“Yes. We all do. When some French were assembling an encyclopedia of paranormal experiences, they decided to leave déjà vu out, because it was so common it could not be considered paranormal.”
“That’s for sure. Right now I am stuck in it all the time.”
Cartophilus nodded. “Why didn’t she give you the amnestics when she returned you?”
“There wasn’t time! I barely got out of there alive. I told you, I need to go back. Hera’s in trouble. They all are. They need an outside force to arbitrate.”
“I can’t do it without them doing their part at their end. You know.”
“I don’t know. I want you to get me back. I can’t stand this, it’s like torture. It will kill me.”
“Soon,” the old man said. “Not right now. I’ll ask again, but there hasn’t been a response. It may be some while. But that won’t matter in the end, if you see what I mean.”
Galileo glared at him. “I don’t, actually.”
Cartophilus picked up an emptied platter. “You will, maestro. You will or you won’t, but nothing to be done about it now.” And he slunk away in his usual craven manner.
The latest letter from Maria Celeste had come. He will open it.
You having let the days go by, Sire, without coming to visit us, is enough to provoke some fear in me that the great love you have always shown us may be diminishing somewhat. I am inclined to believe that you keep putting off the visit because of the little satisfaction you derive from coming here, not only because the two of us, in what I suppose I would call our ineptitude, simply do not know how to show you a better time, but also because the other nuns, for other reasons, cannot keep you sufficiently amused.
“Get some food on the mule,” Galileo had snapped at the boys. “Be ready in an hour. Go.”
Galileo had long since beaten a path of his own over the hilltops between Bellosguardo and the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri. Every time he walked or rode over, he took a basket of the food he grew in Bellosguardo’s extensive gardens. For the sake of the nuns he had shifted the focus of his gardening to staple crops, so on this morning the mule was loaded down with bags of beans, lentils, wheat, and garbanzos; also zucchini, and the first of the gourds. He would add a bouquet of lupines he found in bloom around the borders of the piazza. Already it was well into spring; he had missed a lot of the year.
This morning was one he had very definitely lived before: the mule, the hills, the boys ahead, Cartophilus behind, all under whatever sky the day might bring. Today it would be high clouds like carded wool. The previous fall he and Maria Celeste had begun collaborating on jellies and candied fruits, so that both establishments might have some variety and pleasure in their diet; so hanging from the mule also was a bag of citrons, lemons, and oranges. They still looked like little Ios to him.
On the way Cartophilus would keep well behind, and it was too nice a morning for Galileo to want to talk to him anyway. May hills were green under a silver sky. They would be arriving at San Matteo just after midday. Convent rules forbade outsiders to go into most of the buildings, and the nuns were forbidden from going outside; supposedly they were required to have a screen to be set between them and any visitors. But over the years the screen had slowly shrunk to a waist-high barrier, and finally been dispensed with altogether, so that Galileo and his daughter could embrace, and then sit side by side in the doorway looking out at the lane, Maria Celeste holding him by the hand.
These days she was even thinner than she had been as a girl, but she was still bright and outgoing, and obviously attached to her father, who served as a kind of patron saint for her. Livia, now Suor Arcangela, on the other hand, was more withdrawn and sullen than ever, and never came out of the dormitory to see Galileo. From reports it appeared she was uninterested in anything but food, which was a bad sole interest for a Clare to have.
Maria Celeste, whom he persisted in thinking of as Virginia, today would be overjoyed to see him again. She would inquire repeatedly about his health, and seem surprised when he did not want to discuss it. He would see that this was one of the only subjects of conversation in the convent, perhaps the principal one. How they felt. How they were too hot or too cold, and always, how they were hungry. He would have to bring bigger baskets of food. He had given up trying to slip his daughters gifts he could not give to the other nuns; Maria Celeste felt it was wrong. So if he wanted to help her and Arcangela, he would have to help all of them. But that he couldn’t afford.
