The Pope stands between them, hands clasped before him, inclining his head to each as he speaks. Don Jerònimo grows heated under Faria’s gibes, speaking faster and more vehemently until every second word is in Spanish and every other a curse. The Pope’s expression is of mild surprise. Why are ambassadors so turbulent?
“Come,” he commands abruptly, and begins climbing the stone steps that lead to the second terrace. His escorts fall silent and follow.
Just as the steps that lead to the second level swell in a wide semicircle from the front of the terrace, so the receding tiers of the staircase that will take them to the wilder garden are gouged from the back. The three men find themselves in a place of bare white stones where the Pope stands a little apart from Faria and Vich, as if their bickering has driven him off. His large head turns from side to side. His eyes sweep up the empty steps.
“In Llauri—” Don Jerònimo begins to speak, but stops as his voice returns louder than before, the words garbled in their ricochet off the facing steps. Faria glares at him, but the Pope seems not to hear this noise. Something holds his attention in the garden above. Set back some ten or twenty yards, a canopy of foliage clears the sight-line of the wall. A crash sounds from somewhere within it.
“Christendom has its natural enemies,” the Pope says softly. “The Turk, the Saracen and Moor, all those who would blind their peoples to Christ’s teaching and domain … And then there are those who are born blind and must be made to see. Are they our enemy, too? Perforce their eyes must be opened, and yet when they resist our ministry so fiercely, when their sight is restored by extinction, I wonder what kind of enemy is this?” He turns to his companions as though they might serve him with an answer. Sunlight skates off the blank stones. He hears undergrowth rustling and crackling above. But the enemy is a distant specter, more report than reality; a shape-shifter. The men who stand and wait avoid one another’s eyes. They are too alike in their petitions: Faria for a blessing to wave in the faces of the Spanish; Vich the same for his Fernando. They are too alike. They cannot see the real enemy.
“Come,” he says again. Neither will answer his question, nor would he wish it. He climbs the steps to the third and last of the garden’s terraces, wheezes, waits for his petitioners. Distant battles are being fought in his name. Castles fly his standard over baking plains and deltas a thousand miles distant. Pennants flutter in the thick poisons of the air, but he is left behind to gasp in a vacuum. The war is a far-off clangor of faceless men pulled farther away by the racing frontier. Blood flushes the skin while the organs cool and slow their efforts within. The heart kicks sluggishly, lungs barely swell. He wanders in a shell of stone while generals spill their lifeblood on the frontier, and he wonders how the fight might return and who will bring the enemy to his champion. The sky is so bright that his eyes have screwed themselves shut. Dull red spots blot the darkness of his inner eye. Faria holds a gift in his box of manners; a second beast, by Ghiberti’s estimate. The Pope is clear. Ambassadors, their kings, their secretaries: all clowns, all tumbling after one another and kicking each other in the backside, falling and rising, laughing and crying about him. He looks down at the bare stones and sees the actors floating in air, shrieking and wielding swords, limbs falling to the floor, heads rolling down the steps, still chattering and shouting and screaming. Ribs burst and splay like the claws of some vast bird. Bones crack in the sewers under Prato.
“Holiness?”
Stone-pines loom above the trio, and sunlight glints in the high yew hedges as they walk deeper into the gardens. Faria is chattering of their mutual enemies.
“The proofs of his idiocy grow more blatant by the day,” says the Pope of one.
“So vast an error from so small a mind. Its birth is miraculous,” replies the Ambassador.
“You have added blasphemy to your talents, Faria. It sits well with the others.”
Vich is silent while this talk continues. From time to time, the Pope glances at the man, who nods curtly in return. The garden grows wilder and less penetrable. They walk easily enough, but it is hardly so clear where they are going. Great crashes sound distantly, then nearer. The Spaniard looks around at these, but the other two merely continue with their small talk. They seem oblivious of the approaching racket.
They pass by fruit trees staked with sturdy poles and collected in little groves. Fountains rush water into space. Great pines shade the men from the sun and carpet the garden in needles. They have halted beside a bank of tall shrubs with lavender flowers. Faria is smiling smugly. A joke is being enjoyed.
