[Revolutions 01] Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  “Well, my friend?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Caro Nicolo.”

  They sat down in a richly appointed dining-room to an elaborate veal and champagne supper. A candelabrum of Venetian glass glistened above their heads, its gaudy splendours reflected deep in the dark pool of the polished table on which there sailed a fleet of handcrafted gold and silver serving dishes. The room was hushed, suspended in stillness, except where their bone knives and delicate forks stabbed and sliced the silence above their plates with tiny deft ferocity. Everywhere that Nicolas looked he encountered the Fracastoro monogram, intricately graven in goldleaf on the dishes and the cruets, woven into the napkins, even carved on the facings and reredos of the vast black marble fireplace.

  “Tell me,” he said, “how many such establishments as this do you keep up?”

  “O, not many; the apartments in Verona, where my books are, and a house in Rome. And of course there is a hunting lodge in the mountains, which we must visit, if the weather clears. Why do you ask?”

  “Curiosity.”

  “Are you still brooding on my unsuspected wealth? It is not so great as you seem to imagine. You are too easily impressed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you glad you came here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that all you can say?”

  “What would you have me say? Indeed, my liege, my humble thanks, sweet lord, I am overwhelmed.” He ground his teeth. “Forgive me, I am tired from the journey, and out of sorts. Forgive me.”

  Girolamo gazed at him mildly, more in curiosity it seemed than anger or hurt.

  “No, it is my fault,” he said. “I should not have brought you here. We were happier on neutral ground—or should I say, we were happy?” He smiled. “For we are not happy now, are we?”

  “Does happiness seem to you the greatest good?”

  At that the Italian laughed. “Come, Nicolas, none of your sham philosophising, not with me. Do you hate me for my wealth and privilege?”

  “Hate?” He was genuinely shocked, and a little frightened. “I do not hate you. I . . . do not hate you. I am happy to be here, in your—”

  “Then do you love me?”

  He was sweating. Girolamo continued to gaze at him, with fondness, and amusement, and regret.

  “I am happy to be here, in your house; I am grateful, I am glad we came.” He realised suddenly that even yet they did not call each other thou. “Perhaps,” he stammered, “perhaps the weather will clear tomorrow . . .”

  *

  But the weather did not clear, in the world nor in the villa. Nicolas stormed, wrapped in a black silence. His rage had no one cause, not that he could discover, but bubbled up, a poisonous vapour, out of a mess of boiling emotions. He felt constantly slighted, by Girolamo, by the smirking servants, even by the villa itself, whose sumptuous sybaritic splendours reminded him that it was accustomed to entertaining aristocrats, while he was what Novara had said, a mere tradesman’s son. Yet was he in reality being thus sorely scorned? Was he not, in discerning, indeed in cultivating this contempt all round him, merely satisfying some strange hunger within him? It was as if he were being driven to add more and more knots to a lash wielded by his own hand. It was as if he were beating himself into submission, cleansing himself, preparing himself: but for what? He hungered, obscenely, obscurely, as under the lash his flesh flinched, went cold and dead, and at last out of a wracked humiliated body his mind soared slowly upward, into the blue.

  Now he saw at last how the plot had been hatching in secret for years, the plot that had brought him without his willing it to this moment of recognition and acceptance; or rather, he had not been brought, had not been made to move at all, but had simply stood and waited while the trivia and the foolishness were shorn away. The Church had offered him a quiet living, the universities had offered academic success, Italy had even offered love. Any or all of these gifts might have seduced him, had not the hideousness intervened to demonstrate the poverty of what they had to offer. At Frauenburg among the doddering canons he had been appalled by the stink of celibacy and clerkly caution. Ferrara had been a farce. Now Italy was making of him an anguished grimacing clown. The Church, academe, love: nothing. Seared and purified, shorn of the encumbering lumber of life, he stood at last like a solitary pine that stands in a wilderness of snow, aching upward fiercely into the sky of fire and ice that was the true concern of the essential selfhood that had eluded him always until now. Beware of these enigmas, Canon Wodka had warned him, for they cannot teach us how to live. But he did not wish to live, not by lessons that the world would teach him.

