The Pop’s Rhinoceros (38 page)

“Albuquerque will get his fort in the end, but for the moment, yes, he has only pretty words, a dinner service, and …”

“And the animal,” supplies Vich.

“Two oceans and a sea away in Goa as we speak. It will be some little
while yet before it sees the inside of the Belvedere. I presume your dispatch will advise you.”

“When it arrives,” Vich responds. He sounds gloomy. “I distrust the irregularity of these communications. We are a long way from home, you and I. …”

“But what do you mean?” rallies the other. “We are at the center of the world. We are at Rome!” Both men laugh.

“How will you make the arrangements? A ship, crew, some worthy-seeming fool to play Columbus … My instructions are to aid you in this business. For all his foolery, our Pope is not a fool. One whiff of complicity …” He shrugs. “We would be embarrassed, at least. There would be repercussions. The negotiation at Ayamonte is delicate at the moment. There are those who would rather see it fail altogether.”

“Serra mentioned it earlier tonight. I spoke with him at Colonna’s. Simply dropped the name as though it were nothing. I do not know how he learned of it, but we must presume his inquiries will continue.”

“What does he know?”

“Nothing, or he would not have tested me so crudely. I was casual, and there was an altercation with some monks which distracted him. He would have liked to question me further. If Serra knows of Ayamonte, then others will, too. We cannot rely on discretion; the truth will out. Once the expedition leaves we are undiscoverable. We must reach that point.”

“Outrun the truth. Problems, difficulties,” murmurs the other.

“All of them soluble,” Vich declares, smiling. “For my part, I intend to delegate.”

“Delegate?” The other’s voice is shocked, a note of alarm creeping into it. “Delegate to whom?”

“You know him very well. He is clever, resourceful, adept at disguise; above all”—Vich is grinning—” he is the soul of discretion. My secretary. Signor Antonio Seròn.”

The name seems at first to strike the other dumb. His face is incredulous. Then comprehension dawns, a smile spreads from ear to ear, and when he speaks his tone is admiring. “Don Jerònimo, you were born to this business.”

Behind the door, the girl is motionless and silent. Her mistress, however, begins, after a minute or two, to exhale heavily, to sigh, to shift about awkwardly. There is a problem.

When, at Easter, a bathed Fiametta crosses the brook of the Marrana by the footbridge at the Church of the Greek School, swaps its stench for that of the noisy wharves between the Tiber and the Aventine, and picks her way through the ruins of the Savelli Keep to go to Mass at Santa Sabina, she takes with her a little cushion. The frescoes of the saints in the roundels are very fine and those of the holy cities marvelously detailed. The different-colored marbles adorning the clerestory usually claim her for a minute or two, the mosaics above the door and on Zamora’s tomb also while away the time, but of most importance is the floor.
The floor is neither beautiful nor richly worked, no different in effect from the one she kneels on now. With the cushion, Fiametta may direct her thoughts to the Passion, to the Savior’s suffering, his pain, or even try to follow the Epistle. Without the cushion, though … The floor of Santa Sabina is laid with unyielding flagstones, like her hallway. Almost from the moment that she took up her station there, in the hall, on the unforgiving floor, Fiametta’s knees began to hurt.

She begins by kneeling on both, sitting back on her heels and craning her neck to peer through the crack. After less than a minute of this she gets cramp. She shifts position slightly, then alternates from one knee to the other, swapping regularly to begin with, then with increasing frequency until both knees are in equal agony from the hateful flagstones, on which she finally squats, all her weight bearing down on the balls of her feet, her arches straining, knees splayed in an effort to press her face to the door. … Hopeless. She is too fat to be a spy. Finally she sits back, resigned, propped on her arms, to listen but see nothing.

But the girl does not move, seems not to stir a muscle. The men’s talk drifts through the door. A beast, somewhere. A negotiation, somewhere else. They do not really trust each other; Fiametta, stretching out her legs, idly catches the undertone. She does not care, wiggling her toes. And again, the girl does not move. But then there is a shift, a sudden change, and Fiametta almost scrambles to her feet, sure that the men must have heard, seen, sensed …

Eusebia is soundless as before, just as invisible. Her Ambassador is describing the beast, or reading a letter, something. But the girl is rapt, the air prickling with her attention, its abrupt focus stabbing through the door. Something they have said has provoked this in her. Her excitement is palpable. How can they not feel it?

