The Pop’s Rhinoceros (50 page)

“They’re as bad as each other, arrogant bastards.”

“Haughty, I’d say.”

“Right, haughty
bastards. …”

Proud, too, and overbearing, and … Well, the Rumor finds its first and easiest handhold in Rome’s multiple xenophobias, for just as Bohemians are heretics and all Poles are thieves, so Florentines are grasping sodomites, Venetians uppity, and Neapolitans fit only for simple agricultural tasks. The Hungarians? They flap their arms while drinking and wear strangely formless hats. The English are foulmouthed, avaricious, insular, reeking, tailed toads, while Germans eat like pigs and make boring conversation. The second-best feature of the French is their singing, which sounds like a nanny goat giving birth to a cathedral. The best is their departure back over the Alps two years ago. A few toothless relics of the Borgia’s tenure rattle around in the wings of decayed palazzi, jealous guardians of the
limpieza di sangre
clotting in their veins, geriatric boosters of the Black Legend, who can’t for the dwindling life of them see how chasing about the Indies for weird animals accords with the hard-won Spanish reputation for extreme military cruelty. The contest finds more cheerful acceptance in Rome’s stables and cheaper bordellos, amongst the grooms, whores, and soldiers on secondment from Cardona’s army in Naples who swagger and strut about, propping their stubbly chins on the counters of Ripa’s taverns while affecting a complaisant impartiality and placing bets on the outcome.

“Gambling! Another unattractive Iberian vice.”

“Gambling on what?”

This is far from clear. Further Rumor-modulations play on the city’s taste for exotica. Dear old Hanno is implicated in the odd tripartite contract hammered out in the gardens of the Belvedere (this meeting now being reported as “ill-tempered” and even “stormy”), the elephant’s popularity feeding a burgeoning Roman curiosity as to the identity of the beast to be procured, the more bizarre the better. The Camelopardis is a strong contender, also the fearsome Scaly Boar, various dragons … Kite-flying is the very lifeblood of a vigorous and rudelimbed Rumor, it being closely akin to appetite and metaphor.

“It has”—Colonna pauses, sighs, exhales, ponders, heaves himself upright, begins taking off his shirt—” a most
impervious
armored hide.” Vittoria tsks and clucks as her father repeats this bon mot, watched by one hundred and twenty-seven pairs of eyes. Off come his shoes. Soon he is stark naked, hat excepted. Vittoria leads him out quietly. Why must he always do this during Mass? Does he not love God? The arrow digs a little deeper into his skull.

“Hooves.” A dwarf says this to his dwarfish wife in a sweltering attic-room of the Vatican. (Rumor thrives on feedback.) “Hooves,” she repeats. It becomes a password between them. A troupe of their relatives is planning to descend on them from Magdeburg sometime in the late summer and try their luck with the Pope, who is said to like dwarfs. “Hooves,” he says again.

“Hooves,” says his wife.

“Tail like a rat,” mutters Cardinal Serra in his apartment a quarter of a mile away. “Perhaps it
is
a rat.” He is grumpy because Vich will not take him into his confidence and has refused three successive invitations to dinner in the past month alone. Something’s in the air, he smells it, something to do with Ayamonte. A rat.

“… and it sleeps by leaning against a tree, for, lacking joints in its knees, once toppled it may not right itself. A large saw and a larger store of patience are all that is required. The beast is yours. Alternatively it may be lured out and tamed using virgins. It is very partial to virgins, this beast. …” They nod.

In the locked basement of a farmhouse on the Pincio, isolated, carefully chosen, stinking of mildewed plaster and cowshit, La Cavallerizza throws red hair over her naked shoulders and clamps her thighs tight about the boy’s face. A threatening flick from one pointed fingernail to the bobbing member draws the reluctant tongue upward into her innards. She settles herself more firmly in the saddle. “What
(oof)
I want to know
(unnnk)
…” Vitelli looks at his wife in mild surprise as the boy begins to struggle. She reaches for his testicles. “…is how big
(uurgh)
is this horn
(aaagh)
on the end
(aaargh!)
of its nose?”
Eeeurgh-aaAARGHH!

“But most important of all…” They lean across the table, politely agog. “… really, of the utmost significance …” They incline their heads to become mirror-images of each other’s rapt and patient fascination. “…absolutely key to an understanding of this beast. …” Their heads touch, their attentions being that undivided. “…is that it
absolutely loathes elephants.”

