The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  —I’ve said only the truth, Giordano said, rising. The truth.

  The doctor raised a hand to calm him.

  —Best to leave after moonset, he said. I will come then to wake you.

  Another sleeping courtyard, another wallet full of bread, a pouch of coins, a book. Night. A frontier to cross. It was a world full of dangers: and to all of them a young man on foot, with a monk’s robe in his satchel and a headful of notions, not used to keeping still, was subject.

  Southward he could not go. Northward, in the Spanish kingdom of Milan, the Inquisition was busy and the Spanish soldier, the tercio, stood—grinning and most likely drunk—astride every road Giordano might take. Giordano had known the tercio all his life, had laughed at him in the commedie in his old city: Capitano Sangre y Fuego, El Cocodrillo, the eternal bragging soldier, ragged fiery and mad, loyal only to a Spanish honor incomprehensible to all the rest of the world, and to a Catholic church whose every moral law he flouted. Killing heretics—and their servants and children if necessary, their oxen and geese for his sustenance—was what the tercio lived to do; after that to drink, and lie, and have his way with women. The Milanese girls didn’t leave their shuttered houses even to go to Mass.

  So Signor Bruno (new sword at his side) went west, skirting the Milanese borders, and up to Turin in the kingdom of Savoy: which was just as Hapsburg as Milan but not Spanish at least, having fallen to the Holy Roman Empire when old Charles had broken his vast inheritance in two, half for Phillip of Spain, half for Maximilian of Austria. In Turin Giordano taught Latin grammar to children until he could stand it no more; then he packed books, papers, habit, and, one step ahead of the parents who had paid him in advance, found a place on a boatload of Alpine timber going downriver to the Po. The Po went east to Venice. So did Bruno.

  It could seem in those years that half the world was in motion, put to flight by the other half. From square to square across the chessboard of the Hapsburg possessions the tercios crossed and recrossed, billetted on households in Naples and Milan, rifling the warehouses of Protestant merchants in Antwerp (who packed their goods in trunks and fled to Amsterdam and Geneva); shipped by Armada to the New World, slaying Indians, who had no souls, and looking for El Dorado in Guinea and Brazil; battling the Turks in Transylvania and Crete, holding open the doors of a Spanish corridor from Sicily to the Baltic, starting fugitives like hares wherever they passed.

  But there were other armies abroad who also admitted of no boundaries, either geographical or in the hearts of men; forces that could likewise abide no compromise, could not even conceive of it.

  —They come out from Geneva with books hidden in the false bottoms of their trunks, said the lean passenger who shared Giordano’s perch upon the timber. They come into a city, and never reveal themselves. They are merchants, agents, goldsmiths, printers. They begin to attract others by their secret preaching—the father of a family, who brings in his wife, his children, his servants. In this way many small congregations are established, like the cells built by a honeybee, linked but sealed off from each other; if one is broken into, no matter, others remain whole. They know only the names of those who share with them, so torture cannot wring the names of others from them. And so they grow, in secret, like worms inside a fruit, until one day they are enough; they reveal themselves, the fruit bursts to show the roiling mass inside, the city falls to them. Just in that way.

  —How do you come to know so much of it? Giordano, irritated, asked him.

  —In France, the lean man said, the Huguenots (which is only another name for them) are now debating whether the believers are justified in killing a monarch who oppresses them. Killing a monarch. Why not the Pope then? Why not Jesus Christ himself again?

  —Hm, said Giordano.

  He pretended to sleep. The riverbanks, crowded with people and carriage, went by him, or he went by them. Later he saw the lean man take from his clothes and open a black book Giordano recognized; his lips moved as he read, and his hand now and then sketched a cross on his bosom.

  They were soldiers, and in motion too: the Company of Jesus, soldiers loyal to no crown, no bishop, no territory. No more than the Genevans did they believe that Christ’s church could be divisible, and at every breach from Scotland to Macao they were there. They could stab a monarch, Giordano was sure: or pay to have one stabbed. They could. They already had.

  In Venice he again found help: a name he knew led him to another name, and that one to a scholarly doctor with a room to spare; there was an academy where he could lecture, money for books.

