The Pop’s Rhinoceros

by Lawrance Norflok

  But the scrabbling was not Jörg. He ran forward and five or six fat black bodies froze for a second, then fled from him, or perhaps from the unfamiliar light, scattering around the chamber and disappearing into the shadows. Chewed pages of the Prior’s manuscript were strewn about the opened chest. Opened, HansJürgen realized, by the rats. He frowned, then stooped to gather them up. The rats were growing bolder and cleverer. They were still in the room, he knew. That was the game the children had been playing—the Rat Game—which was based on exactly this tactic. Instead of disappearing down their holes, the rats would hide in some dark or inaccessible corner, keeping still and silent until they judged that the danger was past, then they would move forward again. Their entrance to the chamber was a crack in the wall that they had enlarged somehow, choosing to chew through solid stone rather than attack the door. A puzzling decision. HansJürgen secured the chest and walked out to the back courtyard for a clod of earth to block their egress, a vague plan to hunt them down in the chamber forming in his mind as he walked back in. He would need a stick or something. He was tamping the soil into the crack when Lappi’s widow started shouting. The usual rage. Jörg had returned. He worked the soil in with his thumb, but it crumbled and would not stay in. A dash of water, perhaps. The woman was still shouting. He would have to go out if it continued much longer. Sometimes his presence seemed to abash her. Sometimes it raised her ire to a new level entirely. The shouting grew no quieter, and after a minute or so he rose reluctantly to investigate.

  Again he was mistaken. The widow was raising her broom as he appeared. Before her stood not Jörg, but a brown-faced man, quite old, his face wrinkled. He knew him from somewhere. The old man dodged the broom-thrusts with ease, looking up as HansJörgen emerged from the hostel’s darkness.

  “Murderer!” shouted the old woman.

  “Murderer yourself,” retorted the man, seemingly unconcerned by the accusation. “Remember me?” he addressed HansJürgen. “I’m Batista.” He gestured in the rough direction of the Pope’s palace. “I remember you. Last summer.”

  HansJürgen nodded.

  “You look different, if you don’t mind my saying so. Or even if you do. Will you shut up?” This last was directed at Lappi’s widow, who, rather surprisingly, did. “Anyway, say good-bye from me, that’s why I’ve called. I’m Batista. Don’t forget. Had some good chats we did, me and old Jörg. Never a cross word. Then again, I never understood a word he said.”

  Batista made a little salute and turned to go.

  “Wait,” said HansJürgen. “Where shall I say you’ve gone?”

  “Gone?” Batista turned again but continued walking, backward, away down the street. “I’m not going anywhere. It’s you two who’ll be off, won’t you? I mean, now His Holiness has heard that petition of yours. Building a city under the sea, wasn’t it? Something like that. …”

  “A church,” HansJürgen called after his departing back. “What do you mean, the Pope has heard his petition?”

  Batista waved without turning around. HansJürgen watched him dodge his way through the children playing the Rat Game and pass the cart still waiting up the street. Its driver woke as he walked quickly past. One of the children ran toward him.

  HansJürgen went back inside and resumed his work on the rat-hole. They would dig it out, of course. Clay would be better, or plaster. Or best of all, cement. Batista was talking nonsense. It was quite clear that Jörg had been delayed by something this particular night. He knew that the petitioners played tricks on each other. In the early months, Jörg had several times returned covered with chalk dust or soaked with water. He presumed it was water. By this standard, Batista’s would be quite a sophisticated trick. He began smoothing the earth flush with the surface of the wall. Once or twice they had directed Jörg down to the Porta Pertusa or into the sea of mud behind the palace, where, on the basis of four stone piers and several hundred waterlogged trenches, the new basilica was rumored to be rising. It might take him hours to find his way out of there, and he, HansJürgen, would probably have to go out and look for him soon. Yes, a silly trick. No doubt at all. Or almost none. Although, perhaps, barely possibly …

  “Filthy murderer.”

