AEgypt (53 page)

—Send it there, he said. You'll be paid. I promise you, you...

The bookman grinned.

—I know the man, he said. Take it to him. With my compliments. I will put it on the account he keeps with me.

He released the book.

What glyph was that he wore?

Giordano carried Copernicus with him through the rainy streets, wrapped in his cloak like an infant.

In the spring he heard that the Venetian Inquisition, so slow to act, had at last noticed him. Spies had reported his lectures and his boasts. The bookseller on the piazza shuttered his shop. By now, Giordano's old Dominican habit provided more of a disguise than the signor's hose and sword; so the doctor cut his hair, and put him into his own gondola at the water-stairs, and wished him luck.

Eastward from here there was only the Turk. Frater Jordanus put his hands within his sleeves, and went west again.

"Pierce,” said Rosie. “Gotta go."

Pierce—looming large in Kraft's miniature study—whirled around on the swivel chair, looking guiltily surprised. “Oh?"

"Mouths to feed.” He only stared at her, though not perhaps seeing her leaning there in the doorway, a bunch of Kraft's papers in her arms for Boney to look at, letters from long ago. She wondered if it was a face like that with which she had used to look up from the books into which she escaped. That wild absent blind look. “Okay?"

"What?"

"If you're near a stopping place,” she said. “Soon."

"Yes,” he said, “yes,” and turned back to the typescript. A small stack of it on his left-hand side, a big pile on his right. He cupped his chin in his hands and sighed.

"It's stopped raining,” Rosie said.

While Pierce read, his old teacher Frank Walker Barr at Noate stood up before his senior seminar on the History of History, and, talking as he worked, opened the classroom windows; for the rain that was ceasing in the Faraways had passed from here too, and the sun was hot.

"What, then, grants meaning to historical accounts?” he asked, for the last time in that semester. “What is the difference between a history and a register of facts, of names and events?” He had taken from the corner a long oaken pole, with a brass finger on the end of it; this he was inserting into the brass sockets set for it in the frames of the windows, and drawing them down. Many in the classroom remembered grade-school teachers doing the same, in past classrooms, and they watched Barr with interest.

"What we might do to conclude,” Barr went on, “is to try to think how meaning arises in other kinds of accounts or narratives.” The finger engaged the hole of the last westward-facing window. “It seems to me that what grants meaning in folktales and legendary narratives—we're thinking now of something like the
Nibelungenlied
or the
Mort D'Arthur
—is not logical development so much as thematic repetition, the same ideas or events or even the same objects recurring in different circumstances, or different objects contained in similar circumstances."

The window he tugged at yielded, and slid open, admitting a crowd of breezes which had been pressing for admittance there.

"A hero sets out,” Barr said, not turning back to his students but facing the sparkling quad and the air. “To find a treasure, or to free his beloved, or to capture a castle or find a garden. Every incident, every adventure that befalls him as he searches,
is
the treasure or the beloved, the castle or the garden, repeated in different forms, like a set of nesting boxes—each of them however just as large, or no smaller, than all the others. The interpolated stories he is made to listen to only tell him his own story in another form. The pattern continues until a kind of certainty arises, a satisfaction that the story has been told often enough to seem at last to have been really told. Not uncommonly in old romances the story just breaks off then, or turns to other matters.

"Plot, logical development, conclusions prepared for by introductions, or inherent in a story's premises—logical completion as a vehicle of meaning—all that is later, not necessarily later in time, but belonging to a later, more sophisticated kind of literature. There are some interesting half-way kind of works, like
The Faerie Queene
, which set up for themselves a titanic plot, an almost mathematical symmetry of structure, and never finish it: never need to finish it, because they are at heart works of the older kind, and the pattern has already arisen satisfyingly within them, the flavor is already there.

"So is this any help in our thinking? Is meaning in history like the solution to an equation, or like a repeated flavor—is it to be solved for, or tasted?"

He turned to face them.

"Is this a parable? Have I simply repeated our seminar in another form?"