  He had often before retreated into science as a refuge from the ghastliness of life; thus, he saw now, he had made a plaything of science, by demanding from it comfort and consolation. There would be no more of that, no more play. Here was no retreat, but the conscious accepting, on its own terms, of a cold harrowing discipline. Yet even astronomy was not the real issue. He had not spent his life pursuing a vision down the corridors of pain and loneliness in order merely to become a stargazer. No: astronomy was but the knife. What he was after was the deeper, the deepest thing: the kernel, the essence, the true.

  *

  Rain fell without cease. The world streamed. Lamps were lit at noon, and a great fire of pine logs burned day and night in the main hall. Outside, black phantom cypresses shuddered in the wind.

  “The villagers have gone back to the old ways,” Girolamo said. “Christ-come-lately is abandoned, and the ancient cults are revived. Now they are praying to Mercury to carry their appeals to the gods of fair weather.”

  They were at table. They dined now four or five times a day. Eating had become a sullen joyless obsession: they fed their guts incessantly in a vain effort to dull the pangs of a hunger that no food would assuage. The tender flesh of fish was as ash in Nicolas’s mouth. He was pained by Girolamo’s gentle puzzled attempts to reach out to him across the chasm that had opened between them, but it was a vague pain, hardly much more than an irritant, and becoming vaguer every day. He nodded absently. “Curious.”

  “What? What is curious? Tell me.”

  “O, nothing. They are praying to Mercury, you say; but I am thinking that Mercury is the Hermes of the Greeks, who in turn is the Egyptian Thoth, whose wisdom was handed down to us, through the priests of the Nile, by Hermes Trismegistus. Therefore by a roundabout way your villagers are praying to that magus.” He looked up mildly. “Is that not curious?”

  “The fisherfolk cannot work in this weather,” Girolamo said. “Three of their men have been lost on the lake.”

  “Yes? But then fishermen are always being drowned. It is, so to speak, what they are for. All things, and all men, however humble, have their part to play in the great scheme.”

  “That is somewhat heartless, surely?”

  “Would you not say honest, rather? This sudden concern of yours comes strangely from one who lives by the labour of the common people. Look at this fish here, so impeccably prepared, so tastefully arranged: has it not occurred to you that those fishermen may have perished so that you might sit down to this splendid dinner?”

  Guido, the stooped steward, paused in his quaking progress around the table and peered at him intently. Girolamo had turned pale about the lips, but he smiled and said only:

  “Do I deserve this, Nicolas, really?—Guido, you may go now, thank you.” The old man departed with a dazed look, shocked and amazed it seemed at the suggestion that his master should concern himself with housekeeping. Girolamo’s hand trembled as he poured the wine. “Must you make a fool of me before the servants?”

  Nicolas put down his knife and laughed. “You see? You are less anxious for the fate of fishermen than for the good opinion of your servants!”

  “You twist everything I say, everything!” Suddenly the Italian’s poise had collapsed entirely, and for a moment he was a spoilt petulant boy. Nicolas, intensely gratified, smiled with his teeth. He watched the o
ther closely, with a kind of detached curiosity, wondering if he might be about to break down and weep in fury and frustration. But Girolamo did not weep, and sighed instead and murmured: “What do you want from me, Nicolas, more than I have already given?”

  “Why nothing, my dear friend, nothing at all.” But that was not true: he wanted something, he did not know precisely what, but something large, vivid, outrageous–violence perhaps, terrible insult, a hideous blood-boltered wounding that would leave them both whimpering in final irremediable humiliation. Both, yes. There must be no victor. They must destroy each other, that is, that part of each that was in the other, for only by mutual destruction would he be freed. He understood none of this, he was too crazed with rage and impatience to try to understand, nevertheless he knew it to be valid. Frantically he cast about for a further weapon to thrust into the shuddering flesh. “My theory is almost complete, you know,” he said, shouted almost, with a kind of ghastly constricted cheerfulness.

  Girolamo glanced up uneasily. “Your theory?”

  “Yes yes, my theory of planetary motion, my refutation of Ptolemy. Ptolemy . . .” He seemed to gag on the name. “Have I not told you about it? Let me tell you about it. Ptolemy, you see—”

  “Nicolas.”

  “—Ptolemy, you see, misled us, or we misled ourselves, it hardly matters which, into believing that the Almagest is an explanation, a representation—vorstellung, you know the German term?—for what is real, but the truth is, the truth is that Ptolemaic astronomy is nothing so far as existence is concerned; it is only convenient for computing the nonexistent.” He paused, panting. “What?”