  He lectured on the Ars memoriœ, and let it be whispered that he had fled a Dominican monastery: the reputation of his order for possessing potent memory arts was old and wide. To his students at the academy he began to seem—as he would seem to many others from that time onward—to have a secret he could impart, a secret that had cost him not a little in the learning, if they would just sit still to hear it. He drew hearers, not all of them sympathetic. He lost—discarded, threw away in a few terrific moments—his old virginity, in a closed gondola rocking on the autumn Adriatic.

  His powers continued to grow. Offered a counterfeit coin—not a silver ducat but cast glass silvered with mercury—his fingers knew the difference. Mercury, trickster and thief, speaker and laugher, his own Hermes, was burning to his touch: silver, the moon’s metal, was cool and liquid. If he drew on Venus, blew on Venus inwardly as on a coal, then other powers were his: women turned to watch him pass, men deferred to him, there was no hesitancy in him when words needed to be whispered into a small pink ear, when masks—hers frilled and black, his white and long-nosed—were put aside.

  (He found, after those exertions, as he lay still and glowing beside a sleeping woman, that something was loosened within him; for a few moments or an hour he would perceive the packed contents of his consciousness on the move, streaming together, like with like, rank on rank, like the different troops of an army, horse and foot, artillery, pikemen, fusiliers: each kind in different bright coats and caps, all under the command of the different captains he had set for them, the Reasons of the World; and their general the god Omniform. He would think then: There is only one thing in the universe, and that thing is Becoming. Endless, timeless, ceaseless Becoming, infinite generation exfoliating from the ideas within the mind of God and casting these bright moving shadows in his own soul—and colored, all colored, for if the shadows in his soul were not colored, then nothing is. In a Venetian bagnio on the last night of the feast of the Redentore he lay listening to the soft inhalations beside him and the distant revelers, watching within himself the pulse and scintillation of Becoming, like the silver tips of wavelets endlessly becoming on the sea.)

  Venice in rain sailed its broad lagoons like an ark of Noah (so he described it in a sonnet) bearing all kinds, two of each. Venice was indulgent: a man could live here, and think. In the bookstalls around the Piazza San Marco, amid the smudgy almanacs and books of prophecy, the pamphlets and novelle, he came upon books he had long heard of but had never seen between covers. Iamblichus on the Mysteries. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia. Here were the wild hymns of Orpheus to the Sun that were sung in the young age of the world. Here was the Ars magna of Ramon Lull, an art of memory like his own but not like his own: he stared at its branching trees and climbing steps and wheels-within-wheels.

  Who was publishing these things newly? How did they know he needed them? Why was he seeing books like these in the book presses and cabinets of the kind doctors and scholars who sheltered him? He raised his eyes from the page to see the bookseller, leaning on the back of his bin of books, cheeks in his hands, smiling at him. On his finger he wore a gold ring, a ring cut with that same curious figure the gardener in Genoa had worn:

  Seeing Bruno baffled and uncertain, the bookseller put before him a thick German volume, sewn but unbound, wrapped in parchment covers. He opened it to the title page.

  —Cosmography, the bookseller said.

  The book was On
the revolution of the orbs of Heaven and was by Nicholas Copernicus of Poland.

  Copernico. That was another name Giordano knew, a figure of fun in his Neapolitan schoolrooms, the man who, to explain the heavenly motions, had set the solid earth revolving and staggering around the spheres. He had seemed almost imaginary to Giordano, but here was his book. Nuremberg, A.D. 1547. Dedicated to the Pope. Giordano turned the big pages.

  Saturn, the first of the wandering stars, completes its circuit in 30 years. After him comes Jupiter, moving in a duodecennial revolution. Then Mars, which rolls around every two years. The place fourth in order is occupied by the annual revolution of (as we have said) the Earth, carrying with it the orbital circle of the Moon as an epicycle.

  He had begun to feel very strange. It was as though, when he read Copernicus’s placements of the planets, he felt the same planets in the heavens he kept within him (and their tutelary gods and spirits) open their eyes, and move to their proper places. And then the earth moving too, and all its contents.