“…it takes grass, straw, and boiled rice. I imagine the Governor of the Indies was unamused,” Vich is saying. She
knows,
thinks Fiametta, eyeing the girl, she knows what they are talking about. A beast, a Governor, the Indies … Which of these has galvanized her? The two men talk on, the candle burns lower, or redder, the cracks in the door glow like embers now. Eusebia is blank again, a silhouette of nothing. What do you know? Fiametta wonders to herself. As if in response, the girl rises to her feet. The voices within have fallen silent for a moment. They are bidding their farewells.

Fiametta struggles up. Together they hurry back down the hallway, climb the stairs in silence. Outside the door to the main
sala,
she turns to her maid, pinching her arm and hissing in her ear, “Never again, do you understand? Never again.” She jerks her thumb back down the stairs. “What did you think you were doing?”

Fiametta expects the girl to hang her head, adopt her habitual cringe, to remain silent. Instead Eusebia faces her squarely, and when she speaks her voice is unguarded.

“I was thinking of the country whence I came,” she tells her mistress. “I was remembering the great river which divides it and the forests which grow along
its banks. I was remembering a village there, where my father’s brother took me, and I was watching a boy who was fishing in a pool beside it.”

These words mean nothing to the woman gripping her by the arm. It is her voice that silences Fiametta, for it is neither wistful, nor sad, nor apologetic. None of the tones she would expect. Even unknowing, the two men have sparked something in her servant. She looks into the girl’s face, searching for whatever she is hiding there, but the barbarous markings that run in lines across her cheeks are like a mask; her passivity is impenetrable. The sound of chairs scraping comes from below. Eusebia turns away then, and Fiametta watches as she continues upstairs. She waits until she hears the men open the scullery door and pad through the hallway before she makes her own way back to the bedchamber. The sheet clings to her, damp with sweat. She hears the bolt drawn back, the door opened and closed. Hooves clop loudly in the courtyard, are silenced abruptly as the horse turns into the street. Vich’s careful quiet footsteps on the stairs. He is considerate, she thinks, feigning sleep. Kind, as the door is opened. Warm, as he slips into the bed. He plants a line of chaste, deceitful kisses down the nape of her neck. Vague
mmm-mms
from Fiametta, as though dreaming of him.

“
in
-dia-aah,” he murmurs, half-mocking, leaning over her to kiss her breast. She rolls onto her back, stretching, wanting him. “Where the King”—he has her nipple between thumb and forefinger—” lives in a volcano.” Her other breast flops lazily over to join the first and partially bury it. “Ah-ha! Af-rica-aaah.” He sucks busily for a second, then licks around the underside.

“Is he gone?” she asks, yawning, reaching for him. Vich does not answer. His tongue moves down, darting into her navel, his teeth nipping at her, farther down. She raises her head to look down in surprise—he has never done this before. Vich carefully parts her lips with his fingers, flicks his tongue experimentally. He is improvising, different from the man of a few months ago. She lets her head fall back. His weight shifts on the bed. She breathes in, waiting, her hand tightening in his hair. She feels his breath on her, his head poised in the gulf between her thighs.

“Ro-ma,” he murmurs as she pushes his head down.

Ro-ma, it would seem, is humid tonight. There is water in the air, or vice versa; indoors and out, commingled promiscuously in the troughs and sloughs of the city’s contours. In the damp folds of the Velabrum, the wet crease of the Subura, rank vapors and steaminess imply spatterings, localized downpours, short-lived but drastic squalls. Heavy dust-laden fogs lumber into town. Ro-ma drips tears and oozes sweat, secretes and releases drool. Lips pucker or slaver, tongues loll or stiffen. The Caput Mundi grows hydra-headed and thirsty, these mouth-to-mouth exchanges marking junctions, short-lived intersections in the commerce that the city carries on with itself, a new and fluid topography. Its creatures seek each other out in damp-ridden bedchambers and musty attics, in doorways, against the walls of lightless alleys, blind grindings and gropings, mouths crammed
with spit, throats gagging on innards, swilling and swallowing and gasping and grunting. … On the piano nobile, in a tangle of come-flecked sweat-soaked sheets, Vich is a muscled darting fish feeding on the water-bleached carrion of his mistress. Beneath a wharf in Trastevere, some Corsican bravo bruises the slack tonsils of his sweetheart. Elsewhere a barge captain licks the plump cheeks of his “Roman heart’s desire” (he calls her that) in a manner practiced on his Magliana, Vicinia, and Ostia “Heart’s desires.” An elderly banker’s wife snacks on her page’s downless upper lip; a tart pulls up her shift. Amongst jangling bits and bridles a saddler plants his laughing mouth over that of his partner’s laughing daughter. A consumptive shoemaker hacks midkiss and coughs a gobbet of gray phlegm down the throat of his perfectly lovely wife. It is a detail: they are in love and have no money. It doesn’t matter that the tart will go unpaid, nor that the page will, that three dogs are fellating themselves in Pescheria, inspiring a baker’s boy who will later try the same in Ponte and find he cannot reach. Think supple, he thinks. … Then again, a stone’s throw away, the Albergo d’Orso, top-floor, east-facing window: An ex-functionary of the Apostolic Camera stands motionless, his bronzed body muscled and naked as a god, eyes searching the anterior darkness while minions tongue him from below, all three waiting for sunrise and ejaculation. Dawn is hours off.

