The Pop’s Rhinoceros (117 page)

Raucous applause greets this popular choice: something for everyone to enjoy. Slowly, in step, the two men walk forward into the cheers of the crowd. The beggars are already ripping the hangings off the wall, and Dommi has reverted
to his earlier table-smashing mode while the poets bend their energies toward the task of reconfiguring the wood fragments and tattered strips of velvet. With miraculous speed, a ramshackle but serviceable confessional rises in the center of the dance floor. King Caspar beats out a stately measure, and behind him the violas go to work, pounding out a thunderous flattened fifth, a two-note earthquake that they privately dub “The Confessional Processional; Music for Fat Bastard and Whatever-His-Name-Is to Stroll To”:

Leo smiles at Salvestro. Salvestro smiles at the Pope.

“After you.”

“No, after
you
.

“They enter together.

To hear His Holiness’s confession had seemed an inspired notion just a few minutes before, but now Salvestro is unsure how to proceed. There is a dull ringing in his head, muffled and somehow distant. Inside him and yet far away. The cries of the Pratesi? Of the soldiers who had slaughtered them? It was hard to hear the victims under the noise of their aggressors. He thinks of Bernardo’s terrified face as the water poured into the hold. His mouth had been open to say something, but the sea had drowned him out. Confess to that, he thinks, but it is hard to connect the plump and jolly Pope to Bernardo’s fate, or that of the Pratesi, or even Diego’s a thousand miles away in Nri. A mad white soldier kneeling before his dead black King. Should the Pope confess to that? And what of the corpses tossed up on the beach? He must say something now, mark the ended lives that have carried him like so much cargo to his landfall. At Spezia he was the one the sea would not take. There was a place for him, but it was not there. He thinks of a boy swimming in the near tideless waters of a near saltless sea, bone white, silent, diving for Vineta. Ashore, an identical creature creeps ino the forest. Behind him, the torches muster for the chase and dot the night with their red glows. He might as well be outside the palace at Nri, or in Rome, or Prato, or on the shore of the mainland, looking back at the island. The torches of his pursuers are always there, gathering behind him, driving him forward. Who awaits him at the end of his circuit? For Salvestro there is only the Water-man now, and the Water-man is himself, the self he fled long ago when he pulled himself out of the Achter Wasser and stumbled into the forest. He is always there, hanging in the water, waiting to coax him forward down the ramp of ice that leads to drowned Vineta. The ringing in his head is her bells.

He sits there pondering these matters. A sharp yelp sounds from the other side of the curtain. His Holiness has sat on a splinter. The music outside seems to be getting louder and faster.

“Twenty … Come on, little Pierino. You don’t want to be late, do you?”

Little Pierino shakes his head uncertainly. The girl is much stronger than she looks. She is more or less dragging him toward the source of a noise that started up a few minutes ago and now sounds like a thunderstorm.

“Nineteen,” mutters Amalia. “Come
on!”
They run though a long, low chamber. There is a small door at the end of it. The door is shaking. Amalia pushes him forward.

“What on earth can they be doing in there?” asks Cardinal Bibbiena, peering over the heads of the dancers to the confessional marooned in their midst.

Dovizio shrugs.

“I imagine they are remembering their time at Prato.” Ghiberti has appeared behind them, ledger closed now.

“Prato? Where he had Tedaldi’s family killed?” Bibbiena snorts. “Who cares about that now?”

“His Holiness, apparently. And this, this”—Ghiberti flicks quickly through his ledger—“Salvestro.”

“And me!” protests a child’s voice behind the trio. They turn, searching for the source of this impudent intervention, and that is the moment when, on the other side of the booming
tinello,
the alpine zitherer raises high his plectrum and brings his hand down on the trembling strings with a sound like trees being ripped out by the roots.

At this, the music reaches a new and horrendous pitch. It would take every oak in the bear-haunted forests of the Gargano Mountains to build the glockenspiel, which sounds as though it is now being smashed in the
tinello,
and all the iron in the Harz to forge the hammers to do the smashing, but who would have thought the men to wield them would be suave King Caspar and his diminuendo-adept Mauritians, those first fiddles of the lachrymose, those wizards of the sepulchral? Their shuddering leader stomps the floor, the sweat beading through the blacking on his face, whipping them through the diabolical tritone while the alpine zitherer slithers up the scale and slaloms down in a scorching zigzag that the violas and sackbut name variously and privately as “Death by Shrieking,” “Zither in Flames,” “Slaughter of the Innocents,” and “Music for Fat Bastard to Bang His Head against a Wall To,” although it should more properly be called “The Purple Spur,” for that is the bit of biochemical grit around which this pearl of song is forming. Groot’s meal was spurred. The bread was spiked. Now two dozen church organs are trampolining on a drumskin the size of the erstwhile Lake of Mars
(plop!
the last drop), and one hundred and eighty sweating, mud-caked, drink-fueled, tipsy Terpsichoreans are dancing the carmagnole, all jammed together thigh to thigh, except for Cardinal Armellini (protected as always by the
six-foot cordon sanitaire of his own unpopularity), La Cavallerizza (because anyone who touches her thighs seems to come away covered in blood), and Father Jörg, who is sitting down in a corner.

No, he’s not. He’s up, pulled to his feet by two childish hands as the alpine zitherer raises his instrument to his face and begins playing it with his teeth, as King Caspar brings his staff down on his toe, doesn’t feel it, and carries on, while Vich scratches at the itchy ring of teeth-marks scabbing around his member and Faria reaches for the
corquignolles,
chews, swallows, and falls choking to the floor, while the black flood courses down the rat-tunnels and the crow perched atop the eastern wall of the Belvedere wonders which it should eat first: the orange? the leathery gray tail it found wrapped around the weather vane of the spire of San Damaso? or the sodden cat-carcass lying on the mud-streaked flagstones of the courtyard below? The crow has just noticed that the cat lacks a tail when a small boy shoots it dead with a catapault.

