Galileo's Dream (64 page)

I
N
S
IENA, WHEN HE CAME OUT
of his syncope, he was shaking and white-faced. He stared up at Cartophilus, clutching him by the arm.

“I had a dream,” he gasped, confused. Trying to hold on to it. “I was stuck!” He stared up at Cartophilus as if from out of a deep well. From the bottom of that depth he said, “I am the sum of all possible Galileos.”

“No doubt of that,” the old servant said. “Here, maestro, drink a bit of this mulled wine. That was a hard one, I could tell.”

Galileo gulped down the wine. Then he fell asleep, and when he came to, he had forgotten that he had even experienced a syncope that night.

He was left with a very strange feeling, however. In his weekly letter to Maria Celeste he tried to describe it:
I am caught in the loops of these events, and thus crossed out of the book of the living
.

She replied in her usual encouraging way:
I take endless pleasure in hearing how ardently the Monsignor Archbishop perseveres in loving you and
favoring you. Nor do I suspect in the slightest that you are crossed out, as you say
, de libro vivendum.
No one is a prophet in his own country
.

Galileo shook his head as he read this. “No one is a prophet anywhere,” he said, looking out his window to the north, toward San Matteo. “And thank God for that. To see the future would be a most horrible curse, I am quite sure. Let me be not a prophet in my own country, but a scientist. I only want to be a scientist.”

But that was no longer possible. All that life was gone. He sat in the gardens in Siena now, but did not see anything. Piccolomini tried to interest him in more problems of motion and strength, but even those old friends did little to rouse him. He sat waiting for his mail. If Maria Celeste's letters didn't arrive when he expected them, he would cry. Some days he could barely be persuaded out of bed.

Around that same time, some of the Venetian spies reported that Piccolomini had been anonymously denounced to the pope. It was all still happening. The letter received at the Vatican said:
The Archbishop has been telling many people that Galileo was unjustly sentenced by this Holy Congregation, that he is the first man in the world, that he will live forever in his writings, even if they are prohibited, and that he is followed by all the best modern minds. And since such seeds sown by a prelate might bear pernicious fruit, I hereby report them
.

The identity of this Siena informer was never found out, although the priest Pelagi would have been a good guess. In any case, the campaign against Galileo clearly had not ended. Cartophilus, hearing of this secret denunciation when Buonamici came up from Rome to tell him about it, went that evening to Archbishop Piccolomini, and asked him in a shy way if the time might have come when Galileo could hope to be remanded to Arcetri. Piccolomini thought it might indeed be possible, and he took the old servant's hint that it could be a case of getting the old man home before he died. And Buonamici made sure that same night to convey his news of the secret denunciation to the archbishop's confessor, so that soon afterward Piccolomini would know of that danger too.

So he began to campaign for Galileo's return to Arcetri. This was the start of October 1633. He pretended not to know he himself had been denounced, of course, and intimated, in letters to people outside
the Vatican who would take the idea into the fortress, that confining Galileo to house arrest in Arcetri would be a more severe punishment than his relatively lavish and public situation in the archbishop's palazzo in Siena.

When Urban heard it put this way, people said, he agreed to the plan. In early December a papal order came to Siena: Galileo was to be removed to Arcetri, there to be confined to house arrest.

Piccolomini himself took this news to Galileo, beaming with pleasure for his old teacher, whom he feared had gone a long way toward permanently losing his mind. A reunion with his girls would surely help. “Teacher, the news has come from Rome, the Sanctissimus has blessed you with permission to return to your home and family, God be praised.”

Galileo was truly startled. He sat down on his bed and wept, then stood and embraced Piccolomini. “You saved me,” he said. “Now you are one of my angels. I have so many of them.”

He did indeed. So many, stepping onto the stage from nowhere: the people who helped him, the crowd who tried to do him harm. Any event in history that gets more crowded the longer you look at it—that's the sign of a contested moment, a crux that will never stop changing under your gaze. The gaze itself entangles you, and you too are one of the changes in that moment.