  No. None, for this surely was Jörg. The widow seemed to have already expended that day’s store of hatred, for after this single weary expletive she fell silent. HansJü;rgen settled himself to his task once again. He played the oil-lamp over the surface of the patch. Quite smooth. Next would come the shuffling footsteps. Then, “Brother, are you there?” He would reply that he was. The Prior would go to his chest and take out his papers. Later he would unhook the palliasses that they now hung from a rope fixed to the wall. He would have to suspend the chest up there, too, or devise a more resistant lock. They would pray. They would sleep. He smoothed the earth in the rat-hole. Perhaps he would try to kill the rats. Quite smooth. There was no “petition.” No petition “would be heard.” Quite, quite smooth. He moved the lamp away from his handiwork, placing it a little way behind him. Then his heart jumped.

  A pair of boots.

  He turned back to the wall. Someone was standing behind him, at the very edge of his vision. He felt strangely weightless. Perhaps this too was part of Batista’s trick? He ran his hand over the wall for what must have been the thirtieth time, feeling his heart thud in his chest.

  “You can’t pretend I’m not here forever, Brother HansJü;rgen.”

  He swiveled clumsily on his heels, ready to rise and … And what? Defend himself? The notion was almost comical, but he seemed to be getting up anyway. Before he could do so, the intruder placed a firm hand on his shoulder, squatted on his haunches, and joined him on the floor. A face moved forward into the ambit of the lamplight.

  Later, HansJürgen would realize that the question he blurted out in the shock of that instant more properly belonged to the other and, later still, that the smile that flitted across the other’s face was in consequence not of his knowing the answer, but of an odd pleasure taken in the momentary confusion of their roles. He should have known that it would never be the Prior who would come upon him like this. Not only should the question have been the other’s, but the answer should have been his, and the smile, too, for only minutes earlier the answer he received now was precisely the one that he had rejected then for fear that his hopes raised to such a height might not survive the fall if dashed. He had felt nothing in the black mud by the river, nothing at all. Not even despair.

  “Where is Father Jörg?” he demanded more sharply than he intended.

  “With the Pope,” answered Salvestro.

  Two or three times a day, women arrived with basins and cloths to wash his sores with warm salt water and, after that, to force a vile-tasting gruel down his throat. He was turned this way and that as they swabbed the rawest patches of flesh. Then one held his head and another wielded the spoon. He coughed and spluttered but otherwise neither helped nor hindered them in their ministrations. They always looked the same, although he knew that there were several of them. They kept the shutters open so that the sea air should dry the worst of his sores, those that exuded a colorless fluid and stubbornly refused to scab. Most of his waking hours were spent with his head bent back, watching the upside-down view out the window, which was the same as the view through the open hatch-cover: a sky scrubbed to a raw blue by high freezing winds. A sky strung with white filaments like wool on a loom. A sky dark and heavy with rain, prowling silently forward, belly low to the ground. A storm sky.

  “They cut us out of the canoes and threw us in the cage with it.”

  He thought of the expressions on the Portingales’ faces as they were lifted up on deck.

  “They believed it would crush us. Or devour us, perhaps.”

  The animal’s blunt mouth and lips would curl and pucker when it ate, briefly animating the expressionless head that swung low over the planking in search of food-scraps that it would deftly pluck up and then chew with a placid roll of its jaw. It seemed too
delicate a maneuver for so bulky an animal. The brown-faced crewmen called it gomda.

  “All it ate was hay, though,” he said.

  Amalia waited politely until she was sure that these latest ramblings were finished.

  “Do you know how to play leapfrog?” she inquired brightly.

  At night the sea sounded soft and endlessly patient. Wish, wash, wish, wash … He was on the beach, white as a fish and festooned with dark green seaweed. Bernardo was out to sea with a good thick rope cinched diagonally across his shoulder and a further loop around his waist. He was quite a way out and swimming very powerfully, enough power there to tow a fleet. The rope rose slowly to the surface as it tautened. Bernardo’s arms were going like windmills. He watched the hawser pop up out of the smooth wet sand and run past him to tug at the embedded corpse, which lifted like a great tree-stump, its roots snapping under the tension of huge winches. Then it was free and being dragged down into the water, where it rolled and flopped, legs showing briefly above the surface, four comical stumps, before turning on its side. Bernardo was swimming along an enormous arc, raising a ridge of water before him and cutting a deep, turbulent wake. The animal hardly disturbed the surface at all. He watched them dwindle and disappear: a giant towing a small gray island out into the dwarfing sea.

