True Story

By David Fitzsimmons

There is a man who stands outside the Vatican embassy every weekday afternoon, holding a sign that reads: The Pope Hides Pedophiles. He is very consistent, this white man of about sixty-five. It’s rain or shine for him. There were several warm days last week, for example, but there he stood on the sidewalk, shaking his big cardboard sign like a tambourine, newspaper strips like shingles stuck into the brim of his hat, protecting him from the sun.

And I was reminded of a certain story I came across in the newspaper one summer, a summer I was an intern at a small public relations firm. The job was exceedingly boring, the office a small one. Like all interns, I thought it would be a good way for me to build up my résumé so that I would be employable when I finished college. My job was to read newspapers and magazines to see if our clients had made it into print, which they never seemed to.

The first story I came across was about the murder of the head of the Swiss Guards, the ancient unit responsible for the Pope’s security. The man murdered was named Alois Estermann and he was discovered, along with his wife, a Venezuelan doctor, as well as another Swiss Guard, a young man named Cedric Tornay, in the entrance parlor of his apartment inside the Vatican walls.

It was not a major headline at the time; only later did the story gain steam – and eventually it was made it into a book called City of Secrets: The Truth Behind the Murders at the Vatican.

Later in the summer there was a story about a woman, an American doctor stationed in Antarctica, who had discovered a lump in her breast that turned out to be cancer. They couldn’t evacuate her from the South Pole because it was too cold for planes to land and so for a time she had to treat herself.

That story, too, got made into a book – the woman doctor wrote it! That one was called Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Story of Survival at the South Pole.

That same summer there was the beautiful Op-Ed piece in The New York Times about a never-delivered speech that William Safire wrote for Richard Nixon in the event of an Apollo XI catastrophe. While that essay didn’t turn into a book, it was included in a book, one about Neil Armstrong called First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong.

And of course, there was the crash that July of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane into the Atlantic: the search, the coverage; the funeral, the coverage.

The funny thing is this: While I remember all these headlines quite clearly as ones I read during a boring summer spent interning, only the latter three: the woman stuck in Antarctica, the Op-Ed piece, and the crash of John Kennedy Junior’s plane occurred that summer, the summer of 1999.

The matter of the murdered Swiss Guard – that happened one year before, in the late spring of 1998.

I am not old but already I am forgetting things, misplacing events or rearranging them for purposes of convenience or linearity or who knows what reasons? What am I to make of this?

If I am young and forgetting things, and therefore not to be trusted, then what of my friend the protestor, the local celebrity, who every day stands outside the Vatican embassy, deploring the Vatican and the Pope for hiding pedophiles? If he is more than twice my age (and he almost certainly is) then are we to believe anything he says?

And yet, it would be interesting to consider: If the motivation for his standing outside everyday is personal (that is, involving himself rather than something that happened to a child or a sibling), and if one were to ask him, and he were willing to answer, I would suspect that he would be able to recall in great detail the events that served as the germ for his crusade. He would know the names, the dates, the locations, the acts – all the important details.

And if he were to be wrong, if he were off inasmuch as one day, or even as much as a year, would we who see him every day then begin having a laugh at his expense, start referring to him as “the crazy guy”? Would we care less? Would we care not at all?

Let’s take a survey. It’ll be a survey of what is forgivable when it comes to Truth. It will be a Truth and Reconciliation survey. We’ll start with John Kennedy, Jr. and work our way backward to Alois Estermann and see what they have to say.

Fred Herzog, Magazine Man, 1959, Laurence Miller Gallery, New York