The Pop’s Rhinoceros (114 page)

Fummo gia come voi sete

Voi sarete come noi

Morti siam come vedete

Cosi morti vedrem voi. …

Just a little song to pass the time.

Squarely, promptly, in perfect silence, and from unimaginable height, continuously from just before the donging of the campanile of nearby San Damaso onward, without pause or respite in the spread of its measureless glow, rather subtly in the corners but quite unabashedly elsewhere, with neither fear nor favor, warmly, finally, and inevitably: thus sunrise dawns on the Field of Honor. The sharp-shadowed angles of the steps to the north and the benches on the east dissolve in soft beiges and creams. The triple-decked arches of the loggie to the west admit congruent arches of sunlight whose skewings produce interesting ogivelike intersections on the back walls. The palace radiates warm yellows and whites. A limey-smelling breeze wafts in from the east and jiggles the pennants hung from the underside of the little roofed deck whence the Pope will watch the battle, itself hung rather precariously from the modilions of the palace’s third-story cornices. The breeze passes on. All is pastel. All is still, the Lake of Mars so flat that it mirrors everything around in perfect detail down to the brutally pollarded willows and the parasitic lichens on the stone pines in the wilder gardens behind the sandbags that restrain the water from flooding down in a torrent of mud and shallow-rooted squills to the Porta Pertusa. The substructure of the benches doubles as a subaqueous frame. The benches hold the sandbags in place, and the sandbags uphold the benches: solid, simple engineering, an elegant piece of load-bearing
construction. The surface of the water is milky brown, or silver, or glossy and green as a fern. Ah, a ripple now. Is something about to happen?

A little boat pushes its nose out of the ground floor of the Palace of Saint Nicholas. It is a rowboat, rather too small for three people. Nevertheless there are three people in it. It is being punted toward the very center, toward the fountain, or what used to be the fountain before it was enclosed inside a tall and boxy plinth with a ladder up the side and one of His Holiness’s best chairs (upholstered in green silk with silver knobs on the armrests) perched precariously on the top. The little boat wobbles and bobbles its way to the foot of the ladder, its inexpert punter sending it left and right while his companion deals with their cargo, which is chiefly old curtains and table linen, strings of bunting, a hammer, tacks, two pennants sharing a representation of the world divided by a line running one hundred leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, a papier-mâché miter, a wooden staff, and Father Jörg. They have been ordered by Neroni to “bedeck the podium.” Costumed approximately as a Pope, Father Jörg is part of the bedecking.

“How we going to get him up there?” demands the manager of the cargo, eyeing the narrow ladder. The gurgling fountain resonates inside the box.

“Dunno,” says the master of the boat, assessing Jörg’s probable weight. Not much, he decides. “Poor old devil.”

Silence.

“Carry him?”

This turns out to be the preferred option. Halfway up the ascent their gaudily robed captive suffers a violent coughing fit, which continues until they deposit him on his “throne.” They impress upon him the dangers of the drop and the coldness of the water, then get on with their bedecking, hammering and hanging, pinching and cinching, until the makeshift podium is dressed in a jolly motley of mauves and light greens, the Medici emblem of the Pallia picked out in gold and all the edges neatly tucked in behind a ruff of crimson velvet whose dags dangle a finger’s width short of the water. … Which dips. Like a shallow bowl.

Then undips—
plop!
—catching the eye of the master of the cargo.

“What’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“The water. It sort of, well, dipped.”

The master of the boat hangs out from the ladder.

“Looks all right now.”

“It dipped. I saw it.”

“Probably a fish.”

The master of the cargo looks doubtful. “Funny sort of fish.”

They climb down into the boat and begin the punt back to the palace, calling out a final warning to the lone figure sitting on the podium before they disappear inside. Father Jörg hears the gentle plash of their departing boat, then,
“Whatever you do, don’t stand up!” then nothing. He is alone, undistracted. Outside, it would seem, and in some sense “aloft.” The bells of San Damaso are silent. A crow caws, but far away. And there is a kind of bustle. Voices?