  Amalia staggered through the door with a pile of clothes that she dropped on the floor in front of him. Some shirts, thick breeches, a kind of coat made of cowhide. He pored over these, turning them over, pushing them about. A pair of boots.

  “Hurry up, Salvestro,” she said when it seemed that he might continue his inspection indefinitely. “Violetta’s made crosses for all your friends, but she doesn’t know what to write on them.”

  He looked up at her, standing over him impatiently. “Your dress has a stain on it,” he said.

  “I blew my nose on it,” replied Amalia, sounding pleased. “It’s snot.”

  They had laid out the bodies in the stable. Two of them were Portingales. The rest were crewmen, eighteen in all.

  “One of these two was the vessel’s commander,” he told the older woman who hovered at his elbow. “But I do not know which one, nor either of their names.”

  Violetta frowned but desisted from questioning him further. He continued on down the line.

  “This one I know. The native men called him Ossem. He was the one who gave us food.” He looked down at the body, which, unlike many of the others, had been spared disfigurement in its passage to shore. When the first mast had snapped it had been on the orders of this man that two of the natives had tried to break open the cage.

  “There were no others?” he asked.

  Violetta shook her head. The two of them stood in silence over the dead men.

  “Where is the animal?” he asked.

  The woman looked up from her contemplations. She led him toward a door at the rear of the stables.

  “It was Amalia’s doing,” she said dryly as they emerged. She pointed to the source of the ammoniac reek now wrinkling both their noses. “Or at her insistence.”

  So Rome, scabbed and raked-over Rome, where night is falling, the dipping sun giving the fabled bumps of her topography the chance to throw casts of shadow eastward over their rivals. The pink-lit ridges of the Quirinale, Viminale, and Esquiline are briefly a three-pronged claw closing about the wreckage of the Forum before the Palatine lops off the last of these and is eclipsed itself by the Janiculum. The Aventine and the Coelian go the same way, doused in black, sunk in the shadow of the long hump on which they will take their corresponding revenge in the morning. Goats scuttle down the sides of the Capitoline, followed quickly by the shrinking hill itself as it buries the jagged angles of its abandoned ruins in the chaotic tessellations of the city’s blocky houses and stumpy towers. Grassed-over heaps of broken pottery ripple and flatten into the contoured sweep up from the kinked river to the Porta del Popolo. Rome, for the moment, is the place where deer nibble the trees in the Baths of Diocletian and cows graze in the Forum, where the cinerary urn of Agrippina is used as a grain measure and the marble bas-relief of a fish on the Palazzo dei Conservatori is the pretext for a tax on sturgeon. Around the wreckage of the Flaminian Circus, tonight as every night, Parian and Porinian marbles are being crushed and roasted for lime, the kilns of the Calcararia pricking the night with little glows. Subterranean Rome is burning, too, the same lime eating out cadaverous vesicles, soft body-shaped cases of earth that riddle the porous subsoils, a ransacked gallery of empty aedicules and niches cut to the exact dimensions of absentee river-gods and emperors. Things sink into these waiting spaces, these obverse-statues of Rome’s builders and rulers and demolishers. Foundations sag and tip houses into the unsuspected urban churn. Successive Romes collapse under their own accumulated detritus and rise out of it again and again, reconsecrating themselves to the greater glory of Roma, a cannibal with the palate of a gourmet. Pasquino’s missing head, Marforio’s arms, the lower halves of innumerable Tritons … There are good reasons why the gazes of statues are almost always directed down. Planted outside the Convent of the Blessed Virgin inserted into the erstwhile Temple of Minerva is an enormous marble foot. It has not taken a step in fifteen hundred years.

