And upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Peter’s blood and bone sag in their body’s sack, hung by the feet in Nero’s Circus.
Delfinio watches in silence from an upper window as the Abbot of Passignano and the Prior of Capua walk together in the gardens. The two are deep in conversation, solemn figures with their heads bent forward, nodding from time to time as a point is made. Delfinio views them with private satisfaction. The Abbot stops, turns, and Delfinio draws back quickly. He can hear the Prior’s reedy voice, but the words are a jumble. His ears seem to age more quickly than the rest of him. The Abbot’s voice is a little deeper. Perhaps they are in dispute again. Perhaps their friendship is as fast as it seems. He waits for them to continue before he looks again. The garden of the monastery abuts an orchard. Beyond that, placid cows graze a meadow that follows the slope of the hill on which the monastery stands. The two have already made their way through the gardens. Now they walk the orchard. Their conversation seems to have become a debate. Their gestures are more vigorous. As Delfinio watches, the Abbot lashes out suddenly, catching the Prior of Capua a clout about the head. Delfinio turns quickly for the stair. From the cloister he sees the two of them running between the apple trees. He shouts, but they take no notice. The Prior of Capua is fleeing with the Abbot in pursuit. Delfinio gathers up his cassock and hurries through the garden. Rotted apples crush underfoot. Cows low in the far field, and the Prior of Capua’s shrieks grow louder. Suddenly they stop. Delfinio clears the orchard and sees in the field beyond it the Abbot astride the Prior. Delfinio redoubles his efforts. The Abbot’s arms are caked to the elbows. Apprehensive cows watch his performance as the Abbot of Passignano rubs cowshit into the face of the Prior of Capua.
“Idiots!” Delfinio cuffs the Abbot until he howls as loudly as the Prior, then continues until he stops.
“Giulio made me!” yells the Abbot.
“Giovanni started it!” wails the Prior. Delfinio begins scraping cowshit off the boy’s face. “Giovanni did it!”
“Shut up!” Delfinio tells them both sharply. The three march in silence back toward the monastery.
“Giulio said I could never be Pope. He said my head was too big. …” Delfinio cuffs Giulio.
“Too empty,” he says, thinking. Too full. And all too soon. Piero is already in Rome, lobbying for his brother. The Abbot of Passignano is twelve years old, the Prior barely nine.
Now, outside his window, the starlings will be cheeping. The air will be still and dank with the smell of the Tiber, which only the fiercest midday heat seems to banish. The Borgo begrudges the morning its sunlight, the air is weighted down and hangs between basilicas and palaces, dripping walls and crumbling towers, until the prelates gasp and their servants cough sulfurous breath from their lungs. The city chokes on its own exhalations, and the tired campagna that surrounds it is dead pasture to the lush meadows of Camaldoli. The Pope remembers well enough the smell of the cowshit. Faintly sweet. In Rome the cowshit smells old as it spills from the beasts themselves. They graze old pasture, breathe old air. Their flesh sags on the bone as they wander stupidly in the Campo de’ Fiori. Would Giulio remember? Delfinio? Suddenly a hand of iron grips him by the guts. He clutches his stomach as a fart burns its passage through his vitals. The private wound aches, then subsides. And of course it was true, then as now. His head is slightly too large for his body. A question of proportion. And his arms are rather thin. He was never meant to be the warrior, cloistered there with Delfinio and Justinian in the nurture of the monastery. Priest, Abbot, Bishop. Never his brother. Always, and at least, the Cardinal.
Piero!
Oh, Piero, thinks the dozing Pope, you always were a fool. Even in death. …
The deck of the overloaded barge seesaws in a choppy swell. An imagined Piero takes a tighter grip on the bridle of his horse. Paulo Orsini watches off the stern as their abandoned escort mills about on the banks. Cordoba and the Spanish will reach the river at sundown. The cannon strain against their ropes. The Garigliano is swollen in December. A strong current pulls the vessel downriver, timbers creaking under the shifting cannon, horses, men, and their weapons. The nose of the barge swings about, and Piero sees the far bank slide away. The boat is turning in midstream, and the men are struggling with the rudder. A wave of water slaps against the side, then another.
“Piero!”
