The Pop’s Rhinoceros (31 page)

“Mistress, Don Jerònimo is here.”

Plinius?

Noise from Saint Peter’s Square funnels down into the adjacent Courtyard of the Parrot, bouncing off the walls and casements, jumbling itself as though Babel were rebuilt in air and the air about it made stone: straw-sellers, horse-dealers, women hawking crosses and kerchiefs, pilgrims from every corner of Christendom, monks, priests, hucksters, clerks, and beggars. A donkey brays. A dog barks.
Possibly these sounds are each other, for the courtyard is deceptive on the ear. The racket is near, but baffling. An underlying plashing is the fountain next to the water-trough?

No, the fountain of the Belvedere. And somewhere amongst the babble of human voices, Antonio knows, is that of his master Don Jerònimo. And that of the Pope. And that of the Portuguese, whose monkeys lounge insolently on the opposite side of the courtyard: Bandera, secretary like himself; Don Hernando, skin burned and wrinkled from the Barbary campaigns; six of Hernando’s thugs; and Venturo. His own party—Don Diego and five men-at-arms—talk casually amongst themselves. They ignore the party opposite, except for Diego, who casually eyes Hernando’s horse, a powerful but strangely marked bay, as though he might walk over and take it for himself. But for this, Faria’s men do not exist. The horses’ hooves clop as they shift on the cobbles, and the noise echoes up and down the walls. There have been hours of this.

Suddenly, out of the vague washes of sound spilling over the rooftops, a thin trumpeting erupts. Antonio looks up, startled, expression unguarded, masked quickly but too late. The Portingales across the courtyard are already aping him, looking skyward in terror and making a great show of forced laughter,
heurgh-urgh-urgh
… Don Diego’s hand twitches toward his sword. The bay horse neighs, and the Portingales all look up again, as one, even funnier this time,
heurgh-urgh-urgh
… Naturally it is Ventura’s laughter that is loudest, his squeaky little voice quite perfect for this kind of thing. The elephant’s blast means many things, none good, among them that their Ambassador will not be long in returning.

Soon the Switzers in their green-and-gold uniforms are beating back the crowd of petitioners that daily gathers in the courtyard of Innocent’s old palazzo, opening a channel in the braying mob for the Spaniards’ horses. The sun took up residence in the Courtyard of the Parrot for an hour around noon. Thereafter shadow returned. Antonio smelled damp gathering under the flagstones—the Borgo is notoriously dank. Now, outside its precincts, the sun’s full force returns. A looser crowd gathers here, the more hopeless petitioners who have not gained admittance even as far as the courtyard. Antonio blinks and follows the rigid back bobbing up and down on the mount in front of his own. The audience, he knows already—knew when he saw Faria’s men, when he heard the beast hooting its ridicule—has not gone well.

They cross the Ponte Sant’Angelo at an ill-tempered trot, Don Jerònimo at their head cursing a crowd of loutish halberdiers, a small boy carrying a piglet, stray monks, anyone and everyone who dares to cross his path. Behind him ride Antonio, then Don Diego and his men. The little piazza at the far side of the bridge is clear—here, above all, Antonio knows, his master will not wish to linger—and the cortege picks up speed, dodging carts with wine-barrels from Ripetta and stone-wagons bound for the kilns, sweeping aside pedestrians, ducking under awnings. The recently renamed Via dell’Elefante is left behind. They
pass the bankers’ houses and swing left. Ahead, a grain cart has been stopped by officials of the
stadera
a little way into the street of the jewelers. The horses close up and he draws abreast.

“Plinius!” barks Don Jerònimo at his secretary, then pulls ahead again. The road kinks toward the river hereabouts, and the stump of the Torre Sanguigni pokes its top above the pantiled roofs and chimneys. A tannery Antonio has never detected discharges its stench along this stretch, but the alternative road by the Torre di Nona hugs the bank of the river, which in this heat, and this far down-stream, will stink unbearably. Just past Santa Nicola the procession turns left. Glancing over his shoulder into Navona, Antonio sees men leading strings of packhorses into pens crudely roofed with sacking, people drifting away. Everyone is doing what he is doing—although here in this city of strangers the very phrase rings false to him; another of Rome’s deceptions—going home. Antonio Seròn, secretary to the Ambassador of Fernando the Catholic of Aragon, wheels his horse about and follows his master into the courtyard.

