The Pop’s Rhinoceros (108 page)

“It will be here before tonight,” says Ghiberti, who is standing behind him. It is not hard to divine the Pope’s thoughts. Of late, he has only had the one. “Here in the city, if it is not arrived already.”

“Arrived already! Impossible. How would I not know if it were in Rome? If it were to roar in Trastevere, I would hear it in my sleep. If it shat on a stone of the Via Appia, I would have the droppings in my possession before they so much as stopped steaming.”

“No one has seen it,” Ghiberti answers bluntly. “Everyone has heard of it only because it is so profitable to do so, Holiness.”

“Not true,” counters Leo. “Size, color, distinguishing features? Gray, big, horn on its nose. All the reports agree in these particulars. How do you explain that, my cynical secretary?”

“By the fact, Holiness, that your agents have been offering to pay between three soldi and a full gold scudo for any and all information relating to a beast described by them as gray, big, and having a horn. …”

“That was later,” Leo answers tetchily. “The first reports were clear enough. The ones from Spezia. …”

“From Massa and Carrara, Holiness. As I recall, those reports mentioned a hay-cart that floated miraculously above the ground suspended by a single golden thread from the ankle of an angel of tender years and attended by anything between one and a score of vagrants. The animal itself was said to be in the cart. Something of an afterthought, I recall thinking. At the time …” He stops there, for the Pope is glaring at him. “It is the orators, Holiness,” he continues more
humbly, once again the self-effacing keeper of ledgers, the docile butt of his master’s wit. “Vich. Faria. I have men in both their camps, and they know no more than we do. For the Portingales, a ship named the
Santa Ajuda
arrived from the Indies and took on supplies at the mouth of the Tagus more than two months ago. Since then, nothing has been heard.”

“And Vich?”

“The little charade he played for you at Ostia seems to have been the only act of the Spanish comedy. The local fishermen were of one mind. That ship was only afloat because it lacked the decency to sink. There will be no gift from the Spaniards, and there is no evidence of one from the Portingales. It was you yourself who proposed this contest, Holiness. And it was you who linked it to the question of the bull—”

“Dear Ghiberti, do not trouble yourself,” Leo breaks in airily. “The bull will be published tomorrow, and I will hand it over in person, sealed
sub plumbo
with the heads of Peter and Paul, signed Leo Episcopus Ecclesiae Catholicae in my best Lombard hand on parchment thick as board. As promised. And the Beast will be here to contribute his hoofprint. There now, does that reassure you?”

It is apparent to Leo, peering solicitously at his secretary, that it does not. Ghiberti is more troubled than he calculated. It makes no difference whether they have their bull or not, he wants to tell him. They will draw their fantastic frontier. They will form a battle-line the diameter of the globe and sail east and west to kill each other on the other side of the world. Perhaps they will slice the world north to south next. Perhaps they will upend the two halves and join them at the poles to form an hourglass. They are in league with each other, in any case—he would especially like to tell Ghiberti that. But the bull is his word;
Prae-celsae devotionis et indefessum fervorem, integrae fidei puritatem, ingeniique in Sanctam Apostolicam observantiam
. … Sadoleto presented it for his inspection in the Cancellaria with the air of a singer who has somehow resolved a cacophonous and conflict-ridden sheet of music into clear and effortless harmony and now condescends to return it to its composer, its knots untied and puzzles solved, more obviously beautiful and yet tainted by the implication of the improvement. He wanted to tell Sadoleto, too. At root, the exquisite tissue of compromise and half-truth was theirs, not his. He was merely the place where their separate parts met in dissonance and discord. His word was the Pope’s, and the Pope was the Servant of the Servants of God. Did Vich and Faria serve God?

“Do not trouble yourself,” he repeats vaguely, turning to look out of the window.

The sheet of water now covering the lower courtyard of the Belvedere had spread with miraculous rapidity: a puddle, a pool, a lake… Now a little sea, three hundred paces by two, bounded by the loggia to the right, the steps leading up to the next level in front of him, the palace itself, and on the left—Leo pokes his head out of the window—a rather unsightly palisade of sandbags now being gradually concealed by tiers of outsize steps. Leno’s men are hard at work sawing
timber under the direction of their foreman, many of them standing up to their waists in the freezing water to maneuver the longest lengths into position. Others, similarly bedraggled, habits tucked into the toolbelts slung about their waists, are sizing up the fountain in the center. Leno has designed an ornamental platform that will sit above it. A throne will sit on the platform. He, Leo, will sit on the throne. Or rather, he, Leo, will sit on the throne in effigy, for someone else will actually do the sitting. Standing in for him, as it were. And probably—at the climax of battle—falling in for him as well. Splosh.

