The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  Below, in the nave of Santissimi Apostoli, a pig is being strung by the hocks and hoisted up to swing twenty feet above the floor. A thurible soon joins it, belching thick smoky arcs that the pig’s wilder trajectories intersect and cut, sending fragrant wafts of olibanum forward to do battle with the noxious airs of the crypt. Servants carrying brimming churns have bunched together at the far end of the gallery. “Deploy yourselves evenly!” bellows a barrel-chested major-domo into uncomprehending faces. One or two begin to pluck at the draw-strings of their hoses. “Spread out! There!” He points across the nave to the opposite side. They lug the slopping churns by their handles. Chicken-carriers follow. “Not you!” Chicken-carriers stop. Vich’s mistress is proving something of a problem again. Ascanio is essaying a handstand, and Vittoria seems to be, perhaps, praying?

  Below, flanked by his deacon and subdeacon and surrounded by a gaggle of grubbily smocked urchins, a bearlike man strides powerfully down the nave. Behind the rood-screen he deposits a chalice with a bang on the altar. A Bible follows. The urchins form lines to either side of the chancel and begin limbering up, drawing deep breaths and emitting piercing squawks. Ushers stand at the doors through which dim sounds can now be heard, muffled shouting, wolf-whistles, the odd thud. Father Tommaso cracks his knuckles and looks to his choir, his ushers, up to the gallery, where the majordomo nods solemnly back at him. His deacons have disappeared through a small door in the transept. He follows.

  The sacristy is somewhat cramped: the corner of some other building seems to have broken through the facing wall and beached itself here like the prow of an unpiloted vessel, effectively dividing the once square room into two triangular ones. With the help of his deacon he pulls on alb, chasuble, amice, stole, rummaging amid the layers of linen to girdle himself with the cingulum, held out by Brother Bruno, a tough, wiry-haired native of Ripetta. Brother Fulvio busies himself with tapers and tablets of incense, whose cloying smoke quickly fills the cubbyhole. Bruno and Father Tommaso exchange glances. Brother Fulvio is tall and willowy, fair-haired and blue-eyed, a Perugian, in Rome for three weeks now and lodging with Tommaso on the orders of his Bishop, who had been charmed by letters of introduction mentioning “the humility of Saint Francis.” Well, taming wolves was one thing; Tommaso would have liked to see Saint Francis celebrate Mass for the Colonnas.

  “There will be incidents,” he begins, “but so long as the tanners don’t turn up …” At that moment a piercing whine reaches all three pairs of ears, modulating into a soprano squeal, resolving itself as a kind of screech coming from the main body of the church: “Ex-cla-ma-ve-runt ad te”—a pause—“domin-aaayy…” The choir has begun singing.

  “Idiots!” barks Father Tommaso as a louder din begins to echo down the nave, bangs and shouts, hammerings, the sound of the faithful called to prayer. Bruno hands him the maniple, lights candles, as a first “Alleluia-aaa!” drifts in from the chancel, then a second one, longer, its jubilus more drawn out still, and more bangs and thuds and shouts, the swinging pig squealing. Fulvio closes the lid of the thurible, crosses himself, and precedes them both into the church. “Exultate iusti …,” quavers the choir. “Introiboadaltaredei-eee,” hums Father Tommaso. “Ad deum quiletificatinventutam rne-am,” descants Bruno. “Iudica me deus” —rattling along quite nicely here—“to-oo-tum” —a glare at the choir in passing. They go through the routine again. He murmurs, “Deus tu conversus vivificabis nos …” Gets, “Et plebs tua letabitur in te,” in response. The church is lit with candles set into the pillars upholding the gallery. Aloft, the thurible appears to have ensnared itself with the pig, for both are being untangled (“Domine exaudi orationem meam …”) by serving men who lean out over the nave. Faces peer down at him: Vittoria’s (rapt), Ascanio’s (bored), Don Geraldo’s, and Villefranche’s. The old man stares stonily ahead. Behind him a soldier is toying with his helmet and three identically dressed women are … no, in fact, they are not. There is only one after all. Very fat. Suddenly the pig and thurible are set to swinging once again; smoke and squealing as the choir reaches its twelfth Alleluia, the door begins to shudder as though being battered from without, and Father Tommaso shouts, “Ready?” down the nave to his ushers, who nod and move to unbar the doors. “Dominus vobiscum,” he intones as the little procession reaches the rood-screen. Tommaso turns, flexes his shoulders, takes up a position in front of the screen. Bruno mumbles, “Et cum spiritu tuo … “ in reply. They glance at each other, old comrades and veterans. Fulvio has continued on to disappear somewhere behind the screen.

