Surprisingly the cross, as a religious symbol, was not the object of any kind of adoration in Christianity’s early beginnings. The first Christians completely ignored the instrument of his martyrdom, preferring happier, decorative symbols and images. Also, the Roman persecutions were few, limited more or less to Nero’s known acts after the burning of Rome in 64 and to the two years incorrectly named the Great Persecution of Diocletian (from 303 to 305), according to Eusebio.* During these Roman persecutions, public display and adoration of the cross had undoubtedly become very dangerous, so symbols such as the lamb, the fish, the anchor, or the dove appeared on the walls of the catacombs and houses, on headstones, personal objects, and altars. Without a doubt, the most important drawing was the chrismon, the monogram formed by the first Greek letters of the name of Christ (X and P, chi and rho). It was widely used to decorate sacred places. There were multiple variations of the chrismon, with any religious interpretation you may want to assign them. For example, there were chrismons on martyrs’ tombs with a palm branch in place of the P, symbolizing Christ’s victory. Monograms with a triangle in the center expressed the Mystery of the Trinity.
In 312 of our era, Emperor Constantine the Great, who worshipped the sun, had a vision of his decisive battle against Maxentius, his main rival for the throne of the empire. One night he dreamed that Christ appeared and told him to engrave those two letters, X and P, on the upper corner of his army’s banners. The next day, before the battle, legend has it he saw that seal appear, along with a transverse bar to form the image of a cross, over the dazzling sphere of the sun. Below it were the Greek words EN-TOUTΩI-NIKA, better known in the Latin translation as In hoc signo vinces, “With this sign you will vanquish.” Constantine soundly defeated Maxentius in the battle of the Milvian bridge. His banner with the chrismon, later called “Labarum,” became the empire’s flag. This symbol took on extraordinary importance in what was left of the Roman Empire. After the western part of the territory, Europe, fell to barbarian armies, the symbol was still used in Byzantium until at least the sixth century, after which it completely disappeared from Christian art.
So, then, the monogram that our Ethiopian bore on his torso was exactly the same as the one that the emperor saw upon the sun before his fateful battle. It bore the telltale crosspiece, distinguishing it among the many variations and making it a curious—indeed, downright strange—detail. It hadn’t been used in fourteen centuries, as the father of the church, Saint John Chrysostom, attested to the symbol in his writings, recording that by the end of the fifth century the symbol had largely been replaced by the one True Cross, the same one that to this day continues to be publicly displayed with exuberance and pride. It is true that during the Romance and Gothic periods, the monogram would reemerge, but these symbols had evolved away from the simple, concrete monogram that Constantine used.
So, once the mystery of the chrismon was apparently solved (with that of the word STAUROS spread over the body), we were then mired down in a matter even more perplexing. Every day our desire grew to unravel that imbroglio, to understand what that strange cadaver was trying to tell us. Still, we stuck to our assignment, to explain the symbols, despite what all the other clues were trying to tell us. We had no choice but to continue down the path we were assigned and to clear up the meaning of the seven crosses.
Why seven, and not eight or five or fifteen? Why were all the crosses different? Why were they all framed by geometric forms like medieval windows? Why were they all dignified by a small radiate crown? We would never figure it out, I told myself. It was too complicated, too absurd, too random. I raised my eyes from the photos and the sketches and turned my attention to the paper silhouette, hoping the placement of the crosses would provide a clue, but I saw nothing that would help me figure out the hieroglyphic crosses. I lowered my eyes back to the table and focused wearily on studying the strange small crowned windows.
Glauser-Röist hardly said a word those days. He wasted hours typing away on the computer. I started to feel quite bitter toward him for foolishly wasting his time in front of that screen while my brain was slowly turning to mush.