The negotiations were protracted, official assumption of the office delayed, but Lorenzo had his way in the end.
“Piero!”
Now he has seen him, bright in the bright of earlier years, before the Garigliano took him, elder brother Piero at the head of his escort astride a massive and vicious stallion caparisoned in gold. His retinue is a loose and chattering phalanx of friends who pass rough wine amongst themselves. Giovanni waves from the bridge at Mugnone. The cardinalate was his at thirteen, with a deferral appended by Innocent—dubbed “the Reluctant Rabbit” by Lorenzo in private, later “the Persuaded,” and finally “the Magnanimous.” Three years have passed, and Giovanni is ready at last. Louts, thinks Delfinio as the horses draw nearer. Piero’s faithful, thinks his brother. The stallion stamps the turf as Piero salutes him.
“Silence!” shouts the horseman to the rabble at his back. “Show the Cardinal your respect.” He grins at his young brother. In a day of observances and process Piero’s arrival is a surpassing surprise. He turns to Delfinio in delight.
“Now Pietro can ride alongside us,” he tells his mentor.
“I fear not,” Delfinio replies. “Your brother has more urgent appointments, Giovanni.” The horsemen block the road for thirty yards or more. “The arrangements cannot be changed at this late hour.” Delfinio’s demeanor is humility itself. Piero’s face is a storm.
“Is that so?” His voice is suddenly full of scorn, and the horse is already wheeling about, buffeting the mounts behind as Piero forces his passage through their midst. The other horsemen jostle to turn and follow their leader. The road is chaos in a moment. Giovanni calls after his brother, but the thundering hooves drown him out and Piero is lost behind his own chasing retinue.
“Today you gain the Cardinal’s hat,” Delfinio recalls him.
“You do not favor Piero,” Giovanni challenges the old man. “Why?”
“We are already late,” says Delfinio.
That evening, fireworks splutter in the dank air over Fiesole. The December air is heavy with damp. Flanked on the high table by the Abbot, who has invested him with mantle, cap, and hat, and his aging mentor Delfinio, Giovanni watches the musicians perform by the fitful light of bonfires. The investiture is complete. He turns to ask his earlier question of Delfinio and is again refused.
“I am Cardinal now,” he tells his mentor. “Please answer my question.” Delfinio sighs and folds his hands in his lap.
And Piero’s barge rolls and yaws, all out of control, still years away. Piero clings to his horse as the river spins them around. The cannon are too heavy, and now it is too late to cut them loose. The river breaks over the wales and Piero’s horse jerks loose, kicking out and falling, then sliding down the deck and over the side. Its head rises once, then sinks below the surface. The boat sits lower and lower in the water. They are sinking. Men are already jumping clear of the vessel and striking out for land, but the current is strong. He looks about for Paulo, but his companion has disappeared. Water swirls about his feet. The nose of the boat buries itself in the river and will not rise. Piero looks over the side, unbuckles his sword, and jumps.
“He is a fool,” Delfinio tells his young master that night at Fiesole. “And a fool will bring down ruin on the Medici.” Giovanni colors but says nothing. Delfinio knows a childish bond is being sundered. Not even a Cardinal can forgive the truth.
He stumbles to the window, rubbing his eyes, then pulling back the drapes. The river was in spate, and Piero’s body never found. Peter, Piero, the whining monk in Florence: all hallowed fools. Sunlight jumps and floods int
o the chamber. Soon Ghiberti will come to knock softly upon the door. The Pope begins to dress. He does not yet wish to look upon the gardens of the Belvedere. Peter between the needles, the monk upon his pyre, and Piero in the waters after the fiasco at Gaeta. The ruin of which Delfinio had spoken those years before was already upon them. Lorenzo dead, Piero yet to die. Florence lost to Soderini. The days when loyalists might crowd the balconies and shout, “Palle! Palle!” for the Medici were an age away. He saw the last days, the ruffians breaking down the doors, their own servants looting the halls, the mob gorging on their masters. Cowled and habited, he mingled with the Beast, smelled its sweat, watched it feed in the palaces at Careggi and the Via Larga. The horses were waiting for him by the Porta San Gallo, Piero and Giuliano were already fled along the Bologna road. Half a day’s ride behind his brothers, Giovanni turned his horse south to Rome.
