‘It doesn’t have a title page,’ Pierce said.
He thought he knew, though, what title it might have been intended to have; what title he, as editor, would be tempted to give it. He thought: there is not only more than one history of the world, one for each of us who studies it; there is more than one for each of us, there are as many as we want or need, as many as our heads and wanting hearts can make.
Rosie put her head into the room. ‘Ready?’ she said.
‘I won’t go in with you just yet,’ she told Pierce as they went toward Stonykill.
‘No?’
‘I’ve got another house to break into,’ Rosie said. ‘Some errands. I’ll drop you off, and come back.’
In rain, Stonykill was hangdog, exposed and unhappy-looking. Someone stood by the gas pumps of the little store, under the sagging marquee, wiping the drops from his spectacles. ‘Anyway,’ Rosie said. ‘You know what you’re looking at in there. I don’t.’
‘Maybe yes,’ Pierce said, ‘maybe no.’
They coasted to a stop at Kraft’s barred drive, and for a moment sat in silence looking out the rain-speckled windows toward the shuttered house and the dark pines. ‘You know,’ Rosie said, ‘in his autobiography? Kraft said he wanted to write just one last book.’
‘Yes?’
‘He says: a book he could die before finishing.’
‘And when,’ Pierce asked, ‘was it that he died?’
‘Oh six years ago. I think. About 1972.’
‘Oh. Hm.’
‘Why?’
‘Nothing, really. I was just thinking about this book, coming to be. I suppose it could have been in the works for a while. And then abandoned. I was just wondering.’
Rosie extracted the key to Kraft’s kitchen from her ring, and gave it to Pierce; he opened the great door of the wagon and put out first his black umbrella, which Rosie had laughed at when she had seen him with it; he in turn had claimed to think it was funny that no one around here had any use for umbrellas, and dashed through the rain bareheaded, a matter of pride it seemed.
‘See ya.’
‘I won’t be long,’ Rosie said.
The umbrella popped open. ‘Automatic,’ Pierce said.
She watched him step long-legged over the gate and walk the drive, avoiding puddles. His city mac was rumpled and gray.
She could have had him, yesterday, on Fellowes Kraft’s satin sheets; only he seemed for some reason too stunned to participate. And Rosie had not pushed it.
She looked behind her, as best she could, and before her, and made a wide and clumsy U-turn. Bye, Pierce.
What had happened was that as she stood with him in the dim bedroom, she had felt herself, all in a moment, forgetting why you did this, seduced people, got into their pants. She just forgot; it vanished from her. And so she gave it up.
She might get him yet, of course. Not a warmth but a weird coldness went through her to think of it, the wrong tap turned on.
The house she had lived in with Mike lay on the other side of the wide township of Stonykill, the newest side: a flight of broad terraces, unwooded and windswept, upon which two-and-a-half-story houses were being built, all alike except that some were mirror images of the others, reversed left to right, and some turned front to back; for variety. It made them look oddly random to Rosie, scattered on the hillside, with their hopeful young birches tethered to the lawns. As though none was aware that others were being built around it. The streets that wind through them are called Spruce and Redbud and Holly, but the whole place has always been called – perhaps after some now-lost village – Labrador.
She approached the house slowly, ready to turn back if there was a car or cars in the driveway. There was none. Rosie had got into a habit, which she reproached herself for, of getting into the house when Mike wasn’t there, to find things that she or Sam needed, things she had never recovered, things she didn’t want to negotiate with Mike about delivering or replacing. She had at first believed that none of it was important, but now and again over the months had recalled this, or found herself in need of that, and a picture would present itself to her of the thing lying just where it lay in the Stonykill house; and she would come break in to get it.
Only it wasn’t really breaking in. She just went up the stairs from the garage; that door was never locked.
She wondered if Mike noticed the pilfering. He never said.
Parked in Redbud Street she pulled her little list from her pocket. There was a hard stone in her breast, the leaden coldness that had been there all day; all spring for that matter.
R. view mirror
Mice/balloons
Pelican
BCPs
She had done without a rear-view mirror for nine months, but it was time to get the wagon inspected, and she wasn’t sure it would pass without one. Her Pelikan drawing pen lay (she could see it) on the windowsill of the sun porch, behind the TV; she had been writing letters with it on a summer night last year.
