A small courtyard: ramshackle balconies, more washing, silence, and a penetrating smell that Salvestro recognized. He stepped out of the alley, sniffing. A low arcade ran along two sides of the yard, its arches planked over but punctured with little doors. Salvestro moved from one to the next, still sniffing, the odor growing stronger: damp clothes and boiled millet. He pushed at a door and found himself in a low cellarlike room dominated by an enormous brick oven. A pile of wood lay in one corner; sacks filled another. Two large tables were strewn with odd, long-handled implements, spatulalike and vaguely gruesome. Flour spotted the floor. From the room beyond came the sound of a sharp slap followed by a thin cry of protest. Salvestro closed the door carefully behind him and moved toward the noise.
He was standing with his back turned, arm raised over a boy of nine or ten whose own arm was raised in a cowering defense. For a moment Salvestro thought that his hands were oddly discolored or burned, for he wore stained cotton gloves. In his hand he held an object that Salvestro could recognize by sight, taste, smell, touch, and—now—sound: a flaccid, gray, leathery, oval loaf of inedible, unsalable bread that slapped with dull force on the boy’s head. The boy squawked. Then he noticed Salvestro.
In a moment the man will turn at the boy’s prompting and show a face prickly with black stubble, red cheeks, a mountainous ridge of bone across the brow; but the squat legs, broad back, wiry black hair, these alone are enough, as they were at the tavern. The sack has disappeared or, more accurately, is indistinguishable from the scores of identical sacks tossed in a mound against the far wall.
The man froze, gloved hand holding punitive loaf forgotten and left suspended over the boy. He turned to face his old comrade.
“Hello, Groot,” said Salvestro.
Assume disparity: dogs on a chained bear, crows mobbing the solitary hawk, metal colossi leaking yellow lubricant into the wavy yellow-beige sand. Grit, mangy fur, feathers, and lousy down. Pain-noise, exhaustion, unsweet inglorious death. To be Bernardo is to cling on, to brace oneself against desertions of what is familiar, to find things that are orderly and imitate them. His unremembered dreams are sculpted, geometric, filled with wistful icons. Why is wakefulness not like this? Why is wakefulness crowded with dogs, and what are they for? Dog-pelts are uncoveted. Few cuisines make use of dog-meat. A necklace of dog-claws remains untalismanic. So dogs (understood broadly here) are for tormenting Bernardo: the big man, the simpleton, and the present dog, worrying and snapping at chained and anxious Bernardo, is Antonio.
“Just left? Just walked out and left you here?”
“It’s happened before.”
“Before” is a storehouse of old resentments and the resignations foisted upon them. At best, the dogs slink off and live to fight another day. “Before” is where they kennel themselves. No one is sympathetic to Bernardo’s private plights, and when they are it is because they want him to do something terrible, an act that is unspeakable. The stones that fit his hand are the size of skulls. Antonio wants him to betray Salvestro, so he is being nice to him, deploying a tactful concern to make him do this, the latest of his unspeakable things. The secretary sits opposite, an untouched mug of beer between them.
“I cannot believe he would just walk away without a word. Not without a reason. After all, he knew that we were to meet here today, unless he is trying to avoid me. An unintended offense, perhaps? I am racking my brains, but. …”
Here they come, on their springy legs with their full-sail tails and fish-flesh tongues, a-bristle and befanged, jaunty for the mauling.
“What would cause him to run off like that? It really is very worrying, for you not least, Bernardo. What does he fear so much that, well”—and here Antonio’s hands come up, fingers splayed loosely in priestly helplessness, the promise of absolution when, oysterlike, Bernardo should decide to yield his pearl—“it is his own secret to take to the grave as he wants. I must presume.”
Hints of questions, raised eyebrows, quizzicalities, a weaseling miasma of offer balanced against vaguely sketched Salvestro-dooms: Antonio’s game, his area of expertise.
“For instance, he might have …”
Or, “I only hope that whatever it is …”
And, “But I’m sure that …”
Dogs.
