The Pop’s Rhinoceros (25 page)

Sunlight creeps down the Torre delle Milizie atop the Palatine, down the Torre de’ Conti, down the towers of the Lateran, of San Pietro in Vincolo, the
palace of the Senate on the Capitol, and San Pietro in Montorio. The night is in recession, pouring through the channels that divide them and that they punctuate as fingers of rock whittled to sharp angles by the flood. Cupolas poke the sky as though some second, protecting skin might tent the city in safety. But the bastions are lost and fend off nothing. The skin is stripped away. Sunlight reaches deeper into the city’s secret folds, inching down the east-facing walls into the narrow alleys and runs, finding out basilicas and palaces, running over the rough pasture of the piazzas, and drawing mist off the marshy valleys that run between the hills. Long shadows emerge, run west, shrink as the sun climbs higher and the city is overtaken, turned to stone, overrun by its invaders. From the east, light. And now, from the south, a baking and penetrative heat.

The ground is clogged with bodies: cadavers and their sepultures. The earth is heavy with oils that bubble as the heat finds them. The circuses are wrecked, and arches raised to older triumphs are fallen in defeat. Now out of the old city’s burial come the survivors. In the Pincio, San Rocco melts in the dawn half-light. A bronze torso flops in the Campo de’ Fiori, Pan clambers from the ruins of the Satrium, which curls itself about him, and Venus scatters fish-heads in Pescheria. Marforio chatters with Pasquino, and the sick are already gathering around the fount of Juturnus, newly risen and steaming in the magical morning heat. Groups of figures haul themselves out of the molten ground, their long interment suddenly no more than a blink of the sun’s eye and forgotten as quickly. The wall of the Scrofa splits open, and a sow clambers from the wreckage of her crypt, her litter squealing, slack belly dragging in the mire of the road as she hunts stupidly for the hopeful augurs to welcome this second foundation. Across the Campo Marzio, brushwood, creeping weeds, and hybrids find their abandoned roots and rise again in the Garden of Sallust.

The old city is staggering to rise, but the sun is a strong disperser of its half-lights. The night leaves its silt in the cracks and eaves. Columns of smoke from the lime kilns stand high in the still air above the Calcaranum. Heat moves in a crescent across the districts of Ripa, Sant’Angelo, Parione, and Ponte, over the Tiber, and through the drab precincts of the Borgo to the gardens of the Belvedere, where panthers will stretch, rise, piss in their cages. A great gray body lies seemingly lifeless in the shade of the plane trees. Overlooking them all, in the Stanza di Eliodoro in the palace of the Vatican, heat and light batter the sleeper’s uneasy dreams and a thick body stirs beneath its coverlet. The face of God is pressed against the city, and the morning is a clarion of light calling excavators to the depleted ruins of the Capitol, butchers and horse-traders to the market in Navona, swineherds and fishmongers to Campo de’ Fiori. Haulers trundle salvaged columns and marble slabs through the narrow streets to the lime kilns, Tiber boatmen ferry wine to the
sensali
of Ripetta, millers feed their island mills, and the cardinals slumber in their palaces. Innkeepers are throwing back grease-stained curtains, and pilgrims are rising from beds and straw palliasses the city over. Buildings faced with travertine glare over marshy courts. Stations of faith
beckon differently to drive the honest devotees up the Holy Steps, blood soaking through their knees, and the next, and the next. A chamberlain knocks softly; a fishwife shrieks at a Jew. In the Via delle Botteghe Oscure, thick slabs of tufa soak in the morning heat while curio-sellers erect their stalls and booths before the workshops of the jewelers. Now the sun is high, but for all the purpose and bustle of the awakening city, an inhibition hangs over the workaday efforts of its inhabitants. Something latent, not visible yet. They are marking time, hurrying through the motions. Waiting.

Rain in June? Random downpours have drenched the city these two days past, turning the plazas into lakes, the alleys to minor tributaries flowing into the swollen river proper. Puddles still stand under the open drum of Saint Peter’s and the square outside. To the north of the city, bright sunshine lifts a murky steam off the mire of the Piazza del Popolo, where a small herd of cattle mooches over the sodden humance, hooves squelching and sinking in the mud. Neatherds stood in hunched gangs under the awning of the German print shop to watch their wading charges suffer the downpour in silence while the pelting rain turned pasture to swampy mud, mud to shit-stained pools that glare in the succeeding sunshine and stink in the heat. Delays were inevitable.

