Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  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.

  He crawled back to bed, exhausted now. He felt like a very worn old man. The shining clarity of a moment ago was all gone. He needed sleep, days and days of sleep. However, no sooner had he laid down than he was up again, scrabbling eagerly at the drapes. He thrust his face against the stippled glass, peering toward the east, but the clouds had gathered again, and there was to be no sun, that day.

  *

  Girolamo and he said their farewells in a filthy little inn by the lake-shore; it seemed best to part on neutral ground. They could think of nothing to say, and sat in silence uneasily over an untouched jar of wine amid the reek of piss and the rancid catty stink of spilt beer. Through a tiny grimed window above their heads they watched the t hunderclouds massing over the lake.

  “Caro Nicolo.”

  “My friend.”

  But they were only words. Nicolas was impatient to be away. He was returning to Prussia; Italy had been used up. Go! he told himself, go now, and abruptly he rose, wearing his death’s-head grin. Girolamo looked up at him with a faint smile. “Farewell then, uncle.” And as Nicolas turned, something of the past came back, and he realised that once, not long ago, there had been nothing in the world more precious than this young man’s reserved, somehow passionately detached presence by his side. He went out quickly, into the wind and the gauzy warm rain, and mounted up. Riding away from Incaffì was like riding away from Italy herself. He was leaving behind him a world that had begun and ended, that was complete, and immune to change. What had been, was still, in his memory. Someday, fleeing from some extremity of anguish or of pain, his spirit would return to this bright place and find it all intact. The ghostly voices rose up at his back. Do thyself no harm! they cried, for we are all here!

  III

  Cantus Mundi

  I, Georg Joachim von Lauchen, called Rheticus, will now set down the true account of how Copernicus came to reveal to a world wallowing in a stew of ignorance the secret music of the universe. There are not many who will admit that if I had not gone to him, the old fool would never have dared to publish. When I arrived in Frauenburg I was little more than a boy (a boy of genius, to be sure!), yet he recognised my brilliance, that was why he listened to me, yes. Princes of Church and State had in vain urged him to speak, but my arguments he heeded. To you, now, he is Copernicus, a titan, remote and unknowable, but to me he was simply Canon Nicolas, preceptor and, yes! friend. They say I am mad. Let them. What do I care for a jealous world’s contumely? They drove me out, denied me my fame and honoured name, banished me here to rot in this Godforgotten corner of Hungary that they call Cassovia—yet what of it? I am at peace at last, after all the furious years. An old man now, yes, a forlorn and weary wanderer come to the end of the journey, I am past caring. But I don’t forgive them! No! The devil shit on the lot of you.

  *

  My patron, the Count, is a noble gentleman. Cultured, urbane, brilliant, generous to a fault, he reminds me in many ways of myself when I was younger. We speak the same language—I mean of course the language of gentlemen, for in Latin it’s true he is a little … rusty. Not like Koppernigk, whose schoolman’s Latin was impeccable, while for the rest, well, his people were, after all, in trade. The Count saw in me one of his own kind, and welcomed me into the castle here (as house physician) when the others chose to forget me and the great work I have done. He dismisses with characteristic hauteur the vile slanders they fling at me, and laughs when they whisper to him behind their hands that I am mad. The Count, unfortunately, is mad, a little. It comes from the mother’s side, I think: bad blood there without a doubt. Yes, I must exercise more caution, for he is capricious. Be less arrogant in his presence, grovel now and then, yes yes. Still, he needs me, we both know that. What, I ask, without me, would he do for the conversation, the intellectual stimulation, which save him from going altogether out of his mind? This country is populated with swineherds and witches and cretinous priests. I was a new star in his sparse firmament. Anyway, why should I worry?—the world is full of Counts, but there is only one Doctor Rheticus. It is not, the world, I mean, full of Counts, so go easy. What was I. . ? Copernicus, of course. Forty years ago— forty years!—I came to him.

