The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  “Your dress is spotted. See the soap, here and here.”

  “I will rinse it tonight.”

  “And you are sweating.”

  “The steam …”

  “Come. Take it off.”

  Calico, thicker than she would wish for May, crumples slowly on the floor. An underskirt of thin cotton drops, slack with damp, beside it. Sandals clatter over the rugs. This is easy for her. This has all been prefigured before; cloth castles melting about her ankles, herself naked, stepping forward. “Come. Take it off.” Or a barked command in any one of half a dozen languages, or a gesture of the hand. The merchants had peered curiously at the lines scarified across her cheeks. She is turned this, that way. Often she lies, legs up in a V, while a practiced finger prods in her vagina till she yelps. Then she yawns. That is when she outwits her captors. She yawns, and the merchant backs away. The deal is off. This one he will not take. It happens eight times in succession, and her captors grow more furious every time. They are brothers, she thinks. Perhaps cousins. They slap her and spit on her but dare not bruise her badly. The caravan had wound north, always north, with nothing to mark their journey but each day’s nascent and then failing heat, the wadis where they stopped, and the markets where she was rejected. The caravan begins with eighty, but in twos and threes their numbers dwindle as the goats tethered behind them do, too, until finally there is only an old man, a wheezing boy, and herself. One night they kill the old man and the boy in a ditch. She hears them quarrel over money and knows the quarrel concerns her. They hate her, cannot be rid of her. She laughs silently to herself, sitting there with her hands bound together with strips of goatskin, sitting alone in the desert, waiting to learn the outcome. The bitter uli- berries itch against her scalp, eight swallowed already, four remaining. Four will be enough, she thinks. They will reach the market by the water, a glare of white buildings, tiny ships on a glittering sea. The brothers will drink arrack and break her wrist, then quarrel again. She is worthless and they should kill her, but they have traveled too far north. She will conceal this injury. A Genoese merchant laughing and holding her up by the wrist, watching her body stretch, break sweat. The wrist, but she makes no sound. The brothers agreeing to a pittance. Once aboard, he sets it. He knew all along. He watches her pick the last of the bitter-tasting berries from her plaits and throw them over the side. Four blue-black stains drifting, dissolving. She mimes popping them into her mouth, one by one, market by market. … Understanding dawns, and the Genoese laughs; his clever little bargain. He points forward, curls his lips around the word. “Ro-ma.” Yes, this is easy. She understands this very well. Ro-ma. Shrewd eyes set in a woman’s laughing face, hanging on the arm of her indulgent lover, who counts the coins into her hand. The Genoese watches, collects, is gone. The woman’s kisses slap wetly against her lover’s gaunt cheeks, but her eyes look over the man’s shoulder, stripping her. Eu-say-biah. Her mistress lowers herself carefully into the tub.

  “Eusebia …”

  “Mistress?” Fiametta’s eyes sweep up and down her body.

  “Hardly more than a girl. … How old are you, Eusebia?”

  She shrugs ignorance.

  “Turn around now. …” Whispered, the words sheathed in steam-laden air, in the bedchamber’s watery perfumes. Custom has never smoothed the edge of this particular request.

  She turns, feels the skin tauten up the backs of her legs, hears the drip-drop of water as a hand surfaces behind her. A first speculative touch, fingers stroking up the backs of her knees, her legs, fingertips brushing the skin of her buttocks. She feels the blood swelling in her sex; so easy. Think back.

  “Eusebia …”

  She has felt the late summer rains spatter on her face nineteen times and counted three more since “Eu-say-biah.” The sky has fattened five moons since the last, and tonight, in a place very distant from here, from this Ro-ma, the sixth will bring three fools out to gaze at it and remember her, believing that she is dead. Leaning forward now, steamy breath, lips mouthing silently over fine-grained skin to a secret crease of darkness, parting tight-curled hair. Lips meeting melting lips. Pink-mouthed. Her legs splay slowly.

  “Eusebia …”

  She has lived through twenty-two years; traveled a desert and a sea. She is not of this place, only adapted to it. Fiametta grunts softly behind her.

  “Little blackface …”

  She waits for the fat familiar tongue.

