Galileo's Dream (39 page)

He followed himself out into the garden. The world became as it was as it was. The day would be what it had always been. Sun struck the back of his neck. The great Saint Augustine had also felt this
pseudoiterative feeling, he would notice in his desperate reading. Had the deepest of all the Christian philosophers also had an encounter with the stranger? No one else Galileo knew had ever written about time the way Augustine did:

That was right there in
The Confessions
, Book XI. Augustine made no conclusions in the long feverish chapter that held his meditation on time, but only confessed to his own confusion. Of course he was confused, and so was Galileo. These thoughts had always been there, and now he read them just after they generated themselves spontaneously in his head. It gave him a headache to read like that.

But in the garden he would sit still, and think. It was possible, there, to collapse all the potentialities to a single present. This moment had a long duration. Such a blessing; he could feel it in his body, in the sun and air and earth sustaining him. Blue sky overhead—it was the part of the rainbow that was always visible, stretching all the way across the dome of sky. Sitting there, he knew he would go back inside and eat, and try to write to Castelli. He was going to shit without shitting his guts out his second asshole. It was going to hurt. He would be standing at the edge of his field at sunset, watching the last light burnish the tops of the ripe barley, praying for the consolation of the sky. There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future. He would precede and follow his own footsteps. It would happen later, as he had already seen. It had already happened, as he would see later.
Finally, one spring morning just after sunrise, Galileo roared furiously from his bedroom. What inspired his defiance of the pseudoiterative no one knew, and to him it was still just a matter of obeying the compulsion of the now; but after the trembling happy boys had helped him to dress, cringing at his every move, each of which looked like the start of a blow, which they would have welcomed to see even as they dodged, he hobbled out to the narrow terrace that overlooked Florence in the valley below them to the north. Down there the Duomo stood above the sea of tile rooftops like something from a different world, bigger and more geometrical. Like a little moon come down to earth, or like the clouds rafting over it.

Over his shoulder he growled to La Piera, “Bring me breakfast. Then have the boys move my desk out here. No doubt I have letters to catch up on. I'll just have to follow myself out there and work through it. Hopefully it will feel like being a scribe making copies. Someone else can do the thinking.”

Everyone in Bellosguardo ignored his grousing, pleased by his actions. The maestro had returned to life—surly life, it was true, ill-tempered, whining life—but better than the miserable limbo of the winter. He would spend much of the next few weeks writing fifteen or twenty letters a day; it always happened that way when he snapped out of his funks. He was sick so often that even his recovery period was a ritual they all knew.

“Send me Cartophilus,” he said to La Piera, when she brought out food and wine at the end of a long day of scribbling and cursing.

When he had finished eating, staring at each biscuit and capon leg as if it were entirely new to him, the ancient servant stood before him.

Galileo surveyed him wearily. “Tell me more about déjà vu.”

“There isn't much to say. It's a French term, obviously. The French language has always been very analytical and precise about mental states, and they will work out these terms. Déjà vu is the feeling something has happened before.
Presque vu
is the feeling that you almost understand something, usually something important, but you don't quite.”

“I feel that all the time.”

“But mystically, I mean. A really big existential tip of the tongue moment.”

“Pretty often, even so. I feel like that pretty often.”

“And
then jamais vu is
a sudden loss of comprehension of anything, even just the ordinary day.”

“I've felt that too,” Galileo said thoughtfully. “I've felt all of those.”

“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.

“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.