Sunday, March 19—the day of San Giuseppe and the festival in honor of my father—was fast approaching, and I began preparing for my trip to Palermo. I didn’t go home very often, maybe two or three times per year; but, like any good Sicilian family, the Salinas remained inextricably united, for better or for worse, and beyond the grave if need be. Being the next-to-last of nine siblings (that’s where my name, Ottavia, comes from) has many disadvantages, especially where survival tactics are concerned: There was always an older brother or sister ready to torture you or crush you under the weight of their authority. (Your clothes are all hand-me-downs, “your” space actually belongs to the first person to get there, your triumphs and failures have already been experienced by those who came before you.) Nevertheless, the bond I shared with my eight brothers and sisters was an indestructible one: Despite my twenty-year absence, as well as that of Pierantonio (a Franciscan in the Holy Land) and Lucia (a Dominican stationed in England), we could be counted on to organize any family activity, buy any gift for our parents, or make any group decision that would affect the family.
The Thursday before my departure, Captain Glauser-Röist returned from lunch in the Swiss Guard’s barracks with a strange metallic gleam in his gray eyes. I was slogging away reading a disjointed treatise dealing with Christian art of the seventh and eighth centuries. I hoped in vain to find some allusion to the design of one of the crosses.
“Dr. Salina,” he whispered the minute he closed the door. “I’ve thought of something.”
“I’m listening,” I replied, pushing away the tedious abstract in front of me.
“We need software that fact-checks the crosses on the Ethiopian man with all the catalogues from the Archives and the library.”
“Is that possible?” I asked.
“The Archives’ information service can do it.”
I thought it over for a few seconds.
“I don’t know…” I mulled it over. “It’d be very complicated. It’s one thing to type some words into the computer and search databases for them but it’s a whole other thing altogether to take one image and compare it with others. They could be different sizes, incompatible formats, taken from different angles. The quality of the images might not even be good enough for a computer to recognize them.”
Glauser-Röist looked at me with compassion. It was as if we were climbing the same staircase and he was always a few steps ahead of me, always having to turn back to look at me.
“The search for images doesn’t use those factors.” There was a hint of commiseration in his voice. “You know how in the movies the police use computers to compare the image of a murderer with digital photographs of criminals they have on file? They use parameters such as space between the eyes, width of the nose, coordinates of the forehead, nose, and jaw, and so forth. Those programs use numerical calculations to detect fugitives.”
“I doubt very much,” I said angrily, “that our information service has a program for locating wanted criminals. We’re not the police, Captain. We’re the heart of the Catholic world. In the library and the Archives, we only work with history and art.”
Glauser-Röist turned and opened the door.
“Where’re you going?” I asked incredulously, on seeing that he was about to leave without answering my question.
“To talk to Prefect Ramondino. I’m certain he can set it up with the IT department.”
On Friday after lunch, Sister Chiara picked me up and we left Rome behind on the highway headed south. She was spending the weekend in Naples with her family and was delighted to have company for the ride. Chiara and I weren’t the only ones leaving Rome that weekend. To fulfill one of his more ardent wishes, His Holiness was making a supreme effort in the middle of jubilee to travel to sacred places in Jordan and Israel (Mount Nebo, Bethlehem, Nazareth). One had to admire how the approach of an ex
hausting trip revived a body in such sad shape. The pope was a true world traveler; contact with the multitudes invigorated him. The city I was leaving behind that Friday was boiling with activity and last-minute preparations.
In Naples I caught the night ferry, the Tirrenia, that would stop in Palermo very early Saturday morning. The weather was excellent that night, so I wrapped my coat tight around me and settled into an armchair on the second-floor deck, where I could enjoy a peaceful crossing. Any time I crossed that sea toward home, my mind was invaded by the hypnotic memories of the years I lived there. As a little girl, I had wanted to be a spy. At eight, I lamented there were no more world wars for me to take part in, like Mata Hari. At ten, I was making small flashlights out of little batteries and tiny bulbs—stolen from my older siblings’ electronic games—which I then used to spend nights hiding out under my covers, reading adventure stories. Later, at the School of the Providential Virgin Mary (which I was forced to attend upon turning thirteen, after a fateful little romantic escapade I had with my friend Vito), I continued to read compulsively as a form of catharsis, transforming the world to my imagination’s content and making it conform to the way I wanted it to be. Reality was neither pleasant nor happy for a little girl who viewed life through a magnifying glass.
