The Pop’s Rhinoceros (109 page)

“Ah,” says the Pope.

They proceed through the Stanza di Incendio, turning left, then right. Leo peers anxiously down a stairwell. The chapel choir is rehearsing; thin harmonies reach the two men’s ears mixed with the dull clanging of a distant church bell and the nearer squawking of parrots from the courtyard. The stairwell seems deserted, but when they reach the first landing, two figures glide out of the shadows, right hands moving smoothly to their breasts, left extending toward him. … Poets. The black is not a uniform at all, Leo realizes suddenly. It’s camouflage.

“Dum iuvenes poppysma rogant, tu, Lucia, nasum,”
recites one.

“Inspicis et quantum prominet ille notas,”
continues the other.

“Splendid, splendid,” mutters Leo, turning in a mild panic to Bibbiena.

“Hoc perpendículo virgas mettre viriles. …”

Bibbiena edges between his master and the pasty-faced declaimers, reaching into his purse for coins to press into the outstretched hands and turning to cover the Pope’s retreat as the latter scurries down the stairs, adopting a gait he has developed for situations like these, suggestive of gratitude, whose full expression is baffled only by the irresistible demands of his office. It involves a number of decelerations and half-turns while quick expressions of joy pass across his face and are overtaken by regretful remembrance of unspecified pressing business: such a
finely turned iamb, it seems to say, if only I could stay to hear more. … Bibbiena clatters down the stairs after him, pursued by
“Ut iam ego me fieri rhinoc,”
which line gains a sudden rude caesura as they exit into the Cortile di Sentinella, where the situation is worse. They are hardly out of the door before five or six black-garbed collections of angular limbs are moving in on them like hungry crows, thin arms moving to their breasts as though to contain the inner swelling of song. The courtyard grows loud with a macaronic gibberish in which comparisons between himself and various celestial bodies vie with rhymeless testaments to his liberality and several acrostic constructions loosely based upon the word “Leo.” He favors a stout gray-bearded individual with his most beneficent smile, some vague association between age and the production of epigrams prompting this decision, between epigrams and brevity. … Instead the old man smiles back, reaches down, and propels toward him a boy of six or seven.

“Holiness, let me present my little Pierino. Even from the crib his wails had a poetical character. …”

Little Pierino beams up at him. Leo looks about in desperation but the Switzers guarding the doors are confused by the joyful rictus plastered over his face. Little Pierino takes it as his cue to begin:

You were born, O Leo, in fair Florence town,

Where the fields are green and the earth beneath brown. …

Notwithstanding his tender years, little Pierino has already perfected the poet’s stance. He varies it at the end of each line by throwing out his left arm in an expansive gesture and making a little skip to emphasize the anapest. Leo flees.

More poets are encountered in the passageway leading along the outer wall of the chapel (the singing louder, the barked orders of the chapel-master as he mimes the actions of the Mass), but Bibbiena precedes him, blocking their view until the last minute, when he dances sideways to dip his head beneath the far door and escapes with no more than two heroic couplets and the fragment of a Horatian ode ringing dissonantly in his ears. The two men move farther into the palace, away from his apartments (an obvious focal point for petitioners of all kinds) and deeper into the cells and chambers of his
famiglia
and their servants. Here, a bedchamber means a screen of sacking and an apartment is a curtained section of corridor. They pass dim shapes, slumped against the walls or hunched over smoking oil-lamps, whose heads follow the progress of these finely robed figures as they stride forward out of the fug, pass by, and are swallowed by it again. Rotting rushes squelch under their shoes. Bibbiena offers an elaborate salute to a woman relieving herself in the gutter that runs down the center. Leo notices that not a few of the creatures they pass carry or keep within reach short, ugly-looking clubs. He frowns. Soon, the sweat-and-urine stink of the “apartments” is augmented by several new odors: salty tangs and creamy steams, beef broth, vegetable water, charred fish-skin, hot fat, the complexity of stocks. The scent of or
anges somehow struggles through this gallimaufry of stenches. Leo’s nose is tickled, tantalized. He sniffs appreciatively. They are on the outskirts of the kitchens.

Through the aromatic fog of a large vaulted chamber known as the Boiling Room, Leo sees Neroni and his new chef, Guidol, deep in conversation. The latter mumbles something as they approach and hurries off in the opposite direction. Neroni turns to greet them.

“Had to go and check the
corquignolles,”
he offers in answer to the Pope’s curious glance. Leo nods, still peering after the rapidly retreating chef.

“Some dish he’s working on for tomorrow.”

