[Revolutions 01] Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  *

  Andreas pushed his platter away and belched sourly. A scullion passed by their table, lugging a steaming urn, and he turned to watch her joggling haunches. Dreamily he said:

  “They are all Italians, of course,” and he smiled at his brother suddenly, icily. “Yes, bumboys all.”

  Nicolas went no more to Novara’s house, and stayed away from his lectures. By Christmastide he had left Bologna forever.

  * * *

  The city crouched, sweating in fright, under the sign of the brooding bull. Talk of portents was rife. Blood rained from the sky at noon, at night the deserted streets shook with the thunder of unearthly hoofbeats and weird cries filled the air. A woman at Ostia come to her time brought forth an issue of rats. Some said it was the reign of Antichrist, and that the end was nigh. In February the Pope’s son Cesare returned victorious from the Romagna and rode in triumph with his army through the cheering streets. He was clad for the occasion all in black, with a collar of gold blazing at his throat. The entire army likewise was draped in black. It seemed, in the brumous yellowy light of that winter day, that the Lord of Darkness himself had come forth to be acclaimed by the delirious mob.

  This was Rome, in the jubilee year of 1500.

  *

  The brothers had moved south to the capital on the instructions of Uncle Lucas: they were to act as unofficial ambassadors of the Frauenburg Chapter at the jubilee celebrations. It was a nebulous posting. They performed during that year only one duty that could have been considered in any way connected with diplomacy, when they dined at the Vatican as guests of a minor papal official, a smooth foxy cleric with a disconcerting wall-eyed stare, who desired, as far as the brothers could ascertain from his elaborately veiled insinuations, to be reassured that Bishop Lucas’s loyalty to Rome was in no danger of being transferred to the King of Poland; and they might have made a serious blunder, inexperienced as they were in matters of such delicacy, had not the grey and cautious Canon Schiller, the representative of the Frauenburg Chapter, been there to guide them with astutely timed and enthusiastically administered kicks under the table.

  It was with Schiller that they lodged, in a gloomy villa on the damp side of a hill near the Circo Massimo, where the food was stolidly Prussian and the air heavy with the odour of sanctity. Nicolas glumly accepted the discipline and arid rituals of the house; from his schooldays on he had been accustomed to that kind of thing, and expected nothing better. Andreas, however, chafed under Canon Schiller’s watchful eye, in which there was reflected, all the way from Prussia, the light of a far fiercer, icier gaze. Lately he had become more morose than ever, his rages were redder, his fits of melancholia less and less amenable to the curative pleasures of student life. What had once in him been fecklessness was now a thirst for small destructions; his gay cynicism had turned into something very like despair. He complained vaguely of being ill. His face was drawn and pallid, eyes shot with blood, his breathing oddly thin and papery. He began to frequent the booths of astrologers and fortune tellers of the worst kind. Once even he asked Nicolas to cast his horoscope, which Nicolas, appalled at the idea, refused to do, pleading not very convincingly a lack of skill. Uncle Lucas had secured a canonry at Frauenburg for Andreas, and for a time his finances flourished, but he was soon penniless again, and, worse, in the hands of the Jews. Nicolas watched helplessly his brother’s life disintegrate; it was like witnessing the terrible slow fall into the depths of a once glorious marvellously shining angel.

  Yet Andreas loved Rome. In that wicked wolf-suckled city his peculiar talents came briefly to full flower, nourished by the pervading air of menace and intrigue. He spoke the language of these scheming worldly churchmen, and it was not long before he had found his way into the cliques and cabals that abounded at the papal court. In the eyes of the world he was a firebrand, brilliant, careless, and hedonistic, destined for great things. Schiller cautioned him on the manner of his life. He paid no heed. He was by then treading waters deeper than that Canon could conceive of. But he was out over jagged reefs, and his light was being extinguished; he was drowning.

  Nicolas detested the capital. It reminded him of an old tawny lion dying in the sun, on whose scarred and smelly pelt the lice bred and feverishly fed in final frantic carnival. He was shocked by what he saw of the workings of the Church. God had been deposed here, and Rodrigo Borgia ruled in his place. On Easter Sunday two hundred thousand pilgrims knelt in St Peter’s Square to receive the blessing of the Pope; Nicolas was there, pressed about by the poor foolish faithful who sighed and swayed like a vast lung, lifting their faces trustingly toward the hot sun of spring. He wondered if perhaps the tavern prophets were right, if this was the end, if here today a last terrible blessing was being administered to the city and the world.

