The Pop’s Rhinoceros (80 page)

“You would threaten me on this matter?” Gonçalo murmured then. “Is this beast so important that you would risk the crew for ten days’ sailing?”

“The best part of a month’s sailing, as I understand it,” Teixeira replied. “And yes, the animal is dearer to me than a hundred of Dom Francisco’s horses, and it is dearer yet to our King.”

The pilot shook his head, his face adamant. “I will not do it,” he said.

Teixeira sighed. “Tell me about the
Cinco Chagas”
he said softly.

Gonçalo stared at him, his face expressionless. “She was lost.”

“How was she lost?”

This time there was a long pause before Gonçalo answered. “She ran aground.”

“And you were her pilot?”

Silence.

“And you were her pilot?”

A longer silence followed. The man would not meet his eye. Teixeira let it go on, knowing now how the Duc had persuaded the pilot to sail in the
Ajuda
. After a while he spoke again. “Come. Let us tell Dom Francisco where his vessel is going.”

The southeast trades would be blowing steadily in a few weeks’ time; for the moment they were variable, and the ship sped along one day only to find herself becalmed the next. A weak southerly current was all they could rely on then. It flowed across the face of the coast that they sighted at Angra dos Ilheos, its odd pair of conical islands identified positively by the great cross erected on the larger one. Teixeira watched it disappear as their bearing took them out again and they began climbing the latitudes to São Thomé. Dom Francisco had blustered and shouted, and finally Teixeira had fetched his own orders and laid them out in front of the man, who had squinted, his tongue sticking from the side of his mouth with the concentration required to decipher them. Then he had disowned himself from the disasters that would surely follow from this piece of lunacy and ordered both him and Gonçalo from his quarters. First his horse and now his ship, thought Teixeira. How the man must hate me.

The salted meat and dried fish had rotted in their barrels and were useless now. There was a little rice and rather more flour, which were both cooked into cakes on deck. The ship’s company was put on half rations, and Teixeira felt his hunger grow and become a hard stone lodged in his abdomen. At first he sat in his cabin by day and ventured out only to eat and meet with Gonçalo, who plotted their course an hour after sunset. By his reckoning, and at their present rate of progress, they would sight São Thomé in fifteen or sixteen days, “if there were any left alive to look,” he added bleakly.

It was growing hotter. Teixeira’s cabin became stifling, forcing him out on deck. Much of the cargo stored there had been ruined and jettisoned after the storm. His own lading was bales of silk, twelve full quintals crated and wrapped in oilskin, stored somewhere below and most probably rotting now. He tried to calculate their worth in cruzados and reis, then his own worth, then the
Ajuda’s. …
If the Ganda were not flesh, bone, hide, and horn, but silk, how much would he fetch. How many of the heavy gold coins? How many men?

As Gonçalo had predicted, more men began to fall sick, and those who were already sick began to die; by the end of the first week four more bodies had been sewn into bags and thrown over the side with no more ceremony than that. Dom Francisco’s watch mustered fewer than thirty men now, and looking about the crew, he saw hollow faces and gray skin. Those still able to work moved about listlessly, taking an hour over tasks requiring a few minutes, sometimes coming to a glassy-eyed halt and staring forward at a point that seemed to be receding rather than drawing nearer. The next day those men would join the sick, and then the ship would be more shorthanded still. Dom Francisco shambled about, barking the odd order to the men on his watch, who then looked furtively to Estêvão for confirmation before carrying it out until Teixeira feared another outburst of the
fidalgo’s
temper. It never came. These slights went unnoticed, or perhaps the man no longer cared. It was the fact of São Thomè’s drawing nearer, the petty defeat that that spoke of, Teixeira speculated privately. Or Dom Francisco was only biding his time. He should check his lading of silk, he told himself. He should get down into the hold with the sick men and with the beast. Oçem told him that the animal was thriving, eating its way steadily through bales of hay and straw, standing there obediently while its keeper rubbed lanolin into its hide or shoveled the dung from its enclosure. Each morning the native would stagger up on deck to empty a basketful of the beast’s droppings over the side, wincing theatrically under its weight when he caught Teixeira’s eye. Its contents rained down like gravel. He watched this, he ate, he slept. Their vessel continued, hour by hour and league by league, but the
Ajuda
herself was strangely set apart from them now; it was no longer the ship demanding their labors, nor the sea sucking the life from them. These were merely the places where they did this. Day after day they woke to the cloudless skies that arched over them horizon to horizon, utterly indifferent to their fate. A man drank seawater and went mad. Other men fell sick. The ship seemed hushed and the sea was calm, a bystander. The malaise was all their own.