“I am, of course, divided by your dispute,” the Pope remarks generally. He considers a pun on his “worldliness,” rejects it. The day has gained an unanchored quality already. His gardens abstract him. “I am no geographer—” He raises a hand to ward off Faria’s anticipated protest; he does not wish his sagacity praised just yet. “Be assured that these questions of proportions and distances lie close to my heart. I recognize their import.” A crumb for Vich now? Yes. “Their complexity vexes all who delve into these matters, including my own deficient clerks, Don Jerònimo. It is appropriate care, not the concoction of jokes, which delay these matters. I have promised a settlement, and a settlement there will be, mark my words, for it pains me to repeat them.”
The note of reproach is quite perfect. Both men have leaned forward intently during his discourse. Suddenly both don their masks once again. Don João is a charming courtier, Don Jerònimo a sullen child. The Pope scuffs the turf with the toe of his slipper. A dove flaps and glides until its bowed path takes it beyond the taller trees to the west. He should resume work on the wall there, although the foxes must surely discourage the rabbits. Enemies and champions: inevitably the one must become the other. Julius had at least taught him that much. They would have him draw lines around the world, across lands and oceans they had never seen, which might not even exist for all they would know. The Borgia Pope’s legacy.
Now, elsewhere in the thickets of the gardens, a disturbance. Further crashes, signaling large maneuvers at a distance or smaller ones nearby. The three of them stroll forward, and there it is again, moving closer. Vich stutters to a halt, but the other two appear quite at ease, as though the gardens were silent, puzzled even at his discomfort. He can hear trees and undergrowth being shunted aside. The bushes that surround them are higher than a man. He can see nothing.
“Don Jerònimo …?” The Pope prompts him, but the noise is louder and now moving toward them. He knows the scene they have inveigled him into now. He recalls the crowded balcony of six months before, the challenge laid down as the drummers of D’Acunha’s embassy marched forward onto the bridge, himself left stranded and impotent as the cardinals rushed to congratulate Faria, the new Medici Pope quite obviously besotted as the Portingales’ surpassing gift made its clowning obeisance below.
It is the animal. They can hardly not have heard, yet they betray no sign. Is Faria’s grin a smidgen broader? The Pope is nodding at his reply. The sound of wood being splintered. They are watching him, waiting. There is an instant of silence, and then an ear-piercing shriek blows all thought away.
The trees are riven apart and it is there before him again, above him this time, its body the size of a house. He looks up and there above his head is the shrieking head of a monster. It has teeth, two huge white teeth that grow out from its face, a shoveling mouth, and in place of its nose an obscene member, a muscled intestine brandishing a tree. He steps back, and the club wavers above them. To their left a small brown wiry man dressed in ill-fitting livery emerges from the undergrowth. He is carrying, pointlessly, a short length of enormous chain. He hears the Pope’s voice as it addresses, what? It can only be the beast itself.
“Hanno! Hanno! Kneel down.” Don Jerònimo hears Faria’s smirk break cover as laughter. The balcony, these gardens, the miserable keeper, his master, and most of all the beast: his stalled negotiations, his failure, Fernando’s honor, and his own looming disgrace. The Pope is wav
ing away the keeper. Don João turns to him in delight. Is this not absolutely priceless? The gift, its giver, and its recipient. Where is his place in this scene? The beast sways, but it will not kneel. The Pope shrugs.
“Hanno is lonely,” he tells the two men. The animal swings its head from side to side, eventually following its own momentum to turn about and amble back into the undergrowth. The small tree held in its trunk is cast aside as its gray bulk disappears into a dense stand of saplings. They listen to its crashings growing fainter.
“Your Holiness’s thoughts had alighted on the matter of a settlement,” Faria prompts gingerly.
