But the girl does not move, seems not to stir a muscle. The men’s talk drifts through the door. A beast, somewhere. A negotiation, somewhere else. They do not really trust each other; Fiametta, stretching out her legs, idly catches the undertone. She does not care, wiggling her toes. And again, the girl does not move. But then there is a shift, a sudden change, and Fiametta almost scrambles to her feet, sure that the men must have heard, seen, sensed …
Eusebia is soundless as before, just as invisible. Her Ambassador is describing the beast, or reading a letter, something. But the girl is rapt, the air prickling with her attention, its abrupt focus stabbing through the door. Something they have said has provoked this in her. Her excitement is palpable. How can they not feel it?
“…it takes grass, straw, and boiled rice. I imagine the Governor of the Indies was unamused,” Vich is saying. She knows, thinks Fiametta, eyeing the girl, she knows what they are talking about. A beast, a Governor, the Indies … Which of these has galvanized her? The two men talk on, the candle burns lower, or redder, the cracks in the door glow like embers now. Eusebia is blank again, a silhouette of nothing. What do you know? Fiametta wonders to herself. As if in response, the girl rises to her feet. The voices within have fallen silent for a moment. They are bidding their farewells.
Fiametta struggles up. Together they hurry back down the hallway, climb the stairs in silence. Outside the door to the main sala, she turns to her maid, pinching her arm and hissing in her ear, “Never again, do you understand? Never again.” She jerks her thumb back down the stairs. “What did you think you were doing?”
Fiametta expects the girl to hang her head, adopt her habitual cringe, to remain silent. Instead Eusebia faces her squarely, and when she speaks her voice is unguarded.
“I was thinking of the country whence I came,” she tells her mistress. “I was remembering the great river which divides it and the forests which grow along its banks. I was remembering a village there, where my father’s brother took me, and I was watching a boy who was fishing in a pool beside it.”
These words mean nothing to the woman gripping her by the arm. It is her voice that silences Fiametta, for it is neither wistful, nor sad, nor apologetic. None of the tones she would expect. Even unknowing, the two men have sparked something in her servant. She looks into the girl’s face, searching for whatever she is hiding there, but the barbarous markings that run in lines across her cheeks are like a mask; her passivity is impenetrable. The sound of chairs scraping comes from below. Eusebia turns away then, and Fiametta watches as she continues upstairs. She waits until she hears the men open the scullery door and pad through the hallway before she makes her own way back to the bedchamber. The sheet clings to her, damp with sweat. She hears the bolt drawn back, the door opened and closed. Hooves clop loudly in the courtyard, are silenced abruptly as the horse turns into the street. Vich’s careful quiet footsteps on the stairs. He is considerate, she thinks, feigning sleep. Kind, as the door is opened. Warm, as he slips into the bed. He plants a line of chaste, deceitful kisses down the nape of her neck. Vague mmm-mms from Fiametta, as though dreaming of him.
“in-dia-aah,” he murmurs, half-mocking, leaning over her to kiss her breast. She rolls onto her back, stretching, wanting him. “Where the King”—he has her nipple between thumb and forefinger—” lives in a volcano.” Her other breast flops lazily over to join the first and partially bury it. “Ah-ha! Af-rica-aaah.” He sucks busily for a second, then licks around the underside.
“Is he gone?” she asks, yawning, reaching for him. Vich does not answer. His tongue moves down, darting into her navel, his teeth nipping at her, farther down. She raises her head to look down in surprise—he has never done this before. Vich carefully parts her lips with his fingers, flicks his tongue experimentally. He is improvising, different from the man of a few months ago. She lets her head fall back. His weight shifts on the bed. She breathes in, waiting, her hand tightening in his hair. She feels his breath on her, his head poised in the gulf between her thighs.
“Ro-ma,” he murmurs as she pushes his head down.
