The Pop’s Rhinoceros (110 page)

“Here we are,” says Dovizio, providentially but too late.

Prato. Again.

“Where?” asks Bibbiena. “And what?”

“Him,” answers Dovizio, pointing into a sunken side-chamber so narrow that there is barely room for the bench that runs down one side. The Pope’s expression is quite vacant. “Your Holiness? Are we boring you?”

“No, no, not at all.” He shakes his head gently, regrouping. “No, this is all very interesting and instructive. Very good, dear Dovizio. I presume that this is my ‘surprise’?”

“Isn’t he perfect?”

An old man is sitting on the stone bench, supping from a tin bowl, rocking forward to take each sip with so minute a motion that Leo, observing the bow of his back almost touch the wall behind and then—a generous second or two later—almost not, is put in mind of the mechanism of a clever water-clock built
for his father. A palsied cantilever would hang, then quiver, and finally tip itself over a pivot to trigger something or other. It was the hesitancy of the thing that was so maddening. Piero had smashed it eventually, and both of them had been glad.

“Perfect? Well, Dovizio, I am not at all sure I would have reached that epithet without your aid. There is, for instance, his beard. …”

“Matted, unkempt, irregularly cut if cut at all, stained, and probably lice-ridden, too.”

“Yes, and he is rather gaunt, almost emaciated. As to his rags, might we agree not to dwell overlong on the subject?”

“Their filth and stench urge my prompt concurrence. Let us pass them over in silence and move to the pronounced rattle in his lungs or, if you prefer, the cough which seems to accompany his least movement or—”

“Perhaps later,” Leo interrupts, a vague curiosity now overtaking the fading pleasures of this exchange. “What I should like to know now is what he is.”

“He is one of your petitioners,” Dovizio replies, shooting Bibbiena a quick grin of complicity. “I found him this morning in front of San Damaso.”

At this, the old man, who has shown no sign of having paid the slightest attention to their words up to this point, or even of having heard them, lowers his tin bowl from his lips and places it carefully on the bench beside him. He does not, however, alter his expression or turn his head to look at the three heads crowding the narrow doorway to peer in at him. Rather, he folds his hands in his lap and directs his gaze to the bare wall opposite him.

Leo frowns. It is not unwelcome to find himself unregarded from time to time. No, he is not displeased, but puzzled, perhaps, at the old man’s lack of curiosity and also at the purpose behind his display. Dovizio is grinning again. They are making fun of him, but how? Leo feels his patience ebbing.

“What baffles me is your interest in this graybeard, Dovizio. Why is he here?”

“My interest? It is your interest that he engages, Holiness.” A snort of mirth escapes through Bibbiena’s nose at this. Leo is about to lose his temper with them. Today has not been an easy day. … Then it comes to him. The filth. The rags. All that business about a “surprise. …” He knows. He nods his head sagely, turning to the two of them and reaching out so that they might each clasp an elbow in comradely fashion. They do.

“This,” he announces with absolute, fatal conviction, “is Rosserus.”

They stare at him for a second, faces frozen. Then melting. … They start laughing, beginning with a succession of nasal explosions, then some half-stifled hiccups that quickly develop into full-throated side-aching guffaws. Soon, Bibbiena can stay upright only by leaning against the wall. Dovizio has to sit down, wall or no wall.

“Rosserus!” Dovizio gulps between roars of laughter. He glances in at the seated figure. “Rosserus? Him?” (More laughing.) “Oh dear, Your Holiness … he’s not Rosserus. He’s
you
. …

“Put him,” attempts Bibbiena, but his own hilarity thwarts him.

“On the,” tries Dovizio before mirthfulness gags him with giggles.

“Platform. On the fountain. Tomorrow. Got a tiara for him. And everything,” says one or the other or a combination of the both of them.

