John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

She didn’t understand his first words either, some bitter dialect. Then: “Oh, my.” The priest appeared to test his joints, his legs toggling around beneath the robe. “There’s, there’s a cliché, don’t you know,” he stammered. ‘“No fool like an old fool.’”

She went to the fridge, yanking the handle and the drawer, pulling out a bell pepper. “Father — Mother of God! Of all the women in the world.”

“I, I realize how you feel about her, signora. What am I to say?”

A good big bell pepper, she could use the chopping.

“What would you like, Mrs. Lulucita? Shall we put an end to our talks?”

“Oh sure.” She couldn’t sit yet. “That’s just what I need, more sneaking around.”

The man’s wrinkles multiplied around an uncertain squint.

“If I say you can’t visit”—Barb pointed at him with the pepper—“then I’ll have two pairs of lovebirds sneaking around.”

Cesare didn’t quite nod.

“Do you know what that’s like , Cesare? Do you know what it’s like, living with doubletalk? If I say you can’t visit, I’ll never be able to think straight again. If it’s not JJ and Romy sending signals, it’ll be you and Aurora.”

The old man plucked at his sweat-stuck shirt, and the gesture unexpectedly softened her. With that Barbara could see how he lonely he’d gotten, caught between a comfortable parish and radical dreaming. For years and years, his own heavy-knuckled hand must’ve been the only touch he’d known.

“Plus,” she said more evenly, “I won’t even have a priest to tell about it.”

“Perhaps then we should do as the Romans do.” He too was regaining control. “We should say Dio boia , ‘hangman God,’ don’t you know. An apt blasphemy.”

She sat and attacked the garlic again.

“Apt,” he went on, “when everyone’s got their neck in a—”

“Cesare, don’t. Don’t give me that Irish wit, pseudo Irish, can you imagine how it sounds? Your lying pretend Irish? I mean, I am trying to understand. I’m trying to tell myself, a priest is as human as the rest of us. That’s sort of the point, isn’t it?”

“The point, oh my. The point.”

“Please.” Her wrist was burning; she set down the knife. “Cesare.”

“Signora Lulucita, it’s high time we stopped this charade. You call me your chosen priest, as if I were some boy at a dance.”

“Can I help you here, Father? Can I try? Aurora, you know, she didn’t—”

“Fa-ther, oh my. Really, signora, this has to stop. You’re more than bright enough to have realized, long since, just what a miserable excuse for a proper Catholic father I’ve become.”

Barbara’s turn to pluck at her clothes. Whatever she hoped to accomplish by staying in town, she’d counted on her priest to help. When the guard downstairs had announced the man’s arrival, she’d taken a moment with her hair and exchanged her frayed slippers for her best flats. Jesuit, Dominican, whatever, he still carried a communion kit. He still conducted the Mass. The old man even held a weekly service for the head cases, down at DiPio’s clinic.

“Cesare,” she tried, “you said yourself, it’s Christ who calls you.”

“But what if I no longer hear him, signora? What if my faith has become, as you say, mere lying and wit? I daresay you could see the truth the moment we met.”

The garlic had been reduced to crumbs, and the onion and pepper looked overwhelming, far too much to start on.

“Signora, my faith — it’s dwindled to nothing. A heap of offal.”

Barbara shook her head. “Cesare, please. Can you understand, Aurora’s not worth it? You know how many men have fallen for the merry widow?”

The man flushed again. This time the red-and-white contrast, cheeks and hair, suggested one of the local cameos.

“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.”