She thrust the list back into her pocket. The book about the family of mice who go traveling in a balloon: it had taken her a while to figure out what Sam meant by the bloon mice, until she remembered the long-overdue, the already-paid-for lost library book. Amazing Sam could remember it, so long ago. It was because of the spring balloon festival up at Skytop tomorrow: and Mike’s ridiculous promise to Sam, he’d promise her anything lately. Bloon ride. Anyway she had to have the book. Had to.
The birth control pills, a three-month supply she had got the day before she left this house and Mike, were in the little cabinet beside the toilet, where there was also the extra baby powder, the twelve boxes of tissues Mike had abstracted from The Woods, the potpourri from the bath shop in the Jambs.
They would still be there, she was sure. Mike lived in the house like a squirrel or a caveman, some creature unable to think how he might alter his circumstances to suit himself. Nothing had changed since last summer; last time she had broken in her old nightie still hung on the back of the closet door. The pills would still be there. Rosie had gone off the pill the month after she’d moved out; now she thought she ought to go back on again, and the little pink dots were damn expensive, and she’d need a new prescription if she didn’t come get these she’d already paid for: and standing in the damp and concrete-smelling garage she couldn’t remember why she wanted them after all.
In the garage were Sam’s trike, which sometimes traveled with her and sometimes got left behind; and Mike’s ten-speed, not used as much as it had been on the flats of Indiana. The cyclist’s body he had once had, heavy-thighed and round-backed, had pleased him more than it had her. The cold stone behind her sternum was heavy. The autumn rake; the summer lawn mower; the winter snow shovel. She had forgotten why it had been important to get away from all this, why she had gone to all the trouble she had gone to to break these connections; she had forgotten, just as she had forgotten why she had once tried hard to make them.
Love’s labor’s lost.
She had forgotten why: as though the heart inside her had been removed, and with it all knowledge of such things. What makes people love each other? Why do they bother? Why did children love parents, and parents children? Why did husbands love wives, and women love men; what did it mean when they said: he drives me nuts, but still I love him?
She must have known once. Because love had made her do a lot of things, and go to a lot of trouble. She had known once, she almost remembered knowing; she remembered getting along with Mike and Sam, and the getting along was powered by love; love was the necessity for getting along. Once she had known, and now she didn’t; and not knowing now made it seem that not she or anyone really knew, they were all faking it, forcing it, even Spofford, even Sam, and why did they bother. A cold loss of knowledge and dark ignorance were where her heart had been, and were all that these commonplace things, innocent tools and toys, called to; her dog Nothing, the name of the stone in her breast.
You couldn’t live that way long, of course
. You couldn’t live in that kind of ignorance. She’d have to remember, sometime. She was sure she would. Because she still had a whole long life to get through, Sam’s growing up, Boney’s death and her mother’s and at last her own: and she couldn’t get through it without remembering why you bother.
She would. She was sure of it. Sure you will she said to herself, and patted her own bosom: sure you will.
At the bottom of the stairs leading up to the kitchen, a flight of open bare wood steps still showing the carpenter’s marks, she stopped, unwilling to go up. It seemed certain she would have an accident on the stairs, or that the door at the top would turn out to be locked after all. She stood for a long time looking up, and then went back out into the warm rain.
*
‘So how’s it going?’ she asked Pierce, at the door of Fellowes Kraft’s study, brushing the rain from her cheeks. ‘How’s Bruno?’
‘Off to see the Pope,’ said Pierce.
SEVEN
The coach racketed over the bad roads out of Naples, two bright-garbed men riding postilion to clear the way. Carters cursed at them and peasants along the road took off their caps and crossed themselves. The friar in black and white opposite Giordano murmured to him in Roman-accented Latin of what the visit would entail, how long he would be with the Pope – Sanctissimus he called him, as though it were a pet name – what Giordano should do and say, whom he should speak to, and whom not.
— Sanctissimus will present His ring to you but you must only come near it and not kiss it. Peter’s ring would be worn away to nothing if everyone who came to Sanctissimus actually pressed his lips to it. Sanctissimus will see you in the afternoon, between Nones and Vespers, after He has dined. His dinner is of the simplest. He is as abstemious as He is pious. You must speak clearly and distinctly, as His hearing is not what it was . . .
