Rain in June? Random downpours have drenched the city these two days past, turning the plazas into lakes, the alleys to minor tributaries flowing into the swollen river proper. Puddles still stand under the open drum of Saint Peter’s and the square outside. To the north of the city, bright sunshine lifts a murky steam off the mire of the Piazza del Popolo, where a small herd of cattle mooches over the sodden humance, hooves squelching and sinking in the mud. Neatherds stood in hunched gangs under the awning of the German print shop to watch their wading charges suffer the downpour in silence while the pelting rain turned pasture to swampy mud, mud to shit-stained pools that glare in the succeeding sunshine and stink in the heat. Delays were inevitable.
Now, while the arriving warmth shrinks puddles to salty residues on the flagstones and heats the mud to steam, two of this city’s thoroughfares turn from quagmires covered with water to quagmires covered with people. The Via Lata and Via del Popolo cut a wedge out of the city to meet at the plaza, intervening macchia forces them farther apart as they reach back into the city and rough pasture cedes to hovels and sprawling tenements, stables, and barns. Pilgrims, minor clerks, and the whole flood of skiving tradesmen follow in the hoofmarks of curious riders who braved the rain and cantered up and back to report what they could of the embassy beyond the gates. At first the spectators pick careful paths to avoid the deepest basins, but the roads are quickly ruined and the following, cursing crowds sink in the muck and wade through pools of stinking water. Flies whirl in figures of eight about their struggling legs, and the freshening stench wrinkles noses from the Porta del Popolo to the heart of the city: cowshit and goatpiss and their own breaking sweat. The marshy square grows crowded, and more crowded, and still the influx continues. Trampers through the mud slow and slow their pace until the roads themselves are jammed, the surrounding slopes stiff with people, and the few mean houses that mark the sections of this churned surface fill and spill onto balconies and porticoes, with everyone elbowing for a view. The impatient city is emptying northward and westward, harried by heat and light. Huge water-wheels thrash the yellow waters about the Tiber island, while buffalo watch their masters decamp across the river and empty barges knock against the piers. Straw-sellers and innkeepers have left their precincts in the Borgo, excavators and lime-burners upped and followed the general drift northward through the crowded alleys and shambles of Ponte and Parione. The banks are closed. The churches are empty. At Campo Marzio, the tenements and shambles give out and odd buildings stand in strange isolation amongst the scrub, wild grasses, and ruins. Or stood. Crowds in the distant plaza have already swelled and fed back along the Via del Popolo, so now the flood of the curious is stemmed farther and farther from the spectacle they await. They stand shoulder to shoulder on the rising ground to left and right, all their sweating faces turned north, from where the procession will emerge, although now they see only more of themselves, curious, expectant, blurring in the distance.
Peter’s city jabbers in a hundred dialects, a thousand irritated conversations. Outriders shout down at pilgrims who still mill and jam the narrow lanes about Sant’Angelo. Various vanguards drive wedges through monks, apprentices, insolent boys, and dogs. But the way is blocked, the alleys, courtyards, and dismal runs all stoppered up and stuffed with shuffling bodies. How many of them even know where they are going? Their irritation is solidarity enough, mere number an irresistible compulsion. The distant plaza is a heaving mass of Roman flesh, women are fainting and children being trampled, but all of them are craning for a view toward the ruin of the gate. The roads are solid and still the city feeds them forward, thousand upon thousand growing blacker and denser until the northern districts are silted solid and the crowd must layer itself about the girth of the gathered citizenry, a swelling bole of bodies bulging into Parione. Ponte is already solid, and the latecomers must swing west, farther back into the cradle of the Tiber bend, then up toward the Borgo and the grim frontage of the Castel Sant’Angelo. Even here the going is heavy and the slow coagulation of pilgrims and clerics hardening. Horsemen trying to force their way through the crush swerve back and forth with the crowd’s surges as they make for the span of Ponte Elio that links the castle to its city. Disgruntled bodies move sluggishly before the onslaught, then more smartly as other horsemen join the first, diving for their lives at the last—a phalanx of horses is driving forward, insensible of the bewildered pilgrims and beggars, galloping headlong for the bridge, while in their midst a gang of foulmouthed angry old men dressed in scarlet shout at the crowd and each other. Watching from the balcony of Castel Sant’ Angelo, the papal datary turns to tell his master the cardinals are coming.
