“What baffles me is your interest in this graybeard, Dovizio. Why is he here?”
“My interest? It is your interest that he engages, Holiness.” A snort of mirth escapes through Bibbiena’s nose at this. Leo is about to lose his temper with them. Today has not been an easy day. … Then it comes to him. The filth. The rags. All that business about a “surprise. …” He knows. He nods his head sagely, turning to the two of them and reaching out so that they might each clasp an elbow in comradely fashion. They do.
“This,” he announces with absolute, fatal conviction, “is Rosserus.”
They stare at him for a second, faces frozen. Then melting. … They start laughing, beginning with a succession of nasal explosions, then some half-stifled hiccups that quickly develop into full-throated side-aching guffaws. Soon, Bibbiena can stay upright only by leaning against the wall. Dovizio has to sit down, wall or no wall.
“Rosserus!” Dovizio gulps between roars of laughter. He glances in at the seated figure. “Rosserus? Him?” (More laughing.) “Oh dear, Your Holiness … he’s not Rosserus. He’s you. …
“Put him,” attempts Bibbiena, but his own hilarity thwarts him.
“On the,” tries Dovizio before mirthfulness gags him with giggles.
“Platform. On the fountain. Tomorrow. Got a tiara for him. And everything,” says one or the other or a combination of the both of them.
The pair have almost calmed themselves when Leo sets them off again by stating huffily that, actually, he knew all along and was simply pretending not to for their amusement. Then he makes matters worse again by beginning a new topic of conversation—“So, my friends, what about these rats of Neroni’s?”—in a blatant and clumsy attempt to divert them from their task, which is laughing at him: what else are cardinals for? Their hearty derision springs and bounds down the empty corridor, slowly breaking up into sniggering and intermittent titters. Eventually they shut up.
“Since he is to be me, I am going to speak with him,” Leo announces to the pair’s mild surprise.
He begins maneuvering himself through the narrow entrance. The chamber itself is barely wider, its floor a mere three flagstones laid end to end. His belly squeezes into the aperture. Has he gained more girth through the winter? A solid belly aids balance. Footing is related to the center of gravity, especially when hunting. Look at Boccamazza, although his equally generous middle is found a little higher up. More in the chest region, really. … Leo is still trying to get through the doorway. Perhaps by using one arm to lever the protuberance while squashing it in with the other. … Yes.
The old man has not moved. He does indeed stink, Leo notes, but the smell is musty rather than acrid. His hair is indeed matted, the beard stained and stringy, but he is not gray, or not naturally so. Has someone deposited ashes on his head? From time to time, when bored, and from a suitably discreet vantage point, he has watched the rough pranks of the petitioners waiting in the Courtyard of San Damaso, their brutish japes and capers. Anyway, old “Graybeard” is actually fair-haired. He stands before him, waiting.
“Stand up, old man,” commands Bibbiena from the doorway.
The creature turns his head at this, and there follows an outbreak of the promised coughing, which racks the old man for a minute or so and is succeeded by the similarly promised lung-rattle.
“He doesn’t have to stand up,” Leo tells Bibbiena. The Cardinal shrugs.
Then more waiting. It is rather awkward standing there, a mere arm’s-length away, while being ignored. Usually by now there would have been a grab for his foot, or at least the hem of his mozzetta. The situation is drifting. He gazes airily about. He considers the possibilities. A decision.
“My son,” he says to the presumably weak-witted creature. The old man turns his face to the voice issuing from above, and Leo sees first that the old man is really not so aged after all, hardly older than himself, in fact. And then, the strange immobility of the upturned head, its fixed focus on someone who seems to have drifted free of Leo, a shadow-Pope …
“He’s blind!” he exclaims.
“Did I not mention that?” replies Dovizio from behind.
“He does not know who I am,” continues Leo. He looks down again in a more kindly manner. “My son, I am your Pope.”
The not-so-old old man appears to find him then. Dead though they are, his eyes widen, his face loosens, and an expression passes across it that might be wonderment, or amazement, or even joy. Leo never identifies it, something promised and snatched away, for in the next instant the brow wrinkles, the face hardens, and its fleeting unguardedness is replaced with resignation. His voice, when he speaks, is surprisingly clear.
