The Pop’s Rhinoceros (111 page)

With that, Mudhat pushed himself off the wall and began to walk off. He put a hand on the man’s arm and was opening his mouth to thank him when Mudhat rapped him hard on the knuckles.

“That,” Mudhat cut him off, “is just the kind of thing which irritates me. When I get irritated, I usually get annoyed. And when I get annoyed what I usually do is pick up whoever is annoying me by the ankles and pull them apart like this”—he demonstrated the motion—” till he splits down the middle. After that, I examine the two halves carefully to see which has the head on it. Often it’s the left side. Sometimes, though, it’s the right. Whichever side it is, I find it makes an excellent tool for beating the other side, the headless side, to a pulp. Am I making myself plain?”

It was late November. The next day, as promised, he gained his pitch by the bridge.

Without it, HansJörgen thought now, counting out his day’s earning under the grim turret of Castel Sant’Angelo—twenty-five, twenty-six—he and his Prior would in all probability not have survived the winter. Twenty-seven soldi, which was about average. The amount he had taken on his very first day had proved to be a fluke, and his somewhat wild speculations walking back to the Stick after his encounter with his brutish savior—that he might hoard enough one day, perhaps, to escape from the city that had effectively become their prison—were quickly quashed in the succeeding days. There was firewood to buy, lamp-oil or candles, bread, and from time to time there was Lappi’s widow to be placated, for they were the only tenants left in the Stick. After the murder of her husband, she had appeared in the entrance hall enthroned on a chair stuffed with horsehair that leaked from a rent somewhere on its underside and that Sig-norina Lappi tried to restuff by gathering the stray wisps off the floor and forcing them back in, all this without moving from her seat. In fact, she seemed never to move at all. HansJörgen would come upon her bent sideways over the arm and
uttering great groans of effort. He had tried to help her once, and she had hit him with her broom. There was a box chained to her chair. The box was where their “rent” was collected. Sometimes he would put in the full four soldi. Usually rather less. Sometimes an old nail or a piece of glass. It was a charade, in any case, for the real tariff on their entry each night was paid in a quite different coin, and it was paid by Father Jörg.

Lappi’s widow hated him. She detested the very sight of him. At his appearance each evening after his fruitless sojourn in the Cortile di San Damaso, she would scream and bellow at him that he was a ruthless trickster, that he only feigned his blindness, and when this ritual of rage had built itself up to the required pitch, she would accuse him of her husband’s murder. Lappi, according to his widow, would still be alive if it were not for Father Jörg. No evidence or reason explained her conviction beyond the facts that the murderer had never been discovered, that the only people with whom she came into contact, so far as HansJörgen could see, were himself and the Prior, and that an antipathy so fierce and so cherished as that which she harbored against the latter could hardly subsist without the foundation of her heartfelt faith that it was justified. She believed in his guilt because she must. She had a leaking chair and a blind man. Sometimes she waited for him to hesitantly mount the steps, treading quietly, stealthily, into the hallway, where the similarly silent, wakeful widow would be waiting for him with the broom handle. … She bloodied his nose once. Her frustrated yelling would continue for long minutes after he had scrambled past her and made his escape.

Jörg endured this without comment, as he endured everything without comment. He had fallen sick that winter: a disease of the lungs. Now, rounding the corner that led him into the Via dei Sinibaldi, he recalled the admixture of forebodings he had fallen prey to every evening at this point in his journey home. Listening night after night to the coughing and choking, he had come to realize that the Prior would die. That thought was the gate to the rest. He had dreaded it, and yet, shivering on the thin straw mattress, sleepless with the cold and the gruesome noise, he had been drawn through it nonetheless. Jörg kept the silver scabbard in his chest with the papers on which he poured out his ramblings. There were
bancherotti
in the piazza who would change it into coin. The coin would pay their passage away from here. It would pay their passage home. But Jörg would not pawn the scabbard. Perhaps it was the accusations he had flung in the heathen’s face or his dismissal of Salvestro’s own accusations—shortly after proved abundantly true—or perhaps it was the scabbard’s provenance, for it was of the island and in the Prior’s mind perhaps a last link with that. In any case it did not matter, for Jörg would not go and would only chuckle when HansJürgen urged this on him night after night, replying, “But you do not understand, Brother. Darkness is not a force, nor a power to be fled from. Our fears will only rebound on us if we retreat back into them. Our ignorance is where we are needed. …” Or, when he had described their lives as hopeless and foolish, “My foolishness is
only the truth, Brother HansJürgen. Look at the candle, since I cannot. Does it not flicker? Are there not moments, very brief ones, when it gives no light at all?” Finally, when he had ventured to recall the church that they had left to the mercy of the elements, “But why did it crumble in the first place? Better to ask yourself that, Brother. …”

