.
Teléfono Vaticani,” says the light, lovely recorded female voice. “Vi preghiamo di attendere.” A moment later a second voice, this one with a prim British accent, offers a trans- lation. “Vatican telephones. Please hold on.”
I hold on until finally a brusque, live Italian operator picks up. “Pronto?”
I blurt out the first of the two lines I’ve been rehears- ing since I started dialing ten minutes ago. “Palazzo papale a Castel Gandolfo, per favore.” Which means, more or less, “Please connect me with the papal palace at Castel Gandolfo.”
I’ve made this call before. As usual the operator breaks off before I get to the “per favore,” and I get the obnoxious sound of a European telephone try- ing to connect, something between a buzz and a honk. HOZONK. HOZONK. HOZOOOOOONK . . .
Finally another voice answers, this one male and even more brusque than the last one. “Pronto!” (Sup- posedly this is how Italians say “hello,” but at this number it usually comes across as something more like “whaddaya want?”)
I blurt out my second line. “Prego, parlare con la dottoressa Pawlowska, per fa—”
HOZONK. HOZONK. HOZOOOOOONK . . .
Now comes the wild card of the whole endeavor. This is the point where anything could happen. I might wait only a few seconds before the man who answers the phone breaks in and snaps in Italian: “They’re not here, call later,” and hangs up. Or I might just hold on, listen- ing to the buzz-honk for another fifteen minutes before I finally admit defeat. Or, if I’m really lucky, someone might actually answer the phone.
That could be any one of half a dozen people.
It could be La Dottoressa herself, who may not remem- ber me, is a bit scary, not particularly patient, and not at all reluctant to act on her first instincts. It could be her philosophy professor husband, who certainly will not remember me but won’t care. We might have a per- fectly pleasant chat. But since he will forget all about me as soon as he puts the phone down, there will be no point leaving a message and I’ll have to repeat the whole exercise later.
Or—and this is hitting the jackpot, this almost never happens—it could be one of the people I am trying to reach: my friend Kasia Zajac, with her husband Stani- slaw, and their two sons, Walter and Charlie.
It wasn’t always so hard to reach them by phone. When they lived in the Bronx and we lived in Queens, we shared an area code.