  Outside, elsewhere, heat thickens with the afternoon’s passage, weighing on Ro-ma, lying slackly in her streets. Her inhabitants take refuge in the shade of buildings and awnings, drift unthinkingly indoors. A lull descends. In the markets of Navona and the Campo de’ Fiori, matrons and their servants turn and head for home. Cows, horses, goats, unsold pigs, and sheep swelter neglected in their pens. Fish, cheeses, and meats are swept off tables and stored in boxes underneath. The tradesmen slump together in untalkative clumps. People sweat. Behind shutters, windows, and screens, in hovels, houses, and palaces, the men and women of this city lie down to wait out the stifling warmth. Nothing to do but yawn and scratch, pull cool bucketfuls of water from the well. Something of the night’s ban on careless movement touches these hours. Chained in the afternoon’s languor, Arnolfo and Emilia sprawl listlessly together in the kitchen. The fire burned itself out an hour ago. Tebaldo prefers the courtyard’s shade. Violetta has disappeared somewhere; ears boxed when she returns, although truth to tell, Emilia would prefer her gone on these occasions. Her lazy pleasures with Arnolfo—thick-chested and hairy as a goat—somehow require these summer afternoons, not to mention the accompaniment from upstairs: vague thuds and groans, a shout or two, then moans building to a series of earsplitting shrieks, then for some minutes silence. The sounds excite her in a way actual sight of the two of them never could. Succeeding them, a puzzling coda: a succession of terrific bangs. Inexplicable these, and the evidence the mistress’s overbearing Moorish whore occasionally displays in the aftermath—a split lip, a cauliflower ear—only serve to deepen the mystery. They are her signal to shake Arnolfo free or disengage his hand from its labors beneath her skirts, to dismount, to straighten from her position bent facedown over the table, wipe her mouth, spit in the dead embers of the fire … To stay her thoughts of the girl’s dark skin against Fiametta’s body. Hmm, rocking back and forth, knees clamped firmly about Arnolfo’s thighs, who rocks in time and utters soft “gn, gn, gn,” sounds, “Aaah,” as she opens the front of her dress and lifts out slack breasts one at a time. “Suck,” she instructs. Arnolfo’s “Mmmmth” is the only sound—the pair upstairs have reached their interval of silence, a shout or two from the street beyond the courtyard, perhaps, a horse’s hooves somewhere. Emilia grinds a little more urgently. Hooves. She screws her eyes shut, sets to work with her fingers. Hurry now, yes, yes, yes … Then, bang, bang, bang. But now? Surely it is too soon, surely, and she is on the very point, guts boiling like jam. … Again, bang, bang, bang. Worse than she feared; suddenly she knows that these detonations come not from the floor above, but from the door. Hooves? A horse! And it is worse even than that, smoothing down her skirts, pushing disorderly hair behind her ears, gesturing in frantic silence at her late mount (dazed, still flopping heavily about on the floor), for at that moment, resounding through the ceiling from the bedchamber above, Fiametta’s pleasures recommence in earnest. Great thuds from above, sharp reports from below, Emilia’s feet thump up the stairs, and the house is a cacophony of banging. Tap, tap, tap, across the floor of the sala—ee-eek (a floorboard is loose), her single knuckle against the door, tock, quite lost amongst the battering from below, and as she turns the handle, an enormous bang! from within. The door swings open to show her the tub, the bed, the steam, her mistress’s red flesh, the girl’s black skin, two faces caught like animals. Fiametta is standing, panting, over the girl, who lies on the floor beneath her; there is a sudden silence and within that a strange complicity, as though between a predator and its prey. Emilia gasps, red-faced herself,
speaks—“Your pardon, mistress”—as Fiametta’s expression of inscrutable joy is exchanged for shock at the intrusion, then anger, and then panic as the knocking from below is redoubled. Emilia’s quavering message is already written in her face, indeed is resounding through the timbers of the house.

  “Mistress, Don Jerònimo is here.”

  Plinius?

  Noise from Saint Peter’s Square funnels down into the adjacent Courtyard of the Parrot, bouncing off the walls and casements, jumbling itself as though Babel were rebuilt in air and the air about it made stone: straw-sellers, horse-dealers, women hawking crosses and kerchiefs, pilgrims from every corner of Christendom, monks, priests, hucksters, clerks, and beggars. A donkey brays. A dog barks. Possibly these sounds are each other, for the courtyard is deceptive on the ear. The racket is near, but baffling. An underlying plashing is the fountain next to the water-trough?

