The Pop’s Rhinoceros (113 page)

But nothing. It’s gone, and Boccamazza is digging a pit in Trastevere with the help of two dozen Corsicans. “Netting over the top,” he tells them. “Leaves, stuff like that.” The Corsicans indicate surprise on learning of the pit’s purpose, it being unlikely that the Beast would return to the exact same spot, and even though Boccamazza is His Holiness’s chief huntsman, renowned for the wiliness of his trapping, this strikes the Corsicans as an elementary error. Should they have offered Boccamazza this opinion before digging the pit? “What? Here? An hour ago …?” Which is confirmed by the youngest of three priests sitting down to a late fish supper in a waterfront tavern on the opposite bank wedged between the Dalmatian hospice and the Church of Santa Lucia Infecundita where they have just finished celebrating a particularly turbulent mass. “I did not see it”—Brother Fulvio rises suddenly from his seat, his voice thick with fervor—” but I believe it was here. And it is a loving Beast!”

The other two are dividing up a splendid steamy tench. “Then why don’t you find it and sit on its horn?” replies Father Tommaso. “Where would you say it is now, Bruno? The Pyramid of Cestius?” Brother Bruno nods.

Inevitably it is not, although—equally inevitably—it was, just as it was overlooked in Arenula, disregarded in Trevi, missed in Monti, skipped in Ripa, unheeded in Pigna, and pretermitted in both Campitelli and the Campo Marzio. The Beast does not enter Rome so much as materialize out of it, leaving the shadows of its sloughed former selves on plastered walls and iron-braced doors, in broom-choked porticoes and rubbish-filled vaults. It wipes itself off the travertine
and tufa of Rome’s
rioni,
leaving not afterimages, but only the surprise occasioned by their disappearance, a déjà déjà vu.

“Twenty-nine,” says Amalia.

“Tighter,” commands La Cavalierizza.

“Then show him up,” commands Vich.

“Ouch!” gasps Colonna.

“Too big,” opines the Pope.

“But why fish?” wonders Grooti the Baker.

“Just. One. More. Notch.” Vitelli bends obediently to refasten the buckles. The strap’s deliberately-roughened leather chafes pleasantly in the cleft between her nates. “Good,” decides La Cavalierizza. Vitelli falls back on his haunches to admire her, admiring herself in the pier-glass. La Cavalierizza wears raffish fox-furs, thigh-boots, and a phallus. She turns this way, then that way. It juts nicely in quarter profile. The rising curve. The tapered point. Grooves to channel the blood. “Tighter.”

“Thirty.”

“Hush,” Vittoria soothes her father. She tousles his gray hair (a martial basin-cut) where it sprouts about the nub of the arrow-stump. The barb, she thinks, made of iron and embedded in his brain. The consequent pain when she does
this
. (Another howl from Colonna.) How many daughters can boast such access to the insides of their fathers’ heads? Her thumb massages its way in concentric spirals, creeping closer to the little boss of wood. Her father does not love God, so the Beast gored him at Ravenna. Everything is clear, now that the Beast is here. Or it was: she never caught sight of it herself. She jabs down again in frustration.

“Argh!”

“Thirty-one.”

“My dear Faria!” exclaims Vich, arising naked as a satyr from the squalor of Fiametta’s bed. A broad sweep of his arm takes in peeling velvet hangings, grease-stained sheets, wine-jugs, goblets, a finger-gouged bowl of dazzling crème fraîche. “This Beast’s act of coition lasts upward of six hours.” His swiveling arm halts above the shuddering humps of his mistress. “Shall we?” Little Violetta’s soot-blackened face retreats behind the door, the blacking applied each morning by her teary-eyed mistress, “for the memories. …” She scrubs and scrubs in the scullery while the house reverberates with the cries of the rutting ambassadors, bucking and bouncing on either end of their fleshy sweaty seesaw. This not-so-secret meeting—their last—already has a valedictory feel, which they dispel with wild conquering shouts.

Africa!

India!

“Thirty-two.”