  In July Lucrezia Borgia’s husband, Alfonso Duke of Bisceglie, was savagely attacked on the steps of St Peter’s; Cesare was behind the outrage, so it was whispered. The rumours seemed confirmed some weeks later when Il Valentino’s man, Don Michelotto, broke into Alfonso’s sickroom in the Vatican and throttled the Duke in his bed. Nicolas recalled a certain strange day in Bologna, and wondered. But of course it was altogether mad to think that Novara and his friends could be in any way involved in these bloody doings, or so at least the Professor himself insisted when one day, by chance, Nicolas met him on the street near the amphitheatre of Vespasian.

  “No no!” Novara whispered hoarsely, glancing nervously about. “How can you imagine such a thing? In fact the Duke knew something of our views, and was not unsympathetic. Certainly we wished him no harm. It is too terrible, truly. And to think that we once considered this Cesare as . . . O, terrible!”

  He was paying a brief visit to Rome on university business. Nicolas was shocked by his appearance. He was stooped and sallow, with dead eyes and trembling hands, hardly recognisable as the magisterial, cold and confident patrician he had lately been. He frowned distractedly and mopped his brow, tormented by the heat and the dust and the uproar of the traffic. He was dying. A slender bored young man got up in scarlet accompanied him, and stood by in insolent silence with one hand resting on his hip; his name was Girolamo. He smiled at Nicolas, who suddenly remembered where he had seen him before, and blushed and turned away only to find to his horror Novara watching him with tears in his eyes.

  “You think me a fool, Koppernigk,” he said. “You came to my house only to laugh at me—O yes, do not deny it, your brother told me how you laughed after running away from us that day. My scheming and my magic, I suppose they must have seemed foolish to you, whose concern is facts, computation, the laws of the visible world.”

  Nicolas groaned inwardly. Why were people, Andreas always, now Novara, so eager that he should think well of them? What did his opinion matter? He said:

  “My brother lied; he is prone to it. Why should I laugh at you? You are a greater astronomer than I.” This was horrible, horrible. “I left your house because I knew I could be of no use to you. What part could I play in your schemes—” he could not resist it “—I, a mere tradesman’s son?”

  Novara nodded, grimacing. The sun rained hammerblows on him. He had the look of a wounded animal.

  “You lack charity, my friend,” he said. “You must try to understand that men have need of answers, articles of faith, myths—lies, if you will. The world is terrible and yet we are terrified to leave it: that is the paradox that hurts us so. Does anything hurt you, Koppernigk? Yours is an enviable immunity, but I wonder if it will endure.”

  “I cannot help it if I am cold!” Nicolas cried, beside himself with rage and embarrassment. “And I have done nothing to deserve your bitterness.” But Novara had lost interest, and was shuffling away. The youth Girolamo hesitated between them, glancing with a faint sardonic smile from one of them to the other. Nicolas trembled violently. It was not fair!—even if he was dying, Novara had no right to cringe like this; his task was to be proud and cold, to intimidate, not to mewl and whimper, not to be weak. It was a
scandal! “I never asked anything of you!” Nicolas howled at the other’s back, ignoring the looks of the passers-by. “It was you that approached me. Are you listening?”

  “Yes yes,” Novara muttered, without turning. “Just so, indeed. And now farewell. Come, Girolamo, come.”

  The young man smiled languorously a last time, and with a small regretful gesture went to the Professor and took his arm. Nicolas turned and fled, with his fury clutched to him like a struggling captive wild beast. He was frightened, as if he had looked into a mirror and seen reflected there not his own face but an unspeakable horror.

  He did not see Novara again. Once or twice their paths might have crossed, but time and circumstance happily intervened to keep them apart; happily, not only because Nicolas feared another painful scene, but also because he dreaded the possibility of being confronted again by the frightening image of himself he had glimpsed in the looking glass of that incomprehensible fit of naked fury. When he heard of the Professor’s death he could not even remember clearly what the man had looked like; but by then he was in Padua, and everything had changed.

