[Revolutions 01] Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  *

  At Bologna, where they were to enrol at the university, the brothers parted company with the remnants of the pilgrimage. The representative at Rome of the Frauenburg Chapter, Canon Bernhard Schiller, had travelled north to meet them. He was a small grey cautious man.

  “Well, gentlemen,” he snapped, “welcome to Italy. You are late arriving. I hope you had a pleasant journey, for certainly it was a leisurely one.”

  They gazed at him. Andreas laughed. He said:

  “We have no money.”

  “What!” The Canon’s grey face turned greyer. In the end, however, he agreed to advance them a hundred ducats. “Understand, this is not my money, nor the Church’s either; it is your uncle’s. I have written to him today informing him of this transaction, and demanding an immediate refund.” He permitted himself a bleak smile. “I trust you have ready for him a satisfactory explanation of your poverty? And why, may I ask, are you got up in this monkish garb? Have you been gambling with clerics? A perilous pastime. Well, it is no business of mine. Good day.”

  Andreas watched with bitter amusement as Nicolas carefully counted his share of the ducats.

  “Better get it sewed up quick, brother.”

  * * *

  At twilight through hot crowded noxious streets he strode, speculating furiously on the true dimensions of the universe. Dark glossy heads and almond eyes turned to follow him with curiosity and amusement as he flew past. Bologna was a city of grotesques and madmen, yet he did not go unnoticed, with his long cloak and stark fanatic face. What did he care for their opinion, this noisy, stupid people! Italy had been a great disappointment; he hated it, the heat, the stale inescapable smell, the infantile uproar, the indolence, the corruption, the disorder. He had imagined a proud blue sunlit, serene land. Hawkers shrieked in his face, wheedling and bullying, thrusting at him their wine, their sweetmeats, their blinded singing birds. A fat buffoon with a head like a gobbet of raw meat, jiggling a string of stinking sausages, opened the wet red hole of his mouth and crowed: Bello, professore, bello, bello! A leprous beggar extended a fingerless hand and whined. He fled around a corner and was struck full tilt by a blinding blast of light. The setting sun sat on the city wall, flanked by a pair of robbers freshly hung that morning, black blots against the gold. Suddenly he yearned for those still pale pearly, limpid northern evenings full of silence and clouds. Vile vapours rose up from below. He had stepped in dogmerd.

  With a sinking heart he heard his name called from the courtyard of a tavern close by, but when he made to hurry on he was prevented by a grinning drab, black as pitch, who planted herself in his path, smacking her blubber lips. A roar of tipsy laughter gushed out of the tavern.

  “Come join us, brother, in a cup of wine,” Andreas called. He sat with a band of blades, good Germans all, his friends. “See, fellows, how pale and gaunt he looks. You are too much at the books.”

  They regarded him merrily, delighted with him, provider of fine sport. One said:

  “Too much at the rod, more like.”

  “Aye, been galloping the maggot, have you, Canon?”

  “Bashing the venerable bishop, eh?”

  “Haw haw.”

  “O sit down!” Andreas snapped, flushed and petulant; drink did not agree with him very well. Nicolas had often wondered at his brother’s uncanny knack of gathering about him the same friends wherever he went. The names varied, and the faces a little, but otherwise they were the same at Torun or Cracow or here in Bologna, idlers and whoremasters, pretender poets, rich men’s sons with too much money, bullyboys all. There was of course this difference, that they got progressively older. Among this present lot there was not a one under thirty. Perennial students! Nicolas smiled wryly to himself: he was not so young that he could afford to scoff at others. Yet he was different, he knew it, a different species; why else did he fit so ill among them, perched here on the edge of this bench, hugging himself in a transport of embarrassment and repugnance, grinning like an idiot?

  “Tell us, brother, who was that fair wench we spied you with just now? Likely you were discussing the motions of the spheres? Venus rising and suchlike?” Nicolas shrugged and squirmed, simpering foolishly; he was no match for his brother at this kind of cutting banter. Andreas turned to the others with his languorous smile. “He is very hot on stargazing, you know, the pearly orbs, the globes of night, and so forth.”

