A traveler in Vatican City arrives during the Pope’s dying moments to experience the panic and mourning caused by his passing. While the city awaits the news, he browses the bones of saints in local shops and eavesdrops on the conversations of the priests who call this place home.
The Pope has been sick for months.
He grew ill during Carnival: while revelers in costumes and masks and wearing cowbells stomped around every mountain town on the peninsula shooting confetti, he was quietly, and without any fuss, checked into Rome’s Gemelli hospital for pneumonia in the only lung he has left. It’s been two months now, and every broadcast on every station tells the news of only one man, known of by all but known by so few: insipid pop stations cut in between Chappell Roan and Harry Styles to tell you that the Pope has rested comfortably, which seems hard to believe a person can do when swollen, sick, and filled with tubes next to beeping machines.
It had seemed there was hope, and then it grew worse: stories came down that he’d prepared a will, admitted to his assistants that he suspected he was soon to meet his Lord. Over time, the monotony of the daily reports of his survival grew too wearisome, and slowly but steadily, Italian rap emcees and techno DJs feel less and less need to tell their listeners how their world’s most famous fluid-filled Argentinian is doing.
It’s the morning after Easter and, at a bar next to the Victor Emanuel Bridge that crosses the Tiber River into the Vatican, I eavesdrop on two priests at the table next to me talking about the situation. One–the louder, stereotypical American–rattles on about how the next Pope might please him better: the current one is too progressive, too kind for his tastes. He doesn’t stand up, the man announces, to the homosexual crisis of our modern world, who can forgive the atheists and love even those who, unmarried, make children out of not contracts but petty lust. And now, on Easter morning, Christ risen not even a whole day, this priest wanted him dead, deader than dead. Dead as Calvary. Dead as something that never existed. And it would be better if he died quickly, decreased the somewhat surplus population of people with love in their hearts in the world, and made space for a man who might finally crack down on the world’s big problem, according to this celibate man of the cloth, of people who have found love.
At a store around the corner, I see a slate of antique documents in the window and pop in to look at all the things I don’t need and can’t afford, and find–marvel at, really–in a display case dozens upon dozens of time cases and frames with mountings of little fragments of bone. Under them are written, in old ink by hands surely since turned to dust, names in Latin. I ask the gentleman at the desk if they’re what I think, and he confirms: relics of saints held in churches that have been deconsecrated. If you’d like a little chip of Saint Bartholomew, a tiny fragment of Saint Agatha, he’s got it, though one wonders how these things were harvested. It is easy enough, in a land of loose morals, to chip off a piece of dog bone, lift a femur from an ossuary and turn it into fractions. He tells me that, with so many pilgrims in town for the year of Jubilee that they’ve become his best seller, after so many years of collecting so much dust.
It is a strange thing to sell your bones, both these literal ones and the metaphorical as well, but here at the Vatican, they do it daily. The Holy See sees to it that through every gift shop and kiosk and bar window the saints, and their memory, are peddled as artifacts: you can buy a statue, a medallion, a cup, a plate, a shot glass, any damned holy thing you’d ever want depicting any of a wide variety of ecclesiastical lunatics drawn to greatness or over spiked wheels. Yes, Saint Catherine died for your sins. But she’s also, now, a keychain.
And rumors say the Pope has been dying for months. The word rumor comes from the Latin word for noise and here at the Vatican, perhaps the only place in the world where Latin still has a foothold, there’s no real noise–just the sad shuffling of tourists trying to assemble from gift shops something that resembles a life, but rumors still abound.
It is important that the Pope is dying. Dying is one of the most important things, in the long run, that a Pope can do: it has historically been the load-bearing beam of the institution that its chief decision maker has no choice that he can possibly survive.
The traditions around it are tremendous, not all of them real but all of them are well-founded. Most famous of which is that of the camerlengo–the chamberlain–who supposedly whacks the Pontiff’s cold-growing noggin, and by all accounts breaks his ring so that no bad actor might use it to seal an unscrupulous posthumous decision.
The Pope is dying.
I knew the Pope. No, it is unfair to say I knew the man. We met, we spoke. I liked him and had, in every radio broadcast, listened with a close ear each time somebody interrupted my classical orchestras, my jazz quintets, and yes, my Sabrina Carpenter, to tell me how the man that I, like so many, had imagined as my friend might be doing.