On the day of his departure from Siena, a strong wind poured over them from the hills to the west, tossing the last leaves on the trees in a wild flight. Galileo was hugged by several well-wishers, and when he finally embraced the little archbishop, he lifted him up. When he set him down and stepped back, wiping his eyes and shaking his head, Piccolomini held him by the arm to help him up into the carriage. Galileo's gray hair and beard streamed in the wind, as did the banners over the palace, and the clouds. Birds wheeled overhead. Galileo stopped to look around, gestured at the spectacle, stomped on the ground. “It still moves!” he said.
“Eppur si muove!”

Later Piccolomini told the story of Galileo's parting remark to his brother, Ottavio Piccolomini; who, later still, when living in Spain, commissioned the painter Murillo to paint a painting to commemorate his brother's tale. Murillo depicted the scene as taking place
before the Inquisition itself, Galileo pointing at the wall over the congregation, where fiery letters spelled out
Eppur si muove
. In this way, and by word of mouth, the story was passed on. At some point the painting's story became the one people told, and later still it must have been regarded as too blasphemous to show, and its canvas was folded and reframed so that the inscribed wall was hidden from view. It only came back to light when the painting was cleaned, many years later. But all the while people kept telling the tale, of Galileo's sidelong defiance of his persecutors, his muttered riposte to the ages. It was true even though it wasn't.

The carriage took only two days to bring Galileo to Arcetri and the gates of Il Gioièllo. All the household was standing there to greet him, with Geppo jumping in front and La Piera standing impassively at the rear. He had been gone eleven months.

He levered himself out of the carriage, stood with the help of a hand on Geppo's shoulder, groaned as he straightened up. “Take me to San Matteo,” he said.

I
T WAS A SHOCK TO SEE
how much thinner Maria Celeste had become in his absence. She had driven herself hard those eleven months, running the convent and also helping to take care of Il Gioièllo. Geppo had fallen ill, and afterward suffered a truly noxious skin rash; Maria Celeste had cured it with a salve of her own devise. She had authorized for La Piera the extra spending needed to get through a three-month flour shortage, and late in that bad time had instructed the housekeeper to shut down the house's oven and get their bread from the convent, setting the price at eight quattrini a loaf. She never ate unless everyone else had.

As a result of all this she was skinnier than ever. No doubt her incessant worry about Galileo had also had its effect. She had tried to help him with his trial, which from her position was a little futile, but she had written repeatedly to Caterina Niccolini, asking her to petition a particular sister-in-law of the pope to intercede. Pursuing these chains of female influence, which were everywhere even though invisible to the men and to the history books, may or may not have helped his cause; it was even possible this had been the crucial intervention, and Caterina the architect of the strategy that got Galileo out of Rome alive. But there was no way to tell from outside that network. In one
of her last letters to him before his return, Maria Celeste had mentioned her efforts, saying of them,
I know, as I freely admit to you, that these are poorly drawn plans, yet still I would not rule out the possibility that the prayers of a pious daughter could outweigh even the protection of great personages
.

She went on to address another matter brought up in his last letter, one of his feeble attempts at a joke in such dismal circumstances:

So the women in his life had joked with him, teased him back when he teased them, sent their love in the rough
buffa
style that he liked best—Maria Celeste's burst of temper like something out of Marina herself, back in the day. Question my love and I'll beat the shit out of you! This
amorevolezza
had given him heart in a bad time.

Now, as he stood there before her in the convent, she collapsed in his arms and wept. Even Arcangela, looking down to the side, sidled up and touched him briefly on the arm. Galileo touched her back, on the shoulder, gently, then seized up Maria Celeste and lifted her in a hug, kissed away her tears of joy. She was like a bird in his hands, he too wept to feel her lightness. “My little Virginia,” he said into her ribs, shocked and afraid.

