Galileo's Dream (44 page)

“Please. Self-pity is simply the reverse side of bravado, and just as
unconvincing. That's something you never seemed to learn. You lived a life of privilege that you took for granted. You started with a little bit of privilege and leveraged it upward, that's all.”

“I worked like a donkey!”

“Not really. There
were
people who worked like donkeys—literally, in that they were porters and carried burdens for their living—but you weren't one of them. Let's see what your own mind tells you about that.”

Roughly she put the helmet on his head, and he did not really resist her. Where in his lost life would he return to?

With an odd look, perhaps of pity, almost of affection, a kind of indulgent
amorevolezza
that was very affecting to see in someone so
amore-vole
, so lovely, she reached out to touch him on the side of the head.

It was midsummer, very hot and humid, and the Count da Trento had invited Galileo's colleague Bedini to his villa in Costozza, in the hills above Vincenza. Galileo, recently arrived in Padua with the entirety of his worldly possessions in a single trunk, had been introduced to everyone by Pinelli, over wine in Pinelli's library of eighty thousand volumes. Bedini and Pintard were two of these new friends, and now, courtesy of Bedini's noble friend, they were off to the hills together.

At the Villa Costozza, they joined their convivial host and did just what they would have done at home—eating and drinking, talking and laughing, while the count opened bigger and bigger bottles of wine, until they were hoisting fiascos and balthazars and small casks, and had eaten most of three geese, along with condiments, fruits, cheeses, and a great number of pies. And all on a day so hot that even here in the hills they were sweating greasily.

Finally the count was overcome, and staggered off to vomit like a Roman. The young professors groaned at the prospect, feeling stronger than that. It seemed if they jumped in one of the villa's fountains or pools, they could immerse themselves to cool their stomachs and slow their bile. When he returned, the Count shook his head groggily as they proposed this. “I have something even better,” he said, and led them to a back room on the ground floor, where the villa had been dug into the hillside. In this room, the plaster wall did not meet the marble floor, and out of the black gap between wall and floor
flowed a cold humid breeze, making the whole room as cool as an ice pantry. “It's always like this,” the count mumbled, still gasping a little from his vomiting. “There's a little spring somewhere down there. Please, be my guest. On days like this I simply lie on the floor. See, here are some pillows. I would join you, but I fear I must retire again,” and he stumbled off.

Laughing at him, the three drunk young men pulled off their clothes, groaning and joking and elbowing each other, and arranged the pillows as bedding and fell on them with happy moans and snorts. And there in the cool relief, after sliding right onto the marble and oohing and aahing like pigs in mud, all three of them fell asleep.

Galileo was hauled out of an ugly red dream by the count and his servants. “Signor Galilei! Domino Galilei, please! Wake up!”

“Qua—? Qua—?”

His mouth would not form words. He could not focus his eyes. They were dragging him by the arms over the rough floor, and he felt his butt scraping over flagstones as from a great distance, while hearing someone else's groans. He wanted to speak, but couldn't. The groans were his. Looking up as if from the bottom of a well, he felt a nausea so deep that it seemed if he vomited he would throw up his bones. Someone nearby was groaning in a truly heartrending way. Ah—he himself again. It was frigidly cold….

When he came to again, the anxious count and his retainers surrounded him as if looking down into his grave. “Signor, it's good to have you back,” the count said solemnly. “Something made you three very sick. I have no idea what it could have been. The air out of the hill is usually very fresh, and all the food and wine was checked, and seemed fine to the servants. I don't know what could have happened. I'm so sorry!”

“Bedini?” Galileo said. “Pintard?”

“Bedini has died. I'm so sorry to tell you. It's really a mystery. Pintard is in a state like yours. He has roused a couple of times, but is now fallen into a catalepsy again. We are keeping him warm and dripping some spirits into his mouth, as we did with you.”

Galileo could only gag. He too could have died. Death, the fundamental nausea. He felt the horror of it, then the terror.

Hera's big white face. She stared into his eyes. “You could have died right there.”

“I almost did. I was never right again.”

“Yes. Almost died of an excess of privilege.”

“Of poisoned air!”

“The poisoned air of a rich man's villa. You ate yourself sick, you drank yourself into a stupor. And it wasn't the first time, or even the hundredth. While your women drudged and starved, had the babies and raised the children and did all the real work, the work that's work. Your own partner, the one you had children with, she didn't even know how to read, isn't that what you said? Didn't know how to add or subtract? What kind of a life is that?”

“I don't know.”

“You did know.”

She reached out. Touched him on the forehead.

When Marina told him she was pregnant he first only stared at her, looking like one of the boxed fish in the market. Part of him was pleased; he was thirty-six years old, and had been with 248 women, if his count was right, and none had ever reported to him that he had gotten her pregnant. Of course they had their ways, and some of the regulars made you hood the rooster, but still he had had reason to wonder if he were sterile. It could make sense that he was like a mule, in that his father had mated with some kind of gorgon. Not that the lack of children bothered him, given the women and children already underfoot everywhere in his household, screeching for his attention. But it was nice to know one was normal, like any other healthy animal or plant. In his garden everything flourished, and so he should too in his way.

But it was a bit of an embarrassment as well. Here he was angling to become the tutor of the little Medici, one of his best chances of improving his patronage and getting back to Florence, and yet nothing had proceeded there yet, and it was not going to be any kind of help if people said Oh Galilei, he got his Venice girl pregnant, a fishmarket puttella, a Carnivale puttana who can't even read. Her fine qualities would only make them nod their heads knowingly and conclude Galileo had lost his head—that his cock led his fate, that he was not
really a courtier, that he was a bit of a drunken obnoxious fool. And of course his enemies said that every time his name came up. It was not that hard of a case to make.

