The Pop’s Rhinoceros (33 page)

A small mystery: If the Church of Santissimi Apostoli truly did push itself free of the adjoining palace to form this latest baffling space, no one can remember exactly when. It had always been assumed that the west wall of the nave ran flush with the east wall of the palace and the west wing of the transept intruded into the body of the adjacent building. A number of passages at that end of the palace have a certain blocked-off look about them. Eyeing it up from the available angles,
the intruding transept theory looks unassailable. Direct access from palace to church? No problem at all, a simple matter of knocking through from
here
and coming through into the upper gallery that runs all around the church. …

The wielders of hammers and crowbars should be inured to this sensation, but still it catches them out. Crumbling brickwork topples in, a head is poked through, and there it is, thirty or forty feet away, the wall that should have been
this
wall. It appears from the piazza that the two buildings stand side by side. It appears from here that they do not. Another of those puzzling and pointless gaps, another fault in Fortress Colonna’s internal topography (some obstreperous geometry at work here). Fabrizio remembers angling his five-year-old head to peer down into this newly discovered secret space. The ground twenty feet below looked like a slice of cheese, but a hundred feet long. Anxious nursemaids had snatched him away, but thereafter he escaped at every opportunity to watch the men at work: cutting rope for the scaffold, winching up beams, emptying bags of lime, silversand, and horsehair into the plaster-vat. A man working all day at the business of splitting laths, he remembered that. A gap: the solution, to his grandfather, at least, had been obvious.

Over weeks, Fabrizio watched an outgrowth inch forward into space. The farther it extended toward the obdurate wall opposite, the more improbable it appeared, yet when it finally reached the church the apostles worked a little miracle, and suddenly it was inevitable, as though suspended between the Church of Santissimi Apostoli and the palace of the Colonna there had always been a corridor with a sprung floor, little frosted windows, its roof leaded against the weather. Had there been an opening ceremony? Fabrizio Colonna, white-haired now, stiffly erect, waiting patiently for the servants to knock the seals off the door of the same corridor, racks his brains for the memory. His mind frays between then and now. How long? Fifty years? Now the corridor is used but once a year. The procession shuffles behind him. Someone coughs. Yes! Remembered now. Files of servants had carried steaming salvers and trays of sweetmeats. The sun setting over the gable of the church had struck the frosted glass of the windows and suffused the interior with warm pink light. A chattering crowd drank wine and shifted from foot to foot as though testing the boards. The dry, resinous smell of new wood. The door closed behind the last of the celebrants. Nightfall soon; moonlight on the jumbled turrets of Fortress Colonna, on the tiles and spires of Santissimi Apostoli, two brooding masses of timber and stone. The same cold light seeped through the frosted glass of the corridor. Silence there too for a while, but then rustling, sniffing, scrabbling, and scampering as two rival hulks sent their emissaries forward. Church and palace are home to more than humans. The bridge between them made, conflict was inevitable. That night, the rat-war began.

The banging of hammers, sawing of saws, scraping of trowels, and other builderly commotions had served extended notice to the Colonna rats for some weeks before now. Slinking through cracks, flattening themselves under floor-boards, whiskers twitching and senses tuned to the limit, scouts sent out from
Nest Central had monitored the corridor’s construction and seen in the workmen’s efforts only another pointless folly, less disruptive than some of the others and—the obvious function of providing some unneeded peripheral nest-space apart—pretty much of no account. The advice offered to Nest Central was “Disregard.”

Wrong.

The first raiding party is encountered, confusingly enough, way over on the west side of the palace: two females returning from a forage find themselves confronted by strange-smelling rats who set upon them, killing one, impregnating the other. That same night a nest is despoiled behind the wainscoting of the kitchens, three males are found with their heads bitten off beneath the steps leading down to the cellars, and several traumatized females are come upon, cowering in a crack in the exterior wall, their exposed tails chewed down to stumps. Clearly these are more than mating kerfuffles. Urgent meetings in Nest Central result in more scouts being sent out and a first, hesitant call to arms.

