The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  It seemed to the two observers that a maddened and mud-bespattered water buffalo had burst among the unsuspecting crowd, upending pilgrims by the plankful as it cut a swath of chaos in pursuit of the absconding trio. All four disappeared around a bend in the embankment while men and women picked themselves up out of the mud, gazed about in baleful shock, and then began to brush at patches of filth on their clothes, making them worse.

  “That’s the second time,” said Salvestro. “They’ll be back again in a minute.”

  They were.

  “Stop!” barked HansJürgen, and the three novices skidded to a halt, looking up wild-eyed with their shouts and laughter dying on their lips, suddenly the still point amongst the lurching pilgrims about them. “Come here!”

  Bernardo reappeared, charging around the corner, heedless of the various pilgrim-shaped obstructions that melted magically at his approach or found themselves facedown in the mud. He ground to a halt at the sight of the three of them, momentarily baffled by this conclusion to the pursuit.

  “Up here!” Salvestro called, then turned to HansJürgen. “We saw them down there and thought they were lost,” he explained, “so Bernardo volunteered to, er, collect them. We thought …”

  “Quite,” replied HansJürgen. “That was the right thing to do. I was in search of them myself.” He eyed the trio sternly as they trudged up the stairs from the river and waited at the end of the bridge. Wilf looked back at their late pursuer who was trudging up the steps after them. All three began once again to giggle. “Silence!” HansJürgen shouted, then turned back to Salvestro. “Thank you,” he said, and hesitated as if he might say more. He felt awkward, beholden somehow. He is a hired lance, and faithless, HansJürgen reminded himself. He had avoided the two of them since they had found him on the beach, as though his helplessness then were shaming. A few words had passed between them on the journey. That was all.

  They walked back against the flow of the crowd with Bernardo at their head, Salvestro and HansJürgen bringing up the rear. The three youngsters chattered in guarded voices between them.

  “Did you see the Pope?” Salvestro asked at one point.

  “No,” HansJürgen replied shortly.

  Dusk was falling as they took an alley off the Via Alessandrina. The streets narrowed and darkened until it seemed to HansJürgen that night had fallen, though when he paused outside the entrance to the Stick and looked up, the sky was still luminous. Joachim-Heinz and Heinz-Joachim had returned in their absence. They had decided to divide and scout out the river from opposite banks, switching over by the bridges at Tiber island. Joachim-Heinz had observed the latter part of Bernardo’s pursuit of the three novices until he had lost sight of them under the bridge at Sant’Angelo. Matthias limped in a little later, helped by Georg. A horse had kicked him. Only Gerhardt was still missing.

  Father Jörg lay on his pallet, his lips moving almost imperceptibly in prayer. The other monks gathered in twos and threes to talk in undertones HansJürgen could not hear. Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf fidgeted and jabbered together in whispers. Only their two guides seemed at ease, Salvestro dozing, Bernardo picking the mud from his clothes as it dried. HansJürgen thought to join the Prior in his devotions, but he could not settle. Blind, or almost blind. … He marveled again at his own stupidity. How many of the others had understood the weakness revealed that afternoon? It hardly mattered; they would learn it soon enough. Such a thing could not be concealed. Bring this day to a close, he thought.

  He might have fallen asleep, though it was brief and troubled. A sudden commotion had him stirring, looking about him. What? The brothers were getting to their feet. Where was Jörg?

  “Brothers, today we have been tested. Our hardships have changed their natures. …”

  To what? HansJürgen found himself asking. He struggled to his feet as Jörg spoke of their mishaps, recasting them as tests and trials, necessities on the path to reward. He spoke forcefully at first, and the monks hung on his words. They want to believe, HansJürgen thought, or wished. Soon, though, he began to drift and ramble, to repeat himself, and HansJürgen felt the same drift move through his audience. Then, in the midst of this address, the door banged open.

  Jörg stopped and turned to the source of the noise. Gerhardt stood in the doorway. There was a short awkward silence before Jörg said, “You are late, Brother.” Gerhardt was white with dust from the crown of his head to the soles of his sandals, his appearance made even stranger by Jörg’s failure to mention it. He made a casual apology, and Jörg returned to his theme, which had become an analogy between their own misfortunes and the Pope’s; but the monks were no longer listening. They glanced about at Gerhardt, who stood in their midst pulling their attention to himself while outwardly hanging rapt on the words of his Prior. When Jörg was finished it was Gerhardt they watched as he strode to his pallet on the far side of the chamber. Hanno and Georg followed.