Bernardo’s eye sidles around the steady and reasonable eyes opposite. This is how it always starts, these smooth tones and unanswerable arguments. The patent and patient concern. … Remember Marne now, “Bernardo …” Remember Proztorf. “And if you don’t, well …” Well what? It gets worse. Because the accumulation of his past errors and stupidities is by now a cliff of granite, an overhang of wrongness, and a fat rock-slab of getting it wrong again. Antonio toes some more shingle over the edge, which dwindles to dust as it speeds down in individual arcs and tumbles to rematerialize as rocks bouncing off his head. The bad things happen now. Dogs or rocks is the choice.
“I’m not supposed to say,” he began. Then, “It wasn’t him, anyway.”
Then he rambled forward blindly, into the stones and dogs that cracked against his skull and stripped the flesh off his hands, into Prato and the Colonel, who was killing Salvestro now, somewhere outside, for what else was there to flee from? Why else would Salvestro leave him here, on his own?
“He is a Spaniard like you. Here in Rome, Salvestro says, but it wasn’t him. I told him that.”
The morning advanced uncharitably. The Broken Wheel’s patrons began to drift in and take up positions in a respectfully distanced semicircle around the Master Explorer and his interlocutor. Nobody at the Broken Wheel liked Antonio much. Bernardo stared about him between sentences to measure their effect. The cliffs of black and rotted compacted sin grew blacker and more compact and did not fall. Dogs squatted to spatter the ground with dog-mess and did not chew on his hands. There was Groot first, then Salvestro, now Antonio. He had to do this. He was not supposed to; it was one of that vast set of things, bad things, all of them. He had to do it, and afterward Antonio would tell him what he should do next, now Salvestro was gone.
“I have not come across this Colonel Diego,” said Antonio. “Tell me about him.”
They walked in twos, Groot and the sergeant ahead, Salvestro and Bernardo behind. Rounding the Pieve di San Stefano, they seemed to be heading toward the Palazzo Pretorio, and Salvestro remembered dully that this was where the Colonel had set up his headquarters. It was almost dusk, and on every corner soldiers were struggling to light braziers, or torches, or chaotic bonfires of smashed furniture. At night the town came alive with flames and sparks. No one seemed to sleep. Nothing stopped.
They passed in front of the Pretorio but did not enter, Groot and the sergeant swapping commonplaces about the warmth of the season and the fear of disease. There were no cadavers in this precinct, for the Colonel had put a price on the head of any man caught leaving a body unburied. The edict’s force exhausted itself gradually as they moved into narrower, darker streets. The smell of putrefaction came in thick waves, strangely regular until Salvestro realized that the quintanas between the houses were their source. They passed a little orchard in which invisible dogs could be heard snarling at one another. Two shapes hung like sacks from the branches of an apple tree, black outlines in the failing light. They wore signs about their neck that read—Salvestro knew only because he had asked—“Coward.” Two days before, he had watched a middle-aged man, a soldier, being frog-marched down to the dyeing sheds, wearing just such a sign. The nature of the offense was unclear. The men were beginning to turn on themselves.
Now the four men entered the San Marco district. The men lounging on the corners or idling past them were more ragged and watched the quartet suspiciously; only their arms marked them as soldiers. The Free Companies ruled here. At the far ends of the streets branching off to their left, Salvestro saw little barricades manned by uniformed men, Medici’s and Cardona’s. The Cardinal and Viceroy maintained their famiglias in the two fortresses whose turrets poked above the clutter of
meaner houses. Medici was in the older castle, with Aldo, who was dying. Aldo was Prato’s ruler, and now he was dying of a kind of plague. Salvestro had heard, That old goat Aldo. … And, They should go ahead and kill him, that old bastard Aldo. … He knew who this “Aldo” was, and he knew the barricades were to keep the men outside out, the rabble, the animals. A double row of walls—the cassero—linked the establishments, and messengers passed back and forth, mobile interruptions of the darkening pink of the western sky. Minutes later it was dark.
