The Pop’s Rhinoceros (51 page)

Salvestro drifted, turning slowly on his heels while a sheet of light wheeled above him. Vaults tessellated the curves and contours, forming diamonds and swooping scimitarlike insets. Glaring sunlight fattened in the heat of early afternoon and broke apart against the hard marble. The rays that struggled through beat weakly on the garish panels overhead, as though the air itself were an impedance. Salvestro saw the metallic scales of a massive armature and, at once held by the vista and lost within it, felt that he was suspended within the nave, not looking up but strung by the heels and falling headfirst down to the dim glister sunk deep below him. The interior was viscous, inescapable. A great gold animal heaved itself over the bed of its domain. He was in the barrel, trapped again, falling into Vineta. …

When they emerged, a friar standing by the door told them that the ceiling was gilded with the first gold to be brought back from the New World, but Salvestro did not care about that and thereafter he avoided Rome’s churches whenever possible, preferring to wander up and down the bustling riverfront, where watermen took on their passengers and cargoes, shouted at each other, and battled the caprices of the Tiber’s currents and eddies. They saw a mule drown and below the Ponte Cestio a boatload of bottles capsize its craft and sink in an instant. A few men stopped to watch the dark shapes tumble down into the white sand of the riverbed and then disappear as though the water there flowed over a bed of thick cream. One spectator told his companion that he had seen whole bargeloads of stone vanish as quickly. The Tiber’s sandbeds were deep enough to swallow Rome.

Salvestro’s store of soldi transferred itself in steady installments to the pockets of the innkeepers whose taverns fronted the wharves and who gave them in return fat fillets of sturgeon, stringy chickens, heavy Campanian wines that tasted of black currants, and plates of steaming swedes and carrots, whose combined effect was to turn their bowels to water and their heads to cauldrons of blood. They squatted miserably in the grip of their quivering guts and shivered as though they had the fever. When Salvestro’s haphazard calculations revealed that eating like kings would soon render them penniless as peasants, they reverted to doughy biscuits soaked in thin vegetable broth, unsalted porridges made from meal, or mashed beans and chickpeas and drank beer until they pissed like horses. The sun seemed to rise higher by the day. The afternoons were yawning wastes of heat.

The streets emptied as pilgrims, priests, and the city’s natives alike denned themselves in palazzi, stables, huts, hovels, and makeshift bivouacs of poles and
sacking. Salvestro and Bernardo sought refuge in Rome’s ruins. To the south and east, the clotted precincts loosened and liquefied; granaries, stables, and high-walled houses drifted on independent currents and beached themselves on isolated plots of land. The streets unraveled and a strange detritus took their place: great blocks of stone, massive buckled walls, toppled columns and arches. Farther and the ruins began to gather themselves into bare blockhouses, little amphitheaters, roofless temples. Ivy and scrubby bushes gouged footholds in the mortar. Goats clambered about, and, Salvestro and Bernardo slowly realized as they stumbled dull-witted from drink in search of shade, the most massive of these survivors of time’s slow violence were the refuge of others besides themselves.

Salvestro sensed that they were watched long before their observers showed themselves. Bernardo trudged beside him, oblivious of the faint rustles and near noiseless footfalls that pricked his ears always from behind or above. He remembered his time in the forest when he had tracked his own kind for long hours, watching their anxiety mount as the invisible fact of his presence had dawned on them, feeling their reaction as a kind of pleasure, the fact that he existed and was not nothing. Now the roles were reversed. It was their fifth or sixth foray into this deserted-seeming world, a late afternoon of blazing heat in which they had slumped, Bernardo falling fast asleep in the shade of a great curving colonnade, himself dulled and drowsy. Their spy was simply and suddenly there, had neither approached, nor emerged, nor dropped from some hiding place.

He was clothed only in scraps of cloth wound about his waist, his body streaked with filth and his hair matted in stiff plaits that reached his shoulders. His face was expressionless. He made no sound. Then, when Salvestro struggled to his feet, he skipped backward, turned, and was gone. Salvestro rubbed his eyes and reached down to shake Bernardo. Hard white light glared off the dust, bleached earth, and stone. Archways stretched and curved away to either side of them and rose in tiers above. Within, the shade was blacker than tar. He could look within and be dazzled when he turned his gaze outside, or look without and find himself blind amongst the shadows of massive piers and porticoes. Cicadas rasped and fell silent and rasped again. The heat seemed to gather weight and press on him. He squinted and listened and heard nothing, and then the man was back.