  The monks settled slowly that night, carefully picking at the lumps that had formed in their mattresses, going out in ones and twos to splash water on their faces. New rituals, thought HansJürgen. His unease ballooned inside him.

  Father Jörg had taken out his quill and was writing with painstaking slowness, his face only inches from the parchment.

  “The Devil conjured cities for Christ in the wilderness, to test him, and to test his worthiness. Just so do the monks of Usedom face this city called Roma. Some see a city of churches and pilgrims. Others see only difficulties and tasks which they would rather leave to others. Some will persevere, and others will not. The monks of Usedom will be winnowed here, as Christ was, and the chaff will be threshed away. Already the husks are peeling off the corn. …”

  Jörg paused there, not quite sure how to proceed. There were matters he wished to treat of and yet no manner in which to treat them. He listened to the sounds in the chamber: low murmurs, straw-rustles, the odd cough or sneeze … Then the scratch of his nib as he resumed.

  “Their Prior led the monks of Usedom to Roma, but some came only against their will…”

  He stopped again. He heard the same sounds as before. Other than these, there was silence. Gerhardt, Hanno, and Georg were still huddled together on the far side of the room, the latter two nodding from time to time. Jörg bent over his parchment and began scribbling more quickly than before, his earlier reservations brushed aside.

  “Their Prior found in Rome that his enemies had not changed. Brother Gerhardt plotted against him on the island and undermined him in Rome. He mocked his Prior, and the monks of Usedom ignored his authority, mocking him, too. To begin with, he would disappear for the best part of the day in order to raise speculation about his true activities. Thus were the monks of Usedom distracted from the proper object of their attention, namely their Prior. After that he would gather select groups of malcontents and instill in their breasts the selfsame bile which poisoned his own, namely envy, for he once believed that he would be Prior himself, but Our Lord directed otherwise. …”

  He continued in this vein for the remainder of the page, then stopped and began to read through what he had written.

  HansJürgen lay back on his pallet, watching Gerhardt out of the corner of his eye and listening to the sound of Jörg’s writing. Gradually the tiny noises ceased: the nib stopped scratching as Jörg ceased his account, the rustling quietened, only a few low voices disturbed the hush. The Prior was still bent over his parchment when he motioned with his hand for the lights to be put out. The smell of candle-smoke drifted around the chamber. He heard the Prior shift and guessed that he had taken up his quill once again. Its point scratched across the parchment, but more harshly than before and the same motion over and over again. He is scratching it out, HansJürgen realized belatedly, whatever he had been writing. … He was asleep, or on the brink of sleep, when the voice sounded in his ear.

  “It was lime dust. We saw him at the quarry.”

  He could not rouse himself in time. He raised his head, but there was no one. Lime dust.
Quarry. … Was there more? The voice had been Salvestro’s.

  “Ghiberti.”

  “Holiness?”

  “Where is Sergeant Rufo?”

  A serving man bearing a candle-snuffer maneuvers himself gingerly through the panel door in the far chamber, catches sight of the two men, and stops, legs straddling the sill. Leo gestures impatiently for him to get on with his business. Soon candle-smoke wafts toward them from within the darkening room. Minatory rumblings gurgle in the softness of his bowels; tomorrow’s turd promises much pain. It is possible, he thinks, that Leno’s intelligence will prove baseless. And it is possible, he thinks, that it will not. Only Rufo will know with certainty, for only Rufo came face-to-face with them. They listen to the man pad about in the adjacent room. Rufo and, perhaps, the Colonel. At length, the far door closes.

  Ghiberti says, “I believe he is in the service of the Republic of Venice, Holiness.”

  Is it foolish of him to reconvene Prato’s combatants here in Rome? Would it not be more foolish for him to do nothing while they maneuver about him? Undirected, men err. Misdirected, they sin. Misfortunes follow, and gluttonous categories yawn open: the cavernous “Unforeseen,” the engulfing “Unexpected,” dimensionless as the adjacent darkened sala with spongy Bishop-of-Spezia lips. The future almost always exceeds expectation. … Is this wise?

