The Pop’s Rhinoceros (65 page)

“He gave it to me to remember,” said Bernardo. “But I forgot.”

Salvestro nodded. “Did he tell you to cross these marks off, one a day?”

“Yes!” Bernardo exclaimed, amazed at this.

“These are days. This curly thing is the river. Bridges over it, see? We meet him by the X.” Bernardo was openmouthed in admiration. Salvestro was pensive. “It means we’re off,” he said. He banished the frown gathering on his face. “Off at last. Good news, eh, Bernardo? We’ll be out of here in two weeks.”

“Good,” said Bernardo. “Now you can tell me why you ran off like that.”

He had not recognized the boy leaning against the damp wall in the alley leading back to Via delle Botteghe Oscure. A thin leg swung out casually to block his path, bare from the knee and the foot shod in sacking tied about the ankle. Arms folded over his chest, a straw dangling from the side of his mouth, he looked out from under the brim of his hat to assess Salvestro.

“What’s it worth?”

“What? What do you mean?”

He knew him then, though his manner was completely changed; no longer the cowering scurrying boy-shaped silence who had served him wine at Groot’s bakery. Gangs of street-hardened urchins hung about in the alleys and courtyards off the main streets, shouting, fighting amongst themselves, knocking off hats, and torturing cats. Groot’s boy was one of these.

“What I know,” said the boy. “About you and Sweat-Bucket back there.”

Salvestro moved as though to push past the boy, the small shock of recognition receding and being overtaken by larger anxieties centered about Bernardo. The boy planted his foot more firmly.

“You. Sweat-Bucket. And someone else.” Salvestro stopped. “C’mon, what’s it worth?” The boy was looking at the chain around his neck. “Gimme that. Looks stupid anyway. Go on. I’ll tell you what they’re up to.”

“Who?”

“Gimme.” His hand beckoned.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Salvestro. The urchin made no reply, simply kept his hand outstretched. There was a short silence. Salvestro reached to unfasten the clasp.

“Nice,” said the boy. The chain sparkled as he dangled it from his hand. It disappeared inside his shirt.

“So?” Salvestro demanded.

“Rufo,” said the boy. “Old friend of yours. Turns up a few weeks ago, asking about you. Sweat-Bucket starts sweating, but he doesn’t know anything, so he can’t exactly say anything, can he?”

“Rufo,” said Salvestro, his heart sinking. He had not thought of Rufo. “What did he want?”

“You.” The boy shrugged. “Where you’re staying. What you’re doing here. That kind of thing.”

“Groot doesn’t know anything,” Salvestro murmured to himself.

“Doesn’t know his dick from a dog-turd,” agreed the boy. “You’ve gone white, by the way. Go ahead and puke if you want, I don’t care. No, he doesn’t know a thing. Then again he doesn’t need to, seeing as how this Rufo was sunning himself out the back while you were gabbing on. …”

“I have to go,” Salvestro said weakly.

“Hang around,” the boy retorted. “He’ll probably be strolling this way in a minute or two. You could talk about old times, all jolly soldiers together. …” He was laughing as Salvestro pushed past him and hurried away up the alley.

“Anyway, when I caught up with the fellow I was already past that church at the end of Ripetta. He moved pretty quick with that sack. Turned out to be some villainous Tiburtine, never set eyes on him in my life before.”

“Oh,” said Bernardo.

Salvestro looked at him sideways and saw lingering clouds of doubt in the big man’s face. He pulled his biretta down a little farther. “So what did you think had happened? That I’d just dump you there?” Salvestro shook his head in theatrical disappointment.

“I thought it was the Colonel,” said Bernardo.

“Disguised as a baker?” Salvestro made no effort to conceal his incredulity.

“No. Just, when you didn’t come back, I thought, well… Well, what would
you
think?”

They had taken the path along the west bank and were nearing Santo Spirito, the saggy clutter of its roofs rising above the wooden-walled hovels.

“Let’s stop and have a drink,” said Salvestro.

“Where?” asked Bernardo. “There aren’t any taverns here.”

They walked on in silence.

“I’ve been thinking we should change our accommodation,” he said as they were passing the hulk of the hospital. “I’m sick of Lappi and his shouting. We should get somewhere better, over on the other side of the river.”

“How? We haven’t got enough money,” said Bernardo. “Anyway, we’re leaving soon.”

“True,” said Salvestro. They walked on.