This time with three of his fellows, appearing as suddenly as before. Two more strolled up from the left, then a small group appeared on his right. Soon there were twenty or more of them, standing casually and in silence before the two men, ragged men and women dressed in a motley of rags and ill-fitting garments. A few squatted on their haunches, planting heavy clubs in the sandy ground before them and staring directly at the two of them with blank expressions on their faces. Several had crudely bandaged stumps in place of hands. Others carried yellowish sores, which they would brush at as the flies tried to settle. No one spoke. Bernardo stood up slowly. Salvestro looked about him and thought of flight. Then the crowd before them stirred and parted. One of their number strode to the front: a woman.

She wore a leather coat and tattered skirts cut below the knee. Heavy silver earrings hung from her ears, and a few locks of thick black hair escaped from beneath a battered cap. Her face was burned to a deep brown by the sun, the skin creased about her eyes. The fingers of her right hand were decorated with rings of some plain metal that clicked and clacked together dully as she toyed with the handle of a short knife. She planted herself between Salvestro and Bernardo and the crowd, looking the two men over. Someone behind her made a sound. Her head twitched almost imperceptibly to one side, and her shoulders stiffened. The exclamation was stifled abruptly; her eyes never left the two of them. Salvestro stared back and found he could not match her gaze. The silence was a key winding in his bowels, urging other such silences upon him.

“You do not belong here,” she said; then, treating Bernardo as though he did not exist, she marched up to Salvestro and thrust out her arm. “Whatever you have. Now.” When he hesitated, the men and women behind her growled and began to shuffle forward. Bernardo shifted beside him. Salvestro thought again of flight. Stupid, he told himself, thinking of the huge ruin at his back, colonnades, shadows, hiding places … Stupid. He reached for the bundle inside his shirt, fumbling with the knots, then placing it in her outstretched palm. She clenched her hand and unclenched her hand, watching him with frank dislike. “Not much, and not much good in any case.” Her other arm moved in a blur, the little knife flashing as though the bag might as likely have been his face. Coins spilled onto the ground.

“You could buy food,” Salvestro said weakly.

The woman made a play of looking about. “How strange! There don’t seem to be any markets around here. Wonder where they disappeared to. …” A few men chuckled behind her. She pointed to the coins scattered about her feet. “Pick them up.”

“There’s a market.” His voice sounded thin and unconvincing to him, though what he said was true. He pointed vaguely. “You could—”

“In the city? Well, we’d get a warm welcome there now, wouldn’t we?” Underneath the mockery, her tone grew more threatening. She pointed again. “Get on your knees and pick them up.”

She will not stab me in the neck, Salvestro told himself. She wants to prove herself master, that is all. He dropped to his knees and began to pick up the coins. Bernardo fidgeted behind him. The woman remained stock-still, even as he picked the last of the soldi from between her bare feet. He stood up warily. There was another silence. “We could buy food for you,” he offered. She stared incredulously for a second, then burst into harsh laughter. Bernardo smiled uneasily.

“Break their heads,” said a voice.

“Shut up,” the woman said sharply. Salvestro noticed for the first time that she was barely older than him. She put her arm out again, but this time to gently cup his cheek. Her fingers curled about his ear. He saw her throat work, her neck stiffen, he tried to pull away, but too late. The woman spat full in his face. The little
mob behind her erupted into laughter. “You don’t belong here,” she hissed. “If we find you here again …” Her fingers stroked across his throat.

After that they took refuge from the afternoon sun in abandoned outhouses and tumbledown cottages that they sought out on the margins of the city. Noisy crowded streets would suddenly give out and be replaced by pasture. Bustling squares and plazas turned into open fields, or vineyards, or vegetable plots. Farms backed onto churches and ruined houses rose in the midst of orange groves like deserted vanguards of a main force that never arrived. Broken by imposing gatehouses, Rome’s walls rose and fell with the lie of the surrounding land, but the city itself never seemed to reach them, as though the sun had shrunk its flesh to a pellet rattling dryly in a hollow rind. The two men wandered a region that was neither city nor country, being themselves not quite of one or the other.

