The Last Cato Read Online Free Page A

troubles.
    Sisters Ferma, Margherita, and Valeria, who worked together in a public school nearby, had just gotten home. They were in the kitchen, fixing dinner and chatting happily. Ferma, fifty-five and the oldest, still stubbornly wore a uniform. After habits were retired, she’d donned a white shirt, a navy blue cardigan, a skirt that reached below her knees, and thick black stockings. Margherita, the mother superior of our community and director of the school, was only a few years older than I. Our relationship over the years had gone from distant to warm, then from warm to friendly, but not any further. Lastly, young Valeria from Milan taught four- and five-year-olds, among whom increasingly numbered the children of immigrant Arabs and Asians, with all the problems of communication this brought to a classroom. I had recently seen her reading a big book on the customs and religions of other continents.
    The three respected my work at the Vatican, but they didn’t know the details of what I did. All that they knew was that they shouldn’t ask too many questions; I assume they must have been warned firmly by our superiors, for in my contract with the Vatican, one clause was explicitly clear: Under penalty of excommunication, I was forbidden to discuss my work. However, once in a while they liked to hear what I’d recently discovered about the first Christian communities or the beginnings of the church. I only talked about good things, the things I could divulge without undermining the official history or the props of their faith. How would I explain to them that in a zealously guarded writing, Ireneo, one of the fathers of the church in the year 183, was cited as the first pope—not Peter, who wasn’t even mentioned? Or that the official list of the first popes, collected in the Catalogus Liberianus from the year 354, was completely false, and that the alleged pontiffs who appeared on that list (Anacleto, Clement I, Evaristo, Alexander) hadn’t even existed? Or that the four Gospels had been written after the Epistles of Paul, the true forger of our church, following his doctrine and teachings, and not the other way around as everyone believed? Why tell them any of that? My doubts and fears, my internal struggles and great suffering, which Ferma, Margherita, and Valeria clearly sensed, were a secret only my confessor could be a witness to. All of us who worked in the third and fourth subterranean floors of the Classified Archives had the same confessor, the Franciscan father Egilberto Pintonello.
    After putting supper in the oven and setting the table, my three sisters and I went to our small chapel and sat on floor cushions around a shrine where a tiny candle permanently burned. Together, we prayed the painful mysteries of the Rosary, and soon we grew quiet, gathered in prayer. It was Lent. On Father Pintonello’s recommendation, I reflected on Jesus’s forty days of fasting in the desert and the devil’s temptations. It was not exactly my taste, but I’ve always been tremendously disciplined. It would never have occurred to me to go against my confessor’s suggestions.
    As I prayed, the meeting with the prelates came back to me again and again, blocking my prayers. I asked myself how I could possibly succeed at my work if they were going to keep information from me. Besides, the subject was very strange. “The man in the photographs,” Monsignor Tournier had said, “was implicated in a serious crime against the Catholic Church, as well as against all other Christian churches. We are very sorry, but we cannot give you any more details.”
    That night I had horrible nightmares. A beaten, headless man who was the reincarnation of the devil appeared to me around every corner and down a long street. I stumbled down that street, like a drunk. He tempted me with power and the glory of all the kingdoms of the world.
    A t exactly eight o’clock the next morning, the doorbell rang insistently. Margherita answered the