The Pop’s Rhinoceros (68 page)

“No,” says Boccamazza.

“I only hope our plainer entertainment will please you as much at Ostia tomorrow,” says Vich.

Clever, thinks Leo. But clever enough? Vich bows politely and walks away.

“Did you prepare the beast as I commanded?” he inquires of Boccamazza in a whisper.

His huntsman nods, adding, “You have only to give the signal, Holiness.”

A second later, the dolorous clanging starts up again, the dinging and donging more distinct than earlier, the first shouts coming into earshot as the unseen beaters shake the ants from their laps, loosen their belts, and advance. Wildlife flees in the general direction of Leo.

Presently, a premature goat emerges hesitantly from the trees and eyes the sailcloth, the little marquees, the Pope enthroned on his knoll, the idle courtiers and members of his
famiglia
, hawkers and their hawks, servants carrying water-churns and weaponry, cardinals, ambassadors … The goat retreats.

Then reappears, standing there for a little longer the second time. Then it retreats again. This happens several times until capricious ill temper gets the better of caution; it springs forward with a frisky gambol and takes its stand in the middle of the field, back legs planted rigidly, front ones digging at the turf, curly horns at the ready for the spindly adversaries milling about fifty yards away. Someone shoots it with a crossbow.

This sets the pattern.

Rabbits are particularly entertaining, scampering about in maddened circles pursued by hunters trying to dash their brains out with clubs. Ferrets too demonstrate a certain low cunning, lying doggo in the longer grasses until squished underfoot, and three more goats provide a midafternoon highlight by butting d’Aragona so hard, he has to be carried off on a stretcher. Someone cuts a badger in two. Quite interesting.

Naturally there are lulls and
longeurs
in which no rabbit deigns to poke its twitching nose out of the undergrowth, when the brachets and tracker dogs roll about on the grass soliciting belly-scratches or run around sniffing one another’s behinds. The hawks keep themselves occupied by picking off small rodents, but for the huntsmen themselves these are disconcerting intervals, not really long enough for a game of checkers or even a cup of wine. They find themselves making awkward conversation, toting their bloodstained swords and crossbows like murderers caught red-handed by a chatty and oft avoided neighbor. “Nice day.”
“Lovely
day.” That kind of thing. The ground has become quite marshy in places, and the servants picking up the kills slide about in bloody, muddy morasses. Bibbiena and Dovizio have stuffed some pillows under their tunics and parade about with eyepieces protruding from their heads, introducing themselves as “the Anti-Popes of the
Carnpagna.”
Everyone finds this very amusing.

Including Leo, who claps and laughs with the best of them while his thoughts drift between Rome and Prato, back and forth. …

Amalia was eaten by a wolf; he is more or less convinced of this, there being a scarcity of bears in the Florentine
contado
. A wolf, yes. … Or foxes! A good-size fox would make short work of a poor little helpless girl. He shifts awkwardly on
his chair. His buttocks are sweaty. The old trouble flared up again on the journey from Rome, two nights of horrid internal itching and several torturous sessions on the pot. With howling. Very bad. But foxes, there was a thought. He trains his eyepiece on the bloodstained meadow. Not a fox in sight.

Suddenly a massively antlered stag bursts out of the woods. It pauses for a moment, looks to its left and right. No one seems to have noticed it yet, but how can that be? Leo stands up and shouts. A few heads turn. The dogs look up. The animal stamps, once, twice. Someone raises his crossbow, but hesitantly, for no one else is doing anything, just looking dumbly about as the stag stamps again, then hurtles off to the right, leaps cleanly over the sailcloth, and is gone. The huntsmen stare at their shoes. A baffled silence descends on the killing-ground. Now how did that happen?

And the girl would be unconfessed. … Meaning limbo, though surely she had reached the sunnier slopes of purgatory by now. How many sins is it possible to commit before one’s eighth birthday? For the knaves who led her there, the hellish inferno. Forever. And beginning tonight.

“Holiness?” Boccamazza stands before him, broad-chested in a leather jerkin. Leo gestures for him to speak. “The beaters are almost through …” The sentence is left hanging.