  Yes; he thinks, weighing, pondering, best to err on the side of caution. Better to have their throats cut.

  “Send for him,” he says.

  “…?”

  “…!”

  It takes a week. Premasticated by clerkly molars and part dissolved in the mouth-juices of garrulous papal fonctionnaires, this juicy morsel of gossip is passed mouth-to-mouth Tiber-ward, west across the bridge, then coughed up in the city proper: a sickly information-slick to be sniffed as cautious dogs sniff the acidic foam on one another’s vomit. What’s His Roly-Poly Holiness up to now?

  “The Bishop of Spezia?”

  “That was months ago. …”

  “It was last week.”

  But it isn’t the Bishop of Spezia, and it isn’t the escalating rat-problem, and it isn’t the eels, either. Disrobed women and semipublic copulation? Buggery? The French? No, no, no, no. … Well-placed sources from the kitchens to the Apostolic Camera report a conversation. …

  “Bor—and may I add—ing.”

  “No, wait, listen to this. …”

  There follows, “Mmm-hmmm,” and “Uh-huh,” and “So what?”

  So this is not exactly Rome’s staple rumor-fare; no pratfalls, pranks, or pox. No precipitous falls from grace or richly deserved comeuppance, not a mention of the ever-unpopular Cardinal Armellini. The city’s ticklish collective cortex sweats in its travertine-and-tufa brainpan. The gossip meanwhile mutates, sprouts odd prehensile limbs, gradually becoming something Rome can recognize. … Enter the Rumor-Beast, sporting a pelt of voided velvet with a pomegranate design, seven legs, a single head, and three tails (two more than the average Englishman). Iberia-on-Tiber is at odds with itself, bruits the Beast, extending a number of lobster-like antennae. Ambassadorial discontent is hardly enthralling but at least offers a point of purchase on this nebulous and somewhat abstract anecdote.

  “Well, what would you expect from the Portingales?”

  “And the Spaniards.”

  “Hmmm. … Do they really brush their teeth in piss?”

  The Rumor-Beast gallops about, evolving and disintegrating, shedding a pair of udders in Pescheria; growing gills in Ponte; in next-door Parione excreting a bubble of quivering mucus within which movement becomes more labored, notwithstanding the addition of fifteen virile tentacles. A last sad schlepp down the Via delle Botteghe Oscure, a slimy southward sashay for the salving river. … Too late. Fate decrees suffocation within an exoskeletal carapace of its own sun-hardened snot. The Beast is dead. The Rumor lives on. A gravelly tongue slaps and slobbers in the ears of hemispherical friars, demimondaines, quavering, crotchety semirecluses …

  “They’re as bad as each other, arrogant bastards.”

  “Haughty, I’d say.”

  “Right, haughty bastards. …”

  Proud, too, and overbearing, and … Well, the Rumor finds its first and easiest handhold in Rome’s multiple xenophobias, for just as Bohemians are heretics and all Poles are thieves, so Florentines are grasping sodomites, Venetians uppity, and Neapolitans fit only for simple agricultural tasks. The Hungarians? They flap their arms while drinking and wear strangely formless hats. The English are foulmouthed, avaricious, insular, reeking, tailed toads, while Germans eat like pigs and make boring conversation. The second-best feature of the French is their singing, which sounds like a nanny goat giving birth to a cathedral. The best is their departure back over the Alps two years ago. A few toothless relics of the Borgia’s tenure rattle around in the wings of decayed palazzi, jealous guardians of the limpieza di sangre clotting in their veins, geriatric boosters of the Black Legend, who can’t for the dwindling life of them see how chasing about the Indies for weird animals accords with the hard-won Spanish reputation for extreme military cruelty. The contest finds more cheerful acceptance in Rome’s stables and cheaper bordellos, amongst the grooms, whores, and soldiers on secondment from Cardona’s army in Naples who swagger and strut about, propping their stubbly chins on the counters of Ripa’s taverns while affecting a complaisant impartiality and placing bets on the outcome.

