The Pop’s Rhinoceros (28 page)

His secretary knocks at last, enters, and stands before him. Ghiberti’s grayness, his flatness, his imperturbability, all these are provocation to his master. His servant glides and copes. He is effortless when the Pope wants pratfalls and commotion. These are not his functions, yet in being so unsuitable, Ghiberti tempts the Pope, almost invites the japes and practical jokes his master rehearses in his head. Chamber-pots and horses’ tails wreathe Ghiberti in possible fun and games. He desists, of course. But Ghiberti is a perfect foil, the ideal candidate. The Pope rolls
an olive stone between his fingers as Ghiberti opens the ledger. Upon the page his day is marked out in appointments, offices, and functions. Ghiberti coughs—he always coughs—and looks up at the Pope.

“Holiness?” His Holiness nods and Ghiberti begins to read. Tomorrow another page will turn, and another, and another. How many ledgers, he wonders, how many stacks of ledgers have the successors to Peter filled? So many years. So many popes.

With Julius’ death, twenty-five cardinals march into Sixtus’ Chapel. Twenty-five cramped and tetchy prelates barge the thin partitions of their cubicles, toss and turn on their narrow beds, pace the floor, argue, urinate noisily behind the curtained pissoir at the far end of the nave. Their servants scurry from cubicle to cubicle, relaying messages in hushed voices, throwing up their hands or nodding their heads. The doors are locked and the conclave is commenced. The cardinals are exasperated, barging and growing bullish. Adrian of Corneto has already been pressed by Riario’s man, refused, wavered, and still wavers. Soderini plays a waiting game, his mind on his deposed kinsman, while Bainbridge appears aloof, disdainful of the politicking that hums and buzzes in the vaults of the church, sharpening, dying away, resuming. A decision must be made here, yet nothing seems clear. Slumped on a cot, Cardinal Medici feels his secret wound flare up and ache inside him. Dovizio is tireless, scampering among the doubters, pressing his cause, but all he can do is groan and turn from side to side. He regards the urinal with dread, the pot with terror. Twice a day they listen to him straining and moaning behind the curtain, but the conclave goes on.

On the sixth day, a vote is taken. Having cast their lots, the cardinals return immediately to desultory talk and their idle pastimes. Some return to their cubicles and do not trouble to emerge even when the votes are counted; others listen out of the depths of boredom. Disinterest hangs like a fog in the chapel. They are hopelessly split and know it. The returning officer announces that the ballot is scattered. None of them will be Pope just yet.

Soon the guardians of the conclave have reduced them to a single meal of vegetables each day. There is no debate now; the lines are drawn. From one side of the chapel stooped bodies and faces lined with age array themselves against the younger cardinals. Neither patience nor good counsel will bring the conclave to an end. The younger cardinals grin in the candlelight. Endurance will elect this Pope. Seconds dawdle on the way to being minutes. Minutes take on the aspect of hours. Time stretches out and yawns open before them. Nothing happens, except delay. Then, as the two sides face one another down, a loud moan is heard, and succeeding it, a vile vapor rises in the chapel, a truly horrible stink that sends all of them scurrying for their handkerchiefs. In his cot in the far cubicle, Cardinal Medici rolls in misery. His wound has disclosed its secret. All through the preceding week he felt it swelling to the size of an egg. Now the albumin is trickling between his legs, and its stench recalls him to the place he believed consigned to
hell. Deep within his fundament, his cyst has burst and now engulfs him in its vapor. He moans once more. A second, more subtle torment is rising out of the stench. He sniffs and the suspicion is confirmed. Soon the surgeon will be with him, but for now he must listen as the message of his bowels is passed in whispers about the conclave. Medici is sick. Medici may not last. … Later that night, after the usual, humiliating probing, Dovizio murmurs in his ear that Cardinal Riario seeks a meeting. His discharge smells as Prato did.

Now he turns to his waiting secretary. “Of all the Pope’s anatomy, Ghiberti, which part would you say actually joins him with the throne of Peter?”

