The Pop’s Rhinoceros (42 page)

The day was already warm. Groot and Bernardo followed Salvestro, who had the air of searching for something, peering about him as he strode along, and even twirling his pike.

“I think I will die unless I eat,” Bernardo said presently.

“Well then, we must eat,” Salvestro answered brightly, and ran up the next stairway to the door at its top. He knocked politely. “No one home?” he inquired of himself. “Oh well …” And with that he began swinging at the door’s planking with his pike. The street resounded with the din as the other two stared up open-mouthed. A voice within shouted something. “Come on, come on! Open up!” Salvestro bellowed back. The door flew open suddenly and he charged in. Some screaming followed, and then several great crashes, and then a man’s voice begging or pleading for something.

Bernardo and Groot climbed slowly up the same stairs and peered in the door.

“Ah, there you are!” Salvestro greeted them. “We’re about to have breakfast.”

He was sitting on a chair in the center of the low-ceilinged room. At the other end, two women, one old, the other middle-aged, were trying to cower each behind the other. A man was on his knees, somewhat tearful, murmuring, “Anything, anything. We have nothing. Take it,” and suchlike. Most of the furniture appeared to be in the fireplace, which was unlit.

“Didn’t I rape your daughter yesterday?” Salvestro asked the man, who shook his head, bewildered. “Are you sure?” he persisted. “She looked very much like you—ugly, I mean. These streets are all the same to me.” The man only shook his head.

“It was another street,” Groot said quietly.

“Everything we have is yours,” said one of the women.

“Or maybe it was your mother?” Salvestro went on.

“He means to … Oh, Jesu, gather me now!” the old woman cried out.

“It was not here, Salvestro,” said Groot.

“How did it feel?” asked Salvestro, getting up to take the man by the neck and drag him to the window. “How did it feel!” He began cuffing the man about the head. “How was it, watching her die down there! Watching me finish her, eh? How was that!”

The man began to cry out that he had no daughter, but Salvestro only grew more furious at that, shouting, “Why don’t you fight! Why don’t any of you fight!” beating the man with his fists now, the two women howling and not daring to move. Groot pulled him off and wrestled him to the floor, holding him down until he calmed himself. “Silence,” Salvestro said softly.

“I’m still hungry,” said Bernardo. “I think I’m going to die.”

They ate everything in the house. Salvestro did not speak again that day.

He remembered sleeping in odd snatches, a few minutes on the steps of San Giovanni and waking to dazzling sunshine or propped in the corner of a high barn somewhere while men rolled barrels around him, a sound such as wooden bells might make, a silvery rumble. Someone said, “That’s nothing. Look here,” throwing up a trapdoor and faces staring up at him out of the darkness, then the screaming that started up when the trapdoor was closed. Braziers were set up in some of the squares, the instruments stacked against the walls. The worst of it
happened out of sight, in the dyeing sheds that backed onto the river. The Pratesi were marched down in little groups. Some of them vomited as they were led down there. The smell stayed in his nostrils: scorched hair and skin. Once Bernardo was chasing some children about and Groot grasped him by the arm. “Watch him. Don’t let him … You know what I’m talking about.” He nodded dumbly, not knowing. Groot went off somewhere.

The days fell into each other. He could not stay awake. Someone took his pike while he dozed one day, and Bernardo grew worried about it, repeating the tag that had been dinned into their brains by the sergeants at Bologna, “A good pikeman is never without his pike,” and drilling himself there in the street: One, lower the pike; two, step forward; three, thrust. … One, two,
three
. One, two,
three
. He turned away from his friend’s display and tried to go back to sleep. The other two marched him about, brought him food, or perhaps he found it for himself. The other soldiers looked at him curiously. He ignored them. They spent some time with the Sicilians, but he unnerved them somehow, breaking into laughter for no reason or drumming on a tabletop for hour after hour, talking in his forest-language or what he thought of as that. Bernardo turned up with a tiny corpse in his arms, exclaiming, “I didn’t do
anything!”
when Groot began shouting at him, then wandering off again to get rid of it. “I told you!” Groot hissed in his ear, but he didn’t understand. “Remember the boy at Marne? Remember Proztorf? I told you to watch him!” And then the day came when Groot returned and shook him awake to tell him, “Come on, come with me. I’ve got us a way out. Come on, we have to talk to him. …”