Perhaps this too is ominous: Rome always greets him with rain. Alone but for the grooms, he enters the city by Porta del Popolo. The piazza is a sea of mud and the Via Lata a river. His own palace appears as a drab prison, lightless and forbidding in the wet. The first of his secretaries is waiting. Dovizio already knows the worst.
“They have outlawed Piero.” Giovanni nods. His cloak drips steadily on the flagstones. “And you too. There are two thousand florins on your head.”
Rome will protect him, Rome and his Cardinal’s hat, and in return he will be the servant of the Borgia Pope. He will ignore the mules loaded with silver, the preferred nephews, the bastard son who rages through the lands of Saint Peter with a cutlass. He will nod and murmur his assent, and the Spaniard will know he is weak and no threat. He will sponsor clowns, attend carnivals, live well. He will wait.
The latest of his secretaries knocks gently, once, twice, upon the door. The Pope seems not to notice. Presently he hears the man’s footsteps move away and the far door close. Only then does he quit his bedchamber for the spacious Sala di Pontifici. Raffaello’s prelates gaze down on him from the ceiling and walls. The Borgia was at least adept in ornament. A table is laid for him with a single chair facing the window. The Pope reaches for bread and olives. Oil runs down his plump fingers, making them shiny and sticky. A napkin is pressed into service. The Pope reaches for water, drinks noisily, burps. Another olive follows, and more oil. The napkin again. Bread, and more water, added this time to his wine until it is a pale pink. The Pope sips and considers the cheese. Bread pumps him full of wind. Cold meats aggravate the problem and so are banned from the breakfast table. Cheeses are neutral in this respect. Olives too. His wound aches and suppurates at the very thought of cold meats. The Pope denies himself the cheese, and breakfast is over. The room is bright, with dust motes whirling in the sunlight that runs in at the windows. Empty days and waiting, dust frantic to fill the spaces after Florence. Air too has its substance, thinks the Pope. Nine olive stones sit upon his plate. Perhaps the cheese after all. Julius’ face underlies his own in Raffaello’s painting of the Apostles. Cardinals cluster about him: Petrucci, Riario, Bainbridge, himself. He appears twice, Cardinal and Pope, young and mature, with the face that first divided them now painted over. The glutton Borgia is absent. Always a popish Spaniard before a Spanish Pope. Alexander and, after him, Julius. There were years of nothing, years to be filled, in which not to grow dull. Distractions, diversions, drollery. Clowns.
“My cup is invaded with daylight.”
“Banish it!”
The Cardinal feeds his guests with caramelized sheep’s feet, sparrow beaks ground to powder, and rats roasted in honey and nutmeg. Cows’ eyes shiver in jelly. Lizards fried in cinnamon fill a tureen, and black broth foams in its pot at the table’s end. Cardinal Medici presides above a banquet of cavaliers and idiots. Bad poets declaim and bad singers croon. There are clowns. The waiting brings them out, draws them to him: misshapen men, clots, and vainglorious fools. He smiles, chuckles, claps, weeps with laughter, howls with mirth; he loves them, absolutely loves them. Hunchbacks and maniacs turn cartwheels down his hall while he hiccups, farts, and gulps the air as though he might eat the merriment within it. It is a hunger he never satisfies. He watches the stomachs of his guests swell and sometimes burst with his spicy curiosities. Rivers of wine disappear down their gullets, and their buffoonery is a playground of polity for him to practice lunges and feints, quick jabs and stabs to the back. The body of the Borgia blackens and swells in the pestilential airs of Rome while his Cardinal passes dishes of beech leaves pickled in wine, ginger concoctions, and pigeons’ feet in aniseed.