“You are not.”
Dovizio snorts, or perhaps it is Bibbiena. Leo looks down in consternation, ignoring them. He puts his hand on the man’s shoulder.
“I am,” he insists. “I am your Pope.”
But the figure seated on the bench is no longer paying attention to him. He seems to be coming to some comfortless realization of his own. His reply, if that is what it is, sounds weary and dismissive.
“I have been mocked long enough.”
Pebbles, wood chippings, apple peel, dried horse dung, old nails, walnut shells, melon rinds, and spit. These were the objects and substances that made the most regular appearances in his bowl.
At the other end of the scale, having appeared only once so far, were a small perfume bottle made of blue glass, a chipped knife-blade, a turnip with a smiling face cut in it, a milky-colored mosaic tile, a spinning top, a playing card (the seven of spades), another playing card (oddly, also the seven of spades, but a different design), and an ear.
The bowl rested on the ground between his feet. The shape and size of the bowl mattered. Too large a bowl attracted all kinds of rubbish, while too small a bowl was ignored. Wooden bowls were better than tin bowls (no one used a tin bowl), and the bowl must be shallow enough for passersby to see its contents. Not too much, for that argued lack of necessity, but neither should it be bare, for potential donors needed guidelines. The bowl therefore was “seeded.” A wizened apple and a worthless copper disk were his items for this. He would accept food and coin. The most ambitious beggars would seed their bowls with nothing less than a fat silver baiocco, but they were the ones who worked in the piazza or on the city side of the bridge, and those were the richest pitches in the whole of Rome. In front of the bridge on the Borgo side was where he had started himself, where he had had what remained his best and worst day. He had sat a little way down from another beggar, or rather three, for they rotated the pitch among them. One had greeted him with a cheery salute: “First day?” He had confirmed that it was. It had taken him ten days to bring himself to this, ten days of racking his brains for any other way… And there was a way, of course, but it was even worse than this. So he sat there on the bridge, shaking with shame to begin with, but gradually resigning himself as the coins clinked steadily into his bowl. When the crowds began to thin, the two teammates of the beggar to the left of him reappeared, and they began to divide up their spoils. He counted his own, which came to eighty-seven soldi. “Good day?” inquired one of the three beggars, sauntering over toward him. He was the largest of the three, and he was the one who, a moment later, punched him efficiently in the stomach while the second banged his head on the ground and the third poured the contents of his bowl into their own. He recalled lying on the ground, dazed, with hundreds of boots and shoes stepping around him.
He moved to a pitch south of the bridge. There were fewer beggars there and fewer passersby. From a little after dawn to a little before sunset, he accumulated three stale rolls and fifteen soldi. The three men reappeared as he was counting out the coins. He handed them over without protest, and he did the same the next day (seven soldi) and the next (twelve). They did not take the food. He moved still farther down the river, into the neighborhood of Santo Spirito. It was cold, sitting there motionless on the ground, so he found a piece of sacking to insulate h
im from a chill that seemed to travel up his spine and freeze his brains to ice. He watched men more ragged even than him scouring the mud-banks that ran along the river. Once he nodded to one, and the scavenger nodded back. A good day.
A bad day: his three oppressors found him and beat him. They explained to him between blows that since he was so evidently untrustworthy—the movement of his pitch downriver was offered as evidence of this—he would in future present himself to them at the bridge each evening, there hand over his earnings, and thus save himself this (what they termed) “bother.” The “bother” at that point took the the form of an agonizing blow to the ear, so he heard only the end of a strange ululation that rang across the river, something like “… ss’rus…!” and which seemed to give them pause, for they then threw him bodily over the embankment and ran off. He landed in freezing mud. The oarsman of a passing wherry glanced at him curiously and passed on. The river looked like treacle. He lay there for a while, then, when he was picking himself up, eyes watering, blood and snot still bubbling in his nostrils, he looked across the river and saw the scavenger of a few days before joined now by two of his companions. All three were watching him. They must have seen it all. They stood shoulder to shoulder and raised their arms high above their heads:
“Rosserus!”
