The Pop’s Rhinoceros (63 page)

The light from his candle would not reach the roof. There were pillars and pallets, loose straw, a chest, illumined by the yellow stain of his light. The air was dead and musky; its stench curdled the contents of his stomach. In the midst of
this sat a cowled and habited man. Salvestro had mentioned “the monks,” some of them by name. He should have made a note, but he already knew that his errand was futile. Salvestro was not here. The monk had not looked up yet. He was bent over a piece of parchment, scribbling furiously. Seròn moved closer and the man started, letting out a startled yell. A face smeared with dirt stared about wildly, its sightless eyes rolling in search of him.

“I am looking for a man named Salvestro,” he hurried to reassure the wretch.

“I told you! He is not here. I do not know where they are.” He tried to cover the pages before him with his arms. Seròn glanced at them curiously, then at the inkwell that was placed on the floor beside the monk. It was dry. The pages were blank.

“Forgive the disturbance,” he said, backing away. The monk was feeling the floor, hands outstretched and fingers splayed. He found a piece of paper and grunted to himself before taking up his pen once again.

It should have been funny, Seròn thought now, boots twinkling, buckles undone. Pewter was a fine metal with its powdery sheen. Why was it not funny? The other horse was gone when he’d reemerged. The monk’s words struck him then:
I told you
. … I told you before? Or already? Had someone else been searching for his Master Explorer? It did not matter. He would find Salvestro at the Broken Wheel the next morning. Diego’s boots resumed their soft tattoo. Would the soldier pursue his own purposes, slip the leash and simply go after them? No, no, no. …Just a mad monk in a cellar, nothing more. Join the other idiots, Idiot Seròn.

In the next room, the pacing stopped and started and stopped again. A muted creak would be the handle of the door and the soft knock that followed the carefully damped closing of that door. The passageway was cheaply planked and squeaked like a choir of mice, but on this occasion the mice declined to sing and Seròn listened to the sound of a man not wishing to be heard as Diego padded past his door.

Two minutes later, noises off: a creak, a clunk, a rustle, a whisper. Saying what? Only that Diego was back, scraping and scratching, gravid in his soundbox. He was wide awake, straining his ears. Next door a wheezy organ rattled its pipes, footsteps beat an irregular measure, the bed supplied the air. In major and minor keys, the bed boards groaned, then groaned again. The bed feet first tapped, then jiggled, then scraped. Then thudded. And accelerated, and Seròn could no longer disbelieve the evidence of his own ears when a heavy grunt sounded the theme and was answered by a low drone that rode the scales up to wailing, then dispersed itself in a series of high-pitched squeals. The crescendo was a single resounding unambiguous crash: the bed itself being driven into the wall.

Silence. Then, again, the padding of feet. He counted, one, two, three, four. The door, the passage, the door once again. In the silences interposed between these sounds he heard only the reverberations that shook their way through his
frame. He lay there, incredulous, reluctantly accepting, persuaded only for want of any other explanation. It seemed somehow unimaginable, but why not? Why would he not? Diego had a woman. Seròn had listened. Seròn had heard. In the room next to his own, Diego had had a woman.

Now the palazzo was silent, all the idiots asleep. He masturbated noiselessly and joined them.

The light came and went, a trembling glow in the dark distance. Whole days went by when he did not see it. His eyes were useless to him; he did not see it with his eyes. On the days when he was left alone he waited for a dim flicker to reappear. Sometimes it came. Sometimes not. He waited. He prayed. He wrote:

“
I …”

Only poets sang themselves, Jörg thought. Contemptible pride drove them to it. Augustine of Hippo sought the footprints of the Trinity in the mud of Man’s soul and found Memory, Will, and the Power of Thought. The Holy Spirit walked in everyone, being Love, the hungry Will. Christ walked in everyone, being the power of God’s Thought. The double procession bound each man to both, two grinning shepherds guiding their flock down from the mountain, all galloping toward God. And memory is who we are, he thought, being all we know of ourselves and the traces of the Trinity within us. The ground was churned now, plowed under, almost illegible. It was late to be searching for footprints. Perhaps too late. Augustine too wrote of himself, but humbly, as a penitent. I, the solitary upright, the bare bar, the drawn and driven appetite for God.

“I, Jörg…”

Prior, and scribbler of these lines, the
Gesta Monachorum Usedomi
, and petitioner of His Holiness the Pope: the Trinity or succession of himself. Gather the scattered glass beads and restring them on the thread of “Jörg.” He was a rope of rounded mirrors, mouth spread wide, eyes slewed and stretched: a hopeful novice, then a monk in orders, then a Prior and a recorder of these images. Observe—he observed—the graying and silvering of the hair, the lines cut in the skin, the dimming of the eyes, a man becoming the pieces of a man. Mad old Jörg. He chuckled to himself, pen paused. He was one of those who waited on the Pope, one of the desperate, clamorous, and grasping. And therefore one of the faithful. Before honor is humility, as Solomon knew, and wrote twice.

“I, Jörg of Usedom …”

Of? Or merely from? And which Usedom? Its first jagged contours were bastions shielded by natural moats, sea and river mouth; beech-wooded and un-transfigured. An ur-Usedom, notional, not his island, or anyone’s. The heathens came and marked their presence with the groves of their barbarous gods and the piles of a great city: Vineta, which was torn loose from her foundations and sent to the bottom of the sea. Henry the Lion built a church to stand guard above it,
to stand firm against the suck and pull of its patient vengeful tides, or to mark his bloodless consummation. The island cared nothing for conscience. Then the silly simple islanders with their plows and fences. But this was not his, neither the island he was of nor that which he was from. Last of all, the Usedom of his return with the different greens of its tree mosses and bog mosses, the low humps of its fields and their straw-colored crops, its beehives and pigpens, cow-sheds and barns. Come winter the icicles hung like swords from the eaves. Look, a church rises on the seaward coast, its spire stabbing the sky’s blue and its bells bringing the men and women running across the fields to praise God, its impregnable walls and high windows founded on granite: the miracle church of a miracle island. He would never see this Usedom, though it was his.

