The Pop’s Rhinoceros (47 page)

“No, it’s not,” he said.

Lucullo turned to look at him, his astonishment all the stranger for registering on a face so unused to astonishment. Then, as if in sympathy, Bernardo’s own
face began to move. First his brow furrowed, then wrinkled, his lower jaw began to jut, and his eyes narrowed, anchoring themselves to a point just beyond the end of his nose. Salvestro’s own surprised face mirrored Lucullo’s. The two men watched as Bernardo’s jaw began to work, his cheeks contorted, the muscles there flexing left and right as though two fat men were fighting for sole possession of his mouth. His Adam’s apple pumped steadily, then quicker. He chewed on his tongue. Salvestro’s astonishment became amazed recognition at what was taking place. He’s thinking, he thought. Then Bernardo spoke again.

“Money,” he said. “It’s not agreeable. It’s not agreeable at all because …” A pause then as his face heaved in the grip of a final contortion—part gulp, part spasm—which unfurrowed his brow, retracted his jaw, and sent both fat men tumbling down his gullet. “Because there’s not enough of it.”

An hour later—no, two or three, sitting on the edge of the bed and pulling his shirt back over his head, Salvestro reflected on Lucullo’s reaction. He felt the bed move slightly as the woman rolled over behind him. A dim clangor of banging doors and raised voices reached him from below. It was precipitate, in his opinion. Precipitate, and even unconsidered.

Lucullo had sat bolt upright at Bernardo’s contradiction, and for a few seconds he had said nothing, only stared incredulously across the table. But then he had risen to his feet, slowly, and even before he’d opened his mouth Salvestro had felt it—great waves of it rolling out and engulfing the room, flooding it in an instant: bonhomie, or good cheer, or a vast and irresistible happiness. When Lucullo spoke, calling for drinks, more food, for general celebration, it seemed to Salvestro that the light brightened about their corner of the room, shining in the faces that turned toward them, already calling for food themselves, drink, too, for a general celebration.

“In a
barrel,
you say?” Lucullo’s fascinated face drew the other patrons like a beacon, agog, shaking their heads in wonderment, exclaiming along with him as the two of them spun the yarn of their undersea voyage to Vineta. The customers of the Broken Wheel were a shabby and ill-dressed crowd beside Lucullo, peering over the backs of the adjoining booths, clustered on stools about the end of the table, and standing room only behind, all nodding away with Lucullo.

“And this would be where you acquired the scabbard, I imagine.” It seemed that Lucullo was breathless to hear more, so it was breathlessness that the other patrons aped then, and Salvestro heard himself agreeing that yes, it was indeed, wondering at the same time how it might have been possible to pick something from the bottom of the sea while sealed in a barrel. Then it was Bernardo who would say, “No, actually. You see, he was in the barrel. …” And Lucullo would throw up his hands in delight, exclaiming, “There’s a man who speaks his mind,” or, “He certainly tells it like it is.” He proposed a toast to “the explorers,” and the Broken Wheel drank to their health as a single Lucullo-like entity. Food arrived, pots of steaming soup in which to dip the hard, flat bread that was the best the Broken Wheel offered. Pots of beer and cups of rough wine were ordered in a
constant stream, but even as he nodded and smiled with the others, Salvestro felt a second disposition underlying the general merriment. The talk drifted casually, but only when Lucullo spoke, and when he did not a vague panic seemed to take hold of his court, which they assuaged with drink. The faces about him glowed and shone with Lucullo’s excitements, his own, too, he realized at one point, and he wondered if the others sensed something beneath their own reflected agitations and excitements. For it was fun, and good-humored, and underneath that were imperturbable depths that cared nothing for laughter and delight in the Broken Wheel. Underneath was a yawning emptiness, and this too was Lucullo’s.

Now a single yelp pierced the wall of the upstairs chamber, a woman’s voice. It was followed by another, then a succession of deep grunts. Something on the other side of the partition began to knock rhythmically. The bed, he thought. It roused the girl, who cocked an ear. “That’s Anjelica. Your friend must be …” She stopped in midsentence.