Neroni too carries a short, weighted club, “for the rats,” as he explains. The
maestro di casa
hauls sturgeon out of baskets and slaps them onto the table. Leo prods one gingerly.

“You have a problem with rats?” he inquires, looking up from the fish.

“Problem!” roars Neroni, then, remembering whom he is addressing, lowers his voice. “No, Your Holiness. A ‘problem’ is what we used to have. What we have now is a plague!”

“A plague?” murmurs Leo, looking about him at the boiling pots, whose steam billows up, condenses on the ceiling, then drips down to form small puddles on the floor. “My dear Neroni, I see no rats. If rats there are, they seem … how should I put it, too reticent to constitute a plague. …”

Neroni stands there for a second. He wants to say something light and witty. This, he has been told, is the language the Pope understands. On the other hand, he also wants to make his point about the rats. He is crude, he knows, but the habitual utterances of an effective
maestro di casa
are directed not upward toward popes, but downward at lazy scullions and underchefs, at thieving butchers and grocers, down even so far as pot-boys, for whom the most effective language is kicking. He thinks about this for a while. Then he throws back his head and unleashes a great roar of laughter. Next, directing a jovial wink to both Leo and Bibbiena, he snatches a cleaver from a passing minion and with a single swipe cuts off the head of the sturgeon. The Pope appears a little alarmed now, but he presses on by hurling the fish-head into the corner of the room.

“Now watch this,” he says.

He is still worrying that what he should have said was, “Now watch this,
Holiness,”
when something moving like a rocket-propelled ink-spill shoots across the floor and seems to simply erase the fish-head from existence.

“There,” says Neroni. “Your Holiness.”

Leo looks at him blankly. “That was a cat,” he says.

“They ate the cat,” says Neroni. “Poor old Towser.” He looks grief-stricken, briefly. “Mozzo!” he bellows. “Bring me the rat-basket!”

A plump steward presently appears, straining under the weight of a two-handled basket rather wider than himself, which he places at their feet.

“That’s just from this morning,” says Neroni. “Pull out a nice one, Mozzo.”

The basket is full of black-haired bodies. Mozzo rummages amongst them,
emerging with a rat-corpse that he holds up by the tail. The belly, as it swings toward the Pope, appears to be a collection of open sores and scabs. Green fluid drips steadily from the nose. By Leo’s conservative estimate, it is approximately ten inches long.

Neroni says, “That’s one of the smaller ones.”

Someone else begins whispering in his ear:

There once was a Bishop of Rome

Who got lost in his very own home. …

Rome? Home? It rhymes. … Worse, it scans. He turns about in a panic, but instead of the expected black-garbed figure, left hand planted on his chest (the fetters of the heart) and right arm extended (for money), he sees a more moderate version of Bibbiena topped by a familiar face, now grinning into his own: Dovizio’s.

“Found you at last!” Dovizio exclaims. “What an evasive Pope you are!”

“I am?” Grinning sheepishly.

Relieved.

“You are indeed, but now I have tracked you down. Today, in fact, I have tracked you down
twice. …”

Dovizio will not as yet be drawn on the meaning of this enigmatic declaration. Instead he tells him that the beast probably entered by the Porta del Popolo some three or four hours ago (” Yes, yes, Rosserus. …”), somehow passing undetected under the noses of papal, Spanish, and Portuguese “welcoming parties” composed of low-level functionaries and thugs.

Outside, the brilliant afternoon shades itself in ever-deepening blues. In the courtyard of the Belvedere the water level rises at the rate of an inch an hour in a futile chase after the sunlight, which drops below the tiers of seating on the western side. The monks wring out their soaking habits. The business of the day is halted and the paperwork assembled. Palatine secretaries present their findings to the Cardinal Nephew; abbreviators and protonotaries apostalic seal them beneath the ring of the Fisherman. It is more or less the hour of the day when brecciated marbles look their best—
traccagnina, corallina, samesanto
—when their stalagmitic whorls and schistose veins seem to pump a little of their formative heat into the cooling interiors, where candles are now being lit and evensong sung. The Pope peers at his cardinals through a feathered fan improvised from the wings of a plover. He samples a quail’s egg. Dovizio sniffs a plate of pâté, and Bibbiena reaches into the dark red carcass of a part-gutted boar to set the soggy viscera hanging there swinging like the clapper of a big meaty bell. They are stocky and heavy-fleshed men, three beardless Olympians sporting in the busy squalor of the kitchens. After battle is joined, and won, there will be a banquet in honor of the victor, so, scurrying around them, pastry chefs are busy fashioning little horns that will be filled with a variety of sweetmeats, subchefs are rolling up slices of ham
for Hanno’s trunk and debating whether cabbage leaves or fillets of skate most nearly resemble his ears. Around the kitchens, the horned and trunked combatants face each other in the guise of modified poultry, mutant suckling-pigs, carefully carved butter-sculptures, and racks of bulbous meringues. The “Hannos” are more or less uniform—trunk, tusk, big flappy ears—but their opponents appear to be the victim of the cooks’ internal dissent over what exactly this beast is meant to look like. Pig-with-Additions seems the most popular guess, but Very Big Mouse has its supporters, as does Foreshortened Drayhorse and Bull with Reshaped Head. Others look like the victims of drunken surgery. Rosserus has been at work down here, too, as anywhere where the absence of dogma demands answers that the usual channels cannot or will not supply. Clouds of steam and smoke, shouting, banging, running around: out of this chaos comes regular fodder for six hundred people three times a day, but even the
Dauer im Wechsel
of kitchens cannot hold forever. These botched bestial concoctions gesture at deeper failures, an undiagnosed lack probably too late to treat by now, a fissure already slicing through the center of the earth. …

