“Salvestro!”
“Wake up!”
“What now, Salvestro?”
Salvestro looks down at the trio, then left and right along the battle-line of his army. They are silent now, all waiting, stalled there in front of the water. He clambers to his feet and balances precariously on the back of the Beast. A little flotilla of poets is advancing hesitantly, a boatload of the boldest almost at the podium. Salvestro gestures to the motley collection of punts and rowboats before them. He raises his arms, cries, “To the boats! Attack!” and plunges headlong into the water.
ROSS-err-oooss. …
Say this much for poets: they do not lack for nerve. Unnecessary to the well-ordered society and mostly incomprehensible to its citizens, they know all about advancing into the void of public indifference and hostility. This serves them well as their gilded gondolas paddle forward to the rhythm of Saturnians and hexameters chanted by their metrically minded coxes. Two or three adopt stately alcaics and drop back toward the rear, while the foremost whip out brisk heroic couplets, arms and lungs pumping, lobbing up the odd orange as a covering bombardment, speeding forward to meet the vanguard of the forces of Rosserus, half of whom are still struggling to get afloat while most of the others are manhandling the Beast into two of the least leaky-looking punts. Imperfect logistics will be the besetting fault of Rosserus, compounded by confusions at the level of command. Of their three potential strategists, one insists on saying three things at once, another submits entirely to his penchant for elaborate and unmanageable violence, and the third spends most of the battle underwater.
“That’s Rosserus,” the Pope informs Bibbiena smugly.
“Where?”
“Underwater.”
Salvestro dives and skims the floor of the lake, pulling himself forward through the cold drag of the water in a smooth glide. The lines of the flagstones slide under him and tumble away. This is dead tideless water. He is an arrow moving through vacant space, toward the center of the Lake of Mars, toward Jörg. His lungs burn the last of their oxygen. Time to rise.
“There!” shouts the Pope. “Look, Bibbiena! Rosserus!”
Bibbiena and Dovizio exchange glances.
Below, it appears the battle has now been joined in earnest. Most of Rosserus are afloat and punting vigorously to engage the enemy fleet. A detachment under Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf is already occupied in restraining Dommi, who has upended a scrawny rhymester and is emphasizing the gravity of a perceived flaw in the latter’s metrical technique—” How would you like it if I reversed one of your feet, poetastro?”—while Hanno seems to have achieved this already, fourfold, galumphing about in circles directly in front of the Pope’s platform and unaware as yet that his mortal enemy is at last being launched from the opposite side of the Lake of Mars, teetering and lurching away from the waiting punts, the unevenness of Salvestro’s stuffing making itself felt as it rears, twists, topples, and—kersploo-oosh!—crashes down into the water. “Hooray!” shouts little Pierino. A melon floats past. He tries to pick it up and hurl it. It’s too heavy. He starts sniffling.
“Try a grapefruit!” shouts King Caspar. “Yes! Over here!” join in the rest of the Mauritians. (No supper. No breakfast. They can hardly hear themselves think over the rumbling of their stomachs.)
Salvestro looks up at the faces looking down at him. He seems to have veered to the left and has surfaced beneath the crowded loggie. “That’s Salvestro,” Lucullo remarks with quiet pride to the bancherotti standing next to him. “Old friend of mine.” They nod in agreement. Salvestro sees four gray legs sticking up in the air, the Beast’s stitched-up bobbing belly, a Rosserus-squad paddling furiously to the rescue. Motionless in the dross of his finery, Jörg might as well be carved out of stone. Salvestro dives again.
The black bodies of the punts pass over him like huge fish. He twists under gondolas whose paddles are the legs of scurrying watercranes. Pressed between air and stone, this sliver of water is his domain; Salvestro is the only thing alive in it. He kicks off his boots, then shrugs off his jerkin. He ripples forward noiselessly, the slick liquid running over his skin. Faster, he tells himself, for the surface is a fragile sheet of perfect ice. Find the depths. … There are no depths. The surface breaks about his head.
Krekk-unnch! Splosh! Arrgh!
