The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  “Whoosh!”

  She was standing in front of the seaward window, looking out over the water. White crests were forming farther out from the shore, and the wind was blowing harder.

  “Whoosh!”

  She jumped, throwing up her arms, sending her white dress flying about her as she turned in midair and crouched in front of the older woman. Sometimes, Violetta thought, she was like an animal, angelic and undomesticated. Sometimes she was only a little girl. Today she did not know. The girl turned again and stared intently out at the troubled sea. Violetta waited a few moments before speaking.

  “Amalia.”

  “Have they been fighting again?” asked the little girl in her singsong voice.

  “No,” she answered.

  Amalia nodded without looking around.

  The two newcomers had arrived cold, soaked by a late afternoon shower and in a foul humor with each other. Violetta had suspected that they would come to blows. Rightly. It had begun in the laundry room, where they had sat wrapped in blankets while their clothes—the usual brightly dyed rags—had been dried. She had left them there and gone in search of bedding. Suddenly two naked harridans had spilled into the courtyard, screaming and scratching at one another. She had seen them from an upper window and hurried down. Fights were not uncommon. After the noisy violences of the town it was the calm of this place that set them off. She had arrived in the courtyard only to find a ring of silent women surrounding the pugilists, who were now separating and feigning modesty at their nakedness, appearing cowed and oddly unresentful. Amalia was within the ring, peering at them in a curious fashion, calming them in a way Violetta did not understand. It had happened many times before and in many different circumstances. The women did not question it. Only she remained puzzled.

  “Amalia, what are you doing?” she asked now.

  By way of an answer, the little girl suddenly jumped up again, making the same exclamation as before.

  “Whoosh!”

  Her feet thudded on the wooden floor as she landed.

  “I’m watching the shipwreck,” she announced.

  Startled, Violetta hurried over to the window. The wind was blowing full in her face, and her eyes stung from the cold. She peered out over the gray sea, which was laboriously piling up dark mounds of water, then flattening them again. Beyond these, crests of white water were breaking out of the dark liquid, and beyond these she could see only turbid brine. The thunderheads were nearer and blacker and higher. There would be a storm tonight, that much was obvious. She would have to marshal two of the more trustworthy of the women and have them check the doors and shutters before lights out. She looked left and right, up the coast to the low headland of Punta Bianca to the north and down to where the strand fell away, curving inland until it met the waterway to Massa. In the very distance she thought she could see the first of the rain, an advancing curtain of gray. But there was no ship.

  She looked down curiously at the child, whose eyes did not seem to be fixed on any point in particular but whose face showed every sign of animation, as though she were indeed witnessing the catastrophe she claimed. Her mouth twitched, her hands jumped halfway to her mouth, then fell to her sides again, she leaned forward, then seemed to be pushed back by some ghastly detail. She jumped and shouted again:

  “Whoosh! Oh, the poor sailors! Their souls are like … like rockets! They look beautiful. …”

  Violetta watched with her for a minute or more. In the first months after the child’s arrival she had frowned in puzzlement at the odd pronouncements that issued from Amalia’s lips. At times, the child had lacked propriety. At others, she had seemed to descend into a matter-of-fact insanity. When her brother had arrived with his three hundred ducats, the child had spent the whole period of his visit laboriously dividing the coins into piles. She had then informed him that the amount was seven ducats short, that Jesus had been sold for thirty pieces of silver, not twenty-three, and that her brother’s lips looked like sausages. After his departure Violetta had gently upbraided the child, who had skipped away, singing, “A sausage is a sausage is a sausage. …” What was one to make of this?

  Amalia counted things. There were seven thousand five hundred and thirty-one blades of grass between the stables and the gatehouse, or had been over a certain two days last June. She invented languages all of whose words rhymed with each other, outlined extraordinarily complex descriptions of God and then forgot them the next day. When confronted with such inconsistencies by Violetta, she would dismiss all objections by saying that God had been like that yesterday, but today He was quite different, and then launch into a yet more incredible account. In her childlessness, Violetta felt, a child had been sent to her. The wrong one, possibly. Children were troublesome beings. Her brother’s initial false concern had not veiled his customary and unctuous malice, but still it had pricked her skin. Ask yourself what she is doing here, he had urged, a familiar hand upon her arm. Why is she here, dear sister? For want of anything better to say, she had parroted the latest of the child’s burblings to the prelate. Amalia was waiting for her savior, and her savior would come from the sea. This phantom ship was part of that, perhaps. In the failing light, the sea crawled and slithered like a nest of snakes.

  “There is no shipwreck,” she told the child flatly.

  “Whoosh,” replied Amalia. “Not yet, no. But tonight it will be too dark to see anything except for their souls. I wish you could see them, Violetta, all of them shooting up.” The child paused and looked up at her. “Nearly everyone goes to heaven.”

