“… and in the morning there was no sign of her. She just ran off and left us there. So we started walking. There were patrols after us, too, we saw them. Salvestro saw them, anyway. We had to hide. We walked a long way. …”
Bernardo shook his head. Sitting opposite him, Seròn cursed himself for the twenty-eighth time. What had he been thinking? How could he possibly have thought that humoring this imbecile might serve to while away the time before the other imbecile returned from whatever fool’s chase had sent him scurrying out of the tavern in the first place? The giant droned, repeated himself, lost the thread, whined, went on and on and on. …
“You shouldn’t worry yourself,” he reassured Bernardo. “I feel quite certain that all that is behind you now, and this, this Colonel, what was his name?”
“Diego.”
“Diego. Well, even if he is in Rome, he would not dare harm men in the employ of the Spanish Crown. Certainly not such illustrious servants as yourselves; no, it’s inconceivable, out of the question.”
“Anyway,” Bernardo resumed, “it was a very long walk. And we were running away, too. From the Colonel. So when Salvestro just…” He struggled to find the word he sought. “Just went, well, I thought, It’s the Colonel. He’s here, see, in Rome. …”
The Colonel was what he feared. Other things, too, being left behind, being alone. Events had taken place, things had happened, and he had to keep quiet about them. There was no clear distinction among these things. He was not stupid. He knew he was not stupid, but things went wrong, became troublesome, and sometimes he lost his temper or grew so frightened of losing his temper that it was just as bad. He had to keep quiet, but he found it hard not to say these things. Don Antonio’s questions … What did you do if you had to keep quiet and someone asked you about the very thing you had to keep quiet about? What did you do then? Dogs and rocks. It was always one or the other.
“What do you do then?” he asked Don Antonio abruptly.
“I think”—Seròn spoke carefully and slowly—“that I can personally guarantee that you will not be bothered by this Colonel Diego.” This seemed only to confuse the man further, for he went off on a completely different tangent involving running away (again), something about “keeping quiet” and a little boy who, halfway through the story, turned into a little girl. Aldo’s brat Amalia? He hardly cared and could sit there no longer.
“I will call on Salvestro in a day or two,” he said, rising from his chair. “Or perhaps this afternoon, but if I do not, you may tell him that the ship is ready to sail. His Holiness himself will bless her. Two weeks. …” The giant’s face was a picture of confusion and alarm. He repeated the message. It did no good.
It never does, he thought later, lying fully clothed on his bed, waggling his feet so that the candlelight reflected off the leather of his shoes. They hurt, but he did not take them off. Eventually he had scribbled a message in simple signs on a scrap of paper and left it with the oaf. After returning from his encounter with Bernardo and the fruitless search for Salvestro that followed it, he had come upon Vich patiently searching through the papers in his study. Loose pages, bound accounts, papers tied with string or wrapped in cloth, and rolls of cracked parchment were off the shelves and on the floor. He was leafing through a volume of charts as Seròn walked in.
“I have mislaid the small portolan,” he said. It was the larger one that he held before him. A brown water stain at the bottom of the book added the same fanciful continent to the ragged coasts and seas on each of its pages. “Do you remember it, Don Antonio? The one with the likeness of Don Francisco de Rojas carved on its boards. …” He had closed the book and asked after his business at Ostia, but he was uninterested, abstracted, most urgently concerned with seating arrangements and the order of precedence. “Place Faria next to me,” he told Seròn. “I want to watch his face when the vessel sails. The Santa Ajuda, is it?”
“Santa Lucia,” Seròn corrected him, then asked if the dispatch had arrived from Spain.
Vich shook his head resignedly. “They have forgotten we exist,” he said. “But we continue anyway, we loyal servants of Fernando. Two weeks, do you say, before she sails?”
The days that followed were taken up with correspondence and accounts, for which Don Jerònimo seemed to have developed a sudden, brief, and inexplicable passion. He was eager to leave for the hunt at La Magliana and told his secretary that he would travel to Ostia directly from there, with the Pope. Idiot Vich, thought Seròn, yawning on his bed. He cocked an ear to the footsteps that padded about in the room adjacent to his own. Diego’s room.