  And into this city, or swallower and regurgitator of cities, plods the Beast. Of the various semiofficial “reception committees” stationed respectively by the obelisk (the Portingales), the print-shop of the Cinquini (the Spaniards), and the Porta del Popolo itself (the delegation of the Apostolic See), perhaps one, at least, should have known that very little of value is obtained in Rome without either the aid of a shovel or a willingness to get one’s hands dirty. They are all meant to be there incognito and as such are busying themselves with the usual inconspicuous activities: picking at their fingernails, hailing imaginary friends, trying to read the inscription on the obelisk, retying the laces on their sleeves, lining up to buy goat’s cheese or a reproduction of the Crown of Thorns from one of the stalls set up on the north side of the piazza, strolling about singly with their arms folded over their chests as though deep in thought, or standing on one leg while trying to find a particularly elusive stone that has worked its way into their shoes. All these precautions come to naught every five minutes or so when guests invited by His Holiness to tomorrow’s water-fight, aware that one of the combatants has yet to arrive and anxious whether they should attend so lopsided an event, arrive on horseback and direct indiscreet questions toward these master dissimulators, such as “So, has it arrived?” or “Any luck yet?” Perhaps most dispiriting of all is the thrice daily appearance of the secretary of Cardinal Armellini, who, no doubt through some clerical oversight, has not been invited at all. The secretary is the proud possessor of a powerful baritone. He stands up in his stirrups at one end of the piazza, directs his roving eye over the unhappy agents already scurrying away, fills his lungs, and simply bellows, “WELL!?”

  They have been waiting here a week now. Their guts are running white with the goat’s cheese. Most of them have two or three copies of the Crown of Thorns. There is no inscription on the obelisk. Even the neatherds know who they are and why they are here. The word was out before they even arrived because the exact same word was what got them posted here in the first place: Rosserus.

  So all three camps miss Salvestro and his ox and cart. One or two take note of a little girl skipping about in a brilliant white dress, remembering their instructions, “Anything out of the ordinary. “Anything at all. …” But then, checking her happy gambols and eye-catching attire against the issued description—“large, gray, horn on end of nose”—they dismiss her from their minds. The cart rumbles on, out of the piazza and south along the Via del Popolo. However did they miss it? A few hours later the same question will be asked by a double column of pike-bearing Switzers who trot up the same road and practice complicated drill-maneuvers in front of the gatehouse while their commander makes inquiries amongst the hapless spies. Loitering neatherds applaud a slick transition from the defensive
square to the double-crescent with pincer movement, and it is left to the lone apprentice in the print-shop working late to fold in quarto the fourth and final printing of Brandolini’s Simia to tell the vexatious officer that yes, the Beast passed through this afternoon, and no, he did not actually see it himself, nor did anyone. So how does he know? Oh, well, it’s simply one of those things. Rather like the supposedly incognito delegates. Everybody knows. The Beast? It just did. …

  And does. By this point, having trundled past the noisy quays at Ripetta—the light fading and giving the distant tin-topped towers of the Palace of the Senators a milky oxidized sheen, darkening further the already treacly trickle of the river, which swings away only to be met again at the end of the Via del Panico—the Beast is in the Borgo, a hundred paces west of the now defunct Pilgrim’s Staff in the Via dei Sinibaldi on the left side of the street, to be exact. More Switzers are soon milling about there, together with a small cadre of hunted-looking Palatine secretaries, although it is they themselves supposed to be doing the hunting. “Murderers!” shouts a mad old woman from farther down the street. The Beast is gone. Where? Artisans working late in the Via delle Botteghe Oscure look up from the pile of beast-brooches they are whittling for sale to the crowds expected at tomorrow’s event in the Belvedere and are struck by the strong sensation that, had they just peeked out their doors about an hour ago, they would have seen the subject of their labors ambling down the street. How odd! They look out anyway. Their neighbors look back at them. They have all had the same simultaneous thought, all missed it, sighing, waving, shaking their heads, and then back to gluing pins on the backs of their brooches, worrying now over details that never bothered them before, such as whether its hooves are perissodactyl or merely cleft, and the position of the second horn. All of a sudden their products look somehow wrong. (Second horn?) Absurd doubts, for nobody actually saw it, and by now it is probably mingling with the cattle in the Campo Vaccino or the buffalo on Tiber island, which soon and sure enough are lowing grumpily on being awakened by torch-bearing Switzers, who prod them about to no good purpose, acting on information received from a gang of stonemasons inspecting the crumbling keystone of the Ponte di Quatro Capi from a cradle anchored to the underside of the arch. The stonemasons will not be dissuaded that, yes, it was here about an hour ago. No, can’t say that anyone actually saw it, but …