Prologue: The Table

Rome, an autumn morning

Caffè della Pace, just off the Piazza Navona. A Tuesday in October. The summer tourists have thinned to a manageable trickle. The morning light comes in at an angle through the old windows, and the espresso machine performs its hissing liturgy in the background. The tables are small and the chairs are close, and the owners have long since stopped caring whether you stay an hour or four.

Emmanuel arrives first.

This is not a surprise. In forty years of friendship, Father Emmanuel Conti has never been late for anything. He is already seated when I arrive, his coat folded over the back of his chair, a copy of something by Balthasar facedown on the table, his hands wrapped around a small cup as though warming them at a fire. He is seventy-one years old, which he wears with considerably more dignity than I wear my own seventy-eight.

He rises when he sees me. This is Emmanuel — he would rise to greet a passing stranger if the occasion seemed to call for it.

“Tardissimo,” he says, though I am exactly on time.

“Tu sei impossibile,” I tell him, and we embrace the way old men do, with more weight and care than young men manage, because we both know how many people we have lost and how precious the ones still standing have become.

We sit. We order. The morning moves around us at Rome's particular pace, which is to say it moves quickly and slowly at the same time, and somehow everything gets done.

Michael arrives seven minutes later, slightly breathless, carrying a notebook that has already seen considerable use. He is an American, which means he apologizes for being late in a way that implies he does not entirely believe he is late. I find this charming.

I have known him through correspondence and conversation for some time before this meeting. I have read his work — nine volumes of Christian apologetics that arrived in my life like a stone thrown into a still pond. The ripples have not stopped. I expected someone more guarded in person. He is, if anything, more direct.

“Coffee?” I offer.

“Always,” he says, and sits down across from us and opens his notebook, and looks at me the way people look at a building they intend to understand, not just to admire.

Good. I have had enough admiration in my life. Understanding is rarer and more valuable.

Emmanuel refills his cup. Michael uncaps his pen. Outside, a pigeon makes its case for the breadcrumbs near the door.

We talk for a while about nothing consequential — the weather, the state of Roman traffic, a small theological argument Emmanuel and I have been conducting for approximately three decades and which neither of us expects to resolve. Michael listens to this with visible amusement.

Then he says: “Where do we begin?”

And Emmanuel, without looking up from his cup, says the thing he has been saying to me in private for years:

Emmanuel: “The Church knows your theology, Augusto. It does not yet know your life. Begin there.”

He is right. He is almost always right, which is one of the great irritations and great gifts of a long friendship.

I look at Michael’s open notebook. I look at Emmanuel’s steady face. I look at the morning light coming in through the old windows of the Caffè della Pace, and I think of Brescia in 1946, which is where everything begins.

“Alright,” I say. “Then I will tell you about my father’s hands.”