The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  On the floor below, Leno hears it, too. He ignores it—and most sensibly, for it tells him nothing, cannot be sold, is valueless. Rough-cut marble is twenty-three giulii the toise. That’s a fact. He employs two hundred and five men and women: another fact. One hundred and thirty-two of them in workshops owned by him outright behind the Via delle Botteghe Oscure. One hundred and four of them Jews. Fact, fact. He is waiting for the Pope in the anteroom of the Sala Regia. A fact? What if His Holiness does not come? An abstract fact. Useless.

  Further: There are a hundred giulii to the scudo, and twenty soldi to a Genoese lira, fifteen of those to the English pound. The florin and Venetian zecchino are firm at one to one. There are four soldi to a cavalotto, six quatrines to a soldo, one of those to two Genoese denarii, four to a baiocco, ten of those to the giulio, or paolino, or carlino, though you don’t see many of those nowadays. No one in his right mind accepts dalers, and the same goes for stivers, batzen, and copstucks. This is all very diverting. One hundred and fourteen Milanese soldi buy a single silver crown, which equals three Genoese lira plus a number of Roman soldi fluctuating between twelve and twenty. Four bagatini make a quatrino. Fact, fact, fact.

  A riddle: If one Venetian ducat is a little under two and a half livres tournois, and a toise of rough-cut marble is sold at five and a quarter livres, how many toises will fill his largest purse—capacity: one foglietto, usual weight: one libbra—with Venetian ducats? Answer: Not all the quarries in Christendom. Ha ha. The Republic’s ducat is money of account, a figure in the ledger, a handshake and settle up next year at Besançon. Hurry up, he thinks, fidgeting on the bench.

  From time to time members of Leo’s famiglia poke their heads around the door, stare at him, then withdraw. An official he knows from the Camera nods to him. Some young men leapfrog each other down the corridor, then run away. It is warm, waiting in the antechamber. He is sweating. Bibbiena wouldn’t have forgotten him, would he? Or decided to forget him? It wouldn’t be the first time; a good laugh at the expense of Signor Giuliano Leno, left waiting for the day. Price each guffaw at a giulio, how much would that come to per annum? Last year someone tallied up the number of pasquinades against each of those lampooned, then chalked the results on Pasquino’s chest. Amongst the most reviled inhabitants of Rome, Giuliano Leno ranked second.

  Muffled shouting reaches him then, rolling down the corridor from the courtyard of San Damaso. The noise increases, becomes part groan, a strange mix of applause and disappointment. It begins to subside. The noise the petitioners make, thinks Leno. Petitioners imply the Pope, thus more waiting for himself, and—two lira to the justino—the hardening conviction that Bibbiena has decided to add a giulio or two to the mockery-account. Or a soldo, a full scudo. … Then, as if to confirm his fears, the sound of laughter assails him. And then, as if to allay them, the Pope appears, flanked by Bibbiena and Dovizio at the far end of the corridor.

  The three of them pause. More laughter, some embracing. Bibbiena’s green-trimmed hat bobs up and down. Leno stands up to be noticed and organizes his thoughts: Vich and Serra, that’s good, though his man caught nothing of their conversation. The monks, too, it will amuse His Holiness, and while he is still chuckling, ask him about the bill. The Camera has delayed his payment again, and he is down to a skeleton crew. Dovizio takes the big man by the arm; Bibbiena catches sight of him standing there and raises a hand before he is led away. Leno waves back quickly. The Pope composes himself, then marches quickly toward him, hardly stopping to take his arm, sweeping him up and continuing.

  “What news, Leno?” he asks briskly, propelling him forward, releasing him to take a narrow spiral staircase whose wooden steps become stone ones halfway down, then give out onto a broad, high-ceilinged corridor echoing the one above. Barred vents set high on one side admit vivid shafts of light. On the other, arched openings in the brickwork hung with sackcloth disgorge a clangor of pots and pans, cooking smells, and aproned scullions who shoot in and out the doorways while being shouted at from within. Men balance trays on their head and stagger about, trying not to collide with others carrying firewood, fish-barrels, huge steaming tureens. A barrowload of calves’ heads is wheeled past. A second is filled with eels. It is hotter down here, Leno realizes as he relays to the Pope what was relayed to him the previous night sometime after midnight and wipes furtively at the sweat trickling stickily from his armpits.

