Galileo's Dream (65 page)

She effervesced. She could not keep up with the pace of her thoughts. It was a wonder that her letters managed to hold their chain of thought together as well as they did, the act of writing being so much slower than the speed of her thinking. When Galileo found his own thoughts racing ahead of him like that, he tended to focus on individual words, fingering them like pebbles to slow himself down; but she did not. She had perhaps inherited some of Galileo's mental habits, along with her mother's imperious will; and all of that power had to be vented into the battered confines of San Matteo. It made him think of Ariosto's stanzas about the princess confined to a walnut shell and yet holding court there just as always. You could not help but love such a gift for sizing one's ambition in accordance to a real situation. He had never been able to do that.

Once, he stopped work on the gears and pulleys of their balky old clock to sketch out a possible plan for a pendulum-based clock, which would rely on a spring pushing at the very top of the swing to keep it going. A fine idea it seemed on first inspection; the potential force that was forged into a spring, making it a kind of weight always pushing sideways, would be all you would need for a clock that might run for years. When Maria Celeste came in he told her the idea and she laughed to see his face. She looked over his shoulder and asked about the column of numbers he had written beside one sketch of his plan, and he tried to tell her what he had been thinking about. She nodded her comprehension, and so he went on, and eventually came to his rule of falling bodies, and she looked startled at the very idea that there was a ratio of distance to time, in a way that brought a tear to his eye.

“Yes,” he confirmed. “The world works by mathematical rules. This is
much
more amazing than people usually seem to realize. Consider it—numbers are ideas, they are qualities in our minds that we abstract by looking at the world. So we see that we have two hands, and that
there are two sheep in the meadow, but we never see a two anywhere. It's not a thing but an idea, and therefore intangible. Like souls in this world. And then we teach each other some games we can play with these ideas—we see how you can add them together and get resulting numbers, as if adding sheep to the meadow. We see for instance that any number can be added to itself by its own number of selves, two twos, four fours, we call them squares because they can be put into squared patterns with the same number of sheep on each side, and we see how larger numbers multiplied by themselves grow larger than the previous number very quickly, and that this rapid growth also happens in a proportion. An interesting idea. It makes a nice pattern in the mind or on the page. Then we look at the world around us. We drop a ball and watch it fall to the ground. It seems to be speeding up as it falls, the eye tells us that much, and so we measure the falls in various ways, and lo and behold, we find that all things fall at the same speed, and that the distance that something falls increases by the square of the increase in the
time
of the fall—this quite precisely!—and despite the fact that time and distance seem to be such very different things. Why should it be so? Why should the ratio be so simple and neat? Why should the two be related at all? All we can say is, they are. Things fall by rules, acting the same always, and the rules are simple—or then later, not so simple. But the world moves by mathematical laws! The world is proportionate to itself across things as disparate as time and distance. How can it be?
“

“It can only be because God made the world that way.”

“Yes. God makes the world using mathematics, and He has given us minds that can see it. We can discover the laws He used! It is a
most beautiful thing
to witness and understand. It's prayer. It's more than prayer, it's a sacrament, a kind of communion. An apprehension—an epiphany—it's
seeing God
, while still in this body and in this world! How blessed we are, to be able to experience God like that. Who would not devote their time to understanding more, to seeing deeper into God's manner of thinking about these things?”

“Not I,” she said, looking at him fondly.

And then to feel God's goodness in the sun on his back, in the garden. He had a little rolling seat he could move about between the row of plants, with a groove in it for the bottom of his truss. His knees and
back got some relief as he sat on the cart and leaned down and pulled out weeds, feeling the dirt in his fingers. It was feeling the touch of God in the world, just as determining the proportion in nature was seeing the mind of God. He could not help wishing that Maria Celeste would be allowed to come up the lane to Il Gioièllo, to help La Piera around the house, and sit with him in his garden as he sat with her at the convent. He would have to try to arrange that. The new abbess could probably be convinced. Ah the blessed tumble of days.

But he was right to be afraid. Well, we always are. One day, a few months after his return, some tainted meat gave her the runs, and she had not enough flesh to hold water or give her extra strength when she needed it. The dysentery quickly wrung her dry twisting her insides so that she writhed with the pain of it, having already evacuated everything in her. She became parched and began to pass blood, and the various other internal liquids and viscosities that line the gut, and after that there was nothing to do but to sit by her on her bed and call for the other nuns to lift her up if she needed relief, retiring so as not to offend her modesty, returning as soon as he could to wipe her brow and give her citrons to suck on, and then to sit and see how much broth she could hold down, urging sips on her every time he could get her attention. In her fever she became delirious, and her lips cracked. Her body gave up squirming and she lay there breathing shallowly, not even sweating, her pulse faint, and by the fifth day, erratic.