Thank you.

The animal swells like a bladder puffed with boozy breath and collapses like a lung. Printers around the city sell out their editions of Pliny’s
Natural History
and print more, which sell out, too. Informal factions coalesce about the Spanish and Portuguese, whose contest becomes heroic, or fierce, or faintly ludicrous, depending upon the circumstance. The Pope is generally applauded, though for what remains unclear. Grooms groom, menders mend, diggers dig, drunks drink. … Everyone talks. Rome’s gossipmongers find their calling infested with rank amateurs who prove alarmingly adept at the Confiding Whisper,
the Wild Claim, and the Vague and Unfounded Assertion. They take refuge in hyperbole and lying.

“Why?” asked Salvestro.

“Why indeed?” replied Pierino. “It is an enigma.”

“So the Elephant and the Enigma, they would be old enemies,” offered Bernardo. The onlookers who gathered about their table attended the conversation more closely as he spoke. “This is very simple. It’s like Christians and Turks, or cats and dogs, or the French and, er …”

“Everyone else?” supplied Lucullo.

“Yes,” agreed Bernardo. “The Enigma is like Everyone Else.”

“And Everyone Else is the Enigma?” Everyone else nodded.

At first, as talk of this latest Hispano-Lusitanian spat scended and breasted the abutments of Rome’s inert attention, the Broken Wheel maintained a lofty disdain, a faintly self-conscious insouciance compounded of genuine ignorance and the patrons’ clubbish resistance to whatever the rest of the city finds noteworthy. The tavern’s bordelloish light suggests a perpetual “just before midnight”: opaque mustards grounded on candlelight-through-cheap-wine crimsons and pinks. Who cares about diplomacy when disinterest is so sublime? For three weeks this was the party line, which the recently dubbed “Enigma” dispensed with in three minutes flat, busting horn-first through the wall with a buffoonish butt of its head and setting the wagging tongues of the Broken Wheel’s topers flip-flopping with talk of its improbable anatomy. The tavern’s idiolect quickly gained mastery of the word “perissodactyl,” and Salvestro and Bernardo found themselves coopted as resident weird beast experts. The “Master Explorers” tag has stuck.

“But what I want to know,” Pierino continued, “if our Pope loves his elephant so passionately, is what does he want with its most fearsome enemy, this … enigma?”

“Popes want whatever they cannot have,” a voice piped up near the back of those gathered about their table. The speaker was a man whose features crowded together near the center of his face, giving his head a deceptively swollen look. “Usually it’s the revenues of the Duchy of Modena. I was a copyist in the Camera under Julius. He wanted to build the greatest church in Christendom for three and a half
soldi. …”

“That would be it,” said Salvestro, and was about to develop the point when a second voice broke in.

“It would be better to ask why the Spaniards or the Portingales are so eager to give it to him.” A tall man with a high shiny forehead; those around him peered up in mild indignation. Who was this lanky oddball to offer unwanted advice to the master explorers? “And where are they going to get this animal, anyway?” he went on.

A few of the more belligerent listeners muttered, “Shut up,” or, “Mind your mouth, beanpole,” but Salvestro held up his hand to quell them.

“Fair questions both. I myself have yet to see an Enigma for sale in Navona,” he answered genially. “Where indeed? And why?” He contemplated both questions for a moment. “Bernardo?”

Bernardo had been nodding along sagely. Now he looked up, startled, to find the eyes of their audience upon him. From across the table, Lucullo and Pierino watched expectantly.

“Right,” he said. “Well, not here. So, somewhere else. When I think of where such a beast would be found, I don’t think of anywhere in particular. I’d start by going somewhere I’ve never been before to see if that’s where it is. If it isn’t, I’d go somewhere else, like, uh …” He floundered for a few seconds.

“Good God, the man’s a marvel!” Lucullo burst out then, and the crowd, which felt perhaps the first uneasy stirrings of skepticism at Bernardo’s answer, performed a swift volte-face. Warm agreement prevailed as Lucullo continued, “Where and why? Nonsense! Bernardo here leaps straight to the crux. It’s the ‘how’ that matters, that’s what he’s telling us. That’s real independent thinking for you!”

“Exactly!” Bernardo exclaimed, deciding to join the sudden consensus. He scanned the complaisant faces and nodding heads before him for that of their interrogator, but the lanky man had disappeared.