  In the fifth place, Venus, who completes her revolution in 7½ months. The sixth and final place is occupied by Mercury, who goes around in 88 days. But in the center of all rests the Sun.

  As though all the guglie of his memory system had been lifted up, at a signal, and put in motion—a motion they had always had, potentially, a motion without which they were asleep, or stopped, like a stopped clock. Giordano laughed. From the sparkling piazza beyond the arcade a flock of pigeons arose, as though suddenly shaken out like a banner: the view of the square was shattered in an instant into a thousand flying particles, fluttering bodies hurtled through the arches of the dark arcade and out again into the light, rousing others to flight.

  Wings. Taken wing.

  What if it were so? What if it were really so?

  —He says, the bookman said in a low voice, he says that it’s not new knowledge he has found. It’s old knowledge he has brought back again. Pythagoras. Zoroaster. Ægypt. So he says.

  And who would place the lamp of this most magnificent of temples anywhere else, who could find a better place for it than there from where it can illuminate all that is at the same time? That’s why some, and not improperly either, have called it the Lantern of the World, others the Mind, others the Pilot. And Trismegistus calls it “God visible.”

  The bookseller had gently put his hands on the book to take it back, but Giordano would not give it up.

  —I have no money now, he said. But.

  —No money no Cosmography.

  Giordano gave the name and street of the house where he was lodging.

  —Send it there, he said. You’ll be paid. I promise you, you …

  The bookman grinned.

  —I know the man, he said. Take it to him. With my compliments. I will put it on the account he keeps with me.

  He released the book.

  What glyph was that he wore?

  Giordano carried Copernicus with him through the rainy streets, wrapped in his cloak like an infant.

  In the spring he heard that the Venetian Inquisition, so slow to act, had at last noticed him. Spies had reported his lectures and his boasts. The bookseller on the piazza shuttered his shop. By now, Giordano’s old Dominican habit provided more of a disguise than the signor’s hose and sword; so the doctor cut his hair, and put him into his own gondola at the water-stairs, and wished him luck.

  Eastward from here there was only the Turk. Frater Jordanus put his hands within his sleeves, and went west again.

  “Pierce,” said Rosie. “Gotta go.”

  Pierce—looming large in Kraft’s miniature study—whirled around on the swivel chair, looking guiltily surprised. “Oh?”

  “Mouths to feed.” He only stared at her, though not perhaps seeing her leaning there in the doorway, a bunch of Kraft’s papers in her arms for Boney to look at, letters from long ago. She wondered if it was a face like that with which she had used to look up from the books into which she escaped. That wild absent blind look. “Okay?”

  “What?”

  “If you’re near a stopping place,” she said. “Soon.”

  “Yes,” he said, “yes,” and turned back to the typescript. A small stack of it on his left-hand side, a big pile on his right. He cupped his chin in his hands and sighed.

  “It’s stopped raining,” Rosie said.

  While Pierce read, his old teacher Frank Walker Barr at Noate stood up before his senior seminar on the History of History, and, talking as he worked, opened the classroom windows; for the rain that was ceasing in the Faraways had passed from here too, and the sun was hot.

  “What, then, grants meaning to historical accounts?” he asked, for the last time in that semester. “What is the difference between a history and a register of facts, of names and events?” He had taken from the corner a long oaken pole, with a brass finger on the end of it; this he was inserting into the brass sockets set for it in the frames of the windows, and drawing them down. Many in the classroom remembered grade-school teachers doing the same, in past classrooms, and they watched Barr with interest.

  “What we might do to conclude,” Barr went on, “is to try to think how meaning arises in other kinds of accounts or narratives.” The finger engaged the hole of the last westward-facing window. “It seems to me that what grants meaning in folktales and legendary narratives—we’re thinking now of something like the Nibelungenlied or the Mort D’Arthur—is not logical development so much as thematic repetition, the same ideas or events or even the same objects recurring in different circumstances, or different objects contained in similar circumstances.”

  The window he tugged at yielded, and slid open, admitting a crowd of breezes that had been pressing for admittance there.