And now? Nine olives, and bread. No cheese. No cold meats. The Borgia’s face seems to stare out of his eyes in the painting of the Apostles. And behind the Borgia stands Sixtus, and behind him Innocent, and Clement, and Martin, and every Servant of the Servants of God back to Gregory and every Pope to Peter. The death of the Borgia brings Julius to the bishopric of Rome, and basilicas rise and fall about the city, domes swelling and collapsing like lungs of stone, buttresses and columns reaching up from the ground, while at the center of this monumental animal a smidgen of flesh and blood veins the whole with its passions and humors. Julius is outraged. Julius is resigned. French armies circle in the Romagna. The Emperor is hungry for Milan, or Urbino, or Rome. The Church too needs its venal armies, its warrior popes, and their creatures. The Pope joins leagues, raises armies, marches on his enemies, who are mutable creatures, by turns French, and Spanish, and Venetian, and Imperial, alike only in their rapacity and the hatred of Julius. His allies too might change from day to day, might even become one another or disappear. Good and ill hover, moving too quickly to be caught, at times too quick to be distinguished. On Easter Day, between Ravenna and the sea, two armies come to face each other across the marshy ground. A Cardinal in armor meets a Cardinal in scarlet robe and hat. Far away in Rome, Palazzo Medici is quiet and closed up. The clowns have disappeared. Fuses hiss along the line as tiny figures inch closer over the rough macchia. The pleasure-loving Medici stands behind the papal armies; Sanseverino with the French. Then the first of the cannon explode.
Afterward, running through the battlefield with the fugitives and mindless men, he will believe that the very air was turned to knives. The dead lie all around, cut apart, mangled, twisted. Some of the dying scream horribly, some seem merely puzzled by the guts spilling out of their bellies. He remembers a man walking dazed through the carnage, carrying, he thinks, a cudgel. He draws nearer. The man is lopsided, blood pouring from his shoulder, and the cudgel is his arm. Others appear unmarked, until they turn and reveal terrible wounds, skulls staved in, faces cut in two. Giovanni runs and runs, ignoring the hands that brush his ankles, the voices that cry out to him. It is dusk. The fighting is finished. He hardly knows where he is. The pikestaff catches him first in the stomach and, as he lies there winded, descends upon his head.
Then, as he would later understand it, because the schismatic cardinals at Pisa dawdled, accused their master the Pope of contumacy, betrayed themselves as lackeys of the hated French, took refuge in Milan, where their hootings and jeers met only the same from the faithful Milanese, and Cardinal Medici held captive there by the victors of Ravenna dispensed forgiveness to his foes, because the French army left five thousand dead in the marshes about Ravenna including their commanders and could not hold Milan and retreated and took Cardinal Medici, who escaped, and because Cardinal Medici was recaptured and rescued finally by the banks of the Po and Pisa was under the dominion of Soderini’s Florence, francophile and ripe for the plucking, responsible at the last for the schismatics who so raised their master’s ire, the Pope’s, then it behooved the Holy See to ensure the safety of the Church by sending papal forces to take back Florence for the Medici. So it was the Cardinals at Pisa who were to blame for what followed. Not himself. Not Giovanni.
Soon, thinks the Pope, Ghiberti will appear with his ledger and deliver him from these thoughts. The day is still beginning, and already ugliness has encroached. He wanted Florence to fall in celebration, in carnivals
and triumphal processions. He had thought the worst was past, that nothing could match Ravenna. His capture on the battlefield came as a blessing. Sanseverino’s custody was a convalescence from the horror. He quit the marshes with the French and never looked back, but the worst was ahead. Sometimes even now it would come for him in his sleep, and he would wake in terror. Perhaps if the troops had been Romans or Swiss. If they had been fed and the promises made to them kept. Perhaps, perhaps. Cardona’s Spaniards were starving, and the villages that resisted should have signaled what was in store. If Soderini had left the Bologna road open, had made his decision earlier. A desperate army of infantry and light horse moved through the valley of the Mugello, ragged and footsore, until Prato.
Thunderheads nailed themselves to the late August sky, and the air grew closer by the hour. He rode with his brother, and when he looked into the faces of the Spaniards he saw nothing. The sun had burned them the color of copper, and the hunger had hollowed their cheeks. He had looked at the walls that shut them out and wondered how such desperate beggars might scale them. Cardona gathered his captains, and the word went out. Within the walls were food and gold. Giovanni understood the contract then, that they would take this town or they would starve. The alchemy was done in an instant, and their very weariness would carry them to victory. There could be no retreat, no failure, and as the first of them broke ranks and ran for the walls, he knew that Prato would not be able to resist this hunger or match the depth of this need. And then, and then.
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 20