The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  In the garage were Sam’s trike, which sometimes traveled with her and sometimes got left behind; and Mike’s ten-speed, not used as much as it had been on the flats of Indiana. The cyclist’s body he had once had, heavy-thighed and round-backed, had pleased him more than it had her. The cold stone behind her sternum was heavy. The autumn rake; the summer lawn mower; the winter snow shovel. She had forgotten why it had been important to get away from all this, why she had gone to all the trouble she had gone to to break these connections; she had forgotten, just as she had forgotten why she had once tried hard to make them.

  Love’s labor’s lost.

  She had forgotten why: as though the heart inside her had been removed, and with it all knowledge of such things. What makes people love each other? Why do they bother? Why did children love parents, and parents children? Why did husbands love wives, and women love men; what did it mean when they said: he drives me nuts, but still I love him?

  She must have known once. Because love had made her do a lot of things, and go to a lot of trouble. She had known once, she almost remembered knowing; she remembered getting along with Mike and Sam, and the getting along was powered by love; love was the necessity for getting along. Once she had known, and now she didn’t; and not knowing now made it seem that not she or anyone really knew, they were all faking it, forcing it, even Spofford, even Sam, and why did they bother. A cold loss of knowledge and dark ignorance were where her heart had been, and were all that these commonplace things, innocent tools and toys, called to; her dog Nothing, the name of the stone in her breast.

  You couldn’t live that way long, of course. You couldn’t live in that kind of ignorance. She’d have to remember, sometime. She was sure she would. Because she still had a whole long life to get through, Sam’s growing up, Boney’s death and her mother’s and at last her own: and she couldn’t get through it without remembering why you bother.

  She would. She was sure of it. Sure you will she said to herself, and patted her own bosom: sure you will.

  At the bottom of the stairs leading up to the kitchen, a flight of open bare wood steps still showing the carpenter’s marks, she stopped, unwilling to go up. It seemed certain she would have an accident on the stairs, or that the door at the top would turn out to be locked after all. She stood for a long time looking up, and then went back out into the warm rain.

  * * *

  “So how’s it going?” she asked Pierce, at the door of Fellowes Kraft’s study, brushing the rain from her cheeks. “How’s Bruno?”

  “Off to see the Pope,” said Pierce.

  SEVEN

  The coach racketed over the bad roads out of Naples, two bright-garbed men riding postilion to clear the way. Carters cursed at them and peasants along the road took off their caps and crossed themselves. The friar in black and white opposite Giordano murmured to him in Roman-accented Latin of what the visit would entail, how long he would be with the Pope—Sanctissimus he called him, as though it were a pet name—what Giordano should do and say, whom he should speak to, and whom not.

  —Sanctissimus will present His ring to you but you must only come near it and not kiss it. Peter’s ring would be worn away to nothing if everyone who came to Sanctissimus actually pressed his lips to it. Sanctissimus will see you in the afternoon, between Nones and Vespers, after He has dined. His dinner is of the simplest. He is as abstemious as He is pious. You must speak clearly and distinctly, as His hearing is not what it was. …

  The coach stopped at Dominican monasteries in Gaeta and Latina, the horses lathered and weary; Giordano lay long awake in the sultry heat, putting together the journey he had come already, the longest of his life, and attaching the places, roads, shrines, churches, and palaces he had seen to the Neapolitan places of his memory: new spokes of the earthly wheel he had constructed, centered on the church of San Domenico. Before dawn they started out again, to travel in the cool part of the day, and before the brigands—so the friar with him said—were awake.

  Giordano’s fame had spread to the widest imaginable circle: the widest anyway that the monks of Naples could imagine. When the abbot had come to his cell to tell him that the Pope had heard of the young man with the astonishing memory, and desired to know more, and that the Pope was sending a coach from Rome to bring him there, his voice had sunk low in amazement and solemnity.

  Giordano’s first thought had been, irrelevantly, about Cecco of Ascoli. He had thought: I’ll tell Him about Cecco. I’ll tell Him: if what Cecco said about the stars is true, if the universe is as he thought it to be, then it can’t have been heresy, can it? The truth could never be heresy. A mistake was made, that’s all; it’s clear that a mistake was somehow made.

