Endless Things (24 page)

So he would do that too. He would burn his books—or
they
would burn them, the books of which he was composed, the Book of Everything and Other Things that he contained, that he
was
. Giving up magic as that old Englishman did or one day would do. Silence and prayer at the end.

And perhaps he was wrong after all: perhaps no spirit was so strong as to refashion the earth, or even to choose to try. Maybe—it seemed to come to be so even as he thought it—maybe earth and time and the endless things were not to be ruled, for like cannot rule like. Was that another and opposite meaning of the tale of Actæon?
Actæon
: Why did the story seem to make a different sense to him now than it had made before?

If you won't bind the things of this world on men's behalf—as you have learned to do, and even to bind us gods on occasion—will you not stay to teach them to unbind themselves?

—To teach unbinding is only to bind further. Every man's bonds are his own: only that one who learns his unbinding from his own soul and the love of his neighbors and equals is truly unbound.

The reverend cardinals wish to teach the world that a free man can be destroyed as easily as a coward or a fool.

—That's not the lesson that the world will learn.

You must know that you renounce me in renouncing all that you have been and all that you have fashioned from the soul the gods gave you. I cannot aid you at the last.

—That soul was not mine to keep. It will go its own way.
Animula vagula blandula
. Let them catch it if they can.

Son.

The man Bruno crossed his arms before him, arms in his threadbare sleeves.

—Tell me only this, he said.

One last thing.

—Will it be you I see at the gates of Avernus? Conductor of souls, will it be you who guides me down?

But there was no answer, for there was no longer one who could answer. There was also no Avernus to go down to, there was no down, no up. With no further word, that
genius
or friend or master slapped his knees, rose, and departed: he would never in that age speak again to anyone, though many would think they heard him, and the images of him (finger to his lips and winged feet) would in those years vastly multiply. He went out, and up the dark passage into the sun. Then he took the few steps up to the doors of the papal apartment, to the Sala Paolina and its high frescoes—of the Archangel Michael sheathing his sword, the war in Heaven done; of the victories of Alexander the Great; the life of Saint Paul.
If I give up my body to be burned, and I have not love, it profiteth me nothing.
Having reached that room without being hindered, he opened a small door at the side, and put his foot upon a stair. Then he stopped—stood stock-still, as though he had thought of something, and if he could remember what it was, might turn and go back—but that wasn't it. It was that, with Bruno's refusal (whether
because
of it or merely
on the occasion
of it could not be known, and only Bruno himself could have thought adequately about the question), the gods, angels, monsters, powers, and principalities of that age began their retreat into the subsidiary realms where they reside today, harmless and unmoving, most of them anyway, for most of us most of the time. The bright god came to a stop there on his upward way, because the upward way just then ceased to be, and then the door that led to it ceased to be a door, and then he ceased to be himself, his head remaining half turned in wonder at what was coming over him.
What wind is that?
And there he is today, stopped in midstep, all in black, as flat and still as paint, unrecognizable even to those who most need to know him. Pierce Moffett, for instance, passing the same way nearly four centuries later, at a dark day's end climbing out from that prison too and reaching the same high still empty chamber, alone himself and grieving without reason: he turned his own head in that direction, where—according to his, that is Kraft's, guidebook—the chamber's decorator had painted a
trompe-l'oeil
door and staircase, apparently just to match a real one at the hall's far end. And on that imaginary stair was painted an imaginary young man in black, just going up, just turning to look back.
Legend claims this to be a portrait of Beatrice Cenci's advocate
, said that cunning heartless guidebook,
but if it is he, then he must have wandered backward fifty years from Beatrice's time to when these walls were painted; actually no one knows who he is, if indeed he is anyone at all.
And in the book's margin, beside the place, one of Kraft's little gray stars, nearly vanished.