  Girolamo shook his head. “Nothing. Tell me about your theory.”

  “You do not believe it, do you? I mean you do not think that I am capable of formulating a theory which shall reveal the eternal truths of the universe; you do not believe that I am capable of greatness. Do you?”

  “Perhaps, Nicolas, it is better to be good than great?”

  “You do not believe!—”

  “—I believe that if there are eternal truths, and I am not convinced of it, then they can only be known, but not expressed.” He smiled. “And I believe that you and I should not fight.”

  “You! You you you— I amuse you, do I not? I am kept for the fine sport I provide: what matter if it rain, Koppernigk will cut a merry caper and keep us in good spirits.” He had leapt up from the table, and was prancing furiously about the room in what indeed looked like a grotesque comic dervish dance of pain and loathing. “O, he’s a jolly fellow, old Koppernigk, old Nuncle Nick!” Girolamo would not look at him, and at last, trembling, he sat down again and held his face in his hands.

  They were silent. Greenish rainlight draped them about. The trees beyond the window throbbed and thrashed. Presently Girolamo said:

  “You wrong me, Nicolas; I have never laughed at you. We are made differently. I cannot take the world so seriously as you do. It is a lack in me, perhaps. But I am not the dunderhead you like to think me. Have you ever, once, shown even the mildest interest in my concerns? I am a physician, that I take seriously. My work on contagion, the spread of diseases, this is not without value. Medicine is a science of the tangible, you see. I deal with what is here, with what ails men; if I were to discover thereby one of your eternal truths, why, I think I should not notice having done it. Are you listening? I express it badly, I know, but I am trying to teach you something. But then, I suppose you cannot believe that I am capable of teaching you anything. It is no matter. Do you want to know what I am currently embarked upon? I am writing a poem—yes, a poem—dealing with the pox! But you do not want to know, do you? Remember, Nicolas, the morning we met in the market place in Padua? I told you I was returning from a debauch; not so. I had gone there to study the methods of sanitation, or I should say the lack of such, in the meat market. Yes, laugh—” It had been hardly a laugh, rather a hollow retching noise. “—How prosaic, you will say, how comic even. That is why I lied to you that morning. You wanted me to be a rake, a rich wastrel, something utterly different from yourself: a happy fool. And I obliged you. I have been lying ever since. So you see, Nicolas, you are not the only one who fears to be thought dull, who is afraid to be ridiculous.” He paused. “Love . . .” It was as if he were turning up the word gingerly with the toe of his shoe to see what outlandish things might be squirming underneath. “You drove Tadzio away.” There was no trace of accusation in his tone, only sadness, and a faint wonderment. Nicolas, still cowering behind his hands, ground his teeth until they ached. He was in pain, he thought it was pain, until late that night when the word was redefined for him, and pain took on a wholly new meaning. Girolamo’s door was ajar, and there were sounds, awful, vaguely familiar. The scene was illuminated by the faint flickering light of an untrimmed lamp, and in a mirror on the far wall all was eerily repeated in miniature. Girolamo with his long legs splayed was sitting on the edge of the bed with his head thrown back and his lips open in an O of ecstasy, a grotesque and yet mysteriously lovely stranger, his blurred gaze fixed sightlessly on the shadowy ceiling. Ah! he cried softly, Ah! and suddenly his body seemed to buckle, and reaching out with frenzied fingers he grasped by the hair the serving girl kneeling before him and plunged his shuddering cock into her mouth. Look! The girl squirmed, moaning and gagging. Girolamo twined his legs about her thighs. Thus, locked together in that monstrous embrace like some hideous exhibit in a bestiary, they began to rock slowly back and forth, and with them the whole room seemed to writhe and sway crazily in the shaking lamplight. Nicolas shut his eyes. When he opened them again it was finished. Girolamo gazed at him with a look of mingled desolation and defiance, and of utter finality. The slattern turned away and spat into the darkness. Nicolas retreated, and closed the door softly.

