The Pop’s Rhinoceros (112 page)

“Where is Father Jörg?” he demanded more sharply than he intended.

“With the Pope,” answered Salvestro.

Two or three times a day, women arrived with basins and cloths to wash his sores with warm salt water and, after that, to force a vile-tasting gruel down his throat. He was turned this way and that as they swabbed the rawest patches of flesh. Then one held his head and another wielded the spoon. He coughed and spluttered but otherwise neither helped nor hindered them in their ministrations. They always looked the same, although he knew that there were several of them. They kept the shutters open so that the sea air should dry the worst of his sores, those that exuded a colorless fluid and stubbornly refused to scab. Most of his waking hours were spent with his head bent back, watching the upside-down view out the window, which was the same as the view through the open hatch-cover: a sky scrubbed to a raw blue by high freezing winds. A sky strung with white filaments like wool on a loom. A sky dark and heavy with rain, prowling silently forward, belly low to the ground. A storm sky.

“They cut us out of the canoes and threw us in the cage with it.”

He thought of the expressions on the Portingales’ faces as they were lifted up on deck.

“They believed it would crush us. Or devour us, perhaps.”

The animal’s blunt mouth and lips would curl and pucker when it ate, briefly animating the expressionless head that swung low over the planking in search of food-scraps that it would deftly pluck up and then chew with a placid roll of its jaw. It seemed too delicate a maneuver for so bulky an animal. The brown-faced crewmen called it
gomda
.

“All it ate was hay, though,” he said.

Amalia waited politely until she was sure that these latest ramblings were finished.

“Do you know how to play leapfrog?” she inquired brightly.

At night the sea sounded soft and endlessly patient.
Wish, wash, wish, wash …
He was on the beach, white as a fish and festooned with dark green seaweed. Bernardo was out to sea with a good thick rope cinched diagonally across his
shoulder and a further loop around his waist. He was quite a way out and swimming very powerfully, enough power there to tow a fleet. The rope rose slowly to the surface as it tautened. Bernardo’s arms were going like windmills. He watched the hawser pop up out of the smooth wet sand and run past him to tug at the embedded corpse, which lifted like a great tree-stump, its roots snapping under the tension of huge winches. Then it was free and being dragged down into the water, where it rolled and flopped, legs showing briefly above the surface, four comical stumps, before turning on its side. Bernardo was swimming along an enormous arc, raising a ridge of water before him and cutting a deep, turbulent wake. The animal hardly disturbed the surface at all. He watched them dwindle and disappear: a giant towing a small gray island out into the dwarfing sea.

Amalia staggered through the door with a pile of clothes that she dropped on the floor in front of him. Some shirts, thick breeches, a kind of coat made of cowhide. He pored over these, turning them over, pushing them about. A pair of boots.

“Hurry up, Salvestro,” she said when it seemed that he might continue his inspection indefinitely. “Violetta’s made crosses for all your friends, but she doesn’t know what to write on them.”

He looked up at her, standing over him impatiently. “Your dress has a stain on it,” he said.

“I blew my nose on it,” replied Amalia, sounding pleased. “It’s snot.”

They had laid out the bodies in the stable. Two of them were Portingales. The rest were crewmen, eighteen in all.

“One of these two was the vessel’s commander,” he told the older woman who hovered at his elbow. “But I do not know which one, nor either of their names.”

Violetta frowned but desisted from questioning him further. He continued on down the line.

“This one I know. The native men called him Ossem. He was the one who gave us food.” He looked down at the body, which, unlike many of the others, had been spared disfigurement in its passage to shore. When the first mast had snapped it had been on the orders of this man that two of the natives had tried to break open the cage.

“There were no others?” he asked.

Violetta shook her head. The two of them stood in silence over the dead men.

“Where is the animal?” he asked.

The woman looked up from her contemplations. She led him toward a door at the rear of the stables.

“It was Amalia’s doing,” she said dryly as they emerged. She pointed to the source of the ammoniac reek now wrinkling both their noses. “Or at her insistence.”

So Rome, scabbed and raked-over Rome, where night is falling, the dipping sun giving the fabled bumps of her topography the chance to throw casts of shadow eastward over their rivals. The pink-lit ridges of the Quirinale, Viminale, and Esquiline are briefly a three-pronged claw closing about the wreckage of the Forum before the Palatine lops off the last of these and is eclipsed itself by the Janiculum. The Aventine and the Coelian go the same way, doused in black, sunk in the shadow of the long hump on which they will take their corresponding revenge in the morning. Goats scuttle down the sides of the Capitoline, followed quickly by the shrinking hill itself as it buries the jagged angles of its abandoned ruins in the chaotic tessellations of the city’s blocky houses and stumpy towers. Grassed-over heaps of broken pottery ripple and flatten into the contoured sweep up from the kinked river to the Porta del Popolo. Rome, for the moment, is the place where deer nibble the trees in the Baths of Diocletian and cows graze in the Forum, where the cinerary urn of Agrippina is used as a grain measure and the marble bas-relief of a fish on the Palazzo dei Conservatori is the pretext for a tax on sturgeon. Around the wreckage of the Flaminian Circus, tonight as every night, Parian and Porinian marbles are being crushed and roasted for lime, the kilns of the Calcararia pricking the night with little glows. Subterranean Rome is burning, too, the same lime eating out cadaverous vesicles, soft body-shaped cases of earth that riddle the porous subsoils, a ransacked gallery of empty aedicules and niches cut to the exact dimensions of absentee river-gods and emperors. Things sink into these waiting spaces, these obverse-statues of Rome’s builders and rulers and demolishers. Foundations sag and tip houses into the unsuspected urban churn. Successive Romes collapse under their own accumulated detritus and rise out of it again and again, reconsecrating themselves to the greater glory of
Ro
ma, a cannibal with the palate of a gourmet. Pasquino’s missing head, Marforio’s arms, the lower halves of innumerable Tritons … There are good reasons why the gazes of statues are almost always directed down. Planted outside the Convent of the Blessed Virgin inserted into the erstwhile Temple of Minerva is an enormous marble foot. It has not taken a step in fifteen hundred years.