How about nice little dry kisses? Grandpa to granddaughter’s soft white forehead, or tearful mother to departing son, or like Vittoria Colonna’s on the hard dry wood of her crucifix with its little carved Christ, the thorns so well-realized that she has sometimes bloodied her lips, so salty-sharp, mmm-mm, while Papa bites the heads off rats (an untruth, Vittoria’s single sin today) and howls in the dusty gallery where the servants finally abandoned him, alone but for the drummer boys of Ravenna whose tattoo throbs within his skull, stamping madly on the broken boards. … Shall we continue? Cardinal Serra is slumming it on a pallet in Ripa with an unwashed girl from the docks who kisses his “wound,” or sucks out the “lance,” or swabs his face with her vinegary juices, or something equally banal, while downstairs (these events are unrelated), Ascanio and “friend” pour wine down each other’s throats: from the cup, from the jug, from the mouth, from the … And upriver, in the malarial dankness of the Borgo, in the inky darkness of the back hall of the Pilgrim’s Staff, lying together on the straw mattress acquired that afternoon in Peter’s Square, Wolf is kissing Wulf.

Wulf cried earlier, on the way back from the church, but now he has cheered up somewhat and is surreptitiously masturbating under his habit, hoping Wolf will not notice. To one side of him the bulky outline of Bernardo masks the slighter one of Salvestro, who groans softly from time to time. To the other lies Father Jörg. The faint tinkling of sheep bells sounds loud in the night’s stillness,
ting, ting, ting,
a flock being driven up to the pastures of the Pincio,
ting, ting, ting,
through the backstreets of the Borgo, across the bridge of Sant’Angelo, silly directionless sheep bumping into one another, bumbling along the Via Lata, fading in and out of earshot, a familiar sound to Rome’s tireless lovers, the smoochers and
snoggers, the wives of snorers and grinders of teeth, to the earliest of early risers and latest of late sleepers, to the sleep-abandoned. A familiar sound, too—recognized, discounted—to Don Diego, who kisses the pommel of his sword. Lying on his cot, staring into the insomniac darkness, he sees the shapes of enemies: a great gallery of backbiters, suave liars, two-faced placemen, soft-skinned smooth-faced back-stabbers …
Ting, ting, ting
… Gone.

If I am to be thought a monster, he thinks, sword rising above the first bowed head, why should I not slaughter them all?

The blade quivers and Diego imagines how it will bite the bone of the skull. Or slice the soft flesh of the face. Yes, but whose face? Who, if this scene were actually played, would he drag forward to be the first? The tip of his sword taps the fat chin of Ramon de Cardona, and obediently, slowly (so Diego can savor it—this ritual has been refined in repetition), the fat-faced Viceroy of Naples looks up at his accuser. The moment of recognition. Fear. Excellent, thinks Don Diego.

“Forgive me, Don Diego.”

“Colonel
Diego,” Diego corrects him.

“Colonel Diego, forgive me my cowardice at Ravenna, where I—”

But Don Diego, faced with his former commander, cannot restrain himself at the sound of his voice, even imagined. He stabs forward and the tip of his sword disappears into the Viceroy’s throat, abruptly cutting off the confession. Blood runs along the flat of his sword. The Viceroy gurgles and chokes. On his bed, Diego sighs. Patience, he tells himself. Try again. He stares into the teeming darkness, and once again Ramon de Cardona shuffles forward, fat frightened face upturned to his own.

“Forgive me, Colonel Diego. I am a coward. I left my men at Ravenna. I betrayed you at Prato, and afterward …” Don Diego signals for him to pause, then cuts off one of his hands. The Viceroy howls, then continues. “Together with Cardinal Giovanni di Medici, now our Pope, I conspired to place the disgrace of Prato on your shoulders when it was rightfully our own. It is our filth which stains you”—Cardona fouls himself at this point; he seems to be naked now—“mine and the Cardinal’s.”