He was led around the back of San Stefano, through a little door, across a courtyard, through a long succession of empty rooms. A finely dressed sergeant eyed them from behind a table. “Are you the Colonel’s men? I have a task for you. …”

An unfamiliar sound now, here in Rome. His memories are silent, or overlaid with silence. The voices rumbling together in Prato are not distant but smothered, and the noise that takes their place is cloistered and pent-up as a madman swinging at phantoms that dissolve beneath his frustrated fists. He dangles above the silenced street, a hapless stage-angel clawing at the ground where Cippi kneels, his hand tightening over the girl’s mouth. His disowned carcass couples with hers, and the quiet of the scene is cankered. The Pratesi cowering behind their doors choke back their shouts of outrage, the watching men chew on their tongues, the hand over the girl’s face forces her cries back down her throat. …

All tears come too late. It was a saltless sea that carried him away, watching a thin white ghost as she wrestled with her tormentors.
Hold her now. …
Her weirdly framed eyes roll in her head, or did he imagine that later? The boat pulls away from the shore, but not quickly enough, no, never quickly enough. Her bent body jerks about like a puppet’s—did he see that? The water folded her shrieks in its custodial silence. The dulled drumbeat of his blood drowned her out as the weight of the Achter-Wasser pushed in on him. Is that what she heard, too? As
they picked her up, one on each side, as they pushed her head forward? As they drowned her there, that night, in a barrel of rainwater?

Silence upon soiled silence; Prato’s smothered quiet upon that night’s complicit hush. Bernardo pulls him whimpering off the dying woman. He lies bruised and wakeful amidst the softly breathing bodies. Some rustling, the odd cough. Anything else?

It begins quietly, growing slowly in definition: a mucal mewling or snorty snuffly-sound. The monks sleep soundly. Bernardo snores on. Only Salvestro is awake, alone in the chamber, in the hostel, in the Borgo. In Ro-ma. No one hears and no one cares. Little liquid hiccups and half-stifled sobs erupt unvigorously and sink swiftly in the night’s tarry silence. It’s too late. It always is. Salvestro is crying for his mother.

Reveille, breakfast, the pot, a Mass.

“Otiurn, negotium.”
hums the Pope, sweeping briskly out of the chapel into the
sala
beyond, farcing the o’s into antiphonal neumes,
o-oo-o,
stopping to glance out of a window at the loggia overlooking the courtyard, deeply shaded, noisy with the shouts of today’s jostling petitioners. He considers showing himself, taking a turn around the gallery.

“Holiness, the Bishop of Spezia has been waiting three days already,” murmurs Ghiberti. “There is an audience after that. …”

The Sala di Constantino is loud with chatter that falls silent as he passes through, the painters and paint-mixers high on their scaffolds peering down at him, the air heavy with oily and metallic vapors. Chatter again as he exits and finds himself in the Eliodoro. Through the windows to his right the Belvedere gardens sweep up the hill, part-shadowed by the palace, then glorious in the morning’s sunshine beyond. The Vatican hogs the Borgo’s light. Ghiberti coughs, or sniffs, prompting him again. The ledger is clasped to his chest. Leo sees the Bishop standing alone in the Sala di Segnatura.
“Otiurn, negotium …”

A dolphin, he thinks a few minutes later, because of the lips. The gulping, too, great roomfuls of air swallowed and belched up in droning periods. The dolphin-like Bishop of Spezia squints inflexibly at a point three feet in front of his nose, turning his head from side to side in slow quarter rotations as Leo paces before him. The monologue began as he entered.