The air in the room had all been changed now for the air outside, burdened with June, whatever that was exactly, something heavier than warmth or odor or vapor. It was the last day of classes.

"No?” he said, regarding their mild faces, absent already, and no wonder either. “Yes? No? Maybe?"

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Out of Turin the roads west and northward rose quickly into the mountains, climbing toward the passes of Little St. Bernard and Mont-Cenis; and an endless train of wagons, carts, mules, and men unwound from the Piazza del Castello and upward, carrying mail, news, jewels, and specie (well hidden in the pack trains or sewn in the linings of merchants’ coats, not mentioned at inns and borders) and luxury goods of the Levantine and Asian trade valuable enough to make the overland journey worth the cost—ostrich feathers, drugs, silks, plate. The outlaws, the fugitives and spies, the friars and common people, went over the Alps on foot; the great were carried in litters, surrounded by clanking men-at-arms.

The road they followed went up into the high Savoy, through meadows lush and spangled with flowers, into a country of dark firs; beside rivers now rushing and dangerous; between beetling walls of gorges where snow still melted. Snow: Giordano pressed a handful to his lips. He heard someone say that it was from drinking snow-water continuously that the natives of these mountains—the strong squat men and long-armed women whose cottages hung on the points of crags, whose sheep danced from steep to steep—were so often hideously goitered.

He supposed that these must be the mountains where witches lived as well, the witches who were prosecuted so relentlessly by his Dominican brothers; stories of the witch-hunters and their dangers and triumphs were the lore of Dominican houses. Down those deep passes perhaps; in those black cave mouths; in those low cottages, roofs piled comically thick with snow, a breath of dark smoke from their chimney-holes. He thought maybe he should go find them, and live with them. Raise winds, and fly. There was a wind rising even then, harsh and searching, and a few snowflakes blown in it like cinders.

That night in the cold guest cell which he was allotted in a Dominican hospice in the Val Susa he lay awake before dawn, between Matins and Prime, remembering Nola.

Brother Teofilo had told him that the earth was not flat, like a dish, but round, like an orange; it seemed right that Teofilo would know this, round as he was himself. Giordano listened to him; he watched the friar draw with a burnt stick the circle of the world, and the outlines of lands on it, a
mappamundi
—and was content to believe it. Teofilo did not know that the round world which Giordano had instantly conceived and assented to when Teofilo drew his picture was a hollow sphere, and contained the lands and peoples, the mountains and the rivers and the air, as an orange contains its meat; what the boy thought Teofilo had drawn a picture of was its outside surface, marked like a plover's egg, the view God had. Inside was the earth we see. Along the bottom half lay the fields and vineyards; the mountains rose up the curved sides; the sky was the inside of the top, whereon the sun and stars were stuck.

Bruno laughed, remembering, and laced his hands behind his head.

When Teofilo at last realized what sort of world Giordano imagined, then the struggle began. Giordano's world was just as round as Teofilo's, and it made better sense; it was to him so obviously the case that it took him a long time even to grasp what Teofilo was laughing at, and then expostulating about. And when he did grasp it, the difficulties of it seemed overwhelming: What held the air and the light in? How could we live, sticking out into the nothingness? Why did the peoples in the Antipodes not fall off, and keep falling forever? It was absurd.

And then on a golden day he sat eating an orange in the winter ruin of the garden, and he turned—it felt like cracked knuckles or crossed eyes all through his being—he turned the round world inside out, like the skin of the orange he was peeling; and all the mountains and rivers, the vineyards and farmsteads and churches, turned with it. The sun and stars flew out to fill the nothing where God lived. The world was outside itself. The world was round.

Softly through the hospice of Susa the low bell sounded for Prime.

That—that sense of the world turning inside-out like the peel of an orange—was what he had felt standing in the rain in Venice at the stall of the bookseller with the curious ring: that was what had made him laugh.