He feels their attentions fix on him again, or advance upon him as two masses of interest and purpose, himself denied all but the narrowest corridor between them, a sliver of room to pace in, a sliver of unreachable light above. The subtlest of his doctors have pored over the settlements of his predecessors and found only the arguments the two men flanking him have represented to him in the last months. Manolo’s Padroado and Fernando’s Patronato. The Portingales to the east; the Spaniards to the west; and where they met was hazardous and inequitable. They hang a war above his head and ask for judgment. No, you may not abstain. … His curialists’ injunction bringing him up short in the benighted hours, the air breathed over and headachy, clogged with clauses and construals until there was no more talking to be done. And then one of them had spoken, reluctantly and to their weariness. There is a way. …
The Pope says, “‘And thou, son of man, take thee a sharp knife, take thee a barber’s razor, and cause it to pass upon thine head and upon thy beard: then take thee balances to weigh and divide the hair.’ Do you remember that?” He holds up his hands as two pans, his head their fulcrum, his helpless talking head. “But my razor is too blunt,” he says. A little flock of small brown birds erupts from the foliage of a nearby mulberry tree, wheeling and disappearing. He thinks he sees Hanno’s back, a comical gray island mooching amongst little trees and bushes below. His hands jiggle up and down. He begins to talk of equivalences and balances, of perfectly weighted claims canceling one another out, of treaties and compacts and the web of his predecessors’ words, which snag and hold him fast. “Your claims are too even,” he tells them. “Ezekiel himself could not split this hair. …”
He talks and talks. Vich and Faria steal stony-faced glances at one another, sifting, calculating. “I cannot tip these scales, not for the love of Fernando, not for that of Manolo. Were the difference just a grain of salt, a mote of dust. …” Gradually it surfaces, milky and amorphous in its camouflage of watery manners, taking imaginary shape on the imaginary scales. He is in search of something, gazing over the gardens, which appear still at first, then twitch and shudder oddly as the animal’s progress reveals itself; a blundering disturbance of branches snapping and startled birds beating up into the sunlight. Hanno crashes into view again, the huge head emerging foolishly from between two bushes covered with small yellow blooms, which the beast’s trunk seeks out with intricate methodical curls. The three men watch in silence. Would that I were transparent, thinks the Pope.
“Holiness,” says Faria, the faint note of exasperation whistling softly, not his own but his master’s, not his impatience but Manolos’. “What is it that you want?”
“Plinius tells a wonderful tale in his Natural History,” he says with sudden enthusiasm. “Every beast has its adversary, the Lion and the Tiger, the Tortoise and Eagle. … There are others, though I forget them now. Even Hanno has his enemy, the one he must live to destroy. Even Hanno …”
The beast shakes its head vigorously, flapping its ears. They can hear it, a leathery, slapping sound. The Pope beams at the animal. The animal chews. The two men chance a look between themselves.
“Have you read Plinius?” he asks the ambassadors.
Swelling tongues of steam lick upward, thin to invisible wraiths, thicken suddenly in the bars of light, a rich summery gold deepening with the afternoon beyond the linen screens of the half-shuttered windows. Sunlit swirls of fog thrust solid beams of brightness into the gloom, where, abruptly robbed of light, they continue in secret up the walls. Condensing droplets gather along the oaken joists above and presently drip in a wet echo on the rugs that cover the floor. A light mildew reappearing this autumn will need to be scrubbed off, meaning ladders and clatter, stiff brushes, elbow grease, general commotion. For the moment all is stillness. From the gloom of the far wall, a massive bed tented in fading red velvet coughs dust into a vaporous interior.
Since midday: the trudge of Arnolfo’s boots between woodpile and kitchen, the lighting and stoking of the fire, drawing of water, heating of the same in a blackened copper cauldron groaning and bubbling above the blaze of the fire, the whole kitchen disappearing in bubbly boiling clouds and Emilia herself ejected choking into the courtyard, then wheeling out of the apparatus, boots banging up and down the stairs through the main sala and the smaller one beyond to the impromptu bagnio; jugs slopping and overspilling pots, everybody’s sweat and ill temper, even imperturbable Tebaldo, even little Violetta (tears, a little after noon, put down to the general air of upset), and standing in the midst of all this one hardly seeming part of it yet directing this, reminding of that, keeping the contraption on course, waiting impassively for her own main role to begin, for, as the whole household might forget at its peril, haphazardly and frequently during the sticky months of summer, on the feasts of Saint Urban, Saint Lambert, Michael, Luke, Leonard, Barbara, Sylvester, and Peter, on Epiphany, Advent, and Halloween, the third sunday in Lent (if Easter were early) or the first day of Shrovetide (if not), and most particularly on the feast of Saints Philip and James (today), it pleased their mistress Fiametta to take what she called “a little bath.”