  The coach sped down the old Appian Way, the friar nodding in his sleep while Giordano’s eyes ate up the tombs, ruins, churches along that impossibly straight and metaled road. The coach dove through the Porta San Sebastiano, and past the gigantic ruins of baths and circuses, and into the thronged heart of Rome. At the Tiber bridge the friar pointed out the Castelo Sant’ Angelo, which had been built as the Emperor Hadrian’s tomb, and was now the keep and dungeons of the Papacy. An angel with a sword stood atop it, mobile in the shimmer of noon.

  The coach did not stop even at the gates of the Vatican Palace, it went right through, and only came to rest at last in a garden of golden stone and green poplars, fountains and galleries and silence.

  —Come, said the friar. Wash and refresh yourself. Sanctissimus is at dinner.

  From that day forward this garden (it was the Cortile del Belvedere that Julius II had built) would mean Garden to Giordano Bruno. This flight of stairs would mean Stairway. These stanze he entered now, dark-brilliant in the flaming day, were the courts and chambers of a mind, a thinking, remembering mind.

  —These are the stanze painted by Raffaello. There is the Triumph of the Church. Saint Peter. Saint Stephen. Aquinas, of our order. Come along.

  —Who are these?

  —Philosophers. Look more closely. Can’t you see Plato with his beard, Aristotle, Pythagoras? Come along.

  He tugged at Giordano’s sleeve, but the young monk in wonderment held back. The painted crowd on the stairs of that cool edifice, those gowned men holding tablets, stirred; they blinked, looked down on Giordano, smiled, and resumed their conversation and their stillness.

  The friar delivered him to other Dominicans, secretaries of the Dominican cardinals around the Pope; they looked Giordano over, and put questions to him. And Giordano began to understand why he had been brought here.

  Around Peter’s throne now the jealousies and suspicions that tend to divide and inflame the busiest of Christ’s servants were unusually raw, and Giordano was to be a counter, one small counter, in the game of influences and prestige waged between the Domini canes and the Black Company of Jesus. The Jesuits were famed for their adoption everywhere of the New Learning, and for putting its novelties and successes to the Church’s uses in their colleges and academies. The Dominicans wanted to show off some knowledge that was theirs, and to remind Pius, who was after all a Dominican himself (though He seemed not always as conscious of it as He might be), that His black-and-white hounds guarded treasure as precious as any New Learning: the Art of Memory, which the order had so perfected. Sanctissimus would be amused to see how agile it had made a Dominican mind. Sanctissimus would be instructed as well.

  Cardinal Rebiba himself returned Giordano to the Raffaello stanze when he had washed and eaten, and introduced him to the little dried pear Who was Pius V, Vicar of Christ on Earth. He lived in those rooms, beneath those pictures, amid these bustling monks. He sat on a pillowed chair; He was so short that His white satin slippers didn’t reach the floor, and a monk hastened to slip a stool beneath them.

  Giordano did his tricks. He recited the psalm Fundamenta in Hebrew after hearing it read aloud once; he named the tombs on the Appian Way in their order as he had passed them. The trick of amiavi-amaveri-veravama was tried, but Sanctissimus could not unde
rstand what was proceeding, and it had to be quickly given up.

  —We studied this art when We were young, the Pope said to Rebiba, who nodded encouragingly. To Giordano the Pope said:

  —Now We have no need of it. You see here are secretaries all around Us now, who remember for Us all that We need to have remembered. Perhaps you will be one of them, one day.

  He nodded then, smiling sweetly, and said: Go on.

  Under Rebiba’s questioning, the memory artist (closemouthed with stage-fright, and having forgotten Cecco) gave an account of his practice of the art, how he had built his palaces, and cast the images he used on them; he said nothing about the stars, or the horoscopi, but he told them how the hieroglyphs of Ægypt could be used, the signs made by Hermes.

  —Is this that Hermes, the Pope asked, who gave laws and letters to the Ægyptians?

  —It is, Giordano answered.

