The Pop’s Rhinoceros (40 page)

“Had the windows walled up,” the proprietor explained. He pointed to some patches of brickwork. “Stop the bastards who won’t pay crawling out and not paying. I’m Lappi. There’s a big place at the back, get you all in no trouble. Good lock on it, too. Got straw?” The dormitory room would cost them twenty-three guilii a week, in advance. “Bit gloomy back there, but then you’re Germans. You’ll be used to gloom.” Lappi was squat, wiry-haired, long-armed. His face resembled a cowhide stuffed with violence into a sack. It uncrumpled, briefly, when Father Jörg threw open the chest, handed the man a heavy silver goblet, and asked how many weeks would it buy? “Where’d you get that lot!” he blurted out at the sight of the silver and gold plate.

“So
that’s
what was in it,” said Bernardo, who had carried the chest for the greater part of the journey.

Holding aloft a single candle, Lappi escorted them into the bowels of the building. A cavernous chamber yawned before them. Volker, Henning, and some of the others were sent out for the cheapest palliasses to be had; these were set down on the floor, and then Signor Lappi was sent for again.

“I wish to know where we might give thanks,” asked Father Jörg of the hosteler.

Lappi’s earlier astonishment had already given way to suspicion. “Oh, you do, do you?” he retorted swiftly, eyeing his latest guests. Then he remembered the chest. “Well, that’s reasonable. Thanks is a fine thing, very fine. Given a few myself over the years, off and on. Can’t say as I have a specific place for it, though. …” He limped on through a few more improvisations. “Why don’t you give thanks here? Bit dark at the moment, but there’s a few candles in the store. I could spare a couple, on the cheap. Got candles, have you?”

“We wish to celebrate Mass,” said Father Jörg, at which light dawned in Lappi’s face and something else too, perhaps, in Salvestro’s view. He was eyeing Lappi, as he had eyed the innkeepers throughout their journey, from Stettin down the valleys of the Oder and Neisse to Gölitz, to Dresden, through Chemnitz and Zwickau to Plauen, on to Nuremberg, and Regensburg, the Alps rising above
them, then under them, then behind them, the country changing almost from day to day, the little and greater towns that led them south, Piacenza, Carrara, Viterbo … Rome, eventually. Innkeepers in all of them.

“Mass!” exclaimed Lappi. “Well, you’re in luck! It’s Philip and James tonight. Used to go to it myself. …” He began to give directions. “The first thing is to put this gloomy shambles behind you and get yourselves across the river. …”

Salvestro watched Lappi point this way and that. Innkeepers, he had decided, fell into either of two categories. There were the brutish, near silent ones, prone to rare but spectacular rages, public displays of wife-beating, and insolence. They were usually huge and red-faced. Then there were the helpful ones, overflowing with suggestions, tips for the route, attentive at the table, happy to turn their own staff out of their beds to make room for late-coming weary travelers. These were the ones who swindled their guests, pilfered their possessions, and organized surprise ambushes an hour or two farther up the road. To Salvestro’s way of thinking, Lappi was probably one of these.

“… so, you’re across the river. Go north past the Sanguigni Tower. It’s fairly tall and square, but don’t confuse it with any of the other fairly tall square towers, Sanguigni’s the one you want. Keep Citorio on your left then swing east past the Mitre; there’s no sign, but you’ll know it from the smell of cabbage—never did understand that—bear right, across the Via Lata by Saint Mary’s, right again, and you’re in Piazza Colonna. Santissimi Apostoli is smack in front of you. Get there early, mind you. Usually a bit of a crush.”

“Thank you,” said Father Jörg.

“That’s a real Mass, that is,” Lappi reminisced fondly. “Not many like that nowadays. Anything else before you go?” Father Jörg shook his head. “Well, the Church is a whore, as they say,” said their host. “Enjoy her.”

“It
was.”

“It
wasn’t.”

Salvestro and Bernardo are whispering. It is a whisper-inducing darkness.