Now, while the arriving warmth shrinks puddles to salty residues on the flagstones and heats the mud to steam, two of this city’s thoroughfares turn from quagmires covered with water to quagmires covered with people. The Via Lata and Via del Popolo cut a wedge out of the city to meet at the plaza, intervening
macchia
forces them farther apart as they reach back into the city and rough pasture cedes to hovels and sprawling tenements, stables, and barns. Pilgrims, minor clerks, and the whole flood of skiving tradesmen follow in the hoofmarks of curious riders who braved the rain and cantered up and back to report what they could of the embassy beyond the gates. At first the spectators pick careful paths to avoid the deepest basins, but the roads are quickly ruined and the following, cursing crowds sink in the muck and wade through pools of stinking water. Flies whirl in figures of eight about their struggling legs, and the freshening stench wrinkles noses from the Porta del Popolo to the heart of the city: cowshit and goatpiss and their own breaking sweat. The marshy square grows crowded, and more crowded, and still the influx continues. Trampers through the mud slow and slow their pace until the roads themselves are jammed, the surrounding slopes stiff with people, and the few mean houses that mark the sections of this churned surface fill and spill onto balconies and porticoes, with everyone elbowing for a view. The impatient city is emptying northward and westward, harried by heat and light. Huge water-wheels thrash the yellow waters about the Tiber island, while buffalo watch their masters decamp across the river and empty barges knock against the piers. Straw-sellers and innkeepers have left their precincts in the Borgo, excavators and lime-burners upped and followed the general drift northward through the crowded alleys and shambles of Ponte and Parione. The banks are closed. The churches are empty. At Campo Marzio, the tenements and
shambles give out and odd buildings stand in strange isolation amongst the scrub, wild grasses, and ruins. Or stood. Crowds in the distant plaza have already swelled and fed back along the Via del Popolo, so now the flood of the curious is stemmed farther and farther from the spectacle they await. They stand shoulder to shoulder on the rising ground to left and right, all their sweating faces turned north, from where the procession will emerge, although now they see only more of themselves, curious, expectant, blurring in the distance.

Peter’s city jabbers in a hundred dialects, a thousand irritated conversations. Outriders shout down at pilgrims who still mill and jam the narrow lanes about Sant’Angelo. Various vanguards drive wedges through monks, apprentices, insolent boys, and dogs. But the way is blocked, the alleys, courtyards, and dismal runs all stoppered up and stuffed with shuffling bodies. How many of them even know where they are going? Their irritation is solidarity enough, mere number an irresistible compulsion. The distant plaza is a heaving mass of Roman flesh, women are fainting and children being trampled, but all of them are craning for a view toward the ruin of the gate. The roads are solid and still the city feeds them forward, thousand upon thousand growing blacker and denser until the northern districts are silted solid and the crowd must layer itself about the girth of the gathered citizenry, a swelling bole of bodies bulging into Parione. Ponte is already solid, and the latecomers must swing west, farther back into the cradle of the Tiber bend, then up toward the Borgo and the grim frontage of the Castel Sant’Angelo. Even here the going is heavy and the slow coagulation of pilgrims and clerics hardening. Horsemen trying to force their way through the crush swerve back and forth with the crowd’s surges as they make for the span of Ponte Elio that links the castle to its city. Disgruntled bodies move sluggishly before the onslaught, then more smartly as other horsemen join the first, diving for their lives at the last—a phalanx of horses is driving forward, insensible of the bewildered pilgrims and beggars, galloping headlong for the bridge, while in their midst a gang of foulmouthed angry old men dressed in scarlet shout at the crowd and each other. Watching from the balcony of Castel Sant’ Angelo, the papal datary turns to tell his master the cardinals are coming.

