The Pop’s Rhinoceros (58 page)

“I told you, I hardly saw him. He was standing down here, and I was going up the stairs. Told him I’d never come across either of you, but I’d pass on a message if I did.”

“And he asked for us by name?” Salvestro pressed.

Rodolfo nodded. “Then he walked out. Got a perfect view of his hat, if that’s any help.”

Salvestro walked back to Bernardo, shaking his head.

“Told you it wasn’t him,” the big man said without conviction.

News of the “soldier’s” inquiry had galloped after him that night, its shadow cast forward to swallow him up. They had not dared return to the tavern since, and did so now only for Don Antonio’s sake. He was to return from Ostia that day with news of their ship and shipmates. It crossed Salvestro’s mind that they might have accompanied the secretary, but Don Antonio had not raised the possibility, and curiosity aside, he had no real reason to bring up the matter himself. In place of Ostia, the two men had endured a week of nervousness and boredom in Rome. Salvestro had struggled to find some other explanation, but the fact was finally unavoidable. Somehow the Colonel had found them.

“Anyway,” Bernardo said, “Rodolfo told him we weren’t here.”

Two nights before Salvestro had awoken, skin greasy with sweat, the wavering image of the Colonel’s face imprinted in the darkness. Next, with rot-fringed clarity:
Time to leave
. He considered:
Get out. …
Heard,
Run, run, run for the sea. …

He had sat up and felt for the hole in his palliasse. The scabbard was still there. With care, and converted into coin, it would see him safely north of the Alps. Alone, he was indistinguishable from any other out-of-work footpad. Bernardo snored softly to one side of him. Jörg’s breath rasped on the other. He sat upright for a long time.

“He knew to look here in the first place,” Salvestro replied. A large sack had descended the stairs and now seemed to be walking unaided into the kitchen. A groan—Rodolfo’s—greeted its arrival. Stubby legs appeared and disappeared as it squeezed itself through the doorway. No sign of Antonio yet. Today, he had promised, they would fix the day of the expedition’s departure. Time to go.
Time to go. Time to go. Time to go. …
He had sat upright and stared ahead into the darkness. He imagined the first candle to be lit next morning, Bernardo turning over to find him gone. What would he do then? Quietly, he reached for his clothes.

“Should we have some food?” Bernardo suggested.

“It’s too early,” replied Salvestro.

They were the Broken Wheel’s only patrons at that hour. Rodolfo’s voice sounded from within the kitchen, “No. That’s final.” Some mumbling followed from whomever he was talking to. “I said no. It’s inedible. I cannot even give it away.”

“Perhaps some bread,” Bernardo countered, overhearing the exchange.

Salvestro’s face was blank. He was thinking of his hand running over the fabric of his new clothes, thick velvets and cottons, laces and buttons. The monks had stared in open amazement at their transformed appearance, but not one had asked how this transformation had been wrought. Only Jörg had not stared. He saw nothing now. Salvestro had come upon HansJurgen passing a candle back and
forth across his face, the Prior telling him, “No, nothing. Nothing at all. It is unimportant. …” He would have to abandon his finery, dress like a vagrant again. He weighed this up, already knowing that he would not leave, not that night. Soft snoring and the rattle of the Prior’s breath lulled him and pressed him down. He slept.

“Bread? Yes, why not?”

The sack reappeared, a burlap bulger encircled by hands and supported by feet. It moved unsteadily toward the stairs. Salvestro pushed back his chair and made for the kitchen. The sack staggered up the stairs. A stocky man dressed in soiled baker’s whites was attached to it, his back straining as though the sack were attempting to push him down the steps. Salvestro glanced indifferently at the unequal struggle, then poked his head into the kitchen. Rodolfo was muttering to himself and shaking his head. He looked up at Salvestro. “If you want feeding, you’re out of luck,” he said. Salvestro looked at him blankly. The door at the top of the stairs slammed shut. “Well?” said Rodolfo. The sound of the outer door followed, fainter. Rodolfo looked at him quizzically. Still Salvestro did not reply. He seemed to have forgotten why he was there. “What is it?” asked Rodolfo, curious now.

Salvestro looked down at his shoes, then turned and eyed the staircase. He glanced back at Rodolfo, an absent expression on his face. Then, swiftly succeeding one another, Rodolfo saw bewilderment, puzzlement, disbelief. He was about to ask what troubled him when Salvestro turned away abruptly and began to climb the stairs.

A man was unloading fresh straw from a high-sided cart in the courtyard. Salvestro walked out into the street, looked up—two carts like the one inside, a sea of bobbing caps and bonnets, a man on a horse—then down—more heads, their hats, other horses, two men selling apples from a barrow, three women eating them. The sack.

He began to thread his way through the crowd, slowly at first, but then, as his quarry was lost to view, he became more forceful, breaking into a half-run and elbowing people out of his path. Stifled curses pursued him down the street as men and women stepped out of his way or were jostled aside. At the end of the street he stopped. A line of horses was being led out of a stables. Deep blue sky framed the bells in the open campanile of Santa Caterina’s. Salvestro looked left and right: more carts and crowds, more barrows and bales. No sack.

He chose left, hurrying up the broader thoroughfare, dodging the piles of horseshit. He heard cowbells somewhere, human voices, the creak of cartwheels. Narrow shaded alleys opened between the buildings every few yards or so. He peered into them as he passed, squinting to squeeze the glaring sunlight from his eyes. The sack reappeared, bulbous as before, a monstrous goiter of its human appendage, which staggered with alacrity through the washing lines strung between the windows. Salvestro ran after it, gaining half the length of the alley before man and sack reached the end, turned right, and again were lost to view.