One night there was a sound outside his door. He later calculated that this was five days’ sailing from their landfall, although in its immediate aftermath he thought of it as “the night before he fell,” for the five days would pass him insensibly or nearly so. He was lying in his cabin in near complete darkness—the hatch-cover to his window having swung shut and being himself unable to muster the energy to rise and reopen it—perhaps he was sleeping, perhaps awake. His memory of it was confused or blurred. There was a soft knocking at his door; he remembered that, at least. And there was a native, one of the hands, and he spoke brokenly, supplementing his words with little mimes and gestures. He whispered. He recalled the one word they held in common, which was “Ganda,” and the man was saying that he should be brought up on deck. There was more,
but he could not grasp it, and the man was frightened, crouched down that he might not be seen, eventually shrinking away when he realized that no more might be accomplished. It was only then that Teixeira remembered him: the man who had quarreled with Oçem on deck the day after the storm. Want of food or the bleaching moonlight had altered the shape of his face. He staggered back into his cabin, strangely debilitated by the encounter. There was a taste to his mouth, metallic, putrid. He realized that it had been there all day and he had not noticed until now. He exhaled slowly and sniffed. Rot.

The next morning he woke, rose, swung his legs over the side of his bunk, and fell heavily to the floor. He lay there for some minutes, dully surprised. His legs seemed to have lost all sensation. His arms appeared not to be strong enough to raise him. He thought of calling out for help, but even this was beyond him. His tongue felt fat in his mouth, and the taste was stronger now. He lay there for a while, then fell asleep again.

The next time he awoke he was back in his bunk and Estêvão was standing over him, trying to spoon something into his mouth. It was cold and thick, difficult to swallow. Estêvão’s face became the native crewman’s. He said, “Ganda,” but his tongue was swollen and filled his mouth. The word sounded wrong. Then it was Estêvão again, and then the crewman’s, who was not the man who had come to him but another, quite different. The face kept changing, though he understood vaguely that he was falling asleep between these metamorphoses and the arms shaking him awake from time to time, then lifting the spoon to his mouth, belonged to different men. The intervals were dreamless black silences or submergences from which he would surface briefly before sinking once more. “Ganda,” he said again, but there was no one present to hear. He waited patiently for someone to return.

“Ganda.”

“What of him?” said Estêvão.

He swallowed hard on the cold mash in his mouth. He said, “Bring him on deck.” He had to repeat it before Estêvão understood.

“He’s already there,” said the boatswain. “We’ve built a cage for him. He’s sick. Even sicker than you.”

He moved more of the mash around his mouth. He could taste nothing, though it smelled of onions, perhaps.
Sick? Sick of what?
He tried to gather his energy, then asked, “When do we …?” That was all he could manage.

Estêvão indicated that he understood. “Landfall? São Thomé?”

He nodded, already falling back into sleep.

“Well, let me see,” he heard the man say. “That would be about dawn, and two days ago. We’re anchored in Povoasan Bay.”