Ro-ma, it would seem, is humid tonight. There is water in the air, or vice versa; indoors and out, commingled promiscuously in the troughs and sloughs of the city’s contours. In the damp folds of the Velabrum, the wet crease of the Subura, rank vapors and steaminess imply spatterings, localized downpours, short-lived but drastic squalls. Heavy dust-laden fogs lumber into town. Ro-ma drips tears and oozes sweat, secretes and releases drool. Lips pucker or slaver, tongues loll or stiffen. The Caput Mundi grows hydra-headed and thirsty, these mouth-to-mouth exchanges marking junctions, short-lived intersections in the commerce that the city carries on with itself, a new and fluid topography. Its creatures seek each other out in damp-ridden bedchambers and musty attics, in doorways, against the walls of lightless alleys, blind grindings and gropings, mouths crammed with spit, throats gagging on innards, swilling and swallowing and gasping and grunting. … On the piano nobile, in a tangle of come-flecked sweat-soaked sheets, Vich is a muscled darting fish feeding on the water-bleached carrion of his mistress. Beneath a wharf in Trastevere, some Corsican bravo bruises the slack tonsils of his sweetheart. Elsewhere a barge captain licks the plump cheeks of his “Roman heart’s desire” (he calls her that) in a manner practiced on his Magliana, Vicinia, and Ostia “Heart’s desires.” An elderly banker’s wife snacks on her page’s downless upper lip; a tart pulls up her shift. Amongst jangling bits and bridles a saddler plants his laughing mouth over that of his partner’s laughing daughter. A consumptive shoemaker hacks midkiss and coughs a gobbet of gray phlegm down the throat of his perfectly lovely wife. It is a detail: they are in love and have no money. It doesn’t matter that the tart will go unpaid, nor that the page will, that three dogs are fellating themselves in Pescheria, inspiring a baker’s boy who will later try the same in Ponte and find he cannot reach. Think supple, he thinks. … Then again, a stone’s throw away, the Albergo d’Orso, top-floor, east-facing window: An ex-functionary of the Apostolic Camera stands motionless, his bronzed body muscled and naked as a god, eyes searching the anterior darkness while minions tongue him from below, all three waiting for sunrise and ejaculation. Dawn is hours off.
How about nice little dry kisses? Grandpa to granddaughter’s soft white forehead, or tearful mother to departing son, or like Vittoria Colonna’s on the hard dry wood of her crucifix with its little carved Christ, the thorns so well-realized that she has sometimes bloodied her lips, so salty-sharp, mmm-mm, while Papa bites the heads off rats (an untruth, Vittoria’s single sin today) and howls in the dusty gallery where the servants finally abandoned him, alone but for the drummer boys of Ravenna whose tattoo throbs within his skull, stamping madly on the broken boards. … Shall we continue? Cardinal Serra is slumming it on a pallet in Ripa with an unwashed girl from the docks who kisses his “wound,” or sucks out the “lance,” or swabs his face with her vinegary juices, or something equally banal, while downstairs (these events are unrelated), Ascanio and “friend” pour wine down each other’s throats: from the cup, from the jug, from the mouth, from the … And upriver, in the malarial dankness of the Borgo, in the inky darkness of the back hall of the Pilgrim’s Staff, lying together on the straw mattress acquired that afternoon in Peter’s Square, Wolf is kissing Wulf.
Wulf cried earlier, on the way back from the church, but now he has cheered up somewhat and is surreptitiously masturbating under his habit, hoping Wolf will not notice. To one side of him the bulky outline of Bernardo masks the slighter one of Salvestro, who groans softly from time to time. To the other lies Father Jörg. The faint tinkling of sheep bells sounds loud in the night’s stillness, ting, ting, ting, a flock being driven up to the pastures of the Pincio, ting, ting, ting, through the backstreets of the Borgo, across the bridge of Sant’Angelo, silly directionless sheep bumping into one another, bumbling along the Via Lata, fading in and out of earshot, a familiar sound to Rome’s tireless lovers, the smoochers and snoggers, t
he wives of snorers and grinders of teeth, to the earliest of early risers and latest of late sleepers, to the sleep-abandoned. A familiar sound, too—recognized, discounted—to Don Diego, who kisses the pommel of his sword. Lying on his cot, staring into the insomniac darkness, he sees the shapes of enemies: a great gallery of backbiters, suave liars, two-faced placemen, soft-skinned smooth-faced back-stabbers … Ting, ting, ting … Gone.