Nevertheless, sundials cast shadows that lengthened and crept about their stelae; bell towers and obelisks aped them. By late afternoon the Roman air was a balloon of heat pumped to bursting point and awaiting the needles of dusk. Days passed in this manner. The two men would make their way back into the thick of the city, then rousing itself for nocturnal sports such as wasting money, drinking gut-rot wine, and pissing out of upper-floor windows. By early evening small and sportive carnivals would begin to erupt out of Ripa and advance along the east bank of the Tiber as far as Scrofa: a riverine crescent of fun and games involving plump acrobats, rigged dogfights, and gambling by torchlight. The more devout pilgrims pursed their lips—an expression known locally as “the donkey’s bum-hole”—passing through the siesta-charged throng on their way to lodgings in the Borgo and an evening of consoling dullness. Salvestro and Bernardo joined them of necessity. Of their original one hundred and eighty-five soldi, twenty-three remained.

Past the bridge, the crowd began to thin and Salvestro would consider their route from Sant’Angelo to the Stick. Sometimes they would stride boldly down the center of the Via Alessandrina, through the square in front of San Giacomo Scossacavalli, past the palace of the Cardinal d’Aragona, reaching the Via dei Sinibaldi by one of the Borgo’s cross streets. More often they used the shambles that clung to the back of the hospital of Santo Spirito like flotsam washed against a cliff by some ancient storm, threading a path through the makeshift shacks and skirting the cooking fires of the squatters who made their homes there. There was the towpath, too, which took them almost around the bend of the river before a drover’s path skirting the foot of the Janiculum led them back. If they took the arched passage past the Palazzo della Rovere, they could approach the Via dei Sinibaldi from the south. Continuing in the direction of the Porta Pertusa allowed them to enter the same street from its westernmost end.

Salvestro invariably grew silent as they neared their nightly destination. Bernardo prattled freely, and then he too fell silent. They paused and waited a minute or two, watching the few passersby as they moved up and down the street. Salvestro eyed the various patches of black shadow whose shape and size
gradually became as familiar to him as the street’s daytime aspect, watching for a movement, a change, the slightest and least noticeable of shifts. There was a partly collapsed wall almost opposite the Stick. A little farther was something that had once been an elaborate drinking fountain. There were doorways, niches, corners … He waited and Bernardo waited, too. Only when the street was empty and silent, when the slightest intake of breath, or footfall, the slither of metal in a scabbard, could be depended on to betray the presence he awaited would the two men walk forward, into view, and seek the safety of the hostel. For, as Salvestro could not help but repeat to himself, there was still the Colonel. It would be here that he would spring, if he chose. Every evening, as they gained the safety of the hostel’s dark interior, Salvestro would turn, see nothing, loose a long, pent-up breath, and hear Bernardo do the same. When challenged on this, his companion denied the man’s existence nevertheless.

By night the Stick seemed to grow half as big again, adding staircases and new overhanging stories imperceptible in daylight. Lappi lurked within, shouting obscene challenges at all who crossed his path and only conceding the right of entry with a grudging, “Well, that’s as may be!” after elaborate identifications. Sometimes he stalked the corridors or concealed himself around corners to bellow threats in the ears of elderly women. In the rear chamber the monks squatted on their mattresses as though from dawn, when the two men had risen and stepped carefully over their sleeping bodies, to dusk, when they returned, the monks had done nothing more than sit up. Salvestro thought vaguely of “special devotions” and “audiences with bishops,” or the Pope. The monks did not speak to them. Gerhardt and his claque whispered together in their corner. Father Jörg scribbled jagged lines that wandered over the parchment in accordance with the humped lid of the chest he employed for a desk. Brother HansJürgen watched in silence.

As they stumbled down the passageway, Bernardo would resume prattling of the onions they had eaten in place of supper or reminiscing on a succulent fennel of the day before, Salvestro grunting perfunctorily in response. Their talk died again at the door. The monk’s eyes followed them across the chamber as they settled on their mattresses. If he glanced across, HansJürgen would look away. He remembered their second night, when he had crept across the chamber to whisper a warning in the monk’s ear, found himself kneeling there in the dark at a loss as to what he was warning against, had mumbled something about Gerhardt, something about lime. His misgivings had intensified but grown no more defined since then. Why should I care? he thought angrily to himself. Jörg was all but blind; he had known it before any of them. Now it seemed that they had fallen from the Prior’s awareness as through a trapdoor. The nights spent facing one another across the paper-strewn table in Jörg’s cell belonged to someone else’s life, not his. The grievance gnawed at him like a known but unprovable theft. He thought of the wretches who sheltered in the ruins with their bandages and
stumps. Wiping the woman’s spit from his face, he’d choked back the urge to ask her, If they did not belong “here,” where then did they belong?