The stalls are empty. The courtyard echoes. Grooms appear and take the horses. Don Jerònimo calls over, “With me, Antonio,” before ducking under the lintel and vanishing through the door. Two dozing ushers peer out, startled, to see what other surprises might follow.

Don Jerònimo’s heels disappearing up the stairs, footsteps echoing along the loggia, his back vanishing as he strides through the
sala,
an unseen door flung open within. Antonio scurries after. Glancing down from the open loggia, he sees Don Diego standing alone in the courtyard below, looking up at the cloudless sky, stone-faced as ever. Once one of Cardona’s favored captains, he made neither show nor secret of his indifference to his role in Rome. Ceremonial? Bodyguard? There are rumors of his “excesses” after Ravenna and Prato. The man unnerves him.

“Antonio!”

The antechamber beyond the
saletta
serves as repository and audience room. Yellowing window-screens soften the light from the courtyard to oranges and ochers, sunset colors. Even so, the rays are strong enough to brown the edges of the papers piled up in the alcoves of the far wall, those spilling from the chests beneath, and more yet carpeting a good portion of the floor: draft treaties, memoranda, copies of decrees, dispatches dating from before even Rojas’s time, an enormous and aging correspondence, and buried amongst it the relevant bulls of successive popes, which Antonio has lately unearthed only by rooting through the whole of this wordy midden, stirring up old quarrels and disputes, blowing the dust off long-forgotten deceptions, squinting in the inadequate light to read, finally,
Nicholas, Calixtus, Alexander, Julius
… They have all had a hand in this business.

“Did you speak with our friend today, Antonio?”

“He kept himself close, Ambassador. There was no opportunity.”

“But he will come?”

“If there is a gain to be had, he will come.”

Don Jerònimo nods slowly. Seated here in the heat and semilight of the chamber, he looks down, his fingers toying lazily with the thin folio before him. A few irregular, dog-eared pages. Astonishing that so much should depend on so little. He knows the words before him almost by rote, Nicholas’
Romanus Pontifex
confirming his earlier
Dum Diversas
(but contradicting Eugenius’
Rex Regum),
extended by Calixtus, ratified at Alcaçovas in the year of his younger brother’s birth, little Alonso.
Aeterni
Regis? That gave the Portingales more again, promulgated by Sixtus in the year of Alonso’s death. Three years. … Alexander’s
Inter Caetera,
his
Eximiae Devotionis,
his second
Inter Caetera,
then
Dudum Siquidem,
the tide turning Spain’s way now, washing them west, and the Portuguese routed, it would seem,
had
seemed. At Tordesillas, their triumph. And at Tordesillas, their defeat.

Invisible lines divided unseen seas, snaked about coasts and islands whose positions seemed to shift with the whims of the popes: Cape Verde, the Canaries, Cape Bojador, Antilla. Perhaps there were no islands at all, only cloud-banks, deceptive fogs, credulous and sleepless lookouts seeing substance where there was none. Now, in the open seas three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde isles, a frontier begins. A line is drawn. Portugal stands back to back with Spain, two foolish duelists facing east and west who will meet face-to-face again on the other side of the world. And what then?

“I will not send an army to fight in the Moluccas when one orator can win this war for me in Rome. …” Fernando’s confident words. They too are amongst the papers in the chamber. The Indies lie to the east, and the Indies lie to the west. They may be reached by either route. So does the Pope’s line bisect the globe or merely describe the starting post? Is it only a beginning or also (a hemisphere away) an end? No, Fernando had not sent an army, but the rumor of an army had set sail anyway, spectral, sails like the wings of seabirds, a squadron of portable islands blown forward on a gale of words. The Portingales had taken fright, sought confirmation of Julius, received it. He was still “Fernando’s lately arrived Ambassador” then, less than two years at the post.
Ea Quae
gave them Tordesillas again, and a line still invisible and substanceless, but changed utterly. How could that be?