Ghiberti looks up, startled. The Pope sits back, smiling faintly at the conundrum. His secretary is terribly dull. He will be thinking of his ledger, already worrying that the day is slipping by, time racing past. And dawn is barely risen. There is plenty of time, a hatful of hours for his diversions and pleasures.

“Come now, it is not hard. Which part?” The Pope waits.

“His faith,” says Ghiberti.

Tedious, dull Ghiberti. It is a wonder he stands it, a miracle. He needs wit, not dogma, a lively sally, a joke to rouse him up. Ghiberti invariably spells gloom.

“Wrong,” barks the Pope.

Suppurating, sweating on a sweat-soaked bed, he listened to Riario’s drone while Dovizio stood and nodded as if he were too stricken a beast to reply for himself. He might even have wished for death. It was possible he had; he is unsure now. Riario’s words were a tawdry epitaph to his ambitions as his rival talked of Peter’s burden and the necessary humilities, the loneliness. Get it over, he thought in his weakness. Tell me the conclave has reached its decision. But Riario talked on and on, assuring him that he need fear nothing, his loyalty was unshakable, the others would stand at his side, young and old alike. Scant recompense, he thought, cursing his weak and leaking body. That the flesh alone should trip him in his course, no failing of the head or heart or spirit. It was unbearable. And Riario’s soothing monotone sounded in his defeated ears as the victor’s trumpet, hooting and crowing, deafening him to everything, all his patient hopes crashing down about him. But then his tormentor began speaking more urgently—he will not hear—his face looming nearer, which he will not see, disappearing and bending to touch the hem of his stinking robe, but the indignity of whatever he is doing will not touch him. To the vanquished, flight. Riario’s watery eyes appear once more. Dovizio has stopped nodding and seems to be telling him something his ears cannot hear. Only later will he understand that his very weakness, his secret ailment and its discovery, were the keys. The cardinals did not think he would live. They thought their own opportunities would come again soon enough. His buttocks parted, and stinking air filled the chapel with his mortality, and the cardinals smelled death. He has been utterly mistaken, for he has won.

“I and my party withdraw our interest from the conclave,” Riario told him. “You will be Pope, Giovanni.”

Ghiberti still stands there, silent and stolid.

“Come now. Which part?” But he is dull, quite dreadfully dull. He will not answer.

“My fundament,” the Pope tells his secretary in triumph. “My arse!”

Ghiberti smiles briefly, then looks to his ledger.

“The Ambassador of Aragon,” he says. “I can put him off no longer.”

The air in the Sala Regia is already thick with their dislike. The two rivals pace stressful tangents on the echoing floor, curt nods exchanged on introduction an hour back and since then not a word. They do not look to each other. They do not speak. Two men have come to see the Pope. Twice already, Ghiberti has appeared and disappeared. Sunlight floods by the window while lutanists practice in the adjacent chapel and the two men wait.

Through frescoed and gilt-encrusted galleries and chambers, up and down short staircases that link the Vatican’s haphazard levels, moves the Pope with his secretary in tow. Perhaps it is the arched panels above which bow the flat plane of the corridor floor, some sympathetic echo, a sunk reflection nudging up against the calm marble. Or his eyes, weak and liable organs at best. Or his own slippered feet wearing a gentle groove, the merest trough as he patters over the milky slabs. Erosions and latent damage: the repeated paths of a hundred popes. Use and custom are the cambers and beaten trails of his palace. Clerics and their masters, suppliants, cardinals, and princes wash through Peter’s square, scending the walls and flooding by the palace culverts into reception rooms and chambers, scouring hollows and recesses out of the architecture. The church is worn and there is only so much volume, only room for some, yet still they come to fill and drink the sump. Underneath the palace lie deep wells and cisterns that only Peter’s keys unlock, and there Christ’s agony slops in the darkness. The grail holds a healing sea which he may measure out and never drain. God’s kingdom lies beneath a glassy skin, and this world’s being is but its poor reflection: brute pigment, veined and milky marble, the body’s organs throbbing in their leaking, mortal rind. He farts softly, painlessly, as Ghiberti precedes him down the staircase.