In the weeks following his homecoming, he devoted himself to the sisters at the convent. Arcangela reverted to her usual distance; she looked away whenever he spoke to her. She too was more gaunt and angular than ever. Uneasily Galileo tried yet again to befriend her, this time with bits of candied fruit, in the way you would tame a crow; and she would duck her head and snatch the food and drift away.

Meanwhile Maria Celeste talked incessantly, as if to make up for lost time; and though Galileo knew that time lost could never be regained, he indulged her happily. It was good to be home again, and responsible for real things—for physical objects, not only for the ovens and chimneys and windows and roofs of his own house, but also for the ramshackle convent of the Clares, which at this point was nearing a material collapse to match the mental collapse long since suffered.

So he spent many days inside the place, the old prohibition against men's presence long forgotten. He measured beams for the servants to cut, and augured in the peg holes and hammered in the pegs himself. What joy to pop a dovetail into place like a key in a lock. Theorems you could hit with a hammer. With materials less prone to rot he could have made a roof that would hold off rain for a thousand years. But lead was expensive, and cedar too; pine shakes would have to do.

There weren't so many chores to accomplish in his garden. It had been tended closely by La Piera, as being one of the things that kept them alive. Now there was little to do except decide on which varieties of cedros and lemons to put in the broken wine casks that had been cut in half for use as tubs.

Then San Matteo came into an agricultural inheritance. “First your prayer was answered and then mine!” Galileo said to Maria Celeste. The elder brother of Suor Clarice Burci had left the sisters a farm at Ambrogiana worth five thousand scudi. Maria Celeste estimated it would yield them annually 290 bushels of wheat, fifty barrels of wine, and seventy sacks of millet. “It was my prayer too, believe me,” she replied with a dark expression. “My ten thousand prayers.” Burci had attached a farm crew to the bequest, as well as an obligation to the nuns to say a mass for him every day for the next four hundred years, and to absolve him three times a year for the next two hundred years. That was fine, but the land had been neglected and was now nearly wild, crew or no.

It was something Galileo could do, and he threw himself into it. To
be able to get one's hands on a problem and strangle it was a very satisfying thing. Clever engineering could do a lot. Once he was pacing the floor of the dining hall, considering a difficult problem in counterbalancing, and a nun got in his way. He explained to her very firmly that she shouldn't do that, that he was fixing the roof, and afterward she told all the other nuns, “He fixes things by thinking about them!” And indeed, when he was done thinking about the new farm, the nuns would have reliable sustenance at last. It was what he had been hoping for when he had asked Maria Celeste about a benefice from the new pope. He should not have asked her, he realized now, but merely requested the land grant he had been thinking of.

Now they had it, and he stumped across the neglected winter field, under low pewter skies, bark-ringing the midsized trees already overgrowing the pasture, then cutting down the smaller ones with hard awkward swipes of his ax, swinging as if taking off the heads of certain Dominicans, Jesuits, Benedictines, and professors. He was an executioner of trees. At age seventy, and despite his truss, he could still strike harder than most of the boys, and his shout on impact was the loudest by far. It was very satisfying. He would bring this farm into production and give them a sustenance. “Things occur in their own time,” he said.

He wished he could help Maria Celeste in the same kind of way. She had pulled her teeth out as they rotted, and now had nearly none, but was at least free from infections of the jaw. But the lack of teeth could not be good for her digestion. He contrived some rending devices for mashing meats, scavenging bits of an old framework of one of the inclined planes with a bitter smile. There was more than one way to chew on reality.

The workshop was much reduced. It was only a small room stuffed with tools and machinery and beams and metal rods and slats. Mazzoleni was ancient and shriveled and slept most of the time, even though he was in fact four years younger than Galileo himself. Of course Galileo was beyond ancient at this point. But Mazzoleni had perhaps been a bit baked in the head by his many hours in the Venetian sun, and next to the fumes of furnaces. His brains had dried out a little, though he still had his cracked cheery grin, the sight of which now sent a stab through Galileo, who recalled so clearly what it used to mean.

