“Hang around,” the boy retorted. “He’ll probably be strolling this way in a minute or two. You could talk about old times, all jolly soldiers together. …” He was laughing as Salvestro pushed past him and hurried away up the alley.
“Anyway, when I caught up with the fellow I was already past that church at the end of Ripetta. He moved pretty quick with that sack. Turned out to be some villainous Tiburtine, never set eyes on him in my life before.”
“Oh,” said Bernardo.
Salvestro looked at him sideways and saw lingering clouds of doubt in the big man’s face. He pulled his biretta down a little farther. “So what did you think had happened? That I’d just dump you there?” Salvestro shook his head in theatrical disappointment.
“I thought it was the Colonel,” said Bernardo.
“Disguised as a baker?” Salvestro made no effort to conceal his incredulity.
“No. Just, when you didn’t come back, I thought, well… Well, what would you think?”
They had taken the path along the west bank and were nearing Santo Spirito, the saggy clutter of its roofs rising above the wooden-walled hovels.
“Let’s stop and have a drink,” said Salvestro.
“Where?” asked Bernardo. “There aren’t any taverns here.”
They walked on in silence.
“I’ve been thinking we should change our accommodation,” he said as they were passing the hulk of the hospital. “I’m sick of Lappi and his shouting. We should get somewhere better, over on the other side of the river.”
“How? We haven’t got enough money,” said Bernardo. “Anyway, we’re leaving soon.”
“True,” said Salvestro. They walked on.
“What’s the matter?” Bernardo asked when Salvestro stopped at the end of the Via dei Sinibaldi. Clouds of doubt began to gather again. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” said Salvestro. His eyes swept up and down the street. “Come on.”
Salvestro got no rest in the days that followed. Each day began with elaborate excuses designed to dissuade Bernardo from heading back to the Stick. Rodolfo’s supposed wrath at the broken tables sufficed for a while, but as the incident faded in Bernardo’s mind and became part of the hazy jumble that he called his memory, Salvestro was forced into ever more desperate inventions and distractions. These culminated in Salvestro’s sudden fascination with the shrine of a minor saint, prayers to whom were said to safeguard the mendicant against death by shipwreck, banditry, and falling roof-tiles, whose name Salvestro claimed to have been told by Brother HansJürgen and then forgotten, whose shrine was, by his own account, “somewhere to the north of the Campo de’ Fiori.” Francesco di Paola? Stephen of the Seven Deacons? They did not find it.
A similar charade was played out on their return to the Stick each evening, when Salvestro would once again insist on elaborate routes through the Borgo and long periods of circumspection before actually stepping foot in the Via dei Sinibaldi, with the difference that having already let this precaution lapse once, he found it increasingly difficult to justify its resumption to an exasperated Bernardo. They would eventually regain the safety of the Stick, and Salvestro would fall exhausted onto his palliasse amongst the already sleeping monks, but his mind remained obstinately alert and most of the night would be spent awake, trying to think of a reason why it would prove impossible to revisit the Broken Wheel on the morrow, just as most of the day was spent inventing reasons why they should not go back to the Stick before nightfall, He grew distracted and short-tempered. Behind his prevarications was the urge to spew what he knew into Bernardo’s lap, Yes, Bernardo, it is just as you said, Groot is alive as we are. More so, if he has his way. … Let the big man deal with Groot’s treachery himself. And behind this urge was the fact that soon they would be setting sail, soon they would be clear of it all, free of danger, or at least free of these particular dangers. And behind this vista of escape lay an obligation of which he was at first insensible but whose weight settled itself upon him a little more firmly with each and every one of the days that brought them closer to the departure for which he longed. It should not have mattered. He told himself that it did not several times a day, and the days passed, and the date drew nearer, and he felt the obligation more keenly with every one. He had not told the monks.