If I am to be thought a monster, he thinks, sword rising above the first bowed head, why should I not slaughter them all?
The blade quivers and Diego imagines how it will bite the bone of the skull. Or slice the soft flesh of the face. Yes, but whose face? Who, if this scene were actually played, would he drag forward to be the first? The tip of his sword taps the fat chin of Ramon de Cardona, and obediently, slowly (so Diego can savor it—this ritual has been refined in repetition), the fat-faced Viceroy of Naples looks up at his accuser. The moment of recognition. Fear. Excellent, thinks Don Diego.
“Forgive me, Don Diego.”
“Colonel Diego,” Diego corrects him.
“Colonel Diego, forgive me my cowardice at Ravenna, where I—”
But Don Diego, faced with his former commander, cannot restrain himself at the sound of his voice, even imagined. He stabs forward and the tip of his sword disappears into the Viceroy’s throat, abruptly cutting off the confession. Blood runs along the flat of his sword. The Viceroy gurgles and chokes. On his bed, Diego sighs. Patience, he tells himself. Try again. He stares into the teeming darkness, and once again Ramon de Cardona shuffles forward, fat frightened face upturned to his own.
“Forgive me, Colonel Diego. I am a coward. I left my men at Ravenna. I betrayed you at Prato, and afterward …” Don Diego signals for him to pause, then cuts off one of his hands. The Viceroy howls, then continues. “Together with Cardinal Giovanni di Medici, now our Pope, I conspired to place the disgrace of Prato on your shoulders when it was rightfully our own. It is our filth which stains you”—Cardona fouls himself at this point; he seems to be naked now—“mine and the Cardinal’s.”
“How?” demands Diego. “How did you do it?” But Cardona only stammers and sobs. The real Cardona could answer, thinks Don Diego, running him through. He is growing tired of Cardona’s presence in these nightly parades and beckons impatiently to the next witness. Another pudgy body hurries to take the corpse’s place. “Forgive me, Colonel Diego,” begins Cardinal Giovanni di Medici himself, bug-eyed with fear. “I am scum, I am traitorous and mendacious, I—”
“How? How did you do it?” barks Diego. Medici’s stammering. His disgusting sobbing, but no answer. Diego thrusts quickly at his stomach, then slashes sideways. “If not how, why?” he shouts. The prelate looks down in amazement at the innards spilling out of his belly. He tries to gather them in his hands and stuff them back in. Diego cuts his throat. Boring. Who next?
In his mind’s eye a whole crowd of panicky preening courtiers whirls up. Diego scans their faces as they mill about and chatter. They are interchangeable, copies of one another. That was how I missed him, thinks Diego. But the face he seeks soon comes into view, there, at the very edge of this shrieking flock, and there, in its midst, and at its rear, moving smoothly about amongst them. “You!” he commands. “Come here.”
A man in his late thirties steps forward confidently. He is dressed like a courtier, in French silks, sleeves slashed, ostrich feather in his hat. His sword, though, is a heavy steel affair, not the useless brittle rapier affected at court, and his gait is vaguely military, a gentle swagger. His face gives away nothing, and that too is as Don Diego remembers, for the first time he set eyes on the man he saw only that: a face poked through the flaps of a tent.
It had been evening and they were gathered in Cardona’s marquee: he, the Viceroy, five or six of the other commanders. They were arguing about supplies, as they had been the night before and the night before that. They were on the march to Prato.
The army that had left Bologna two weeks before was almost ten thousand strong. They had all but exhausted their own provisions in a week, and the chests loaded with Bolognese ducats were now in the possession of the victuallers who had followed the baggage train, sold their wormy meal and rancid bacon, and turned tail. They were camped near the headwaters of the Savena. A little village had been ransacked the night before while the sergeants stood by, either helpless or cheering on the men. The next day had seen the first attack on the baggage train, and when they’d pitched camp three men, the ringleaders, had been hung. There would be nothing more until Barberino, and even there they might have to fight before they filled their bellies. None of that had been settled yet.
Suddenly there had been horses and shouting outside the tent. They got up quickly, though no alarm had been sounded. It was Medici and a party of horsemen, a dozen or so, who acted as his escort. He came in alone and the talk went on, Medici saying little or nothing, until the talk turned to Prato, which was ruled by an old condottiere called Aldo Tedaldi, according to Cardona, who might or might not resist them.