The monks who had stridden confidently out of the hostel earlier that evening reentered it demoralized, bewildered, jarred. Wulf had cried. Father Jörg had rebuked him, “We set out to give thanks. We gave thanks. Now be silent.” He should have said more, rallied them somehow, Salvestro thought. In the melee of the church, Jörg had retreated into himself, gazing sightlessly forward in prayer. He was untouched and untouchable. Salvestro had looked to him for some sign, a command, but there was nothing. It was Gerhardt who had given the lead, striking out fearlessly, forcing the brawling celebrants to their knees. Now he wore an air of silent contempt, and Salvestro himself was preoccupied with quite different concerns, his bruises throbbing. They were all locked in their own thoughts, and, preparing for bed in self-reproachful silence, the monks avoided one another’s eyes as though they had failed some collective trial and were consequently set apart from one another, each to ponder his failing alone. The silence was heavy with private bafflements and shock. They were unprepared for Rome.

When they finally walked out of the church it was Gerhardt who led the way, as though Jörg had exhausted himself and lost his argument with the Cardinal, instead of winning as he had. Bernardo lingered near the back and was the last to join the huddle that regrouped outside, muttering, “Look what I got,” in a pleased-furtive manner and drawing back the flap of his coat to reveal a large cabbage. “Got itself stuck on a candlestick. …” Salvestro was looking at the cabbage, wondering why it was so wet, when a sharp burst of laughter sounded, nervous and high-pitched. Jörg had wandered a few yards away from them and tripped on the rough ground. Someone had laughed, that was all.

With the candles doused, the sound of wakeful breathing filled the dormitory. Now that he was lying down, Salvestro’s ribs gave him no peace. One side of his face felt tight and huge with swelling. But the blows and kicks were as nothing to their aftermath.
Him,
he thought over and over, but without advancing beyond the quick blow of the recognition itself, which felled him each time he approached. Gradually, the breathing around him changed character. Inhalations grew deeper, exhalations longer, the first snores sounded. Some rustling on the other side of Bernardo ended with a stifled half-yelp; someone sleep-talking nonsensically on the far side of the room ceased finally or was silenced by his neighbor. Private nervous exhaustions slackened and loosened, sinews relaxing and unknotting, cordage unwinding and racing off the spindle, the bucket plunging down the well-shaft into oblivion. Salvestro waited in wakeful silence for the last of them to sink into sleep before reaching over painfully to shake Bernardo.

“It was him,” he whispers.

The giant stirs, comes more fully awake. “Who?”

“The Colonel. At the church.” His mouth is swollen. It hurts to whisper.

There is a short silence while Bernardo thinks about this. “It was not,” he says.

“It was.”

“It wasn’t.”

“It
was.”

” It
wasn’t.”

Someone stirs then, someone who might be the Prior, and both of them fall silent. Salvestro waits, counting interminable minutes before reaching over again, more painful still this time—the flesh around his ribs seems to be stiffening—to shake Bernardo. But Bernardo has fallen asleep and a little later begins to snore, and Salvestro realizes from past experience of Bernardo’s snoring that he will not be wakened easily, at least not without violence. He is far from sleep, alone but for the head that rears up like a grizzled monster out of the depths. Hobbling back to the Borgo, he’d kept glancing over his shoulder to see if they had been followed. When his companion had asked him whom he sought, he’d said nothing. Bernardo had not recognized him.

He was unsurprised—Bernardo was ignorant. He was ignorant himself, though his ignorance was different in kind. Colonel Diego was a familiar sight to
any who had survived the march from Bologna to Prato that summer. Unlike most of the commanders, he traveled light. His tent, bedding, and armor went with the baggage, the rest with himself. He rode back and forth on a powerful roan, dressed plainly, always helmeted, his saddlebags bulging with kit; a point of reference in the bland contours of the Mugello, his comings and goings monitored almost instinctively. Even the Sicilians, if asked where one of their compatriots was that day, might answer without looking up that he was farther up the column, “about a stone’s throw past the Colonel” or “pretty much where the Colonel crossed the column this morning, just behind the cannon.” He hung on the valley’s lower slopes, this side, that side. He might disappear for most of the day, and the men would begin to ask casually if anyone had seen the Colonel, or angrily, “Where the hell has that damn Colonel got to,” as though he were late to a wedding. He was outside the stench and viciousness of the camp. In the days before they reached Barberino, the very worst, when Salvestro, Bernardo, and Groot slept sitting up, back to back, to ward off the throat-slitters, when even the Sicilians briefly stopped knifing each other in some show of self-preservative solidarity, the Colonel appeared unchanged and unchangeable, like an image struck for a medal.

