And came to in Count da Trento’s cellar in Costozza, moaning. He hurt all over. His companions were still on the stone floor.
“Signor Galilei! Domino Galilei, please, please! Wake up!”
“Qua—? Qua—?”
His mouth would not form words. He could not focus his eyes. They were dragging him by the arms over the rough floor, and he felt his butt scraping over the flagstones as from a great distance, while hearing someone else’s groans, muffled as if through a wall. He wanted to speak but couldn’t. The groans were his.
Hera’s voice, then, in his ear, as he looked down the blasted mountainside of Io, clutching her arm, laid out on the bench.
“You died on the floor of the cellar, that first time, along with your two companions. Now we’ll take the dead body from there and put it back on the stake, to fill your absence in the fiery alternative. Here in Costozza, the rescued one will survive his trauma, and live on. But understand: there will always be this little whirlpool in you, between the worlds.”
“So I live it all again?”
“Yes.”
Galileo groaned. “Do I have to know it?” he asked. “Can you let me forget?”
“Yes, of course. But it will be in you anyway. The potentiality is always there. And sometimes therefore you will remember it, despite the amnestics. Because memory is deep, and always entangled, and while you live, it lives.”
“That’s fine, as long as I don’t remember it.”
“Yes. But even when you don’t, you do. It lies below your feelings.”
“And the others? The other Galileos, in the other potentialities?”
“Please understand. They are always there. There are so many.”
“Will they end? Will it ever end?”
“End? Do things end?”
Galileo groaned again. “So,” he said, “even if I saved myself an infinite number of times, there would still be an infinite number of me that I hadn’t saved. I will live through them again and again. Make the same discoveries and the same mistakes. Suffer the same deaths.”
“Yes. And sometimes you’ll know that. Sometimes you’ll feel it. This is your paradox of the infinities within infinities, which you will have discovered by feeling it in yourself. You live in Galileo’s paradox. You’ll hold your wife and mother apart as they try to kill each other, and it will strike you as horrible, then ridiculous, then beautiful. Something to love. This is the gift of the paradox, the gift of memory’s spiral return.”
“Always in me. Even if I forget.”
“Yes.”
“Then let me forget. Give me the amnestic.”
“Is that what you want? It will mean losing your conscious memory of a lot of this that you have seen out here.” Gesturing at Io’s slaggy grandeur, and at Jupiter’s enormity. And at herself.
“But not really,” Galileo said, “as you have just told me. It will still be in me. So, yes. I have to. I can’t stand to know about the others. I would have to keep going back and trying to change things, like Ganymede. I can’t face that. But I can’t face the bad alternatives either—all the deaths, all the burning. It isn’t right. So—so I need to forget, to go on.”
“As you wish.”
She gave him a pill. He swallowed it. She had slipped another one in the mouth of the Galileo there on the floor of the poisonous cellar, he was sure; a Galileo who would therefore live through all that followed that moment again, in ignorance, just as he had already; or at least until the stranger arrived. When it would all begin again.
“So I didn’t really do anything by rescuing him,” he said. “I didn’t change anything.”
“We made this eddy in time,” she said gently, and touched him.
IN SIENA, WHEN HE CAME OUT of his syncope, he was shaking and white-faced. He stared up at Cartophilus, clutching him by the arm.
“I had a dream,” he gasped, confused. Trying to hold on to it. “I was stuck!” He stared up at Cartophilus as if from out of a deep well. From the bottom of that depth he said, “I am the sum of all possible Galileos.”
“No doubt of that,” the old servant said. “Here, maestro, drink a bit of this mulled wine. That was a hard one, I could tell.”
Galileo gulped down the wine. Then he fell asleep, and when he came to, he had forgotten that he had even experienced a syncope that night.
He was left with a very strange feeling, however. In his weekly letter to Maria Celeste he tried to describe it: I am caught in the loops of these events, and thus crossed out of the book of the living.