  Violetta resisted the temptation to ask archly if “nearly everyone” included herself. She was the eldest daughter of one of the oldest families of Spezia, a town where she was known for her charity, her vigor, and her levelheadedness. Her father had distinguished himself in three campaigns against the French, and her brother was Spezia’s Bishop, albeit a venal one. Her love affairs were discreetly managed and had given her much pleasure. It was difficult to understand the changes that had so transfigured that life. Perhaps the women she took in, most of whom would leave again in the summer to resume their trade in town, were only the rudiments of a new mode of existence. Goodness was a maze through which she craved guidance. Was this humility? Weakness? To be pitied would be the pariah-hood she could not bear. … Silly woman. The child was only a child, painting her imaginings and observations, her heart’s desires and soul’s registerings, willy-nilly on the same fantastically jumbled canvas, where cows roamed freely with monsters, where unnamed “saviors” blew the water out of their lungs and arose from the sea to claim her, where invisible ships descended from the sky and smashed themselves on waves made of granite.

  “Ooh!” Amalia clamped her hands to her ears. “The masts have snapped! She’s starting to break up, Violetta!”

  With that, the child spun away from the window and began to stomp maniacally in a circle around the room, her windmilling arms punching the air, her voice imitating the creaks, groans, and crashes of the stricken ship. She made one circuit, then a second, then a third, and her movements grew more and more violent, her feet pounding more and more heavily. She was lost in the privacy of her game, Violetta realized as she dodged away from the child’s mad progress. But it was nothing more than a frightening game. Amalia shrieked and shouted and stamped and stabbed, now and again interrupting this ugliest of dances to leap into the air, each time calling out, “Whoo-oosh!” or “There goes another one!” while Violetta, determined not to intervene, stared at her with ill-concealed alarm. The room resounded with the child’s cries, which, after they had grown as loud as her lungs would permit, became more anguished, more piercing, as though something that had lain concealed within her uncanny but blunt-spoken self-possession was now cutting its way out. As though, Violetta believed or realized, it was not a ship that was breaking apart at all. Nonsense, she admonished herself. One of her brother’s better barbs: You think too deeply for a woman, sister. Amalia was a little girl and no more than th
at. She had feelings after all; it was only now she chose to exhibit them. Grasp hold of her. Comfort her, a child in a child’s pain. If only you could see, Violetta. … Violetta did not see, or not then, nor did she move to comfort the child.

  And yet there would be a shipwreck, in the night and less than a league from the shore and invisible as foretold in the child’s grotesque performance, in a storm that smashed the vessel and drove her down, pounding and ripping at the corpse of its enemy. Tattered flesh and splinters of bone. Exorbitant victory. That she should “think too deeply”? Pah! Not deeply enough, she would decide then. Brother Bishop was the silly and greedy fool he had always been and would always be. The child had been right in her rudeness and in her strangeness, and she had been right about the ship. Her mad circuits had narrowed until she was almost marching on the spot, her little head jerking from side to side, her half-controlled limbs twitching like a puppet’s. Violetta turned from this vision in distraction, which, she told herself later, was only the prelude to her running to the child. … She turned to the window, the encroaching night, the rising sea, the thunderclouds descending like hammers to smash whatever might fall to them.

  To a ship. At first she saw only a distant speck or mere interruption of the darkening storm that, it seemed, was about to overtake it. Violetta stared as the speck grew in definition. A vessel under near bare spars was running before the wind in a hopeless dash to drag itself out from between the great black plates of sea and sky that met like millstones to crush it. But it was still leagues away from landfall. She turned back to Amalia in amazement. The child had fallen silent.

  “You knew?” she demanded softly. “But how could you know?”

  “Whoosh,” Amalia mumbled. She sat down quickly and bent her head. “Whoosh, whoosh. Three more souls.”

  She appeared crumpled, skeins of her black hair scattered about her face. Violetta glanced out the window, and at that moment the wind blew the first spatter of rain into her face. Even at such a distance the vessel seemed to lurch as it toiled north and east in the heavy sea. Making for the gulf, she supposed. Night would fall within the hour.

  “Oh,” the child said behind her. She repeated it, as though she had just remembered or realized a fact that now surprised her.

  She was picking at the linen of her dress, face still mostly covered by her hair. She hiccuped, then sniffed. Violetta watched her curiously. The mad marionette of a minute ago was a limp ragdoll. The ragdoll sniffed again, then wiped her nose on her dress.

  “Amalia,” she exclaimed, never having witnessed the phenomenon before, as much surprised by the sudden realization of its earlier absence as by its appearance now. Why had she never remarked it? “You are crying.”

  But the crying seemed to end as suddenly as it began, and when the child looked up her eyes were hardly reddened.

  “Whoosh,” Amalia said quietly. “Bernardo’s going to drown.”

  “Who is Bernardo?” asked Violetta.

  “Bernardo is Salvestro’s friend,” replied Amalia.

  Violetta awoke to a monotonous endless drumroll, the sound of rain beating against the shutters. When darkness had fallen she had closed them, and the two of them had sat in silence. There was nothing more to be seen or done. The storm began to batter in earnest, a shrieking gale driving it onto the coast. The seas rose up and pounded furiously on the beach, the normally inert gray waters releasing their store of noise for hour after hour. Eventually the din had numbed her and driven her down into an exhausted stupor, where thought of the fates being suffered in the watery turmoil outside had been unable to find her. Now the predawn light, entering through the cracks in the shutters, etched the room’s roughly hewn stones and roof-beams in cold bluish-gray light. Her neck ached. She looked blearily about her: a small wooden chest, a crucifix hung high on the wall, a small puddle of water where the rain had found an entrance. The nest of blankets in which the child made her bed was empty. Amalia was gone.