“The Pilgrim’s Staff? You mean to tell me that you’re staying at the Stick, the worst doss-hole in the city? Stay with me!” Lucullo had burst out. Salvestro was already accepting, the press of their audience closing on him, urging him on, for only a fool would refuse, and what an offer, and
yes, yes, yes. …

“No,” said Bernardo. Was it the brief stilling of his deeper disquiet that he felt then? “We can’t. We have to stay with the monks,” Bernardo went on, and for a second it seemed as if Lucullo might protest before he clapped his hands together, saying, “Well, that’s a ‘no,’ no question. Certainly knows his own mind, this one, eh?”
Yes, yes, yes. …
Respectful comments on the quality of Bernardo’s mind followed, and then the talk ranged wider, to the time that Lucullo had once spent in a madhouse, then back again to Bernardo and himself and their journey from Usedom far to the north. When it was time for Lucullo to meet his sons in the piazza, he exacted promises from them that they would return and drink with him again. He left, waving, and the gathering faltered as suddenly as it began. Their audience drifted away, rubbing their eyes and looking about them in vague bewilderment as though just awakened from sleep. They were left alone with the last of the celebrants, a man of about their own age who introduced himself as Pierino, a scholar who seemed to have found himself marooned in Rome for want of funds to leave. “Just get out, just get yourselves out,” he kept muttering, for he was quite drunk, then would apologize for his rudeness: “I mean Rome, not this place.”

They left him eventually, Salvestro demolishing Lucullo’s colonnade of soldi and scooping them into a ragged triangle of cloth torn from his shirt, which he tied carefully. The other drinkers nodded perfunctory farewells as they weaved through the tables to the door opposite the one they had entered. At the bottom of the stairs, one of the women he had seen earlier barred their way. “Anjelica!” she shouted up the stairwell.

“What?” Salvestro had asked.

“Lucullo left you a gift,” she said, then shouted again. Anjelica appeared and looked down at them both over the balustrade.

“So which one of you is the famous Bernardo?” she asked, and when Bernardo indicated himself he was told, “Come on up.”

The bed next door was silent now. Salvestro pulled on his boots. The woman was quiet, dressing herself quickly on the other side of the bed. She stood and dusted herself with a powder that smelled of roses. Salvestro felt her hand trail over his shoulder as she walked past him to the door. “Why so quiet, Master Explorer?” she asked. “It happens to everyone one time or another.”

As he waited for Bernardo to emerge, Salvestro heard heavy footsteps coming down the stairs. A man with thinning hair poked his head around the door. “You Bernardo or the other one?” he asked.

“I’m the other one,” Salvestro replied.

“Well, you’ll do.” He was unwrapping something from a length of cloth. “Lucullo left you this.” He weighed the scabbard in his hand. “Nice story, that business with the barrel. We can always use a good story here at the Broken Wheel. You’ll have met Simon out the back. He’s there to scare off the pilgrims. Next time, come in from the other side, through the yard. I’m Rodolfo, the most
dis
-agreeable man in Rome.” He laughed then at Salvestro’s continuing bafflement. “I own the place. Anyway, there you are.” He handed over the scabbard. “Where’d you get it?”

He recalled coming blearily awake that morning from a dream in which his teeth had clamped themselves to tree-trunks and would not let go. He swallowed twists and slivers of bark, and his incisors gouged shallow grooves in the tree-flesh beneath. The sour sap seemed still to fill his mouth as he opened his eyes. Bernardo was already awake, gnawing on a cabbage-stalk. He motioned to him silently and put a finger to his lips. They rose, and it was only then that he noticed the Prior, wakeful like themselves amongst the other sleeping bodies.