So it was really Bruno, and not an eidolon or ghost or substitute or figment or illusion or spirit cognate made of thought, who burned to great acclaim and cries of loathing in the Campo dei Fiori in the Jubilee Year 1600. It was him, his flesh, his life, the books his mind was made of. The crowds were able to see the skin blister and blacken, the hair and beard combust, finally the body collapse into a shapeless mass like a burning building falling. Some said (later) that they saw his spirit rise up from the pyre and be snatched away by devils or angels, but people often say they see those things, and once having said them they begin to believe they really happened, and they never forget them.

Thereafter the rolling ball went that way and not the other way, to arrive again in the course of things at the year 1619, when a young man named René Descartes, a lawyer's son of no particular profession, went traveling in Germany, just as the Bohemians were making their stand against the Empire. He visited Heidelberg in its days of beauty, and later would remember the famed statues he saw there, moving solely from the force of water piped within them. Acis and Galatea. Echo and Narcissus. Apollo and the Muses. Midas and the Singing Reeds. Was it perhaps in some similar way, René wondered, that the fleshly statues of our bodies also worked? When winter came he put up in a house in Neuburg, on the border of Bavaria. For weeks he stayed all alone in a room heated by a large ceramic stove—very warm—and thought. He was thinking of how a foundation for all knowledge might be discovered that had the certainty of the self-evident truths of mathematics, a philosophy free from the ambiguities and ambivalences of words. He had heard about the Rosicrucians, and of their promise of new and fruitful philosophies, and had thought of seeking them out; he even wrote out (but maybe it was just a joke) the elaborate title page of a book that would be dedicated to the Frères de la Rose-Croix, so famous in Germany.

We know how in that warm room, on the eve of St. Martin's Day, young René had a number of dreams, three in fact, which seemed to him of the utmost significance. He dreamed of a great deforming wind, and a school and a chapel that the wind propelled him toward; he dreamed of the gift of a sweet melon from another country; of an encyclopædia of all sciences, which became a book of poems. He tried to read the poems, but (as they do in dreams) they kept changing, the one he wanted to find gone. One by Ausonius began with what he recognized as Pythagoras's choice:
which way in life will I go?

It's true, it's recorded. When he awoke from this dream he felt the world distorted, full of strange sparks or fires he could see in his room. When he slept and woke again, though, he felt certain that God had revealed truths to him that would take a lifetime to explicate, but would end at last in certainty. He thought the dreams had been sent to make him conscious of his sins, as well—sins no one knew about but he. And he thought of the Virgin, and vowed that, if he could, he would make a pilgrimage to her shrine at Loreto. Perhaps he was on his way there when he decided instead to join the Catholic forces marching to Prague for the battle against the Winter King and the Queen of Snow.

The battle for the end of the world was brief. At dawn René and the Imperial forces sang the
Salve Regina
and the attack began. The word of the day was “Sancta Maria.” (For a long time—and the war beginning now would last thirty years—this would be a war between God and Mary.) And just as the mists lifted, revealing dimly each side to the other—heaving fields of creatures, like herds of haystacks or shaggy cattle on the move—a light wind sprang up.

A light wind, able to stir the yellow fog but not at first to disperse it. A wind young and inexperienced, learning its uses and its work, but so far aimless; a wind that had been borne along with the world's great slow-marching airs and atmospheres from west to east, from Albion to the Middle Sea and over the Bavarian mountains, wondering, wandering. As it blew more steadily over the White Mountain, the day grew clearer. Not the light of day: what the day
was
grew clearer, though not at once to everyone, and to some not at all.

A little wind.
The first wind bears in the time
, an angel said to John Dee,
and the second bears it away again
.

The Protestant soldiers on the heights felt it first, lifted their heads and noses to it, to see from which quarter it blew. The various unearthly powers standing behind them felt it too, and turned from the battle to the rearguard, to see who or what was coming through from behind. No zephyr they knew. They were astonished then to be picked up and swept away by it, one by one, as by a broom, right out of the to-be and back into the once-was forever. All in a moment those powers were gone, were nothing—for they had all along really been nothing, less than nothing, mere
signs
, mere
phantasmata,
and no help now to the human soldiers, left with only their human commanders, standing on an insignificant little hill outside a contested city in the middle of Europe at the start of another battle in another war. Their warm mammalian breath condensed on the damp cold air. They thought how short life is, and of how little worth is the promise of Heaven. On the other side the same, as in a mirror. Then the first wave of Catholic pikemen, crying out as though for their mothers, advanced against the Protestant left.