These mad heresies, and others equally incomprehensible, were what had come to mind as he walked toward the entrance to the hostel one particular night, as he wondered whether he would find his Prior hunched noisily over a phlegm-filled bowl or curled up in a corner, motionless and cold. He counted soldi in his head, this much, then that much. Thirty-one ysterday. Seventeen tomorrow. Never enough. Never, ever enough. And then the dirty thought. Or worse even than that: a hope. It had found him here, just a few yards short of the doorway, where he was now. Farther up the street, some small boys were playing a game that had grown popular over the winter, running about chaotically, then suddenly freezing at a shouted command. A dog was wandering around, sniffing at their legs. Beyond them, a cart with splayed wheels and high battened sides stood uncoupled from whatever beast had drawn it there. Some hovering men would be the gang hired to unload it. The driver appeared to be asleep. In the depths of winter he had seen such a wagon rumble very slowly through the streets, its load gradually growing heavier as the men who drove it stopped to search down alleys and passageways, behind low walls, or in the doorways of abandoned buildings. These seemed to be the favored places for those with nowhere better. The bodies they found in these miserable refuges were typically frozen solid. The cart’s drivers were able to roll them out like logs. His prayers seemed to offer no consolation. Rome, this particular part of Rome, this exact street, and this stone on which he now stood and ground the wooden sole of his sandal, were where he had stopped and thought that if Jörg were dead, he could leave. A slick, gritty sound. The scent of manure drifted in the air. Jörg had lived. Their existences went on as before. He had collected close to forty soldi today. A good day.

Lappi’s widow said nothing as he dropped four coins in the slot of her box. He added a fifth, and she nodded her satisfaction. The passageway emerged from darkness, the light from the lamp revealing walls of cracked and crumbling plaster. Small islands of the same fell daily from the ceiling and shattered on the floor. The smell of damp was more pronounced back here. He heard Jörg scrabbling amongst his papers in the chamber at the rear of the building. This was usually how his evenings were spent. He scraped lamp-black and mixed ink, scribbled and scratched, using and reusing the sheets of parchment that they could not afford to replace, covering them with his minute script left to right, then turning the sheet to cover it again, sometimes a third time along the diagonal, until the page was black with his near indecipherable handwriting. The ink alternated between its constituents. Water and soot.

But the scrabbling was not Jörg. He ran forward and five or six fat black bodies
froze for a second, then fled from him, or perhaps from the unfamiliar light, scattering around the chamber and disappearing into the shadows. Chewed pages of the Prior’s manuscript were strewn about the opened chest. Opened, HansJürgen realized, by the rats. He frowned, then stooped to gather them up. The rats were growing bolder and cleverer. They were still in the room, he knew. That was the game the children had been playing—the Rat Game—which was based on exactly this tactic. Instead of disappearing down their holes, the rats would hide in some dark or inaccessible corner, keeping still and silent until they judged that the danger was past, then they would move forward again. Their entrance to the chamber was a crack in the wall that they had enlarged somehow, choosing to chew through solid stone rather than attack the door. A puzzling decision. HansJürgen secured the chest and walked out to the back courtyard for a clod of earth to block their egress, a vague plan to hunt them down in the chamber forming in his mind as he walked back in. He would need a stick or something. He was tamping the soil into the crack when Lappi’s widow started shouting. The usual rage. Jörg had returned. He worked the soil in with his thumb, but it crumbled and would not stay in. A dash of water, perhaps. The woman was still shouting. He would have to go out if it continued much longer. Sometimes his presence seemed to abash her. Sometimes it raised her ire to a new level entirely. The shouting grew no quieter, and after a minute or so he rose reluctantly to investigate.

Again he was mistaken. The widow was raising her broom as he appeared. Before her stood not Jörg, but a brown-faced man, quite old, his face wrinkled. He knew him from somewhere. The old man dodged the broom-thrusts with ease, looking up as HansJörgen emerged from the hostel’s darkness.

