The Secret Dead

Copyright © 2014 by S. J. Parris

I was eighteen years old and had just
taken holy orders the summer Fra Gennaro found the girl. It was not the first
time I had seen a naked woman. I had entered the Dominican order as a novice at
fifteen, old enough by then to have tasted first love, the sweet warmth of a
girl’s pliant body in the shade of the olive trees above the village of Nola. A
distant cousin, as it turned out; her family was livid. Perhaps that was why my
father had been so ready to pay out for my education, though God knows he could
ill afford it. Sending me away to the Dominicans in the city was cheaper than a
scandal. We were given new names on taking our final vows, to symbolize the
shedding of our old selves. I took the name Giordano, though most people just
called me Bruno.

Naples in the summer of 1566 was an inferno of heat and
noise, dust and crowds; a city of heart-stopping beauty and casual violence. Two
hundred and fifty thousand souls seething inside ancient walls built to house one-tenth
that number, the tenements growing higher and higher, until their shadows
almost shut out the sun because land was scarce, so much of it taken up by the
vast gardens and courtyards of the palazzos and the religious houses. Tensions
in the city streets brewed and boiled like the forces of the great volcano that
overshadowed them. Even walking from one side of a piazza to the other felt like
fighting through the front line of an advancing army: elbows and fists,
baskets, barrows, and hot, angry bodies jostling and shoving, trampling or
crushing one another. Horses and carts plowed through the heaving marketplaces while
the sun hammered down without pity and blazed back from walls of yellow tufa
stone or from the flashing blades of knives drawn in exchanges of rich,
inventive cursing. The Neapolitans discharged the tension by fighting or
fucking, often at the same time. Soldiers of the Spanish viceroy patrolled the
streets, though whether their presence imposed order or fueled the general air
of aggression depended on your view of our Spanish overlords. It was a city stinking
of hypocrisy: Kissing in public was illegal, but courtesans were permitted to
walk the streets openly, looking for business even in the churches (especially
in the churches). Blasphemy was also punishable by law, but beggars, vagrants,
and those without work were allowed to starve in the streets, their bodies
rounded up each night on carts and thrown into a charnel-house outside the
walls before they could spread contagion. Thieves, assassins, and whores
thrived and prospered there and, naturally, so did the Church.

In the midst of this simmering human soup stood the
magnificent basilica of San Domenico Maggiore, where the faithful could worship
the wooden crucifix that had once spoken aloud to St. Thomas Aquinas. San Domenico
was one of the wealthiest religious houses in the city; the local barons all
sent their superfluous younger sons there as a bribe to God, and many of my
brothers dressed and strutted like the young lords they still felt themselves
to be, keen to preserve the distinction of degree despite their vows. The
deprivations of religious life were interpreted here with considerable lassitude;
it must have been well known to the prior and his officials that a number of
the novices had copied keys to a side gate and often slipped out into the heat
of the city streets at night, but I never saw anyone punished for it, provided
they were back in time for Matins. Drinking, dicing, whoring — sins such as
these were straightforward, easy to overlook in young noblemen with high
spirits. It was sins of thought that the authorities could not countenance. In
its favor, I should say that San Domenico prized other qualities than birth: It
was famed as the intellectual heart of Naples, and a mere soldier’s son like me
might be admitted at the Order’s expense if he showed enough promise as a
scholar.

By early September, the city had grown heavy and slow,
exhausted by the ferocity of the long summer’s heat; people barely made the
effort to curse as you pushed past them. There was a sense of apprehension,
too; the previous autumn had brought a season of thick fogs off the sea carrying
the contagion of fever, and the epidemic had infected half the city. I had
taken my final vows and been admitted to the Order in the spring, despite some
misgivings on the part of the novice master, who confided to the prior that Fra
Giordano Bruno had trouble submitting to authority and a taste for difficult
questions. During my novitiate, I had shown aptitude for my studies in the
natural sciences, and the prior had set me to work for a while as assistant to
Fra Gennaro, the brother
infirmarian
, in the belief that vigorous practical
tasks — measuring, chopping, and distilling remedies, helping to cultivate and
harvest the plants used to make them, as well as tending to the ailments of
those brothers confined to the infirmary — would occupy my mind and curb my willfulness.
In this, he was mistaken; the more I learned about the natural world, its
correspondences and hidden properties, the more my questions multiplied, for it
seemed to me that our understanding of Creation, handed down from antiquity
through the Scriptures and the Church Fathers, did not stand up to the most
elementary scrutiny and observation. Fra Gennaro regarded my questions with
forbearance and a hint of dry humor; for the most part he proved an attentive
audience, if noncommittal, while I formulated my doubts and theories aloud. Only
rarely did he reprimand me when I overstepped the bounds of what he judged a
God-given hunger for knowledge. Few of the other friars would have shown such
tolerance.

Fra Gennaro had studied medicine and anatomy at the famous
medical school in Salerno. He had wished to become a doctor and eventually a
professor, but some years earlier his family’s fortunes had shifted for the
worse, obliging him to leave the university and offer his skills in God’s
service. It was not the worst blow Fate could have dealt him — he was granted
considerable freedom to further his medical knowledge in his new role, though I
understood there was some dispute with the prior over the morality of using
certain Arabic texts — but it was not the life he had aspired to and, though he
never voiced this, I sensed in him a restlessness, a wistful longing for his
old world. He was barely forty, but to me, at eighteen, he appeared to possess
a wealth of knowledge and wisdom that I yearned toward — and not all of it
sanctioned. In his heart, he was a man of science, and a Dominican only
incidentally, as I felt myself to be; perhaps this accounted for the
instinctive affinity that quickly grew between us.