So, he did what he could to help Maria Celeste to eat, and worked on the convent, and their farm, and the garden of Il Gioièllo. When he was tired of the garden he went to the workshop and paged through his dusty old folios, making lists of propositions for the book he was now thinking of writing.

This was another good idea that Piccolomini had been inspired to recommend to Galileo: to go through his old experiments and write a book that had nothing to do with Copernicus or the heavens—a book that instead gave to the world what he had learned about local motion, and the strength of materials. He had started one dialogue while still in Siena, using Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio as his speaking characters again, in an obvious act of defiance, even insolence, as he himself recognized with some pleasure. He could decide to keep the names or not, if it ever came to the point of publishing. He would never be allowed to publish anything anyway, at least in Italy, or anywhere the pope held sway. But there were Protestant acquaintances who might be interested. In any case that was not the point. So sometimes he worked on adding new pages to the dialogue.

But the main project was Maria Celeste. He had seen a lot of women's bodies in his younger days, and like everyone else, he had seen a lot of people sicken and die. And so each day he walked down the lane that was the main street of Arcetri to the convent, and met her at the gate and kissed her cheeks and lifted her up, as if weighing her, as she once observed—and it was true. And each day therefore his stomach clenched, and he thought about the food on hand that could be made attractive that day. Of course for the most part he needed to be providing for all the nuns equally, so it had to be a matter of some bulk, usually something that could be made into a thirty-bowl soup. These soups were often pretty thin gruel, and they usually poured their wine in to give it a little more body. Maria Celeste complained of a cold stomach, and he could well believe it, as she had no fat on her. And so soups were always good. Galileo had suffered so much disease in his life that he knew all the signs of it, and knew what they meant; and so, watching her, although he threw himself into every day, he too always suffered a bit of a cold stomach, chilled by the fear in him. Even the sun beating on him in the garden could not warm that part. In her letters during his time away, she had written of her fear that she would not live long enough to see him return, and she was not the type to exaggerate
fears, or even to speak of them. So it had been a true feeling. He knew how that felt, to sense that the end could be near; he had felt it himself more than once, and it was unmistakable. It marked you. And in her closeness to him she had not hesitated to write to him and let him know what she was feeling.

Well, this was life. You never really escape this fear. Once long before he had written,

Easy to say, when you're healthy. But healthy or not, it was still true.

As the days passed, he got used to her new gauntness. It was just the way she looked. She was as rapid and talkative as ever, like some finch turned into a woman, always babbling on about anything and everything, much as she had in her letters, but now it was music too—as if her letters had been only sheet music, written so that he could imagine her saying it all in his head, but only in the same way he could hear his father's old melodies by looking at the sheet music he had left behind. Being in the presence of the musician herself, as she sang the music of her thoughts aloud in the air, was an entirely different thing. He soaked it up like sunlight, like church music. It was Kepler's ridiculous music of the spheres, immanent in the world. Her brown eyes burned like Marina's had. Her skin tone was a little hectic, the cold stomach notwithstanding. She acted hot. There were a lot of ways in which she resembled Marina.

In the tumble of days he watched her flitting around the convent, talking all the while. “The cedros aren't dry enough to candy yet, and one of them has mold so I'm afraid if it rains we'll lose them all, and there's thirty scudi lost to the carpenter who tried to fix the door, Father, you will look at that door's lower hinge, won't you? Look at it. I said your penitential psalms for you, by the way, so you don't have to
think of that. Suor Francesca, please, don't peel those here it will only make more work for Suor Luisa later, move over here if you would, that's right, you're a good soul, come with me Father, let's sit in the garden and pick the lemons while it's still cool—” and out there, while they picked, under a blue sky and tall puffy white clouds, she would enumerate every quattrini then available to them, this time in the hope of calculating if they had enough to make a first payment on two dozen blankets.