Trumpets and drums to the north. The spectators have waited, sweated, grown ill-tempered, then quiescent, suffered the blazing day and their neighbors, but now their patience seems set to be rewarded. Snippets of gossip have flown around the crowd. The rumored beast stands as high as a house, eats only oysters, and drinks the blood of virgins. Hootings and bangings beyond the gate draw their heads about until the whole of the plaza is focused on the break in the city wall. They are silent now, and the trumpets louder. Soon the first of the drummers appear, and following them on horseback, a bearded man, very erect in the saddle and oblivious of the gaping onlookers. More drummers, and trumpeters, and more men on horseback riding four abreast and fifty deep. A miraculous passage opens before them and seems to draw them on, but it is not for these marchers and riders that the crowd has waited. Hooting, marching, banging: the
city’s palate is jaded with these. Crumbling plaster arches and tattered pennants still mark the Medici Pope’s late
possesso
. Smashed, abandoned floats litter the courtyards, and dead echoes of
Palle! Palle!
are spattered over walls. Rome is inured to carnivals and triumphs, yet today its citizens jostle and strain for a view. A new hunger is being fed, a wide gullet opening in the plaza and Via del Popolo, and down this pressed, impossible corridor the splendid embassy advances in regular wide-spaced files. The crowds forget their discomfort and impatience. From farther up the route waiting spectators hear perfunctory cheering, which gradually dies away to be replaced with a weird silence. The trumpeters, drummers, and liveried horsemen are a necessary prelude, no more. Fractious neighbors grow calmer and quieter, anticipation clears the packed road, and now only dogs trespass on this luxurious space. Everyone is waiting.

Even the Pope. Seated in the center of the loggia of Castel Sant’ Angelo with his cardinals to left and right, the ambassadors behind, the Servant of the Servants of God overlooks the crowd below. They, in return, look up. The Pope seems calm, composed, on his little dais. Flanking cardinals are more restless, perturbed perhaps by the promised spectacle. Then, too, waiting is unfamiliar to them; unsettling, even. Their clerks wait, their households wait. Cardinals do not, save on the Pope. And the Pope is calm, or seems so. The cardinals are reassured. They press nosegays to their faces, swat at insects, shift about in their chairs. On the stairs their officers eye each other up and vie for precedence. Cardinal Armellini’s men have the topmost steps and are operating an unsanctioned customs post. Unhappy servants carrying trays of sweetmeats and silver pitchers of wine have protested their devotion to Cardinals Riario, Grimani, Soderini, Vigerio, Della Rovere, Del Monte, Accolte, De Grassis, Sauli, d’Aragona, Cornaro, Farnese, Gonzaga, Petrucci, Remolino, Serra, Challand, Schinner, Bakòcz, and Bainbridge. They are cowed and disgruntled porters who reach Armellini’s ruffians and struggle through, much depleted, to serve the thirsty prelates. A conclave is assembled here to elect the lumbering symbol that approaches from the north. The Pope is self-possessed, a model of patience. The crowd below is abandoned. Between them both, the cardinals urge God’s speed on the invisible embassy. They hear weak cheers and, succeeding them, an indecipherable silence.

Stiff Tiber mud caked on the piers of Ripa tells of succeeding and overlapping washes, rising levels and late recessions leaving their alluvium on the city fringes. A central spring is sprung and moves along the Scrofa, but noise leaves no silt and silence no mark. Overleaping cheers are an airy vanguard, easily broken under the sun’s boot. Tomorrow there will be nothing of this but tavern gossip and lies. The smart ranks of infantry will be a thousand Scipios, or ragged mountaineers; turbaned keepers will be captured kings or monsters with heads the size of houses. The procession will balloon in the heat, or shrivel to wizened fruit, or change into something quite different, something rarer. The strange, failing cheers send these specters forward into the city, where spaces wait to be filled: shifting, swelling, and shrinking volumes, new colors. The embassy advances in overlapping
waves, succeeding one another and draining into the parched sands, disappearing, melding, sinking below the surface. The crowd’s appetite is dry as dust, drawing on the spectacle to taint and dissolve and fuse. A new amalgam hardens under the baking sun. Their bodies are rigid figures grouped about the beast’s abandoned path, held in place by all the spaces of its bulk. There is nothing to see, yet they look on still. They are different people and changed, or ready for change.

Here, on the balcony of Castel Sant’Angelo with the rabblement of cardinals and in their midst the Pope; now, after the first flurry of expectation has become merely waiting, before the embassy of the Portingales is arrived, scarlet robes flap and wave like banners over the crowd, goblets glint in the sun, while the Bishop of Rome sits still in his composure. The minutes tick by and the prelates’ gabble and banter quietens and finally dies away. The Pope sits patiently. His cardinals strive to emulate him. But their silence is disconcerted, their noise suppressed. Their Pope, they know, should be clamorous and impatient by now. His silence is a signal they ape without understanding. He seems hardly aware of them, blandly overlooking the throng below, the cluttered roofs, the infinite tent of the sky, while distant trumpets hoot thinly as the procession nears the Borgo.