  *

  Nothing less than a new and radical instauration would do, if astronomy was to mean more than itself. It was this latter necessity that had obsessed him always, and now more than ever. Astronomy was entirely sufficient unto itself: it saved the phenomena, it explained the inexistent. That was no longer enough, not for Nicolas at least. The closed system of the science must be broken, in order that it might transcend itself and its own sterile concerns, and thus become an instrument for verifying the real rather than merely postulating the possible. He considered this recognition, of the need to restate the basic function of cosmography, to be his first contribution of value to science; it was his manifesto, as it were, and also a vindication of his right to speak and be heard.

  A new beginning, then, a new science, one that would be objective, open-minded, above all honest, a beam of stark cold light trained unflinchingly upon the world as it is and not as men, out of a desire for reassurance or mathematical elegance or whatever, wished it to be: that was his aim. It was to be achieved only through the formulation of a sound theory of planetary motion, he saw that clearly now. Before, he had naturally assumed that the new methods and procedures must be devised first, that they would be the tools with which to build the theory; that, of course, was to miss the essential point, namely, that the birth of the new science must be preceded by a radical act of creation. Out of nothing, next to nothing, disjointed bits and scraps, he would have to weld together an explanation of the phenomena. The enormity of the problem terrified him, yet he knew that it was that problem and nothing less that he had to solve, for his intuition told him so, and he trusted his intuition—he must, since it was all he had.

  Night after night in the villa during that tempestuous spring he groaned and sweated over his calculations, while outside the storm boomed and bellowed, tormenting the world. His dazed brain reeled, slipping and skidding in a frantic effort to marshal into some semblance of order the amorphous and apparently irreconcilable fragments of fact and speculation and fantastic dreaming. He knew that he was on the point of breaking through, he knew it; time and time over he leapt up from his work, laughing like a madman and tearing his hair, convinced that he had found the solution, only to
sink down again a moment later, with a stricken look, having detected the flaw. He feared he would go mad, or fall ill, yet he could not rest, for if he once let go his fierce hold, the elaborate scaffolding he had so painfully erected would fall asunder; and also, of course, should his concentration falter he would find himself sucked once more into the quag of that other unresolved problem of Girolamo.

  And then at last it came to him, sauntered up behind him, as it were, humming happily, and tapped him on the shoulder, wanting to know the cause of all the uproar. He had woken at dawn out of a coma of exhaustion into an immediate, almost lurid wakefulness. It was as if the channels of his brain had been sluiced with an icy drench of water. Involuntarily he began to think at once, in a curiously detached and yet wholly absorbed fashion that was, he supposed later, a unique miraculous objectivity, of the two seemingly unconnected propositions, which he had formulated long before, in Bologna or even earlier, that were the solidest of the few building blocks he had so far laid for the foundation of his theory: that the Sun, and not Earth, is at the centre of the world, and secondly that the world is far more vast than Ptolemy or anyone else had imagined. The wind was high. Rain beat upon the window. He rose in the dawning grey gloom and lifted aside the drapes. Clouds were breaking to the east over a sullen waterscape. Calmly then it came, the solution, like a magnificent great slow golden bird alighting in his head with a thrumming of vast wings. It was so simple, so ravishingly simple, that at first he did not recognise it for what it was.

  He had been attacking the problem all along from the wrong direction. Perhaps his training at the hands of cautious schoolmen was to blame. No sooner had he realised the absolute necessity for a creative leap than his instincts without his knowing had thrown up their defences against such a scandalous notion, thrusting him back into the closed system of worn-out orthodoxies. There, like a blind fool, he had sought to arrive at a new destination by travelling the old routes, had thought to create an original theory by means of conventional calculations. Now in this dawn, how or why he did not know, his brain, without his help or knowledge, as it were, had made that leap that he had not had the nerve to risk, and out there, in the silence and utter emptiness of the blue, had done all that it was necessary to do, had combined those two simple but momentous propositions and identified with impeccable logic the consequences of that combining. Of course, of course. Why had he not thought of it before? If the Sun is conceived as the centre of an immensely expanded universe, then those observed phenomena of planetary motion that had baffled astronomers for millennia became perfectly rational and necessary. Of course! The verification of the theory, he knew, would take weeks, months, years perhaps, to complete, but that was nothing, that was mere hackwork. What mattered was not the propositions, but the combining of them: the act of creation. He turned the solution this way and that, admiring it, as if he were turning in his fingers a flawless ravishing jewel. It was the thing itself, the vivid thing.