  “A hero sets out,” Barr said, not turning back to his students but facing the sparkling quad and the air. “To find a treasure, or to free his beloved, or to capture a castle or find a garden. Every incident, every adventure that befalls him as he searches, is the treasure or the beloved, the castle or the garden, repeated in different forms, like a set of nesting boxes—each of them however just as large, or no smaller, than all the others. The interpolated stories he is made to listen to only tell him his own story in another form. The pattern continues until a kind of certainty arises, a satisfaction that the story has been told often enough to seem at last to have been really told. Not uncommonly in old romances the story just breaks off then, or turns to other matters.

  “Plot, logical development, conclusions prepared for by introductions, or inherent in a story’s premises—logical completion as a vehicle of meaning—all that is later, not necessarily later in time, but belonging to a later, more sophisticated kind of literature. There are some interesting half-way kind of works, like The Færie Queene, which set up for themselves a titanic plot, an almost mathematical symmetry of structure, and never finish it: never need to finish it, because they are at heart works of the older kind, and the pattern has already arisen satisfyingly within them, the flavor is already there.

  “So is this any help in our thinking? Is meaning in history like the solution to an equation, or like a repeated flavor—is it to be solved for, or tasted?”

  He turned to face them.

  “Is this a parable? Have I simply repeated our seminar in another form?”

  The air in the room had all been changed now for the air outside, burdened with June, whatever that was exactly, something heavier than warmth or odor or vapor. It was the last day of classes.

  “No?” he said, regarding their mild faces, absent already, and no wonder either. “Yes? No? Maybe?”

  NINE

  Out of Turin the roads west and northward rose quickly into the mountains, climbing toward the passes of Little St. Bernard and Mont-Cenis; and an endless train of wagons, carts, mules, and men unwound from the Piazza del Castello and upward, carrying mail, news, jewels, and specie (well hidden in the pack trains or sewn in the linings of merchants’ coats, not mentioned at inns and borders) a
nd luxury goods of the Levantine and Asian trade valuable enough to make the overland journey worth the cost—ostrich feathers, drugs, silks, plate. The outlaws, the fugitives and spies, the friars and common people, went over the Alps on foot; the great were carried in litters, surrounded by clanking men-at-arms.

  The road they followed went up into the high Savoy, through meadows lush and spangled with flowers, into a country of dark firs; beside rivers now rushing and dangerous; between beetling walls of gorges where snow still melted. Snow: Giordano pressed a handful to his lips. He heard someone say that it was from drinking snow-water continuously that the natives of these mountains—the strong squat men and long-armed women whose cottages hung on the points of crags, whose sheep danced from steep to steep—were so often hideously goitered.

  He supposed that these must be the mountains where witches lived as well, the witches who were prosecuted so relentlessly by his Dominican brothers; stories of the witch-hunters and their dangers and triumphs were the lore of Dominican houses. Down those deep passes perhaps; in those black cave mouths; in those low cottages, roofs piled comically thick with snow, a breath of dark smoke from their chimney-holes. He thought maybe he should go find them, and live with them. Raise winds, and fly. There was a wind rising even then, harsh and searching, and a few snowflakes blown in it like cinders.

  That night in the cold guest cell he was allotted in a Dominican hospice in the Val Susa he lay awake before dawn, between Matins and Prime, remembering Nola.

  Brother Teofilo had told him that the earth was not flat, like a dish, but round, like an orange; it seemed right that Teofilo would know this, round as he was himself. Giordano listened to him; he watched the friar draw with a burnt stick the circle of the world, and the outlines of lands on it, a mappamundi—and was content to believe it. Teofilo did not know that the round world Giordano had instantly conceived and assented to when Teofilo drew his picture was a hollow sphere, and contained the lands and peoples, the mountains and the rivers and the air, as an orange contains its meat; what the boy thought Teofilo had drawn a picture of was its outside surface, marked like a plover’s egg, the view God had. Inside was the earth we see. Along the bottom half lay the fields and vineyards; the mountains rose up the curved sides; the sky was the inside of the top, whereon the sun and stars were stuck.