The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  At first, as talk of this latest Hispano-Lusitanian spat scended and breasted the abutments of Rome’s inert attention, the Broken Wheel maintained a lofty disdain, a faintly self-conscious insouciance compounded of genuine ignorance and the patrons’ clubbish resistance to whatever the rest of the city finds noteworthy. The tavern’s bordelloish light suggests a perpetual “just before midnight”: opaque mustards grounded on candlelight-through-cheap-wine crimsons and pinks. Who cares about diplomacy when disinterest is so sublime? For three weeks this was the party line, which the recently dubbed “Enigma” dispensed with in three minutes flat, busting horn-first through the wall with a buffoonish butt of its head and setting the wagging tongues of the Broken Wheel’s topers flip-flopping with talk of its improbable anatomy. The tavern’s idiolect quickly gained mastery of the word “perissodactyl,” and Salvestro and Bernardo found themselves coopted as resident weird beast experts. The “Master Explorers” tag has stuck.

  “But what I want to know,” Pierino continued, “if our Pope loves his elephant so passionately, is what does he want with its most fearsome enemy, this … enigma?”

  “Popes want whatever they cannot have,” a voice piped up near the back of those gathered about their table. The speaker was a man whose features crowded together near the center of his face, giving his head a deceptively swollen look. “Usually it’s the revenues of the Duchy of Modena. I was a copyist in the Camera under Julius. He wanted to build the greatest church in Christendom for three and a half soldi. …”

  “That would be it,” said Salvestro, and was about to develop the point when a second voice broke in.

  “It would be better to ask why the Spaniards or the Portingales are so eager to give it to him.” A tall man with a high shiny forehead; those around him peered up in mild indignation. Who was this lanky oddball to offer unwanted advice to the master explorers? “And where are they going to get this animal, anyway?” he went on.

  A few of the more belligerent listeners muttered, “Shut up,” or, “Mind your mouth, beanpole,” but Salvestro held up his hand to quell them.

  “Fair questions both. I myself have yet to see an Enigma for sale in Navona,” he answered genially. “Where indeed? And why?” He contemplated both questions for a moment. “Bernardo?”

  Bernardo had been nodding along sagely. Now he looked up, startled, to find the eyes of their audience upon him. From across the table, Lucullo and Pierino watched expectantly.

  “Right,” he said. “Well, not here. So, somewhere else. When I think of where such a beast would be found, I don’t think of anywhere in particular. I’d start by going somewhere I’ve never been before to see if that’s where it is. If it isn’t, I’d go somewhere else, like, uh …” He floundered for a few seconds.

  “Good God, the man’s a marvel!” Lucullo burst out then, and the crowd, which felt perhaps the first uneasy stirrings of skepticism at Bernardo’s answer, performed a swift volte-face. Warm agreement prevailed as Lucullo continued, “Where and why? Nonsense! Bernardo here leaps straight to the crux. It’s the ‘how’ that matters, that’s what he’s telling us. That’s real independent thinking for you!”

  “Exactly!” Bernardo exclaimed, deciding to join the sudden consensus. He scanned the complaisant faces and nodding heads before him for that of their interrogator, but the lanky man had disappeared.

  Looking at the same beaming and amicable countenances of their adoring audience, Salvestro thought to himself, We should have come to Rome a long time ago. Then, following close on its heels, the accompanying thought came to him, as it had the day before and the day before that: We should have fled this place the very day we arrived. For there was still the Colonel. Somewhere within the same city that clasped him so fondly to its breast, the Colonel awaited him. Welcome to Rome. … They had been there twenty-five days. The face would come at him in the pitch-dark of his waking and would not be dispelled until he rose, stumbled over the sleeping bodies of the monks, and splashed a little water on his face from the well in the yard. Twenty-five such thoughts and twenty-five reprieves to match them. When he returned to rouse Bernardo, the soldier would start to fade from his thoughts. Then, and only then, their days in Rome could begin.