A small courtyard: ramshackle balconies, more washing, silence, and a penetrating smell that Salvestro recognized. He stepped out of the alley, sniffing. A low arcade ran along two sides of the yard, its arches planked over but punctured with little doors. Salvestro moved from one to the next, still sniffing, the odor growing stronger: damp clothes and boiled millet. He pushed at a door and found himself in a low cellarlike room dominated by an enormous brick oven. A pile of wood lay in one corner; sacks filled another. Two large tables were strewn with odd, long-handled implements, spatulalike and vaguely gruesome. Flour spotted the floor. From the room beyond came the sound of a sharp slap followed by a thin cry of protest. Salvestro closed the door carefully behind him and moved toward the noise.

He was standing with his back turned, arm raised over a boy of nine or ten whose own arm was raised in a cowering defense. For a moment Salvestro thought that his hands were oddly discolored or burned, for he wore stained cotton gloves. In his hand he held an object that Salvestro could recognize by sight, taste, smell, touch, and—now—sound: a flaccid, gray, leathery, oval loaf of inedible, unsalable bread that slapped with dull force on the boy’s head. The boy squawked. Then he noticed Salvestro.

In a moment the man will turn at the boy’s prompting and show a face prickly with black stubble, red cheeks, a mountainous ridge of bone across the brow; but the squat legs, broad back, wiry black hair, these alone are enough, as they were at the tavern. The sack has disappeared or, more accurately, is indistinguishable from the scores of identical sacks tossed in a mound against the far wall.

The man froze, gloved hand holding punitive loaf forgotten and left suspended over the boy. He turned to face his old comrade.

“Hello, Groot,” said Salvestro.

Assume disparity: dogs on a chained bear, crows mobbing the solitary hawk, metal colossi leaking yellow lubricant into the wavy yellow-beige sand. Grit, mangy fur, feathers, and lousy down. Pain-noise, exhaustion, unsweet inglorious death. To be Bernardo is to cling on, to brace oneself against desertions of what is familiar, to find things that are orderly and imitate them. His unremembered dreams are sculpted, geometric, filled with wistful icons. Why is wakefulness not like this? Why is wakefulness crowded with dogs, and what are they for? Dog-pelts are uncoveted. Few cuisines make use of dog-meat. A necklace of dog-claws remains untalismanic. So dogs (understood broadly here) are for tormenting Bernardo: the big man, the simpleton, and the present dog, worrying and snapping at chained and anxious Bernardo, is Antonio.

“Just left? Just walked out and left you here?”

“It’s happened before.”

“Before” is a storehouse of old resentments and the resignations foisted upon
them. At best, the dogs slink off and live to fight another day. “Before” is where they kennel themselves. No one is sympathetic to Bernardo’s private plights, and when they are it is because they want him to do something terrible, an act that is unspeakable. The stones that fit his hand are the size of skulls. Antonio wants him to betray Salvestro, so he is being nice to him, deploying a tactful concern to make him do this, the latest of his unspeakable things. The secretary sits opposite, an untouched mug of beer between them.

“I cannot believe he would just walk away without a word. Not without a reason. After all, he knew that we were to meet here today, unless he is trying to avoid me. An unintended offense, perhaps? I am racking my brains, but. …”

Here they come, on their springy legs with their full-sail tails and fish-flesh tongues, a-bristle and befanged, jaunty for the mauling.

“What would cause him to run off like that? It really is very worrying, for you not least, Bernardo. What does he fear so much that, well”—and here Antonio’s hands come up, fingers splayed loosely in priestly helplessness, the promise of absolution when, oysterlike, Bernardo should decide to yield his pearl—“it is his own secret to take to the grave as he wants. I must presume.”

Hints of questions, raised eyebrows, quizzicalities, a weaseling miasma of offer balanced against vaguely sketched Salvestro-dooms: Antonio’s game, his area of expertise.

“For instance, he might have …”

Or, “I only hope that whatever it is …”

And, “But I’m sure that …”

Dogs.

Bernardo’s eye sidles around the steady and reasonable eyes opposite. This is how it always starts, these smooth tones and unanswerable arguments. The patent and patient
concern. …
Remember Marne now, “Bernardo …” Remember Proztorf. “And if you don’t, well …” Well what? It gets worse. Because the accumulation of his past errors and stupidities is by now a cliff of granite, an overhang of wrongness, and a fat rock-slab of getting it wrong again. Antonio toes some more shingle over the edge, which dwindles to dust as it speeds down in individual arcs and tumbles to rematerialize as rocks bouncing off his head. The bad things happen now. Dogs or rocks is the choice.

“I’m not supposed to say,” he began. Then, “It wasn’t him, anyway.”

Then he rambled forward blindly, into the stones and dogs that cracked against his skull and stripped the flesh off his hands, into Prato and the
Colonel
, who was killing Salvestro now, somewhere outside, for what else was there to flee from? Why else would Salvestro leave him here, on his own?

“He is a Spaniard like you. Here in Rome, Salvestro says, but it wasn’t him. I told him that.”

The morning advanced uncharitably. The Broken Wheel’s patrons began to drift in and take up positions in a respectfully distanced semicircle around the
Master Explorer and his interlocutor. Nobody at the Broken Wheel liked Antonio much. Bernardo stared about him between sentences to measure their effect. The cliffs of black and rotted compacted sin grew blacker and more compact and did not fall. Dogs squatted to spatter the ground with dog-mess and did not chew on his hands. There was Groot first, then Salvestro, now Antonio. He had to do this. He was not supposed to; it was one of that vast set of things, bad things, all of them. He had to do it, and afterward Antonio would tell him what he should do next, now Salvestro was gone.

“I have not come across this Colonel Diego,” said Antonio. “Tell me about him.”