“Murderer!” shouted the old woman.

“Murderer yourself,” retorted the man, seemingly unconcerned by the accusation. “Remember me?” he addressed HansJürgen. “I’m Batista.” He gestured in the rough direction of the Pope’s palace. “I remember you. Last summer.”

HansJürgen nodded.

“You look different, if you don’t mind my saying so. Or even if you do. Will you shut up?” This last was directed at Lappi’s widow, who, rather surprisingly, did. “Anyway, say good-bye from me, that’s why I’ve called. I’m Batista. Don’t forget. Had some good chats we did, me and old Jörg. Never a cross word. Then again, I never understood a word he said.”

Batista made a little salute and turned to go.

“Wait,” said HansJürgen. “Where shall I say you’ve gone?”

“Gone?” Batista turned again but continued walking, backward, away down the street. “I’m not going anywhere. It’s you two who’ll be off, won’t you? I mean, now His Holiness has heard that petition of yours. Building a city under the sea, wasn’t it? Something like that. …”

“A church,” HansJürgen called after his departing back. “What do you mean, the Pope has heard his petition?”

Batista waved without turning around. HansJürgen watched him dodge his way through the children playing the Rat Game and pass the cart still waiting up the street. Its driver woke as he walked quickly past. One of the children ran toward him.

HansJürgen went back inside and resumed his work on the rat-hole. They would dig it out, of course. Clay would be better, or plaster. Or best of all, cement. Batista was talking nonsense. It was quite clear that Jörg had been delayed by something this particular night. He knew that the petitioners played tricks on each other. In the early months, Jörg had several times returned covered with chalk dust or soaked with water. He presumed it was water. By this standard, Batista’s would be quite a sophisticated trick. He began smoothing the earth flush with the surface of the wall. Once or twice they had directed Jörg down to the Porta Pertusa or into the sea of mud behind the palace, where, on the basis of four stone piers and several hundred waterlogged trenches, the new basilica was rumored to be rising. It might take him hours to find his way out of there, and he, HansJürgen, would probably have to go out and look for him soon. Yes, a silly trick. No doubt at all. Or almost none. Although, perhaps, barely possibly …

“Filthy murderer.”

No. None, for this surely was Jörg. The widow seemed to have already expended that day’s store of hatred, for after this single weary expletive she fell silent. HansJü;rgen settled himself to his task once again. He played the oil-lamp over the surface of the patch. Quite smooth. Next would come the shuffling footsteps. Then, “Brother, are you there?” He would reply that he was. The Prior would go to his chest and take out his papers. Later he would unhook the palliasses that they now hung from a rope fixed to the wall. He would have to suspend the chest up there, too, or devise a more resistant lock. They would pray. They would sleep. He smoothed the earth in the rat-hole. Perhaps he would try to kill the rats. Quite smooth. There was no “petition.” No petition “would be heard.” Quite, quite smooth. He moved the lamp away from his handiwork, placing it a little way behind him. Then his heart jumped.

A pair of boots.

He turned back to the wall. Someone was standing behind him, at the very edge of his vision. He felt strangely weightless. Perhaps this too was part of Batista’s trick? He ran his hand over the wall for what must have been the thirtieth time, feeling his heart thud in his chest.

“You can’t pretend I’m not here forever, Brother HansJü;rgen.”

He swiveled clumsily on his heels, ready to rise and … And what? Defend himself? The notion was almost comical, but he seemed to be getting up anyway. Before he could do so, the intruder placed a firm hand on his shoulder, squatted on his haunches, and joined him on the floor. A face moved forward into the ambit of the lamplight.

Later, HansJürgen would realize that the question he blurted out in the shock of that instant more properly belonged to the other and, later still, that the smile
that flitted across the other’s face was in consequence not of his knowing the answer, but of an odd pleasure taken in the momentary confusion of their roles. He should have known that it would never be the Prior who would come upon him like this. Not only should the question have been the other’s, but the answer should have been his, and the smile, too, for only minutes earlier the answer he received now was precisely the one that he had rejected then for fear that his hopes raised to such a height might not survive the fall if dashed. He had felt nothing in the black mud by the river, nothing at all. Not even despair.