  At first they fell into step with the successive bands of pilgrims whose circuits looped between Rome’s churches. Huge hymn-singing crowds of them would gather in the Piazza of Saint Peter’s early in the morning, then set out in groups of thirty or forty for the first of their stations. Most would march off briskly to take boats from the Ponte Sant’Angelo or stride along the riverbank as far as Santa Sabina, where they left the towpath for the Porta Pauli, passing by the pyramid to begin the dusty trek to San Paolo fuori le Mura. Others, however, would forsake this farthest-flung of Rome’s stations and begin directly with the Lateran, which was a twenty-minute dawdle through Ponte and then a stroll through the ruins, rather than the hour-long forced march along the Ostia road. Accordingly, Salvestro and Bernardo preferred the Lateran and visited it four times in as many days.

  After clambering up and down the Holy Stairs, the pilgrims would amble toward the squat towers of the Porta Asinara and thence to San Croce in Gerusalemme, Salvestro and Bernardo still in tow; there both men dutifully peered at the fishes carved inside the newly installed water stoup. A few prayers and they were all off again, up the little hill and through the Porta Maggiore to San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, which stood alone on rough pastureland and was linked to the city only by the ant-column of supplicants who trudged toward it carrying their staves, crosses, and occasionally each other, for a bustling tavern stood just outside the gatehouse. Once around the cloister and it was time for Santa Maria Maggiore. The pilgrims’ pace had slackened by now, and the crowds of ragged hawkers who followed them about selling everything from caged birds to water met with greater success as the marchers sought excuses to rest their feet.

  They took the Aventine road, keeping the city on their left, while to the right the dwellings and outbuildings quickly gave out and beyond there was nothing but fields, a few gardens, the odd ruin. The pilgrims strung themselves out along the road, the slowest and most weary slipping off to the left on one pretext or another and disappearing back into the city. Leading up to the church was a long, gentle slope, which the pilgrims would negotiate with loud shouts and theatrical flourishes of their staves as though they were scaling the Alps rather than the low hump of the Esquiline. The “climb” was an excuse to pass the wineskin, or slap one another on the back, or offer extravagant prayers for their survival. But there was no hymn-singing now, and for that Salvestro, at least, was glad. On the top of the hill stood the church of Santa Maria Maggiore.

  It might have been the Lateran, or Santa Croce, or even one of the little chapels that clustered about the greater churches as though an earlier cathedral had exploded and left its wrecked oratories scattered about the church that would replace it. It might have been one of the little wooden structures at which the monks had stopped to give thanks on their journey. Bernardo always went in. Salvestro looked at the massive walls, the dark interior, heard on occasion the warbling and wailing of a choir. … At Santi Apostoli he had been swept in by the press of the crowd and found himself in an ill-tempered carnival rather than a church. Throughout these latter tours he waited outside, his curiosity mounting, until, striding up the Esquiline, he told Bernardo that they might as well peer inside this one together if it was all the same to him, which it was.

  A huge bell tower dropped from the sky like a stone battering ram driven down into the nave. When the bells rang, their clangor thundered down the shaft and exploded within the body of the church. The pilgrims covered their ears and shouted to one another, but Salvestro stood in silence next to Bernardo, looking not at the great colonnades that ran down either side of the nave, nor at the mosaics inlaid within the walls, nor at the different marbles of the floor. When everyone else had drifted out to view the treasures of the oratory of the presepio, Salvestro found himself stand
ing there alone but for Bernardo, gazing up into the gloom of the roof. Subaqueous light filtered through the tracery of the carved marble windows and struggled up into cavernous spaces high above his head. Then, when it reached the ceiling, the light seemed to come alive, drawing new energies from what it struck there, for the ceiling was made of gold.

  Salvestro drifted, turning slowly on his heels while a sheet of light wheeled above him. Vaults tessellated the curves and contours, forming diamonds and swooping scimitarlike insets. Glaring sunlight fattened in the heat of early afternoon and broke apart against the hard marble. The rays that struggled through beat weakly on the garish panels overhead, as though the air itself were an impedance. Salvestro saw the metallic scales of a massive armature and, at once held by the vista and lost within it, felt that he was suspended within the nave, not looking up but strung by the heels and falling headfirst down to the dim glister sunk deep below him. The interior was viscous, inescapable. A great gold animal heaved itself over the bed of its domain. He was in the barrel, trapped again, falling into Vineta. …

  When they emerged, a friar standing by the door told them that the ceiling was gilded with the first gold to be brought back from the New World, but Salvestro did not care about that and thereafter he avoided Rome’s churches whenever possible, preferring to wander up and down the bustling riverfront, where watermen took on their passengers and cargoes, shouted at each other, and battled the caprices of the Tiber’s currents and eddies. They saw a mule drown and below the Ponte Cestio a boatload of bottles capsize its craft and sink in an instant. A few men stopped to watch the dark shapes tumble down into the white sand of the riverbed and then disappear as though the water there flowed over a bed of thick cream. One spectator told his companion that he had seen whole bargeloads of stone vanish as quickly. The Tiber’s sandbeds were deep enough to swallow Rome.