He leans farther out of the window to see if he can catch a glimpse of Hanno in the gardens beyond the workmen’s sandbags. Hanno will be his champion. Last night he improvised a little prayer for his victory, although as the ultimate arbiter of the battle, he will be careful to keep this partiality to himself. If only it had been possible to enlist the orators. … Faria equipped with a trunk. Vich with the addition of a horn. Or perhaps the other way about.

“Of all the water-fights ever staged in the palace of the Pope,” a voice offers from behind him, “this will undoubtedly be the most splendid.”

“Naumachia!” he snaps back automatically. “It is not a ‘water-fight.’ It is a naumachia. My predecessor had bullfights. Commodus cut the heads off giraffes. I, on the other hand, a lover and patron of the gentler arts. …” He stops there, for the voice behind him is laughing. Ghiberti does not laugh.

Whoever actually is laughing then slaps him heartily on the back, causing him to jerk forward into space and his belly to extrude over the sill, where the narrowness of the casement pinches it tight. Thus bisected, he reaches down to maneuver it back inside, but as he does so a second voice begins declaiming from the loggia below:

O Leo! So low were we

’
Ere thee. Now none say no

Though there are those decline our fee

Not ye! A mere giulio? No, a scudo d’oro!

A poet, dressed in the inevitable black, one arm folded across his breast (indicating sincerity), the other extended at full stretch toward him (an aiming device), bows deeply from the arcade below him and to his right.

“Very good,” he calls back. “Very nicely done.” He waves his thanks one-handed while the other tries to lever his stomach back inside. He attempts a discreet wriggle, but he is stuck tight as a cork, and the poet has now been joined by another, who is taking up position to deliver his own encomium, when suddenly, from behind him, two enormous arms shoot past his ears, bend at the elbows, then retract with tremendous force, knocking him bodily back inside. He finds himself on his back in the bearlike clasp of Cardinal Bibbiena.

“Poets?” the Cardinal inquires sympathetically.

Leo nods unhappily.

Ghiberti hovers over them, appearing faintly ridiculous with the plump unopened ledger clasped protectively to his chest, unsure what to do. The inexpert tumblers look up at him.

“Take a seat,” Leo says innocently. “You could join us down here on the floor.”

Ghiberti purses his lips and shakes his head. He is waiting to be dismissed now, thinks the Pope. How fickle I am with my servants: the servants of the Servants of the Servant of God.

“You may go.”

Ghiberti and his ledger glide away, leaving the two of them still sprawled on the floor. Through the crack of the closing door, he glimpses groups of black-capped curialists and notaries, two veiled women nodding to one another, indolent youths leaning against walls, scaffolding for the painters. The Sala di Constantino hums with their noise, which stops as the door is opened, then starts again as the door booms shut. Leo nods in the opposite direction, and the two men struggle to their feet.

More painters perched on scaffolding are at work in the Stanza di Segnatura. Indeed, they seem to have become a fixture there. Last summer the ceiling was predominantly green. Then, for a few brief weeks, it was yellow. Now it seems to be green again. An outsize seagull is dropping splats on the floor as they pass beneath. Several paint-spattered faces peer down at them.

“Storm at sea?” hazards Bibbiena, pausing to look up. “Marsh gas over the Borgo?”

Leo ignores this and gestures shortly for him to continue into the Stanza di Incendio, which is painterless, and poetless, and where the Pope turns on his striding Cardinal, bringing the big man up short.

“So, will Hanno be performing solo tomorrow? Tell me now, is the animal in the city or not?”

This surprises Bibbiena, Leo observes. Directness is a rarity in their exchanges, its meaning unfixed by usage.

“It is.”