The pair have almost calmed themselves when Leo sets them off again by stating huffily that, actually, he knew all along and was simply pretending not to for their amusement. Then he makes matters worse again by beginning a new topic of conversation—“So, my friends, what about these rats of Neroni’s?”—in a blatant and clumsy attempt to divert them from their task, which is laughing at him: what else are cardinals for? Their hearty derision springs and bounds down the empty corridor, slowly breaking up into sniggering and intermittent titters. Eventually they shut up.

“Since he is to be me, I am going to speak with him,” Leo announces to the pair’s mild surprise.

He begins maneuvering himself through the narrow entrance. The chamber itself is barely wider, its floor a mere three flagstones laid end to end. His belly squeezes into the aperture. Has he gained more girth through the winter? A solid belly aids balance. Footing is related to the center of gravity, especially when hunting. Look at Boccamazza, although his equally generous middle is found a little higher up. More in the chest region, really. … Leo is still trying to get through the doorway. Perhaps by using one arm to lever the protuberance while squashing it in with the other. … Yes.

The old man has not moved. He does indeed stink, Leo notes, but the smell is musty rather than acrid. His hair is indeed matted, the beard stained and stringy, but he is not gray, or not naturally so. Has someone deposited ashes on his head? From time to time, when bored, and from a suitably discreet vantage point, he has watched the rough pranks of the petitioners waiting in the Courtyard of San Damaso, their brutish japes and capers. Anyway, old “Graybeard” is actually fair-haired. He stands before him, waiting.

“Stand up, old man,” commands Bibbiena from the doorway.

The creature turns his head at this, and there follows an outbreak of the promised coughing, which racks the old man for a minute or so and is succeeded by the similarly promised lung-rattle.

“He doesn’t have to stand up,” Leo tells Bibbiena. The Cardinal shrugs.

Then more waiting. It is rather awkward standing there, a mere arm’s-length away, while being ignored. Usually by now there would have been a grab for his foot, or at least the hem of his mozzetta. The situation is drifting. He gazes airily about. He considers the possibilities. A decision.

“My son,” he says to the presumably weak-witted creature. The old man turns his face to the voice issuing from above, and Leo sees first that the old man is really not so aged after all, hardly older than himself, in fact. And then, the strange immobility of the upturned head, its fixed focus on someone who seems to have drifted free of Leo, a shadow-Pope …

“He’s blind!” he exclaims.

“Did I not mention that?” replies Dovizio from behind.

“He does not know who I am,” continues Leo. He looks down again in a more kindly manner. “My son, I am your Pope.”

The not-so-old old man appears to find him then. Dead though they are, his eyes widen, his face loosens, and an expression passes across it that might be wonderment, or amazement, or even joy. Leo never identifies it, something promised and snatched away, for in the next instant the brow wrinkles, the face hardens, and its fleeting unguardedness is replaced with resignation. His voice, when he speaks, is surprisingly clear.

“You are not.”

Dovizio snorts, or perhaps it is Bibbiena. Leo looks down in consternation, ignoring them. He puts his hand on the man’s shoulder.

“I am,” he insists. “I am your Pope.”

But the figure seated on the bench is no longer paying attention to him. He seems to be coming to some comfortless realization of his own. His reply, if that is what it is, sounds weary and dismissive.

“I have been mocked long enough.”

Pebbles, wood chippings, apple peel, dried horse dung, old nails, walnut shells, melon rinds, and spit. These were the objects and substances that made the most regular appearances in his bowl.

At the other end of the scale, having appeared only once so far, were a small perfume bottle made of blue glass, a chipped knife-blade, a turnip with a smiling face cut in it, a milky-colored mosaic tile, a spinning top, a playing card (the seven of spades), another playing card (oddly, also the seven of spades, but a different design), and an ear.

