“You know,” he said, raising his voice to make himself heard above the noise of an electric drill, “when I was a boy in ’58—when I was still at the seminary in Genoa, in fact—and then again in ’63, before I was even ordained, I used to love looking at the pictures of those Conclaves. They had artists’ impressions in all the newspapers. I remember how the cardinals used to sit in canopied thrones around the walls during the voting. And when the election was over, one by one they’d pull a lever to collapse their canopies, apart from the cardinal who’d been chosen. Can you imagine that?