They had talked as they ate a dinner together with the abbess, then it was time to go, if they were to get back to Bellosguardo in the light.
On the mule on the way back he would be silent, as usual. He had the grim look he always had when thinking about family or money; perhaps the two simply went together. His annual retainer from the Medicis was a thousand crowns, more than the grand duke paid anyone except his secretary and his generals, and yet still it wasn’t enough. His expenses continued to mount. And much of it had to do with family. He supported the old gargoyle, of course. His sister Livia, who had left the convent she had entered in order to get married, had been unable to keep her odious husband Landucci from abandoning her. And this was after he had sued Galileo for nonpayment of what was really Galileo’s brother’s part of her dowry. Livia had come to Galileo for shelter, then died while he was in Rome; died of a broken heart, the servants said. Now Galileo had the care of her children. And Landucci was suing yet again for nonpayment of Michelangelo’s portion of the dowry—talk about déjà vu—even though he had left the marriage and the abandoned wife was dead, and Cosimo had given Galileo a dispensation. Meanwhile Galileo’s invertebrate brother had sent his own wife and seven kids to Galileo while he stayed in Munich and continued trying to make a living as a musician. That was family.
So even though Galileo was no longer teaching, and took in no student boarders, the household in Bellosguardo consisted of about the same number of people it had had in Padua, where people had often called the big house on Via Vignali the Hostel Galileo. Roughly forty people, he didn’t even bother to keep count anymore. La Piera kept the house accounts, and very capably. She always gave him the bad news with a straight face. They were running at a loss. Galileo had definitely lived these things before. And no one had ever bought a celatone, or ever would. And the ones he had given away, in hope of creating orders, had been expensive to manufacture.
A bad time came to Tuscany—years of plague, years of death. Sagredo asked him to think about a telescope for looking at things close up, to see more clearly objects like paintings and Cellini’s medallions, and Galileo and Mazzoleni worked up a thick rectangular lens, convex on both sides, which worked admirably, and which gave Galileo ideas for a compound lens system that might work even better. But then word came that Sagredo had died, with no warning and very little illness. The shock of it was like a sword thrust to Galileo’s heart; his knees buckled when he heard it. Giovanfrancesco, his big brother, gone.
Then his mother Giulia died, in September of 1620, after eighty-two years of making everyone in her life miserable. Galileo made all the arrangements for the funeral, he emptied and sold her house, he dispersed the money to his sisters and his hapless brother, all without a word or a sign, staring grimly at the walls as the furniture and goods left the place, revealing it to be pitifully small. For a long time it had been a comfort to him to realize that his mother was insane, and had been for the entirety of his life. But not now. She was angry. She was a person just like you, just as smart as you. She wanted what anyone would want. Everyone is equally proud. In one of her cabinets at the bottom of a mass of papers, he found two glass lenses, one concave and one convex.
Then Cardinal Bellarmino died, leaving no one alive who knew exactly what had passed between him and Galileo in the crucial meetings of 1616.
Then Grand Duke Cosimo died, after many years of illness: Galileo’s patron, gone at age thirty. This was the kind of disaster his Venetian friends had warned him against, when he
had opted for Florence’s patronage over Venice’s employment.
But Cosimo’s heir, Ferdinando II, only ten years old, was put under the regency of his grandmother, the Grand Duchess Christina, and his mother, the Archduchess Maria Maddelena. In Christina, Galileo still had his patron, which was a very lucky thing. She took up his offer to tutor the new prince as he once had his father, and on they went, Galileo and his Medicean Stars. But this particular arrangement did not lead to much time with the boy, and when Galileo did meet with him he found it a very melancholy thing—instructing and entertaining a sweet little boy of ten, who so resembled his father at the same age that it was uncanny to experience, like living a loop in time. Another way his life was repeating itself, although he himself grew older at every repetition. A particularly dark kind of déjà vu. He walked in his own footsteps.