Rabble. Animals? They spat on the ground and pissed against walls, ate, slept, rose … They wrenched the genitals off old men at spear-point and broke the legs of their old wives. Killed children. They were murderers and torturers. Salvestro looked at their faces, all red in the torchlight and firelight. They were men who wondered where their supper was coming from, who scuffled about in stables looking for straw on which to bed down, who shivered or sweated. He thought of the Teeth. Terror wrote itself over the countenances that looked upon him; it was invariable. Where was the mark on these men? They appeared ordinary: dirty, tired, disheveled, bandaged, and bedraggled. He looked no different. I took no part in this, he told himself. Groot and the sergeant still conversing in a whisper just ahead. I reached down my hand to pull another out, a girl in a silent street, quite ugly. Whisper, whisper. But she died.
The streets narrowed again, the frontage bulging like the sides of great ships drifting heavily together. A few men were huddled in the archways beneath the steps running up to the upper floors. The four of them passed through dead-eyed fields of vision, emerged unscathed, continued. He did not know what this quarter of the town was called, but it was meaner than those they had passed through already. There were no orchards or gardens to break the drab rows of houses that snaked and wound toward their destination. Even the stinking canals were fewer. The whispering ahead was dismembered and senseless: Remember this if nothing else. … Of course, but what if … Count on it. … Depend on me for that. … The very worst … No, not before he … At the end of one of these streets stood three men, soldiers better dressed than the others they had seen, more alert or more sleepless. The sergeant nodded to them, and the trio nodded back. A light showed for a second in a house farther up. The air was sharp with wood-smoke from a fire somewhere.
“Within this house is Aldo’s family,” the sergeant told them. “His wife, Signora Anna Maria, her maid, two children. They are safe here, and your duties are to keep them safe. Admit no one, unless it is myself. Tell no one. You are the Colonel’s men and will answer to him if any harm befalls them.” He repeated these commands twice more in different terms, the three of them nodding dumbly. They could smell food cooking within now. Another trio of soldiers was just visible at the other end of the street. Salvestro saw that every house in it had been ransacked, doors and shutters swinging off hinges, smashed chairs and beds and pots piled against the outer walls. Ransacked and then meticulously cleared. Where, he wondered, were the people who once lived here? “You will be brought food.” The sergeant pointed to the men they had just passed. “There is no need to step outside.”
There were grilles over the windows. The door was studded and banded with iron. It was opened as they reached it by a man who nodded to the sergeant, then looked warily out into the street before closing it softly behind them. Two other men rose from their cots at their entrance and, barely glancing at the newcomers, joined their comrade by the door. A fire burned slowly in the hearth at the far end of the room, a pot suspended above it from which rich meaty smells were wafting. A partition had once divided this space from the one behind it. Now the planks were stacked neatly in a corner, and the backroom was open to view. Lines were strung across it, and sheets thrown over them formed a kind of curtain. A woman emerged from behind it, looked at the four of them contemptuously, then retreated again. They heard whispering start up. “You are not to touch them, do you understand?” the sergeant said. He brushed a speck of muck from his sleeve. “Not a finger.”
Just then the sheets were flung aside and a second woman strode forward. Salvestro registered billowing skirts, simple jewelry, a stiff-backed carriage. Her eyes swept over the three of them. Salvestro saw that though her clothes were rich—silks, lace, gold thread—they were also filthy.
“So,” she addressed the sergeant coolly, “the murderers have arrived. Is my husband dead so soon?”
“You frighten your children for no reason, Signora,” the sergeant replied. He turned to the three men, saying, “Remember your orders. You will be well rewarded if you follow them. If not …” He did not finish the sentence but walked toward the door.
“Wait!” exclaimed the woman, a new note in her voice.
The sergeant ignored her. The door was closed. Groot moved to bolt it while Bernardo flopped down on the nearest of the cots.
A boy’s face appeared from behind the curtains, then a little girl’s. The boy looked at Salvestro, then strode forward, his sister’s hand in his. A miniature empty scabbard dangled from his belt. He looked ten or twelve, no more, the girl perhaps half his age.
“Did you kill my father?” he asked Salvestro.