  Salvestro’s store of soldi transferred itself in steady installments to the pockets of the innkeepers whose taverns fronted the wharves and who gave them in return fat fillets of sturgeon, stringy chickens, heavy Campanian wines that tasted of black currants, and plates of steaming swedes and carrots, whose combined effect was to turn their bowels to water and their heads to cauldrons of blood. They squatted miserably in the grip of their quivering guts and shivered as though they had the fever. When Salvestro’s haphazard calculations revealed that eating like kings would soon render them penniless as peasants, they reverted to doughy biscuits soaked in thin vegetable broth, unsalted porridges made from meal, or mashed beans and chickpeas and drank beer until they pissed like horses. The sun seemed to rise higher by the day. The afternoons were yawning wastes of heat.

  The streets emptied as pilgrims, priests, and the city’s natives alike denned themselves in palazzi, stables, huts, hovels, and makeshift bivouacs of poles and sacking. Salvestro and Bernardo sought refuge in Rome’s ruins. To the south and east, the clotted precincts loosened and liquefied; granaries, stables, and high-walled houses drifted on independent currents and beached themselves on isolated plots of land. The streets unraveled and a strange detritus took their place: great blocks of stone, massive buckled walls, toppled columns and arches. Farther and the ruins began to gather themselves into bare blockhouses, little amphitheaters, roofless temples. Ivy and scrubby bushes gouged footholds in the mortar. Goats clambered about, and, Salvestro and Bernardo slowly realized as they stumbled dull-witted from drink in search of shade, the most massive of these survivors of time’s slow violence were the refuge of others besides themselves.

  Salvestro sensed that they were watched long before their observers showed themselves. Bernardo trudged beside him, oblivious of the faint rustles and near noiseless footfalls that pricked his ears always from behind or above. He remembered his time in the forest when he had tracked his own kind for long hours, watching their anxiety mount as the invisible fact of his presence had dawned on them, feeling their reaction as a kind of pleasure, the fact that he existed and was not nothing. Now the roles were reversed. It was their fifth or sixth foray into this deserted-seeming world, a late afternoon of blazing heat in which they had slumped, Bernardo falling fast asleep in the shade of a great curving colonnade, himself dulled and drowsy. Their spy was simply and suddenly there, had neither approached, nor emerged, nor dropped from some hiding place.

  He was clothed only in scraps of cloth wound about his waist, his body streaked with filth and his hair matted in stiff plaits that reached his shoulders. His face was expressionless. He made no sound. Then, when Salvestro struggled to his feet, he skipped backward, turned, and was gone. Salvestro rubbed his eyes and reached down to shake Bernardo. Hard white light glared off the dust, bleached earth, and stone. Archways stretched and curved away to either side of them and rose in tiers above. Within, the shade was blacker than tar. He could look within and be dazzled when he turned his gaze outside, or look without and find himself blind amongst the shadows of massive piers and porticoes. Cicadas rasped and fell silent and rasped again. The heat seemed to gather weight and press on him. He squinted and listened and heard nothing, and then the man was back.

  This time with three of his fellows, appearing as suddenly as before. Two more strolled up from the left, then a small group appeared on his right. Soon there were twenty or more of them, standing casually and in silence before the two men, ragged men and women dressed in a motley of rags and ill-fitting garments. A few squatted on their haunches, planting heavy clubs in the sandy ground before them and staring directly at the two of them with blank expressions on their faces. Several had crudely bandaged stumps in place of hands. Others carried yellowish sores, which they would brush at as the flies tried to settle. No one spoke. Bernardo stood up slowly. Salvestro looked about him and thought of flight. Then the crowd before them stirred and parted. One of their number strode to the front: a woman.

