The Pop’s Rhinoceros (35 page)

“… eh? Eh, Colonel Diego?” The service is under way below, a beardless deacon swinging the thurible over the altar, the unsighted mass of the congregation already bored and talking amongst themselves, bareheaded journeymen, some monks at the back, a dog on its hind legs, barking. … “Don Diego!”

He comes to, Colonna’s voice jerking him out of this. A tall, elderly man has entered and stands on the other side of Colonna’s chair. Colonna looks up at him, raises a hand, which the other brushes with his lips, glancing at Diego as he does so.

“Vitelli, dear old Misha …” They are friends, or more than friends, it seems. Vitelli wants to smile his affection but glances again at Diego instead, his mouth twitching slightly. “Vitelli, this is Colonel Diego here. I am keeping him with me tonight.”

Vitelli nods his head. “I know of Colonel Diego, naturally.”

Behind him stands a young woman who looks up quickly at his name, gazing steadily across the two older men, weighing him up. Her nose is thin and hawkish, set in a strong face, too strong to be truly beautiful, her eyes brown, perhaps, but seeming almost red from the great cascade of coppery hair spilling over her shoulders. Diego notes her face with a start, another as he realizes she is costumed like a man.

“Signora Maria Francesca d’ Aste,” Vitelli announces. “My wife.”

The woman offers her hand to Colonna, who kisses it. Then she thrusts it at Diego himself. He hesitates. Vitelli growls,” Keep your place,” but she remains
there, arm outstretched. He looks between them, feels himself color. She simply waits, staring into his face, challenging him. Abruptly she laughs, withdraws with a little flourish of her hand. Another latecomer has entered. She turns away from all three.

“Will
you
kiss my hand, Cardinal Serra?” she asks of the red-smocked man bustling through the press of the passage.

“Will you kiss my ring?” retorts the Cardinal, squeezing past her. “Vitelli. M’lord Colonna.” He makes little bows to both. “Captain Diego. Is our Ambassador …? Ah-ha! No need to answer. I see his marker. Lord, she is even fatter. …” He moves on and is presently swallowed in the crush.

“I still think of Paulo from time to time. …” Colonna is speaking absently, gazing out into the noisy maw of the nave. “I mean your cousin, Misha. I think, sometimes, that he was the best of us, in his way.”

“Paulo cared for nothing and nobody. Least of all himself,” Vitelli replies. Colonna nods sadly. Their eyes drift back to the spectacle below, or are drawn down there.

Below, the swollen mystery of the mass is throbbing, growing tight and bloated as the stomachs of drowned pigs swept down the Tiber by spring floods, unfurling fillets of itself in the long, drawn-out Alleluias of the choir that are sometimes audible above the racket of the worshipers’ yacking, a dog barking, pig squealing (still swinging overhead), several chickens,
“Alleluia-aaaa. … Alleluia-aaaaaahhh …”
Angels ride in on tongues of sound that flap through the church’s toothless gums, and Bruno prays that he will read well: the ambo is well inside enemy territory. Silently, invisibly behind the screen, Father Tommaso prays with him. Subdeacons and ushers gather together, bearing candles and little thuribles. Slowly the procession forms up.

“Should not the choir be silent now?” inquires Fulvio of Father Tommaso.

“Shut up,” responds Father Tommaso.

Above, idle pot-boys are leaning over the balustrade to let thin strings of drool dangle from their mouths, then, just as it seems they must break, sucking them safely back up. Or not. It is a contest—longest string wins—somewhat vexing to those below. Trays of sweetmeats circulate perilously: pork in cider, beef in radish sauce, borne by sweating serving women who edge their way in difficult procession through the clumps and clusters of the guests. It is hot up here. And sliced tongue! Mmmmm. Fiametta
loves
a slice of tongue, signaling, waving, ignored, finally shouting, “You! Over here!” which attracts pained expressions from those around her, a smirk from Ascanio, but nothing at all from Don Jerònimo da Vich and Cardinal Serra, who, it would appear, are leaning out over the rail to watch and pass comment on the gobbing contest going on opposite—” Not bad, that one” and “More phlegm needed” and “Ooops! Overextended himself”—until the serving woman continues on, other attentions drift away, a kind of privacy is regained, and their real conversation resumes.

“… so I had Diego there tickle his ear.”

“And?”

“And nothing. He does not know, nor does it matter. I meet our friend again tonight. Venturo is only for appearance. What is the word from His Holiness?”