“Yum,” says Bibbiena, reaching for a third handful of little frosted sugary things.

“Mmm-hmmth.”

Dovizio swallowing melon.

The trio quits the kitchens in high, oblivious spirits. Leo is a taut wire strung between his cardinals, humming a tune composed for him the week before by Gian Maria to accompany his favorite
frottola, “II Grasso Porco di Cattivo Umore,”
a title widely touted as his epithet. His favorite verse is the one in which the cunning librettist finds five perfect rhymes for the metrically awkward
occhiata
. Leo appreciates polish. They march three abreast past the bivouac-clogged corridors, Leo content enough with his central position to straddle the gutter while his cohorts bluffly hold forth on the expected opulence of tomorrow’s entertainment. Apparently Dovizio has secured the gondolas that Leo so desired as the craft for his rival navies, and they are being gilded with the Medici emblem of the Pallia even now. More important still, he has managed to engage the services of King Caspar and the Mauritians, an ensemble consisting in lute, sackbut, several viols, and dulcimer, famed for their suavity and a facile diminuendo ranging from the lachrymose to the sepulchral. They are expected to arrive late tomorrow afternoon. Now, arm in arm up a stairway to the antechamber battened onto the side of the Chapel of Saint Nicholas, where Leo notes happily the absence of the mooching poets who thronged it earlier. Departed, he presumes, for dinner. Dovizio has a surprise for him and is trying to inveigle him into guessing what it is.

“You have written a play to be performed tomorrow in which I feature as my earlier namesake, Leo the First, and the Dauphin of France plays Attila. I halt his advance at the Mincio, then return to Rome in triumph and am adored until
my death, which scene is affecting but free of sentimentality. A tuneful dirge played on goatskin drums accompanies my passage to heaven,” hazards Leo.

He thrums and twangs between them, his querulous treble rising, then sinking, as Dovizio informs him that his guess is incorrect, and the Dauphin of France does not, as far as he knows, yet exist. “I gave you a clue earlier, Holiness. Remember? Today I have found you twice. …”

This is obscure but happy banter. They swing around corners and swoop down corridors. Clerks bow low, then press their backs against the walls to let them pass, and stewards burdened with tureens take little staggering backward steps. The dinner din of the
tinello
is a softened roar, a distant clamor, the barbarians corralled in their camp. No poets are encountered, not one. Retailing the choicest of the recent pasquinades against the hapless Cardinal Armellini, Bibbiena knocks over a dwarf.

Dovizio punctuates his companion’s theme with directional jolts and jabs— “This way” and “Turn left” and “Just around here”—a segmented antiphon that bowls them along and around and up and down while Leo’s happy, fun-stuffed head nods and chuckles and wonders where he is. They seem to have been walking for quite a long time now. He had not realized his palace was quite so big. The cardinals exchange their tunes along the buzzing cord that joins them. Leo Vibrato. Then big black thumbs give the tuning pegs a twist. Leo conceives of a thick hairy rope passed through his glistening guts and bluish translucent tubes, his buttocks
thwocking
in time with the strikes of the bow against the lacquered fingerboard of a tree-size violin: His Holiness the Highly Strung. Now that would be a martyrdom, grisly as Erasmus’, musical as Cecilia’s wedding song with its latent squawks and pain-filled screams, the cries of martyrs giving birth to saints. Such a tortured music, and strangely familiar. Now where would he have heard that song before, sung to the accompanying clank of tongs in the braziers, the grating of saw-blades on bone, toneless peelings like the tearing of dry cloth … Ah.