The Pop’s Rhinoceros (62 page)

You are a whiner, thought Seròn. An ingrate, a thug, a mutineer in the
making. Perfect, perfect, perfect. He said, “You may have heard talk of an expedition. …”

The mate was called Jacopo. He had crawled out of a swamp a little way south of Spezia twenty years ago with the conviction that he was born to be a sailor. The
Santa Lucia
was where this belief had fetched him up. As Seròn talked on, skepticism, then disbelief, then appalled amazement, then appalled and reluctant credence passed across his face. A heavily pregnant rat scampered up the jetty, paused, sniffed at the
Santa Lucia
, then turned and scampered back to shore.

“What about Alfredo?” he asked finally.

“The same way as the others,” Seròn said without a pause.

Jacopo thought about this.

“Well?”

Jacopo nodded. “Very well,” he said.

A minute later, Seròn was again picking his way through the
cordon salissant
of the quay, head panning left to right, the Tiber, the Last Gasp, stables behind it, cottages, more cottages, sheds, more sheds … Huts and then a shed that was larger than its neighbors, barn doors on the seaward side, high-sided and windowless: the sail-loft.

Seven or eight aproned men eating their lunch outside looked up as he passed. He ignored them. The barn doors would not budge, so he continued around the back to where a smaller door was propped open with a sawhorse. He strolled in and found himself at the bottom of a huge well of light.

The floor was smooth and planked with light wood. Nails driven into the beams of the walls held knives of varying lengths, strange tongs, other tools whose function he could not guess. The roof forty feet above his head was slatted, and waterfalls of light poured down. Before him, hanging from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, making this end of the shed a little square courtyard, was a vast single sheet of crackling white canvas.

There seemed to be no one about. He slipped around the side of the huge curtain, only to find himself faced with another. Then another. And another. The canvas hung from thick poles suspended with pulleys from the joists high above, sheet after sheet, each one interleaved flush with its neighbors. Seròn involved himself busily in their folds, openings, and cul-de-sacs, wrestling the canvas this way and that, working his way through the floppy walls of the maze. The cloth seemed to go on forever, winding back on itself to confuse him, tempting him with openings that led only to more cloth. He was sweating and growing irritable when he finally emerged in an airy square of the workshop identical to the one he had left except for a number of strange windlasses anchored to the walls. There were ropes and pulleys, too, the ropes running up the walls under tension to tackle-blocks in the roof, then down again, down the walls, into the windlasses, out again … They seemed to be converging on him. He looked down. He was standing on canvas. One of his shoes was scuffed. He frowned.

“You! Get those brothel-slippers off that canvas! Go on! I said,
Go on! MOVE!”

It appeared that a woman was requesting his absence. A rather foul and loud one. She made the same request again, in subtly different terms, then a third time, at which he moved off the canvas as per her suggestion. She was blousy, fifty, red in the face, with a mop of curly hair that flopped like a mad rag doll on the top of her head. She marched up to him. Down the open top of her dress he could clearly see her nipples, which were big and chewed looking.

“I am Don Antonio Seròn,” he announced. “Master of the
Santa Lucia. …”

“No, you’re not. You’re Don Antonio Seròn,
owner
of the
Santa Lucia.”

“And I am in search of the sail-master,” he continued smoothly.

“Wrong again. You’re in search of the
sail-mistress
, and that’s me. Unfortunately. And before you start telling me what I know you’re going to tell me, which is that you need a full set of sails for that tub by yesterday, let me tell you, Don Antonio Whoever-you-are, something about sail-lofts. Sail-lofts are not ‘calm,’ they are not ‘airy,’ they are not ‘havens of peace’ amongst ‘the bustle of the docks.’ They are places of
work
. Canvas gets cut here with shears and knives, and shears and knives are
sharp
. It gets pierced with
awls
, and they are sharp, too. Canvas is stretched under tension, and tension is
dangerous. …”

She was fond of emphasis, or perhaps just shouting. Seròn was undecided.

“For instance, while you were admiring your stupid shiny face in your stupid shiny shoes, if I were to accidentally knock out the wedge in this
windlass
, and these ropes were to release their
tension
, then
this
would happen.”