She replied in her usual encouraging way: I take endless pleasure in hearing how ardently the Monsignor Archbishop perseveres in loving you and favoring you. Nor do I suspect in the slightest that you are crossed out, as you say, de libro vivendum. No one is a prophet in his own country.
Galileo shook his head as he read this. “No one is a prophet anywhere,” he said, looking out his window to the north, toward San Matteo. “And thank God for that. To see the future would be a most horrible curse, I am quite sure. Let me be not a prophet in my own country, but a scientist. I only want to be a scientist.”
But that was no longer possible. All that life was gone. He sat in the gardens in Siena now, but did not see anything. Piccolomini tried to interest him in more problems of motion and strength, but even those old friends did little to rouse him. He sat waiting for his mail. If Maria Celeste’s letters didn’t arrive when he expected them, he would cry. Some days he could barely be persuaded out of bed.
Around that same time, some of the Venetian spies reported that Piccolomini had been anonymously denounced to the pope. It was all still happening. The letter received at the Vatican said: The Archbishop has been telling many people that Galileo was unjustly sentenced by this Holy Congregation, that he is the first man in the world, that he will live forever in his writings, even if they are prohibited, and that he is followed by all the best modern minds. And since such seeds sown by a prelate might bear pernicious fruit, I hereby report them.
The identity of this Siena informer was never found out, although the priest Pelagi would have been a good guess. In any case, the campaign against Galileo clearly had not ended. Cartophilus, hearing of this secret denunciation when Buonamici came up from Rome to tell him about it, went that evening to Archbishop Piccolomini, and asked him in a shy way if the time might have come when Galileo could hope to be remanded to Arcetri. Piccolomini thought it might indeed be possible, and he took the old servant’s hint that it could be a case of getting the old man home before he died. And Buonamici made sure that same night to convey his news of the secret denunciation to the archbishop’s confessor, so that soon afterward Piccolomini would know of that danger too.
So he began to campaign for Galileo’s return to Arcetri. This was the start of October 1633. He pretended not to know he himself had been denounced, of course, and intimated, in letters to people outside the Vatican who would take the idea into the fortress, that confining Galileo to house arrest in Arcetri would be a more severe punishment than his relatively lavish and public situation in the archbishop’s palazzo in Siena.
When Urban heard it put this way, people said, he agreed to the plan. In early December a papal order came to Siena: Galileo was to be removed to Arcetri, there to be confined to house arrest.
Piccolomini himself took this news to Galileo, beaming with pleasure for his old teacher, whom he feared had gone a long way toward permanently losing his mind. A reunion with his girls would surely help. “Teacher, the news has come from Rome, the Sanctissimus has blessed you with permission to return to your home and family, God be praised.”
Galileo was truly startled. He sat down on his bed and wept, then stood and embraced Piccolomini. “You saved me,” he said. “Now you are one of my angels. I have so many of them.”
He did indeed. So many, stepping onto the stage from nowhere: the people who helped him, the crowd who tried to do him harm. Any event in history that gets more crowded the longer you look
at it—that’s the sign of a contested moment, a crux that will never stop changing under your gaze. The gaze itself entangles you, and you too are one of the changes in that moment.
On the day of his departure from Siena, a strong wind poured over them from the hills to the west, tossing the last leaves on the trees in a wild flight. Galileo was hugged by several well-wishers, and when he finally embraced the little archbishop, he lifted him up. When he set him down and stepped back, wiping his eyes and shaking his head, Piccolomini held him by the arm to help him up into the carriage. Galileo’s gray hair and beard streamed in the wind, as did the banners over the palace, and the clouds. Birds wheeled overhead. Galileo stopped to look around, gestured at the spectacle, stomped on the ground. “It still moves!” he said. “Eppur si muove!”