If he put the center of the universe in motion, then what became of its circumference? If he turned the outer spheres inward, what became of spheres? In the center of the old universe had been the earth, in the center of the earth himself, in the center of himself the spheres of the heavens he had built within himself, in the center of them....

If he turned the small universe within him inside-out, then what would happen in the one outside him?

He heard the sandals of the postulant whose duty it was to wake the monks for prayer. The sandals approached his door, the postulant struck his door and passed on, calling at each door:
Oremus, fratres
.

Snow was still falling in the spring air as the caravan Giordano joined went up through Novalese to Mont-Cenis. The travelers coming down from the top rode on sledges, a strong
marron
in front with a strap around his chest pulling, and another up behind with an alpen-stock to steer; on the slick path the sledges shot by, the
marrons
stoical, the faces of the fur-wrapped foreigners wide-eyed with alarm. All day the snow swirled heavily down from the heights; stuck carts began to burden the trail, the tough little mules waded in snow to their knees. Giordano, terrified and elated, felt his senses swallowed up in it.

His caravan called a halt at last at a carter's village just short of the Col; the villagers expertly tucked all the travelers in among themselves, every cranny could contain a sleeper; the animals were penned and the carts covered. Giordano paid high for a bowl of milk and bread and a share of a mattress stuffed with crackling beech leaves, not far from where the fire glowed.

It was still night when he awoke amid the snorers. The inn was a lightless cave. Giordano struggled out from the pile he was ensconced in, and pulled a fur robe with him; he wrapped it around his monk's robe, and—stepping over and around and sometimes on sleeping dogs and children on the floor—he found a door to go out by.

The air was shocking, as still as if all crystal, corrosive in his nose and throat. The storm had passed, and the sky was clear, more clear than he had known it could be: as though he were high up, away from the earth, and within the sphere of air itself. His warm breath hung before his face in a cloud. He gathered his robes and his fur around him and stepped into the yard; his rag-bound feet left black holes like pools behind him in the starlit snow.

But was there a sphere of air above the earth, if Copernicus was right? The old earth of Aristotle, black thick and base, collected at the bottom of creation, within finer spheres of water, air, fire. Whatever was lighter—sparks, souls—rose up. But Copernicus said the earth itself rose up, lighter than air, and went sailing; and so which way was up?

His heart was full. In the moonless sky the stars and planets stared down or stared away and burned. Burned. There was Cassiopeia's great chair. Lyra. Draco. The Bear standing on his tail, looking at the North Nail on which the heavens turned. Only they didn't. The eighth sphere of stars only seemed to turn because the earth turned around once a day, spinning on its toe like an
arlecchino
.

Perhaps there was no eighth sphere.

With a sound of not-being, a kind of tinkling indrawn breath, the eighth sphere went away. The stars, liberated, rushed away outward from the earth and from one another; the smaller ones (rushing away even faster) were perhaps not smaller, they were only farther off. Yes! And there might be—must be!—others, too far off to be seen at all.

His heart might burst, filled with cold starlight. The Milky Way, a powder like snow, might be stars simply too far away to distinguish from one another, like the blue haze of a far-off vineyard, which is nothing but all the blooming grape-globes seen together.

How far off?

What could mark the limit? What reason could there be for them to end?

Infinite, Lucretius said, who could think of no reason. Cusanus said: a circle, whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.

No. Cusanus had only spoken so of God. It was he, Giordano Bruno, who was saying it of God's creation, the shadow of God that was the universe. If there was an end to the stars then God was not God.

It was not only clear to him, neck bent staring upward, as clear as this air, it was self-evident; he seemed to have always known it, and had simply never said it aloud. Infinite. He felt its infinity tugging at his heart and eyes, and he felt an answering infinity within himself: for if it was infinite outside, then it must be infinite inside as well.

Infinite. He stirred his cold feet in the snow, and turned back toward the hostel. The little ponies stamped in their pens, breathing whitely, their shaggy manes powdered with hoarfrost. In the windows of the hostel, candles flickered, and furry smoke filled with sparks rose from the chimney; someone laughed within. Wake up.