Sniggering Apostolic rats ambush the corridor scouts, killing all but one, who reports back on the source of the trouble. It is worse than Nest Central first feared: a rival colony, as big as their own (?), as ferocious, perhaps, acquisitive, expansionist. … More meetings then, although there is only one course of action. The culverts and roof-spaces of Fortress Colonna grow thick with rat-secretions as the colony twitches itself into action: attack-posture, submit-posture, win-posture, lose-posture. … Mock battles break out and rat-squeals sound in registers reserved for threat, rage, distress. In a chamber buried deep within the labyrinth of Nest Central, nine males breathe the colony’s heady chemicals, bodies shaking in resonance, tails thrashing, and snarling, pulling tighter and tighter until they are fused together, become one central symbol, an overwhelming message to attack.

The Apostolic-Colonna rat-war would be fought tooth and nail through the darkness of the next three nights, a desperate hole-and-corner affair of chance encounters in confined spaces, ferocious skirmishes, raids, repulses, even one-on-one trials of strength fought out on open floors in full view of the giants. There are atrocities, too. The second night a stricken Apostolic female, her legs bitten off, is left as bait for the mercy-killing party, which advances cautiously, noses sniffing, whiskers twitching, looking all about for the enemy they know is near, somewhere in the vicinity, careful now … But those screams! Those wounds! Proper procedure is abandoned as they rush forward to nip her jugular, and Colonna rats—lying motionless all this time, unseen, unheard, simply observing up till now—drop from the rafters above and fall on the mercy-killers, cracking spines and gouging eyes, leaving nine dead on the floor of the corridor before scampering off in jubilation to lick the enemy’s blood off one another’s fur.

Neighboring colonies lodged beneath churches and chapels along the Via Lata relay the strife, feeding it north to country cousins scraping an existence from the vineyards and pastures of the Pincio, south into the metropolitan
precincts. Socketed in their holes, tongues slippery with acidic secretions, gray-pink gums peeled to show sharp yellow incisors, Rome rats the city over twitch, scrabble, shudder at the slaughter. Commotive pheromones come reeking down the tunnels. … Feral cats and rat-catchers are accepted hazards, but a rat-war! Claws scrape and scratch in agitation; only the River colonies keep their cool, stationed down by the Tiber, ears tuned tight to the upper registers, the frequencies of distress, noses jabbing as ever across the dark flood toward the Borgo. Faint alarm signals from the north provoke no reaction here. To them, the war is but a local squabble, a rehearsal of apocalypse. The real danger will come from the west: monsters lurk across the river. They’ve seen bodies float across the size of small foxes, scabbed with disease, bristly and powerful, maladapted for anything but slaughter. … One day the rats of the Borgo will cross in search of nest-space—they know this, these legions of the Roman
limes
—and then the real war will begin. So they listen, and wait, and sniff, and wait. … There are rumors, only rumors, that the Borgo rats eat dogs.

Meanwhile, from the deepest cellars to the highest garrets, along passageways and ceilings, the human inhabitants of Fortress Colonna are kept awake by the scrabbling and squealing. A pot-boy slumbering in the
tinello
awakens to find himself the chosen battleground of crazed furry bodies. Fabrizio himself recalls a brute the size of a cat flying past his shoulder as it leaped from balustrade to floor, three balls of black terror in hot pursuit. Six hundred and twenty-seven rats lose their lives in these internecine nights. Come morning, servants stumble over piles of the dead. By the third night, the last of the Apostolic invaders has been chased down, killed, and Fortress Colonna is at peace once again. The corridor that began the slaughter is the focus of an obscure dread, held in terror by Colonna and Apostolic rats alike. Forbidden territory to begin with. Later, something more complex.

A servant has dropped the keys. A jangling, a crashing. Dust dislodged from the lintel trickles onto his head as he bends to pick them up. Try again. The lock is stiff, creaking in protest as the key grates inside. Seal wax crunches under his boot. Colonna stands still as a statue. The servant grunts, puts his shoulder to the door, which comes free, swinging open. … Droppings litter the floor like gravel, loose boards stick up, and the floor itself twists and rises in the middle. The raddled walls are scarred and eaten away to expose the bare laths beneath. Frosted windows and moonlight. Candlelight. He advances into the corridor, and his guests follow. Before him, studding the floor, double-shadowed in the different lights, bodies stir and drag themselves to safety. Others remain inert. Behind the walls a mad scrabbling starts up, and a strange crunching sound.