Later Piccolomini told the story of Galileo’s parting remark to his brother, Ottavio Piccolomini; who, later still, when living in Spain, commissioned the painter Murillo to paint a painting to commemorate his brother’s tale. Murillo depicted the scene as taking place before the Inquisition itself, Galileo pointing at the wall over the congregation, where fiery letters spelled out Eppur si muove. In this way, and by word of mouth, the story was passed on. At some point the painting’s story became the one people told, and later still it must have been regarded as too blasphemous to show, and its canvas was folded and reframed so that the inscribed wall was hidden from view. It only came back to light when the painting was cleaned, many years later. But all the while people kept telling the tale, of Galileo’s sidelong defiance of his persecutors, his muttered riposte to the ages. It was true even though it wasn’t.
The carriage took only two days to bring Galileo to Arcetri and the gates of Il Gioièllo. All the household was standing there to greet him, with Geppo jumping in front and La Piera standing impassively at the rear. He had been gone eleven months.
He levered himself out of the carriage, stood with the help of a hand on Geppo’s shoulder, groaned as he straightened up. “Take me to San Matteo,” he said.
If anyone is to be loved, he must love and be lovable.
—BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE, The Book of the Courtier
IT WAS A SHOCK TO SEE how much thinner Maria Celeste had become in his absence. She had driven herself hard those eleven months, running the convent and also helping to take care of Il Gioièllo. Geppo had fallen ill, and afterward suffered a truly noxious skin rash; Maria Celeste had cured it with a salve of her own devise. She had authorized for La Piera the extra spending needed to get through a three-month flour shortage, and late in that bad time had instructed the housekeeper to shut down the house’s oven and get their bread from the convent, setting the price at eight quattrini a loaf. She never ate unless everyone else had.
As a result of all this she was skinnier than ever. No doubt her incessant worry about Galileo had also had its effect. She had tried to help him with his trial, which from her position was a little futile, but she had written repeatedly to Caterina Niccolini, asking her to petition a particular sister-in-law of the pope to intercede. Pursuing these chains of female influence, which were everywhere even though invisible to the men and to the history books, may or may not have helped his cause; it was even possible this had been the crucial intervention, and Caterina the architect of the strategy that got Galileo out of Rome alive. But there was no way to tell from outside that network. In one of her last letters to him before his return, Maria Celeste had mentioned her efforts, saying of them, I know, as I freely admit to you, that these are poorly drawn plans, yet still I would not rule out the possibility that the prayers of a pious daughter could outweigh even the protection of great personages.
She went on to address another matter brought up in his last letter, one of his feeble attempts at a joke in such dismal circumstances:
Now, thinking this over, as I said, when your letter came telling me that one of the reasons why I desired your return was that I wanted a present you had for me, oh then I can tell you I did get angry! But such an anger as King David speaks of in the psalm, Irascimini et nolite peccare—be angry, but do not sin. For it seemed to me that you thought I wanted to see the present more than to see you; which is as far from my thoughts as darkness is from light. Perhaps I did not quite understand your letter, and I try to keep quiet with that thought. But if indeed you meant that, I do not know what I should say or do. Do see if you cannot come back to your tower, which cannot bear to remain so desolate any longer! And now it is time to think about the wine casks as well. La Piera begs to be remembered to you, and says that if her wish to see you and your wish to return were put in the scales, her scale would go down to the ground and yours up to the ceiling.
So the women in his life had joked with him, teased him back when he teased them, sent their love in the rough buffa style that he liked best—Maria Celeste’s burst of temper like something out of Marina herself, back in the day. Question my love and I’ll beat the shit out of you! This amorevolezza had given him heart in a bad time.
Now, as he stood there before her in the convent, she collapsed in his arms and wept. Even Arcangela, looking down to the side, sidled up and touched him briefly on the arm. Galileo touched her back, on the shoulder, gently, then seized up Maria Celeste and lifted her in a hug, kissed away her tears of joy. She was like a bird in his hands, he too wept to feel her lightness. “My little Virginia,” he said into her ribs, shocked and afraid.
