Doctor Copernicus

by John Banville

  “Koppernigk, is it not?”

  He was wrapped in a dun cloak, and his long fair swathe of hair was hidden under a battered old black slouch hat; even in such dull apparel he could not be less than elegant. He was smiling a little, not looking at Nicolas, but musing on the still-dark distance beyond the city walls, saying silently, as it were: come, cut me now if you wish, and so have some small revenge. But Nicolas just as silently declined the offer, and suddenly the Italian laughed softly and said:

  “Nicolas Koppernigk—you see? I have been concentrating.”

  Nicolas with a faint smile inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Signor Fracastoro.”

  The other looked at him directly then, and laughed again.

  “O please,” he said, “my friends call me that; you may call me Girolamo. Shall we walk this way a little?” They left the bridge and crossed the open piazza, where the fishwives were hurling amiable abuse from stall to stall. “But tell me, what brings you here at this strange hour?”

  Nicolas shrugged. “I do not sleep well. And you?”

  “Wine and women, I fear, keep me from my bed. I am for home now after a misspent night.” It was meant as a boast. He was at that age, not quite twenty yet, when the youth he had been and the man he was becoming both held sway at once, so that in the same breath he could slip disconcertingly from hard cold derisive cynicism into simple silliness. Now he said: “You disappointed Novara greatly, you know, by not taking seriously his grand schemes to save the world. Ah, poor Domenico!”

  They both laughed, a little spitefully, and Nicolas, suddenly stared at out of the sky by the Professor’s pained reproachful eyes, said hastily:

  “But they are not without significance, his preoccupations.”

  “No, of course; but it is all mere talking. He is too much in love with magic, and despises action. I mean that natural magic for him is all centaurs and chimaeras. Now I, however, understand it in general as the science which applies the knowledge of hidden forms to the production of wonderful operations.” He glanced out quickly from under the downturned brim of his black hat with a candid questioning look, but it was impossible to know if he was being sincere or otherwise. “What do you say, friend?”

  But Nicolas only shrugged and murmured warily:

  “Perhaps, perhaps …”

  He did not know what to make of this young man; he did not trust him, and did not trust himself, and so determined to go cautiously, even though he could not see where trust came into it, except that he knew he did not care to be made a fool of again. It was all odd, this meeting, this dreamlike morning, these dim figures hurrying here and there and crying out in the gloom. They entered a narrow alleyway given over entirely to the trade in cagebirds. Cascades of bright mad music drenched the dark air. Coming out at the other end they found themselves abruptly in a deserted square. The sky was of a deep illyrian blue, lightening rapidly now to the east, and the towers of the city were tipped with gold.

  “May I offer you breakfast?” said Fracastoro. “My rooms are close by.”

  He lived in a tumbledown palazzo near the Basilica of St Anthony, the family home of an elderly count who had long ago fled to a villa in the Dolomites for the sake of his ailing lungs. “My uncle, you know,” he said, and winked. They ascended through the shabby splendours of gilt and tempera and stained marble statuary to the fourth floor, where a kind of rambling lair, stretching through five or six large rooms, had been scooped out of the dust and genteel wreckage deposited by years of neglect. Here, under the sagging canopy of a vast four-poster, they came upon a young man asleep in a tangle of soiled sheets. He was naked, his limbs sprawled in touchingly childish abandon, tacked down firmly, as it were, like some exotic specimen, by the enormous erection that reared grotesquely out of his jet-black bush. Fracastoro barely glanced at him, but in passing picked up a tortured shirt from the floor and flung it at his head, crying:

  “Up up up! Come!”