  “What?” murmurs Colonna, lost for the moment in a quite different thought. “Have we begun yet?”

  “Right,” the priest commands his ushers. “Let the bastards in.”

  Don Diego watches the heavy crossbars slide back, jam momentarily as the doors are pressed from without, then jerk free. The ushers stagger, suddenly encumbered with the oaken rails’ full weight, the doors just as suddenly weightless, it seems, for they shiver, clatter, spring lightly open to reveal the faithful stilled in the doorway, mouths agape, silent and cowed, stopped dead in their already stopped tracks. A couple look half-wonderingly back at the bobbing heads behind. Impossible, this moment. No one quite believes it. The line of pressed and waiting bodies swells for a second, then breaks, outriders and vanguards forming to make the breach in the undefended church’s skin.

  Its defenders take their stand a little behind the ambo, Bruno at their center, legs braced, arms hung loose and at the ready. He eyeballs the advancing congregation. “Hold it… Hold it!” Face them down at the start. He singles out a beefy individual leading a mastiff by the collar whom several more timorous rogues are nudging forward. “You! Yes, you. No dogs!” He is ignored. A flanking movement is creeping around to his left. Diego nods approvingly to himself. Delay them, thinks Bruno. Take their brunt here. A right-hand movement has joined the left—the inevitable pincer-maneuver—and now the center is edging up the middle of the nave, shunted forward by the press of bodies behind, drawn on by the luxuriant unoccupied space before. Bruno’s retreat is inevitable. It must be measured, unforced. One step at a time. Good God, one of them’s brought a brace of chickens! Bruno glances heavenward to where the pig still swings, momentarily silenced by the sweaty surge of bodies below. Ignore the pig.

  Those already in the church are coming to rest, or something approaching rest—a lot of scratching, nudging, and toe-treading is still going on. The ingress of bodies outside is slowing, ineffective shunts and squirmings to get in proving less and less effective, some kind of equilibrium is reached. The field is taken, thinks Don Diego above. Raise standards.

  But the congregation gathered to celebrate the feast of Phillip and James possesses no standard, knows no victorious cry beyond the rumbling of stomachs, so they stand there and jostle stupidly amongst themselves. What now?

  Like Prato, thinks Don Diego. Like the horrible quiet of Prato in the dumb moments before the nails and hammers were produced, the fires lit and dice rolled. The aimless yawning hiatus, the gluey bog of the Pratesi’s nonresistance. Clambering over the low turret to the breach their laborious cannonade had at last opened—it was already late in the afternoon—Diego saw Prato’s defenders either fleeing or mooning in half-embarrassed fashion by the Porta del Serraglio like children caught in a game of hide-and-seek, knowing they are too old for this silliness. His halberdiers were pushing at them, nudging them back, but it was too desultory, and when challenged, the Pratesi simply dropped their weapons with a shrugging gesture. His own sword was tight in his hand, its hilt seeming to pierce the heel of his hand and weld itself to the bones in his arm, so indivisible were they. He did not understand this soft yielding of theirs, this nothingness, like a fawning dog that no matter how many times you kick at it will drift back and nuzzle to be fed, this cloying passivity. It enraged him. He understood his halberdier singling one of them out, cursing and shouting—this being somehow ludicrous, forced, goading at a different level—pushing the unprotesti
ng man back against the wall he should have been defending, using the butt of his pike to drop him, the point to stick him. Then his turning from this miserable execution still unsatisfied, the same question still written in his bafflement. What next? What now?

  “… eh? Eh, Colonel Diego?” The service is under way below, a beardless deacon swinging the thurible over the altar, the unsighted mass of the congregation already bored and talking amongst themselves, bareheaded journeymen, some monks at the back, a dog on its hind legs, barking. … “Don Diego!”