Since the soldier’s first grim outburst he had confined himself to curt nods and the occasional inquiry. Seròn’s stock of replies rotated between “As it should …” and “Satisfactorily …” and “Well…” delivered flatly but with conviction: the song of the competent functionary. The soldier would nod and pass by him, accepting this without further question. None of them see it, he told himself. The thought was almost melancholy. Idiot Diego, too. The footsteps paused.
And there was Salvestro. Another idiot? A fool? A fly in the Seròn-spider’s web? These terms shaded into one another. Men drifted within them and between them. Some escaped.
After leaving the big man at the tavern, he had gone in search of the absent Salvestro. He rode the towpath on the west bank of the Tiber to the Borgo. Skirting the foot of the Janiculum, he had cast his eye over the city that bulged from the opposite bank. The land rose. The city fattened on its slopes. Steely rolls of late morning heat ground the roofs and terraces into shimmering mirrors or melted them to a liquid mirage. Streets thrashed and flopped in the furnace, curling and twisting, sweeping churches and towers of melting stone before them. Sweat pooled and squelched between his toes.
Even so, the cool of the Borgo was unwelcome. The lurching shambles of Santo Spirito overhung an irregular path that narrowed to squeeze past improvised hovels and shelters. The stench of their inhabitants brought out his handkerchief. The air was thick with damp stinks and stenches that spread and collided to become doubly and triply noxious.
“Pilgrim’s Staff?” he inquired of a better-dressed passerby.
“God help you,” came the reply. “Halfway down the Via dei Sinibaldi.”
Its entrance breathed sweat and stale urine, a mouth blackened with decay. Flaking stone and unidentifiable muck lined its gullet. He tied his horse next to another already tethered to a broken boot-scraper and entered. The owner was on him immediately, a thickset ruffian with a collapsing face.
“Salvestro,” Seròn announced. “He resides here, I believe?”
“Him again? Master Popular, ain’t he? In the back, if he’s about.” The oaf pointed, snuffling and growling around him. “Need a candle?”
He took the candle.
“That’ll be two giulii.”
He paid for the candle.
A passageway tunneled back into the guts of the hostel. Distant noises that might have been moans or stifled shrieking drifted down from the upper floors through stairways hacked out of the building’s interior mass. The floor seemed to have been laid with tombstones. The hostel’s inhabitants had scraped their marks in the damp-softened stone. The last door stood open. Absolute darkness and a faint sound, a soft scratching. He ventured in.
The light from his candle would not reach the roof. There were pillars and pallets, loose straw, a chest, illumined by the yellow stain of his light. The air was dead and musky; its stench curdled the contents of his stomach. In the midst of this sat a cowled and habited man. Salvestro had mentioned “the monks,” some of them by name. He should have made a note, but he already knew that his errand was futile. Salvestro was not here. The monk had not looked up yet. He was bent over a piece of parchment, scribbling furiously. Seròn moved closer and the man started, letting out a startled yell. A face smeared with dirt stared about wildly, its sightless eyes rolling in search of him.
“I am looking for a man named Salvestro,” he hurrie
d to reassure the wretch.
“I told you! He is not here. I do not know where they are.” He tried to cover the pages before him with his arms. Seròn glanced at them curiously, then at the inkwell that was placed on the floor beside the monk. It was dry. The pages were blank.
“Forgive the disturbance,” he said, backing away. The monk was feeling the floor, hands outstretched and fingers splayed. He found a piece of paper and grunted to himself before taking up his pen once again.
It should have been funny, Seròn thought now, boots twinkling, buckles undone. Pewter was a fine metal with its powdery sheen. Why was it not funny? The other horse was gone when he’d reemerged. The monk’s words struck him then: I told you. … I told you before? Or already? Had someone else been searching for his Master Explorer? It did not matter. He would find Salvestro at the Broken Wheel the next morning. Diego’s boots resumed their soft tattoo. Would the soldier pursue his own purposes, slip the leash and simply go after them? No, no, no. …Just a mad monk in a cellar, nothing more. Join the other idiots, Idiot Seròn.