Looking at the same beaming and amicable countenances of their adoring audience, Salvestro thought to himself, We should have come to Rome a long time ago. Then, following close on its heels, the accompanying thought came to him, as it had the day before and the day before that: We should have fled this place the very day we arrived. For there was still the Colonel. Somewhere within the same city that clasped him so fondly to its breast, the Colonel awaited him.
Welcome to Rome. …
They had been there twenty-five days. The face would come at him in the pitch-dark of his waking and would not be dispelled until he rose, stumbled over the sleeping bodies of the monks, and splashed a little water on his face from the well in the yard. Twenty-five such thoughts and twenty-five reprieves to match them. When he returned to rouse Bernardo, the soldier would start to fade from his thoughts. Then, and only then, their days in Rome could begin.

At first they fell into step with the successive bands of pilgrims whose circuits looped between Rome’s churches. Huge hymn-singing crowds of them would gather in the Piazza of Saint Peter’s early in the morning, then set out in groups of thirty or forty for the first of their stations. Most would march off briskly to take boats from the Ponte Sant’Angelo or stride along the riverbank as far as Santa Sabina, where they left the towpath for the Porta Pauli, passing by the pyramid to begin the dusty trek to San Paolo fuori le Mura. Others, however, would forsake this farthest-flung of Rome’s stations and begin directly with the Lateran, which was a twenty-minute dawdle through Ponte and then a stroll through the ruins, rather than the hour-long forced march along the Ostia road. Accordingly,
Salvestro and Bernardo preferred the Lateran and visited it four times in as many days.

After clambering up and down the Holy Stairs, the pilgrims would amble toward the squat towers of the Porta Asinara and thence to San Croce in Gerusalemme, Salvestro and Bernardo still in tow; there both men dutifully peered at the fishes carved inside the newly installed water stoup. A few prayers and they were all off again, up the little hill and through the Porta Maggiore to San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, which stood alone on rough pastureland and was linked to the city only by the ant-column of supplicants who trudged toward it carrying their staves, crosses, and occasionally each other, for a bustling tavern stood just outside the gatehouse. Once around the cloister and it was time for Santa Maria Maggiore. The pilgrims’ pace had slackened by now, and the crowds of ragged hawkers who followed them about selling everything from caged birds to water met with greater success as the marchers sought excuses to rest their feet.

They took the Aventine road, keeping the city on their left, while to the right the dwellings and outbuildings quickly gave out and beyond there was nothing but fields, a few gardens, the odd ruin. The pilgrims strung themselves out along the road, the slowest and most weary slipping off to the left on one pretext or another and disappearing back into the city. Leading up to the church was a long, gentle slope, which the pilgrims would negotiate with loud shouts and theatrical flourishes of their staves as though they were scaling the Alps rather than the low hump of the Esquiline. The “climb” was an excuse to pass the wineskin, or slap one another on the back, or offer extravagant prayers for their survival. But there was no hymn-singing now, and for that Salvestro, at least, was glad. On the top of the hill stood the church of Santa Maria Maggiore.

It might have been the Lateran, or Santa Croce, or even one of the little chapels that clustered about the greater churches as though an earlier cathedral had exploded and left its wrecked oratories scattered about the church that would replace it. It might have been one of the little wooden structures at which the monks had stopped to give thanks on their journey. Bernardo always went in. Salvestro looked at the massive walls, the dark interior, heard on occasion the warbling and wailing of a choir. … At Santi Apostoli he had been swept in by the press of the crowd and found himself in an ill-tempered carnival rather than a church. Throughout these latter tours he waited outside, his curiosity mounting, until, striding up the Esquiline, he told Bernardo that they might as well peer inside this one together if it was all the same to him, which it was.

A huge bell tower dropped from the sky like a stone battering ram driven down into the nave. When the bells rang, their clangor thundered down the shaft and exploded within the body of the church. The pilgrims covered their ears and shouted to one another, but Salvestro stood in silence next to Bernardo, looking not at the great colonnades that ran down either side of the nave, nor at the mosaics
inlaid within the walls, nor at the different marbles of the floor. When everyone else had drifted out to view the treasures of the oratory of the
presepio,
Salvestro found himself standing there alone but for Bernardo, gazing up into the gloom of the roof. Subaqueous light filtered through the tracery of the carved marble windows and struggled up into cavernous spaces high above his head. Then, when it reached the ceiling, the light seemed to come alive, drawing new energies from what it struck there, for the ceiling was made of gold.