Possibly it is the languorous awakening groans of the denizens of the dining-hall or the more plaintive ones of those bivouacked in the passageways below. It might be the poets, limbering up with a few macaronics before breakfast, or perhaps the rumbling stomachs of King Caspar and the Mauritians, arrived last night but too late for supper, or the shrill yips and yelps of His Holiness, who ate his own later still and is now enduring some difficult negotiations over his ermine-padded chamber-pot (a gift from an anonymous donor, although Bibbiena is strongly suspected). Indeed, it might even be the latter’s snoring, for he has over-slept deliciously and later will be late to a degree just this side of fashionable. Or Guidol’s muttering? There is something peculiarly penetrating about his rolling
r’s
and elongated diphthongs. He is up already and busy in the kitchens, piping intricate whorls of oyster-cream over the
corquignolles
while keeping an eagle eye on a bubbling pot of thick orange marmalade to which he will shortly add the six braces of plucked pigeons resting in a basket beside it. A wailing or screeching noise reaches his ears, a stringy ululation. The musicians, Guidol thinks balefully. He caught them literally red-handed last night with their fingers in his blood sausage vat and, unable to bear their whining (nothing to eat since Montepul-ciano three days ago, faint with hunger, the usual nonsense), chased them out of the kitchen with a meat cleaver, shouting after them that Montepulciano was less than two days’ walking away, even encumbered with violas. A chef must be feared above all else. He has a disturbing tendency toward diffidence but has been exorcising it through his regular encounters with the poets, who are even worse, turning up bright-faced in the morning with paeans to his “honest toil.” More nonsense. Cuisine is the art of deception, and the rest is elbow grease and heating. None of them have yet appeared this morning. Whatever His Holiness told them last night seems to have rather cowed them. Guidol finishes up the oyster-cream and reaches for the bucket of pike spleens.
Corquignolles
are a demanding dish worthy of his talents. Now, how many spleens?

He looks down, and there, his gaze passing over the rim of the bucket, he notices a little stringy thing, white and wriggly, perhaps a sinew cut from a fillet of pork or a fragment of blanched asparagus. However, the important thing is not what it is, but
where
it is, for it is on the floor. Guidol frowns. As a test he picks up one of the pigeons and hurls it into the corner. Then he waits. He watches, and then, looking around the kitchens, he notices all kinds of detritus on the flagstones that normally would not have lain there more than a second: cabbage hearts, bits of gristle, snippets of intestine… He glances back to the pigeon. Still there. He should be joyful; after all, no chef worth his salt wants a plague in his kitchen. But instead the continuing presence of the pigeon worries him. He feels strangely unnerved. Where have all the rats gone?

Plop!

The water dips again.

Not voices, or not human ones. Something is shifting down there. And it’s not fish because there are no fish. Father Jörg can hear it, but nobody else can. He cocks an ear. He puckers his brow. What is it?

Well, hard to credit without at least a dry sob, it’s actually Towser the cat. …

Yippee! Yahoo!
Over here, Towser! Come on, Towser. Towser!
Towser…!

Boing
. … And up on the worktables, paws in the fish-basket, paw-prints in the pastry: Towser, a long-haired ginger tomcat. In the kitchens of the Vatican, no one and nothing walked prouder than Towser. Watch him spring. And hiss! Fangs bared, claws out, Towser stalked the corners, a terror to all. Towser could leap the length of the boiling room, traverse the scullery with a single bound, fling himself though fires, scale impossible heights. On his birthday, the pot-boys would weave him a garland of rat-tails, which Towser would destroy in under a second. The mere sniff of a rat was enough for Towser, sending him into murderous frenzies. He would froth and foam, sometimes even vomit with anger, and when he had a dead rat beneath his paw he would not be content with merely biting off its head; he would skin it, too, and eviscerate it, and drag its guts around the floor to loud prolonged cheers before stowing them safely in somebody’s boots. From the most elderly of the sauce-stirrers to the youngest of the carrot-peelers, all were agreed: Towser was the greatest ratter of them all. The cooks knew it, and the sub-cooks knew it. Pot-boys, wood-carriers, fish-gutters, meat-trimmers, and stock-boilers harbored no doubts. From Neroni all the way down to the amazingly decrepit old man whose job it was to carry away the excrement squeezed from the bowels of freshly slaughtered cows, anyone in the kitchens asked to identify the most tireless, talented, hardworking, and popular exponent of his or her allotted task would point directly to the same furry candidate: Towser the cat, Ratter Supreme.

Except, unfortunately, the rats.