In the next room, the pacing stopped and started and stopped again. A muted creak would be the handle of the door and the soft knock that followed the carefully damped closing of that door. The passageway was cheaply planked and squeaked like a choir of mice, but on this occasion the mice declined to sing and Seròn listened to the sound of a man not wishing to be heard as Diego padded past his door.
Two minutes later, noises off: a creak, a clunk, a rustle, a whisper. Saying what? Only that Diego was back, scraping and scratching, gravid in his soundbox. He was wide awake, straining his ears. Next door a wheezy organ rattled its pipes, footsteps beat an irregular measure, the bed supplied the air. In major and minor keys, the bed boards groaned, then groaned again. The bed feet first tapped, then jiggled, then scraped. Then thudded. And accelerated, and Seròn could no longer disbelieve the evidence of his own ears when a heavy grunt sounded the theme and was answered by a low drone that rode the scales up to wailing, then dispersed itself in a series of high-pitched squeals. The crescendo was a single resounding unambiguous crash: the bed itself being driven into the wall.
Silence. Then, again, the padding of feet. He counted, one, two, three, four. The door, the passage, the door once again. In the silences interposed between these sounds he heard only the reverberations that shook their way through his frame. He lay there, incredulous, reluctantly accepting, persuaded only for want of any other explanation. It seemed somehow unimaginable, but why not? Why would he not? Diego had a woman. Seròn had listened. Seròn had heard. In the room next to his own, Diego had had a woman.
Now the palazzo was silent, all the idiots asleep. He masturbated noiselessly and joined them.
The light came and went, a trembling glow in the dark distance. Whole days went by when he did not see it. His eyes were useless to him; he did not see it with his eyes. On the days when he was left alone he waited for a dim flicker to reappear. Sometimes it came. Sometimes not. He waited. He prayed. He wrote:
“I …”
Only poets sang themselves, Jörg thought. Contemptible pride drove them to it. Augustine of Hippo sought the footprints of the Trinity in the mud of Man’s soul and found Memory, Will, and the Power of Thought. The Holy Spirit walked in everyone, being Love, the hungry Will. Christ walked in everyone, being the power of God’s Thought. The double procession bound each man to both, two grinning shepherds guiding their flock down from the mountain, all galloping toward God. And memory is who we are, he thought, being all we know of ourselves and the traces of the Trinity within us. The ground was churned now, plowed under, almost illegible. It was late to be searching for footprints. Perhaps too late. Augustine too wrote of himself, but humbly, as a penitent. I, the solitary upright, the bare bar, the drawn and driven appetite for God.
“I, Jörg…”
Prior, and scribbler of these lines, the Gesta Monachorum Usedomi, and petitioner of His Holiness the Pope: the Trinity or succession of himself. Gather the scattered glass beads and restring them on the thread of “Jörg.” He was a rope of rounded mirrors, mouth spread wide, eyes slewed and stretched: a hopeful novice, then a monk in orders, then a Prior and a recorder of these images. Observe—he observed—the graying and silvering of the hair, the lines cut in the skin, the dimming of the eyes, a man becoming the pieces of a man. Mad old Jörg. He chuckled to himself, pen paused. He was one of those who waited on the Pope, one of the desperate, clamorous, and grasping. And therefore one of the faithful. Before honor is humility, as Solomon knew, and wrote twice.
“I, Jörg of Usedom …”
Of? Or merely from? And which Usedom? Its first jagged contours were bastions shielded by natural moats, sea and river mouth; beech-wooded and un-transfigured. An ur-Usedom, notional, not his island, or anyone’s. The heathens came and marked their presence with the groves of their barbarous gods and the piles of a great city: Vineta, which was torn loose from her foundations and sent to the bottom of the sea. Henry the Lion built a church to stand guard above it, to stand firm against the suck and pull of its patient vengeful tides, or to mark his bloodless consummation. The island cared nothing for conscience. Then the silly simple islanders with their plows and fences. But this was not his, neither the island he was of nor that which he was from. Last of all, the Usedom of his return with the different greens of its tree mosses and bog mosses, the low humps of its fields and their straw-colored crops, its beehives and pigpens, cow-sheds and barns. Come winter the icicles hung like swords from the eaves. Look, a church rises on the seaward coast, its spire stabbing the sky’s blue and its bells bringing the men and women running across the fields to praise God, its impregnable walls and high windows founded on granite: the miracle church of a miracle island. He would never see this Usedom, though it was his.