Dommi is breaking boats with one hand and poets with the other, beating the latter rhythmically over the head with fragments of broken boat and melons, awkward but serviceable implements: “Now you’ve got the hang of the amphi-macer.” Bish, bosh, bish!” Let’s move on to the mysteries of the amphibrach, shall we?” BOSH! BISH! BOSH! The poets are wisely giving him a wide berth—it seems to be their ineptitude that enrages him—and most of the Rosserus-boats are, too. He is unrestrainable, now breaking a melon over the head of Marinano: “There! Now you know how Baldus felt!” Little Pierino is still plucking up the courage to grapple with a grapefruit, King Caspar and the Mauritians are still dying with hunger, Hanno is hooting miserably and clog-dancing through a watery hell, when to add to his anguish he sees that the Beast is up and heading toward him, towed by a flotilla of coracles and punts captained by mud-masked desperadoes waving sticks. Hanno panicks, tries to turn, and finds himself reeling through a medley of chaotic Sicilian folk-dances. The Beast looks as though it’s getting bigger and lumpier, as though … Its pilots look nervously over their shoulders. The spectators rub their eyes. It’s undeniable. The Beast is growing. Or, more accurately, it’s swelling. Inside its tautening, tightening hide, the impossible is taking place: Groot’s bread is starting to rise.
“There he is again!” shouts the Pope over the noise of the crowd in the adjacent loggie. They have begun chanting again. His Holiness points to the wet head surfacing like a seal to the left of the podium. “It’s Rosserus.”
Bibbiena drags his eyes away from the ballooning Beast. “No, it’s not,” he says flatly.
“Listen to your unwashed flock,” adds Dovizio.
Even as they watch, the head ducks down again. The chanting only gets louder and clearer, resolving itself into a vigorous anapest—BISH! (ow!) BISH!(ow!) BOSH!(argh!)—as Dommi explains to Pierino senior, even though in strict metrical terms the name that the crowd seems to have seized on as its rallying-cry is actually an amphibrach by stress and an amphimacer by measure. Why? Why—when Hanno (now capering his way through an inept tarantella) seems at last about to engage with his long-dreaded mortal enemy (now swollen to three
times its normal size and still growing), when Dommi is picking up the very last of the gondolas and smashing it over his knee, when Wulf, Wolf, and Wilf are apologizing for his excesses in triplicate to the sodden battered poets wading to shore, when little Pierino finally hurls a wizened orange to the starving musicians, who rise as one, already calculating the probable number and division of its segments, only to see it speared in midflight and carried away on the beak of a passing crow, when all this frolicsome fun is being played out for their entertainment on the surface of the Lake of Mars—why has the crowd chosen as its champion the one creature diving invisibly through the water underneath?
SAL- VES- TRO! SAL- VES- TRO! SAL- VES- TRO!
“Yes, that’s right. Salvestro,” murmurs Lucidlo. “Old friend of mine.” He has been saying this for about half an hour now. “Sal-ves-tro. Important to get the pronunciation right, don’t you agree?” Everybody does. Absolutely everyone agrees absolutely wholeheartedly, and as a result the pronunciation of Salvestro’s name is just about perfect, even more perfect when the volume starts to fall off a little, better yet when it quietens to a whisper, and when the last sussuration dies away, leaving an unbroken silence, the perfection of “Salvestro” is absolute. It is not the silence of smooth water. It is the silence of ice. Every head is fixed on the lake, where the two Beasts gaze at each other and where Salvestro does not rise. Old memories tick and tock. The crowd remains quiet. Possibly they are waiting for their champion to shoot up like a vengeful Neptune. Possibly, though,
they are waiting for the Beasts. Hanno takes a step backward. His enemy creaks. Another step. Another creak. The Beast is a bloated, ballooning monster, its head the size of a water-barrel, its body the hull of a ship, and still growing as the pressure inside builds to the point where this brine-drenched dung-dunked hide stretches tighter than a drumskin, until, in a fleeting instant of aghast anticipation, everyone realizes what the next moment must inevitably bring. Everyone, that is, except two.
“Salvestro? Is that you?”
“It is, Father Jörg. I’m in here. Underneath you.”
Then the Beast explodes.
The force shoots fragments of Beast-skin and sodden bread high and wide into the air in a spray of gray tatters and pinkish-white clods that spatter the waiting crowds. Small brawls develop around the landing-sites of the horns, and the larger flaps of skin are quickly torn to shreds in the quest for souvenirs. The brooch-sellers pack up and go home. Groot’s bread—fluffy but sodden—splats wetly down on all and sundry, who scrape it off their faces and fling it in disgust to the ground (all except King Caspar and the Mauritians, who, notwithstanding its purplish hue and fishy smell, gobble as much of it as they possibly can). When they look up again, what they see, to their astonishment, is Salvestro, their champion, standing upright on the podium with the strangely dressed old man in his arms. What Salvestro sees is the Pope standing upright on the distant platform. They look at each other across the intervening distance. From his gestures, the Pope seems to be making a speech, and from the cheers of the crowd it seems to be a popular one, and from the chant that succeeds it, it would seem that it concerns him.