Don Jerònimo envisioned a shelf of land rearing out of the seas’ depths, brine cascading and pouring off, the raw coast racing forward like a miracle. Colòn’s Indies. Cabral’s New World. Geographers and astrologers should have sailed to map their precious line—successive treaties provided for this—but somehow their ships had never left port. The new coast bulged east, crossing the boundary. A gift to the Portingales. A barrier to their own pioneers, but now they are bound to it as hostages to an earlier ignorance: a ghost-line. Terms shift. Distant seas slop and spill, slap their faces with watery hands. Intentions fail and sink. Now, amongst the warren of offices of the Apostolic Chamber, in the effort of subtle doctors and clerks behind their screens, the game is afoot once more. Dom Manolo and his creatures are in good odor with the Pope. A new bull is in preparation,
that much is firm report. Thereafter all is speculation, save the general understanding that it will not favor Fernando. The Pope is a whimsical referee, his decrees as fluid as the sea’s.

“If you were to divine a singular cause of our ill favor, Antonio, what would it be?” he asks his secretary.

Antonio shifts, considers. “The elephant.”

There it is. Since the embassy of the Portingales, his world has lurched on the back of an elephant. And now, since this morning, since the Pope’s little declamation, his urbane feigning of surprise—
No? Neither of you? Neither of you have read Plinius?
—the beast has changed.
It sharpens its horn on a rock the better to gore the belly of the elephant, is ill-tempered and untamable, but docile in the presence of virgins
. The Pope had grown enthusiastic, all but acting out the description. Could such an animal exist?

“He wants a companion for Hanno,” Vich tells his secretary. “His favor hangs on that.”

“A companion?”

“He wants to see them fight.” Vich’s shrug is unsurprised, as though the Pope’s inanity passed the point of senselessness long ago.

Odd noises percolate up from the
tinello
below, pots banging, the scrape of heavy tables being dragged out from the walls, his crédencier’s barking, scraps of the servants’ backchat. Then, from somewhere behind the room in which they wait, both men stiffen as they hear a catch click, a door open, and careful steps climb slowly up the back stairs. The door at the far side of the room swings open to reveal a figure swathed in hat, and cloak, his face covered by the windings of a voluminous scarf. The figure breathes heavily. And sweats. First the cloak, then the hat, and last of all the scarf is removed to reveal a face bright red from the heat, which grins at the two men while the body makes slight bobbing motions, as though ducking badly aimed stones. Antonio regards the jerky figure with ill-concealed dislike.

“Be seated, Venturo,” says Don Jerònimo.

The man sits, shifts himself forward, settles again. He fidgets, scratches, as though the chair he perches on pains him in some way. Little rivulets of sweat travel erratically down his forehead and run into his eyes, making him blink. He produces a handkerchief and dabs quickly. His hat has formed his hair into a bird’s nest. Antonio and Don Jerònimo wait patiently and in silence. There was rarely any need to actually question Venturo.

“Cursed heat. Quite stifling. Now, interesting developments, most interesting.” More dabbing. “Concerning the supplication. Concerning the soon-to-be bull. The bull, yes. No name yet, mind you, no name, though I have seen the supplication, rough sort of thing. Seen it in the chamber, it’s already there, on its way, as they say. With the clerks, anyhow, had a good old
look,
I did.” Some vigorous nodding. “They won’t have your extension; no, not at all”—shaking his head—“they’ll stop it dead, so they will. In—its—tracks.”

“You are speaking of the line, Venturo?” prompts Antonio.

“Three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verdes, all as before. Dom Manolo to the east, ourselves to the west. … Do I offend, Don Antonio?”

The mention of “ourselves” has brought Antonio’s expression of distaste to a level even Venturo cannot ignore.

“Continue,” says Don Jerònimo.

“To the west, that’s it. Pole to pole, though, not all the way round. That’s the crux, eh? Not all the way round.” Venturo waves his arm in a rough circle. “Not a chance.”