  “Vich and Serra?” Leo queries at one point, but otherwise he is silent, content to watch the whirl of sauciers and sous-chefs, bloodied butcher’s boys and pot-scrubbers, their swervings, near-collisions, and hops over the gutterful of rancid water that runs down the center of the passageway. From time to time, billowing clouds of steam and smoke lift the greasy sacking. Within, the two men glimpse fires and huge red-faced men wielding meat cleavers.

  “Go on,” says the Pope. Leno is telling him about the fracas. His Holiness repeats the choicer morsels in absentminded good humor: “Monks? German monks?” And then, “Quoting Gratianus? Poor Serra. …” Mention of Signora Vitelli brings an arch expression to Leo’s face and a comment in Latin about backward-facing horsemen, Parthians or something, Leno doesn’t catch it. “Well, Colonna was mad even before Ravenna,” says the Pope a few minutes later. “Presumably even more so now.”

  “Oh yes,” Leno agrees happily, but then remembers his man’s report, which had grown garbled toward its conclusion—had he truly seen the evening out as promised?—difficult to disentangle. A dull crash sounds above the din of the kitchen, followed by anguished cursing. “Actually, no,” he corrects himself. “It turned out that two of the monks’ men had seen action at Ravenna. He was happy enough to release them.”

  “The monks?”

  “No, their men. Vich’s captain vouched for them.” The Pope gazes blandly at the sacking over the nearest doorway. The bellowing within has reached a new pitch. He turns to Leno as the other continues, “Your name was mentioned. They claimed to have fought for you, too. …”

  More bellowing. A crisis in the kitchens? Leno stops.

  “Continue,” says the Pope.

  An eel appears. Its head peeks out from under the sacking and waves from side to side, sniffing for water. The eel distracts Leno, and the amusing tale he has brought along to tell grows messy, slippery. He cannot remember the name of the captain. The eel makes a dart for the gutter, slithers in, and starts swimming. Two others appear, and three more behind them. And their former captain, had he been delighted to see them or displeased? It was one or the other, and he had called them something. … It is all suddenly snarled in itself, and awkward, and the Pope seems unamused.

  “They were Diego’s men,” Leo says abruptly. “They acted under his orders.”

  That was the name—Diego—floating free of some weighty introspection that seems to have seized the Pope and now carries him away. Leno cannot keep up with it. Ragged pot-boys are leaping into the passageway armed with brushes and short-handled rakes to drive back the advancing flood of eels—several dozen of them now. Why is His Holiness not doubled up with laughter at this? He observes coldly as eels curl themselves about ankles, slither into the gutter, are picked up by the tail and thrown into pots and buckets. Leo does not smile at the eely japes and wiles. One is attempting the stairs. A private cargo carried on a private current of thought. Leno flounders in its wake.

  “If it would please Your Holiness to know more of these two, or the monks …”

  That rouses him. “Do not give it a second thought, dear Giuliano. It was the mention of Vich’s creature, that is all.” An expression of world-weary regret sinks furrows in his countenance. “Prato still pains me, even now. …” He is briefly noble in his melancholy.

  Leno nods sympathetically, feigning comprehension: Prato means the wool trade, dyeing and weaving, a fair in the autumn switched to Florence (unsuccessfully) during the occupation a couple of years ago, or was it three? He is given no time to reflect on these various possibilities. Eel-anguish has become eel-ir
ritation: biting and general slitheriness have replaced earlier thoughts of escape. The beslimed and bloody-fingered pot-boys scrabble bravely for their tails, and the Pope at last acknowledges the spillage of torrid kitchen-chaos that assaults them now from all sides.

  “These eels!” he exclaims. “Should we give the boys a hand, Giuliano? Or shall we take the side of the eels?” Leno laughs along, uncertain how, or if, to answer. The Pope turns for the staircase.