I, Jörg of Usedom, though blind, write this chronicle of the deeds of the monks of Usedom in Rome. Our lodgings here are mean, though no meaner than a stable, and we are tested daily by new affronts and impieties. Suspicion creeps among us like a jackal, or the serpent in the garden. Brother HansJürgen and I battle together for his conscience, which is assailed by doubts and fears and weaknesses of faith. It is a twisted and wretched thing that he comes to me with accusations, for he is sincere and bears witness sincerely in his belief Still we wrestle. …
In truth, what else was there to do during the long hot mornings spent waiting in the courtyard of San Damaso? A few days after their first attempt at an audience, crushed and downcast, he had listened as HansJürgen whispered of Gerhardt’s scheming and plotting. What did Gerhardt do, during the day, taking the rest of the brothers with him, whoever would go? HansJürgen stayed, but the others went, even Florian. He asked, naturally, and Gerhardt told him, “Building churches, Father, as was our purpose.”
He was aware that he was mocked.
But dusty clothes and Gerhardt’s daily absences constituted no sin, and Hansjürgen’s voice was strained with worry. It came to him suddenly that this was a task he might perform, and his own heart lightened as the other’s disclosed the weight upon it. That Gerhardt should employ his brothers in good works, turning their hands to the business of mortar and stone, that was beyond his reproach. But HansJürgen was lost in a maze of dark suspicions. He, Jörg, would light his way out. Besides, it hardly mattered how Brother Gerhardt employed his time in this place, this city of Rome, their sojourn being less than an eye blink in the sight of God. When they returned, surely all would be as before? He lowered his pen once again and was about to write this when a voice sounded, suddenly loud in the chamber.
“I am looking for a man who goes by the name Salvestro.”
The voice came from the door, or a little way inside the chamber.
“As you see, he is not here,” Jörg replied. He could hear the man’s breathing. From somewhere within the hostel itself came the noise of someone shouting, the sound echoing oddly. The voice was unfamiliar to him. The man did not reply. Jörg heard another sound
as he turned, as if a tin cup were being scraped against the rough flagstones on the floor, more slithery, perhaps, more sibilant. Then the man was gone.
Jörg gathered his thoughts: Gerhardt’s antics, Hansjürgen’s suspicions, his own mediation. And now Salvestro. Salvestro, who slept not six feet away from him, whose nightly returns were marked, still, by a sudden awkward hush. Salvestro, who did not fit. He considered this for a minute or so. He should write about Salvestro. Bernardo too. The pen began to fly over the page once again. Then, suddenly, he jumped and cried out. The man had come back.
“I am looking,” he said, more softly this time, “for a man named Salvestro.”
“I told you! He is not here. I do not know where they are.” He covered the page before him, but others fell to the floor. He moved quickly to gather them, sensing the man move nearer.
“Forgive the disturbance,” the man said. This time there was no strange scraping sound, only footsteps growing quieter as he turned and walked away. Jörg gathered the rest of his papers. HansJürgen would put them in order for him. He took up his pen once again, but now he was disturbed and his thoughts disorderly. Why would anyone, other than himself, be concerned with Salvestro? HansJürgen had mentioned new suits of clothes. Had the two men sunk themselves in debt? Or something worse? The idea swelled in his mind, vexing and goading him. Baseness of birth and ignorance were not obstacles on the path to grace. Salvestro was not beyond salvation. A heathen, yes, but not irredeemable. … The next notion came to him unbidden, so preposterous and unexpected that he laughed out loud. He tapped his finger on the page before him. Of course he must write about Salvestro. How narrow of him to have doubted it. He scratched a line beneath his text and began:
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 47