In the weeks following his homecoming, he devoted himself to the sisters at the convent. Arcangela reverted to her usual distance; she looked away whenever he spoke to her. She too was more gaunt and angular than ever. Uneasily Galileo tried yet again to befriend her, this time with bits of candied fruit, in the way you would tame a crow; and she would duck her head and snatch the food and drift away.
Meanwhile Maria Celeste talked incessantly, as if to make up for lost time; and though Galileo knew that time lost could never be regained, he indulged her happily. It was good to be home again, and responsible for real things—for physical objects, not only for the ovens and chimneys and windows and roofs of his own house, but also for the ramshackle convent of the Clares, which at this point was nearing a material collapse to match the mental collapse long since suffered.
So he spent many days inside the place, the old prohibition against men’s presence long forgotten. He measured beams for the servants to cut, and augured in the peg holes and hammered in the pegs himself. What joy to pop a dovetail into place like a key in a lock. Theorems you could hit with a hammer. With materials less prone to rot he could have made a roof that would hold off rain for a thousand years. But lead was expensive, and cedar too; pine shakes would have to do.
There weren’t so many chores to accomplish in his garden. It had been tended closely by La Piera, as being one of the things that kept them alive. Now there was little to do except decide on which varieties of cedros and lemons to put in the broken wine casks that had been cut in half for use as tubs.
Then San Matteo came into an agricultural inheritance. “First your prayer was answered and then mine!” Galileo said to Maria Celeste. The elder brother of Suor Clarice Burci had left the sisters a farm at Ambrogiana worth five thousand scudi. Maria Celeste estimated it would yield them annually 290 bushels of wheat, fifty barrels of wine, and seventy sacks of millet. “It was my prayer too, believe me,” she replied with a dark expression. “My ten thousand prayers.” Burci had attached a farm crew to the bequest, as well as an obligation to the nuns to say a mass for him every day for the next four hundred years, and to absolve him three times a year for the next two hundred years. That was fine, but the land had been neglected and was now nearly wild, crew or no.
It was something Galileo could do, and he threw himself into it. To be able to get one’s hands on a problem and strangle it was a very satisfying thing. Clever engineering could do a lot. Once he was pacing the floor of the dining hall, considering a difficult problem in counterbalancing, and a nun got in his way. He explained to her ve
ry firmly that she shouldn’t do that, that he was fixing the roof, and afterward she told all the other nuns, “He fixes things by thinking about them!” And indeed, when he was done thinking about the new farm, the nuns would have reliable sustenance at last. It was what he had been hoping for when he had asked Maria Celeste about a benefice from the new pope. He should not have asked her, he realized now, but merely requested the land grant he had been thinking of.
Now they had it, and he stumped across the neglected winter field, under low pewter skies, bark-ringing the midsized trees already overgrowing the pasture, then cutting down the smaller ones with hard awkward swipes of his ax, swinging as if taking off the heads of certain Dominicans, Jesuits, Benedictines, and professors. He was an executioner of trees. At age seventy, and despite his truss, he could still strike harder than most of the boys, and his shout on impact was the loudest by far. It was very satisfying. He would bring this farm into production and give them a sustenance. “Things occur in their own time,” he said.
He wished he could help Maria Celeste in the same kind of way. She had pulled her teeth out as they rotted, and now had nearly none, but was at least free from infections of the jaw. But the lack of teeth could not be good for her digestion. He contrived some rending devices for mashing meats, scavenging bits of an old framework of one of the inclined planes with a bitter smile. There was more than one way to chew on reality.
The workshop was much reduced. It was only a small room stuffed with tools and machinery and beams and metal rods and slats. Mazzoleni was ancient and shriveled and slept most of the time, even though he was in fact four years younger than Galileo himself. Of course Galileo was beyond ancient at this point. But Mazzoleni had perhaps been a bit baked in the head by his many hours in the Venetian sun, and next to the fumes of furnaces. His brains had dried out a little, though he still had his cracked cheery grin, the sight of which now sent a stab through Galileo, who recalled so clearly what it used to mean.
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