“I believe he is rather delighted. Ghiberti sought me out this afternoon, seemingly to demand sureties against the resurgence of ‘your monstrous conduct and temper,’ which I gave willingly”—Serra chuckles—“after which he let me know that His Holiness is retelling the episode with his customary brio to all who will listen. The role of the elephant in particular is growing …”

“Monstrous?”

“Monstrous. Yes, absolutely monstrous; look there now—” Serra points across to the pot-boys again, one of whom is jiggling a veritable stalactite of saliva, eyes narrowed in concentration, sucking now, up it comes. Vich turns at this hint to find a man standing behind him and to his right. He nods and the stranger nods back, moves off once again.

“Do you know him?”

“No. Faria’s creature, most likely. Yes, look. He is leaving now we have seen him. Enough of all that. Tell me of our King.”

“The court was at Toledo when last I heard, but he is aloof from this affair. The negotiation between our ministers and Manolo’s proceeds. I take my instruction from there, and King Fernando his intelligence. We are players here in Rome, merely players. … Good God, look at that one!”

And this time it is Serra’s turn to look about him in vague alarm, but, finding only Fiametta busy with her sliced meats in place of the expected eavesdropper, he redirects his gaze across the nave to the pot-boys, one of whom has unleashed a truly colossal pendant of drool, a glistening column that stretches down, little pearls of quicksilver gloop running down its sides to thicken and strengthen, farther, farther, more and more, until it seems it must wet the unsuspecting head below, but no! No, it is being retracted, its lithe tongue quivering as the Gob Maestro’s own winds the excrescence back, spooling and spooning, cheek, jaw, throat, even stomach muscles all pumping in concert, the last foot of phlegm whipping back up into the gullet that spawned it with a slap, swallow, and gulp.

“Remember me in your next dispatch,” says Serra, moving off. Pot-boys are slapping the victor on the back, making him choke a little.

“You are leaving?”

“I will attend our host for a while. An uncle of mine once fought with the Colonnas at, I think, Parma. Or Piacenza. Against the French, at any rate.”

Vich looks into the pit of the church, where a deacon seems to be conducting the reading while ushers and subdeacons defend the ambo with shoves and curses against the surges of the crowd. The priest directly beneath him appears oblivious of all this commotion farther up the nave, fiddling about with thuribles and pyxes, mouthing inaudibly, now what would it be … the Creed?

It occurs to Father Tommaso, indeed intoning,
“Credo in unum deum,”
that soon the halfway point will be reached and the so-called Mass of the Catechumens will be over. Such markers keep the spirits up. The choir sings:
“Confitebuntur celi mirabilia tua domine. …”
Fulvio inquires whether they should not be forming the offertory procession now and is answered in the negative. It also occurs to Father Tommaso that if the sainted Fulvio should open his mouth one more time, and words issue from that mouth not contained in either the missal or the psalter, Father Tommaso will close said mouth with his fist. The choir sings:
“… et veritatem tuam in ecclesia sanctorum. …”
Father Tommaso repents of said thought.
“Alleluia, alleluiaaa-aaahh!”
It being unworthy in the presence of the host that lies before him on the altar, inanimate for the nonce. Elaborately farced neumes blend their warbling trebles in the barrel of the roof, inviting angels to the feast. They have arrived invisibly and cling to the ceiling like bats: there are just over twenty-seven thousand of them at the moment. Christ is as yet absent.

But sometimes he comes—even here, even now. Sometimes he flickers in the host, or in the quiet that the host might sometimes command before the faithful bray out their smirched faith and sup on cleanliness again. For Christ is like the coldest cold air, skin-pricking and lung-burning. He may be here tonight, thinks Tommaso, clearing this space in his thoughts, Christ who was sown in the Virgin and rinsed at the Passion, reaped by enemies, threshed at the scouring, winnowed in foul words, ground in the mill of the gentiles, and made into pure flour and blood and cooked in the sepulcher for three days—from which a loaf came forth. This loaf: the host. He incenses it and the altar again. He washes his hands. He prays.

