The Pop’s Rhinoceros (106 page)

Now he was floating down a river, in the dark, trussed up in the bottom of a canoe tied to a raft on which the very beast that had lured them here was now shifting its weight, bouncing his canoe up and down as though it wanted to capsize all three of them. Had they been in worse scrapes than this?

“No, Salvestro,” said Bernardo, “we haven’t.”

V
ioletta’s worn leather slippers padded quietly over the cold flagstones. Drafts chilled her ankles where the threadbare gown she had worn throughout the winter fell short. She recalled the chests that, in previous times, would be lowered from the attics, her ladies-in-waiting cracking open their lids and brushing away the wax used to seal them against the moths, then lifting out her winter gowns and shawls. Rich velvets and woolens, their laundered folds falling heavily open. The mere sight of them had warmed her. It would have been more practical, she now told herself, to have plugged the gaps beneath the doors, to have shuttered up the windows, to have paid fewer milliners and more masons. The palazzo was a low and ramshackle sprawl, standing alone on the low rise of the foreshore. The sea sat before it and the marshes behind it. Winds whistled down from the mountains to the north and east, or off the sea, or along the coast. She shivered, walking down the passageway. Two more women had arrived the previous night, and there was nowhere for them to sleep as yet. She heard the cart being pulled about in the courtyard below. Its iron-banded wheels grated on the cobbles, more of which had lifted after the frost got its fingers underneath them. An airy thud would be the stable doors closing. Perhaps the new arrivals might sleep there, if more blankets could be found? Violetta climbed stairs. She considered the realignment of her circumstances.

A door opened somewhere and the cold waft of air made her clutch her elbows. The coarse voices of the women quartered in what had once been her dining hall reached her ears in dulled bursts of noise. The wind plucked a shutter open and banged it against its frame. She turned a corner and walked past rooms that had once played host to her friends when they had quit Spezia’s pestilential summer and gathered here for the
villegiatura
. She had taken her lovers from these rooms. Amongst her new companions she was the oldest woman in the house, though many of them appeared more aged than she. Their profession exhausted them, coarsened their features. Each repetition of the act was vulgarly supposed to shorten one’s life by a day, which was a silly superstition, thought Violetta. One might grow old from a season of such work. The sort of nonsense peddled by her brother. She reached out to pull the shutter closed. The seaward vista was darkening, and the wind had swung around to blow directly inland. Thunderheads were piled up on the western horizon. Violetta shivered again. Herself, the child, and bracketed between them a houseful of clientless Christ-less Magdalens. Her
brother had grown exasperated, then furious when she had reassigned her revenues, withdrawing them from his bishopric and pouring them into the maintenance of this hospice. It had taken a year to persuade him to send a priest to hear the poor creatures’ confessions. A drunk had finally arrived, snored his way through the absolutions, watered his mule, and succumbed to his stupor in the stables. Faced with her fury and to make amends, her brother had traveled, improbably enough, all the way to Rome to petition His Holiness on their behalf and returned with a grant of three hundred ducats, which the child had then refused for reasons she would not or could not explain. Another small mystery to add to the others. She had appeared in the courtyard, a waif found wandering amongst the wagons loaded for the autumn return to Spezia three years before, and had been brought before the mistress of the palazzo herself. Her account of how she had got there was a confused and impossible fantasy studded with the gruesome incidents that little girls loved to frighten themselves with and peopled by the improbable saviors who saved them. She was well-spoken. Some of the words she used were peculiar to Florence, but that meant little except that she had heard and remembered them. She had refused all inquiries and had asked for nothing. She spoke to God in a familiar way, and God spoke back in kind. Violetta’s brother, on being told of her, had declared that she was a charlatan, but her brother was a peasant, a carnival-Bishop at best. Violetta had taken her in. And then others, which had turned out to be a more vexatious and less mysterious story altogether, whose continuance plumbed the depth of her charity and as yet had found it bottomless. Her childish charge was a kind of mirror that reflected only good, and Violetta’s image of herself transfixed her. This was her current understanding.

