words. You spent a full year doing research on the symbology outside the caved-in chamber. You’ve studied first- century AD Roman astrology exhaustively. You were one of my brightest students. I’m confident that you can hit the ground running. No one is in a better position to formulate an opinion quickly.’
Elisabetta stood up, vexed, her face flushed. ‘That was twelve years ago, Professor! I have a different life now. It’s out of the question.’
De Stefano rose in an attempt to stay level with Elisabetta but she was still almost a head taller than him. ‘Archbishop Luongo is pleased that you’re in the clergy. He believes you’ll have the right sensitivity to the issues and he won’t lose any more sleep over confidentiality. Tell me, did you retain your research notes and papers?’
‘They’re in my father’s apartment somewhere,’ she said distractedly. ‘But I can’t just leave my school. I can’t abandon my students.’
‘Arrangements are already being made,’ De Stefano said, his tone suddenly more forceful, more insistent. ‘This evening Monsignor Mattera at the Vatican, the gentleman in charge of all the Church’s religious orders, will be calling the Mother General of your order in Malta. Your Principal, Sister Marilena, will be informed tonight. The wheels are in motion, Elisabetta. You have to help us. I’m afraid you have no choice.’
FOUR
MORNING PRAYER IN the chapel. Lesson-plan reviews. Teaching. Marking homework. Evening prayer. Communal dining in the residence. Reading and meditation. Night-time prayer. Bed.
Such was Elisabetta’s rhythm, the gentle pulse of her weekdays.
Saturdays were for chapel and private prayer, shopping, chatting with sisters and novices, perhaps a football match on TV or a movie.
But Sunday was her favorite. She took Mass at the Basilica Santa Maria in Trastevere. It was here that, as a girl, she took her First Communion, here that she prayed for her sick mother, here that she saw her off with an achingly sad Funeral Mass, here that she came for confession, for solace, for joy.
It was curious, Elisabetta mused, the way her life had unfolded. As a teenager she’d been besotted with notions of adventure and travel, and archeology seemed a ticket to the exotic. But the gravitational pull of the ancient Basilica of Santa Maria proved stronger than those of Luxor or Teotihuacan. Her father, the absentminded widower, would need her, she had decided. Zazo and Micaela, each with their own charmingly self-centered ways, were clearly not the ones to look after him properly, particularly as he grew older. So at university she set her sights closer to home and took up classical archeology.
Then Zazo introduced her to his academy pal, Marco. Good sweet Marco who wanted nothing more than to be a policeman, marry the woman of his dreams and root like a madman for A.S. Roma. He’d never leave Rome, that was for sure, so Elisabetta further narrowed her aspirations to Roman archeology and the early Christian period when the catacombs began to honeycomb the soft volcanic tuff of the city. She would stay in Rome forever. With Marco, with her family.
And then, that terrible night when Marco was ripped away from her. That night had heralded a long spell of physical healing and intense reflection after which she disassembled the person she was and reassembled the person she wanted to be.
Now Elisabetta’s entire universe lay within a mere square kilometer on the western bank of the Tiber. Her school was there, her church, her father’s flat on the Via Luigi Masi. They were the same few blocks that had circumscribed her childhood. The insularity was comforting, like a womb.
Mass was over. Elisabetta had taken communion from old Father Santoro, the priest who also tended to the clerical needs of her order and whose aged voice retained the timbre of a finely cast bell. She lingered under the apse vault after most parishioners had departed, soaking in the stillness. There were biblical scenes above her head set against a sea of golden tiles. The dome was fashioned by Cavallini in the twelfth century and the stories he depicted in mosaic were so intricate that she was, after all these years, still discovering images she had never noticed before. Once she had located the slender mockingbird mosaic, devilishly difficult to find, she always made a point to crane her neck and blink a silent hello to it.
In the thin light of a spring morning Elisabetta walked purposefully to her father’s apartment. The people she passed fell into two camps. One group, mostly older folks, actively sought out her gaze, hoping for a smile and a blessing nod in return. The other group seemed to pretend that she didn’t exist, her robes a cloak of invisibility. She preferred the latter. These walks were precious to her, private reminders of the secular life she’d left behind. She enjoyed looking in store windows, reading the movie posters, watching the easy street intimacy of young couples, remembering what it felt like to walk these streets as a ‘civilian’. But nothing she saw changed her mind or chipped away at her bedrock certainties; the opposite was true. Each passage through her old domain was an affirmation. She was proud to wear her faith on her black sleeves, to openly celebrate the intense love for Christ that she carried within her heart.
When she arrived at her father’s door she braced herself. He never failed to open it with a backhanded swipe, not so much out of sourness any longer but, unquestionably, out of habit.
They kissed. He was so quick with the peck that he missed Elisabetta’s cheek and landed his lips on the edge of her veil. ‘How was Mass?’ he asked.
‘It was lovely.’
‘Blinded by the light?’
She followed him toward the kitchen.
Elisabetta sighed. ‘Yes, exactly, Papa.’
As usual, her nose was assaulted by the heavy Cavendish pipe tobacco that fogged the air. When she was a girl she hardly noticed it, except when someone at school sniffed at her jumper and made fun. It was simply the way her world smelled. Now that she was an adult, she shuddered to think what was going on inside her father’s lungs after all these decades.
Befitting a full professor, Carlo Celestino’s was a spacious flat on the top floor of a clay-white apartment block on a narrow sloping street. There were three bedrooms – she’d shared one with Micaela from early childhood until Elisabetta first left for university. Zazo, the blessed son, had always rated his own room. Now their bedrooms gathered dust, locked into time warps. The door to her father’s bedroom was closed. It was always shut and she had no idea what state it was in, though the rest of the apartment was at worst, only untidy. Dust and grime were the domain of the housekeeper but the woman was too scared to touch the teetering stacks of papers and books that covered most wooden surfaces of the reception rooms.
Carlo Celestino hardly fit the stereotypical image of a mathematician. He had the square shoulders, squat legs and ruddy complexion of a farmer, which made him the odd man out amongst a cadre of spindly, wan colleagues who populated the Department of Theoretical Mathematics at La Sapienza. But he’d always been different, a genetic outlier who had sprung unexpectedly from a lineage of simple dairymen, a fellow whose first boyhood memories were not of cows and pastures but of numbers whirring through his head, organizing themselves.
He’d held onto his parents’ ancient farmhouse in Abruzzo and still took weekends and holidays in the rolling hills overlooking the Adriatic doing as much physical work on the hilly land as his sixty-eight-year-old body would take, letting his mind play with the theorem he’d wrestled with his entire life: the Goldbach Conjecture, a mathematical confection that his wife had claimed he loved more than her. Imagine, she’d said, with that look of exasperation that Elisabetta and Micaela would inherit, spending all your time trying to prove the assertion that every even integer greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers! She couldn’t fathom it then, and what would she have thought if she’d lived another twenty-five years? Here he was, still trying to prove the damned theorem for the sake of bragging rights which had eluded the world’s mathematicians for 250 years.
Elisabetta thought her father looked tired, his thick white hair more disheveled than usual. ‘How have you been feeling, Papa?’
‘Me? Fine. Why?’
‘No reason. Just asking. When are Micaela and Zazo coming?’