“What’s the matter?” Bernardo asked when Salvestro stopped at the end of the Via dei Sinibaldi. Clouds of doubt began to gather again. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” said Salvestro. His eyes swept up and down the street. “Come on.”

Salvestro got no rest in the days that followed. Each day began with elaborate excuses designed to dissuade Bernardo from heading back to the Stick. Rodolfo’s supposed wrath at the broken tables sufficed for a while, but as the incident faded in Bernardo’s mind and became part of the hazy jumble that he called his memory, Salvestro was forced into ever more desperate inventions and distractions.
These culminated in Salvestro’s sudden fascination with the shrine of a minor saint, prayers to whom were said to safeguard the mendicant against death by shipwreck, banditry, and falling roof-tiles, whose name Salvestro claimed to have been told by Brother HansJürgen and then forgotten, whose shrine was, by his own account, “somewhere to the north of the Campo de’ Fiori.” Francesco di Paola? Stephen of the Seven Deacons? They did not find it.

A similar charade was played out on their return to the Stick each evening, when Salvestro would once again insist on elaborate routes through the Borgo and long periods of circumspection before actually stepping foot in the Via dei Sinibaldi, with the difference that having already let this precaution lapse once, he found it increasingly difficult to justify its resumption to an exasperated Bernardo. They would eventually regain the safety of the Stick, and Salvestro would fall exhausted onto his palliasse amongst the already sleeping monks, but his mind remained obstinately alert and most of the night would be spent awake, trying to think of a reason why it would prove impossible to revisit the Broken Wheel on the morrow, just as most of the day was spent inventing reasons why they should not go back to the Stick before nightfall, He grew distracted and short-tempered. Behind his prevarications was the urge to spew what he knew into Bernardo’s lap,
Yes, Bernardo, it is just as you said, Groot is alive as we are. More so, if he has his way. …
Let the big man deal with Groot’s treachery himself. And behind this urge was the fact that soon they would be setting sail, soon they would be clear of it all, free of danger, or at least free of these particular dangers. And behind this vista of escape lay an obligation of which he was at first insensible but whose weight settled itself upon him a little more firmly with each and every one of the days that brought them closer to the departure for which he longed. It should not have mattered. He told himself that it did not several times a day, and the days passed, and the date drew nearer, and he felt the obligation more keenly with every one. He had not told the monks.

No, he corrected himself that night as the notion flitted through his mind for the first time, he had not told Father Jörg. The bodies of the others were stertorous mounds of breathing sweating flesh in the darkness around him. When awake, they were bundles of cloth topped with shaven heads who avoided his eye. They did not speak to the two of them and did not acknowledge either his or Bernardo’s presence any more than they would mourn their absence once they were gone. Salvestro felt rather than understood the contagious nature of their disfavor. Invisible walls surrounded him and Bernardo; of suspicion and distaste. He did not question this isolation any more than he had his ostracism from the islanders or from the other soldiers at Prato. Private Salvestro. Explorer Salvestro. He was neither, never had been. He had to wrap himself in a swagger to be offered a seat. Play the fool in his gaudy motley. The boy had been right. The chain looked stupid. None of his costumes truly fitted. He did not belong, and any who belonged with him, they did not belong, either. He would not taint Jörg with his overtures, not with the others looking on. That at least was what he told himself
that first night. He told himself the same on the second. And the third. On the fourth the monks were gone.

HansJürgen looked up as they entered. Palliasses lay scattered about as usual, but of their occupants there was no sign. Salvestro looked about but said nothing. Gerhardt and sometimes one or two of the others had kept late hours before, arriving back at the Stick long after everyone else, usually covered in stone dust. Since the day he had seen the monk at the lime quarry Salvestro had discovered nothing as to how his days were spent. But all of them gone? An hour or more passed in awkward silence, but it was already clear that they would not return that night. Salvestro, Bernardo, HansJürgen, and Father Jörg heard Lappi slam the door of the hostel shut at midnight. No one said anything. The Prior mumbled a prayer, and HansJürgen blew out the candle.

They did not return the next night or the night after that. Accustomed to fixing his eyes on his feet and keeping them there when it seemed an offense so much as to glance in the direction of the monks, Salvestro began by engineering glimpses of the Prior, affecting head-scratching and restless rollings-over. His first task on reentering the chamber remained checking the stuffing of his mattress for the scabbard, but once its presence was confirmed he turned his attention to Father Jörg. He found himself governed by odd inhibitions or afflicted by a source-less timidity. Embarassment? He could not put a name to it or a reason, but he watched Jörg. He noted the changes he had not noted before.