A little turret at the southern corner of the building had once stood alone. The palazzo had encroached upon it steadily—first a gazzara, then a cottage of ill-defined utility. Her grandfather had added a small chapel and a gallery projected over or through the roofs of the foregoing—until the gallery had succumbed to the inclemencies of the Genoese winter and been replaced by the closed passageway Violetta now traversed, and the earlier buildings became piers to raise it a somewhat purposeless distance above the ground. It met the turret halfway up its height and broached its wall by means of a low doorway. Violetta contemplated a spiral stairway of flagstones. The wind blew in by the superfluous doorway below and whirled up in freezing gusts. She climbed slowly and steadily. The room at the top was little more than a platform, and although the winds that blew through its windows were refreshing in the hottest months of summer, at any other time of the year they bit and sucked the warmth from her flesh until her bones felt as though carved from ice. Its tenant, however, seemed not to notice.

“Whoosh!”

She was standing in front of the seaward window, looking out over the water.
White crests were forming farther out from the shore, and the wind was blowing harder.

“Whoosh!”

She jumped, throwing up her arms, sending her white dress flying about her as she turned in midair and crouched in front of the older woman. Sometimes, Violetta thought, she was like an animal, angelic and undomesticated. Sometimes she was only a little girl. Today she did not know. The girl turned again and stared intently out at the troubled sea. Violetta waited a few moments before speaking.

“Amalia.”

“Have they been fighting again?” asked the little girl in her singsong voice.

“No,” she answered.

Amalia nodded without looking around.

The two newcomers had arrived cold, soaked by a late afternoon shower and in a foul humor with each other. Violetta had suspected that they would come to blows. Rightly. It had begun in the laundry room, where they had sat wrapped in blankets while their clothes—the usual brightly dyed rags—had been dried. She had left them there and gone in search of bedding. Suddenly two naked harridans had spilled into the courtyard, screaming and scratching at one another. She had seen them from an upper window and hurried down. Fights were not uncommon. After the noisy violences of the town it was the calm of this place that set them off. She had arrived in the courtyard only to find a ring of silent women surrounding the pugilists, who were now separating and feigning modesty at their nakedness, appearing cowed and oddly unresentful. Amalia was within the ring, peering at them in a curious fashion, calming them in a way Violetta did not understand. It had happened many times before and in many different circumstances. The women did not question it. Only she remained puzzled.

“Amalia, what are you doing?” she asked now.

By way of an answer, the little girl suddenly jumped up again, making the same exclamation as before.

“Whoosh!”

Her feet thudded on the wooden floor as she landed.

“I’m watching the shipwreck,” she announced.

Startled, Violetta hurried over to the window. The wind was blowing full in her face, and her eyes stung from the cold. She peered out over the gray sea, which was laboriously piling up dark mounds of water, then flattening them again. Beyond these, crests of white water were breaking out of the dark liquid, and beyond these she could see only turbid brine. The thunderheads were nearer and blacker and higher. There would be a storm tonight, that much was obvious. She would have to marshal two of the more trustworthy of the women and have them check the doors and shutters before lights out. She looked left and right, up the coast to the low headland of Punta Bianca to the north and down to where the strand fell away, curving inland until it met the waterway to Massa. In the
very distance she thought she could see the first of the rain, an advancing curtain of gray. But there was no ship.

She looked down curiously at the child, whose eyes did not seem to be fixed on any point in particular but whose face showed every sign of animation, as though she were indeed witnessing the catastrophe she claimed. Her mouth twitched, her hands jumped halfway to her mouth, then fell to her sides again, she leaned forward, then seemed to be pushed back by some ghastly detail. She jumped and shouted again:

“Whoosh! Oh, the poor sailors! Their souls are like … like rockets! They look
beautiful. …”

Violetta watched with her for a minute or more. In the first months after the child’s arrival she had frowned in puzzlement at the odd pronouncements that issued from Amalia’s lips. At times, the child had lacked propriety. At others, she had seemed to descend into a matter-of-fact insanity. When her brother had arrived with his three hundred ducats, the child had spent the whole period of his visit laboriously dividing the coins into piles. She had then informed him that the amount was seven ducats short, that Jesus had been sold for thirty pieces of silver, not twenty-three, and that her brother’s lips looked like sausages. After his departure Violetta had gently upbraided the child, who had skipped away, singing, “A sausage is a sausage is a sausage. …” What was one to make of this?

