The Pop’s Rhinoceros (27 page)

“Piero!”

The negotiations were protracted, official assumption of the office delayed, but Lorenzo had his way in the end.

“Piero!”

Now he has seen him, bright in the bright of earlier years, before the Garigliano took him, elder brother Piero at the head of his escort astride a massive and vicious stallion caparisoned in gold. His retinue is a loose and chattering phalanx of friends who pass rough wine amongst themselves. Giovanni waves from the bridge at Mugnone. The cardinalate was his at thirteen, with a deferral appended by Innocent—dubbed “the Reluctant Rabbit” by Lorenzo in private, later “the Persuaded,” and finally “the Magnanimous.” Three years have passed, and Giovanni is ready at last. Louts, thinks Delfinio as the horses draw nearer. Piero’s faithful, thinks his brother. The stallion stamps the turf as Piero salutes him.

“Silence!” shouts the horseman to the rabble at his back. “Show the Cardinal your respect.” He grins at his young brother. In a day of observances and process Piero’s arrival is a surpassing surprise. He turns to Delfinio in delight.

“Now Pietro can ride alongside us,” he tells his mentor.

“I fear not,” Delfinio replies. “Your brother has more urgent appointments, Giovanni.” The horsemen block the road for thirty yards or more. “The arrangements cannot be changed at this late hour.” Delfinio’s demeanor is humility itself. Piero’s face is a storm.

“Is that so?” His voice is suddenly full of scorn, and the horse is already wheeling about, buffeting the mounts behind as Piero forces his passage through their midst. The other horsemen jostle to turn and follow their leader. The road is chaos in a moment. Giovanni calls after his brother, but the thundering hooves drown him out and Piero is lost behind his own chasing retinue.

“Today you gain the Cardinal’s hat,” Delfinio recalls him.

“You do not favor Piero,” Giovanni challenges the old man. “Why?”

“We are already late,” says Delfinio.

That evening, fireworks splutter in the dank air over Fiesole. The December air is heavy with damp. Flanked on the high table by the Abbot, who has invested him with mantle, cap, and hat, and his aging mentor Delfinio, Giovanni watches the musicians perform by the fitful light of bonfires. The investiture is complete. He turns to ask his earlier question of Delfinio and is again refused.

“I am Cardinal now,” he tells his mentor. “Please answer my question.” Delfinio sighs and folds his hands in his lap.

And Piero’s barge rolls and yaws, all out of control, still years away. Piero clings to his horse as the river spins them around. The cannon are too heavy, and now it is too late to cut them loose. The river breaks over the wales and Piero’s horse jerks loose, kicking out and falling, then sliding down the deck and over the side. Its head rises once, then sinks below the surface. The boat sits lower and lower in the water. They are sinking. Men are already jumping clear of the vessel and striking out for land, but the current is strong. He looks about for Paulo, but his companion has disappeared. Water swirls about his feet. The nose of the boat buries itself in the river and will not rise. Piero looks over the side, unbuckles his sword, and jumps.

“He is a fool,” Delfinio tells his young master that night at Fiesole. “And a fool will bring down ruin on the Medici.” Giovanni colors but says nothing. Delfinio knows a childish bond is being sundered. Not even a Cardinal can forgive the truth.

He stumbles to the window, rubbing his eyes, then pulling back the drapes. The river was in spate, and Piero’s body never found. Peter, Piero, the whining monk in Florence: all hallowed fools. Sunlight jumps and floods into the chamber. Soon Ghiberti will come to knock softly upon the door. The Pope begins to dress. He does not yet wish to look upon the gardens of the Belvedere. Peter between the needles, the monk upon his pyre, and Piero in the waters after the fiasco at Gaeta. The ruin of which Delfinio had spoken those years before was already upon them. Lorenzo dead, Piero yet to die. Florence lost to Soderini. The days when loyalists might crowd the balconies and shout,
“Palle! Palle!”
for the Medici were an age away. He saw the last days, the ruffians breaking down the doors, their own servants looting the halls, the mob gorging on their masters. Cowled and habited, he mingled with the Beast, smelled its sweat, watched it feed in the palaces at Careggi and the Via Larga. The horses were waiting for him by the Porta San Gallo, Piero and Giuliano were already fled along the Bologna road. Half a day’s ride behind his brothers, Giovanni turned his horse south to Rome.

Perhaps this too is ominous: Rome always greets him with rain. Alone but for the grooms, he enters the city by Porta del Popolo. The piazza is a sea of mud and the Via Lata a river. His own palace appears as a drab prison, lightless and forbidding in the wet. The first of his secretaries is waiting. Dovizio already knows the worst.