Salvestro smiled halfheartedly. “No one has killed your father,” he said. “He is as alive as I am.”
“He’s a traitor,” the boy said coldly. “He surrendered the town. You should kill him. I’d kill him, if I got the chance.”
“Silence!” the Signora shouted at him, which brought the maid out again.
“Chop him up and feed him to the pigs,” the boy went on. His mother seized him and pulled his head to her breast. The boy suffered himself to be led back behind the curtain. That left the daughter. And Salvestro.
She stood waist-high to him, wearing a white linen dress or nightdress that reached to the floor. Salvestro had the feeling that he was being assessed in some way; he tried to think of something to say, but his mind was still mired, submerged underwater, where the silence roared and bubbled in his ears. The little girl stared at him curiously. Suddenly she reached down, grasped the hem of her dress, and with a single abrupt movement pulled it up to her neck. Salvestro saw bare legs, her bald cleft, a rounded belly, the white cloth bunched about her throat.
“Look,” she commanded. “I’m a virgin!”
Her name was Amalia. She believed in God.
“God isn’t big,” she confided to him. “He’s as small as an ant. If he wanted to get out of here, he’d crawl through the keyhole.”
“There is no keyhole,” said Salvestro.
“Yes, there is. Back there.” She led him past her sleeping mother to the far end of the captive’s room. Behind some furniture piled there was a low hatch, cobwebbed and with a thick sill of dust. “See in there—” She pointed between chair-legs and crates. “Keyhole.”
Apart from that time, he never ventured into the quarters of Signora Anna Maria and her family. Nor did Groot or Bernardo. The maid emerged to cook their meals, standing spoon in pot with her back to them in grim silence. She retreated with four platefuls as soon as she was done, and then the three men would scrape the pot for their own supper. After his initial outburst, the boy remained sullen and immobile. His mother sobbed quietly, slept, and looked at the three men with disgust when she had to look at them at all. They lived behind the curtain. That was all, and the three men lived in the kitchen.
Food arrived in the morning, announced by a single blow on the door and left on the step outside. By the time they drew the bolts, its deliverer had disappeared again. Groot or Salvestro would glance up at the open sky, grasp the basket and two pails of water, then withdraw again into the oily light of their jail. The windows being shuttered as well as grilled, they had no means of telling whether it was day or night outside and drifted through the time like sleepwalkers. A day or two of this reduced them to near silence, grunting to one another as they awoke, passing comments about the food, dozing irregularly and at odd intervals, despite Groot’s attempts to establish a roster. Their moveme
nts grew sluggish and heavy. Only Amalia rose above it.
She skipped about in her white dress, chattering mostly to Salvestro, occasionally to Bernardo, never to Groot. She drew elaborate diagrams in the ashes of the fireplace and explained the different orders of angels and how small they were. (” Even smaller than God.”) She recited things, played intricate imaginary games. One day was occupied with counting the stones in the wall, aloud. There were, in the four long low walls that enclosed them, two thousand eight hundred and seven stones, exactly. No one, despite her entreaties, was willing to challenge this figure. It was several days after the stone-counting (but how many?) that Salvestro noticed how clean she was.
The white dress was not gray or brown, not smudged, stained, smeared, or smirched. It was white, and stayed white. Salvestro puzzled over this. Then he noticed her hair, which was not matted as his was, nor thick with grease like her mother’s or the maid’s. It floated and bounced behind her like skeins of silk. When she walked, he saw the soles of her feet were white, too. Ash from the fire, dust, dirt, the house’s general filth … nothing touched her. Or nothing seemed to stick. He could not account for it, or did not want to try. It sank at last into their general torpor, the seeming pointlessness of what they were doing. How long would they be here? He didn’t know. Groot didn’t know, either. This day followed that day. The mother sobbed. The boy sulked. The maid cooked. The three men waited. One day the bells rang. The little girl skipped, and chattered, and floated. One day the bells rang and rang.
“Do you remember the bells?” he asked Groot. Sunlight streamed in through the open windows from the little yard at the back of the bakery. Groot nodded. “They were for Aldo.”
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 44