Trumpets and drums to the north. The spectators have waited, sweated, grown ill-tempered, then quiescent, suffered the blazing day and their neighbors, but now their patience seems set to be rewarded. Snippets of gossip have flown around the crowd. The rumored beast stands as high as a house, eats only oysters, and drinks the blood of virgins. Hootings and bangings beyond the gate draw their heads about until the whole of the plaza is focused on the break in the city wall. They are silent now, and the trumpets louder. Soon the first of the drummers appear, and following them on horseback, a bearded man, very erect in the saddle and oblivious of the gaping onlookers. More drummers, and trumpeters, and more men on horseback riding four abreast and fifty deep. A miraculous passage opens before them and seems to draw them on, but it is not for these marchers and riders that the crowd has waited. Hooting, marching, banging: the city’s palate is jaded with these. Crumbling plaster arches and tattered pennants still mark the Medici Pope’s late possesso. Smashed, abandoned floats litter the courtyards, and dead echoes of Palle! Palle! are spattered over walls. Rome is inured to carnivals and triumphs, yet today its citizens jostle and strain for a view. A new hunger is being fed, a wide gullet opening in the plaza and Via del Popolo, and down this pressed, impossible corridor the splendid embassy advances in regular wide-spaced files. The crowds forget their discomfort and impatience. From farther up the route waiting spectators hear perfunctory cheering, which gradually dies away to be replaced with a weird silence. The trumpeters, drummers, and liveried horsemen are a necessary prelude, no more. Fractious neighbors grow calmer and quieter, anticipation clears the packed road, and now only dogs trespass on this luxurious space. Everyone is waiting.
Even the Pope. Seated in the center of the loggia of Castel Sant’ Angelo with his cardinals to left and right, the ambassadors behind, the Servant of the Servants of God overlooks the crowd below. They, in return, look up. The Pope seems calm, composed, on his little dais. Flanking cardinals are more restless, perturbed perhaps by the promised spectacle. Then, too, waiting is unfamiliar to them; unsettling, even. Their clerks wait, their households wait. Cardinals do not, save on the Pope. And the Pope is calm, or seems so. The cardinals are reassured. They press nosegays to their faces, swat at insects, shift about in their chairs. On the stairs their officers eye each other up and vie for precedence. Cardinal Armellini’s men have the topmost steps and are operating an unsanctioned customs post. Unhappy servants carrying trays of sweetmeats and silver pitchers of wine have protested their devotion to Cardinals Riario, Grimani, Soderini, Vigerio, Della Rovere, Del Monte, Accolte, De Grassis, Sauli, d’Aragona, Cornaro, Farnese, Gonzaga, Petrucci, Remolino, Serra, Challand, Schinner, Bakòcz, and Bainbridge. They are cowed and disgruntled porters who reach Armellini’s ruffians and struggle through, much depleted, to serve the thirsty prelates. A conclave is assembled here to elect the lumbering symbol that approaches from the north. The Pope is self-possessed, a model of patience. The crowd below is abandoned. Between them both, the cardinals urge God’s speed on the invisible embassy. They hear weak cheers and, succeeding them, an indecipherable silence.
Stiff Tiber mud caked on the piers of Ripa tells of succeeding and overlapping washes, rising levels and late recessions leaving their alluvium on the city fringes. A central spring is sprung and moves along the Scrofa, but noise leave
s no silt and silence no mark. Overleaping cheers are an airy vanguard, easily broken under the sun’s boot. Tomorrow there will be nothing of this but tavern gossip and lies. The smart ranks of infantry will be a thousand Scipios, or ragged mountaineers; turbaned keepers will be captured kings or monsters with heads the size of houses. The procession will balloon in the heat, or shrivel to wizened fruit, or change into something quite different, something rarer. The strange, failing cheers send these specters forward into the city, where spaces wait to be filled: shifting, swelling, and shrinking volumes, new colors. The embassy advances in overlapping waves, succeeding one another and draining into the parched sands, disappearing, melding, sinking below the surface. The crowd’s appetite is dry as dust, drawing on the spectacle to taint and dissolve and fuse. A new amalgam hardens under the baking sun. Their bodies are rigid figures grouped about the beast’s abandoned path, held in place by all the spaces of its bulk. There is nothing to see, yet they look on still. They are different people and changed, or ready for change.