The quick confirmation rattles between them, the red-robed Pope and his ermine-trimmed prelate. Dumpy stomach almost pressed against the bearlike man, Leo clasps his hands in front of him and Bibbiena takes a step back. The cleverest of his cardinals, the most alert to the feints of his bonhomie. He has a fibrous quality that even Dovizio lacks. As for the rest of them, the old warhorses like Petrucci and Serra, his onetime peers Riario and Farnese and d’Aragona, they are stateless princes, all glitter and pomp. Bibbiena, he suspects, understands this well. Does he then understand the Beast? At mass today he had recalled the whiff of taper-smoke mixed with burning flax, Farnese’s hands extending toward his head, bearing the pearl-encrusted tiara. What had caught his eye, then? A little
gleam of silver in the lime green of the Cardinal’s cap, a tiny finely detailed brooch. A prancing horse … No, a unicorn. Lover of virgins, who were able to tame the animal with a Marian caress of their long white hands. Lurking in the matted fringes of his purpose is the slash of tusk or horn along the adversary’s belly and then, tumbling down from the denaturing birth, unsteady at first on its fawnish props but quickly regaining the strength lost in its long interment, white-haired, soft-skinned, bright-horned … unshackled at last from the coarse prison of its hide. … But what? He believes only, and fondly, that the battle will be a kind of negation, that between the two adversaries lies a third truth, a pristine creature preserved within their caked and coarsened skins, for just as there are truer Romes beneath Ro-ma, so God’s ciphers grow filthy with handling and the accretions of use. How to uncover the infant in its chrisom, the soft nerve cased in its scarred and stinking armor? He has never learned to wield a sword, so a piece of whimsy in its stead, Bibbiena’s water-fight. The Beast is here. It is a bright and beautiful day, the sky cloudless, the air cold and perfectly still. When Lucifer was thrown from heaven, he thinks, it would have been air like this through which he fell. Leo pictures him blazing, his angel’s flesh melting and hardening into a prison of nerveless scars. Whose hands would strip it off? Where would he find his enemy, the one whose cuts and slashes would free him? Bibbiena shifts his feet uncomfortably on the patterned floor. The Pope concentrates. Where I?

“Where?” he asks abruptly.

Bibbiena shakes his head, mildly surprised after the long silence. “I do not know exactly. Perhaps Ghiberti …”

“Ghiberti did not know it was even in the city. How do you?”

His tone is abrupt, even harsh. He softens it, musing aloud to himself on why Ghiberti would not know. Soon the cadences of mockery are bubbling happily in the roof-space of the
sala,
constructing there a flattering comparison between his secretary and the Cardinal, an unvoiced apology. Bibbiena loves him after all. Haughtiness was his brother’s preserve. Poor Piero.

“I only wondered”—rearriving at last where he left off—” how you came by this intelligence? Assuming, of course, that you did not simply reach into your own omniscient mind and divine it there unaided.”

“My mind?” Bibbiena arches his eyebrows. “I hocked my mind to Chigi ten years ago. For the price of my horse, if I remember correctly, which I do not. My memory paid for its shoes.”

“And your soul?”

“Sold for this—” Bibbiena touches his Cardinal’s hat. “Cheap at the price.”

“A Cardinal with a soul would be an unnatural beast in Rome,” offers Leo.

“Unnatural beast, yes.”

There is a short silence, which quickly becomes oppressive.

Bibbiena says, “The source of this intelligence is Rosserus.”

At this, the silence resumes and bifurcates. The pair digest the implications of this in separate contemplations. Rosserus rarely means exactly the same thing to
any two people, and Rosserus-as-the-source-of-a-rumor adds a further twist, for Rosserus himself (or herself, or itself) is only rumored to exist, and only then in the most tenuous and loose-tongued discursive practices, such as idle chitchat, nostalgic reminiscence, confessions swapped amongst drunken strangers, lies, slanders, slips of the tongue, snitching, grousing, whining, and loud slanging matches conducted in public among people with serious speech impediments. Rosserus is not a subject for polite conversation or even meaningful dialogue. Likewise it is impossible to be witty about Rosserus; the subject rasps like sackcloth and sticks like mud, these being the most obvious affects of its (his? her?) constituency, a certain subsect amongst Rome’s beggars, neither the most gruesome (self-mutilation and the maintenance of open sores) nor the most wholesome seeming (the horribly perky, bright-faced urchin and its adult counterpart, the gentleman “temporarily down on his luck”), but rather the middling sort of vagrants, intermittently violent but more inclined to torpor, cussed, and invariably caked with filth. They seem to know more about this “Rosserus” than anyone else, and at any given time Rosserus seems to know more or less anything and everything about Rome’s ground-level activities, diffusing this intelligence through the infinite removes of someone who heard it from someone who heard it from someone … Backtracking along any one of these reports to their source is slightly less feasible than stalking a shrew through the aftermath of a stampede by a herd of aurochs, for Rosserus is decentralized, operates by seepage, makes no sound, and is unimaginable, if by “image” is meant something hard, sharp, and bright, such as a silver brooch in the shape of a unicorn. Its memes are everywhere and nowhere at once, a blackening swarm, multiplying their way through Ro-ma. …