I, Jörg of Usedom, though blind, write this chronicle of the deeds of the monks of Usedom in Rome. Our lodgings here are mean, though no meaner than a stable, and we are tested daily by new affronts and impieties. Suspicion creeps among us like a jackal, or the serpent in the garden. Brother HansJ
ü
rgen and I battle together for his conscience, which is assailed by doubts and fears and weaknesses of faith. It is a twisted and wretched thing that he comes to me with accusations, for he is sincere and bears witness sincerely in his belief Still we wrestle. …

In truth, what else was there to do during the long hot mornings spent waiting in the courtyard of San Damaso? A few days after their first attempt at an audience, crushed and downcast, he had listened as HansJürgen whispered of Gerhardt’s scheming and plotting. What did Gerhardt do, during the day, taking the rest of the brothers with him, whoever would go? HansJürgen stayed, but the others went, even Florian. He asked, naturally, and Gerhardt told him, “Building churches, Father, as was our purpose.”

He was aware that he was mocked.

But dusty clothes and Gerhardt’s daily absences constituted no sin, and Hansjürgen’s voice was strained with worry. It came to him suddenly that this was a task he might perform, and his own heart lightened as the other’s disclosed the weight upon it. That Gerhardt should employ his brothers in good works, turning their hands to the business of mortar and stone, that was beyond his reproach. But HansJürgen was lost in a maze of dark suspicions. He, Jörg, would light his way out. Besides, it hardly mattered how Brother Gerhardt employed his time in this place, this city of Rome, their sojourn being less than an eye blink in the sight of God. When they returned, surely all would be as before? He lowered his pen once again and was about to write this when a voice sounded, suddenly loud in the chamber.

“I am looking for a man who goes by the name Salvestro.”

The voice came from the door, or a little way inside the chamber.

“As you see, he is not here,” Jörg replied. He could hear the man’s breathing. From somewhere within the hostel itself came the noise of someone shouting, the sound echoing oddly. The voice was unfamiliar to him. The man did not reply. Jörg heard another sound as he turned, as if a tin cup were being scraped
against the rough flagstones on the floor, more slithery, perhaps, more sibilant. Then the man was gone.

Jörg gathered his thoughts: Gerhardt’s antics, Hansjürgen’s suspicions, his own mediation. And now Salvestro. Salvestro, who slept not six feet away from him, whose nightly returns were marked, still, by a sudden awkward hush. Salvestro, who did not fit. He considered this for a minute or so. He should write about Salvestro. Bernardo too. The pen began to fly over the page once again. Then, suddenly, he jumped and cried out. The man had come back.

“I am looking,” he said, more softly this time, “for a man named Salvestro.”

“I told you! He is not here. I do not know where they are.” He covered the page before him, but others fell to the floor. He moved quickly to gather them, sensing the man move nearer.

“Forgive the disturbance,” the man said. This time there was no strange scraping sound, only footsteps growing quieter as he turned and walked away. Jörg gathered the rest of his papers. HansJürgen would put them in order for him. He took up his pen once again, but now he was disturbed and his thoughts disorderly. Why would anyone, other than himself, be concerned with Salvestro? HansJürgen had mentioned new suits of clothes. Had the two men sunk themselves in debt? Or something worse? The idea swelled in his mind, vexing and goading him. Baseness of birth and ignorance were not obstacles on the path to grace. Salvestro was not beyond salvation. A heathen, yes, but not irredeemable. … The next notion came to him unbidden, so preposterous and unexpected that he laughed out loud. He tapped his finger on the page before him. Of course he must write about Salvestro. How narrow of him to have doubted it. He scratched a line beneath his text and began:

Might a soul appear as a small yellow light? I have seen such a thing from time to time, or believed that I did. That amongst the deeds of the monks of Usedom should be counted those of a heathen is no more shocking than Christ’s love for Magdalen. It is for him that we are here
.

He stopped there and thought on what he had written. He had presumed that the light he saw was a beacon, the Magi’s star, a burning bush. But why then was it inconstant? It was a soul, wavering between salvation and damnation. Yes, he thought, for who was our guide to this place of testing, and who will guide us back? He wrote:

We are his test
.

How dark the design that this pilgrimage should be not theirs but his. A thousand candles would not light it, a million eyes not see it. He had to sink deeper, breathe it in, eat it and sleep it. Blind? He was not blind enough! His guide was a flickering yellow light, his to follow blindly. He would tell HansJürgen as soon as he should return, for at its unguessable end there would be their church, built again, its bell tower chiming the little hours of Prime, Terce, Sext, and None, the greater hours of Matins, Lauds, Vespers, and Compline, when he would smile to himself in the prayers against darkness and sing with the others
the
Venite
when that darkness was dispelled, and within such hours and within such walls they would pray together, as they had before, as they would again.

He sat alone in the darkness, his own and the chamber’s. From time to time he scratched his pen in the inkwell and bent his head to the paper. He used his finger to measure the lines.
I, J
ö
rg of Usedom
… He began each page of his chronicle with the same formula, and when the bottom of the page was reached he sheaved it carefully under the others.