“This is for your labors,” Jörg said, speaking softly, his hand emerging from the chest. He placed the scabbard in Salvestro’s hand. There was a furtive air to the transaction, as though the other monks might protest their Prior’s extravagance. There had been other such moments, when Salvestro had resisted the urge to engage one or other of the monks in conversation, or had overheard their talk and wanted to burst in with some insight of his own. Above Bolzano, still in the mountains, they had walked until nightfall without encountering another soul and had to make their beds as best they could amongst the trunks of a pine forest. The near blackness beneath the trees’ canopy, the windless silence, these had unnerved the novices. Shivering in the cold air, Salvestro listened as Jörg told them, “But there is no silence. God breathes everywhere. Can you not hear?” And when they shook their heads he went on, “No? Are you sure?” He had breathed louder himself, then cocked an ear to each of their chests in turn, saying, “I think that I hear it,” then, when they had finally understood, “It is God’s breath, do you hear? Only lent to us. Listen. …”

And listening himself, Salvestro had thought of the street in Prato where they had left the girl, where the silence was a pent-up pounding from which he had fled, diving within himself to escape it. Before he could stop himself he had said something, something about the worst silences being the loudest, something stupid, but Jörg had turned to him in surprise and said, “There now, you see? Salvestro here understands,” and he would have said more, but at that point two of the older monks approached and the Prior turned away from him as though this endorsement had exceeded some fixed, invisible limit in their dealings with one another. There had been other such incidents, too—unguarded slaps on the back as an inn hove into view, brief words of encouragement, fleeting exchanges of words on the road—and each time Jörg had pulled back, stopped himself, as though to acknowledge him in that way were too flagrant a breach of his reserve or implied too intimate an acceptance of what he was. The scabbard was given in a like manner, for as he’d murmured his thanks Jörg had turned away impatiently, and he’d felt vaguely baffled and ill-placed, as he had before. He and Bernardo existed in a limbo between the monks and their Prior, as if they were the wedge that split them apart. He tucked the scabbard in the drawstring of his hose.

“The Prior gave it to me,” he said to Rodolfo.

“A gift from a clerk! Good God, we should put it on a plinth,” Rodolfo retorted. At that moment, a large hand appeared around the door opposite and Bernardo tiptoed out, clothes tucked under one arm. He dropped them on the floor and began to dress quickly, glancing up at Salvestro and Rodolfo, who watched curiously. The big man nodded toward the stairs as he pulled on his boots.

“Time to go,” said Salvestro.

At first they had not understood. Their Prior stood before them, his arm bent back behind him like Moses pointing down to the Promised Land. They looked forward obediently, then looked to each other. Before them was a field stripped bare of grass, a part-dried sea of mud, a desert.

“Saint Peter’s!” proclaimed Father Jörg.

The monks stayed silent, dumbfounded by the conundrum. They looked again, but what more was there to see? Four great stumps of stone standing on ground cut with a few trenches and dotted with puddles of stagnant water, a row of tumbrels, people wandering about among little depots of timber, stone, and gravel. Ruins.

The silence gathered weight. Jörg looked back and forth, confused and suddenly uncertain. Then someone said, “Doesn’t look like His Holiness can keep his churches any better than us.”

It began as something that might have been a sneeze, then a wheezing escape of breath, then a hiccup, but a hiccup of laughter. Another followed, then another,
as their stifled laughter broke out, and then they were laughing at him without restraint, some bent double, others slapping their sides at the sight of their Prior, who kept looking back and forth as though in disbelief that the muddy wreckage behind him did not awe them to silence. They guffawed, and giggled, and whooped, and chuckled, and standing at the back, HansJürgen too found himself unable to quell his own rising mirth and laughed heartily along with the rest of them at the absurdity of it. Jörg let his arms fall to his sides and stood before them helplessly. HansJürgen saw the bewilderment on his face, his utter incomprehension, and at that or what it meant, his mirth evaporated as suddenly as it had begun. Of course! he thought. How else could his Prior have blundered so? The fact had been there before him in Jörg’s stumbles and pratfalls, his artless gazings into space, and seeing now the blank shock scrawled across the Prior’s face, he suddenly understood, and it sobered him in an instant. He cannot see, thought HansJürgen.