  Outside, the rain fell in sheets, each new gout of water slapping down onto the beach and disappearing there as though the surface of the gritty mud were a taut sheet of gray silk that the pelting droplets pierced insensibly, driving on into some airy emptiness beneath. The sea’s surface prickled under the same assault. Violetta’s shoes sank into the mud as she climbed down the scarp. The blanket she had thrown over her head was already soaked through, and rain trickled between her fingers where she clasped it bunched beneath her chin. When she looked back, the turret was no more than a thickening of darkness through the rain, the eastern sky a steel gray screen behind it. The palazzo sank into the foreshore. They would not have seen it, she thought, if any had made it ashore. She stood on the rain-lashed beach and shivered. The bare sea heaved and stretched away

  The vessel, or the pieces of a vessel, was all around her. Up and down the beach as far as she could see, embedded in the sand at strange angles, were broken spars and beams, massive curved compass timbers, smashed planks, and barrel staves. A section of decking the height of two men seemed to have been peeled off entire and driven into the mud like an ax-blade. A splintered line of railings pointed jaggedly out to sea, appearing now as futile late defenses against the slopping waves. Farther down the beach a single massive pole with a crosspiece near its top stabbed the shore in an exact vertical as though a huge hand had wielded it like a sword. She tried to grasp the force that had snapped it off and planted it here, a great mocking cross to mark the men who had died beneath it. They were here, too, or some of them. Scattered amongst the detritus were low and irregular humps, unexceptional accumulations of tatters and rags: the ship’s human jetsam.

  A light caught her eye then. A door had opened in the palazzo, and three or four of the women were making their way out to the beach. She saw them hesitate and huddle together beneath their shawls as the rain greeted them with its first cold slaps. The wreck’s transitory monuments studded the strand to north and south: rope-ends and flapping canvas snagged in splintered poles and planks, the timbers themselves set in mud, water, and sand. Amalia emerged from behind one of the larger piles of wreckage, heaped up and dumped some two or three hundred paces away. She was carrying a stick. Violetta squinted. The child seemed oblivious of the rain, moving about in a methodical fashion between the low humps and using the stick to poke at them. Two pokes, a short wait, another poke, and then she would move on to the next. Violetta was already thinking of the work to be done before the tide swept in that afternoon. There were twenty corpses, at least, and each one would have to be dragged up the scarp. The tide would probably fetch up more. It might go on for days, she realized grimly. Down the beach, Amalia came to a halt. The ground about the palazzo was marshy even in summer. Now it would be waterlogged. How would they bury them? she wondered. Amalia had sunk to her knees now, as though she were prostrating herself. … No. As though she were wrestling. But with a corpse? Violetta took two curious, wondering steps, then broke into a run. Beneath the child’s clumsy assault, the corpse had moved.

  It was lying facedown, trying to rise. The feet scraped and scratched, searching for purchase in the mud while its hands grasped handfuls of the same stuff as though trying to pull itself up hand over hand. It was naked except for the rags of something that once had been a shirt, and the cleft between its legs opened and closed with these spasmodic efforts. The limbs were emaciated and spattered with mud that seemed ingrained in the flesh, for the rain did not wash it off. Where the skin showed through the filth it was either bone white or broken with rashes and sores, and when the “corpse” at last managed to raise its head its face was that of a blind man, staring ahead and seeing nothing. Amalia was trying to turn the body onto its back. Him, she forced herself to acknowledge, for it was a man, though he seemed bestial somehow, something that had yet to become human or had been driven beyond that by his privations. She came to herself with a start, took the sodden blanket from her back, and knelt beside the child. The man was trying to speak, but his incoherent mumble made no sense
. With her own help, the little girl rolled him over onto the blanket. The man grunted again, struggling to speak.

  “I’ve told you three times already,” Amalia said in a tone of girlish exasperation. “He’s drowned. They’re all drowned, except you, Salvestro.”

  The man’s eyes closed. The eyebrows that wolves have, thought Violetta, instantly shaking her head at this irrelevance. Practicalities, she insisted to herself. The child’s discovery had unnerved her. How to carry him inside.

  “He’s going to die,” said a voice behind her. “When they stop shivering, that’s when they die. I’ve seen it before.”

  A woman who called herself Minetta was standing behind her. The three others she had seen were beside her, all four looking down at the still body, which had indeed stopped shivering. Had he been shivering before? Violetta could not remember.

  “No, he’s not!” Amalia sounded outraged at the suggestion, as though it were a personal slight.

  “We’ll get him up to the house,” Minetta said then. She was moving to wrap the blanket around their burden when one of her companions let out a little shriek.

  “Urgh!”

  She was standing on something that Violetta had taken for a large, gently rounded stone. It was gray, oddly textured, and when the woman offered it a prod with her toe, it gave beneath the pressure. She jumped back.