The Pop’s Rhinoceros (59 page)

They walked in twos, Groot and the sergeant ahead, Salvestro and Bernardo behind. Rounding the Pieve di San Stefano, they seemed to be heading toward the Palazzo Pretorio, and Salvestro remembered dully that this was where the Colonel had set up his headquarters. It was almost dusk, and on every corner soldiers were struggling to light braziers, or torches, or chaotic bonfires of smashed furniture. At night the town came alive with flames and sparks. No one seemed to sleep. Nothing stopped.

They passed in front of the Pretorio but did not enter, Groot and the sergeant swapping commonplaces about the warmth of the season and the fear of disease. There were no cadavers in this precinct, for the Colonel had put a price on the head of any man caught leaving a body unburied. The edict’s force exhausted itself gradually as they moved into narrower, darker streets. The smell of putrefaction came in thick waves, strangely regular until Salvestro realized that the
quintanas
between the houses were their source. They passed a little orchard in which invisible dogs could be heard snarling at one another. Two shapes hung like sacks from the branches of an apple tree, black outlines in the failing light. They wore signs about their neck that read—Salvestro knew only because he had asked—“Coward.” Two days before, he had watched a middle-aged man, a soldier, being frog-marched down to the dyeing sheds, wearing just such a sign. The nature of the offense was unclear. The men were beginning to turn on themselves.

Now the four men entered the San Marco district. The men lounging on the corners or idling past them were more ragged and watched the quartet suspiciously; only their arms marked them as soldiers. The Free Companies ruled here. At the far ends of the streets branching off to their left, Salvestro saw little barricades manned by uniformed men, Medici’s and Cardona’s. The Cardinal and Viceroy maintained their
famiglias
in the two fortresses whose turrets poked above the clutter of meaner houses. Medici was in the older castle, with Aldo, who was dying. Aldo was Prato’s ruler, and now he was dying of a kind of plague.
Salvestro had heard,
That old goat Aldo. …
And,
They should go ahead and kill him, that old bastard Aldo. …
He knew who this “Aldo” was, and he knew the barricades were to keep the men outside out, the rabble, the animals. A double row of walls—the
cassero
—linked the establishments, and messengers passed back and forth, mobile interruptions of the darkening pink of the western sky. Minutes later it was dark.

Rabble. Animals? They spat on the ground and pissed against walls, ate, slept, rose … They wrenched the genitals off old men at spear-point and broke the legs of their old wives. Killed children. They were murderers and torturers. Salvestro looked at their faces, all red in the torchlight and firelight. They were men who wondered where their supper was coming from, who scuffled about in stables looking for straw on which to bed down, who shivered or sweated. He thought of the Teeth. Terror wrote itself over the countenances that looked upon him; it was invariable. Where was the mark on these men? They appeared ordinary: dirty, tired, disheveled, bandaged, and bedraggled. He looked no different. I took no part in this, he told himself. Groot and the sergeant still conversing in a whisper just ahead. I reached down my hand to pull another out, a girl in a silent street, quite ugly. Whisper, whisper. But she died.

The streets narrowed again, the frontage bulging like the sides of great ships drifting heavily together. A few men were huddled in the archways beneath the steps running up to the upper floors. The four of them passed through dead-eyed fields of vision, emerged unscathed, continued. He did not know what this quarter of the town was called, but it was meaner than those they had passed through already. There were no orchards or gardens to break the drab rows of houses that snaked and wound toward their destination. Even the stinking canals were fewer. The whispering ahead was dismembered and senseless:
Remember this if nothing else. … Of course, but what if … Count on it. … Depend on me for that. … The very worst … No, not before he …
At the end of one of these streets stood three men, soldiers better dressed than the others they had seen, more alert or more sleepless. The sergeant
nodded
to them, and the trio nodded back. A light showed for a second in a house farther up. The air was sharp with wood-smoke from a fire somewhere.