It was their voices he recognized. It was almost dark, and begrimed as they were, the faces of the former novices were anonymous masks of mud. He pulled his hand free of the ooze and lifted it toward them. Something caught his eye then, a movement over the mud on his own side of the river. Rats? When he looked across again, Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf had disappeared.
The next day he presented himself in front of the bridge as promised, but the three beggars were not at their pitch. Leaning against the wall in their place was a broad-chested man wrapped entirely in sheepskins. His head was shaved, and on the top of his head sat something that he first took for a bird’s nest but which, as he drew nearer, revealed itself as a covering of mud shaped into the approximate form of a hat.
“You’re the monk,” said Mudhat, glaring at him.
He nodded, glancing about nervously for his extortioners.
“If you’re looking for who I think you’re looking for, don’t waste your time,” Mudhat told him. “You won’t be meeting them again. Leastways, not here. This here’s your pitch from now on. Everyone’s been told, so there’s no argument and no excuses, either. You can start here tomorrow.”
With that, Mudhat pushed himself off the wall and began to walk off. He put a hand on the man’s arm and was opening his mouth to thank him when Mudhat rapped him hard on the knuckles.
“That,” Mudhat cut him off, “is just the kind of thing which irritates me. When I get irritated, I usually get annoyed. And when I get annoyed what I usually do is pick up whoever is annoying me by the ankles and pull them apart like this”—he demonstrated the motion—” till he splits down the middle. After that, I examine the two halves carefully to see which has the head on it. Often it’s the left side. Sometimes, though, it’s the right. Whichever side it is, I find it makes an excellent tool for beating the other side, the headless side, to a pulp. Am I making myself plain?”
It was late November. The next day, as promised, he gained his pitch by the bridge.
Without it, HansJörgen thought now, counting out his day’s earning under the grim turret of Castel Sant’Angelo—twenty-five, twenty-six—he and his Prior would in all probability not have survived the winter. Twenty-seven soldi, which was about average. The amount he had taken on his very first day had proved to be a fluke, and his somewhat wild speculations walking back to the Stick after his encounter with his brutish savior—that he might hoard enough one day, perhaps, to escape from the city that had effectively become their prison—were quickly quashed in the succeeding days. There was firewood to buy, lamp-oil or candles, bread, and from time to time there was Lappi’s widow to be placated, for they were the only tenants left in the Stick. After the murder of her husband, she had appeared in the entrance hall enthroned on a chair stuffed with horsehair that leaked from a rent somewhere on its underside and that Sig-norina Lappi tried to restuff by gathering the stray wisps off the floor and forcing them back in, all this without moving from her seat. In fact, she seemed never to move at all. HansJörgen would come upon her bent sideways over the arm and uttering great groans of effort. He had tried to help her once, and she had hit him with her broom. There was a box chained to her chair. The box was where their “rent” was collected. Sometimes he would put in the full four soldi. Usually rather less. Sometimes an old nail or a piece of glass. It was a charade, in any case, for the real tariff on their entry each night was paid in a quite different coin, and it was paid by Father Jörg.
Lappi’s widow hated him. She detested the very sight of him. At his appearance each evening after his fruitless sojourn in the Cortile di San Damaso, she would scream and bellow at him that he was a ruthless trickster, that he only feigned his blindness, and when this ritual of rage had built itself up to the required pitch, she would accuse him of her husband’s murder. Lappi, according to his widow, would still be alive if it were not for Father Jörg. No evidence or reason explained her conviction beyond the facts that the murderer had never been discovered, that the only people with whom she came into contact, so far as HansJörgen could see, were himself and the Prior, and that an antipathy so fierce and so cherished as that which she harbored against the latter could hardly subsist without the foundation of her heartfelt faith that it was justified. She believed in his guilt because she must. She had a leaking chair and a blind man. Sometimes she waited for him to hesitantly mount the steps, treading quietly, stealthily, into the hallway, where the similarly silent, wakeful widow would be waiting for him with the broom handle. … She bloodied his nose once. Her frustrated yelling would continue for long minutes after he had scrambled past her and made his escape.