In boarding school, I read the Confessions of Saint Augustine and the Song of Songs for the first time. I discovered a deep similarity between the feelings spilled across those pages and my turbulent, impressionable inner life. I suppose that those works helped to awaken the early concerns of my religious vocation, but I would still have to endure many years of schooling and experiences before I could profess it. Smiling, I recalled that one unforgettable afternoon in which my mother caught me with a smudged notebook in which I’d detailed the adventures of the American spy Ottavia Prescott… She couldn’t have been more scandalized if she’d found a gun or a pornographic magazine under my bed. To her, my father, and the rest of the Salina family, literary pursuits were senseless ones, more suited to unemployed bohemians than to the young daughter of an affluent family.
The moon shone a luminous white in the dark sky. The pungent scent of the sea carried by the cold night air grew so intense I covered my mouth and nose with the lapels of my coat, then drew my blanket all the way to my neck. The Roman Ottavia, Vatican paleographer, now seemed as distant as the Italian coast, while the Sicilian Ottavia came surging from some remote place she had never really abandoned. Who was Captain Glauser-Röist?… What did I have to do with a dead Ethiopian?… In the midst of all these questions and my reverting to my roots, I fell into a deep sleep.
When I opened my eyes, the sky was growing brighter with the red glow of the eastern sun. The ferry entered the Gulf of Palermo at a good clip. Before we docked, as I folded my blanket and repacked my travel bag, I could make out the thick arms of my oldest sister, Giacoma, and of my brother-in-law Domenico waving lovingly from the dock. I was home.
The sailors on the ferry, the other passengers, the soldiers on the pier, and the people waiting on the dock watched me with intense curiosity as I came down the gangway for it was impossible to miss Giacoma, the most famous of the new Salinas, and her very discreet convoy—two impressive armored cars with dark windows and kilometric proportions.
My sister squeezed me until I nearly broke in half, while my brother-in-law gave me loving pats on my shoulder. One of my father’s men gathered my luggage and put it in the trunk.
“I told you not to come get me!” I protested into Giacoma’s ear. She turned me loose and flashed a bright smile, as though what I said hadn’t registered. My sister, who’d just turned fifty-three, had long hair as black as coal and wore makeup as bright as van Gogh’s palette. She was still beautiful and would have been even more attractive if it weren’t for those twenty or thirty extra pounds she carried.
“You’re such a silly goose!” she exclaimed, pushing me into the arms of stout Domenico, who squeezed me again. “Do you think I’d let you arrive in Palermo alone and just take a bus home? Impossible!”
“Besides,” added Domenico, looking at me with paternal reproach, “we’re having some problems with the Sciarra family.”
“What’s going on with the Sciarra family?” I was worried. Concetta Sciarra and her little sister, Doria, were my childhood friends. Our families had always gotten along well and growing up we had played together many Sunday afternoons. Concetta was a generous, caring person. After her father’s death two years before, she had assumed control of the Sciarra’s family business. From what I had heard, the relationship between our families was very good. Doria, however, was the other side of the same coin: devious, envious, egotistical, and always looking for ways to blame others for her evil actions, she had professed a blind envy of me since we were little. She stole my toys and books and often broke them without one bit of remorse.
“They’re cutting into our markets with cheaper products,” explained my sister, defiantly. “It’s an unbelievably dirty war.”
I didn’t say a word. Such a serious action seemed despicable to me, since they were clearly taking advantage of my father’s inevitable decline. He was nearly eighty-five. But Concetta should be smart enough to know that as debilitated as Giuseppe Salina was, his children were not going to allow such a thing.