After the rat-war, memories of the slaughter kept an uneasy peace in the corridor. Occasional encounters were played down, discouraged by Nest Central and its Apostolic counterpart alike. Killing of intruders on either side was understood as a basic condition of the truce. Who knows the crime of the first miscreant rat to venture here and find asylum? Looking back to see his pursuers stalled by the
nameless prohibition hanging over this place, barred absolutely from return or advance, did he regard this place as haven or dungeon? Which side did he come from? It hardly matters, for word spreads fast, and soon this corridor plays host to a stateless colony of outcasts: nest-foulers, young-gobblers, psychotics, thieves, defeated pretenders … The unwanted of both camps flock to the corridor, sniff the air, squeal their presence, note the strange behavior going on around them, forage for something to eat, and find, well, plaster.

A stateless rat is a hungry rat. Plaster is better than nothing. The outcasts feed, breed, suckle their young, clamber about beneath the floorboards, build nests behind the walls. They tend to sleep a lot, although frantic outbursts of activity are also typical. It’s the diet: sand, lime, horsehair—plaster—which sharp incisors make short work of as the hungry outcasts chase their stomachs up the walls. But hair is tough, fibrous stuff, hard on the digestion, and the story of those early colonists is a tale of internal dilations and spasms, hemorrhages and hemorrhoids, all kinds of gastric hell. Torpid rats lie motionless while determined bowel movements wrestle this stringy sustenance past pancreatic cysts, ulcers, reservoirs of catarrh, bodies hunched, guts concertinaed, all effort directed inward to strain nourishment from the monotonous diet. It’s exhausting—hence the sloth.

The lime is just the opposite, winding up their metabolisms, setting tiny hearts racing, appetites quickening, strange enzymes pumping through the system to send their bodies crazy. The hair slows them down and the lime speeds them up: the corridor rats alternate between mania and torpor, snapping between states with no more warning than a spring thunderstorm falling out of the unseen sky above. And now, as ever, unseen lime-crazed guzzlers scrape madly in the invisible recesses while helpless sluggards drag their hair-bloated stomachs across the floor in full view of the advancing party. Servants pick up these unfortunates by the tail and dash their heads against the crumbling walls. Rat-blood trickles down the laths, and rat-bodies are tossed down to their fellow outcasts below. The scrabbling and crunching grows muted and quickly cedes to a few barely audible ripping sounds. After an unrelieved diet of plaster, freshly killed rat-flesh is delicious.

Onward Colonna, stiff-legged, into the ramshackle conduit’s gloom. He wears a hat, a strange affair of banded velvet shaped like a chimney pot. His jerkin is a carapace of hard black leather studded with buttons and sewn in diamonds. Since his wounding at Ravenna, it has hung loosely on his frame. Standing naked in his chamber some hours ago, he counted the emergent outlines of his ribs pressing from beneath his skin. His flesh is wasting. His staff bangs solidly on the sandy shit-strewn floor. Ratnoise. Moonlight. The statues raised to him will be splendid when he is dead.

“Door!”

The servants fiddle and fumble, hunched ahead like thieves about the lock. Colonna notes the position of planks warped to trippable height; difficult terrain. At his back the column ripples, wanting him to move forward: Ascanio and his bastard brother, Umberto, their whores, their sister Vittoria, her page, his higherplaced
familiars. Behind them, the orators: beloved Naples and his train, Aragon and his train. Behind them, his companions: Don Geraldo, Villefranche, Cesare, the loyal Gersault, and others, solid Colonna men, old now and faltering where once they clung one-handed to the barricades and broke Orsini heads with the other. Great days. … From somewhere at the back of these known and unknown faces come birdish twitterings, whinnies and squeals, the scrape of over-filled churns. He has a secret buried in his head.

The far door is open at last; beyond it the gallery of Santissimi Apostoli continues at a slight angle to the line of the corridor. He advances, ducks, emerges, turns. Ascanio follows, kisses his hand, murmurs something, moves on. Umberto next. Their sluts blush and curtsy. A crash booms dully. Someone has stumbled on a floorboard; a delay, another face. Vittoria’s, furious at him for some reason he cannot recall or has yet to be told. A killing undoubtedly. She bobs, disappears. Other faces waver in front of his own before shuffling along the gallery, faces he loves, or has loved, faces he has reviled. He is glacial. Faces blur with the years, merge, combine. Finally they are all the same. Best to show nothing.