  No, the fountain of the Belvedere. And somewhere amongst the babble of human voices, Antonio knows, is that of his master Don Jerònimo. And that of the Pope. And that of the Portuguese, whose monkeys lounge insolently on the opposite side of the courtyard: Bandera, secretary like himself; Don Hernando, skin burned and wrinkled from the Barbary campaigns; six of Hernando’s thugs; and Venturo. His own party—Don Diego and five men-at-arms—talk casually amongst themselves. They ignore the party opposite, except for Diego, who casually eyes Hernando’s horse, a powerful but strangely marked bay, as though he might walk over and take it for himself. But for this, Faria’s men do not exist. The horses’ hooves clop as they shift on the cobbles, and the noise echoes up and down the walls. There have been hours of this.

  Suddenly, out of the vague washes of sound spilling over the rooftops, a thin trumpeting erupts. Antonio looks up, startled, expression unguarded, masked quickly but too late. The Portingales across the courtyard are already aping him, looking skyward in terror and making a great show of forced laughter, heurgh-urgh-urgh … Don Diego’s hand twitches toward his sword. The bay horse neighs, and the Portingales all look up again, as one, even funnier this time, heurgh-urgh-urgh … Naturally it is Ventura’s laughter that is loudest, his squeaky little voice quite perfect for this kind of thing. The elephant’s blast means many things, none good, among them that their Ambassador will not be long in returning.

  Soon the Switzers in their green-and-gold uniforms are beating back the crowd of petitioners that daily gathers in the courtyard of Innocent’s old palazzo, opening a channel in the braying mob for the Spaniards’ horses. The sun took up residence in the Courtyard of the Parrot for an hour around noon. Thereafter shadow returned. Antonio smelled damp gathering under the flagstones—the Borgo is notoriously dank. Now, outside its precincts, the sun’s full force returns. A looser crowd gathers here, the more hopeless petitioners who have not gained admittance even as far as the courtyard. Antonio blinks and follows the rigid back bobbing up and down on the mount in front of his own. The audience, he knows already—knew when he saw Faria’s men, when he heard the beast hooting its ridicule—has not gone well.

  They cross the Ponte Sant’Angelo at an ill-tempered trot, Don Jerònimo at their head cursing a crowd of loutish halberdiers, a small boy carrying a piglet, stray monks, anyone and everyone who dares to cross his path. Behind him ride Antonio, then Don Diego and his men. The little piazza at the far side of the bridge is clear—here, above all, Antonio knows, his master will not wish to linger—and the cortege picks up speed, dodging carts with wine-barrels from Ripetta and stone-wagons bound for the kilns, sweeping aside pedestrians, ducking under awnings. The recently renamed Via dell’Elefante is left behind. They pass the bankers’ houses and swing left. Ahead, a grain cart has been stopped by officials of the stadera a little way into the street of the jewelers. The horses close up and he draws abreast.

  “Plinius!” barks Don Jerònimo at his secretary, then pulls ahead again. The road kinks toward the river hereabouts, and the stump of the Torre Sanguigni pokes its top above the pantiled roofs and chimneys. A tannery Antonio has never detected discharges its stench along this stretch, but the alternative road by the Torre di Nona hugs the bank of the river, which in this heat, and this far down-stream, will stink unbearably. Just past Santa Nicola the procession turns left. Glancing over his shoulder into Navona, Antonio sees men leading strings of packhorses into pens crudely roofed with sacking, people drifting away. Everyone is doing what he is doing—although here in this city of strangers the very phrase rings false to him; another of Rome’s deceptions—going home. Antonio Seròn, secretary to the Ambassador of Fernando the Catholic of Aragon, wheels his horse about and follows his master into the courtyard.

  The stalls are empty. The courtyard echoes. Grooms appear and take the horses. Don Jerònimo calls over, “With me, Antonio,” before ducking under the lintel and vanishing through the door. Two dozing ushers peer out, startled, to see what other surprises might follow.

  Don Jerònimo’s heels disappearing up the stairs, footsteps echoing along the loggia, his back vanishing as he strides through the sala, an unseen door flung open within. Antonio scurries after. Glancing down from the open loggia, he sees Don Diego standing alone in the courtyard below, looking up at the cloudless sky, stone-faced as ever. Once one of Cardona’s favored captains, he made neither show nor secret of his indifference to his role in Rome. Ceremonial? Bodyguard? There are rumors of his “excesses” after Ravenna and Prato. The man unnerves him.