  A pimply fellow with straw-coloured locks and a wispy beard, the son of a Swabian count, took his sharp little nose out of his pintpot and leaned across the table seriously, and seriously said:

  “Canon, have you heard tell of the unfortunate astronomer who got his sums mixed, and ended up with two planets where there should have been only one? Why, he made a ballocks of the orbit of Mars!”

  There was more hawing and hohoing then, and more wine, and landlord! landlord! come fellow, a bowl of your best stewed tripe, for blind me but I have a longing for innards tonight. They left off baiting Nicolas. He was a poor foil for their wit, a poor punchbag. The last light of evening faded and the night came on apace, and stars, hesitant and dainty, glimmered in the trellis of vineleaves above their heads. A boy with a bunch of smoking tapers went among the tables. Here comes our young Prometheus, bringer of fire. What a sweet arse he has, look where he bends; here, boy, a ducat for your favours. The child backed off, smiling in fright. Music swelled in the street, wild caterwauling of fifes and the rattle of kettledrums, and a band of minstrels entered the courtyard in search of free wine. Nicolas grew dizzy in the noise and the smoke of the shaking rushlight. He drank. The Tuscan red was dark and tawny as old blood. Andreas mounted the table, wild-eyed and unsteady, roaring of freedom and rebirth, the new age, l’uomo nuovo. He staggered, clutching the air, and fell with a scream and a clatter into his brother’s lap. Nicolas, suddenly stricken by sad helpless love, rocked in his arms this slack damp drunken lump, this grotesque babe, who leaned out over the table and gawked—Ork!—upon the straw-strewn floor a dollop of tripe and wine.

  Later they were in a narrow ill-lit stinking street, and someone was lying in an open drain being strenuously kicked. The count’s son stood by sniggering, until he was punched smartly out of the darkness by a disembodied fist and went down with a cry, gushing blood from a smashed nose. Nicolas found himself unaccountably on his knees in a low room or kind of little hut. The place was loud with grunting and moaning, and tangles of humped pale phosphorescent flesh writhed on the earthen floor. In the ghastly candlelight a woman lay on a pallet before him spreadeagled like an anatomical specimen, grinning and whimpering. She smelled of garlic and fish. He fell upon her with a moan and sank his teeth into her shoulder. It was a messy business, quickly done. Only afterwards did it strike him, when he put it to himself formally as it were, that he had at last relinquished his virginity. It had been just as he had imagined it would be.

  *

  Next morning he crept into the Aula Maxima bleared and crapulous, and late; his fellow students, elderly earnest young men, glared at him in disapproval and reproach. The Professor ignored him—what was a student’s tardiness to Domenico Maria da Novara, astronomer, scholar of Greek, devotee of Plato and Pythagoras? Perched in his high pulpit he was as ever supremely, magisterially bored. The dry sombre voice strolled weary and indifferent through the lecture, pacing out the sentences as if they were so many ells of fallow land; only later would the significance and peculiar brilliance of his thought be made manifest, when their notes exploded slowly, like an unfolding myriad-petalled flower, in the mean rooms and minds of his students. He was a cold queer fastidious man, tall and swart, in his middle years, with a cruel face like a sharp dark blade. At Bologna, where it was not uncommon for an arrogant lecturer to be humbled by a hail of brickbats, or even run through by a playful rapier, Novara commanded universal fear and respect.

  “Koppernigk—a word, if I might.” Nicolas halted in alarm. The class had ended, and the last of his fellows were shuffling out of the hall. He tried to sm
ile, and leering waited, sick-shotten, quaking. The Professor descended thoughtfully from the pulpit, and on the last step stopped and looked at him. “I am told that you have been putting about some, how shall I say, some curious ideas. Is it so, hmm?”

  “Forgive me, maestro, I do not understand.”

  “No?” Novara smiled thinly. They walked together down a sunlit corridor. Narrow stone arches to their right gave on to a paved courtyard and a marble statue with one arm raised in mysterious hieratic greeting; jagged shadows bristled under their feet. The Professor went on: “I mean of course astronomical ideas, speculations on the shape and size of the universe, that kind of thing. I am interested, you understand. They tell me that you have expressed doubts on certain parts of the Ptolemaic doctrine of planetary motion?”