Observation. Report. Response. Via devolved command chains and relay-systems, an ultrasonic klaxon of squeaks carried the usual warning from beneath the kitchens through the culverts, crawl-spaces, and geometrically planned tunnel-system of the colony to the outlying subsurface bastions and outposts as far as the garrisons by the river. Cat alert. Location: kitchens. Designation:Towser. Decision: Assess risk.

Accordingly, a few mice were released by night into the kitchen and Towser’s performance gauged. Next some shrews. Then cockroaches, finally woodlice and worms. Stage one of the assessment was ended, and from the result the Vatican rats might have predicted what would happen next. Towser’s capture rate was nil, and stage two was a rat. Neither the largest nor the smallest, although possibly the most fearless, for the rat’s mission was to scamper about in front of Towser, as close as possible and as slowly as possible, to get nearer (Towser watching), nearer (Towser rising), nearer (Towser tensing), and nearer yet…

Towser running away.

The rats dubbed Towser “the Executioner.” (Even the Vatican rats have a sense of irony.) Towser never actually caught a rat. Instead the rats fed him their old and sick, their recidivists and degenerates, those hopelessly wounded in skirmishes with the Rome rats guarding the river, and the failures from their selective inbreeding programs, limbless two-headed monsters and the like. They killed them first, then tossed them out to him. One day, they reasoned, they would have a use for Towser. Strategically, in the long view, Towser was best left in place. The Vatican rats can afford to wait, for a cat as easily as a kingdom. The habit is ingrained in them as the counterweight to rattish impatience, the tendency to rush and dart, the impulse to be impulsive when the best policy is to advance slowly and methodically, to discipline their racing hearts into slower rhythms, to watch and wait. Sometimes, very rarely, in the early hours before dawn, one or two of them will scrabble up the eastern wall of the Belvedere and gaze out over the city of their rivals. Colonies weaker than their own are waiting for them over there, over the dark flood of the river. They watch, and sniff, twitching as strange blends of adrenaline and glucocorticoids roar through their arteries. They want to run forward and rip and bite and kill, but they do not. They observe. Conquest will come with discipline and restraint. They wait, just as they wait for Towser and the day they find a use for him, for it will come just as surely as the day when they break out of the Borgo and sweep through the city to unleash their dammed-up rage and bloodlust, killing every alien rat in their path. And then, with a drip, and a drop, then a trickle of water into one of the highest and driest chambers of the colony, the point one would choose if armed with a blueprint of its every tunnel and junction one wished to wash every rat in the Borgo clean into the Tiber, Towser’s day arrived.

Plop!

Here, boy, over here. Here, Towser.
Here!
There, then; yes, there… Oh, forget it, Towser, wherever you’ve got to … Anyone seen Towser?
Towser!

Poor silly Towser, lured down a tunnel with a string of cow-guts. Throat slashed, tail trimmed off, lugged north toward the Belvedere. The most artifice-ridden artificial lake in Christendom has sprung a leak. For the sub-Vatican colony, the leak is a potential catastrophe. For Towser, a final fatal flaw. The Vatican rats are using him as a bung.

Plop! Plop! Plop!

Stop.

An hour passes, or several, time in which the seconds drift in and out of synchronization with the twitches of Jörg’s sinewy heart, advancing, overtaking, recurring, coinciding. He too is waiting, and his faith is like coal, a patient black crystal guarded in a battered body. The little light appeared last night, a little time after the three mocking impostors left him to his contemplations, which were of winter and the memory of stones falling into placid black waters far away and long ago. No church protected him from the soaking and freezings then or now. No buttress held him upright, or gaudy-colored window lit his way. His little
chunk of coal will burn briefly and brightly when the flame is put to it, this being adequate and in due proportion to the needs of a faithful fool. His inner pilgrimage is almost ended. His followers have almost all fallen away. HansJürgen remains, but who else? He smiles to himself, enjoying the fine irony of his elevation after his long confinement in the monstrance of the Pope’s palace. Little breezes play about his feet. Little sounds play in his ears. A dulcimer tinkles, or a hackbrett, perhaps. The silver knob that terminates the armrest grows warm under his sun-warmed palm. He listens to the silence of the water and then the disturbance of that silence. The crow starts up again, then men’s voices, things being dragged, and dropped, and coaxed, and cursed. Various splishings and sploshings.