  She wore a leather coat and tattered skirts cut below the knee. Heavy silver earrings hung from her ears, and a few locks of thick black hair escaped from beneath a battered cap. Her face was burned to a deep brown by the sun, the skin creased about her eyes. The fingers of her right hand were decorated with rings of some plain metal that clicked and clacked together dully as she toyed with the handle of a short knife. She planted herself between Salvestro and Bernardo and the crowd, looking the two men over. Someone behind her made a sound. Her head twitched almost imperceptibly to one side, and her shoulders stiffened. The exclamation was stifled abruptly; her eyes never left the two of them. Salvestro stared back and found he could not match her gaze. The silence was a key winding in his bowels, urging other such silences upon him.

  “You do not belong here,” she said; then, treating Bernardo as though he did not exist, she marched up to Salvestro and thrust out her arm. “Whatever you have. Now.” When he hesitated, the men and women behind her growled and began to shuffle forward. Bernardo shifted beside him. Salvestro thought again of flight. Stupid, he told himself, thinking of the huge ruin at his back, colonnades, shadows, hiding places … Stupid. He reached for the bundle inside his shirt, fumbling with the knots, then placing it in her outstretched palm. She clenched her hand and unclenched her hand, watching him with frank dislike. “Not much, and not much good in any case.” Her other arm moved in a blur, the little knife flashing as though the bag might as likely have been his face. Coins spilled onto the ground.

  “You could buy food,” Salvestro said weakly.

  The woman made a play of looking about. “How strange! There don’t seem to be any markets around here. Wonder where they disappeared to. …” A few men chuckled behind her. She pointed to the coins scattered about her feet. “Pick them up.”

  “There’s a market.” His voice sounded thin and unconvincing to him, though what he said was true. He pointed vaguely. “You could—”

  “In the city? Well, we’d get a warm welcome there now, wouldn’t we?” Underneath the mockery, her tone grew more threatening. She pointed again. “Get on your knees and pick them up.”


  She will not stab me in the neck, Salvestro told himself. She wants to prove herself master, that is all. He dropped to his knees and began to pick up the coins. Bernardo fidgeted behind him. The woman remained stock-still, even as he picked the last of the soldi from between her bare feet. He stood up warily. There was another silence. “We could buy food for you,” he offered. She stared incredulously for a second, then burst into harsh laughter. Bernardo smiled uneasily.

  “Break their heads,” said a voice.

  “Shut up,” the woman said sharply. Salvestro noticed for the first time that she was barely older than him. She put her arm out again, but this time to gently cup his cheek. Her fingers curled about his ear. He saw her throat work, her neck stiffen, he tried to pull away, but too late. The woman spat full in his face. The little mob behind her erupted into laughter. “You don’t belong here,” she hissed. “If we find you here again …” Her fingers stroked across his throat.

  After that they took refuge from the afternoon sun in abandoned outhouses and tumbledown cottages that they sought out on the margins of the city. Noisy crowded streets would suddenly give out and be replaced by pasture. Bustling squares and plazas turned into open fields, or vineyards, or vegetable plots. Farms backed onto churches and ruined houses rose in the midst of orange groves like deserted vanguards of a main force that never arrived. Broken by imposing gatehouses, Rome’s walls rose and fell with the lie of the surrounding land, but the city itself never seemed to reach them, as though the sun had shrunk its flesh to a pellet rattling dryly in a hollow rind. The two men wandered a region that was neither city nor country, being themselves not quite of one or the other.

  Nevertheless, sundials cast shadows that lengthened and crept about their stelae; bell towers and obelisks aped them. By late afternoon the Roman air was a balloon of heat pumped to bursting point and awaiting the needles of dusk. Days passed in this manner. The two men would make their way back into the thick of the city, then rousing itself for nocturnal sports such as wasting money, drinking gut-rot wine, and pissing out of upper-floor windows. By early evening small and sportive carnivals would begin to erupt out of Ripa and advance along the east bank of the Tiber as far as Scrofa: a riverine crescent of fun and games involving plump acrobats, rigged dogfights, and gambling by torchlight. The more devout pilgrims pursed their lips—an expression known locally as “the donkey’s bum-hole”—passing through the siesta-charged throng on their way to lodgings in the Borgo and an evening of consoling dullness. Salvestro and Bernardo joined them of necessity. Of their original one hundred and eighty-five soldi, twenty-three remained.