Two heads turn; two pairs of eyes fix upon his descent. He stares back. A straggly shock of black and a closer-cropped tonsure stiff with oil. Bodies: tall, and of medium height. Clothes: doublet worked with gold against a suit of plain fustian. They stand apart, both waiting for him to reach his station. The suppliants have a particular confidence. They like to touch him, reaching forward to take his hand, free hand gripping his wrist, embracing, kissing his cheek or his gown or ring. They kneel, their hands moving like crabs toward his feet. At Easter he would wash the feet of poor beggars before the Coena Domini. As he settled the arch in his palm and stroked water, over the toes, the calluses seemed to soften and disappear in the water, leaving the skin smooth and cool. When they stood,
the dust would stick where the water still clung. And when he dried them, the old lesions would reappear. His movements were jerky and awkward. Christ never flinched while he bathed the feet of the disciples. Veronica’s hands never wavered as she wiped Christ’s brow.

“Holiness …” Familiar faces approach him. He glances at Ghiberti, who gazes into the floor. The whispered words, lips touched to his ring. They straighten, and he sees the ambassadors’ swarthy faces pucker slightly. Their audiences should both have been in private. Is Ghiberti telling him something? Some realignment at the court of the Portuguese? The Spanish?

“… Faria, Ambassador of Dom Manolo of Portugal, and Don Jerònimo da Vich, Baron of Llauri, Ambassador of Fernando the Catholic of the Kingdoms of Spain. …”

He smiles faintly, gives the merest nod.

“You have waited long, Ambassador?” The title is inflected oddly: “Ambassador,” as though there is some question behind it. Ghiberti sees Don Jerònimo begin to color. He looks away, then down at his own feet. The Aragonese has never, in Ghiberti’s judgment, played this particular game with delicacy. A stumbler, and more so since the game turned against him. There are rumors that Vich is cleverer than he appears. As a dancing bear to an untamed one, thinks Ghiberti.

“I would ask, Holiness, why this Portingale is here, and why I have been misled, and why my master, the King of Aragon and Castile, is treated in this manner after the assistance he has …”

The hall clatters with the Aragonese’s blunt and ill-directed arrows. Ghiberti looks deeply into the matter of the floor. The Pope’s smile widens and his hands are raised, a sympathetic shrug, as though they are both victims of an inescapable muddle, a world at odds with its inhabitants and their imperfect understandings who must nevertheless bear it with good humor, as His Holiness is doing now, as Don João is doing, too, as Don Jerònimo is not. It is, Ghiberti knows, an expression designed to infuriate. And Vich, of course, is correct. He has been promised his audience in private; it has been more than a month in the arrangement. Why, then, has he, Ghiberti, not barred Don João this morning? Ghiberti watches while the trio climb slowly up the staircase, guided by the Pope toward the gardens of the Belvedere. Vich struts awkwardly beside his gliding rival. He has already lost this audience, had lost it even before he arrived. Try as he might, Ghiberti cannot fathom it. Polity, governance, good sense, and good precedents all say “yes” to Don Jerònimo and his master. But—Ghiberti’s turning thought as the three men foreshorten and disappear in the stairway’s weird perspective—the Pope, or the Medici, says “no.”

The gardens stretch. Horizons drop and rise. The Pope’s mind races after his leaping eye as the ground gallops forward and up the hill. Two great terraces are divided by a third, smaller level with linking stairs and ramps to mount the incline, and at the summit of the hill a delicate villa glows in the morning sunlight:
the Belvedere from which the gardens take their name. It is the scale that silences his companions. The first terrace is a formal garden set with mulberries and bay trees that distance shrinks to shrubs at the far end. To their left the ground falls away out of sight, while to the right a great storied arcade runs forward on three levels until the second terrace reduces it to two, the third to one, only the topmost loggia surviving unbroken to the far villa. Behind, the palace of the Vatican stands in shadow, towering above them. Wood pigeons shoot up suddenly, dive left, and disappear into the valley. The gardens appear still, perfect, empty.

“Foxes,” says the Pope, motioning up the hill. The third terrace is more thickly planted, more wooded. “We suffer infestations of foxes.” The ambassadors nod wisely.