Galileo sat there beside her and stared at the wall. Sarpi was dead, Sagredo was dead, Salviati was dead, Cesi was dead, Marina was dead, his sisters, his parents. The list went on. Cosimo. Cesarini. The Bible spoke of three score and ten, but so few got that, so few. It was a fallen world.

Hours passed pulse by pulse, breath by breath. Hours like weeks, days like months. There aren't enough things to think about during a time like that.

At the end of the fifth day he hauled himself to his feet and went outside to talk things over with the doctor who visited the convent, a man he had learned to trust more than most doctors. Now the man wiped his sweating pate and squinted with the distress of his news.
“It's gone too far,” he said. He clutched Galileo's arm as if it were his own daughter he was talking about. “She can't come back when she's this dried out.”

“How long?” Galileo said.

“A day, or less.”

“I'll come back as soon as I get some things. See that she receives the sacrament.”

“She already has. I'll walk you up to your place.”

He dragged himself up the village lane, already so familiar that it seemed the only lane he had ever known. At Il Gioièllo they found the gateway occupied by a little group of clerics from Florence, led by the local vicar of the Inquisition.

“What do you want?” Galileo demanded roughly.

The vicar drew himself up to indicate the importance of his pronouncement. “His Holiness the Pope forbids you to continue to petition the Holy Office in Florence for freedom of movement, or else you may be removed to your prison at the Holy Office in Rome.”

Galileo stared at him. Geppo and La Piera watched in horror from the yard; surely the maestro was about to erupt in one of his black furies, he would beat these prelates and then where would they be.

Finally Galileo said, “I have been trying to get permission to go into Florence to see my doctors.”

“You are forbidden to try.”

Galileo waved a hand and went inside without a word. We watched as the clerics conferred, red-faced, and then departed.

That night Galileo returned to the convent and sat by Maria Celeste, holding her cold hand. She was unconscious and barely breathing. For a while Arcangela came by and cried with her face in her apron and the crook of her elbow. She even smashed her face against Galileo's side and cried, without once looking at him. In the tenth hour of the night, after the bell for second matins, Maria Celeste died.

Thirty-three years old. The same age as Christ. A bride of Christ, his little saint, Santa Maria Celeste, now celestial indeed. If he had not made her a nun, if he had found her a husband and a dowry … The poor Clares were too poor; they died of their vows. She could have been raising his grandchildren and running Il Gioièllo, the saint of the jewel.

April 2, 1634.

Silence descended on the sleepless household. This silence was in such contrast to the howls and shrieks that always emerged from Galileo whenever he was sick or miserable, that no one in the household who heard it could believe it. Now they understood that those earlier histrionics had been like the roaring of a lion with a thorn in its foot, the roar of someone intent that no one should sleep when he could not. Nothing like that now. No sound from his closed room. It was acutely painful to the household to hear that silence, it rang in their ears like a blackness in the heart of everything. Please groan, they said to themselves, please shriek, please shout at the sky and curse the pope and even God, please beat us to within an inch of our lives, please, anything but this silence, which was so unbearable that they went into his room and served him impassively and then went outside and put their arms to the wall and sobbed; and in the soundless nights they huddled in the kitchen or curled on their beds, helplessly listening; and even I myself, ancient beyond all feeling and sanity, sick of everything in this world, even I wept. It would have been better for him if he had died in the fire.

A man riding high on Fortune's wheel
Cannot tell who really loves him
For his friends true and false stand side by side
And show him equal devotion.
But should he fall upon hard times
His crowd of flatterers will slip away.
Only the ones who love from the heart
Will stand by him when he is dead to the world.

—L
UDOVICO
A
RIOSTO
, “O
RLANDO
F
URIOSO
”

Here I live on in a silence, frequently paying visits to the neighboring convent, where I had two daughters who were nuns and whom I dearly loved, but the eldest in particular, who was a woman of exquisite mind and singular goodness, and very fond of me. She had suffered much from ill health during my absence, and had not paid enough attention to herself. At length dysentery came on, and she died after six days' illness, leaving me shattered and unable to speak. And by a sinister coincidence, on returning home from the convent, in company with the doctor who had just told me her condition was hopeless and that she would not survive the next day, as indeed came to pass, I found the Inquisitor's Vicar here, who informed me of a mandate from the Holy Office in Rome that I must desist from asking for grace or they would take me back to the actual prison of the Holy Office. From which I can infer that my present confinement is to be ended only by that other one which is common to all, most narrow, and enduring forever.

To another distant acquaintance he wrote:

I feel immense sadness and melancholy, together with extreme loss of appetite. Perpetual sleeplessness makes me afraid. I am hateful to myself, and continually hear my beloved daughter calling to me.