Then Marina died. When the maestro got the news from Padua, he sat out on the terrace of Bellosguardo all night long, a fiasco of wine at his side. The telescope was set up, but he did not look through it.
More than once that night, he recalled the time the two women had fought so furiously, and he had stood there holding them apart. How these things stick in the mind. Everyone is equally proud. Now when he relived that scene he held them apart with his heart full of an anguished affection. They had been strong people. He had been crucified between two harpies. He could even for once see the comedy of that ridiculous scene. No doubt the servants had laughed about it for years afterward. Now he laughed himself, full of remorse and love.
Then Pope Paul V died. The cardinals gathered in Rome, and could not agree on a successor; in the end they elected an obvious placeholder, Alessandro Ludovisi, an old man who chose the name Gregory XV. No one had any expectations of him, but as soon as he was invested he named two Lynceans to secretarial posts, an excellent sign, possibly a portent of things to come. Certainly Cesi was pleased. But for the most part everyone waited for the next puff of white smoke to tell them who would really shape the next period in their lives.
Meanwhile Galileo continued to work desultorily, in a daze of regretful expectation. He took on various studies: what could be seen through a microscope; magnetism again; the strength of materials again; even, since he had Mazzoleni there, a return to some of his old work on the inclined planes, trying to recapture that magic. He wrote letters to his ex-students, and looked for new ways to supplement his income. Every week, sometimes more often, he visited his daughters at San Matteo, riding the old mule over the track he had beaten into the hills. They were suffering there; he always came home distressed at their threadbare hunger.
“In this world a vow of poverty is going too far!” he would complain to La Piera. “They would be poor even if they took a vow to prosper! Make up another basket for them and send it with the boys.”
He had changed his gardening practices even more drastically, and the new crops made it more a farm than ever. He grew beans, garbanzos, lentils, and wheat. And in a big oven, built under Mazzoleni’s supervision, they were now baking bread, and cooking big pots of soup and casseroles to strap to the mule and take over to the sisters. Also sacks and bushels of uncooked beans and grain. Still, there was no way he could grow enough to feed all thirty of the sisters of San Matteo. They were the thinnest group of nuns he had ever seen, although all nuns were thin. And Maria Celeste was the thinnest of them all.
He gave no lectures to the Florentine court. He wrote no books. He contrived no tests or demonstrations. He did not even want to go to Venice for Carnivale; he claimed now that he had never liked Carnivale, which was odd, because everyone could remember how much he had enjoyed it in the old days, how much he had loved any party or festival. Some in the house joked that now he understood it marked the beginning of Lent, which he had definitely never liked; others said it was because it reminded him too much of his iron truss. In any case, now he looked confused, even alarmed, whenever Carnivale was mentioned.
One night, unable to sleep, he sat out on the piazza looking through a telescope at Saturn. Jupiter was not in the sky. Saturn seemed to be some kind of triple star, oddly wide and shimmering, not with fulgurous rays but with bulbous articulations that made it look like a head with ears. He had seen that first in 1612, then watched the ears go away over the years, and Saturn become a sphere like Jupiter. Now the ears had reappeared, and he could write to Castelli that he should expect to see them in full in 1626. They were not there yet, but on the way. It was an odd thing.
But the heaviness in Galileo did not allow him to vibrate to this sight in his usual way, much less to ring. It had been many years since he had rung like a bell at the discovery of some new thing. And really, the objects seen through the telescope had been disenchanted for him by all that he had seen in his proleptic visitations to Jupiter. People would inhabit the stars and yet remain as petty and stupid and contentious as ever—all the vices fully active, in fact, still writhing as lustily as ever in their vicious ways. It was horrible.