  The main room was a general disorder of books and clothes and empty wine bottles. Most of the furniture was draped in dustsheets. Here and there amidst the clutter the skeleton of a former glory was visible in richly patterned panelling and polished marble pillars, gold-embroidered drapes, an inlaid rosewood spinet delicate and tentative as a deer. Magnificent arched windows framed a triptych of the airy architecture of St Anthony’s soaring motionless against an immaculate blue sky. Fracastoro looked about him, and with a shrug waved his hand in a vague helpless gesture of apology. How many generations of aristocratic breeding had been necessary, Nicolas wondered, to produce that patrician indifference and ease? He shrank back into his black cloak, a lean grey troubled soul suddenly aching with envy of this young man’s confidence and carelessness, his disdain for the trivial trappings of the world. They stood a while in silence by the window, gazing out at the sunlit city and listening to the morning noises that rose to them from the street below, the rattle of cane shutters, rumbling of the watercart, the breadman’s harsh cry. Nothing happened, they said nothing, but forever afterwards, even when much else had faded, Nicolas was to remember that moment with extraordinary vividness as marking the true beginning of their friendship.

  There was a sound behind them, and Girolamo turned and said:

  “Ah, here you are, you dreadful dog.”

  It was the handsome young man from the bedroom. He stood in the doorway clad only in his shirt, scratching his head and gazing at them blearily. His name was Tadziu or Tadzio, Nicolas did not catch it clearly; it hardly mattered, since he was never to see him again. After that first morning he disappeared mysteriously, and Girolamo did not mention him save once, a long time afterwards. They spoke together rapidly now in a dialect that Nicolas did not understand, and the boy shrugged and went away. Girolamo turned to his guest with a smile. “I must apologise: apparently there is no food. But we shall have something presently.” He began to glance idly through a disorderly mass of papers overflowing a small ornate table, looking up at Nicolas now and then with a quizzical, faintly amused expression, seeming each time about to speak but yet remaining silent. At last he laughed, and throwing up his hands said helplessly:

  “I do not know what to say!”

  Nicolas would not look at him; he knew what he meant.

  “Nor I,” he murmured, confused and suddenly happy. “Nor I!”

  Tadziu or Tadzio returned then, with a steaming loaf of bread under his arm, and in one hand a magnum of champagne, in the other a platter covered with a napkin which Girolamo lifted gingerly to reveal a greasy mess of griddle cakes. “O disgusting, disgusting!” he cried, laughing, and they sat down and began to eat. Girolamo’s handsome young friend bent on Nicolas bitterly a dark unwavering glare. But Nicolas refused to be intimidated; he had been light-headed already from lack of sleep, but now the champagne and the warm brown stink of the bread and the griddle cakes befuddled him entirely. He was happy.

  “Come,” said Girolamo, “tell us your famous theory of the planets.”

  Yes, yes, he was happy!

  *

  But happiness was an inadequate word for the transformation that he underwent that summer—for it was no less than a transformation. His heart thawed. A great soft inexpressible something swelled within him, and there were moments when he felt that this rapture must burst forth, that his cloak would fly open to reveal a huge grotesque foolish gaudy flower sprouting comically from his breast. It was ridiculous, but that was all right; he dared to be ridiculous. He fell in love with the city, its limpid mornings, burning noons, evenings in the piazzas loud with birds, that city fraught now with secret significances. Never again without a unique pang of anguished tenderness would he walk through the market, or stand upon the Ponte San Giorgio at dawn, or smell at the streetcorner stalls the rank humble pungency of frying griddle cakes.

  Yet behind all this fine frenzy there was the fear that it could destroy him, for surely it was a kind of sickness. In his studies he thought he might find an antidote. He read Plato in the G
reek, and reread Nicolas Cusanus and Ptolemy’s Almagest, which last by now he almost knew by heart. He took up again those texts to which Novara had introduced him, and plunged once more into the thickets of the translation of Tris-megistus that Ficino had made for Lorenzo de’ Medici. But it was useless, he could not concentrate, and rushed out and strode through the deserted noonday streets under the throbbing plane trees, distraught and alarmed, until his legs of their own volition brought him to the Palazzo Antonini and that disordered room overlooking the basilica, where Girolamo smiled at him sleepily and said:

  “Why, my friend, what is it? You look quite crazed.”

  “I am too old for this, too old!”

  “For what?”

  “All this: you, Italy, everything. Too old!”