Thock!
That’s the crow.

Thock!
That’s His Holiness, who is indeed banging his head against the wall of the confessional in frustration. Valentino? Zoroastro? He cannot for the life of him remember this fellow’s name.

Contrition? wonders Salvestro. Remorse?

The door is flung open: bodies, noise. Father Jörg and a little boy. What are they doing here? muses Salvestro. He is quite calm, quite quiet in the midst of the uproar, simply waiting there, quite content to listen to whatever the Pope might want to tell him and in the meantime, drifting on his own watery thoughts.

“Five!” shouts a furious Amalia, jerking him out of his reverie.

Alessandro? Venturo?
Thock! Thock! Thock!

“Begin,” His Holiness says, wincing. “Begin anyway.”

But the voice, when it finally does begin, sounds squeakier than he remembers, familiar somehow but not attached to, to … He cannot be sure. He has forgotten the sound of the man’s voice.

You came, O Leo, to fair Prato town,

Where the grass is green and the earth beneath brown,

Where the gutters ran red and the hair turned white,

Where the people so loved you that they danced through the night
.

They threw off their clothes and they stripped off their skin,

They tore off their flesh to the white bones within
.

They danced till they fell and with their very last breath

They sang a hymn to you, Leo, called the “Triumph of Death.”

There is a pause then. Leo sees the glowing braziers, the tools of black iron. The smoke from the burning flax, he remembers now, smelled of hair.

“Would you like to hear the hymn now, Your Holiness?”

He says nothing. The voice will continue whatever he says, hanging in his memory like the reek of burning hair. The voice sings:

Once like you we were,

Our corpses now you see,

Such as we now are,

Such you soon shall be. …

“Four!”

Running and running and running and running … Is Salvestro running away again? If so, it is more of a hobble. Father Jörg weighs heavily on his arm. A few figures are dragging their shadows across the piazza. They look tiny and distant in the emptiness of the square. The towers and tenements of the Borgo are silent as mausoleums. Father Jörg coughs, and the sound echoes in the street. HansJürgen will be at the gate through which they first entered this city. He will be cold and anxious, waiting out the hours alone. The moonlight skates over stone and plaster, travertine and tufa, pepperino and pozzolana, wood, slate, brick, the fabric of Rome. Amalia skips ahead of them, a bright banner of white. The two men can hardly keep up. She turns, plants her hands on her hips, and eyes them impatiently.

“Three!”

They are almost at the river when the flood begins. From drains and gutters, scrambling out of walls and scurrying out of doorways, a black wave gathers in the Borgo and flows forward through its streets. Salvestro stops, rooted to the spot. He takes a tighter grip on the man at his side as the silent rats advance and the last paces between them and the unstoppable army disappear. They are upon him. He screws his eyes shut. He sees nothing. He feels nothing. They are two blind men standing there while the dark bodies flow about their ankles and pass on. They have not been touched. When Salvestro opens his eyes, Amalia is already skipping across the bridge. They are losing her. She is slipping away. She will not stop for them again.

“Two!”

The rats scramble down to the water, the river they have waited so long to cross. Thousands upon thousands of them line the bank, serried there behind their commanders, waiting in silence and staring across at the thing they have come to confront. On the opposite bank, a matching army stares back, waiting like themselves, silent like themselves. The roads do not lead here, they only end. From here they can only lead away again, from a tar-black river, or from a tideless sea, or from Rome. Salvestro leans out over the parapet of the bridge and sees the lines begin to waver and break. On both sides of the river, black bodies turn and start clambering over those behind them as the ranks break and retreat. The rats are turning back.

“One!”

He looks up. Amalia is a scrap of white disappearing into the darkness, calling back to him, “You’re on your own now!” Her voice sounds light and mocking.

“God will save you, if you can find him!”

“Amalia! Wait!”

Only her final shout finds him, sent high and clear into the night air.

“You know where to look! Good-bye, Salvestro!”

T
o the greater glory of God and the remembrance of him who founded their church, the present writer dedicates these tattered and unbound leaves, the whole chronicle of the deeds of the monks of Usedom, which was begun by the first Abbot of Usedom in the year that the church was founded and continued by each of his successors until the last, who was Father Jörg. It falls to a humble monk to conclude it, and, by a fitting circuit, this will the last of the deeds of the monks of Usedom. A monk without a monastery may yet be a monk, but the Church Fathers state, if the present writer remembers it truly, that there can be no such thing as a singular monk. Father Jörg died in the year of Our Lord fifteen hundred and thirty-two on the Eve of Saint Bernard and was buried on the Day of Saint John. He who writes these words is the last of the monks of Usedom
.

Many of the leaves which precede this last one are not legible to these eyes. The Prior of Usedom struggled against the blindness which was visited upon him in Rome and which is recorded in these leaves but could not save the neatness of his hand. The ink has faded and in places has been overwritten many times. Too, many of the leaves have embarked on misadventures in emulation of those recorded upon them. Some were lost to rot, others to the hunger of rats, still more went missing on the journey from Rome to Usedom, and more again on the less perilous route to this place, the monastery which gave shelter to the last two monks of Usedom. It is only by God’s grace that we found ourselves here, as it is that we left Rome. God worked through us to guard us safe, and He worked through Salvestro, our guide, who is mentioned many times in the script of Father Jörg, even if the likeness in certain passages is a confusing one
.