  “Antonio!”

  The antechamber beyond the saletta serves as repository and audience room. Yellowing window-screens soften the light from the courtyard to oranges and ochers, sunset colors. Even so, the rays are strong enough to brown the edges of the papers piled up in the alcoves of the far wall, those spilling from the chests beneath, and more yet carpeting a good portion of the floor: draft treaties, memoranda, copies of decrees, dispatches dating from before even Rojas’s time, an enormous and aging correspondence, and buried amongst it the relevant bulls of successive popes, which Antonio has lately unearthed only by rooting through the whole of this wordy midden, stirring up old quarrels and disputes, blowing the dust off long-forgotten deceptions, squinting in the inadequate light to read, finally, Nicholas, Calixtus, Alexander, Julius … They have all had a hand in this business.

  “Did you speak with our friend today, Antonio?”

  “He kept himself close, Ambassador. There was no opportunity.”

  “But he will come?”

  “If there is a gain to be had, he will come.”

  Don Jerònimo nods slowly. Seated here in the heat and semilight of the chamber, he looks down, his fingers toying lazily with the thin folio before him. A few irregular, dog-eared pages. Astonishing that so much should depend on so little. He knows the words before him almost by rote, Nicholas’ Romanus Pontifex confirming his earlier Dum Diversas (but contradicting Eugenius’ Rex Regum), extended by Calixtus, ratified at Alcaçovas in the year of his younger brother’s birth, little Alonso. Aeterni Regis? That gave the Portingales more again, promulgated by Sixtus in the year of Alonso’s death. Three years. … Alexander’s Inter Caetera, his Eximiae Devotionis, his second Inter Caetera, then Dudum Siquidem, the tide turning Spain’s way now, washing them west, and the Portuguese routed, it would seem, had seemed. At Tordesillas, their triumph. And at Tordesillas, their defeat.

  Invisible lines divided unseen seas, snaked about coasts and islands whose positions seemed to shift with the whims of the popes: Cape Verde, the Canaries, Cape Bojador, Antilla. Perhaps there were no islands at all, only cloud-banks, deceptive fogs, credulous and sleepless lookouts seeing substance where there was none. Now, in the open seas three hundred and seventy leagues west of the Cape Verde isles, a frontier begins. A line is drawn. Portugal stands back to back with Spain, two foolish duelists facing east and west who will meet face-to-face again on the other side of the world. And what then?

  “I will not send an army to fight in the Moluccas when one orator can win this war for me in Rome. …” Fernand
o’s confident words. They too are amongst the papers in the chamber. The Indies lie to the east, and the Indies lie to the west. They may be reached by either route. So does the Pope’s line bisect the globe or merely describe the starting post? Is it only a beginning or also (a hemisphere away) an end? No, Fernando had not sent an army, but the rumor of an army had set sail anyway, spectral, sails like the wings of seabirds, a squadron of portable islands blown forward on a gale of words. The Portingales had taken fright, sought confirmation of Julius, received it. He was still “Fernando’s lately arrived Ambassador” then, less than two years at the post. Ea Quae gave them Tordesillas again, and a line still invisible and substanceless, but changed utterly. How could that be?

  Don Jerònimo envisioned a shelf of land rearing out of the seas’ depths, brine cascading and pouring off, the raw coast racing forward like a miracle. Colòn’s Indies. Cabral’s New World. Geographers and astrologers should have sailed to map their precious line—successive treaties provided for this—but somehow their ships had never left port. The new coast bulged east, crossing the boundary. A gift to the Portingales. A barrier to their own pioneers, but now they are bound to it as hostages to an earlier ignorance: a ghost-line. Terms shift. Distant seas slop and spill, slap their faces with watery hands. Intentions fail and sink. Now, amongst the warren of offices of the Apostolic Chamber, in the effort of subtle doctors and clerks behind their screens, the game is afoot once more. Dom Manolo and his creatures are in good odor with the Pope. A new bull is in preparation, that much is firm report. Thereafter all is speculation, save the general understanding that it will not favor Fernando. The Pope is a whimsical referee, his decrees as fluid as the sea’s.