The night before, a man interrupted the soccer broadcast to say the holy father was not conscious, which may be, for him, a relief: he doesn’t have to see the man he surely knows, the chamberlain of the church, darkening the doorway with the little hammer in his hand. He doesn’t have to see the flock of frocked men in the hallway trying to catch a furtive glimpse, say they were there when it happened, all of them eager to be the ghosts that keep the coffins closed. And he doesn’t have to hear what is, for sure, the thing everybody knows best about the death of a Pope: the bells.
Everybody knows it: when the Pope dies, the news gets out the same way it has been the rule of the medieval abbeys: to an illiterate people, a beacons-of-Gondor system of pealing bells from village to village to announce that something is suddenly different. Most Italians, if asked, say they’ll know it’s happened when the whole world gets loud: the system hasn’t changed one bit from Luther until now: every town in Italy has a church, and every church a tower, and when word gets out that the Pope has died every parocan in the land rushes in to pull the cord, press the button, flip the switch to set the bells in motion, so that the entire nation is a deafening net of clanging metal visible each to every other and audible in every corner of every home, every restaurant, every shop, every field, that every single moment and space between sky and soil wails and wails, loud enough to warn all the saints in heaven and elsewhere: death, death, death.
The Pope is dead.
I’m standing in the middle of all of it when the announcement comes down, watching a bizarre reenactment of ancient Romans eating kebabs and scratching unseemly places in their togas, when the loudspeaker pipes up.
We, the office of the Holy See, booms a voice that might be God or perhaps just Giuseppe in the office, announce with great sorrow that our Holy Father, Pope Francis, has died. Today, here and throughout Rome, it will be a day of mourning. All activities are canceled.
One assumes that from here, even in our televised age, the bells begin. There are a few hundred people along the long boulevard that leads into the broad, embracing arms of marble colonnade that surround St. Peter’s Square; within minutes, hundreds more arrive, with thousands on their heels, the lot of them rushing to see mid-swing, to hear them peal out, to feel in the little hairs of their arms the vibrations of a hundred thousand bells, or a million, or a billion, across this city and across this nation and across this continent and all over the little world.
They wait, idly by–some locals, sure, but also every tour group in town has heard the news, changed their plans, and scurries in: they don’t call Rome the Eternal City for nothing. The Forum’s been there for thousands of years. The Colosseum is forever. But the Pope dies only today.
Soon, the road is choked with so many prayers and so many selfies that it becomes impassable. Italian news reporters–men and women who, by appearances, are chosen for their ample hair rather than their hard-nosed journalism–nudge and shove like mushrooms through the crowd, trying to find the best spot to stand in front of a camera.
The city custodians stand their brooms against the wall–no chance of keeping it clean today–and from nowhere, as if by parachute, Africans appear at every corner with their hands out, begging for alms. They’re, in fact, the only ones talking: every breath in the world’s smallest nation is empty. No Our Fathers, no Hail Marys, just waiting and wishing. Somewhere, one suspects, there’s a priest in a bar, his cell phone in his hand, with a great deal to say–but he is not here.
The news reporter closest to me announces–one wonders what soap opera he’s broken in on–that they’ll just be a lone, specific set of bells rung in a few hours, a simple ceremony with no need to echo its largesse throughout the land.
The tourists and their guides do not know what to do: there’s no show today. The man is not at home. Even the chamberlain’s small hammer was far too far away, and much too private, to even announce the unliving things it’s shattered.
For an hour, everyone mills about, hoping the news report is wrong. People in bucket hats lift up their cell phones on long rods to take pictures of the huge crowd; eventually, groups of a dozen here and a dozen there begin to lope into the gift shops, to collect a memory of the day: a cup, a plate, a statue, a tiny slice of holy hip bone.
In the end, the city and villages, like here, hold their mourning only in their hearts and not in their high iron: eventually, the piazza and road empty out over the bridge, water through a funnel back into Rome. And at the Vatican, city of martyrs, city of sinners, all is quieted, the Pope is silenced, and nothing in all of Christendom is any louder than the saints, and all their bones.