  “I have taken part, it is true, in some discussions, in the taverns, but I have done no more than echo what has been said already, many times, by you yourself among others.” Novara pursed his lips and nodded. Something seemed to amuse him. Nicolas said: “I do not believe that I have anything original to say. I am a dabbler. And I am not well this morning,” he finished wanly.

  They strolled in silence for a time. The corridor was loud with the tramp of students, who eyed with furtive speculation this ill-assorted pair. Novara brooded. Presently he said:

  “But your ideas on the dimensions of the universe, the intervals between planets, these seem to me original, or at least to promise great originality.” Nicolas wondered uneasily how the man could have come to hear of these things. His encounter with Brudzewski in Cracow had taught him discretion. He had admitted taking part in tavern talk, but surely he had never been more than a silent sharer? Who then knew enough of his thinking to betray him? The Professor watched him sidelong with a calculating look. “What interests me,” he said, “is whether or not you have the mathematics to support your theories?” There was of course one only who could have betrayed him; well, no matter. He was both pained and pleased, as if he had been caught in the commission of a clever crime. The few notions he had managed to put into words, gross ungainly travesties of the inexpressibly elegant concepts blazing in his brain, were suddenly made to seem far finer things than he had imagined by the attentions of the authoritative Novara.

  “Maestro, I am no astronomer, nor a mathematician either.”

  “Yes.” The Professor smiled again. “You are a dabbler, as you say.” He seemed to think that he had made a joke. Nicolas grinned greyly. They came out on the steps above the sunny piazza. The bells of San Pietro began to ring, a great bronze booming high in the air, and flocks of pigeons blossomed into the blue above the golden domes. Novara mused dreamily on the crowds below in the square, and then abruptly turned and with what passed in him for animation said:

  “Come to my house, will you? Come today. There are some people I think you might be interested to meet. Shall we say at noon? Until noon, then. Vale.” And he went off quickly down the steps.

  Well what—?

  *

  “Well, what happened?” Andreas asked.

  “Where?”

  “At Novara’s!”

  “O, that.” They sat in the dining-hall of the German natio, where they lodged; it was evening, and beyond the grimy windows the Palazzo Communale brooded in late sunlight. The hall was crowded with crop-headed Germans at feed. Nicolas’s head pained him. “I do not know what Novara wants with me, I am not his kind at all. There were some others there, Luca Guarico, Jacob Ziegler, Calcagnini the poet—”

  Andreas whistled softly. “Well well, I am impressed. The cream of Italy’s intellectuals, eh?” He smirked. “—And you, brother.”

  “And I, as you say. Andreas, have you been putting about those few things I told you of my ideas on astronomy?”

  “Tell me what happened at Novara’s.”

  “—Because I wish you would not; I would rather you would not do that.”

  “Tell me.”

  *

  He was shown into a courtyard with orange bushes in earthenware pots; a fountain plashed, playing a faint cool music. The guests were gathered on the terrace, lolling elegantly on couches and dainty cane chairs, sipping white wine from long-stemmed goblets of Murano crystal and lazily conversing. Nicolas was reminded of those cages of pampered quail that were to be seen hanging from the porticoes of the better houses of the city. Diffident, ill at ease, acutely aware of his raw-boned Prussian gracelessness, he stood mute and nervously smiling as the Professor introduced him. Novara was very much the patrician here, with his fine town house behind him. He affected a scissors-shaped lorgnon with which he made much play. This article, together with the brilliant light, the pools of violet shadow on the terrace, the sparkling glass, the watermusic and the perfume of the orange bushes, contrived to create an air of theatre. Elbing. Elbing? Nicolas wondered vaguely why he should suddenly have thought of that far northern town.

  How did he like Italy? The climate, ah yes. And what subjects was he studying here? Indeed? There was a silence, and someone coughed behind gloved fingers. Their duty done, they turned back to the conversation that evidently his arrival had interrupted. Celio Calcagnini, a willowy person no longer in the first flower of youth, said languidly:

  “The question, then, is what can be achieved? Bologna is not Firenze, and I think we all agree that our Don John Bentivoglio is not, and never could be, a Magnifico.” All softly laughed and shook their heads; the jibe against the Duke of Bologna seemed to be a familiar one. “And yet, my friends,” the poet continued, “we must work with the material to hand, however poor it is. The wise man knows that compromise is sometimes the only course—this is an excellent vintage, Domenico, by the way. I envy your cellar.”