  *

  That city at first made little impression on him, he was so busy searching for habitable lodgings, performing the complicated and exasperating rituals of enrolment at the university, choosing his subjects, his professors. He had also to cope with Andreas, who by now was badly, though still mysteriously, ill, and full of spleen. Early in the summer the brothers travelled to Frauenburg, their leave of absence having expired. They had asked by letter for an extension, but Bishop Lucas had insisted that they should make the request in person. The extra leave was granted, of course, and after less than a month in Prussia they set out once more for Italy.

  Nicolas paused at Kulm to visit Barbara at the convent. She had not changed much in the years since he had seen her last; in middle age she was still, for him, the ungainly girl who had played hide and seek with him long ago in the old house in Torun. Perhaps it was these childhood echoes that made their talk so stilted and unreal. There was between them still that familiar melancholy, that tender hesitant regard, but now there was something more, a faint sense of the ridiculous, of the ponderous, as if they were despite their pretensions really children playing at being grown-ups. She was, she told him, Abbess of the convent now, in succession to their late Aunt Christina Waczelrodt, but he could not grasp it. How could Barbara, his Barbara, have become a person of such consequence? She also was puzzled by the elaborate dressing-up that he was trying to pass off as his life. She said:

  “You are becoming a famous man. We even hear talk of you here in the provinces.”

  He shook his head and smiled. “It is all Andreas’s doing. He thinks it a joke to put it about that I am formulating in secret a revolutionary theory of the planets.”

  “And are you not?”

  Summer rain was falling outside, and a pallid, faintly flickering light entered half-heartedly by the streaming windows of the high hall where they sat. Even in her loose-fitting habit Barbara was all knees and knuckles and raw scrubbed skin. She looked away from him shyly. He said:

  “I shall come again to see you soon.”

  “Yes.”

  *

  When he returned to Padua he found Andreas, though sick and debilitated already from the Prussian journey, preparing to depart for Rome. “I can abide neither your sanctimonious stink, brother, nor this cursed Paduan smugness. You will breathe easier without me to disgrace you before your pious friends.”

  “I have no friends, Andreas. And I wish you would not go.”

  “You are a hypocrite. Do not make me spew, please.”

  However much he tried not to be, Nicolas was glad of his brother’s going; now perhaps at last, relieved of the burden of Andreas’s intolerable presence, he would be permitted to become the real self he had all his life wished to be.

  But what was that mysterious self that had eluded him always? He could not say. Yet he was convinced that he had reached a turning point. Those first months alone in Padua were strange. He was neither happy nor sad, nor much of anything: he was neutral. Life flowed over him, and under the wave he waited, for what he did not know, unless it was rescue. He applied himself with energy to his studies. He took philosophy and law, mathematics, Greek and astronomy. It was in the faculty of medicine, however, that he surfaced at last, like a spent swimmer flying upward into light, in whose aching lungs the saving air blossoms like a great dazzling yellow flower.

  *

  “Signor Fracastoro?”

  The young man turned, frowning. “Si, I am Fracastoro.”

  How handsome he was, how haughty, with those black eyes, that dark narrow arrogant face; how languidly he sprawled on the bench among the twittering band of dandies, with his long legs negligently crossed. The lecture hall was putrid with the stink of a dissected corpse, the gross gouts and ganglia of which two bloodstained attendants were carting away, but he was aristocratically indifferent to that carnage, and only now and then bothered to lift to his face the perfume-soaked handkerchief whose pervasive musky scent was the unmistakable trademark of the medical student. He was dressed with casual elegance in silk and soft leather, booted and spurred, with a white linen shirt open on the frail cage of his chest; he had come late to the lecture that morning, flushed and smiling, bringing with him into the fetid hall a crisp clean whiff of horses and sweet turf and misty dawn meadows. He was all that Nicolas was not, and Nicolas, sensing imminent humiliation, cursed himself for having spoken.

  “We met last year in Rome, I think,” he said. “You were with Professor Novara.”

  “O?”

  Fracastoro’s friends nudged each other happily, and gazed at Nicolas with bland sardonic seriousness, trying not to laugh; they too could see humiliation coming.