  “Gambling! Another unattractive Iberian vice.”

  “Gambling on what?”

  This is far from clear. Further Rumor-modulations play on the city’s taste for exotica. Dear old Hanno is implicated in the odd tripartite contract hammered out in the gardens of the Belvedere (this meeting now being reported as “ill-tempered” and even “stormy”), the elephant’s popularity feeding a burgeoning Roman curiosity as to the identity of the beast to be procured, the more bizarre the better. The Camelopardis is a strong contender, also the fearsome Scaly Boar, various dragons … Kite-flying is the very lifeblood of a vigorous and rudelimbed Rumor, it being closely akin to appetite and metaphor.

  “It has”—Colonna pauses, sighs, exhales, ponders, heaves himself upright, begins taking off his shirt—” a most impervious armored hide.” Vittoria tsks and clucks as her father repeats this bon mot, watched by one hundred and twenty-seven pairs of eyes. Off come his shoes. Soon he is stark naked, hat excepted. Vittoria leads him out quietly. Why must he always do this during Mass? Does he not love God? The arrow digs a little deeper into his skull.

  “Hooves.” A dwarf says this to his dwarfish wife in a sweltering attic-room of the Vatican. (Rumor thrives on feedback.) “Hooves,” she repeats. It becomes a password between them. A troupe of their relatives is planning to descend on them from Magdeburg sometime in the late summer and try their luck with the Pope, who is said to like dwarfs. “Hooves,” he says again.

  “Hooves,” says his wife.

  “Tail like a rat,” mutters Cardinal Serra in his apartment a quarter of a mile away. “Perhaps it is a rat.” He is grumpy because Vich will not take him into his confidence and has refused three successive invitations to dinner in the past month alone. Something’s in the air, he smells it, something to do with Ayamonte. A rat.

  “… and it sleeps by leaning against a tree, for, lacking joints in its knees, once toppled it may not right itself. A large saw and a larger store of patience are all that is required. The beast is yours. Alternatively it may be lured out and tamed using virgins. It is very partial to virgins, this beast. …” They nod.

  In the locked basement of a farmhouse on the Pincio, isolated, carefully chosen, stinking of mildewed plaster and cowshit, La Cavallerizza throws red hair over her naked shoulders and clamps her thighs tight about the boy’s face. A threatening flick from one pointed fingernail to the bobbing member draws the reluctant tongue upward into her innards. She settles herself more firmly in the saddle. “What (oof) I want to know (unnnk)…” Vitelli looks at his wife in mild surprise as the boy
begins to struggle. She reaches for his testicles. “…is how big (uurgh) is this horn (aaagh) on the end (aaargh!) of its nose?” Eeeurgh-aaAARGHH!

  “But most important of all…” They lean across the table, politely agog. “… really, of the utmost significance …” They incline their heads to become mirror-images of each other’s rapt and patient fascination. “…absolutely key to an understanding of this beast. …” Their heads touch, their attentions being that undivided. “…is that it absolutely loathes elephants.”

  Thank you.

  The animal swells like a bladder puffed with boozy breath and collapses like a lung. Printers around the city sell out their editions of Pliny’s Natural History and print more, which sell out, too. Informal factions coalesce about the Spanish and Portuguese, whose contest becomes heroic, or fierce, or faintly ludicrous, depending upon the circumstance. The Pope is generally applauded, though for what remains unclear. Grooms groom, menders mend, diggers dig, drunks drink. … Everyone talks. Rome’s gossipmongers find their calling infested with rank amateurs who prove alarmingly adept at the Confiding Whisper, the Wild Claim, and the Vague and Unfounded Assertion. They take refuge in hyperbole and lying.

  “Why?” asked Salvestro.

  “Why indeed?” replied Pierino. “It is an enigma.”

  “So the Elephant and the Enigma, they would be old enemies,” offered Bernardo. The onlookers who gathered about their table attended the conversation more closely as he spoke. “This is very simple. It’s like Christians and Turks, or cats and dogs, or the French and, er …”

  “Everyone else?” supplied Lucullo.

  “Yes,” agreed Bernardo. “The Enigma is like Everyone Else.”

  “And Everyone Else is the Enigma?” Everyone else nodded.