SAL- VES- TRO! SAL- VES- TRO! SAL- VES- TRO!
“Oi! Are you going to stand up there all day?” Dommi’s punt bumps against the podium. “Whoa!” Dommi’s punt-pole suddenly drops a foot, almost unbalancing him. “Come on. Fat Bastards going to feed us dinner. Are these your boots?”
Father Jörg coughs hoarsely. “Have you come to join with me, Salvestro?” SAL- VES- TRO! SAL- VES- TRO! SAL- VES- TRO!
” Come on, Salvestro!” shouts Dommi.
Plop!
No one hears it, not even Father Jörg. The crowd are shouting too loud and will still be shouting when Dommi has punted both men back to the palace, when he has questioned the manhood of a sullen band of Switzers and headbutted their commander in the face en route to the tinello, where Salvestro will find himself seated at the top table, wedged between the Orator of Fernando the Catholic and His Holiness himself, when he looks around and sees that Father Jörg has been seated farther away, amongst the servants, when he wonders, without really worrying, where Amalia can have got to. … They will still be shouting then, but only just. Thirty or forty of them at most. Finally they will be silent, all departed, all forgetful, on their respective routes back to wherever and whatever they came from. As the last one makes his way down the spiral staircase in the eastern wall of the Belvedere, Guidol will be leaning over himself and His Holiness in the midst of an explanation of a dish called corquignolles, the musicians will be about to play, and His Holiness will have offered him “whatever it is in my power to grant,” while wondering privately when Ghiberti will return from the errand he has been sent on. (Sal-ves-tro! Salvestro? That name is in the ledger somewhere. …) It will be dark. It will be his last night in Ro-ma.
Plop! Plop! Plop!…
Poor Towser. Even his corpse is useless.
And poor little Pierino—such a difficult day for the pygmy-poet, for the producer of the Painful Paean. A clout around the ear, an immovable melon, an unreachable grapefruit, then the climactic escrowed orange, and now everyone’s disappeared and left him all on his own. Little Pierino begins to sniffle again, then cry.
“Two thousand seven hundred and three. Two thousand seven hundred and two. Two thousand seven hundred and one. Two thousand seven hundred and none … Oh, hello, little boy. Who are you?”
Little Pierino raises his tearstained face and wipes his freely running nose. A girl is standing in front of him.
“I’m little Pierino,” says little Pierino. “I’m a—”
“Little Pierino the poet?” asks the girl, an expression of incredulous delight suffusing her artless features, as it seems to the diminutive dithyrambist.
He nods proudly. “What were you counting?”
“Oh”—she gestures airily—“just the leaves falling out of the trees, or God’s acts of mercy, or the saved, or the damned, or the people who will remember Salvestro.”
“Salvestro? Who’s he?”
“Six thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine. Never mind. Do you know any games, little Pierino? I only know leapfrog and the rat game.”
“I know a poem,” offers little Pierino. “It’s about His Holiness. Shall I recite it for you?”
Amalia nods eagerly.
His right hand moves to his breast (plucking the Orphic lyre), his left arm extends toward Amalia (tuning it to the Aeolian mode). Little Pierino opens his mouth.
You were born, O Leo, in fair Florence town,
Where the fields are green and the earth beneath brown. …
And so on, while Amalia claps and laughs, dances and cries: the perfect audience for the pipsqueak panegyrist. She even joins in the anapest-skip at the end of each line.
“That was lovely, little Pierino,” she reassures him when the final hendecasyl-lable has been sent rolling down the empty passage. “Although …”
“Although what?”
Two thousand two hundred and two, thinks Amalia. She has been counting silently and still is. Aloud she says, “It is so perfect, its numbers so smooth, its figures so ornate. … But you have left something out, haven’t you, little Pierino?”
“Have I?” He might be about to cry again.
“His Holiness’s visit to Prato, little Pierino. Of course, he was not Pope Leo then, only Cardinal Medici, but he had such fun while he was there. …” She stops, for little Pierino actually is crying now. She puts her arms about the wee weepy wordsmith. “Don’t worry, little Pierino. We’ll write the Prato part together, and then you can recite it to His Holiness. He will be amazed by you, just as I am.”