All this passed through his mind in less than a second. He sat her down on the edge of the Grand Canal, on the steps of the Riva de' Sette Martiri, and said, “I'll care for the child, and for you too, of course. La Collina will be made the godmother, and Mazzoleni the godfather, and I'll set you all up in a house near mine in Padua. You'll move there.”

“Ah yeah.”

Her mouth had turned down into a bitter cast that he had never seen before. It had a swoop like a gull's wing. He was leaving her, so she was leaving him—this was what her look said.

She sat there holding her belly. She was (he suddenly saw) starting to show. A bit pale and sweaty, perhaps with morning sickness. She nodded, looking down at the trash floating on the canal, thinking her own thoughts. She gave him another sidelong look, sharp as glass under a fingernail.

Then she looked away, roused herself. She was realistic, a smart girl. She knew how things went. That he was going to support her and the child was perhaps even as much as she had been hoping for. Although one always hopes for more than one hopes for, as he well knew. And they had been in love. So he felt a little flash of vertigo as he watched her slip away. Things would never be the same, he could see that already. But there was no other choice for him. He had to get patronage, he had to work. So this was the way it had to be. He would have to cheer her up.

But that look. In his voluminous Catalogue of Bad Looks, this one was perhaps the worst. A whole life ended there.

“It all could have been different,” Hera said. Black space, her white face, bilious Jupiter crawling above them. The stars.

“I know,” Galileo said, subdued. Marina was dead now, a ghost from his past, and yet there she had sat, on the fondamente in his mind, as vivid as Hera herself. The two were not that dissimilar in some ways.

“You made your children illegitimate. The son without prospects, the girls unable to marry.”

“I knew I could put the girls in a convent. They're better off there.”

She merely looked at him.

“All right, then,” Galileo said, “send me back earlier than that! You want me to change the,
the fire
—let me change this too!”

“I don't think so.”

“Because you need my science! You don't want me to go back and change my life in a way that will damage my work. You see? I had to do it!”

“You could have done both.”

He held his head in his hands, felt the celatone on him like a condemned man's hood. “So what's the point? Why do you torture me like this?”

“You need to understand.”

He snorted. “You mean I need to have my nose rubbed in my mistakes. I lived with a prostitute, it wrecked everything. You make me feel like shit! How does that help me?”

“You need to understand,” she repeated, relentless as Atropos. “Look again. You have to keep looking. This is the essence of Mnemosyne's physic. In the nothingness which extends behind you, the blackness that you call the past, there are certain luminous points, isolated and discrete. Fragments of your former life that have survived the loss of the rest. Behind you then is not blackness, but a starlit blackness, constellated into a meaning. Without that constellation, there is no chance of a meaningful reality in your present. The living force of those small fires you are discovering make you whatever you are. They constitute a sort of continuous creation of yourself, of the being you are by way of the being you have been. Those crucial moments, unachieved in their time, are entangled with the present always, and when you remember them, they give birth to something that is then achieved, that is your only reality. So look now. Look at your work. First—hmmm—let us look at it in the light of your relations with Marina.”

She touched his head.

Belasario Vinta came to him and asked him to do a horoscope for the Grand Duke Ferdinando, who was sick. Galileo was both pleased and nervous. The gratuity would come in handy, and the Medicis were his
best chance for patronage. Grand Duchess Christina was already almost in hand, having asked him to teach mathematics to her son Cosimo, Ferdinando's heir. Galileo was not surprised when Vinta told him she was also the source of this new request. She was frightened.

Galileo had studied astrology, and it was precisely this that made him uneasy. Vinta stood there regarding him, waiting for his response.

“Of course,” he said. It wasn't a request one could refuse, as they both knew. “Tell His Serenity the
meraviglioso
that I am most deeply honored,
obbligatissimo
, and that I will attend to the matter directly. And give him my best wishes concerning his health. Has he considered consulting Acquapendente? I have been cured many times by that great doctor.”

“The Grand Duke has his own doctors, but thank you. How soon can he expect your horoscope?”

“Oh, let us say a week, or perhaps ten days—” As it was not the kind of thing that should be performed too quickly. “But in any case, as fast as I can.”

When Vinta was gone, without discussing remuneration at all, Galileo sat down heavily on a bench in his workshop.

It was a system that could be defended, if you granted its premises, which were probably true. Every event was the effect of some prior cause, everything moved in a woven tangle of cause and effect, which included of course the stars and planets. But unweaving the tangle was very difficult, and in that sense astrology was a doomed project, or at least quite radically premature, no matter its antiquity. But he could not say that to the Medici. And one could at least calculate the positions of the planets at the time of the subject's birth. Do what everyone else did.

He groaned and called out for a new folio, quills, ink, a dusty old ephemerides. Vinta had left a big packet of papers containing the grand duke's birth information.

For a long time he stared at all these things. He had paid sixty lire each for birth charts for the girls when they were born. He had only passed on one for Vincenzio because by then he could not afford it. He pulled the relevant tomes from the dusty top shelf on the back wall of the workshop. The basic text was Ptolemy himself: just as his
Almagest
covered all Greek astronomy, his
Tetrabiblios
described all their astrology. His description of celestial influences was derived from a
mix of philosophers: Zeno, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus … Archimedes made no appearance. There was no way to apply to this problem the mechanics of Galileo's hero.