But his face, the human business of eyes, nose, mouth, hair, the flesh on the frame, that was lesser and unnoted. A recognizable man hid behind “The Colonel,” but for all their familiarity with the horseman who moved with such assurance about them, the man went unremarked. He was irrelevant to the soldiers who stumbled through the Mugello. He moved in their middle distance. The armature of his trappings fended them off, and without it the soldiers would not have known him. I saw him stripped of that, thinks Salvestro, once.

But the clamor surrounding that moment seemed a far-off noise, someone else’s exhilarations and terrors. Their flight that night and the Colonel’s shocking naked face as he’d reached for them appears to him in the breathing darkness as a dream of escaping-without-escaping, the pursuer’s swipe missing by a fraction again and again. If not the Colonel, it was the islanders; if not them, then the villagers who had chased the Christian Free Company across darkened countrysides, the dogs that bared their teeth at the sight of him. … The forest was a kind of oblivion, a willed forgetting of them all. Always there is a man—himself—running at the limit of his strength. At his back are his pursuers, whose hardened fingers scrape at his spine, driving him forward, drawing them after him. He runs toward nothing. Here is the Colonel again, naturally,
Welcome to Rome. …
There are cold waters where he is safe—tideless waters or nearly so—but they are far, far away. He will not reach them before the fingers close about his neck.

Then there is the moment that stands adjacent to that of his capture, its only alternative, the possible moment when he stops. Imagine the doe turning on the dogs and charging forward, reckless and fateful. Or himself rising back out of the water or hurling himself on the mob. Imagine their surprise! Imagine the jolting stop, the body turning, the heart’s aghast pumping. Turn back, when turning
back, in this instance, on this night of the Colonel’s reappearance, means the starving scramble that carried them into Prato. Turn on
them
.

But the moment is futureless. Bernardo’s snores continue, broken by odd gulps and constricted swallowings. There had been a man on the march—a har-quebusier called Jaggetto—who carried a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. Every night he would disappear, reappearing the next morning with his bag replenished, its new contents bulging through the thin material. When the weather turned warm, the bag stank. No one spoke to him or offered him violence. He was shunned, outside them. That a man should, that men in general, that they themselves might, if… It is the moment when the drawstring is loosened, the mouth opened, when something unfaceable is faced. A possible moment, but possible only because remaining undone, conceded as unthinkable. Unfutured. The three of them, himself, Bernardo, and Groot, stood with their pikes at the ready, the whole company drawn up, the whole army on the plain before the walls of the town, waiting there in the sticky heat. For most of the morning, cannon popped and puffed from a position way over to their left, and sometimes a ball would strike a gate-tower. They cheered then, but the cannonade was desultory and formal. They had been told nothing.

The sergeants stood in a little group in front of their men. Salvestro thought of the hours before Ravenna; but there was little enough of Ravenna in what lay ahead. The walls before them were deserted, and although a breach gradually opened under the cannon’s peppering, no one appeared behind it. There was a company of men set forward of the others who called themselves “the Tifatani” after a desperate skirmish some years before in the pass north of Caserta. They had grown restive in the heat and boredom of the wait, nervous too, perhaps: it was waiting for relief that had decimated them in the col that split Mount Tifata, their cowering and waiting for the crossbows above to find them, the bite and the shudder as their flesh puckered about the shank. Then the pain, which came seconds later, and the screams of those who could not bear the pain. The survivors wore long scars on their right-hand cheeks in remembrance. And the hunger was there amongst them all, eating them from the inside and accepted now only on the promise of its satisfaction. Waiting then, like a breath gulped and held down, swelling until the lungs would burst. …

So they stood there, filthy and ragged, eyes staring out of scabbed faces, the very teeth loose in their gums. But the lines trembled, edging forward and being shouted back by the sergeants, who now strode up and down, watching for the first toe to step out of rank, exchanging curt questions as they passed one another. And there were no orders. And it could not last. The battle the army had fought with itself almost from Bologna was lost sometime in those hours, and then it was only a matter of waiting. There was a scuffle somewhere near the back, a few shouts. It was a little after midday. The shouting reached the Tifatani and fell on them like a storm of arrows. They broke ranks and ran toward the breach. Others followed, then them all. That was how it began.