  “An old greybeard you are, yes, of twice ten years and eight! Come, uncle, sit here. You should not go out in the sun, you know.”

  “It is not the sun!”

  “No; you are altogether too much a Prussian, too sceptical and cold. You must learn to treasure yourself more dearly.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “But—”

  “Nonsense!”

  Girolamo stretched himself and yawned.

  “Very well, uncle,” he mumbled, “but it is siesta time now,” and he laid his head down on the couch beside his friend and smiling fell asleep at once. Nicolas gazed at him, and wrung his hands. I am besotted with him, besotted!

  *

  He was captive to a willing foolishness. Those concerns that up to now he had held to be serious, and worthy of serious considerations, he had with lunatic lightheartedness abandoned; but they had not abandoned him, no, they waited in the outer darkness, gnashing their teeth, ready to come back at him and have a fourfold revenge, he knew it. He knew, but could not care. Had he not liberated himself at last from the pinched mean hegemony of the intellect? Had he not at last set free the physical man that all his life had waited within him for release? The senses now would have their day; they deserved it. Yet strangely, the body whose bonds he had cast off seemed not to know what to do with its newfound liberty. Like a starved stark loony released after years in the dungeons, it reeled about drunkenly in the unaccustomed light, sweating and dribbling, tripping over itself, a gangling spidery pale fork of flesh and fur, faintly repellent, faintly comical, wholly absurd.

  Absurd, absurd: he remembered Ferrara particularly, and the day of his conferring.

  *

  It was for reasons of economy—or stinginess, according to Girolamo —that Nicolas chose to take his doctorate in canon law other than at Padua, for even the most solitary of graduates would find himself surrounded by hitherto unknown friends when the conferring ceremony, and more especially the lavish banquet he would be expected to provide afterwards, were at hand. Nicolas had no intention of allowing a gang of sots to stupefy themselves with drink at his expense, and therefore, although it was a far less prestigious institution than Padua, and he had never studied there, he applied for graduation to the University of Ferrara, and was accepted, and in the autumn of the year travelled south accompanied by Girolamo.

  The ritual of conferring took a full week to complete. It was a horrible business. The promoter assigned to him by the college was one Alberti, a harassed apologetic canon lawyer with a limp and a wild fuzz of prematurely grey hair that stood out from his narrow skull like an exclamation of alarm. During a class of his once a student had been stabbed to death while he lectured on oblivious. Nicolas liked him; he was of the same sad endearing tribe as Abstemius of Wloclawek.

  “Well now, Herr Kupperdik, here is the drill. Firstly I take you before an assembly of doctors to whom you will swear that you have been through the proper course et cetera, which ha ha you have, I take it? The reverend gentlemen will set you two passages of law, and we retire together to study them. It is all a sham, of course, since I know already what the passages will be—I should be a poor promoter if I didn’t, eh, Herr Kopperdyke? Anyway, after a decent absence we return, the doctors question you, they ballot, and you are made a licentiate. All that remains then is for you to take the public examination for your full doctorate, but that is merely a formality after the oral test, which as I said is really a formality also. And there you are: Doctor Popperdink! Nothing to it!”

  But of course it was not so simple. Alberti got the set passages mixed, and coached Nicolas, with admirable diligence, in those intended for another graduate, and on the day of the inquisition Nicolas spent a frantic hour in a hot antechamber, while the doctors fretted next door, trying to memorise the new answers and at the same time block out the distracting apologies of his mortified promoter. The examiners, however, seemed to have had some experience already of Alberti’s organisational powers. It was apparent that they cared less about the indifferent quality of Nicolas’s performance than they did about the fact that the ritual had not been strictly adhered to. They voted, mumbling among themselves, fixed Alberti with a crushing glare, and having announced the result of the examination rose and swept away amid an outraged rustling of gowns. Nicolas, drenched with sweat, closed his eyes and lowered his burning face gently into his hands. His promoter leapt at him and began to thump him on the back in a transport of relief, almost knocking him off his chair. “Congratulations, my dear fellow, congratulations!” Throughout, Nicolas had been able to think of one thing only: the reception he would get from Uncle Lucas if he returned to Ermland without his doctorate. “Herr Poppernik? Are you unwell?”