“Tedaldi? Tedaldi put us to the bother of a siege?” Medici had spoken up abruptly. “Aldo and I all but grew up together. No, no, no. …”
They had accepted that. Medici seemed untroubled, content to leave the situation in their hands. He took a cup of wine or two, listened carefully. A short time later a face poked itself through the flaps of the marquee. Medici looked around, nodded to the man, and bade them all good night. Diego left shortly after, walking the short distance to his tent flanked by Don Luis and Don Alonso, two of his more trusted men-at-arms. Outside, all about them, the darkness seethed with movement. Heads turned toward them and followed them as they passed. In the dark, the men were not bombardiers and pikemen, harquebusiers and crossbowmen, not captains and sergeants, companies and battalions, not Spaniards and Germans, not stradiots, avventureros, and lanze spezzate. They were sloping animals, hungry patches of darkness. By night, the camp was theirs.
“It was you, the face in the tent,” Diego tells the phantom now.
“It was.”
He had seen him throughout the days that followed, but without ever truly taking note. He seemed to move freely and without fear between the various Free Companies, which contained the real rabble, lawless cutthroats and fugitives who had attached themselves to the regular army at Bologna. The whole force moved through the Mugello valley, herded like cattle by their sergeants and captains. When the smoke from a village was sighted ahead, the pace would pick up. The horses dragging the carts and cannon would be whipped to a reluctant trot; eventually the whole army would be charging a cluster of miserable hovels. The villagers had long since fled, taking all they could carry, driving their livestock before them into the hills. They could be seen sometimes on the higher crags overlooking the valley. They were small as flies, watching the straggling carcass that dragged itself along the valley floor far below. The men were racked by dysentery and fevers. Every morning another group of the sickest was left behind, wailing to their comrades not to abandon them. The peasants would sometimes not even wait until the tail end of the army was out of sight before descending to cut their throats.
Diego organized forage parties and vanguards, sent out scouts. Medici himself seemed serene while the force that was to oust the Podesta and return him to Florence degenerated into a starving mob. The nights were broken with shrieks and cries as suspected thieves were beaten to death by their comrades. Patrolling the column of carts and cannons with his men-at-arms, Diego saw a blankness in the men’s faces. Their eyes would fix on a distant outcrop of rock and not see a man an arm’s length away. The attacks on the baggage carts were desperate skirmishes, the looters almost oblivious of their own injuries. It was Florence that drew them on; La Crasa Puta, they called her. They would rip her open and feed on her like wolves. Prato was nothing more than a name.
As the army crawled down the valley of the Mugello, the common soldiers seemed to detach themselves from the spine of carts and cannons
and spread out to fill the broadening floor of the valley. They moved like cattle, stumbling forward aimlessly. Riding high on the right-hand slope, Diego looked down at the horde strung out below. He saw a beaten army; within it, an army of murderers. Medici’s sergeant moved through all this unscathed.
“There was a meeting before we reached Prato, was there not, between Cardinal Medici and an envoy from Florence?” Diego inquires now of the foppish sergeant. He thinks of hauling up Medici by the ears again and tickling between his legs with the point of a dagger, but the sergeant will do as well. “I would run you through if I found you alone,” he adds before the man can answer.
“I do not doubt it. And yes, there was a meeting, but I can say no more than that.”
In the darkness of his bedchamber, Don Diego conceives the sergeant standing before him awkwardly, staring at the ground between them, discomfited by the interrogation. But pleading for a hearing? Pressing his case? Begging for his life? That he cannot imagine. “You were not at the center of this business, I know,” he tells the man. “But you were its functionary. Without you, or another like you, I would not have been entrapped. …”
He stops. The man is laughing at him.
“Entrapped? Don’t you understand that you were the factotum all along? Without you, none of it was possible. Without you, Captain Diego.”
“Colonel,” grumbles Diego, thinking, True, true, but how? He jabs at the sergeant with his sword, which disappears into the man’s chest to no obvious effect and reemerges bloodless.
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 29