Her elbow jabbed, something flew across the floor, a sudden deafening clatter as the windlasses spun, and Seròn fell back. The four corners of five hundred square feet of canvas sprang from the floor with a
whump!
and shot up into the ceiling. The cloth hung like an enormous sack, gathered at the corners, bobbing gently six feet above the ground. The sail-mistress looked down at him.

“If that was you in that canvas, you’d be in the market for a new pair of legs,” she said. “Now, Don Antonio Idiot-Seròn, what can I do for you?”

She had not liked it. She had frowned and tried to dissuade him. The men trooped in from their lunch and they had not liked it, either, also tsking, shaking their heads.

“They’ll shred with the first gust of wind,” she protested. “You’ll be sailing a bag of washing.”

They were standing out the back, contemplating a brown heap of brown cloth that had once been the
Santa Lucia’s
sails.

“I took ’em off the harbormaster for three scudi. They’re worth about two, as flour sacks, perhaps. But as sails…”

“I’ll pay ten,” said Seròn.

The woman whistled slowly. “Does Alfredo know about this?”

“Captain Alfredo lives on my charity, and aboard my ship,” said Seròn.

She shook her head. “You really are a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?” she told him frankly.

He counted out the money.

Road dust, dock-dross, ship-stench, now insults. Seròn shuttles back and forth between the city and its port, tiring himself with nocturnal and early morning flitting about, juggling headachy logistics, watching the mimosa come into bloom through the late Roman summer and sweating under its sun. Nothing’s going wrong, which worries him. He has the ship. He has Jacopo. He has Diego, or Diego has him; it comes to the same thing. He has his “Master Explorers.” Only Vich’s lack of curiosity gnaws at his hypertrophied paranoia. There he stands on the trapdoor, the noose about his neck. Why doesn’t he ask awkward questions? Seròn has answers prepared for them all: budgetary constraints, the draconian timetable, the very nature of the whole project. … Two days later he is back in Rome, on the treadmill again, round and round, for it never ends, this beastly business. Across the table in the Broken Wheel, Bernardo launches himself into the end of his account.

“… and in the morning there was no sign of her. She just ran off and left us there. So we started walking. There were patrols after us, too, we saw them. Salvestro saw them, anyway. We had to hide. We walked a long way. …”

Bernardo shook his head. Sitting opposite him, Seròn cursed himself for the twenty-eighth time. What had he been thinking? How could he possibly have thought that humoring this imbecile might serve to while away the time before the other imbecile returned from whatever fool’s chase had sent him scurrying out of the tavern in the first place? The giant droned, repeated himself, lost the thread, whined, went on and on and on. …

“You shouldn’t worry yourself,” he reassured Bernardo. “I feel quite certain that all that is behind you now, and this, this Colonel, what was his name?”

“Diego.”

“Diego. Well, even if he is in Rome, he would not dare harm men in the employ of the Spanish Crown. Certainly not such illustrious servants as yourselves; no, it’s inconceivable, out of the question.”

“Anyway,” Bernardo resumed, “it was a very long walk. And we were running away, too. From the Colonel. So when Salvestro just…” He struggled to find the word he sought. “Just
went
, well, I thought, It’s the Colonel. He’s here, see, in Rome. …”

The Colonel was what he feared. Other things, too, being left behind, being alone. Events had taken place, things had happened, and he had to keep quiet about them. There was no clear distinction among these things. He was not stupid. He knew he was not stupid, but things went wrong, became troublesome, and sometimes he lost his temper or grew so frightened of losing his temper that it was just as bad. He had to keep quiet, but he found it hard not to say these things. Don Antonio’s questions … What did you do if you had to keep quiet
and someone asked you about the very thing you had to keep quiet about? What did you do then? Dogs and rocks. It was always one or the other.

“What do you do then?” he asked Don Antonio abruptly.

“I think”—Seròn spoke carefully and slowly—“that I can personally
guarantee
that you will not be bothered by this Colonel Diego.” This seemed only to confuse the man further, for he went off on a completely different tangent involving running away (again), something about “keeping quiet” and a little boy who, halfway through the story, turned into a little girl. Aldo’s brat Amalia? He hardly cared and could sit there no longer.

“I will call on Salvestro in a day or two,” he said, rising from his chair. “Or perhaps this afternoon, but if I do not, you may tell him that the ship is ready to sail. His Holiness himself will bless her. Two weeks. …” The giant’s face was a picture of confusion and alarm. He repeated the message. It did no good.