Little Pierino’s runny nose nuzzles her snow-white neck. “All right,” he sniffs gratefully.
One thousand and twelve. One thousand and eleven and counting. Poor Salvestro. At this rate, nobody’s going to remember him at all. …
“Poor” be damned, and “Poor Salvestro” doubly damned. Forget the saved. Forget the leaves. God’s small acts of mercy? On the face of it, Salvestro’s having an excellent time. Just count the number of new friends he has made: a Pope, a cook, an Ambassador, a Cardinal, an underbutler, a wine-server, a noisy man and a quiet man, a short man and a tall man, a shivering band of musicians with lamp-blacked faces, men in caps (red, black, green, and blue), a Senator, a financier, a dozen curvaceous courtesans (all, for some reason, called Imperia), a Baron, a Lord, no priests, innumerable poets (his “honest toil” is already being extemporized upon), fivescore mud-caked beggars, and a secretary. Everyone wants to meet Salvestro, except perhaps the secretary, weighed down by a stoutly bound folio and trying to gesture discreetly to His Holiness, who is preoccupied, as is Salvestro, by Guidol’s explanation of the corquignolles.
“Now we come to the eleventh layer. Unlike layers one to five, which, as you will recall, nourish the natural spirits produced in the liver, or layers six to ten, which feed the vital spirits of the blood, the eleventh layer is sustenance for the animal spirits of the brain.”
Guidol turns over a wafer of pastry and discloses a greenish paste latticed with stringy red things and studded with highly polished periwinkles. Both men are finding it hard to follow this explanation, for Guidol has a habit of talking into his sleeve and his accent thickens when he becomes excited. “You’re not French, are you, Guidol?” asks His Holiness on a hunch.
“Alsatian,” replies Guidol. “Now, these plum-flavored tendons. Any guesses as to the meat?” They shak
e their heads. “Wolf.” The dish containing the corquignolles is deep enough to hold a cow’s head, with horns. So far, they have excavated rather less than an inch. Perhaps, thinks His Holiness, it is time to ask this Salvestro for the second time if he has decided what he wants yet, or Guidol just how many layers of these corquignolles remain.
“Four hundred and twenty-seven. Four hundred and twenty-five …” Amalia’s skipping. Both senses.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the tinello, a jolly Mohrenfest is starting up, King Caspar and Mauritians tuning up their violas, lutes, sackbuts, and some other instrument. Hackbrett? Dulcimer? Call it an alpine zither. Dommi leads the applause by thumping vigorously on the table, which promptly splinters and sends flagons of Tuscan rotgut crashing to the floor together with platters of steamed chicken and tureens of mushy turnips. Everyone else claps, and King Caspar announces that their first tune tonight will be that old favorite “Il Grasso Porco di Cattivo Umore.”
Soon two of the Imperias start dancing a frisky morescho, incorporating sly allusions to the simple life of the peasant girls whose shapeless shifts are the (distant) models for these courtesans’ taffeta-lined gamurras, bobbing and curtsying, hoeing and milking. “Honest toil,” the poets murmur approvingly, wondering if the rhythmic flop of their breasts might lend itself to a tetrameter. Soon everyone is on their feet and hopping around, although King Caspar, mindful of the fact that the Supreme Pontiff paying his fee values suavity and a facile diminuendo ranging from the lachrymose to the sepulchral over anyone actually enjoying themselves, resolutely maintains a sedate tempo against the wilder riffs of his Mauritians and the alpine zitherer in particular, whom he shoots disapproving glares whenever he runs his plectrum down the strings.
From the top table it appears that everyone below is having a splendid time. The Pope taps his finger in time to his theme tune, Guidol begins explaining the fifteenth layer of the corquignolles (puréed squirrel gizzards and chitterlings marinated in snake venom), Dovizio points and says, “There’s Rosserus,” and Bibbiena collapses in fits of giggles. “Another notch,” murmurs La Cavallerizza. Vitelli reaches behind her. Salvestro notes that the Pope’s book-hampered secretary is waving frantically to His Holiness, but only when he, Salvestro, is looking the other way. He waves back but gets no response. The Ambassador sitting beside him has not said a word in over half an hour. It does not matter. He has reached his decision. He has decided what he wants, leaning over now to whisper it in His Holiness’s ear, rather pink and fat, he notes. His Holiness beams delightedly. “Blasphemous, my dear Sylvestro! Wonderful.”
The Pop’s Rhinoceros Page 87