His deacon and subdeacon will pray with him, for they are no longer simply Bruno, his old comrade who has rejoined him in the interval, and Fulvio, the pious whelp whom he will punch in the teeth. They are his ministers and officers, and he is their ministry and office, mill and press of the bread and the wine. They pray, and the choir chants. He says to the two of them:
“Dominus vobiscum”
and
“Sursum corda”
and
“Gratias agamus domino deo nostro.”
They give back to him
“Et cum spiritu tuo”
and
“Habemus ad dominum”
and
“Dignum et iustum est.”
Somewhere in the church the sacring bell rings, and the din beyond the screen begins to subside. The choir falls silent. He remembers their father the Pope, then the living, then the saints who are dead. He stretches his hands over the wheaten disk, hands like rolls of meat, heavy and black-haired. He says the words.

Flanking him, Bruno and Fulvio turn face-to-face, Father Tommaso’s profile—broken nose, chin-stubble—dividing them as Fulvio gazes rapt and vacant into the host’s mystery, as Bruno darts glances through the rood-screen’s tracery to the congregation beyond: heavy, weather-tanned faces staring up dumbly, silent at last, waiting. More angels arrive. Rats scamper over the floors, inaudibly. The first bell sounds high above, then the second, reaching the sounding chamber of the church in shuddering concussions of sound that hammer the air, and Father Tommaso reaches for the host, murmuring, holds it, murmuring, lifts it chesthigh,
pauses, higher, and Bruno sees Him mirrored in the faces of the faithful, in their crumpled mouths and snot-streaked noses, higher, their widening eyes and bobbing Adam’s apples, all waiting for Christ. …

Now.

“Jesu! Jesu!” “Wash me, Christ!” “Here! Over here!”

A single instant, and the church’s silence is a cacophony of bellowed prayers, holy roarings, a din of supplications, orisons, petitions. Christ is not gradual, he is sudden. Rosaries swing about and tangle with wooden crosses. People get hit in the face by other people’s amulets. This is not enough, so there is jumping, too—a good sight of the host being prophylactic against blindness, impotence, and death until sundown tomorrow—while the sick are lifted head-high to likewise receive full benefit: a one-legged woman, a badly mangled fighting cock, the dog (though it is healthy and escapes), coughing infants, somebody’s grandmother. Even the pig joins in, squealing away up there, while from the gallery churns of milk are poured downward over the celebrants below. Cabbages are thrown. Ascanio has one held by his page while he pisses into its leaves, then hurls it out, sailing high over the celebrants’ heads, glancing off a pillar, finally impaling itself on a candle-spike jutting from the back wall. Boys release chickens, which try to fly, fail, and have their necks wrung. The pig is lowered into a waiting scrum of pig-fanciers who tear it limb from limb—prayerfully—spraying themselves with bright red pig-blood. The dog gets tangled in the pig-guts. There is vomiting, too; the victorious pot-boy, having been patted, thumped, and shaken all to no avail, is finally swung upside-down by the heels until his recalcitrant mucal stomach contents spray out. …

In the midst of these devotions, the demon Tutivullus arrives with pen and parchment to take notes from the rafters, said notes to later be collated and later still presented to the loose-mouthed sinner him- or herself at either the Pearly Gates or the Mouth of Hell, whichever should prove appropriate. He primes his pen and cocks an ear: lot of gossiping going on, lot of yelling, too, use block capitals for that, some more or less amiable scuffles, bit of fighting near the back—not his department—howling infants, note it, a barking dog, forget it. Dogs have no soul. Now, have all these infants been baptized? … Angels (a little over twenty-seven thousand) whirr and pout. More vegetables rain down. A Bologna sausage. That fight, though, near the back. Seems to be spreading, is it? Yes. Getting worse, is it? No. It’s the monks. Odd.

Colonna squints into a nether gloom that even two hundred giulios’ worth of beeswax candles has not fully dispelled. A gray stain is spreading there, outward from the back left corner, its leading edge all aggression and thumps on the head—Colonna does not object to this; the reputation of the feast of Philip and James rests largely on its rowdiness—but within this aggressive cordon sanitaire, a weird calm seems to be descending. Within, it seems, people are not fighting.
They are, in fact, kneeling. They are, in fact, praying. And they are kneeling and praying because whenever they try to rise, or stop praying, one of the gray-habited monks is beating them over the head. Not just monks, either. They have helpers, unmonkish ones, and the gray stain of prayer is spreading farther up the nave. He has been calm till now. The presence of Diego and Vitelli have cheered him somewhat; even Vitelli’s little vixen has proved amusing, the rumors notwithstanding, useful in keeping Serra, who bores him, at bay. His wound has throbbed no more than usual. But this, this …