  They talk of the relentless steaming that Rome will soon receive at the hands of the punitive Roman sun, the worsening rat-problem, Leo’s longed-for villegiatura (still months away), and the stables under construction for La Magliana, a blockish mausoleum for horses and their keepers. But the time to mention the balance on the excavations at Saint Peter’s seems in perpetual deferment, inappropriate when the Pope is talking so wittily of yesterday’s lumpish orators and their rendezvous with his elephant, ill-advised while the Pope kindly praises his decorative crenellation atop the Torre degli Anguillara, unmentionable amongst mild complaints about the recementing of the loggia in the Belvedere, and unpaid on his dismissal.

  Thirteen hundred scudi d’oro. But he has been paid the compliment of a private audience seven times since the Pope’s accession: in the vestry of the Chapel of Nicholas V, in the room off the tinello where the serving trays were stored; a part-demolished pavilion in the gardens to the west of the palace; very briefly at the rear door of Leo’s palazzo in Ponte, when he had been told to come back the next day, so twice there; once outside the closet while His Holiness evacuated his bowels within. They conversed through the door. Today, of course, in a passage-way by the kitchens. Most cherished moments, all. Leo glides away, waving. Leno turns for the door.

  The unlucky petitioners are drifting out of the arched doorway from the courtyard of San Damaso, a morose herd whose disappointment engulfs him as he waits for his horse. He feels inviolable, anointed amongst the unanointed. Thirteen hundred is not so much. He mounts and rides through the crowd, past the steps to the old basilica, taking the street running along its south side. The shadow of the obelisk falls on the wreckage of Santa Petronilla, still piled against the dwarfed turret of Santa Maria della Febbre. A few wagons are lined up against the wall, with men sitting idly beside them. The rutted ground makes his horse stumble. He halts there and looks up.

  Out of ground scarred with trenches and pits, a huge ruin looms above him. Four brutish piers of stone reduce the surrounding houses, chapels, and inns to a scattering of hutches and hovels, the shards and splinters shed by these hulking blockhouses in their eruption out of the ground. Their formless tonnage heaves skyward, where, gaining height, they become the bell towers of a race of titans, vast and impossible, and then …

  And then nothing. Precarious vaulting links two of them. Below, figures the size of insects pick their way through piles of unused masonry and wood to inspect dilapidated bits of stonework. Some friars are laughing amongst themselves on the other side of the site; two fastidious mules have stopped in front of a shallow pool of water; some children throw stones at the nearest of the piers. Leno looks back over his shoulder. Towers of white smoke fatten and rise in the sky a mile or two to the east as though in mockery of these behemoths’ bulk. The lime kilns are working full tilt. When he looks back, he sees that one of his workmen is pointing across the broken ground toward him. One of the friars is with him, peering over with a hand raised against the sunlight. His happy rosary starts up again: a hundred giulii to the scudo, and twenty soldi to a Genoese lira, fifteen of those to the English pound. Cloth and stone, he thinks, turning his horse about. Rome shucks its shift fifteen times a day, but the body beneath is stretched and scabbed. The old sow peers at her litter and sees faces of old men. Peter’s basilica is barely conceived and ruinous already. Four soldi to a cavalotto, six quatrines to a soldo, one of those to two Genoese denarii, four to a baiocco …

  ’Are you Leno?”

  He looks down, startled. A rough face stares back up at him evenly.

  ” I said, Are you Leno?” the fellow demands again. “Because if you are, I have a proposition for you.”

  Proposition? The ruffian has taken his horse by the bit. The presumption! But a proposition. A proposition comes without charge. Propositions have served him well in the past. The ruffian waits. He looks more closely and sees that the rags twined about the man’s body are actually a habit. A proposition from a monk?

  “What?” he says.

  His own face stared up at him, wavering, its bony angles rendered more severe in the cool dawn light. He plunged his hands through the cheeks and scooped freezing water to splash on his forehead, feeling it trickle down over his eyes and mouth to his throat, where he brushed it off. A few strands of straw floated in the bucket. The water was black and ill-tempered now, slopping at the sides.

  He led them in silent prayer before they set out, though the shouts and thudding footsteps of the Pilgrim’s Staff’s other inhabitants broke in on their devotions and he found the stillness he sought elusive. Their chamber abutted the passageway, which led to a tiny courtyard where the sky was a small square of light high above framed by the sheer walls of the hostel. Men and women crowded about the well here each morning to fill their buckets before tramping back through the passageway to their quarters elsewhere in the hostel. The footsteps seemed so loud, almost deafening. Jörg opened his eyes and saw in the candlelight the other monks on their knees, each beside his pallet, hands brought together beneath the chin. Pray with me, he thought. Not against me.