No, he corrected himself that night as the notion flitted through his mind for the first time, he had not told Father Jörg. The bodies of the others were stertorous mounds of breathing sweating flesh in the darkness around him. When awake, they were bundles of cloth topped with shaven heads who avoided his eye. They did not speak to the two of them and did not acknowledge either his or Bernardo’s presence any more than they would mourn their absence once they were gone. Salvestro felt rather than understood the contagious nature of their disfavor. Invisible walls surrounded him and Bernardo; of suspicion and distaste. He did not question this isolation any more than he had his ostracism from the islanders or from the other soldiers at Prato. Private Salvestro. Explorer Salvestro. He was neither, never had been. He had to wrap himself in a swagger to be offered a seat. Play the fool in his gaudy motley. The boy had been right. The chain looked stupid. None of his costumes truly fitted. He did not belong, and any who belonged with him, they did not belong, either. He would not taint Jörg with his overtures, not with the others looking on. That at least was what he told himself that first night. He told himself the same on the second. And the third. On the fourth the monks were gone.
HansJürgen looked up as they entered. Palliasses lay scattered about as usual, but of their occupants there was no sign. Salvestro looked about but said nothing. Gerhardt and sometimes one or two of the others had kept late hours before, arriving back at the Stick long after everyone else, usually covered in stone dust. Since the day he had seen the monk at the lime quarry Salvestro had discovered nothing as to how his days were spent. But all of them gone? An hour or more passed in awkward silence, but it was already clear that they would not return that night. Salvestro, Bernardo, HansJürgen, and Father Jörg heard Lappi slam the door of the hostel shut at midnight. No one said anything. The Prior mumbled a prayer, and HansJürgen blew out the candle.
They did not return the next night or the night after that. Accustomed to fixing his eyes on his feet and keeping them there when it seemed an offense so much as to glance in the direction of the monks, Salvestro began by engineering glimpses of the Prior, affecting head-scratching and restless rollings-over. His first task on reentering the chamber remained checking the stuffing of his mattress for the scabbard, but once its presence was confirmed he turned his attention to Father Jörg. He found himself governed by odd inhibitions or afflicted by a source-less timidity. Embarassment? He could not put a name to it or a reason, but he watched Jörg. He noted the changes he had not noted before.
Dirt. The Prior’s habit was stiff with it, his face streaked and darkened with the same. The dirt was everywhere, of course, but it seemed to concentrate itself about the Prior. That a man should or should not wash his face had never been a concern of his before, yet Jörg had appeared to him not as flesh but as bone, hard and smooth so that the stuff of the world should fall away from him. … It had gained a purchase now. His head shook oddly sometimes, when he seemed most remote from the chamber, the hostel, the whole city, perhaps. He would sit in silence for hours on end. Sometimes he wrote, his finger inching down the page, his lips moving soundlessly. He prayed, in silence, sometimes with HansJürgen, but more often alone. Once, Salvestro came across him squatting in the passage outside their room. The sight disturbed him, the blind man grunting and straining on his haunches and his feet shifting awkwardly on the damp flagstones, oblivious of any who might be watching. He could not tell him then.
So it was HansJürgen who was the cause of his delay, not the monks already departed. (Why? When he finally inquired, HansJürgen answered only that Gerhardt’s business had taken him from Rome for a few days, then looked away as though the conversation pained him, as
though the real reason for their absence were the continued presence of himself.) He thought resentfully of the chest of silver trinkets and the exchanges he had made with Lucullo, two more since the first. Who would do that for them when he was gone? Every day he made promises to himself that he would tell the Prior that evening, and when the evening came he spent the hours before the candle was snuffed out turning that promise over, bending and twisting it this way and that until it broke beneath his attentions. And he did not tell the Prior.
Then came the morning when he woke late to find HansJürgen already departed for the market, Bernardo fully dressed and insisting that even if he, Salvestro, would not do their friends at the Broken Wheel the courtesy of a simple visit, share a cup or two, and perhaps another two or three after that, and perhaps get blind drunk as the occasion demanded, then he, Bernardo, would be happy to leave him here, bleary-eyed and groggy from a night of troubled sleep, to be as miserable as he wished, but to do it alone, to which Salvestro nodded and may have grunted something before falling back on the scratchy sacking as Bernardo stomped out in a victorious huff, listening to the inevitable slamming of the door, the stamping down the passageway, then other noises within the hostel, an argument somewhere, raised voices, the cranking up of a bucket of water, his own breathing, soothing sound, wakeful human breathing, his own and Jörg’s. They were alone. The Prior’s voice sounded then, the words distinct and clear; he did not dream them. It was the eve of his departure.