Here, on the balcony of Castel Sant’Angelo with the rabblement of cardinals and in their midst the Pope; now, after the first flurry of expectation has become merely waiting, before the embassy of the Portingales is arrived, scarlet robes flap and wave like banners over the crowd, goblets glint in the sun, while the Bishop of Rome sits still in his composure. The minutes tick by and the prelates’ gabble and banter quietens and finally dies away. The Pope sits patiently. His cardinals strive to emulate him. But their silence is disconcerted, their noise suppressed. Their Pope, they know, should be clamorous and impatient by now. His silence is a signal they ape without understanding. He seems hardly aware of them, blandly overlooking the throng below, the cluttered roofs, the infinite tent of the sky, while distant trumpets hoot thinly as the procession nears the Borgo.
Drums beat in the Via Recta, past Navona and the Tower of the Sanguigni. Cheering and the same succeeding silence float past the embassy as it passes the low hill of Monte Giordano. The musicians and outriders, the Ambassador and his guard, seem to disappear as their charge comes slowly into view. On they march, marooned in silence and the crowd’s blindness, to the Canale di Ponte, where floodmarks chart strange coasts along the walls. They can smell the river and see the piazza, and behind them they sense the animal that has reduced the city to silence driving them forward toward the Pope, a dot of white amongst the red of his cardinals; immaculate on the balcony.
Porticoes and staircases crowd together over the street, casting inky shadows so that the Pope sees vague movements: an advance of heralds, perhaps; he cannot make it out. A second piazza swells and opens in the first as people spill back. Trumpets glint in the murk as odd rays of sunlight strike the street; the drums are louder. A man on horseback appears, outriders and men marching in long files behind them. The cardinals are watching him, watching for his reaction. They glance across the piazza, then quickly back. Drummers, trumpeters, riders, marchers: the embassy stretches the length of the square, and still it is not finished. He blinks in the strong light, his patience ebbing faster. He wants to urge the procession on. A shape is swaying in the overhung street. Slinking creatures led on chains by turbaned men precede it, emphasizing its bulk, its mass. The shadows clear, and he can feel the eyes of his cardinals upon him. He fidgets in his seat, cannot keep still, wants to, cannot. The beast advances out of the dark corridor, and the Pope’s eyes widen. It halts in the sudden sunlight and raises its head to the sky. The Pope rises, raising his arms as though to clap in acclaim. But the moment lengthens and his hands are frozen, his mouth half-open as though to speak, eyes rolled back into his head. He is caught in neutral space, his expression half-formed. The cardinals glare from either side. The animal waits. But the Pope is stalled between happy recognition and unease. He can see himself standing there before them all, offering himself up to their ridicule. He is an imbecile in a white gown. He cannot decide. The crowd is silent, waiting. Still he remains with time ticking away, sand running through his fingers, ebbing, falling back. He is impotent. Far below, flanked by its escort and the silenced spectators, the animal stirs and the Portuguese divide before its shambling, swaying gait. The Pope looks down into the silent afternoon. Red, sweating faces blur and merge. Livery of green and gray. He is frozen, watching the animal moving toward him.
And he saith unto them, Whom do men say that I am?
And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?
The night before his birth, a beast leaps into the dream of Clarissa Orsini. She will remember a huge and docile lion. Such animals are fitted into the design of the bed’s canopy. She has lain and stared up at them for days on end. But the lion of her dream is heavier, more powerful, and its head more massive than those decorative figures that flee the chasing huntsmen above. He paces before her, tail swatting the air. The yellow eyes are fixed upon her, and the tongue is lolling. The sleeping duchess wraps her arms about her belly. The lion patrols back and forth, his heavy paws thudding on the ground, rearing slightly to turn, and all the time his eyes watch her in expectation. She is unafraid. He might be her jailer or guardian, or the portent they have sought these last months. She does not know, and cannot ask, for her dream is silent. The lion stops. The duchess moves forward. The lion turns and she wants to follow, but her belly is huge and tight as a drum. The lion begins to run, and she tries to rise. A hand holds her back. Other hands press cloths soaked in cool water to her brow and cheeks. The maids are chattering, and the midwife’s face is huge above her own. Lions lead huntsmen into the dark wood, where blue birds fill the trees. Quick seizures grip and release her midriff. The bedclothes are already soaked. She gasps suddenly, fully awake. Her waters have broken. The midwife takes her hand.
“I dreamed of a lion,” the duchess says.
“Then the child will be strong,” the woman tells her.
He will be told this story many times.
And thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise. Lion’s whelp, and old lion. Who shall rouse him up?