“Within this house is Aldo’s family,” the sergeant told them. “His wife, Signora Anna Maria, her maid, two children. They are safe here, and your duties are to keep them safe. Admit no one, unless it is myself. Tell no one. You are the Colonel’s men and will answer to him if any harm befalls them.” He repeated these commands twice more in different terms, the three of them nodding dumbly. They could smell food cooking within now. Another trio of soldiers was just visible at the other end of the street. Salvestro saw that every house in it had been ransacked, doors and shutters swinging off hinges, smashed chairs and beds and pots piled against the outer walls. Ransacked and then meticulously cleared. Where, he wondered, were the people who once lived here? “You will be
brought food.” The sergeant pointed to the men they had just passed. “There is no need to step outside.”

There were grilles over the windows. The door was studded and banded with iron. It was opened as they reached it by a man who nodded to the sergeant, then looked warily out into the street before closing it softly behind them. Two other men rose from their cots at their entrance and, barely glancing at the newcomers, joined their comrade by the door. A fire burned slowly in the hearth at the far end of the room, a pot suspended above it from which rich meaty smells were wafting. A partition had once divided this space from the one behind it. Now the planks were stacked neatly in a corner, and the backroom was open to view. Lines were strung across it, and sheets thrown over them formed a kind of curtain. A woman emerged from behind it, looked at the four of them contemptuously, then retreated again. They heard whispering start up. “You are not to touch them, do you understand?” the sergeant said. He brushed a speck of muck from his sleeve. “Not a finger.”

Just then the sheets were flung aside and a second woman strode forward. Salvestro registered billowing skirts, simple jewelry, a stiff-backed carriage. Her eyes swept over the three of them. Salvestro saw that though her clothes were rich—silks, lace, gold thread—they were also filthy.

“So,” she addressed the sergeant coolly, “the murderers have arrived. Is my husband dead so soon?”

“You frighten your children for no reason, Signora,” the sergeant replied. He turned to the three men, saying, “Remember your orders. You will be well rewarded if you follow them. If not …” He did not finish the sentence but walked toward the door.

“Wait!” exclaimed the woman, a new note in her voice.

The sergeant ignored her. The door was closed. Groot moved to bolt it while Bernardo flopped down on the nearest of the cots.

A boy’s face appeared from behind the curtains, then a little girl’s. The boy looked at Salvestro, then strode forward, his sister’s hand in his. A miniature empty scabbard dangled from his belt. He looked ten or twelve, no more, the girl perhaps half his age.

“Did you kill my father?” he asked Salvestro.

Salvestro smiled halfheartedly. “No one has killed your father,” he said. “He is as alive as I am.”

“He’s a traitor,” the boy said coldly. “He surrendered the town. You should kill him. I’d kill him, if I got the chance.”

“Silence!” the Signora shouted at him, which brought the maid out again.

“Chop him up and feed him to the pigs,” the boy went on. His mother seized him and pulled his head to her breast. The boy suffered himself to be led back behind the curtain. That left the daughter. And Salvestro.

She stood waist-high to him, wearing a white linen dress or nightdress that reached to the floor. Salvestro had the feeling that he was being assessed in some
way; he tried to think of something to say, but his mind was still mired, submerged underwater, where the silence roared and bubbled in his ears. The little girl stared at him curiously. Suddenly she reached down, grasped the hem of her dress, and with a single abrupt movement pulled it up to her neck. Salvestro saw bare legs, her bald cleft, a rounded belly, the white cloth bunched about her throat.

“Look,” she commanded. “I’m a virgin!”

Her name was Amalia. She believed in God.

“God isn’t big,” she confided to him. “He’s as small as an ant. If he wanted to get out of here, he’d crawl through the keyhole.”

“There is no keyhole,” said Salvestro.

“Yes, there is. Back there.” She led him past her sleeping mother to the far end of the captive’s room. Behind some furniture piled there was a low hatch, cobwebbed and with a thick sill of dust. “See in there—” She pointed between chair-legs and crates. “Keyhole.”

Apart from that time, he never ventured into the quarters of Signora Anna Maria and her family. Nor did Groot or Bernardo. The maid emerged to cook their meals, standing spoon in pot with her back to them in grim silence. She retreated with four platefuls as soon as she was done, and then the three men would scrape the pot for their own supper. After his initial outburst, the boy remained sullen and immobile. His mother sobbed quietly, slept, and looked at the three men with disgust when she had to look at them at all. They lived behind the curtain. That was all, and the three men lived in the kitchen.