  —And who in his writings spoke of a divine Word, Son of God, through which the world was made, though he lived many generations before Our Savior?

  —I have not read his works, said Giordano.

  —Come and look here, said Sanctissimus. Come along.

  With a bustle of monks and Rebiba, the Pope went into the largest of the stanze, the Stanza della Segnatura, where He was accustomed to sign the decrees of the ecclesiastical court, and stood with Giordano beneath the paintings of the pillared basilica, Plato, sunlight, truth.

  —Look up there, said the Pope. Beside the man with the diagram, who is Pythagoras. Who is he in the white?

  —I don’t know, said Giordano.

  —No one knows, said the Pope. Here is Plato. Pythagoras. Epicurus (who is in hell) with his vine leaves in his hair. Could this one in white be Hermes?

  Giordano looked up at the personage the Pope pointed to.

  —I don’t know, he said.

  The Pope moved away, through the crowded room, crowded with the great dead, and Giordano followed.

  —Ptolemy, He said, pointing. With a crown, who was a king in Ægypt. Was not that Hermes also a king in Ægypt? And look there. Homer. And Virgil. But who are these, these in armor?

  Cardinal Rebiba marveled sourly at them, the little old man, the monk who with his bull neck and tense strut looked more like a brigand or a wrestler than a philosopher. They studied pictures that the cardinal himself had never thought to puzzle over. The afternoon was growing late, and had taken a useless turn; the Neapolitan, instead of astonishing with his art, was advertising his ignorance.

  —We live in these rooms, Sanctissimus said. And so do these people. And We don’t know who they are, or what brought them here. Well.

  He proffered His ring, and Giordano fell to his knee and, as instructed, came close to but did not kiss the stone on His finger even as the Pope withdrew it.

  —Now We must return to Our business. Is there anything you need? Ask Us.

  —I would like, Giordano said, to read the writings of that Hermes.

  —Is that lawful? the Pope said, and turned to Rebiba. Is it?

  Rebiba, blushing, made an ambiguous gesture.

  —If it is lawful, the Pope said, you may. Go downstairs. In Our library We have We-don’t-know-how-many books. Hermes et hoc genus omne.

  Turning to go, He raised His hand, and a secretary flew to His side.

  —The Index librorum prohibitorum, He said as the secretary wrote. It needs looking into. We will appoint a congregatio of Our cardinals. They must take counsel about this. It has been much neglected.

  He was gone, leaving Giordano and the others kneeling, and red-faced Rebiba bowing low.

  —Go away, Rebiba then said to Giordano. The library is below. You have been worse than useless.

  Behind Rebiba as he went out, as though caught up in the angry swish of his red satin skirts, went the rest of the priests, secretaries, guards, and servants who had filled the rooms. One only was left, standing by the far door, a young and smiling boy Giordano had not before noticed, fair-haired, his arms crossed before him. Without words, he crooked a finger, signaling Giordano to follow. Featly he went down the narrow stair, which after a long time debouched into a disused suite of rooms, all painted, empty and lit by the day.

  —Look, the boy said, at that wall, beneath the zodiac. Who holds the book? Hermes.

  Giordano looked. An armillary sphere representing the heavens hung over the head of a sweet-faced man, who spoke to others, Ægyptians perhaps, in a garden.

  —Pinturrichio painted it, the boy said. Come. You will see Hermes again, in the farther room.

  They went through connecting chambers, a room of Apostles instantly recognizable by the emblems they carried, Peter’s keys, Matthew’s book, Andrew’s cross; and through a room of Arts—Astrology and Medicine and Geometry and Grammar—all pictured there much as they were pictured in their rooms in the memory palace Giordano had within.

  —Who do you see there? the boy said, bringing Giordano into the last room. Who is on that wall?

  —Mercurius, Giordano said.

  —Who is Hermes too.

  A young man with the same sweet face as the man beneath the armillary heavens: with a curved sword he was striking down a grotesque figure who grew eyes not only in his head but all over his body, in his cheeks, arms, thighs. Behind these two a placid cow looked on: Io. Transformed into a cow by Juno, she was put to be watched over by Argus the thousand-eyed, but Argus was slain by Mercury, and Io escaped into Ægypt.

