. He talks about John.
“He saw and believed (squeak, squeak). But do you understand what it means?!”
Well, from what he says it’s pretty obvious that he really believes. The priest with a strange insect head puts forward the density of the faith, powerful and without frills, of a man who has soiled his hands with true charity. That’s what this dull chapel in the underground of Termini Station seems to me: a mission church in the heart of Rome, devoted to the city’s forsaken.
He ends the sermon by talking about La Pira. “The greatest mayor we’ve ever had in Italy.” I look around. Among these foreign workers, elderly people on a minimum pension, passing American tourists, Romanian care workers, does anyone know who La Pira is? Perhaps the elderly woman who walks around the station annoying strangers’ children with silly little games? Or that illegal Senegalese vendor with a large parcel next to the bench and the motionless, focused, griot profile? I, too, strain to remember a vague notion: a Florentine Christian Democrat in the 1950s? But the ant-like priest considers none of them, of us, to be beneath this historic character and, first half-closing his eyes to convey his respect, the rounded tips of his fingers raised on his shoulders and spread open, he tells us about a session in the council hall of Palazzo della Signoria many decades ago:
“During a fierce discussion between Communists and Christian Democrats, at the end of which both parties were attacking him, screaming and shouting, La Pira closed his eyes and remained silent for a long time, thus forcing everyone to be equally silent . . . And so they said nothing, waiting to hear what he would say.”
The priest pauses, and looks his audience in the eyes. Nobody breathes. Homecare workers, sellers of pirate DVDs, homeless who haven’t washed for months, everybody is anxiously waiting to know: during the faraway years of the Cold War, in the middle of diatribes between Catholics and Stalinists, what did the mayor of the city where many of them will never set foot say? What did he say? The priest shifts his weight from one leg to the other (squeak), lowers his voice, and starts speaking in the present tense.
“La Pira continues to say nothing, his eyes shut. Then, finally, still without opening them, he says softly: ‘What does all this matter, seeing that Christ has risen?’”
The ant-like priest raises his enormous eyes behind the glasses, looks at us and repeats, announces, with a joyful smile:
“Yes! Christ is truly risen!”
And, to my great astonishment, for a moment, I also feel joy.
When it’s time for the Lord’s Prayer, I look around. Everyone around me has their palms joined together, and a collected expression. And I also find myself, after who knows how many years, muttering the first words of the most child-appropriate prayer there is:
“Vater unser in Himmel, geheiligt werde dein Name. Dein Reich . . . ”
I clam up, I don’t know why. After a moment’s hesitation, I start again. But this time in Italian, Vito’s language:
“Padre nostro che sei nei cieli,
sia santificato il tuo nome.
Venga il tuo regno,
sia fatta la tua volontà . . . ”
“Our Father who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be Thy name,
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done . . . ”
It’s not that I’ve unexpectedly discovered I’m a believer. I haven’t suddenly found again a faith I haven’t been longing for, not even thanks to this very human, inspired priest. It’s just that it comes naturally to me to join those around me, here in this ugly chapel. They all seem like me, children of an unknown father.
After mass, I stop by the bulletin board at the church door. There are the usual missionary magazines, leaflets from religious orders, the program of a trip to Lourdes, the times of masses and extra services for Easter Sunday and Monday, and a checked sheet of paper with, handwritten: on the Tuesday after Easter the Italian rail company chaplain will give a blessing to all the Termini shops.
I can just picture the ant-like priest entering the lingerie shops with his squeaky shoes, walking among dummies with tits and asses covered only by baby-dolls and tangas. He will not lose his composure, he will bless everyone with his wide smile, sprinkle holy water with his long fingers over see-through push-up bras, look with benevolence from behind his thick glasses at sales assistants with too much make-up piously bowing their heads.
It’s almost time for the train. I buy water, some fruit, no sandwiches because there simply has to be a restaurant car on a train journey of seven hundred kilometers, right? An eighteen-year-old Romany in a colorful skirt is sitting on one of the black, fake leather couches scattered around the station; she has a baby in her arms, plus a girl who looks about two and a slightly older, snotty-nosed boy on either side. They’re staring intently at one of the flat screens constantly recycling advertising, paying no attention to the bustle around them. They’re relaxed and at ease like any family watching television on their living room sofa. When I get on the escalator to the platform, they vanish from my sight.