“Salvestro. Will you hear my confession?”
Head down and elbows out, moving brusquely through a crowd that only Rome’s summer heat could uncompact and atomize into these obstructive bodies and loose clods of citizenry through which he barged and bumped on his way down the Via Alessandrina, Lucillo’s cheery wave ignored as he passed the bancherotti, uncaring of the wake of ill temper that trailed him down the street: Salvestro in flight again. He stopped at the bridge. Amongst the porters who shuffled toe to toe across the river, carrying boxes, barrels, crates of pigeons or apples, he was the porter who had shucked his load and found himself pursued by it, the vengeful baggage of the thing he had not done. Kneeling with Jörg in the darkness of the the Stick, he was the Prior’s unconfessed confessor.
“I would not be the first,” he said, “if foolishness is a sin. A great general once stood where I stand now, called the Lion by his men.”
“I know of him,” Salvestro said. It was unsettling to listen to a voice so close to him but the speaker invisible. Their heads were almost touching.
“Don’t interrupt,” said Jörg. “The Lion too saw the thing he most desired sink and disappear beneath the waves. The Devil too works miracles. You were mine, Salvestro. You were the pin to winkle out my brothers from their broken shell. You were the miracle sent me. …” He began to ramble then. The island and their journey from it took shape in the chamber’s darkness, but broken into fragments and the fragments themselves frayed, unraveling in the Prior’s preamble. “But I have proved very foolish,” he resumed. “Foolishness is a sin I readily confess. Have you seen how the brothers laugh at me now? The other petitioners mock me, too. I hear them, though the saintly HansJürgen would deny it and have me afflicted with deafness. It is just that they laugh. I submit to the fool’s penance which is mockery. I was blind before. It is only now that I see.”
He paused there, and Salvestro wondered if he should say something. He heard the other man shift on his knees, drawing nearer to him, perhaps.
“I know of your trials before you led us to this place,” Jörg said quietly. “On the island. HansJürgen thinks I know nothing of these things. I believed then that you were sent us to aid us in our labors, more fool me. … It was exactly otherwise. Our church crumbled to admit you, Salvestro. It was for you, not us. We are your last trial, do you see? Sometimes I see a little light, like a candle-flame, flickering and distant. It is your soul, but your soul as it will be. I know this. We are each other’s sternest tests, you and I.”
There was a short silence while Salvestro again debated whether he should speak.
“As it will be? As it will be when?”
“When you take us up again, dear Salvestro,” Jörg replied. “When you lead us home.”
So there was the Castel Sant’ Angelo, crennellated and squatting on its slab. There was the crowded bridge below it and Salvestro on the bridge. He was leaning over the parapet at the point where he and Bernardo had spied Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf mudlarking amongst the pilgrims on the landing stage below. They had not been seen at the hostel in weeks now. He looked for them amongst the beggars and rowdy boys milling about on the riverbank. Little boats spilled out and lurched in the loose grip of the water, dark green and surfaced with glass. There was the Castle of the Squatting Toad and the Bridge of the Creeping Pilgrims and below them the rolling swelling river telling him, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow … He quit his station there and walked without purpose or direction through the streets of Parione. He must have walked for hours, but his very aim-lessness seemed to lead him inevitably to the river and westward along its banks to the Borgo, for there were no more tomorrows. Tomorrow they would be gone, and he had not told Father Jörg. The day seemed endless.
At the end of the Via dei Sinibaldi there was a short red-faced man sitting on a tall open-weave basket of pears. The man sweated and mopped his brow. Salvestro sat in the shade opposite. They exchanged glances and did not speak. The short man’s partner arrived presently, and they toted the basket away between them. There was that. Then some women walked past and stared at him, sitting there on the ground in his finery, waiting. One spoke in an undertone and another one laughed. At him? Waiting for what? A gang of boys with a dog?