Dirt. The Prior’s habit was stiff with it, his face streaked and darkened with the same. The dirt was everywhere, of course, but it seemed to concentrate itself about the Prior. That a man should or should not wash his face had never been a concern of his before, yet Jörg had appeared to him not as flesh but as bone, hard and smooth so that the stuff of the world should fall away from him. … It had gained a purchase now. His head shook oddly sometimes, when he seemed most remote from the chamber, the hostel, the whole city, perhaps. He would sit in silence for hours on end. Sometimes he wrote, his finger inching down the page, his lips moving soundlessly. He prayed, in silence, sometimes with HansJürgen, but more often alone. Once, Salvestro came across him squatting in the passage outside their room. The sight disturbed him, the blind man grunting and straining on his haunches and his feet shifting awkwardly on the damp flagstones, oblivious of any who might be watching. He could not tell him then.

So it was HansJürgen who was the cause of his delay, not the monks already departed. (Why? When he finally inquired, HansJürgen answered only that Gerhardt’s business had taken him from Rome for a few days, then looked away as though the conversation pained him, as though the real reason for their absence were the continued presence of himself.) He thought resentfully of the chest of silver trinkets and the exchanges he had made with Lucullo, two more since the first. Who would do that for them when he was gone? Every day he made promises to himself that he would tell the Prior that evening, and when the evening came he spent the hours before the candle was snuffed out turning that
promise over, bending and twisting it this way and that until it broke beneath his attentions. And he did not tell the Prior.

Then came the morning when he woke late to find HansJürgen already departed for the market, Bernardo fully dressed and insisting that even if he, Salvestro, would not do their friends at the Broken Wheel the courtesy of a simple visit, share a cup or two, and perhaps another two or three after that, and perhaps get blind drunk as the occasion demanded, then he, Bernardo, would be happy to leave him here, bleary-eyed and groggy from a night of troubled sleep, to be as miserable as he wished, but to do it alone, to which Salvestro nodded and may have grunted something before falling back on the scratchy sacking as Bernardo stomped out in a victorious huff, listening to the inevitable slamming of the door, the stamping down the passageway, then other noises within the hostel, an argument somewhere, raised voices, the cranking up of a bucket of water, his own breathing, soothing sound, wakeful human breathing, his own and Jörg’s. They were alone. The Prior’s voice sounded then, the words distinct and clear; he did not dream them. It was the eve of his departure.

“Salvestro. Will you hear my confession?”

Head down and elbows out, moving brusquely through a crowd that only Rome’s summer heat could uncompact and atomize into these obstructive bodies and loose clods of citizenry through which he barged and bumped on his way down the Via Alessandrina, Lucillo’s cheery wave ignored as he passed the
bancherotti
, uncaring of the wake of ill temper that trailed him down the street: Salvestro in flight again. He stopped at the bridge. Amongst the porters who shuffled toe to toe across the river, carrying boxes, barrels, crates of pigeons or apples, he was the porter who had shucked his load and found himself pursued by it, the vengeful baggage of the thing he had not done. Kneeling with Jörg in the darkness of the the Stick, he was the Prior’s unconfessed confessor.

“I would not be the first,” he said, “if foolishness is a sin. A great general once stood where I stand now, called the Lion by his men.”

“I know of him,” Salvestro said. It was unsettling to listen to a voice so close to him but the speaker invisible. Their heads were almost touching.

“Don’t interrupt,” said Jörg. “The Lion too saw the thing he most desired sink and disappear beneath the waves. The Devil too works miracles. You were mine, Salvestro. You were the pin to winkle out my brothers from their broken shell. You were the miracle sent me. …” He began to ramble then. The island and their journey from it took shape in the chamber’s darkness, but broken into fragments and the fragments themselves frayed, unraveling in the Prior’s preamble. “But I have proved very foolish,” he resumed. “Foolishness is a sin I readily confess. Have you seen how the brothers laugh at me now? The other petitioners mock me, too. I hear them, though the saintly HansJürgen would deny it and have me afflicted with deafness. It is just that they laugh. I submit to the fool’s penance which is mockery. I was blind before. It is only now that I see.”