The Bohemians and their allies, though in the stronger position, broke quickly, evaporating, in effect, as though it had all been a show, and was now over. Anhalt, screaming hoarse with rage and panic, tried to hold the mob at sword's point, but couldn't. The soldiers and people inside the city locked the gates against them, left them to face the advancing enemy, and in the castle through that day and evening the king and his ministers disputed what to do next. There were reproaches; there were tears. The Bohemian leadership begged, demanded, shouted that the city had to be surrendered or it would be attacked and breached and put to the sword; the king berated them for cowardice—and was shocked to be berated in turn. He went on his knees to pray for guidance, but no one would kneel with him; he left the chamber, he fell into his wife's arms, she (terrified by how frightened he was, the deepest emotion she had ever seen pictured on his face, deeper than love, deeper than faith) could see that they had nothing left, nothing but flight. Anhalt in tears too said the same.

With only what they could push into a couple of coaches—someone thought to gather up the crown jewels, which would support them in exile for years—the Winter King and his Queen left Hradcany palace, nearly forgetting their baby son and heir—a nursemaid ran up at the last moment and thrust the little bundle into the queen's arms. Their people, servants, and followers, who knew what fate now awaited
them
, ran after the departing coaches, trying to climb aboard or hang on to the running boards, dropping away as the cavalcade careened downhill.

That little wind went away from the ghastly battlefield, growing just a little less little as it went, though few still could feel it. Nothing hindered it, perhaps because of its small size—it was no more than a breeze, really, a breath, the puff of air that comes in at the thick small windows of desert dwellings to touch a cheek and say that the simoom might be coming, or might not; hardly wind enough to cover with sands the tombs and temples that its mother had before uncovered. Yet it blew “far and wide"; there wouldn't be anywhere it didn't enter in, rattling the windows of the present and scattering the dealt cards of the past, pushing closed the doors of opened books and scrambling the sense of their indexes and
prolegomena
. Finally its baby breath, propelled by those fat cheeks, separated the
a
from the
e
in every word where they were joined, or suppressed one and left only the other, like conjoined twins that can't survive together, encyclopedias of aerial etheric demons in Egypt. Nobody noticed. And then with a little laugh it blew itself out, bowling up its own nonexistent fundament and drawing all of itself in after.

The imperial army entered Prague the next day without opposition. The soldiers were released on the city, as the phrase is, with the common results. One of those who entered was René Descartes, who wandered in the old town and up to the Carolinum; he had the idea that he would like to view the famous collection of Tycho Brahe's astronomical instruments that Johannes Kepler had left behind when he too left Prague precipitously. The young man had—would always have—an uncanny ability to pass single-mindedly through scenes that did not pertain to his own business, seeing in effect nothing. The instruments, unfortunately, had already been removed and dispersed, and René walked back again through the town, where snow was now beginning to fall, snow stained red in the squares and alleys. He was thinking again—of a way to reduce all kinds of physical problems to mathematical equations of the third and fourth degree, perhaps—and in his notebook that night he wrote:
On November 11, 1620, I began to conceive the foundation of an admirable discovery.

In the coming weeks those of the Bohemian leadership who didn't escape abroad were methodically tried and executed by an imperial commission. One cheated them by committing suicide (another tower window, another leap) but his head and right hand were exhibited, nailed to the gallows. Eventually twenty-seven knights, counts, ministers and patriarchs, judges, scholars, and burghers were executed; lesser men were whipped, branded, or lost goods. That Hussite preacher who once led a parade of fellows dressed as sturdy Hussite peasants to welcome Elizabeth to Prague (what a noise they had made with their flails, those false harvestmen, flailing, flailing—what an ungodly noise!) and who had given tongue so long and loud to praise her—he had that tongue nailed to the gallows. Nothing was to be forgiven, or forgotten either.