Food arrived in the morning, announced by a single blow on the door and left on the step outside. By the time they drew the bolts, its deliverer had disappeared again. Groot or Salvestro would glance up at the open sky, grasp the basket and two pails of water, then withdraw again into the oily light of their jail. The windows being shuttered as well as grilled, they had no means of telling whether it was day or night outside and drifted through the time like sleepwalkers. A day or two of this reduced them to near silence, grunting to one another as they awoke, passing comments about the food, dozing irregularly and at odd intervals, despite Groot’s attempts to establish a roster. Their movements grew sluggish and heavy. Only Amalia rose above it.

She skipped about in her white dress, chattering mostly to Salvestro, occasionally to Bernardo, never to Groot. She drew elaborate diagrams in the ashes of the fireplace and explained the different orders of angels and how small
they
were. (” Even smaller than
God
.”) She recited things, played intricate imaginary games. One day was occupied with counting the stones in the wall, aloud. There were, in the four long low walls that enclosed them, two thousand eight hundred and seven stones, exactly. No one, despite her entreaties, was willing to challenge this figure. It was several days after the stone-counting (but how many?) that Salvestro noticed how clean she was.

The white dress was not gray or brown, not smudged, stained, smeared, or
smirched. It was white, and stayed white. Salvestro puzzled over this. Then he noticed her hair, which was not matted as his was, nor thick with grease like her mother’s or the maid’s. It floated and bounced behind her like skeins of silk. When she walked, he saw the soles of her feet were white, too. Ash from the fire, dust, dirt, the house’s general filth … nothing touched her. Or nothing seemed to stick. He could not account for it, or did not want to try. It sank at last into their general torpor, the seeming pointlessness of what they were doing. How long would they be here? He didn’t know. Groot didn’t know, either. This day followed that day. The mother sobbed. The boy sulked. The maid cooked. The three men waited. One day the bells rang. The little girl skipped, and chattered, and floated. One day the bells rang and rang.

“Do you remember the bells?” he asked Groot. Sunlight streamed in through the open windows from the little yard at the back of the bakery. Groot nodded. “They were for Aldo.”

Sheep-bells, Salvestro thought later. The bells of the Pratesi, their one protest at the horrors visited upon them. It began with a single distant peal, answered by a carillon from a nearer church. Soon from all about the town the bells hanging in every campanile swung and clanged out of time and tune, and in the jail their exorbitant din brought Salvestro’s head up in wondering shock, roused Groot from his cot, stayed Bernardo in his pike-practice, One, two,
three;
one two …

Amalia was placing very small white stones in a pattern by inserting them in the loose mortar of the wall. She stopped and turned at the noise. Her mother appeared from behind the curtain and stared at them wordlessly, her face drained of blood.

“What is it?” Groot demanded of her. She shook her head and turned away unsteadily as the clanging gained force, solidified, shook the brains in their skulls with its waves of percussive sound.

“You’ll have to go and see,” said Amalia. “Off you go.” She returned to her remaining stones.

The three men looked at each other.

“We’re supposed to stay here,” said Bernardo.

Minutes later the door slammed shut behind Salvestro. Two loud knocks, five soft ones, he reminded himself. Night. Up the street, the three soldiers guarding the entrance were huddled together, talking, pointing, thirty or forty yards away. Their counterparts at the other end did likewise. As he watched, a man approached the first group and spoke to them quickly, and all four marched off at the double. He looked over his shoulder. The other guards had disappeared. Salvestro frowned to himself, then slipped down the alley dividing the jail from the house next to it. The street he emerged on was dark, empty. He hurried down it, then the next. Soon he was approaching the quarter of San Marco.

The bells chimed away, jangling and echoing down the streets. Clustered
about their bonfires, the irregular soldiers looked about them in alarm. A few shouted over to him, asking what had happened, but the same question was on his own lips. He shrugged his ignorance and moved on. Everyone was in the street, only the drunkest slumbering through the racket. Bands of men were drifting toward the old fortress, but the guards on the barricades were admitting no one. Salvestro saw horses being saddled by torchlight behind the row of pikes. He struggled through the crush.