  —Look, said the boy. Ægypt.

  Along the borders of the wall, all around the room, were pyramids, hieroglyphic bulls, Isis, Osiris.

  —It was Alexander the Sixth who made these rooms, the young man said. His sign was the Bull; he studied magic; he knew Marsilius, and loved him. He loved wealth, too. He was a very bad man.

  His clear laughing eyes directed Giordano’s to another wall: a seated queen, not Our Lady; a bearded prophet on one side of her, and the same strong sweet-faced man on the other, pensive, smiling faintly.

  —Queen Isis, said the boy. Who was Io once. And Mercurius, who went into Ægypt, and gave to the Ægyptians their laws and letters. The other man is Moses, who lived then too.

  —Yes, said Giordano. He looked from the clear dreaming wise eyes of Mercurius in the picture to the clear laughing eyes of the fair-haired boy, and a weird shudder flew over him.

  —Come, the youth said. Down.

  They went into a tiny and shabby chapel, and down a twisting flight of stairs into a chamber whose smell Giordano knew at once. Books.

  —It is called the Floreria. Sit.

  There was a broad scarred table onto which the light fell from a high window; there was a bench before it. Giordano sat.

  In after times he would not remember much of his sitting there, or even how many days he sat. He was brought food, now and then, to his table; a pallet was made for him, in a corridor, between piles of books waiting to be bound, and there sometimes he slept. And the smiling youth came and went, and put the books before him, and took them away, and brought more. It was he too who brought the dishes of food, and tugged at Giordano’s hair when he had fallen asleep on the open pages.

  Had there been others there? There must have been, other scholars, librarians, students harmlessly looting the Pope’s treasure: some of the faces that, ever after, the speakers in the dialogues of Thrice-great Hermes would wear in Bruno’s imagination must have been borrowed by him from the readers whom he saw there: but he wouldn’t remember them. What he remembered was what he read.

  They were great folio volumes, a hundred years old almost, Marsilio Ficino’s translation into Latin of the Greek originals (that had come out of the Ægyptian somewhen): bound in gold and white, printed in a clear and smiling Roman type. Pimander Hermetis Trismegisti. He began with Ficino’s awed commentary:

  In that time in which Moses was born there flourished Atlas the astrologer, brother of Prometheus the physicist and maternal uncle of the elder Mercury whose nephew was Mercurius Trismegistus.

/>   He read how Pimander, the Mind of God, came to this Mercurius-Hermes, and told him of the origins of the universe: and it was an account strangely like Moses’s in Genesis, but different too, for in it Man was not made of clay but existed before all things, was son and brother at once to the Divine Mind and sharer in Its creative power, sharer with the seven Archons—the planets—in celestial nature. A God himself, in fact, until, falling in love with the Creation he had helped to shape, Man fell: and mingled his substance with Nature’s matter: and came to be earthy, bound up in love and sleep, and subject to heimarmene and the Spheres.

  Back upward he must go then, through those Spheres, taking from each of the seven Archons the powers he lost in his fall, and leaving behind the layers of material garment he has worn, until in the ogdoadic sphere he returns to his true nature, and sings hymns of praise to his Father:

  Holy is God the Father of all, who is before the first beginning;

  Holy is God, whose purpose is accomplished by his several Powers;

  Holy art Thou, of whom all nature is an image. …

  Accept pure offerings of speech from a soul and heart uplifted to thee,

  Thou of whom no words can tell, no tongue can speak, whom silence only can declare. …

  What sort of journey was this, how was it made, how were the powers to be acquired so that a man or his spirit could go so far? Giordano read Pimander’s words to Hermes:

  All beings are in God, but not as though placed somewhere; no more than they are placed in the incorporeal faculty of representation. You know this yourself: Direct your soul to be in India, to cross the seas, and it’s done instantaneously. To travel up into heaven, the soul needs no wings, nothing can prevent its going thither. And if you wish to break through the vault of the universe, and see what’s beyond it—if there is anything beyond it—you may do it.