“OK,” I told her. “We might as well face it. Some people are
novelists; some people are not. Does it make me a bad person, that I have five
or six attempts at a novel—all of which ended with me yawning so hard, I got
contractions in my lower jaw? Anyway, what is this mystique of the novel,
anyway? Nobody disses Sappho for writing just those fragments, after all….”
“Nonsense,” Lady told me. “They’re only fragments because
that’s all we have: the wine or the olive oil or the brine of the olives—anyway,
something or other—wore the rest away.”
Lady, owner of the Poet’s Passage café in Old San Juan,
Puerto Rico, is a house painter, impresario, and poet. So she knows about these
things.
“Well, the point remains,” I told her. “Some people write
novels, others short stories, and others—well, whatever it is they write. So
this will be like that book about the orchid….”
“Orchid?”
“You know—the whole point of the book was to find the orchid
that didn’t exist (though maybe it did), and to fail to write the book (though
in fact he or she did, and it sold a gazillion copies, was translated into
languages not yet invented, and allowed the author to win major prizes merely
by looking in the directions of New York, Paris, and Moscow.)”
“There is,” said Lady, “something about not being able to
write a novel that’s warping your character, Marc. You say you’re fine with it,
but are you?”
“It’s galling,” I told her. “How can a cellist not write a
novel? It’s absolutely the same thing: you get up in the morning, put the cello
in front of you, and dog away. Three hours later, you’ve done your scales,
arpeggios, etudes, and the Bach suite for the day. Lunch, and off to your
part-time. So now, it’s a computer instead of a cello, but the rest is
essentially the same. So why should it be so different? Not to mention
difficult?”
“Well, you basically have your story, don’t you?”
In fact, I did, and it was a story that had been told, and
never told. OK—the man had obsessed me, to the point where nobody around me had
wanted to hear any more about it, much less read about it. A Polish papal
nuncio, living in the Dominican Republic, had had the habit of drinking beer on
the malecón in Santo Domingo. Well—I
could relate. After a day of sweltering heat, who wouldn’t want a cold beer
while enjoying the sea breezes off the ocean? And then there were….
…well, they were boys who were and boys who were not. Nor,
perhaps, were they entirely boys, however firmly their ages suggested that they
were. They were victims and victimizers, angels and demons, innocents and the
most deeply dyed of cynics.
They were bugarones,
though if you had told them that, you’d have been lucky to get a fist
instead of a knife in your face. They absolutely were not whores. Instead, they
were there as the nuncio was there, and really, there for better reasons.
The nuncio, after all, was pushing 70. He had been born in
Poland in the years just after World War II, and grew up in the poverty and
chaos of the post-war generation. The country lay in ruins, the people still in
shock from the upheavals of the war, there was little certainty except for the
Catholic Church.
And there he was lucky—not every priest, at age 24, is
ordained by the likes of a Karol Wojtyla. Remember him? If so, you’ll think of
the figure standing in the balcony of the palace overlooking St. Peter’s
Square. He is old, frail, no longer the athlete who skied in the mountains of
Poland, or was goalkeeper in the impromptu games of football. Yes, he would
become John Paul II, and he would be loved for some very bad reasons, and hated
for others. None of that matters now: but it mattered then.
And so Wesolowski—the Polish nuncio drinking his beer in
Santo Domingo—had had a stroke of luck. The man who ordained him was canny,
good-looking, politically astute, and knew how to play the game. Yes, he had
been conscripted by the Nazis, but that hardly mattered: every young man
in Poland had been conscripted by the Nazis. More important, John Paul II hated
the Communists, and why shouldn’t he?
And so, the future pope scrambled up the ranks: he played
one member of the Curia against another. And in the way of ambitious men
everywhere, the nuncio hitched his star to another, far brighter. As the future
pope made his way up the ladder, the nuncio never lost contact. And so, even as
he served as parish priest in Krakow in southern Poland, he contrived to meet,
whenever possible, with John Paul.
Still, his rise was never as meteoric as it should have
been. After all, the conclave of cardinals had elevated in 1978: Wesolowski was
first made nuncio to Bolivia in late 1999.
The Catholic Church, to those outside but especially to
those within, provides endless fascination. And there were those who wondered:
why had an old friend of the pope not been promoted earlier, and more steadily?
The church moves slowly, putting its men in positions of increasing power and
influence. But Wesolowski had catapulted from parish priest to
papal nuncio literally overnight.
True, it was hardly a major post: nobody can claim that
Bolivia has the importance of France or Germany. Still, the diplomatic service
of the Holy See had any number of priests—some young, others older and more
seasoned—who had a far greater claim to promotion. These men had shuffled through
the position papers, settled the minor ruffled feathers, rescued their
superiors when they had had a bit more champagne than was good for them. They
had paid their dues, and were quite ready to slip into the next, and higher,
position. So who was this upstart, Jozef Wesolowski?
And why, after three years as apostolic nuncio in Bolivia
did Wesolowski receive another post—or rather, posts. For in 2002, he became,
through the year, first nuncio to Kazakhstan, then Tadjikistan, then
Kyrgyzistan, and finally Uzbekistan. Certainly they were not the choicest plums
on the diplomatic tree. That would come a decade or so later, when Wesolowski
was appointed nuncio for Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. At last,
Wesolowski was freed of the vast, landlocked Central Asian states—rich in oil,
but with sparse populations and few believers. He had traded the wintry,
wind-swept plains for the lush tropics. And where only one in five people in
Kazakhstan had been some sort of Christian, nine in ten Dominicans were ardent,
or at least steadfast, Catholics. And in Puerto Rico, the situation was much
the same.
“So why did we have to share a nuncio with the Dominican
Republic?” asked Lady, drifting by and reading this over my shoulder.
“Why else,” I told her, “the political status of Puerto
Rico. Since we’re not independent, we don’t get our own nuncio. So we have to
slide in under Dominican Republic. Gotta share!”
“Well, that doesn’t make sense,” said Lady. “After all, we
get our own Olympic team, don’t we?”
“We certainly do,” I said, thinking of all the sports at
which we excel: basketball, baseball and especially boxing being preeminent.
And then, of course, there are other sports, for which the phrase is, “well,
not so much….” Of which everyone’s favorite is…
…bobsledding!
Yes, for inexplicable reasons, Puerto Rico has a bobsledding
team, but has it distinguished itself? Of course, for coming in last, last, and
second last in various winter Olympics.
“Anyway, are you still obsessing about that Polish
guy? I mean, how long has it been, now, since the guy died?”
In fact, it had been exactly a year that Wesolowski,
defrocked and under house arrest in the Vatican, had died. The Vatican had
breathed a sigh of relief, the world had moved on, all had been forgotten, but
for me?
“I just hate to see the bastards get away with it,” I told
Lady.
Which is why, for me, he sits still there on the malecón in
Santo Domingo, relishing the ocean breezes, breathing the salt air, hearing the
merengue as it lilts through the evening to welcome the night.
Movement…
A boy, surely no more than fourteen or fifteen, walks with
unpracticed bravado down the malecón: he fools no one, he’s the new kid in
town. Wesolowski, the papal nuncio, smiles.
The night has just gotten interesting….