“What?” He is blank for a moment, then understands. Of course, the finale. His splendid prank. He raises his eyepiece. The dogs are being recaptured and leashed. His men are gathering the last of the rabbit carcasses from the small blood-puddles that dot the meadow. Vich and Faria are inconspicuous amongst the twenty or so huntsmen who have drawn closer together in some obscure reaction to the stag’s escape. Boccamazza’s back appears, a large leather curtain as he moves across Leo’s line of magnified sight. Leo snorts and chuckles. The huntsmen look to Boccamazza, then to him as the man points back to his knoll. He stands, and a ragged cheer goes up. Then another, the second containing ironic and perhaps derisive grace notes, led as it is by Bibbiena and Dovizio, who wave their eyepieces about with renewed vigor and thump their pillowed chests. With cautious steps he descends from the knoll, takes horn and lance from a waiting serving man, and advances on his fellow huntsmen. A third, very complexly nu-anced cheer reaches into the air and disperses into its several impulses: welcome, mockery, formal politeness, vague recrimination at his tardiness, now rectified. The Pope will take the field.

“Let us give thanks to God for this fine day’s hunting,” he announces as he draws near. They form a crescent around him. Behind them he can see Boccamazza disappearing into the woods. He talks of God’s bounty and camouflages a giggle beneath an unconvincing sneeze, then continues, pointing to Vich and Faria, who are skulking near the back. “Tomorrow begins the quest for a beast stranger than any we have chased today. Our beloved allies Dom João and Fernando the Catholic, through their loyal officers here, Dr. Faria and Don Jerònimo da Vich, have pledged to bring their Pope an animal. …”

Soon his little audience catches the mood, chuckling along as his description of the animal mutates and imaginary beasts run riot through their minds’ eyes, their bizarre appendages and improbable limbs flapping and flopping about. The servants pass around cold meats and cups of wine. Everyone is enjoying this, except perhaps the ambassadors. You think I am a fool, thinks the Pope, catching Vich’s eye. He smiles and waves his hunting-horn.

Behind the juniper bushes, behind a stand of flowering elders behind the juniper, behind a thicket of peeling ash behind the juniper and elders … in the woods, in effect, Boccamazza kicks his way through clinging undergrowth, sidesteps fallen timber, watches out for ankle-twisting hollows concealed by deceptive depots of leaf mold, looks up now and then at patches of late afternoon sky that appear brighter in the shade of the forest, and arrives at the pit. His men are sprawled around it. The animal snuffles and turns as though chasing its tail.

“Ready?” he says.

“It’s rubbed most of the paint off,” says one of his men in a bored tone.

“Well, put some more on,” Boccamazza snaps crisply.

The men look at one another.

“Just pour it on from up here. Come on. Jump to it. …”

The animal does not like having the paint poured on it. It gets angry.

“… and although there is little in the sight of man or beast that can still surprise a Pope, the actions of his predecessors perhaps excepted”—wary laughter—“I confess myself amazed at the discovery of such an animal, not in the deserts of the Indies, nor in the wastes of Africa, nor in the hot and pestilential swamps of the New World, nor in any of those unimaginable territories whose jurisdiction—it is no secret—will be settled by this creature’s procurement. … Portugal or Spain? Our suspense is boundless, almost unendurable, and to leaven the wait the Lord, or the Devil, has, well…” He raises his arms in helpless acceptance of his good fortune, of all their good fortunes. “Well, let my own happy amazement now be yours. …”

The assembly signals its titillation and ticklish puzzlement in sidelong glances at the two orators, who are reduced to pretending that they are in on the joke (whatever it is), nodding and smiling complaisantly. The Pope raises his horn to his lips. A strangled fart squirts skyward and is carried on mild zephyrs over the meadow and into the woods to buzz euphoniously in Boccamazza’s ears. The Pope waits. They all wait. The same mild zephyrs ripple the topmost edges of the sailcloths, jiggle blood-soaked and stainless blades of grass, cool the brows of the spectators now staring expectantly at the trees, pass away. Vague crashing noises sound from within the wood. Getting louder and more distinct, branches snapping and whatnot. The specifics are unimportant, for a moment later it’s there, in plain view, and in the moment following, every one of the huntsmen, the servants behind them, the hawkers and men of the
gazzara
, are silent, the same question framing itself silently behind every one of those furrowed, sweat-beaded, or zephyr-cooled brows: What is it?

To begin with, it is big. Not cow-big, but certainly bigger than a goat. It stands its ground, fifty yards away in front of the trees, being big, or fat, or obscenely well-muscled, and thus dangerous. Let us call it dangerous and add deceptively dangerous, for it also looks ridiculous and mirth-worthy, as the reaction of the huntsmen (two ambassadors excepted) shortly proves. Boccamazza, emerging cautiously from the trees, sees several of the huntsmen bent double with laughter. Cardinal Cornaro has collapsed altogether. It is gray—this too is an important clue—and very bristly. More huntsmen fall over and start rolling around on the grass. Perhaps this angers the animal further, or perhaps it was the paint, or perhaps it is naturally angry. Anyway, it has tusks. And from a standing start it seems to reach an extraordinary velocity in less than two seconds, which is when Boccamazza and Leo have the same simultaneous thought: that this is a big, bristly, dangerous, angry animal, and it is charging toward the main body of laughing and nonlaughing ambassadorial idiots, armed with teeth, tusks, and—perhaps this should have been mentioned earlier—a horn on the end of its nose. A wild boar, with extras.