  But he felt easy in himself, addressing them. The terrors and hardships of their journey were behind them. This was their moment of ease, too. Besieged in ignorance, they had fought their way out to reach the safety of their commander’s citadel. His largesse was their salvation. He told them this. Their habits were like gray stones, like monuments to themselves. He felt their attentions gather and turn on him.

  On waking and lighting the first candle hours before, he had seen the giant lying on his mattress, gnawing on something. A cabbage-stalk? Salvestro had been asleep, but tossing and turning as though in the grip of a nightmare. The bruising on his face was a vague mass of blues and purples. For whose sins? wondered Father Jörg. The two of them had left before the other monks had woken, although Wolf had stirred, or was it Wilf, asking them anxiously where they were going. He had reassured the novice that the two of them would return, but why should that be true?

  The question returned to him unbidden as the monks finished their private prayers. During the journey, the two men had camped apart from the brothers, had walked on ahead for much of the time. Nothing had passed between them and Gerhardt as he had feared it might. Their duties were done now. Why should they stay?

  Then he heard HansJürgen chivying the others, little flurries of action and commotion stirring him and breaking in on these thoughts. His heart began to sing. So many days had had to pass before this one, days like quicksand and un-bridged ravines, like undertows and blizzards, days to be struggled through and broken down, their shards left strewn behind them. Days like ice. If he closed his eyes, he could remember the first of thern, the sound the tiles had made as they shattered on the floor of the church, itself buckling, its flagstones snapping like cakes of powder. Today was the day they all folded into, which would gather them and lay them end to end, making of them a bridge or passage to this place, which was Rome. And to Rome’s master, for today they would petition His Holiness.

  “No,” said the first of the bancherotti. “Can’t help you with this.” He was slightly built, with a neatly trimmed red beard whose point waggled from side to side as he shook his head. “Nice piece, though.”

  The next one weighed it in one hand, held it up to the sunlight, commented appreciatively on the quality of the silver, but then said, “Don’t really handle this stuff,” and nodded them farther down the piazza.

  The morning’s pilgrimage was beginning in earnest: the flow of men, horses, asses, and wagons streami
ng across the Ponte Sant’Angelo already filled the Borgo Vecchio and Via Alessandrina, debouching into the piazza, where the current grew turbid and contradictory, little eddies forming about the hawkers of food, water, straw, bad wine, copies of Veronica’s handkerchief, and plaster heads of Saint John. The river split there, throwing out an arm to the stalls of the bancherotti that lined the side nearest the Via dell’Elefante. Pilgrims carried thence would throw down their bags of coins with a thump on the long tables, demand the day’s rate for groats, or stivers, or gulden, or Lübeck shillings, then howl robbery, haggle, curse, claim to have been offered a rate twice the one offered now only two minutes ago, at which the bancherotto, having been summoned by the dawn carillon of Santo Spirito’s bells to the daily bleary-eyed money changers’ meeting in the lower room of the Inn of the Horn of Plenty, having greeted there his sleep-befuddled competitors and then fixed with them the day’s rate for upward of twenty different currencies, and feeling some hours later that anything agreed at so ungodly an hour should be stuck to even if only to justify getting out of bed so early, would advise the pilgrim to take the earlier rate or otherwise send him packing, and then the pilgrim would mutter, groan, plead, but eventually accept and walk away with a bulging bag of Roman soldi and scudi d’oro. It was business as usual in the piazza.

  But Bernardo’s and Salvestro’s business was not usual, or not usual enough. They trooped from one bench to the next, collecting suspicious glances at the spectacular purple-blue bruises adorning one side of Salvestro’s face and comments like “Interesting,” or “Beautiful filigree,” or “Haven’t seen the likes of this before” from a succession of men who weighed the heavy scabbard in their scales, scraped at the oily patina with their fingernails, or held it up to the sunlight, then continued, “But I’m afraid …” or “Unfortunately …” or, most frequently, “No.”