No. Though the dog sniffed his foot. He patted it on the head, and they all ran off up the street. He rubbed his knees and got to his feet. He had only to walk fifty yards to be in the hostel. The old fountain. The broken wall. The door to the hostel and the interior beyond the door. He had only to deliver his message and leave. In the Via dei Sinibaldi the armies of the sun were being routed by lengthening spears of late afternoon shadow. Chimneys, washing lines, and parapets cast shady swords and shields on the ground. He advanced on the hostel. Two men passed him. They were driving a mule.
It appeared that Lappi had concealed himself in some other part of the building, for the various alcoves and niches in which he was inclined to lie in wait for his nerve-racked guests were empty. Salvestro peered about him at the staircases on either side of the passage. The light from the doorway gave out after twenty feet, and thereafter his progress was the usual fumbling grope, a cautious stumble-with-handholds. Plaster crumbled at his touch and rattled on the flagstones. Salvestro’s footfalls ground them to dust. Presently his fingers felt the wood of the chamber door. It stood open. No lights. No sounds, either. He entered gingerly, feeling for the tinderbox and candles that were kept beside the chest. The door should have been locked, he thought, inching forward into the darkness. If there was no one to safeguard their belongings, then the door … It was the tiniest of sounds, the merest disturbance of the air, unseen, unguessed. A wall of muscle seemed to strike his head, chest, legs, lift him off his feet, and hurl him back, the floor slamming into his back and knocking the breath out of him. His head rose dizzily. A leathery hand clamped itself to his face.
The crystal-moment is in here somewhere.
There are corridors and passageways, curves and corners, stains, stairs, intrinsic difficulty in the obstacles. But clarity will be found amongst these coordinates, this lapsed geography. He is inside, and the darkness does not help.
Three men blocking the entrance to the back-chamber. Problem. He moves sideways, up a flight of stairs. Think of the passage at the top as an overhanging gantry and move quietly, with appropriate humility. Nothing is clear yet.
A door. The door? Surely yes. In here, then, wait for the clarity to come, which it will, Salvestro-shaped and unsuspecting. He kits out the darkness with remembered details:
palliasses, a chest, pillars (no sweeping cuts with the sword), a mad old man who is not here now. He would hear the breathing and the rustling of his clothing as he breathed. No one here. Except himself, Rufo. Rufo waits.
Soon, the terrible cutting, the panic and struggling, blood and piss running in their breeches …
Let us dispense with that. The approaching footsteps can be counted as they intrude on his awareness and advance on his racked-up fury, twenty-two of them. He is in the door now. Wind him first? Yes, but smother him, too, just in case. Stick him in the guts and throat and leave. He is not quite himself when he does these things; coincident with the man who pounces and stabs, but not the same man. It has taken place, already happened, is done. He walks away and leaves his man twitching in a flood of blood. He leaves a murderer brooding over a corpse. Calm now. Someone passes him on the stairs. Someone rages in the back of the building, “Out! Out, you barbarian!” Outside, the soft and fading sunlight is blinding after the darkness in which he has ensconced himself, days or years of the dark and now this searing light, this heat-drenched Roman light.
He will wait for the big man where he waited for his companion. He might even sleep. Someone will find the cadaver, and the cries that follow will draw him to the small, ghoulish crowd that always gathers on occasions such as these. The lumpish weight will be hauled out in a blanket to be inspected by the sheriff or his man. There will be brief municipal formalities. Someone will identify the dead man.
All these things happen in the next hour, the shouts, the crowd, the body wrapped in a dirty sheet and attended by flies. He is calm, leaning over with the rest of them to get a look at the victim’s face, no different from anyone else. An old woman is being led forward by officials. She looks bewildered and angrily defensive, as though they have accused her. She pulls the sheet down, and for a moment he thinks the light has thickened to pure heat, to a furnace that melts the dead man’s face, for it is featureless at first, then deeply lined and creased, old. … The woman is sobbing now, and he searches the dead man’s face for his chosen victim, tries to dredge those features from the cadaver, pull that face from this face. The heat will not have it, smoothing away eyes, nose, mouth, submerging his quarry in this ancient cadaver, encasing him in its transubstantiating inferno, a Romish mirage in which nothing lives save his error.
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 49