  He comes to, Colonna’s voice jerking him out of this. A tall, elderly man has entered and stands on the other side of Colonna’s chair. Colonna looks up at him, raises a hand, which the other brushes with his lips, glancing at Diego as he does so.

  “Vitelli, dear old Misha …” They are friends, or more than friends, it seems. Vitelli wants to smile his affection but glances again at Diego instead, his mouth twitching slightly. “Vitelli, this is Colonel Diego here. I am keeping him with me tonight.”

  Vitelli nods his head. “I know of Colonel Diego, naturally.”

  Behind him stands a young woman who looks up quickly at his name, gazing steadily across the two older men, weighing him up. Her nose is thin and hawkish, set in a strong face, too strong to be truly beautiful, her eyes brown, perhaps, but seeming almost red from the great cascade of coppery hair spilling over her shoulders. Diego notes her face with a start, another as he realizes she is costumed like a man.

  “Signora Maria Francesca d’ Aste,” Vitelli announces. “My wife.”

  The woman offers her hand to Colonna, who kisses it. Then she thrusts it at Diego himself. He hesitates. Vitelli growls,” Keep your place,” but she remains there, arm outstretched. He looks between them, feels himself color. She simply waits, staring into his face, challenging him. Abruptly she laughs, withdraws with a little flourish of her hand. Another latecomer has entered. She turns away from all three.

  “Will you kiss my hand, Cardinal Serra?” she asks of the red-smocked man bustling through the press of the passage.

  “Will you kiss my ring?” retorts the Cardinal, squeezing past her. “Vitelli. M’lord Colonna.” He makes little bows to both. “Captain Diego. Is our Ambassador …? Ah-ha! No need to answer. I see his marker. Lord, she is even fatter. …” He moves on and is presently swallowed in the crush.

  “I still think of Paulo from time to time. …” Colonna is speaking absently, gazing out into the noisy maw of the nave. “I mean your cousin, Misha. I think, sometimes, that he was the best of us, in his way.”

  “Paulo cared for nothing and nobody. Least of all himself,” Vitelli replies. Colonna nods sadly. Their eyes drift back to the spectacle below, or are drawn down there.

  Below, the swollen mystery of the mass is throbbing, growing tight and bloated as the stomachs of drowned pigs swept down the Tiber by spring floods, unfurling fillets of itself in the long, drawn-out Alleluias of the choir that are sometimes audible above the racket of the worshipers’ yacking, a dog barking, pig squealing (still swinging overhead), several chickens, “Alleluia-aaaa. … Alleluia-aaaaaahhh …” Angels ride in on tongues of sound that flap through the church’s toothless gums, and Bruno prays that he will read well: the ambo is well inside enemy territory. Silently, invisibly behind the screen, Father Tommaso prays with him. Subdeacons and ushers gather together, bearing candles and little thuribles. Slowly the procession forms up.

  “Should not the choir be silent now?” inquires Fulvio of Father Tommaso.

  “Shut up,” responds Father Tommaso.

  Above, idle pot-boys are leaning over the balustrade to let thin strings of drool dangle from their mouths, then, just as it seems they must break, sucking them safely back up. Or not. It is a contest—longest string wins—somewhat vexing to those below. Trays of sweetmeats circulate perilously: pork in cider, beef in radish sauce, borne by sweating serving women who edge their way in difficult procession through the clumps and clusters of the guests. It is hot up here. And sliced tongue! Mmmmm. Fiametta loves a slice of tongue, signaling, waving, ignored, finally shouting, “You! Over here!” which attracts pained expressions from those around her, a smirk from Ascanio, but nothing at all from Don Jerònimo da Vich and Cardinal Serra, who, it would appear, are leaning out over the rail to watch and pass comment on the gobbing contest going on opposite—” Not bad, that one” and “More phlegm needed” and “Ooops! Overextended himself”—until the serving woman continues on, other attentions drift away, a kind of privacy is regained, and their real conversation resumes.