  Frauenburg: that hole. It clings to the Baltic coast up there at the outermost edge of the earth, and someday please God it will drop off, like a scab. My heart sank when first I beheld that grey fortress wall. It was 1539, summer supposedly, although the rain poured down, and there was a chill white wind off the sea. I remember the houses,
like clenched fists, bristling within the gates. Clenched is the word: that was Frauenburg, clenched on its own ignorance and bitterness and Catholicism. Was it for this I had abandoned Wittenberg, the university, my friends and confraters? Not that Wittenberg was all that much better, mind you, but the meanness was different; in the corridors of the university they were still jabbering about freedom and change and redemption, parroting the Reformer’s raucous squawks, but behind all that fine talk there lurked the old terror, the despair, of those who know full well and will not admit it that the world is rotten, irredeemable. In those days I believed (or had myself convinced that I did) that we were on the threshold of the New Age, and I took part with gusto in the game, and jabbered with the best of them. How could I do otherwise? At twenty-two I held the chair of mathematics and astronomy at the great University of Wittenberg. When the world favours you so early and so generously, you feel it your duty to support its pathetic fictions. I am inside the gates of Frauenburg.

  *

  Once inside the gates of Frauenburg, then, I went straightway to the cathedral, dragging my bags and books behind me through the sodden streets. From the cathedral I was directed to the chapterhouse, where I encountered no little difficulty in gaining entry, for they speak a barbaric dialect up there, and furthermore the doorkeeper was deaf. At length the fellow abandoned all attempt to decode my immaculate German, and grudgingly let me into a cavernous dark room where bloodstained idols, their Virgin and so forth, peered eerily out of niches in the walls. Presently there came a sort of scrabbling at the door, and an aged cleric entered crabwise, regarding me suspiciously out of the corner of a watery eye. I must have seemed a strange apparition there in the gloom, grinning like a gargoyle and dripping rain on his polished floor. He advanced apprehensively, keeping firmly between us the big oak table that stood in the middle of the room. His gaze was uncannily like that of the statues behind him: guarded, suspicious, hostile even, but ultimately indifferent. When I mentioned the name of Copernicus I thought he would take to his heels (was the astronomer then a leper even among his colleagues?), but he concealed his consternation as best he could, and merely smiled, if that twitch could be called a smile, and directed me to—where?—the cathedral. I held my temper. He frowned. I had been to the cathedral already? Ah, then he was afraid he could not help me. I asked if I might wait, in the hope that he whom I sought might in time return here. O! well, yes, yes of course, but now that he thought of it, I might perhaps enquire at the house of Canon Suchandsuch, at the other end of the town, for at this hour the Herr Doctor was often to be found there. And I was bustled out into the streets again.

  Do you know what it is like up there in the grey north? Now I have nothing against rain—indeed, I think of it as a bright link between air and angels and us poor earthbound creatures—but up there it falls like the falling of dusk, darkening the world, and in that wet gloom all seems stale and flat, and the spirit aches. Even in spring there is no glorious drenching, as there is elsewhere, when April showers sweep through the air like showers of light, but only the same dull thin drip drip drip, a drizzle of tangible accidie, hour after hour. Yet that day I marched along regardless through those mean streets, my feet in the mire and my head swathed in a golden mist, ah yes, it has been ever thus with me: when I set my mind on something, then all else disappears, and today I could see one thing only, the historic confrontation (for already I pictured our meeting set like a jewel in the great glittering wheel of history) between von Lauchen of Rhaetia and Doctor Copernicus of Torun. But the Herr Doctor was proving damnably elusive. At the house of Canon Suchandsuch (the name was Snellenburg, I remember it now), the dolt of a steward or whatever he was just looked at me peculiarly and shook his thick head slowly from side to side, as if he felt he was dealing with a large lunatic child.

  I ferreted him out in the end, never mind how. I’ve said enough to demonstrate the lengths he would go to in order to protect himself from the world. He lived in a tower on the cathedral wall, a bleak forbidding eyrie where he perched like an old ill-tempered bird, beak and talons at the ready. I had my foot in the door before the housekeeper, Anna Schillings, his focaria, that bitch (more of her later) could slam it in my face—and I swear to God that if she had, I would have burst it in, brass studs, hinges, locks and all, with my head, for I was desperate. I dealt her a smile bristling with fangs, and she backed off and disappeared up the narrow stairs, at the head of which she presently reappeared and beckoned to me, and up there in the half dark (it’s evening now) before a low arched door she abandoned me with a terrible look. I waited. The door with a squeak opened a little way. A face, which to my astonishment I recognised, peered around it cautiously, and was immediately withdrawn. There were some furtive scuffling sounds within. I knocked, not knowing what else to do. A voice bade me come in. I obeyed.