Jörg endured this without comment, as he endured everything without comment. He had fallen sick that winter: a disease of the lungs. Now, rounding the corner that led him into the Via dei Sinibaldi, he recalled the admixture of forebodings he had fallen prey to every evening at this point in his journey home. Listening night after night to the coughing and choking, he had come to realize that the Prior would die. That thought was the gate to the rest. He had dreaded it, and yet, shivering on the thin straw mattress, sleepless with the cold and the gruesome noise, he had been drawn through it nonetheless. Jörg kept the silver scabbard in his chest with the papers on which he poured out his ramblings. There were bancherotti in the piazza who would change it into coin. The coin would pay their passage away from here. It would pay their passage home. But Jörg would not pawn the scabbard. Perhaps it was the accusations he had flung in the heathen’s face or his dismissal of Salvestro’s own accusations—shortly after proved abundantly true—or perhaps it was the scabbard’s provenance, for it was of the island and in the Prior’s mind perhaps a last link with that. In any case it did not matter, for Jörg would not go and would only chuckle when HansJürgen urged this on him night after night, replying, “But you do not understand, Brother. Darkness is not a force, nor a power to be fled from. Our fears will only rebound on us if we retreat back into them. Our ignorance is where we are needed. …” Or, when he had described their lives as hopeless and foolish, “My foolishness is only the truth, Brother HansJürgen. Look at the candle, since I cannot. Does it not flicker? Are there not moments, very brief ones, when it gives no light at all?” Finally, when he had ventured to recall the church that they had left to the mercy of the elements, “But why did it crumble in the first place? Better to ask yourself that, Brother. …”
These mad heresies, and others equally incomprehensible, were what had come to mind as he walked toward the entrance to the hostel one particular night, as he wondered whether he would find his Prior hunched noisily over a phlegm-filled bowl or curled up in a corner, motionless and cold. He counted soldi in his head, this much, then
that much. Thirty-one ysterday. Seventeen tomorrow. Never enough. Never, ever enough. And then the dirty thought. Or worse even than that: a hope. It had found him here, just a few yards short of the doorway, where he was now. Farther up the street, some small boys were playing a game that had grown popular over the winter, running about chaotically, then suddenly freezing at a shouted command. A dog was wandering around, sniffing at their legs. Beyond them, a cart with splayed wheels and high battened sides stood uncoupled from whatever beast had drawn it there. Some hovering men would be the gang hired to unload it. The driver appeared to be asleep. In the depths of winter he had seen such a wagon rumble very slowly through the streets, its load gradually growing heavier as the men who drove it stopped to search down alleys and passageways, behind low walls, or in the doorways of abandoned buildings. These seemed to be the favored places for those with nowhere better. The bodies they found in these miserable refuges were typically frozen solid. The cart’s drivers were able to roll them out like logs. His prayers seemed to offer no consolation. Rome, this particular part of Rome, this exact street, and this stone on which he now stood and ground the wooden sole of his sandal, were where he had stopped and thought that if Jörg were dead, he could leave. A slick, gritty sound. The scent of manure drifted in the air. Jörg had lived. Their existences went on as before. He had collected close to forty soldi today. A good day.
Lappi’s widow said nothing as he dropped four coins in the slot of her box. He added a fifth, and she nodded her satisfaction. The passageway emerged from darkness, the light from the lamp revealing walls of cracked and crumbling plaster. Small islands of the same fell daily from the ceiling and shattered on the floor. The smell of damp was more pronounced back here. He heard Jörg scrabbling amongst his papers in the chamber at the rear of the building. This was usually how his evenings were spent. He scraped lamp-black and mixed ink, scribbled and scratched, using and reusing the sheets of parchment that they could not afford to replace, covering them with his minute script left to right, then turning the sheet to cover it again, sometimes a third time along the diagonal, until the page was black with his near indecipherable handwriting. The ink alternated between its constituents. Water and soot.
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 83