We sped away from the dock, not breaking at the red light at the intersection of the Via Francesco Crispi, then turned right toward La Cala. We blew past the signals at the Via Vittorio Emanuele, too. Our three vehicles enjoyed complete right-of-way at any intersection and stop sign. We turned at the Normandos’ palace and left the city on Calatafimi. A few miles from Monreale, in the middle of Conca d’Oro Valley (it was so beautiful and green, all covered with flowers in bloom), the first car made a quick right onto the private road to our house, the old, monumental Villa Salina built by my great-grandfather, Giuseppe, at the end of the nineteenth century.
“While you freshen up and unpack,” my sister said, smoothing her black hair with both hands, “Domenico and I will pick Lucia up at the airport. She gets in at ten.”
“What about Pierantonio?”
“He got in last night from the Holy Land!” squealed Giacoma, elated. I smiled wide, happy as a lizard in the sun. Pierantonio’s presence, confirmed at the last minute, turned the gathering into a gala. I hadn’t seen my brother for two years. He’s the best, sweetest man in the world. Not only did he and I share an extraordinary physical resemblance, more than I did with the rest of the family, but we also had a similar temperament and character that had made us literally inseparable. After finishing his brilliant studies as an archeologist, Pierantonio entered the Franciscan order, at age twenty-five, when I was fifteen. A year later, he was sent first to Rhodes, in Greece, and then to Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, and finally Jerusalem, where in 1998 he received the title of guardian of the Holy Land, which was a post first established by Pope Clement VI in 1342 to assure the continued Catholic presence in the sacred cities after the final defeat of the Crusades. In other words, my brother was a truly important figure in Christianity’s Eastern reaches, and around him he projected that special aura known only to truly sacred, polemical people.
“Mama must be so happy he’s here!” I exclaimed, delighted, glancing out the window.
Protected by iron doors and high concrete walls, the old four-story house had changed over the years. Numerous surveillance cameras around the villa’s perimeter scanned every movement. In my childhood the guards’ quarters had been just ramshackle wooden boxes which housed cane-backed chairs inside. They’d been transformed into genuine control posts on both sides of the sliding iron door, equipped with computerized remote control of every security device and alarm.
My father’s men gave a slight nod as our car passed. I could not help a shout of joy when I recognized Vito among them, my old childhood friend.
“It’s Vito!” I shouted as I waved frenetically out the back window. Vito smiled timidly, almost imperceptibly.
“He jus
t got out of the giudiziarie,* smiled Domenico, pulling his jacket around his gut. “Your father is glad to have him back.”
The car finally came to a stop in front of the house. My mother, dressed in black as always, waited for us at the top of the steps leaning on her ever-present silver cane. Seventy-five years of intense life had exhausted the noble Sicilian woman’s back but the proud bearing of the youngest daughter of the Zafferano family hadn’t diminished one bit.
I took the stairs two at a time and hugged my mother as if I hadn’t seen her since the day I was born. I had missed her so much and felt a childish relief to find her in such good health. Her kisses were firm and her body was still as hard and energetic as always. With a knot in my throat, I thanked God that nothing had happened to her while I was away. Smiling, she took a step back to look me over carefully.
“My little Ottavia!” she exclaimed with a happy face. “You look wonderful! Do you know your Pierantonio has already arrived? He really wants to see you. I want you two to tell me everything.” She put her hand on my shoulder and gently nudged me inside the house. “How is the Holy Father doing? How is his health?”
The rest of the day was one continuous parade of family members. Giuseppe, the eldest, lived in the villa with his wife, Rosalia, and their four children. Giacoma and Domenico, who also lived in the villa with our parents, had five children who were home from the University of Messina and boarding school. Cesare, the third child, was married to Letizia and had four fine kids who, fortunately, resided in Agrigento. Pierluigi, the fifth child, arrived midafternoon with his wife, Livia, and their five children. Salvatore, the brother immediately older than me, was the only one who was divorced. Even so, he showed up that evening with three of his four children. Finally, Agueda, the youngest (she was already thirty-eight!) came with Antonio, her husband, and their three offspring. Their youngest was my dear five-year-old Isabella.