And continues now, interspersed with ill-rehearsed urbanities, each of these prefaced alternately by “If I might be so bold” or “How should I put it to Your Holiness?”: locutions Leo detests, and three of each so far. He listens with diminishing attention, recalling Spezia as swampy and uninteresting; by the sea. A softly spewed fog of rhetoric is clouding his cloudless morning. Bulky entities float shapelessly within it: the objects of the Bishop’s lament. Pay attention, he upbraids himself. Ask a question. Concern yourself with the sadnesses of Spezia. He could
inquire if Turkish corsairs were a danger, baffling the thick-lipped Bishop. Or ask after the quality of the hunting.

“… and as to her origins, all profess the completest ignorance; she herself will say nothing except that she was saved and brought to Spezia by one who came and left in the night, who will come back one day to take her away—you can imagine what the simpler folk make of that—that she is waiting now, and any who wish to wait with her may do so. …” The Bishop has a minor saliva problem and sucks noisily from time to time, perhaps for emphasis.

Certain facts begin recurring, sifted dutifully by the Pope. It seems an eight-year-old child arrived in Spezia two years ago. It seems a prayer-house has since gathered about her. It seems grants of money have been removed from the diocese and reassigned to said prayer-house. The benefice of Spezia is not a rich one. It seems its Bishop is in Rome. The Pope arranges and rearranges these bland counters. He smiles placidly at the Bishop from time to time, encouraging him to go on. It is useful to be thought stupid.

Ghiberti, standing quietly near the back wall of the
sala,
steps forward discreetly, looking sideways with the odd nose-wiping gesture he has adopted lately. A hum of conversation penetrates from the Sala d’ Incendio next door, rises and falls in the high spaces of the ceiling.

“Her influence, you see, is spreading,” the Bishop says. “There are women amongst her followers who are, how should I put it to your Holiness, who are
ill thought of in
Spezia. And it is not only the common people. The diocese relies on its patrons, who have fallen under her influence, my own sister amongst them, Violetta. She has taken an interest in this Amalia, the girl, I mean. And, Your Holiness will understand, it is difficult for me to move against the sect directly, my sister, you understand. … She owns much of the land in Spezia, and two other estates besides. She can be very headstrong, my sister.”

Leo nods sympathetically. He has sisters himself.

“Since she abandoned the Church, we hardly have two cantors to rub together, if I might be so bold. …”

Two cantors to rub together?
Julius appointed this weak and stupid man. Perhaps because of his sister. There would have been a reason; there always was with Julius. To do with the Genoese to the north, or the marble quarries at Carrara, or even the French. Julius couldn’t belch without thinking of the French. His appointment would have been calculated, weighed, Perhaps not today, not this morning, but Spezia must once have been of interest. It is a place, by the Bishop’s account, where churches teeter on the brink of collapse and the host molders in its pyx. Where priests go hungry and their bishops starve. The Prelate is coming to the meat of the matter, although Leo is there already, and already weary of understanding this Bishop of Spezia, and why he is here, and what he will ask for in the next minute, and why he has heard this particular complaint amongst all the thousands of others that he will never hear.

“And for all these reasons, and others I have not said in deference to my sister,
I petition Your Holiness to examine the child Amalia for heresy here in Rome, for I believe she is as injurious to the church in Spezia as Savonarola was in Florence, the very town where you were born.” The Bishop delivers this sentence in one breath and falls silent. There is a long pause. Ghiberti moves toward the far door.

“When you say ‘examine this child for heresy here in Rome,’ do you mean that she should be examined here in Rome, or that her heresy was committed here in Rome, or both?” asks the Pope.

The question travels slowly to the Bishop, extending tendrils that wrap themselves about him. His head wobbles gently. The face remains complacent, telling Leo that his ire remains unnoticed. But he would like a little more time. To mention Savonarola, to
him
. To bandy that name about in here, before himself, before a Medici. The man’s clumsiness. And then,
the very town where you were born. …
The insolence! This must not cloud his judgment; he needs to be calm. “I presume you mean her to be examined here in Rome?” he hazards. The Bishop nods gratefully. “Let us walk,” he suggests, and takes the Bishop by the arm, leading him toward the door Ghiberti has now opened to reveal the
sala
beyond, crowded with gowned and robed figures. Suddenly hushed.