  Girolamo laughed, of course, when he heard of the affair, and then sat in silence, pale and distant, while Nicolas poured over him the scalding bitter brew of the day’s pent-up frustration and rage. And that night along with Alberti they went down to the stews and got vilely drunk in the company of a band of shrieking whores.

  The week rolled on inexorably, like a giant engine gone out of control and disintegrating, flinging bits of itself in all directions, bombard ing Nicolas, the innocent bystander, with spokes and broken ratchets and gouts of thick black oil. On Sunday the contraption exploded finally, with a deafening report. Arriving at the cathedral for the conferring, he halted in the porch, horror-stricken. “Jesus, what’s this?” The place was full of students, hundreds of them, they were even squatting on the steps of the high altar. Alberti turned to him with a bland enquiring smile. “Yes, Doctor?” He had taken to using that title at every opportunity, with a proprietary rib-nudging roguishness that made Nicolas want to strike him very hard with his fist.

  “This crowd!” he cried. “What does it mean? I came to Ferrara to avoid just this kind of hing!”

  Alberti was puzzled; a true Italian, he thrived on crowds and clamour.

  “But the students always come to hear the orations,” he said mildly. “It is the custom.”

  “God!”

  Girolamo was studiously inspecting the architecture, with the solemn look of one shaking inwardly with laughter. He was got up for the occasion in a quilted scarlet doublet and tight black hose, with a long white plume to his cap; like a damned peacock, Nicolas thought bitterly. Now without turning Girolamo murmured:

  “It is for the comic possibilities that they come, I imagine?”

  Alberti nodded enthusiastically. “Si, si, the comedy, just so.”

  “God,” Nicolas groaned again, and, wrapping his gown about him tightly, plunged up the aisle to the pulpit. On the narrow steps he trod upon the liripipe dangling from his neck and almost throttled himself. A sea of rapturous expectant faces greeted him as he peered apprehensively over the brim of the pulpit. Someone at the back of the nave whistled a piercing heraldic flourish, provoking an uproar of catcalls and applause. Nicolas fished about under his gown for the text of his oration. For one appalling moment he thought… but no, he had not left it behind, it was there, though in a dreadful jumble that his shaking hands at once made worse.

  “Reverendissimi…”

  The rest of his opening address was drowned by shouts and a stamping of feet, and he s
topped, quite lost. Alberti and Girolamo, sitting below him, leaned forward with their hands cupped around their mouths and together cried: “They cannot hear you!” After a time some semblance of order returned, and he stuck out his neck like an enraged tortoise and hurled his text at them as if it were an execration. His argument was a defence of the canonical interdict on marriage between a widow and her brother-in-law; it was a purely formal declaration of an accepted doctrine, upon which his audience in like formality was meant to challenge him, but he suspected, rightly as it happened, that these turbulent students had no intention of playing by the rules. Even before he had finished, a dozen of them or more were on their feet, howling abuse at him and at each other amid a general hilarity. He tried to discern even some halfway sensible objection to the contents of his text, but in vain, for his tormentors were mouthing merely nonsense, or obscenities, or both at once, and like a large rag doll being fought over by children he bounced about in the pulpit, throwing up his arms, grinning, opening and closing his mouth in mute helplessness and pain. Never in his life had he known such an exquisite agony of embarrassment.

  At length they lost interest in him, and as the uproar subsided and they began to look about for the entrance of a fresh victim, he scrambled shakily down from the pulpit. He was grabbed at once by a pair of burly vestrymen with cruelly barbered skulls, who marched him off smartly to a side altar and thrust him into the master’s chair. There he was presented with the cap, the book and the gold ring and the graduate’s diploma, and Alberti, with the lunatic intensity of a father crazed with pride, his wild hair bristling, advanced limping and planted on his cheek a tacky garlic-scented kiss of peace.