  “Yes yes, in Rome, and before that in Bologna, at the Professor’s house.” He was beginning to babble. Someone sniggered. “I remember it well. You tried to make a drunkard of Novara’s dog, ha ha. Ha.”

  The young man raised an eyebrow. “Yes? A dog, you say? Extraordinary. Certainly I do not remember that.”

  Nicolas sighed. Blast you, you young prig. Life is dreadful, really. He stepped back, trying not to bow.

  “A mistake,” he muttered. “Forgive me.”

  “But wait, wait,” Fracastoro said, “this Novara, it seems to me I do know the man, vaguely.” He lifted a slender hand to his brow. “Ah yes, a mathematician, is he not?—much given to mysticism? Yes, I know him. Well?”

  “You do not remember our meeting.”

  “No; but I may do so, if I concentrate. Do you have news of the Professor?”

  “No, no, I merely—it is no matter.”

  “But—?”

  “No matter, no matter.” And he fled, pursued by laughter.

  *

  They met again some days later, in the vegetable market, of all places, at dawn. Lately Nicolas had begun to suffer from sleeplessness, and went out often at night to walk about the city and bathe his feverishly spinning brain in the chill dark air. He developed a fondness for the market especially; the colours, the clamour, the heavy honeyed smell of ripeness, all conspired to cheat of its bleakness that inhuman hour before first light. He was leaning on the damp parapet of the Ponte San Giorgio, idly watching the upriver barges like great ungainly whales unloading their produce in the bluish gloom of the wharf below, when a voice said at his shoulder:

  “Koppernigk, is it not?”

  He was wrapped in a dun cloak, and his long fair swathe of hair was hidden under a battered old black slouch hat; even in such dull apparel he could not be less than elegant. He was smiling a little, not looking at Nicolas, but musing on the still-dark distance beyond the city walls, saying silently, as it were: come, cut me now if you wish, and so have some small revenge. But Nicolas just as silently declined the offer, and suddenly the Italian laughed softly and said:

  “Nicolas Koppernigk—you see? I have been concentrating.”

  Nicolas
with a faint smile inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Signor Fracastoro.”

  The other looked at him directly then, and laughed again.

  “O please,” he said, “my friends call me that; you may call me Girolamo. Shall we walk this way a little?” They left the bridge and crossed the open piazza, where the fishwives were hurling amiable abuse from stall to stall. “But tell me, what brings you here at this strange hour?”

  Nicolas shrugged. “I do not sleep well. And you?”

  “Wine and women, I fear, keep me from my bed. I am for home now after a misspent night.” It was meant as a boast. He was at that age, not quite twenty yet, when the youth he had been and the man he was becoming both held sway at once, so that in the same breath he could slip disconcertingly from hard cold derisive cynicism into simple silliness. Now he said: “You disappointed Novara greatly, you know, by not taking seriously his grand schemes to save the world. Ah, poor Domenico!”

  They both laughed, a little spitefully, and Nicolas, suddenly stared at out of the sky by the Professor’s pained reproachful eyes, said hastily:

  “But they are not without significance, his preoccupations.”

  “No, of course; but it is all mere talking. He is too much in love with magic, and despises action. I mean that natural magic for him is all centaurs and chimaeras. Now I, however, understand it in general as the science which applies the knowledge of hidden forms to the production of wonderful operations.” He glanced out quickly from under the downturned brim of his black hat with a candid questioning look, but it was impossible to know if he was being sincere or otherwise. “What do you say, friend?”

  But Nicolas only shrugged and murmured warily:

  “Perhaps, perhaps . . .”

  He did not know what to make of this young man; he did not trust him, and did not trust himself, and so determined to go cautiously, even though he could not see where trust came into it, except that he knew he did not care to be made a fool of again. It was all odd, this meeting, this dreamlike morning, these dim figures hurrying here and there and crying out in the gloom. They entered a narrow alleyway given over entirely to the trade in cagebirds. Cascades of bright mad music drenched the dark air. Coming out at the other end they found themselves abruptly in a deserted square. The sky was of a deep illyrian blue, lightening rapidly now to the east, and the towers of the city were tipped with gold.