And into this city, or swallower and regurgitator of cities, plods the Beast. Of the various semiofficial “reception committees” stationed respectively by the obelisk (the Portingales), the print-shop of the Cinquini (the Spaniards), and the Porta del Popolo itself (the delegation of the Apostolic See), perhaps one, at least, should have known that very little of value is obtained in Rome without either the aid of a shovel or a willingness to get one’s hands dirty. They are all meant to be there incognito and as such are busying themselves with the usual inconspicuous activities: picking at their fingernails, hailing imaginary friends, trying to read the inscription on the obelisk, retying the laces on their sleeves, lining up to buy goat’s cheese or a reproduction of the Crown of Thorns from one of the stalls set
up on the north side of the piazza, strolling about singly with their arms folded over their chests as though deep in thought, or standing on one leg while trying to find a particularly elusive stone that has worked its way into their shoes. All these precautions come to naught every five minutes or so when guests invited by His Holiness to tomorrow’s water-fight, aware that one of the combatants has yet to arrive and anxious whether they should attend so lopsided an event, arrive on horseback and direct indiscreet questions toward these master dissimulators, such as “So, has it arrived?” or “Any luck yet?” Perhaps most dispiriting of all is the thrice daily appearance of the secretary of Cardinal Armellini, who, no doubt through some clerical oversight, has not been invited at all. The secretary is the proud possessor of a powerful baritone. He stands up in his stirrups at one end of the piazza, directs his roving eye over the unhappy agents already scurrying away, fills his lungs, and simply bellows,
“WELL!?”

They have been waiting here a week now. Their guts are running white with the goat’s cheese. Most of them have two or three copies of the Crown of Thorns. There is no inscription on the obelisk. Even the neatherds know who they are and why they are here. The word was out before they even arrived because the exact same word was what got them posted here in the first place: Rosserus.

So all three camps miss Salvestro and his ox and cart. One or two take note of a little girl skipping about in a brilliant white dress, remembering their instructions, “Anything out of the ordinary. “Anything at all. …” But then, checking her happy gambols and eye-catching attire against the issued description—“large, gray, horn on end of nose”—they dismiss her from their minds. The cart rumbles on, out of the piazza and south along the Via del Popolo. However did they miss it? A few hours later the same question will be asked by a double column of pike-bearing Switzers who trot up the same road and practice complicated drill-maneuvers in front of the gatehouse while their commander makes inquiries amongst the hapless spies. Loitering neatherds applaud a slick transition from the defensive square to the double-crescent with pincer movement, and it is left to the lone apprentice in the print-shop working late to fold in quarto the fourth and final printing of Brandolini’s
Simia
to tell the vexatious officer that yes, the Beast passed through this afternoon, and no, he did not actually see it himself, nor did anyone. So how does he know? Oh, well, it’s simply one of those things. Rather like the supposedly incognito delegates.
Everybody
knows. The Beast? It just
did. …

And does. By this point, having trundled past the noisy quays at Ripetta—the light fading and giving the distant tin-topped towers of the Palace of the Senators a milky oxidized sheen, darkening further the already treacly trickle of the river, which swings away only to be met again at the end of the Via del Panico—the Beast is in the Borgo, a hundred paces west of the now defunct Pilgrim’s Staff in the Via dei Sinibaldi on the left side of the street, to be exact. More Switzers are soon milling about there, together with a small cadre of hunted-looking Palatine
secretaries, although it is they themselves supposed to be doing the hunting. “Murderers!” shouts a mad old woman from farther down the street. The Beast is gone. Where? Artisans working late in the Via delle Botteghe Oscure look up from the pile of beast-brooches they are whittling for sale to the crowds expected at tomorrow’s event in the Belvedere and are struck by the strong sensation that, had they just peeked out their doors about an hour ago, they would have seen the subject of their labors ambling down the street. How odd! They look out anyway. Their neighbors look back at them. They have all had the same simultaneous thought, all missed it, sighing, waving, shaking their heads, and then back to gluing pins on the backs of their brooches, worrying now over details that never bothered them before, such as whether its hooves are perissodactyl or merely cleft, and the position of the second horn. All of a sudden their products look somehow wrong. (Second horn?) Absurd doubts, for nobody actually saw it, and by now it is probably mingling with the cattle in the Campo Vaccino or the buffalo on Tiber island, which soon and sure enough are lowing grumpily on being awakened by torch-bearing Switzers, who prod them about to no good purpose, acting on information received from a gang of stonemasons inspecting the crumbling keystone of the Ponte di Quatro Capi from a cradle anchored to the underside of the arch. The stonemasons will not be dissuaded that, yes, it was here about an hour ago. No, can’t say that anyone actually saw it, but …