The Pop’s Rhinoceros (78 page)

They parted then, Teixeira returning to the tiny cabin in the forecastle, where he improvised a rough table, building it from the chests piled against the partition until Dom Francisco’s voice barked, “Silence!” angrily through the thin partition. He looked about his quarters despondently, fell on his bunk, and slept.

The days that followed passed insensibly, divided from one another not by sights or sounds, which were always the same, but by the wind. With every gust the sails pumped like huge lungs, but now out of sight of land, Teixeira felt that they were merely riding up and down on the swell, going nowhere. The winds were capricious and feeble, blowing and dying, swinging about the compass, so that the men spent their days scrambling to trim sails that would need to be trimmed again within the hour if their precious force was not to spend itself in useless flappings of the leaches and lurches of the hull. They sailed west, Dom Francisco and Gonçalo alternating watches in accordance with every eighth turn of the hourglass, though it was the pilot who effectively commanded the ship. Gonçalo erected a little canvas awning on the quarterdeck and spent his days beneath it, watching the water for changes in the wind. Since that brief moment when it had seemed that they were lost and the pilot’s face had collapsed for an instant into hopelessness, the man had betrayed no emotion. He spoke rarely, and though Dom Francisco had insisted as a matter of ship’s discipline that they should take their meals together, these were spent in uncomfortable silence, he and the
fidalgo
avoiding one another’s eyes. Sitting up there on the forecastle for hour after hour, relaying directions to Estêvão, Gonçalo was more an adjunct of the ship herself than a member of her crew. Walking the deck at night, for the heat in his cabin was often stifling, Teixeira would observe him standing erect and very still, his eye glued to a small quadrant trained on the Pole Star, waiting sometimes
for a full half hour before the movement of the deck would cease long enough for the instrument’s plumb-bob to come to rest. Then he would mark down the reading and hurry back to his charts and rutters. One night, Teixeira followed him.

“We are here, if my reckoning is right.” Gonçalo placed his finger at the end of a line that began at a legend marked “Goa” and zigzagged forward, describing a jagged parabola. Teixeira’s curiosity seemed neither to surprise nor to caution him. He spoke quietly and almost tonelessly, these matters too familiar and too ingrained in him to be of interest. “We may sight land at Guardafui. Perhaps not until Delgado.” He pointed to two capes, far apart on the coast down which they would sail. “After that the Moçambique channel. We will need the right winds to get through, but our chances will be better by then.”

Teixeira looked at the island of São Laurenço. “Why not sail direct?” He traced a straight diagonal to the tip of the continent.

Gonçalo shook his head. “Too early in the season, and there are the shoals of Garajos. … Here.”

Teixeira ran his fingertip over the chart, tracing a course up the other side of the continent to São Thomé, a tiny dot in the bight of the great landmass. “We must make a landfall here,” he said. “There will be orders waiting there.” Gonçalo frowned but said nothing. “Does Dom Francisco understand this?” he went on. Gonçalo shrugged and was silent for a few moments.

“It has to do with the Ganda,” the pilot said eventually. Teixeira realized belatedly that this was a question. He nodded quickly.

“The animal is our whole purpose. Why else would the Duc have given us leave to sail so early?” He wanted to say more then, but Gonçalo had sensed his purpose, which was to draw him in, to make of him an ally. He held his tongue. The other began to fold away his chart. Teixeira was rising to leave when the man spoke again.

“The gun deafened you, when you shot his horse.”

Teixeira nodded, surprised at any conversation that the pilot initiated.

“He said that he would have satisfaction. Not aboard ship, but as soon as we reach land. That is what he said.”

Teixeira gave curt thanks for the warning and walked back toward his cabin, stepping carefully to avoid the sleeping bodies of the men. He lay on his bunk, marveling at Dom Francisco’s stupidity. Aboard ship he was the master, an absolute power that no later remonstrance would keep from doing as he pleased. Ashore he would be another penniless mouth returned from the Indies, scrabbling for favors, soon reduced to telling tales in the inns for the price of a mug of liquor. The streets of Belem were filled with them. And he was the envoy of Dom Manolo, protected and favored by no lesser power than Dom Fernão de Peres. …He smiled to himself, remembering the insults thrown in his face in a meadow behind a church in a town on the other side of the world. Then he remembered that São Thomé too might as well be considered “ashore.” They might
prove evenly matched there. He is a distraction, he told himself then. Remember your purpose.

Which was the animal: a distraction thrown out by Muzzafar, a tub for the Portuguese whale to nose about and sport with, then an inconvenience to the Duc and an afterthought in one of his dispatches, which had been seized upon by Manolo or Peres, then cargo, gross tonnage here aboard ship and a fantastic rumor in the slow coils of the negotiation at Ayamonte. …What it was now as it moved toward what it would become. Peres had speculated on unicorns, but the beast was gross, its little eyes receding into the smooth cylinder of its head, as if some delicate creature had been encased in a shell of gray plaster and now raged in there, trapped and maddened by its prison. It would be something that children would poke with sticks. The straight-faced clerks at Ayamonte would speak of it as “the other factor in our calculation” or “the subject of our private transaction” or some such, for it belittled them and was ridiculous. And His Holiness would clap his hands in extravagant delight: this was their anticipation, that he would do this and put his seal to the bull they craved, that the Pontiff and his beast would make a happy match. Teixeira thought too of the man brought up on deck with his chest staved in. It had killed a man, “with great deliberation.” The Ganda had been his pretext when he’d shot Dom Francisco’s horse.

Now they avoided one another’s eyes as they avoided one another’s presence, a transparent fiction within the confines of the
Ajuda
. They met only to eat. Estêvão carried the desultory conversation, discussing their course with Gonçalo, who seemed less inclined to talk than any of them. When addressed directly, Dom Francisco would reply bluffly, even deprecating his own seamanship. His suggestions as to the trimming of the canvas were filtered through Gonçalo before being passed on to the crew, and the pilot made subtle alterations, or delayed them until the wind changed, canceling out
the fidalgo’s
more dangerous absurdities until the flow of suggestions slowed and finally stopped altogether. At table, however, Dom Francisco was indulged by the two of them, who nodded sagely at his words on the understanding that they would remain just that. Gonçalo was the true master of the
Ajuda,
Estêvão his loyal lieutenant. He and Dom Francisco were bystanders, mere passengers, albeit with extraordinary privileges. This situation, the anomaly that bound them together, only highlighted the resentment that kept them apart. He knew better than to try to win over the pigheaded
fi-dalgo
. Ingratiation could bring him only contempt. So each day was punctuated with meals that were collections of long silences, stony and awkward occasions, uncomfortable tests of a precarious truce that Teixeira endured with his eyes glued to his plate while Dom Francisco chewed, and belched, and spat his leavings back onto his plate.

They changed course, swinging south down the coast, and the ship’s smooth progress began to be punctuated with odd lurches. The current was weak but against them, while the wind blew from the northeast more steadily now. They never sighted Cape Guardafui, but the continent was visible from time to time, a
smudge on the horizon far off to starboard, usually indistinguishable from the haze and the shimmer of afternoon heat rising off the water. The headlands of São Laurenço raised a cheer from the crew and an intensification in Gonçalo’s efforts, for dangerous shoals surrounded the vast island’s coasts, long humps and bars, invisible beneath the glare of the sea’s surface. “The channel is many leagues wide,” the pilot said, “and once in it the currents will guide us into deep water.” He fell silent again. Dom Francisco grunted. Teixeira sensed the anxieties beneath this unbidden reassurance. They ate.

When they were nearing the channel, Gonçalo summoned the sounders to their stations, and once again their voices rang out in regular rhythm—“Clear to port!” and “Clear to starboard!”—like responses in a mass. Prayers to Saint Nicholas were supposed to guard against shipwreck, Teixeira recalled. And raising of the host calmed storms, if a priest were to be had. They anchored some leagues out from Cape Delgado, for it was dusk and their pilot wished to enter the straits in daylight. The next morning, the headland grew in definition. Teixeira imagined a crushing convergence, though when they eventually passed the jut of São Laurenço to port and Moçambique to starboard, they might still have been leagues away from either. In the event, and in accordance with the winds, Gonçalo chose the westernmost bearing, passing less than a league from the town of Moçambique. Caught unawares by the earliness of the season, a little fleet of
sambuqs
swarmed belatedly out of the harbor mouth and gave chase, their sailors shouting and waving fruits resembling huge bananas. Some sacks of rice were purchased at bad prices, Estêvão commenting that they probably originated in the very port they had quit a little over a month before. The merchants soon fell back, hauling their lateens about for the slow beat back to port. Their vessel bore south, and the coast of the continent grew gradually more distant, finally fading and disappearing altogether. The
Ajuda
was alone again.

The nor’easterly blew steadily now. Gonçalo took his bearing from the Southern Cross each night, and the following day he bent their course a few more degrees west of the blow. The
Ajuda’s
deck leaned a little more with each tweak of the bearing, finally finding the horizontal when the wind was directly abaft, then leaning again, becoming a slope so gentle that it barely brought the port-side camber level while their course drew a vast gentle curve in the surface of this soft sea, as Teixeira imagined it. They were making for the Cape, the very bottom of the continent, and he spent the days on the poop deck, in idleness, watching the men find tasks to occupy themselves, listening to the jabbering of the men below him in the steerage. Sometimes even they would fall silent, looping a rope about the tiller and dozing off with Estêvão’s connivance. Then he would look out over the side at the sea, which was a liquid mirror smashing and mending itself ten million times a second, or up at the sails, which bulged and shivered, an immense white expanse, too large for the ship, surely. Gonçalo was a rival king atop the forecastle, sitting cross-legged beneath his awning. Or an idol erected by the Canarim. At mealtimes he would have to shake himself awake and
make his way through the cargo on the decks, sun-blind and light-headed. He felt sick climbing the little ladder sometimes. He realized that he would converse with someone if they had a mind to join him. Oçem, perhaps, but he rarely came on deck. These days, these weeks, were intermissions or intervals between deep sleeps. They could end at any second. He would jerk awake and everything would begin again: the donkey-headed Dom Francisco, or the orders awaiting him on São Thomé, or the animal Oçem tended so assiduously belowdecks. He was primed for his indolence’s ending in an instant. Instead, insensibly at first and very gradually thereafter, it grew cold.

A heavy swell got up and and began rolling under the ship. Gonçalo took down his awning and stowed it below. Teixeira watched a weather front spread from horizon to horizon and rise above them, an enormous suspended wave of thunderheads. The storm advanced out of it like a tun of tar rolling down a mountainous sea, its staves the size of tree-trunks, splintering and spilling its black stain across the sky. The wind swung to a sou’westerly and increased steadily. Gonçalo had the sails reefed until the
Ajuda’s
yards held no more than thin strips of canvas along their lengths, and still the masts bent alarmingly, for after a certain pitch, the wind changed its character, seeming to hold back for a second or two before pounding forward again. Then the ship would rock to leeward, for they were sailing due west now, past an invisible lee shore that was the Cape and would smash them in an instant if the wind should push them onto it. No bearings could be taken in such conditions; Gonçalo did not even try. From time to time a pale disk of light showed briefly through the clouds. The sea to windward was a chaos of precipices and crags. The ship rose and fell within them, crashing down into troughs from which Teixeira could not believe she would rise.

Teixeira realized that the storm that had almost destroyed them on Goa’s bar was no more than a squall, noise without force, nothing compared with this. That was the first day. On the morrow he realized that these winds and seas were a respite or holding-off, that the sea contained depths of thoughtless rage and malevolence that he had not imagined possible and that now that bile was being brought up from a stomach that had swallowed bigger and better than the
Ajuda
. The rain came.

It came in sheets. Within the hour every scrap of clothing belonging to every man from Dom Francisco down to the boy who washed pots for the cook was soaked. Within the day everyone aboard knew that they would stay soaked for the duration of the storm. Teixeira lay sleepless in his cabin, kept awake through the night by the
Ajuda’s
lurches and plunges, her sways and rolls, as the sea broke over bows and the rain raked her decks like grapeshot. In the morning he shrank from the touch of wet wool on his skin and shivered until his body warmed the sopping cloth, staggering about his cabin like a drunk while he drew the hose over his legs. His clothes clung to him like bandages soaked in brine. Opening the cabin door, he caught a falling column of spray, and then he was just as wet as he had been when he had tugged off his clothes the night before.
Disdaining his flesh, the wind cut him open to suck the heat directly from his bones.