“You see, he will not be able to walk in them. Do you see that?” Leo explains earnestly to a trio of carpenters and one shipwright. Mooching about in his pen
behind them, Hanno sneezes loudly.
Absit omen,
thinks His Holiness, pondering the four miniature galleons careened at his feet. He had wanted something more like gondolas, but it is too late now. He has promised to address the poets, too. At some point they will have to be told the precise nature of the “Poetry Contest” in which they expect to compete tomorrow. Surprising, really, he reflects, that none of them have put two and two together yet: isn’t that what poets are supposed to excel in? “You need straps,” he tells the still-silent artisans. “And much more padding. The elephant is noted for the delicacy of his feet. Haven’t any of you read Plinius?”

Atchoo-oo!

“Thirty-three.”

The flour gets up his nose. The yeast, too. Groot trickles the remnant of his latest consignment of flour through his fingers, then sniffs the tips cautiously. Fish? And that strange purplish tinge. … The results of three days’ labor more or less fills the bakery. He hates the kneading. The boy used to do it, but the boy has left and he can’t find another. He knows why. They whisper about him. They know about Groot around here. Somehow they have found him out. Idolators and Christ-killers, the lot of them. He used to blame it on Bernardo, when it happened. Marne, Proztorf. And Prato. Two more there. It was one of the problems with Groot, one of the reasons he got rid of him. “Groot” is the past. Now he’s Grooti the Baker, whose bread comes out flat and hard and inedible. Yesterday he nibbled a few crumbs of the latest batch. It was strange-smelling, oddly colored, and made him feel tingly. The problem with Grooti the Baker, thinks Groot, is that Grooti the Baker cannot bake bread. “Groot,” on the other hand, from time to time, had killed children. That was the problem with “Groot.”

“Thirty,” repeats Amalia.
“Three. “

“Thirty-three what?” Salvestro asks at last.

“Thirty-three people following us,” replies Amalia. “Thirty-four now.”

Salvestro peers back over the cart. They seem to have attracted a ragged tail. A small, rather aimless mob is traversing the little square at the western end of the Via Pelamantelli in ones, twos, and threes. The nearest is a good thirty paces away, hardly any kind of threat, thinks Salvestro. Indeed it appears that, far from trying to catch up with the oxcart, most of the mob are having difficulty walking slowly enough to avoid overtaking it. There are lots of pauses and little detours, hitchings-up of their smocks, inspection of the soles of their feet, some rather overdone limping. Also, Salvestro cannot help but notice, they are all incredibly dirty. He faces forward again as the ox turns into the Street of the Jews. Something— Salvestro squints—is coming toward them. Marching, actually, and at a trot, pikes held high, the familiar livery, yes, more Switzers.
Hup, hup, hup
. … Oxcart (hup). Large?Yes. Gray? Yes. Horn on nose? No. Salvestro watches the squad divide a few paces short of the ox’s nose, flow about the cart, then, peering backward, re-form into two perfectly aligned columns, which make a cambered right-hand turn,
hup, hup, hup,
up toward the Chapel of Saint Ambrose and out of sight. Very impressive,
but while he was watching them the oxcart’s straggling escort seems to have disappeared. … No. They’re still there, drifting out of doorways and simulated conversations, re-forming just as impressively, albeit into something looser and harder to define, more Rosserus-like. The Switzers never saw them. They never saw the Beast, either, although that particular sin of omission might be ascribed to a fatal flaw in their instructions: large, gray, horn on nose. This is splendid and succinct as far as it goes. A helpful coda might have added: “and artfully disguised as a pile of manure.” An enabling subcodicil: “by virtue of being deceitfully buried therein.”

Having neglected the question of what spidireen vessel spilled this Beast ashore in the first place, no one has yet essayed either the nature of its landfall or the concomitant unfortunate possibility lurking within this unasked question. Namely, that the animal is dead.

It has swelled alarmingly since Spezia. Twice now he has stuck a knife in its stomach to release a jet of stinking gas.

“Oh, I know where we’re going,” Amalia says as ox, cart, Salvestro, herself, manure, and Beast all turn right into a dank side street a little way before the arch of Septimius Severus. There is a sudden silence as the wheels of the cart pass from stone to hard-packed earth. Tall dark tenements press in on them from either side.

“He’s not going to be very pleased to see you, Salvestro,” warns Amalia, shaking her head.

Salvestro grins. “No one ever is.”

“Bernardo was,” she answers reproachfully.