It never does, he thought later, lying fully clothed on his bed, waggling his feet so that the candlelight reflected off the leather of his shoes. They hurt, but he did not take them off. Eventually he had scribbled a message in simple signs on a scrap of paper and left it with the oaf. After returning from his encounter with Bernardo and the fruitless search for Salvestro that followed it, he had come upon Vich patiently searching through the papers in his study. Loose pages, bound accounts, papers tied with string or wrapped in cloth, and rolls of cracked parchment were off the shelves and on the floor. He was leafing through a volume of charts as Seròn walked in.

“I have mislaid the small portolan,” he said. It was the larger one that he held before him. A brown water stain at the bottom of the book added the same fanciful continent to the ragged coasts and seas on each of its pages. “Do you remember it, Don Antonio? The one with the likeness of Don Francisco de Rojas carved on its boards. …” He had closed the book and asked after his business at Ostia, but he was uninterested, abstracted, most urgently concerned with seating arrangements and the order of precedence. “Place Faria next to me,” he told Seròn. “I want to watch his face when the vessel sails. The
Santa Ajuda
, is it?”

“Santa Lucia,”
Seròn corrected him, then asked if the dispatch had arrived from Spain.

Vich shook his head resignedly. “They have forgotten we exist,” he said. “But we continue anyway, we loyal servants of Fernando. Two weeks, do you say, before she sails?”

The days that followed were taken up with correspondence and accounts, for which Don Jerònimo seemed to have developed a sudden, brief, and inexplicable passion. He was eager to leave for the hunt at La Magliana and told his secretary that he would travel to Ostia directly from there, with the Pope. Idiot Vich, thought Seròn, yawning on his bed. He cocked an ear to the footsteps that padded about in the room adjacent to his own. Diego’s room.

Since the soldier’s first grim outburst he had confined himself to curt
nods and the occasional inquiry. Seròn’s stock of replies rotated between “As it should …” and “Satisfactorily …” and “Well…” delivered flatly but with conviction: the song of the competent functionary. The soldier would nod and pass by him, accepting this without further question. None of them see it, he told himself. The thought was almost melancholy. Idiot Diego, too. The footsteps paused.

And there was Salvestro. Another idiot? A fool? A fly in the Seròn-spider’s web? These terms shaded into one another. Men drifted within them and between them. Some escaped.

After leaving the big man at the tavern, he had gone in search of the absent Salvestro. He rode the towpath on the west bank of the Tiber to the Borgo. Skirting the foot of the Janiculum, he had cast his eye over the city that bulged from the opposite bank. The land rose. The city fattened on its slopes. Steely rolls of late morning heat ground the roofs and terraces into shimmering mirrors or melted them to a liquid mirage. Streets thrashed and flopped in the furnace, curling and twisting, sweeping churches and towers of melting stone before them. Sweat pooled and squelched between his toes.

Even so, the cool of the Borgo was unwelcome. The lurching shambles of Santo Spirito overhung an irregular path that narrowed to squeeze past improvised hovels and shelters. The stench of their inhabitants brought out his handkerchief. The air was thick with damp stinks and stenches that spread and collided to become doubly and triply noxious.

“Pilgrim’s Staff?” he inquired of a better-dressed passerby.

“God help you,” came the reply. “Halfway down the Via dei Sinibaldi.”

Its entrance breathed sweat and stale urine, a mouth blackened with decay. Flaking stone and unidentifiable muck lined its gullet. He tied his horse next to another already tethered to a broken boot-scraper and entered. The owner was on him immediately, a thickset ruffian with a collapsing face.

“Salvestro,” Seròn announced. “He resides here, I believe?”

“Him again? Master Popular, ain’t he? In the back, if he’s about.” The oaf pointed, snuffling and growling around him. “Need a candle?”

He took the candle.

“That’ll be two giulii.”

He paid for the candle.

A passageway tunneled back into the guts of the hostel. Distant noises that might have been moans or stifled shrieking drifted down from the upper floors through stairways hacked out of the building’s interior mass. The floor seemed to have been laid with tombstones. The hostel’s inhabitants had scraped their marks in the damp-softened stone. The last door stood open. Absolute darkness and a faint sound, a soft scratching. He ventured in.