  *

  At my first, I mean my second—third, really—well, my first as it were official sight of him, I was surprised to find him smaller than I had anticipated, but I suppose I expected him to be a giant. He stood at a lectern with his hands on the open pages of a bible, I think it was a bible. Astronomical instruments were laid out on a table near him, and through the open window at his back could be seen the Baltic and the great light dome of the evening sky (rain stopped, cloud lifting, the usual). His expression was one of polite enquiry, mild surprise. I forgot the speech I had prepared. I imagine my mouth hung open. It was the same old man that had met me at the chapter-house, that is, he was Copernicus, I mean they were one and the same—yes yes! the same, and here he was, gazing at me with that lugubrious glazed stare, pretending he had never set eyes on me before now. Ach, it depresses me still. Did he imagine I would not recognise him in this ridiculous pose, this stylised portrait of a scientist in his cell? He did not care! If his carefully composed expression was not free of a faint trace of unease, that uneasiness sprang from concern for the polish of his performance and not from any regard for me, nor from shame that his contemptible trick had been discovered. He might have been masquerading before a mirror. Copernicus did not believe in truth. He had no faith in truth. You are surprised? Listen—

  O but really, all this is unworthy of me, of the subject. Two of the greatest minds of the age (one, at least, was great, is great) met that day, and I describe the momentous occasion as if it were a carnival farce. It is all gone wrong. The rain, the difficulty of finding him, that absurd pose, I did not intend to mention any of this trivia. Why is it not possible to speak of things calmly and accurately? My head aches. I could never achieve the classic style; one must have a grave turn of mind for that, a sense of the solemn pageantry of life, an absolutely unshakeable faith in the notion of order. Order! Ha! I must pause here, it is too late, too dark, to continue. The wolves are howling in the mountains. After such splendours, my God, how have I ended up in this wilderness? My head!

  *

  Now, where was I? Ah, I have left poor Canon Nicolas petrified all night before his lectern and his bible, posing for his portrait. He was in sixty-sixth year, an old man whose robes, cut for a younger, stouter self, hung about him in sombre folds like a kind of silt deposited by time. His face—teeth gone in the slack mouth, skin stretched tight on the high northern cheekbones—had already taken on that blurred, faded quality that is the first bloom of death. Thus must my own face appear now to others. Ah … He wore no beard, but the morning blade, trembling in an unsteady grip, had left unreaped on his chin and in the deep cleft above the upper lip a few stray grizzled hairs. A velvet cap sat upon his skull like a poultice. This, surely, was not that Doctor Copernicus, that great man, whom I had come to Frauenburg to find! The eyes, however, intense and infinitely clever, and filled with what I can only call an exalted cunning, identified him as the one I sought.

  Nor was his observatory what I had thought it would be. I had expected something old-fashioned, it’s true, a cosy little lair full of scholarly clutter, books and manuscripts, parchments crawling with complex calculations, al
l this draped in the obligatory membrane of vivid dust. Also, unaccountably, I had expected warmth, thick yellow warmth, like a species of inspirational cheese, in which would be embedded in his mellow old age the master, a jolly old fellow, absent-minded and unworldly, but sharp, sharp, putting the finishing touches to his masterpiece preparatory to unleashing it upon an unsuspecting world. The room I was in, however, was straight out of the last century, if not the one before, and more like an alchemist’s cell than the workroom of a great modern scientist. The white walls were bare as bone, the beamed ceiling too. I saw no more than a handful of books. The instruments on the table had the self-conscious look of things that have been brought out for display. The window let in a hard merciless light. And the cold! Science here was not the cheerful, confident quest for certainties that / knew, but the old huggermugger of spells and talismans and secret signs. A leering death’s-head and a clutch of dried batwings would not have surprised me. The air reeked of the chill sweat of guilt.

  I did not take in all this detail at once—although it was all registered in my sense of shock—for at first I was distracted by waiting for him to offer some excuse, or at least explanation, regarding our prior meeting. When I realised, to my surprise and puzzlement (remember, I did not know him yet as I was to come to know him later), that he had no intention of doing so, I knew there was nothing for it but to play, as best I could, the part of the simpering idiot that obviously he considered me to be. In the circumstances, then, something dramatic was required. I crossed the room, I bounded across the room, and with my face lifted in doglike veneration I genuflected before him, crying: