“I said nothing,” Pino sobbed in lament. “I did nothing.”
“What are you talking about?” the priest said.
Feeling like he might collapse if he confessed more, Pino lurched to his feet and charged deeper into the cathedral. He crossed beneath the transept and found a door he remembered. He went through it and was outside again, facing Via dell’Arcivescovado.
There were more happy people walking toward the piazza. He went against the grain and looped around the back of the Duomo. He was considering going home or to Uncle Albert’s, when he noticed a priest and a workman come out a door on the far side of the Duomo near Corso Vittorio. There was a staircase behind them that he remembered going up as a boy with a school class.
Another workman exited. Pino caught the door before it closed and started up a steep and narrow staircase that climbed thirty stories to a walkway that ran the long side of the basilica, up there among the gargoyles, spires, and Gothic arches. He kept glancing up at the pristine, polychrome statue of the Madonna atop the Duomo’s highest tower, wondering how she’d survived the war, and how much destruction she’d seen.
Drenched with cold sweat, shivering despite the baking heat as he moved between and under the flying buttresses that supported the roof, Pino stopped at last when he reached a balcony high above the cathedral’s front doors. He looked out over his bombarded city, his bombarded life, splayed out around him like some tattered and bullet-riddled skirt.
Pino lifted his head to the sky and from an anguish that knew no bottom, whispered, “I said nothing to save her, God. I did nothing.”
Those confessions transfixed him right back into the tragedy, and he choked back sobs. “After everything . . . After everything, now I have nothing.”
Pino heard laughter, music, and singing float up to him from the piazza. He stepped out onto the balcony and looked over the railing. Ninety meters below, down where he’d seen the workmen erecting the spotlights nearly two years before, violins played, and accordions, and guitars. He could see bottles of wine being passed around, and couples were beginning to kiss and dance and love on the back side of war.
Pain and grief sawed through Pino. This torment was his punishment, he decided. He bowed his head, understanding that this was between God and . . . The aria of the heartbroken clown echoed in his ears and Anna crumpled and fell again, and again, and . . . in a matter of seconds, his faith in God, in life, in love, and in a better tomorrow drained away to empty.
Pino held on to a marble post and climbed up onto the balcony rail, a betrayer, abandoned and alone. He gazed at the puffy clouds scudding across the azure sky and decided that clouds and sky were good enough to look at while dying.
“You saw all that I did, Lord,” Pino said, letting go of the post to take the worst step of all. “Have mercy on my soul.”
Chapter Thirty-One
“Stop!” a man shouted behind him.
Pino startled, almost lost his full balance, almost pitched off the railing, almost plunged thirty stories to the stone piazza and death. But his mountaineering reflexes were too ingrained. His fingers caught the post. He steadied himself enough to look over his shoulder and felt his heart try to crawl out of his chest.
The cardinal of Milan was standing there, not three meters away.
“What are you doing?” Schuster demanded.
“Dying,” Pino said dully.
“You’ll do no such thing, not in my church, and not on this day of all days,” the cardinal said. “There’s been too much bloodshed already. Get down from there, young man. Now.”
“Really, My Lord Cardinal, it’s better this way.”
“My Lord Cardinal?”
The prince of the church squinted, adjusted his glasses, and looked closer. “Only one person I know calls me that. You’re General Leyers’s driver. You’re Pino Lella.”
“Which is why jumping is better than living.”
Cardinal Schuster shook his head, took a step toward him. “Are you the traitor and collaborator who’s supposedly hiding in the Duomo?”
Pino nodded.
“Get down, then,” Schuster said, holding out his hand. “You’re safe. I’m granting you sanctuary. No one will harm you under my protection.”
Pino wanted to cry, but said, “You wouldn’t if you knew what I’ve done.”
“I know what Father Re told me about you. It’s enough for me to know I should save you. Take my hand now. You’re making me ill standing up there like that.”
Pino looked down and saw Schuster’s hand and his cardinal’s ring, but he did not take it.
“What would Father Re have you do?” Cardinal Schuster said.
At that, something gave way inside Pino. He grabbed the cardinal’s hand, got down, and stood there, stooped and trying not to break down.
Schuster put his hand on Pino’s trembling shoulder. “It can’t be all that bad, my son.”
“It’s worse, My Lord Cardinal,” Pino said. “The worst. The go-to-hell kind of act.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” Schuster said, guiding him away from the balcony.
He got Pino to sit down in the shade of one of the cathedral’s flying buttresses. Pino did, vaguely aware of the music still playing below, vaguely aware of the cardinal calling to someone to get food and water. Then Schuster crouched beside Pino.
“Tell me now,” the cardinal said. “I will hear your confession.”
Pino gave Schuster the spine of his story with Anna, how he’d met her on the street the first day of the bombardment, and then fourteen months later through General Leyers’s mistress, how they’d fallen in love, and how they’d planned to marry, and how she’d tragically died in front of a firing squad not an hour before.
“I said nothing to stop them,” he wept. “I did nothing to save her.”
Cardinal Schuster closed his eyes.
Pino choked, “If I really loved her, I . . . I should have been willing to die with her.”
“No,” the prelate said, opening his eyes and fixing them on Pino. “It is a tragedy that your Anna died that way, but you had the right to survive. Every human has that basic, God-given right, Pino, and you feared for your life.”
Pino threw up his hands and cried, “Do you know how many times I’ve feared for my life in the last two years?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Every time before, I had faith in doing the right thing, no matter the danger. But I just . . . couldn’t believe in Anna enough to . . .”
He started to cry again.
“Faith is a strange creature,” Schuster said. “Like a falcon that nests year after year in the same place, but then flies away, sometimes for years, only to return again, stronger than ever.”
“I don’t know if it will ever return for me.”
“It will. In time. Why don’t you come with me now? We’ll get you fed, and I’ll find a place for you to spend the night.”