  Novara, leaning at ease against a white pillar, lifted his glass and bowed sardonically. A sleek black hound, which Nicolas with a start noticed now for the first time, lay at the Professor’s feet, sphinxlike, panting, with a fanged ferocious grin. Jacob Ziegler, astronomer of some repute and author of a recent much-admired work on Pliny, was a dark and brooding lean young blade with a pale long face and flashing eyes and a pencil-line moustache. He was exquisitely if a trifle foppishly attired in rubious silk and calfskin; a wide-brimmed velvet hat lay beside him like a great soft black exotic bird. The cane chair on which he sat crackled angrily as he leaned forward and cried:

  “Compromise! Caution! I tell you we must act! Times do not change of themselves, but are changed by the actions of men. Bologna is not Firenze, just so; but what is Firenze? A town of fat shopkeepers besotted by soft living.” He glanced darkly at Calcagnini, who raised his eyebrows mildly and toyed with the stem of his wineglass. “They gobble up art and science as they would sugared marchpane, and congratulate themselves on their culture and liberality. Culture? Pah! And their artists and their scientists are no better. A gang of panders, theirs is the task of supplying the pretty baubles to mask the running sores of the poxed courtesan that is their city. Why, I should a thousand times rather we were the outcasts that we are than be as they, pampered adorners of decadence!”

  “Decadence,” Novara softly echoed, gingerly tasting the word. Calcagnini looked up.

  “A pretty speech, Jacob,” he said, smiling, “but I think I resent your imputations. Compromise likes me no better than it does you, yet I know that there is a time for everything, for caution and for action. If we move now we can only make our state worse than it already is. And come to that, what, pray, would you have us do? The Bentivoglio rule in this city is unshakeable. There is peace here, while all Italy is in turmoil—O I know, I know you would not call it peace, but besottedness. Yet call it what you will, our citizens, like their fellows in Firenze, are well fed and therefore well content to leave things just as they are. That is the equation; it is as simple as that. You may harangue them all you wish, berate them for their decadence, but they will only laugh at you—that is, so long as you are no more than a crazy astronomer with your head in the clouds. Come down to earth and meddle in their
affairs, then it will be another matter. Fra Girolamo, the formidable Savonarola, was cherished for a time by Firenze. The city writhed in holy ecstasy under his lash, until he began to frighten them, and then—why, then they burnt him. You see? No no, Jacob, there will be no autos da fe in Bologna.”

  Ziegler pouted, and a pretty flush spread upward from his cheeks to his pale forehead. “Are you comparing us to that mad monk, that creature, who castigated Plato as a source of immorality? He deserved burning, I say!”

  Calcagnini smiled again tolerantly.

  “No, my dear Jacob,” he murmured, “of course I make no such comparison. I am merely trying to demonstrate to you that precipitate and rash action on our part can lead us straight to ruin.”

  “—And further,” Ziegler continued hotly, “why do you assume that the power of the Bentivoglios can be challenged only from within Bologna’s walls?”

  The hound shut its jaws with a wet snap and rose and loped leanly away. There was an awkward silence. Ziegler glared about him haughtily, flushed and defiant. “Well?” he asked, of no one in particular. Novara frowned at him with pursed lips, and very slightly shook his head in wordless mild reproof. A scrawny individual, rejoicing in the name of Nono, laughed squeakily.

  “L-let us hear the results of L-Luca’s 1-1-labours!” he ventured brightly. The others paid no heed to him, being engrossed in disapproving silently of whatever indiscretion it was that the unrepentant Ziegler had committed, and Nono turned unhappily to Nicolas and said, very loudly and deliberately, as if addressing a stone-deaf idiot: “H-he has made a horosc-sc-scope of Cesare, you see. Il Valentino, as he is called, ha ha.” Nicolas nodded, smiling hugely, miming extravagant gratitude and encouragement. “Bo-Bo-Borgia, that is,” Nono finished lamely, and frowned, searching it seemed for that last elusive word, the stammerer’s obsession, that surely would make all come marvellously clear.