Abed, still supine yet awake, the Pope considers the blue birds in the trees that border the canopy of his bed. Points of sunlight prick the paneling in the bedchamber. Boars and stags and hounds are pictured alongside animals with towering necks, long curling tongues, and teeth. Bizarre beasts fringe the scene: gross unicorns, gryphons, basilisks. Mournful lions cluster around an orange tree, and other lions lead to the far corner. The hippopotamus cheers him.
Every morning he awakes to the animals’ muster. Perfunctory artisans labored over this tapestry; the needlework is undistinguished. As a child he recalls garish scarlets and blues. Now, rust and pallid watchet struggle out of the gray dawn light. The animals are fading. The birds keep the cobalt of their first plumage, but the splendid hippopotamus is barely visible, growing drabber with every succeeding day. His eye roves about the scene. To each of the Medici his animal. He has been dutiful, mindful of his mother’s dream. He has kept faith with the lion, as his father with the giraffe, but the kinship remains unfelt. The great gray ruminants afford his affection an easier purchase. The Pope is drawn to bulk.
Nero would swaddle the first Christians in lion-skins and loose the animals into the Circus. Peter’s needle will rise in the Borgo when Peter is dust. Lions pad through the mind of the Pope. Memories of lions circle the cringing flesh, and atop the the needle is a globe of bronze. Christians sweat and pray in the smothering skins, sun breaks over the highest tier, and the globe flares with light. The ashes of Caesar are still in their urn as the blazing globe draws in the beasts, running forward with jaws agape, and the flesh is so soft, a blood-filled sponge. The Circus rises to the unworthy disciple. Blood soaks the sand. Lions slink in the shade, and behind those first few martyrs thousands wait with bright faces and wild eyes, seeing beyond the counterfeit globe and the counterfeit sun to the illimitable sky. They know the face of God is made of light. At dawn they too will crowd the arena and press their faces to His. Claws and teeth will rip their flesh. Bl
ood in the sand and caked about the jaws of the lion are the marks of faith. Unworthy Peter feels his head fill and throb until it must burst upon the ground. His feet point up to heaven. No lion will cut him off the cross and let him fly his agony. Faith is mortal, a weight of blood. No lion can release the Pope. His mother’s dream was of a beast, and she called the beast a lion. The Pope gazes at the canopy. Blue birds, unicorns, lions, the splendid hippopotamus … Yes, he thinks, her dream was true. That was the portent. Yet no lion placed me on the throne of Peter; nor any lion will keep me. Some other, less gaudy beast is meant for me. More massive. More gray.
He is three years old, and the Pazzi would have his father dead. Montesecco will take Lorenzo in the cathedral; Franceschino and Bandini his brother. Lorenzo parries the dagger and runs for the sacristy with blood trickling from his throat. Brother Giulianio is flooding the floor, dead already in the tumult of the church. Poliziano bars the door, and Ridolfi sucks the wound for poison. The ruffians flee with the panicked congregation. The streets are already in uproar. An hour later, Lorenzo addresses the people from the balcony of the Medici: “My people, I commend myself to you. Hold your tempers. Let justice take its course. …”
“Pull them out by the ears,” Petrucci directs his men. Salviati is dragged forward. Petrucci holds him by the hair to spit in his face. The soldiers kick Franceschino across the floor. He holds up broken fingers. Both men plead as the ropes are produced. Franceschino pisses in his breeches.
“The window.” Petrucci points. The ropes are tied, and the conspirators struggle and scream in earnest. The blows and kicks of the soldiers seem to have no effect. Both cry out horribly as they are carried to the casement.
“Throw them out,” commands Petrucci. The ropes jerk for longer than is usual, and when he peers down at the corpses he sees Salviati’s teeth buried in the neck of his fellow. By the end of that week, seventy traitors are strangled and hung by the feet from the walls of the Signorial Palace. Jacopo Pazzi himself is trapped, returned, tortured, hung. Small boys dig up his corpse and drag it by the neck through the streets to the Rubiconte Bridge. The Arno carries it, floating, faceup in the water, all the way to Brozzi. It is pelted with filth from bridges as far away as Pisa—still floating, though the face is half-eaten. The Florentines say Jacopo called for the Devil but the Devil would not take him. Lorenzo sends Giovanni and Giulio to the monastery at Camaldoli. They are cousins, barely toddlers. Medicis.
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 19