“They have outlawed Piero.” Giovanni nods. His cloak drips steadily on the flagstones. “And you too. There are two thousand florins on your head.”

Rome will protect him, Rome and his Cardinal’s hat, and in return he will be the servant of the Borgia Pope. He will ignore the mules loaded with silver, the preferred nephews, the bastard son who rages through the lands of Saint Peter with a cutlass. He will nod and murmur his assent, and the Spaniard will know he is weak and no threat. He will sponsor clowns, attend carnivals, live well. He will wait.

The latest of his secretaries knocks gently, once, twice, upon the door. The Pope seems not to notice. Presently he hears the man’s footsteps move away and the far door close. Only then does he quit his bedchamber for the spacious Sala di Pontifici. Raffaello’s prelates gaze down on him from the ceiling and walls. The Borgia was at least adept in ornament. A table is laid for him with a single chair facing the window. The Pope reaches for bread and olives. Oil runs down his plump fingers, making them shiny and sticky. A napkin is pressed into service. The Pope reaches for water, drinks noisily, burps. Another olive follows, and more oil. The napkin again. Bread, and more water, added this time to his wine until it is a pale pink. The Pope sips and considers the cheese. Bread pumps him full of
wind. Cold meats aggravate the problem and so are banned from the breakfast table. Cheeses are neutral in this respect. Olives too. His wound aches and suppurates at the very thought of cold meats. The Pope denies himself the cheese, and breakfast is over. The room is bright, with dust motes whirling in the sunlight that runs in at the windows. Empty days and waiting, dust frantic to fill the spaces after Florence. Air too has its substance, thinks the Pope. Nine olive stones sit upon his plate. Perhaps the cheese after all. Julius’ face underlies his own in Raffaello’s painting of the Apostles. Cardinals cluster about him: Petrucci, Riario, Bainbridge, himself. He appears twice, Cardinal and Pope, young and mature, with the face that first divided them now painted over. The glutton Borgia is absent. Always a popish Spaniard before a Spanish Pope. Alexander and, after him, Julius. There were years of nothing, years to be filled, in which not to grow dull. Distractions, diversions, drollery. Clowns.

“My cup is invaded with daylight.”

“Banish it!”

The Cardinal feeds his guests with caramelized sheep’s feet, sparrow beaks ground to powder, and rats roasted in honey and nutmeg. Cows’ eyes shiver in jelly. Lizards fried in cinnamon fill a tureen, and black broth foams in its pot at the table’s end. Cardinal Medici presides above a banquet of cavaliers and idiots. Bad poets declaim and bad singers croon. There are clowns. The waiting brings them out, draws them to him: misshapen men, clots, and vainglorious fools. He smiles, chuckles, claps, weeps with laughter, howls with mirth; he loves them, absolutely loves them. Hunchbacks and maniacs turn cartwheels down his hall while he hiccups, farts, and gulps the air as though he might eat the merriment within it. It is a hunger he never satisfies. He watches the stomachs of his guests swell and sometimes burst with his spicy curiosities. Rivers of wine disappear down their gullets, and their buffoonery is a playground of polity for him to practice lunges and feints, quick jabs and stabs to the back. The body of the Borgia blackens and swells in the pestilential airs of Rome while his Cardinal passes dishes of beech leaves pickled in wine, ginger concoctions, and pigeons’ feet in aniseed.

And now? Nine olives, and bread. No cheese. No cold meats. The Borgia’s face seems to stare out of his eyes in the painting of the Apostles. And behind the Borgia stands Sixtus, and behind him Innocent, and Clement, and Martin, and every Servant of the Servants of God back to Gregory and every Pope to Peter. The death of the Borgia brings Julius to the bishopric of Rome, and basilicas rise and fall about the city, domes swelling and collapsing like lungs of stone, buttresses and columns reaching up from the ground, while at the center of this monumental animal a smidgen of flesh and blood veins the whole with its passions and humors. Julius is outraged. Julius is resigned. French armies circle in the Romagna. The Emperor is hungry for Milan, or Urbino, or Rome. The Church too needs its venal armies, its warrior popes, and their creatures. The Pope joins leagues, raises armies, marches on his enemies, who are mutable creatures, by turns French, and Spanish, and Venetian, and Imperial, alike only in their rapacity
and the hatred of Julius. His allies too might change from day to day, might even become one another or disappear. Good and ill hover, moving too quickly to be caught, at times too quick to be distinguished. On Easter Day, between Ravenna and the sea, two armies come to face each other across the marshy ground. A Cardinal in armor meets a Cardinal in scarlet robe and hat. Far away in Rome, Palazzo Medici is quiet and closed up. The clowns have disappeared. Fuses hiss along the line as tiny figures inch closer over the rough
macchia
. The pleasure-loving Medici stands behind the papal armies; Sanseverino with the French. Then the first of the cannon explode.

Afterward, running through the battlefield with the fugitives and mindless men, he will believe that the very air was turned to knives. The dead lie all around, cut apart, mangled, twisted. Some of the dying scream horribly, some seem merely puzzled by the guts spilling out of their bellies. He remembers a man walking dazed through the carnage, carrying, he thinks, a cudgel. He draws nearer. The man is lopsided, blood pouring from his shoulder, and the cudgel is his arm. Others appear unmarked, until they turn and reveal terrible wounds, skulls staved in, faces cut in two. Giovanni runs and runs, ignoring the hands that brush his ankles, the voices that cry out to him. It is dusk. The fighting is finished. He hardly knows where he is. The pikestaff catches him first in the stomach and, as he lies there winded, descends upon his head.

Then, as he would later understand it, because the schismatic cardinals at Pisa dawdled, accused their master the Pope of contumacy, betrayed themselves as lackeys of the hated French, took refuge in Milan, where their hootings and jeers met only the same from the faithful Milanese, and Cardinal Medici held captive there by the victors of Ravenna dispensed forgiveness to his foes, because the French army left five thousand dead in the marshes about Ravenna including their commanders and could not hold Milan and retreated and took Cardinal Medici, who escaped, and because Cardinal Medici was recaptured and rescued finally by the banks of the Po and Pisa was under the dominion of Soderini’s Florence, francophile and ripe for the plucking, responsible at the last for the schismatics who so raised their master’s ire, the Pope’s, then it behooved the Holy See to ensure the safety of the Church by sending papal forces to take back Florence for the Medici. So it was the Cardinals at Pisa who were to blame for what followed. Not himself. Not Giovanni.

Soon, thinks the Pope, Ghiberti will appear with his ledger and deliver him from these thoughts. The day is still beginning, and already ugliness has encroached. He wanted Florence to fall in celebration, in carnivals and triumphal processions. He had thought the worst was past, that nothing could match Ravenna. His capture on the battlefield came as a blessing. Sanseverino’s custody was a convalescence from the horror. He quit the marshes with the French and never looked back, but the worst was ahead. Sometimes even now it would come for him in his sleep, and he would wake in terror. Perhaps if the troops had been Romans or Swiss. If they had been fed and the promises made to them kept. Perhaps,
perhaps. Cardona’s Spaniards were starving, and the villages that resisted should have signaled what was in store. If Soderini had left the Bologna road open, had made his decision earlier. A desperate army of infantry and light horse moved through the valley of the Mugello, ragged and footsore, until Prato.

Thunderheads nailed themselves to the late August sky, and the air grew closer by the hour. He rode with his brother, and when he looked into the faces of the Spaniards he saw nothing. The sun had burned them the color of copper, and the hunger had hollowed their cheeks. He had looked at the walls that shut them out and wondered how such desperate beggars might scale them. Cardona gathered his captains, and the word went out. Within the walls were food and gold. Giovanni understood the contract then, that they would take this town or they would starve. The alchemy was done in an instant, and their very weariness would carry them to victory. There could be no retreat, no failure, and as the first of them broke ranks and ran for the walls, he knew that Prato would not be able to resist this hunger or match the depth of this need. And then, and then.

Because the bodies of a thousand men would not hold so much blood, and the throats of mortal men, women, and children not form such screams, nor the human frame bear such tortures—the braziers, the tools of black iron—because sinew and flesh would not form such shapes, nor the earth itself hold so many cadavers, then the sack of Prato must be a projection of the Devil, a phantasm, and though men afterward said that the sounds he heard and sights he saw truly took place, he knew that really this was but a complication of the evil, the trickery that fools the eye in a painting, not the subject itself, which is elsewhere and distant, only pretending to be there before him. The hearts of men could not be so black, and when Cardona came to him and told him that the Medici were restored and Florence was his for the taking, he counted the cost of this rightful act, the broken skulls, bleeding mouths, the horrible wounds and mutilations, the screams that he can still hear—these must all harden his conviction, armor it and protect it from the pleas of the innocent. The Medici are the masters of Florence once more, but the Cardinal cannot rest there. Behind Florence lies Prato. Behind his own soft features lie those of the Borgia. Once again he leaves the carnage behind him and turns his horse to Rome. The clowns and idiots will return; his waiting resume. The lamps blaze again in Palazzo Medici and its chambers ring with shouting voices, screams of laughter, howls, and echoes and more echoes. Under Rome lie other Romes. By January of the following year, Julius is sick. Come February, dead.