The bowl rested on the ground between his feet. The shape and size of the bowl mattered. Too large a bowl attracted all kinds of rubbish, while too small a bowl was ignored. Wooden bowls were better than tin bowls (no one used a tin bowl), and the bowl must be shallow enough for passersby to see its contents. Not too much, for that argued lack of necessity, but neither should it be bare, for potential donors needed guidelines. The bowl therefore was “seeded.” A wizened apple and a worthless copper disk were his items for this. He would accept food and coin. The most ambitious beggars would seed their bowls with nothing less than a fat silver baiocco, but they were the ones who worked in the piazza or on the city side of the bridge, and those were the richest pitches in the whole of Rome. In front of the bridge on the Borgo side was where he had started himself, where he had had what remained his best and worst day. He had sat a little way down from another beggar, or rather three, for they rotated the pitch among them. One had greeted him with a cheery salute: “First day?” He had confirmed
that it was. It had taken him ten days to bring himself to this, ten days of racking his brains for any other way… And there was a way, of course, but it was even worse than this. So he sat there on the bridge, shaking with shame to begin with, but gradually resigning himself as the coins clinked steadily into his bowl. When the crowds began to thin, the two teammates of the beggar to the left of him reappeared, and they began to divide up their spoils. He counted his own, which came to eighty-seven soldi. “Good day?” inquired one of the three beggars, sauntering over toward him. He was the largest of the three, and he was the one who, a moment later, punched him efficiently in the stomach while the second banged his head on the ground and the third poured the contents of his bowl into their own. He recalled lying on the ground, dazed, with hundreds of boots and shoes stepping around him.

He moved to a pitch south of the bridge. There were fewer beggars there and fewer passersby. From a little after dawn to a little before sunset, he accumulated three stale rolls and fifteen soldi. The three men reappeared as he was counting out the coins. He handed them over without protest, and he did the same the next day (seven soldi) and the next (twelve). They did not take the food. He moved still farther down the river, into the neighborhood of Santo Spirito. It was cold, sitting there motionless on the ground, so he found a piece of sacking to insulate him from a chill that seemed to travel up his spine and freeze his brains to ice. He watched men more ragged even than him scouring the mud-banks that ran along the river. Once he nodded to one, and the scavenger nodded back. A good day.

A bad day: his three oppressors found him and beat him. They explained to him between blows that since he was so evidently untrustworthy—the movement of his pitch downriver was offered as evidence of this—he would in future present himself to them at the bridge each evening, there hand over his earnings, and thus save himself this (what they termed) “bother.” The “bother” at that point took the the form of an agonizing blow to the ear, so he heard only the end of a strange ululation that rang across the river, something like “… ss’rus…!” and which seemed to give them pause, for they then threw him bodily over the embankment and ran off. He landed in freezing mud. The oarsman of a passing wherry glanced at him curiously and passed on. The river looked like treacle. He lay there for a while, then, when he was picking himself up, eyes watering, blood and snot still bubbling in his nostrils, he looked across the river and saw the scavenger of a few days before joined now by two of his companions. All three were watching him. They must have seen it all. They stood shoulder to shoulder and raised their arms high above their heads:

“Rosserus!”

It was their voices he recognized. It was almost dark, and begrimed as they were, the faces of the former novices were anonymous masks of mud. He pulled his hand free of the ooze and lifted it toward them. Something caught his eye
then, a movement over the mud on his own side of the river. Rats? When he looked across again, Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf had disappeared.

The next day he presented himself in front of the bridge as promised, but the three beggars were not at their pitch. Leaning against the wall in their place was a broad-chested man wrapped entirely in sheepskins. His head was shaved, and on the top of his head sat something that he first took for a bird’s nest but which, as he drew nearer, revealed itself as a covering of mud shaped into the approximate form of a hat.

“You’re the monk,” said Mudhat, glaring at him.

He nodded, glancing about nervously for his extortioners.

“If you’re looking for who I think you’re looking for, don’t waste your time,” Mudhat told him. “You won’t be meeting them again. Leastways, not here. This here’s your pitch from now on. Everyone’s been told, so there’s no argument and no excuses, either. You can start here tomorrow.”