Amalia counted things. There were seven thousand five hundred and thirty-one blades of grass between the stables and the gatehouse, or had been over a certain two days last June. She invented languages all of whose words rhymed with each other, outlined extraordinarily complex descriptions of God and then forgot them the next day. When confronted with such inconsistencies by Violetta, she would dismiss all objections by saying that God had been like that yesterday, but today He was quite different, and then launch into a yet more incredible account. In her childlessness, Violetta felt, a child had been sent to her. The wrong one, possibly. Children were troublesome beings. Her brother’s initial false concern had not veiled his customary and unctuous malice, but still it had pricked her skin. Ask yourself what she is doing here, he had urged, a familiar hand upon her arm. Why is she here, dear sister? For want of anything better to say, she had parroted the latest of the child’s burblings to the prelate. Amalia was waiting for her savior, and her savior would come from the sea. This phantom ship was part of that, perhaps. In the failing light, the sea crawled and slithered like a nest of snakes.

“There is no shipwreck,” she told the child flatly.

“Whoosh,” replied Amalia. “Not yet, no. But tonight it will be too dark to see anything except for their souls. I wish you could see them, Violetta, all of them shooting up.” The child paused and looked up at her. “Nearly everyone goes to heaven.”

Violetta resisted the temptation to ask archly if “nearly everyone” included herself. She was the eldest daughter of one of the oldest families of Spezia, a town
where she was known for her charity, her vigor, and her levelheadedness. Her father had distinguished himself in three campaigns against the French, and her brother was Spezia’s Bishop, albeit a venal one. Her love affairs were discreetly managed and had given her much pleasure. It was difficult to understand the changes that had so transfigured that life. Perhaps the women she took in, most of whom would leave again in the summer to resume their trade in town, were only the rudiments of a new mode of existence. Goodness was a maze through which she craved guidance. Was this humility? Weakness? To be pitied would be the pariah-hood she could not bear. … Silly woman. The child was only a child, painting her imaginings and observations, her heart’s desires and soul’s registerings, willy-nilly on the same fantastically jumbled canvas, where cows roamed freely with monsters, where unnamed “saviors” blew the water out of their lungs and arose from the sea to claim her, where invisible ships descended from the sky and smashed themselves on waves made of granite.

“Ooh!” Amalia clamped her hands to her ears. “The masts have snapped! She’s starting to break up, Violetta!”

With that, the child spun away from the window and began to stomp maniacally in a circle around the room, her windmilling arms punching the air, her voice imitating the creaks, groans, and crashes of the stricken ship. She made one circuit, then a second, then a third, and her movements grew more and more violent, her feet pounding more and more heavily. She was lost in the privacy of her game, Violetta realized as she dodged away from the child’s mad progress. But it was nothing more than a frightening game. Amalia shrieked and shouted and stamped and stabbed, now and again interrupting this ugliest of dances to leap into the air, each time calling out, “Whoo-oosh!” or “There goes another one!” while Violetta, determined not to intervene, stared at her with ill-concealed alarm. The room resounded with the child’s cries, which, after they had grown as loud as her lungs would permit, became more anguished, more piercing, as though something that had lain concealed within her uncanny but blunt-spoken self-possession was now cutting its way out. As though, Violetta believed or realized, it was not a ship that was breaking apart at all. Nonsense, she admonished herself. One of her brother’s better barbs: You think too deeply for a woman, sister. Amalia was a little girl and no more than that. She had feelings after all; it was only now she chose to exhibit them. Grasp hold of her. Comfort her, a child in a child’s pain.
If only you could see, Violetta
. … Violetta did not see, or not then, nor did she move to comfort the child.