  “… so I had Diego there tickle his ear.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. He does not know, nor does it matter. I meet our friend again tonight. Venturo is only for appearance. What is the word from His Holiness?”

  “I believe he is rather delighted. Ghiberti sought me out this afternoon, seemingly to demand sureties against the resurgence of ‘your monstrous conduct and temper,’ which I gave willingly”—Serra chuckles—“after which he let me know that His Holiness is retelling the episode with his customary brio to all who will listen. The role of the elephant in particular is growing …”

  “Monstrous?”

  “Monstrous. Yes, absolutely monstrous; look there now—” Serra points across to the pot-boys again, one of whom is jiggling a veritable stalactite of saliva, eyes narrowed in concentration, sucking now, up it comes. Vich turns at this hint to find a man standing behind him and to his right. He nods and the stranger nods back, moves off once again.

  “Do you know him?”

  “No. Faria’s creature, most likely. Yes, look. He is leaving now we have seen him. Enough of all that. Tell me of our King.”

  “The court was at Toledo when last I heard, but he is aloof from this affair. The negotiation between our ministers and Manolo’s proceeds. I take my instruction from there, and King Fernando his intelligence. We are players here in Rome, merely players. … Good God, look at that one!”

  And this time it is Serra’s turn to look about him in vague alarm, but, finding only Fiametta busy with her sliced meats in place of the expected eavesdropper, he redirects his gaze across the nave to the pot-boys, one of whom has unleashed a truly colossal pendant of drool, a glistening column that stretches down, little pearls of quicksilver gloop running down its sides to thicken and strengthen, farther, farther, more and more, until it seems it must wet the unsuspecting head below, but no! No, it is being retracted, its lithe tongue quivering as the Gob Maestro’s own winds the excrescence back, spooling and spooning, cheek, jaw, throat, even stomach muscles all pumping in concert, the last foot of phlegm whipping back up into the gullet that spawned it with a slap, swallow, and gulp.

  “Remember me in your next dispatch,” says Serra, moving off. Pot-boys are slapping the victor on the back, making him choke a little.

  “You are leaving?”

  “I will attend our host for a while. An uncle of mine once fought with the Colonnas at, I think, Parma. Or Piacenza. Against the French, at any rate.”

  Vich looks into the pit of the church, where a deacon seems to be conducting the reading while ushers and subdeacons defend the ambo with shoves and curses against the surges of the crowd. The priest directly beneath him appears oblivious of all this commotion farther up the nave, fiddling about with thuribles and pyxes, mouthing inaudibly, now what would it be … the Creed?

  It occurs to Father Tommaso, indeed intoning, “Credo in unum deum,” that soon the halfway point will be reached and the so-called Mass of the Catechumens will be over. Such markers keep the spirits up. The choir sings: “Confitebuntur celi mirabilia tua domine. …” Fulvio inquires whether they should not be forming the offertory procession now and is answered in the negative. It also occurs to Father Tommaso that if the sainted Fulvio should open his mouth one more time, and words issue from that mouth not contained in either the missal or the psalter, Father Tommaso will close said mouth with his fist. The choir sings: “… et verita
tem tuam in ecclesia sanctorum. …” Father Tommaso repents of said thought. “Alleluia, alleluiaaa-aaahh!” It being unworthy in the presence of the host that lies before him on the altar, inanimate for the nonce. Elaborately farced neumes blend their warbling trebles in the barrel of the roof, inviting angels to the feast. They have arrived invisibly and cling to the ceiling like bats: there are just over twenty-seven thousand of them at the moment. Christ is as yet absent.

  But sometimes he comes—even here, even now. Sometimes he flickers in the host, or in the quiet that the host might sometimes command before the faithful bray out their smirched faith and sup on cleanliness again. For Christ is like the coldest cold air, skin-pricking and lung-burning. He may be here tonight, thinks Tommaso, clearing this space in his thoughts, Christ who was sown in the Virgin and rinsed at the Passion, reaped by enemies, threshed at the scouring, winnowed in foul words, ground in the mill of the gentiles, and made into pure flour and blood and cooked in the sepulcher for three days—from which a loaf came forth. This loaf: the host. He incenses it and the altar again. He washes his hands. He prays.