The bay curved around from a wooded headland that sloped abruptly to a shingle shore. Two short jetties extended into the water. Canoes of various sizes clustered about one, which was crowded with Negroes either loading or unloading boxes and sacks. A caravel was moored to the other. A wide track ran along
the shorefront, passing before the frontage of several long wooden buildings, roofed with thatch of some sort but mostly open at the front. Wagons waited outside these. Farther back there was a jumble of little sheds or houses, perhaps, and behind these Povoasan suddenly became orderly. Long, straight rows of flat-roofed structures extended to left and right for a mile or more, thatched like the other sheds but much larger. Behind the first row were others: seven, eight, perhaps more, ranked so closely together that it seemed a fat strip of the island had been lifted on poles and raised twelve feet off the ground. A single low hill rose behind it, up which two lines of tiny figures seemed to be ascending or descending. The
Ajuda
was anchored four or five hundred paces from the shore, and he could not make them out exactly. Apart from this interruption, the view was of the plantations, acre after acre, stretching back south for leagues in a yellowish-green monotone that rippled and swirled like a sea. It stopped only at the mountains. These rose suddenly, fifteen or twenty miles away, thickly wooded and so dark against the brightness of the sky that their greens appeared to him as blacks. He had slept again after Estêvão had left him. Another night had passed; more time lost. His legs felt weak arid unsteady, only partially his own. Some of the hands were up on the poop deck, talking amongst themselves. Others were asleep on the hatch-cover. He looked about for Estêvão, but other than these men the ship was deserted. Then, through a narrow gangway between the crates and bales aft of the main mast, he noticed a structure that had not been there before. A large cubelike construction had been built out of the poop. Over this, sheets of canvas had been draped and tied down, their lower edges stopping inches short of the deck. The ends of thick wooden posts showed where they had been nailed to the planking.

“He is much happier now, in his tent. And you too, Dom Jaime. You are quite recovered. A miracle, would you say? I know very little of miracles, but this is the term Dom Estêvão used.” It was Oçem.

He stared at the edifice without replying, so Oçem went on, telling him how the Ganda had stopped eating, then drinking, and finally had lain down, remaining motionless for two days before the enclosure was built on deck.

“And now? Is he recovered?” He spoke shortly, not looking at the man.

“He is different, Dom Jaime.”

“Will he live?” he insisted then. The man exasperated him.

Oçem paused, then said, “We await another miracle.”

The words fell on him like stones. Peres was unforgiving and unyielding. Dead, the beast was nothing. There was a long silence while he considered these things.

“I want to see him,” he said abruptly. He strode toward the tented cage. Oçem caught him by the arm, suddenly distressed, asking him to wait. He shook the man off, reached forward, and pulled aside the canvas.

It was shapeless, some claylike substance shoveled into a low mound; he could not make sense of it in the shade within its cage. Then it rose, and a moment
later it was the beast he knew, springing and turning on him much faster than he believed possible, the horn scything around and aimed at him, at his chest, its little eyes hunting for him in the sudden gush of light. …He fell back, startled, and Oçem jumped forward to pull the canvas shut. When he looked up, the hands on the poop deck were peering down at him. He waved them away angrily, an anger directed mostly at himself. What had happened? The Ganda had tried to get up. Then it had turned around to look at him. That was all.

“He can move,” he said to Oçem.

“He can eat, too,” the man replied. “But he chooses not to.” There was a pause. “I think he will die quite soon.”

Teixeira shook his head. “Where is Dom Francisco?” he asked.

“Ashore, with the others. The captain of this island sent boats for them at daybreak.” Oçem watched him anxiously. “You are still weak,” he said. “You should eat, then sleep again.”

“Before I fell ill,” Teixeira said carefully, “a man came to me. One of the hands. He said I should bring the Ganda on deck.”

“But why did you not?” Oçem replied. “Dom Jaime, the beast might today be as well as yourself. …”

“Why did
you
not?” Teixeira turned on him. “And why did this man believe I should?”

“How would I know?” Oçem spread his hands. “We must find this man and ask him. What was his name?” He spoke vigorously and with great purpose, as if this were of the utmost importance.

But he had not asked the man’s name, and though he would recognize him when he saw him, he could not give Oçem a description. He walked away and sat alone on the forecastle, sheltered from the sun by Gonçalo’s awning. Across the length of the ship, Oçem and the men on the poop deck talked amongst themselves. Toward midday, two of them lit the firebox and cooked. The tented cage was quiet. The beast’s deathbed, he thought bitterly. Perhaps if he had heeded the man and had ordered the animal brought up sooner … Or perhaps he would recover anyway. But why had the man come at all? He puzzled over this. Might Dom Francisco have made good on his threat after all, choosing the Ganda as his vulnerable proxy? Cut the mount down; its rider will follow. He thought uneasily of the white horse collapsing, a parallel that even the
fidalgo
might be capable of drawing. Yet it seemed beyond him, and there was no proof.