I was skulking through the darkened cloister one starless
night in the first week of September, clouds sagging overhead like wet plaster
and a warm, sickly wind sighing in off the bay, when I glimpsed him on the far
side of the courtyard, his arms bundled full of linen. He was heading not to the
infirmary but toward the gardens, in the direction of the outbuildings and
storehouses at the furthest extremity of the compound, where the high enclosing
wall backed on to a busy thoroughfare. Something in his bearing caught my
attention — his unusual haste, perhaps, or the way he walked with his head down,
leaning forward, as if into a gale. Though I risked punishment for being out of
my cell at that hour, I called out to him, curious to know what he was about.
If he heard me, he gave no sign of it, though I knew my voice must have
carried. Instead, he kept his eyes fixed on the ground ahead as he hurried
through an archway and disappeared.

I hesitated in the shadows, hoping I would not run into the
watch brothers. They made a tour of the cloisters shortly after Compline to
confirm that everyone was tucked up in his cell and observing silence during
the few hours of sleep, then retired somewhere more comfortable until their
second circuit just before the bell chimed for Matins at two o’clock. If they
knew of the nightly exodus through the side gate in the garden wall, they were
practiced at looking the other way. But for a friar like me, with no family
influence to consider and a growing reputation for disobedience, it would be a
mistake to be caught. I could easily find myself a scapegoat for those they did
not dare to discipline too harshly.

The air hung close, heavy with the scent of night blooms and
a faint aroma of roasting meat from beyond the walls. Through the silence, I
caught the soft murmur of conversation drifting from the dormitory behind me,
the occasional burst of laughter, the chink of Murano goblets. Fra Donato
entertaining his fellow aristocrats, I supposed. The wealthier friars — those
for whom the Church was a political career built on contacts and greased palms
like any other — often held private suppers at night in their richly furnished
rooms. As with the nocturnal excursions, the watch brothers remained tactfully
deaf and blind to this.

Footsteps echoed behind me on the flagstones across the
cloisters, over the low whisper of voices. There was no time to determine
whether they were friend or foe; I slipped quickly along the corridor and
through the archway where I had seen Fra Gennaro disappear. Here, behind the
convent’s grand courtyards, the grounds were laid out to gardens with an
extensive grove of lemon trees. A path followed the line of the boundary wall,
toward the side gate. If you continued past the gate to the far side of the
trees, you reached a scattering of low buildings: grain houses, storerooms, the
saddlery and stables. Beyond these lay a whitewashed dormitory of two stories,
where the convent servants slept.

Without a moon, there was no hope of seeing which direction
Fra Gennaro had taken, though if I strained my ears hard, I thought I could
make out a distant rustling ahead among the lemon trees. The obvious
explanation was that he must be attending to one of the servants who had fallen
sick — but my curiosity was still piqued by his furtive manner and his pretense
of not having heard my call.

Like every other novice, I had learned to navigate the path
from the outer cloister to the gate in pitch darkness, feeling my way and
calculating distance from the scents of the garden and the recognition of
familiar landmarks under my feet and fingers: the twisted stalk of the vine
that grew up the wall at the point where the lemon grove began; the slight
downward incline as the path neared the gate. The footsteps persisted at my
back, crunching on the hard earth. I moved off the path and into the shelter of
the trees as two figures approached, fearing I had been discovered by the
watch. But they paused a short distance away, and I retreated further into the
dark as I caught the wavering light of a taper hovering between them. Urgent
whispers followed the scraping of metal against metal; I heard the creak of the
gate and a gentle click as it closed again behind them. Novices or young friars
heading out to the Cerriglio, the tavern two streets away, for a brief gulp of
the city air before the Matins bell called them back to piety. I craned my neck
and looked up through the leaves, wishing I could see the moon; I had no idea
how late it was.

The gardens were unfamiliar to me beyond the side gate, and
I stumbled my way through the lemon trees, unsure if I was even moving in the
right direction, my arms held up to protect my eyes from the scratching
branches. After some while I emerged into open ground and could just make out
the bulk of a row of buildings ahead. A horse whinnied softly out of the dark
and I tensed; grooms slept above the stables and would be awakened by any
disturbance. Holding my breath, I edged my way toward the storehouses and stood
stupidly, looking around. Had Fra Gennaro come this way? Most likely he was
already in the servants’ dormitory, tending to some ordinary sprain or burn.
How foolish I would look, lurking here in the shadows as if I were spying on
him.

Minutes passed, and I was debating whether to knock at the
servants’ quarters when I heard the muted creak of a door from one of the
outbuildings behind me. A hooded figure slipped out and set down a pail at his
feet. I heard the jangle of a key in a padlock, though it was clear he was
trying to make as little noise as possible. A cone of light slid back and forth
across the ground from the lantern in his hand. From his height I was certain
it was the infirmarian, though I waited until he was almost upon me before
stepping into his path.

“Fra Gennaro.”

“
Dio porco!
” He jumped back as if he had been
assaulted, stifling his cry with his fingers as the pail clattered to the
ground.

“I’m sorry — I didn’t mean to startle you.” I moved closer,
pulling back the hood of my cloak.

“Fra Giordano?” He peered at me through the darkness, his
breathing ragged in the still air. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”

“I wanted to offer my help.”