He would pick up his lute and pluck a tune of his father’s that he called “Desolation.” His father, so quiet and withdrawn. Well, imagine what it must have been like, living with Giulia all those years. No matter how valid the causes, she had not been sane. Later the mnemosynes would help the insane, and peoples’ characters in general would be smoothed by society as if on a lathe, but in his time they were hacked out by chisels and hatchets, and crazy people were really crazy. If you lived with one, you had to withdraw somehow. But no one could truly disappear. Some parts remained in the world. And so this tune, the saddest he had ever heard. His old man, sitting there at the table looking down as the old rolling pin pounded him. Sometimes Vincenzio would try to argue with her, first reasonably, then snapping and shouting like she did, but always at half speed compared to her. His thought was adagio, while her thought and tongue were always presto agitato. Not that he had been unintelligent, rather the reverse; he had been a fine musician and composer, and one of the deepest experts ever in the theory and philosophy of music, having written books on the subject admired all over Italy. And yet in his own household the nightly debates revealed him mostly cruelly to be only the second smartest person in the house—and really, after Galileo reached about the age of five, the third. It must have been disheartening. And so he had died. Without your heart you died. This late tune of his was a kind of last confession, a shriving, a testament. A remaining thought of his, still alive in this world.
In the shadows under the arcade there was a movement. Somebody up and about, skulking.
“Cartophilus!”
“Maestro.”
“Come here.”
The ancient one shuffled out. “What can I get you, maestro?”
“Answers, Cartophilus. Sit down beside me. Why are you up so late?”
“Had to pee. Is that the answer you wanted?”
Galileo’s chuckle was a low “Huh huh huh,” like the huffing of a boar. “No,” he said. “Sit down.” He handed the old man the jug of wine. “Drink.”
Cartophilus had already been drinking, as became clear when he abruptly collapsed on one of Galileo’s big pillows, groaning as he folded into a tailor’s position. He rolled the jug over his bent elbow and took a long pull.
“How old are you, Cartophilus?”
Another groan. “How can I tell, maestro? You know how it is.”
“How many years have you been alive, that’s all.”
“Something like four hundred.”
Galileo whistled low. “That’s old.”
Cartophilus nodded. “Don’t I know it.” He drank again.
“How old do you people live?”
“It isn’t certain, as far as I know. I think the oldest people are about six or seven hundred. But they’re still going.”
“And how long have you been here in Europe, with the tele-trasporta?”
“Since 1409.”
“That long!” Galileo stared at him. “Where was it that you appeared? Did you come with the first arrival of
the thing? And how did it get here, when it was not here to bring it?”
The old man put up a hand. “Do you know about the Gypsies?”
“Of course. They are supposed to be wandering Egyptians, as you are supposed to be the Wandering Jew. They come into towns and steal things.”
“Exactly. Except really they came from India, by way of Persia. The Zott, the tsigani, the zegeuner, the Romani, et cetera. Anyway, we pretended to be a tribe of them, in Hungary in 1409. We were the ones who started what the Gypsies call o xonxano baro, the great trick. In those days, there was a different attitude toward penitents. We found we could go from town to town and say that we were nobles of lesser Egypt who had briefly fallen into paganism and then reconverted to Christianity, and as a penance we were to wander homelessly and beg strangers for help. We could even say we had accidentally offended Christ Himself and so were forced to wander forever after, asking for alms, and that worked just as well. We also had a letter of recommendation from Sigismund, King of the Romans, asking people to take us in and treat us kindly. Thus the Romani. And we could tell fortunes with startling accuracy, as you might imagine. So the tricks worked everywhere we went. We could say anything. Sometimes we told them that we had been ordered to wander for seven years, and during those years we were allowed to thieve without being liable to punishment for it. Even that worked. People were credulous.” He laughed a mirthless laugh.
“And you had the teletrasporta with you the whole time?”
“Yes. Ganymede was with it as well, visiting it off and on. He had tried all this before, you see. He made an earlier analeptic introjection, trying to get the ancient Greeks to develop science to the point of igniting a technological revolution very much earlier in the human story.”
“Aha!” Galileo said. “Archimedes.”
“Yes, that’s right. He even showed him a laser—”
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