But Bernardo is dead, he thinks, crushed under toppling walls of water, driven under by the same sea that had tossed him about and spat him out. All dead or lost, except himself. There had been minutes or seconds when the water had tugged him down, but then released him to bob back up to the surface like a cork. It had dashed him toward rocks, and then sluiced him around them. He had sunk and risen, breathed water, then air. His skin had puckered and peeled, separating and loosening as though he wore it like a smock. He had shucked it off and dived into a calm darkness, where everything was quiet and still. The storm capered and crackled harmlessly a mere fathom above his head while his arms pulled powerfully, a bone-white diving body, a choiceless visitor. Yes, he reflects, Bernardo was happy at every one of his reappearances. Who else? He turned and darted deeper, his head turning about, knowing already. The Water-man was there on the very edge of his vision, waving to him and retreating. The figure turned white, then black, slate gray and bottle green, dissolved into ripples and emerged again. What color is he? wondered Salvestro. And what color himself, when water will take on any color offered it? The flat grays of near tidelessness and near salt-lessness, a dull tinge of yellow. He is not long for that now, although there are no “true colors” and it will not—cannot—happen here. Tonight he is invisible, the color of Ro-ma, which will forget him the moment he is gone.

The ox stops.

Behind, their escort stops, too, although more gradually and chaotically. Those toward the rear shunt into those toward the fore, who turn on them and push back so that little clumps and clusters form, then spring apart gently, a disintegrating vanguard. People start sitting down. Later a contingent from the Ruins will arrive bringing firewood. Little campfires will be lit. It appears to Salvestro that a loosely organized sea of heads is breaking on a gently sloping beach. Amalia’s head-count now looks woefully outdated. There must be two hundred of them and more still drifting in. He wonders if he should offer some greeting, address them, perhaps. They seem to require nothing, simply to be here. For the Beast? Himself? Amalia? He climbs down from the cart. For the ox?

“Is he in the dung?”

“He is, isn’t he?”

“Why isn’t he in the dung?”

Their voices startle him. He had not seen them approach. Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf are regarding him expectantly through face-masks of thick dried mud. Behind them stands their more easily recognizable protector. And his own once, he recalls. After a fashion. The latter seems to be wearing a heap of mud on his head.

“Who?” he asks innocently.

“Rosserus,” growls Dommi.” And are you going to knock on that door or are we all going to stand here all night?”

It takes a long time for Groot to answer.

A saw, thinks Salvestro. And wood. A knife, an awl, strong thread. A needle as thick as a poker.

“Told you so!” sings Amalia at the expression of dismay on the face that peers through a miserly crack in the door. It changes to terror when Dommi kicks the rickety barrier off its hinges, then bafflement as six or seven of the most vigorous beggars leap up on the cart and begin digging bare-handed in the dung. They are tugging at something, all of them scrabbling for handholds and heaving together. Slowly it slithers out and half-falls, half-pours itself out to land with a thud on the ground, something vast, lightly smeared with the manure’s liquids.

“No,” protests Groot as they begin manhandling it through the door.

Salvestro lights as many candles as he can find. A gutter runs along one edge of the floor. That’s good. There is the oven, some large bowls stacked in a corner, empty flour-sacks, oversize spatulas… Anything else?

The bread. Mountains of it. He watches as one of the beggars picks up a loaf, sniffs at it, and puts it down again. He wonders if Groot realizes yet the operation he intends to perform here. Probably not. After all, he hardly knew himself, until now. The bread decided him. It will be perfect. And plenty of it, too.

“Get out!” shrieks Groot from the doorway. He seems to have lost his temper. His next shriek sounds rather strangled, however, for Dommi has picked him up and is patiently explaining that since bakers are one of his least favorite forms of life, noisy ones in particular, in order to shut them up what he usually does is
take a few of their own proudly baked loaves and shove them down their throats. “Sometimes it takes only three or four before they come to their senses,” Dommi continues, reaching calmly for the first. “Sometimes as many as eight” Amalia observes this procedure with a mixture of forensic detachment and glee.

“Right,” says Wolf.

“We’re ready,” says Wilf.

“Let’s go to work,” says Wulf.

Dawn is less than four hours away. It is the second week in March. Groot is on his third loaf already, and the pace is hardly slacking.

“Begin the first cut underneath the tail,” directs Salvestro. “Then continue up as far as the throat.”