Sploo-ooosh …
“Aieow!”
“Too hot?”
“You are boiling me!”
Pul-losshhh …
“Aaaah …”
“Better?”
“Mmmm.”
Standing now in attendance on her mistress, she has restored her flustered and heat-sodden troupe to their respective domains—kitchen, stable, scullery, study—closed the doors at the top and bottom of the staircase, unfolded the linen liner, thrown it over the bath, and watched the water weight it in darkening patches, dragging it down to settle on the rough planks of the tub. She has added oils and petals to the steaming liquid, then watched her mistress rouse herself, rub her eyes, struggle from her shift, settle with a slow exhalation in the scented swirl of the water. The cooling bedclothes breathe a faint sourness, quickly suffocated under the thickening fug of oily, steam-borne perfumes. Drip, a drop from the beam above, plop, into the bath. The bedchamber smells of roses.
“Pumice my feet now.”
“A little longer.”
“They feel like hooves, like a great carthorse’s hooves.”
“The water will soften them.”
“You think I have hooves?”
“No, mistress.”
“Pumice them now.”
“Patience.”
At first she knew only “no,” “please,” “yes,” “mistress,” and “Roma.” Ro-ma. Then, quickly after, “water,” “straw,” “good,” “moment,” “soon,” and “patience.” This shrieking city wanted to drown her in its noise: she learned first the words for the things it lacked. “Pear,” “bless you.” Supplied the deficiencies that gnawed at her in those first bewildering months. Her wrist had healed slowly and badly, stiffening in the damp of winter, unfreezing again in spring. Three times now. The city had its fingers in her. She added her own barbarous accents to the cackle of its shambalic streets, its mires and the stench rising off them—this place of waste, muddle, and noise. “Away with you!” “A julio,” “two,” “three,” “four …” She separates her mistress’s toes between her fingers, sets to work with the pumice stone.
“Soap me now.”
“A moment …”
“Let go. I am going to stand.”
> “The lemon soap? The rose?”
“He hates the smell of lemons. Rose.”
Reddened forearms surface from the oily waters’ depths. Fingers grip the sides of the tub, shoulder muscles tense, arms stretched forward like an oarsman. She will wait a second or two, gather herself, then … She rises suddenly, water cascading down her breasts and belly, steadies herself on feet now planted well apart, lungs gulping air, disappointment at her lost buoyancy, eyes focused in a vacant middle distance, the faraway look of a porter bracing himself beneath a load and his whole world shrunk, for a moment, to weight. She had passed for a boy once. Skinny as a rake.
“Scrub harder.”
“Raise your arms, mistress.”
“Slower now. … Yes.”
She works down from the shoulders, lathering and rinsing, kneeling, leaning forward awkwardly to lift and soap under the breasts. Her mistress’s hand rests lightly on the tight plaits of her head. The solid rounds of her buttocks. Fiametta turns. The hand leaves her head, and thick fingers cup her chin. She looks up; new sadnesses have swelled the face looking down at her. Accolti dead last March. Young Chigi leaving her the next month, his parting thrust a farewell gift done up in a case lined with black silk, a final humiliation. Black days. The household banished themselves to the kitchen while their mistress completed her abasement—long afternoons of great shouts and thuds, grunts, groans, then hours of sobbing resounding through the house—two weeks of this before Chigi’s gift is replaced in its case. “To fill her hours,” as the note had put it, the base of each implement engraved with the image of its appropriate creature: a dog, a goat, a man, a bull, and last of all—inevitably, since the procession they watched together from the balcony of Agostino’s palazzo, since its centerpiece had furnished him with the first of his taunts—an elephant. In their case of cedarwood lined with silk, finger-size to truncheon-size, five ivory phalluses served mute notice, and terms, of her dismissal. Two Sundays later she sent the largest back to him, reeking, smeared with that month’s blood. Now there is only the old warhorse himself, not so cruel as Chigi, not so rich as Accolti, and sadnesses to be masked with gaiety until she can bury them deeper in her flesh. Interim pleasures. The upturned face is impassive, waiting for her word.
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 22