The beast swerves, cantering through a tight circle before gathering speed and charging again. The horn wiggles and shudders, clearly affixed by an agency other than Mother Nature. Glue, possibly. It swerves again, as though it cannot hold its line. … Has it been drugged?

No, it’s simply trying to get this ridiculous stump of wood off its perfectly good snout, get back into the woods, and recommence snuffling about, scraping up roots, and terrorizing the wildlife in preparation for eating them in the winter. The boar is not really interested in the sticklike creatures who have now decided to chase it about the field (their interpretation) or hide from it by following its tail (the boar’s interpretation), led by a somewhat blubbery specimen with a telescope stuck to its face. A comforting boar-thought: You’re never alone in your humiliation, even one so recherché as having an unwanted foreign object sticking out of your head. There’s always
someone. …

Amalia, thinks Leo.

Again. So obvious, how had he failed to see it? Not a bear, not a wolf, not a—perish the thought—fox. Rufo will be killing them now. Telling him later. Not cold, not hunger, not drowning in a bog. No, no, no. … A boar. A boar ripped her open with its tusks somewhere in the wilderness outside Prato. He doesn’t care that his audience still laughs and joshes in procession behind him as he huffs and puffs after the quarry. It’s heading for the sailcloth, there, dashing across the disk of vision he is reduced to by his eyeglass, reappearing, lost again, so he roves left and right, up and down the field, a bit out of breath, this pudgy Atalanta,
Father warned me of fatness …
then a great shout from behind him, the idiots, a triumphal chant led by Bibbiena and Dovizio: “Fatso! Fatso! On, the fierce virgin. …” He advances, lance held high so that its tip will glitter in the sun before plunging down, so that the beast will see it—there, caught up in the sailcloth, struggling to free itself and failing—so that it will know it was he who
wielded the revenger’s steel: Leo. The killer of the killer of helpless, hairless Amalia. Hobbled and trussed in cloth smirched with gray paint, the boar begins to squeal. He steadies the lance over the muscled bulge of its withers. Know that it was I who did this, he urges the entangled beast. And tell God when you see Him.

The lance comes down, all his weight behind it, piercing pelt, hide, flesh, muscle. Behind him, his courtiers have fallen silent, or he no longer hears them. He imagines the weapon’s length sinking deeper and deeper, passing all the way through as one is supposed to, the point driving out the other side and finding there a second strange resistance, but he pushes harder and harder, he is irresistible, and the second hide rips suddenly, the flesh beneath is soft as cheese, the bones brittle as china, splintering with the same sound as the bones of the Pratesi. He has the two of them skewered through the neck, decoy and quarry: the beast he can see and the beast he cannot. He feels their twitching nerves and tendons shuddering through the wood of the shaft.

That evening, Baraballa is served a fricassee of squirrel spiced delicately with rosemary, which he munches bones and all. His Holiness washes down three roasted pigeons with goblets of Tuscan wine as thick and dark as blood. Carried in on his stretcher, Cardinal d’Aragona forces down a vegetable broth. Everyone else eats boar.

After supper there is, as there always is, good music to aid the digestion. Three lutes and a dulcimer (it is almost certainly a dulcimer) jangle and plink their various ways through delicate airs while the huntsmen of La Magliana burp, fart, and compare relative atrocities. Most of the rabbits have been given to the beaters and the rodents to the dogs. No one mentions the stag. As the evening grows late, candles are lit and the windows, which face southwest, darken insensibly until the rich pinks of the sunset are replaced by darkness. The talk turns to the morrow and who will sit where on the papal barge, then to the animal filling their stomachs, then to the animal that the animal filling their stomachs was presumably intended to ape. Baraballo is persuaded to do an imitation, but it is so inept that the Pope threatens to spike him for real to add the lacking verisimilitude, always a problem in circumstances such as these, when time, though it is counted with pumping lungs and hearts that tick and tock away the minutes, has no real business in hand except to pass. So time passes, and the hackbrett plays, and no one quotes Pliny, or leaves, or notices the absence of the lutes. It is almost midnight before Faria, as it were, happens upon Don Jerònimo standing alone under the fresco of Apollo.