The coach stopped at Dominican monasteries in Gaeta and Latina, the horses lathered and weary; Giordano lay long awake in the sultry heat, putting together the journey he had come already, the longest of his life, and attaching the places, roads, shrines, churches, and palaces he had seen to the Neapolitan places of his memory: new spokes of the earthly wheel he had constructed, centered on the church of San Domenico. Before dawn they started out again, to travel in the cool part of the day, and before the brigands – so the friar with him said – were awake.
Giordano’s fame had spread to the widest imaginable circle: the widest anyway that the monks of Naples could imagine. When the abbot had come to his cell to tell him that the Pope had heard of the young man with the astonishing memory, and desired to know more, and that the Pope was sending a coach from Rome to bring him there, his voice had sunk low in amazement and solemnity.
Giordano’s first thought had been, irrelevantly, about Cecco of Ascoli. He had thought: I’ll tell Him about Cecco. I’ll tell Him: if what Cecco said about the stars is true, if the universe is as he thought it to be, then it can’t have been heresy, can it? The truth could never be heresy. A mistake was made, that’s all; it’s clear that a mistake was somehow made.
The coach sped down the old Appian Way, the friar nodding in his sleep while Giordano’s eyes ate up the tombs, ruins, churches along that impossibly straight and metaled road. The coach dove through the Porta San Sebastiano, and past the gigantic ruins of baths and circuses, and into the thronged heart of Rome. At the Tiber bridge the friar pointed out the Castel Sant’ Angelo, which had been built as the Emperor Hadrian’s tomb, and was now the keep and dungeons of the Papacy. An angel with a sword stood atop it, mobile in the shimmer of noon.
The coach did not stop even at the gates of the Vatican Palace, it went right through, and only came to rest at last in a garden of golden stone and green poplars, fountains and galleries and silence.
—Come, said the friar. Wash and refresh yourself. Sanctissimus is at dinner.
From that day forward this garden (it was the Cortile del Belvedere that Julius II had built) would mean Garden to Giordano Bruno. This flight of stairs would mean Stairway. These stanze he entered now, dark-brilliant in the flaming day, were the courts and chambers of a mind, a thinking, remembering mind.
—These are the stanze painted by Raffaello. There is the Triumph of the Church. Saint Peter. Saint Stephen. Aquinas, of our order. Come along.
—Who are these?
—Philosophers. Look more closely. Can’t you see Plato with his beard, Aristotle, Pythagoras? Come along.
He tugged at Giordano’s sleeve, but the young monk in wonderment held back. The painted crowd on the stairs of that cool edifice, those gowned men holding tablets, stirred; they blinked, looked down on Giordano, smiled, and resumed their conversation and their stillness.
The friar delivered him to other Dominicans, secretaries of the Dominican cardinals around the Pope; they looked Giordano over, and put questions to him. And Giordano began to understand why he had been brought here.
Around Peter’s throne now the jealousies and suspicions which tend to divide and inflame the busiest of Christ’s servants were unusually raw, and Giordano was to be a counter, one small counter, in the game of influences and prestige waged between the Domini canes and the Black Company of Jesus. The Jesuits were famed for their adoption everywhere of the New Learning, and for putting its novelties and successes to the Church’s uses in their colleges and academies. The Dominicans wanted to show off some knowledge that was theirs, and to remind Pius, who was after all a Dominican himself (though He seemed not always as conscious of it as He might be), that His black-and-white hounds guarded treasure as precious as any New Learning: the Art of Memory, which the order had so perfected. Sanctissimus would be amused to see how agile it had made a Dominican mind. Sanctissimus would be instructed as well.
Cardinal Rebiba himself returned Giordano to the Raffaello stanze when he had washed and eaten, and introduced him to the little dried pear Who was Pius V, Vicar of Christ on Earth. He lived in those rooms, beneath those pictures, amid these bustling monks. He sat on a pillowed chair; He was so short that His white satin slippers didn’t reach the floor, and a monk hastened to slip a stool beneath them.
Giordano did his tricks. He recited the psalm Fundamenta in Hebrew after hearing it read aloud once; he named the tombs on the Appian Way in their order as he had passed them. The trick of amiavi-amaveri-veravama was tried, but Sanctissimus could not understand what was proceeding, and it had to be quickly given up.
—We studied this art when We were young, the Pope said to Rebiba, who nodded encouragingly. To Giordano the Pope said:
—Now We have no need of it. You see here are secretaries all around Us now, who remember for Us all that We need to have remembered. Perhaps you will be one of them, one day.
He nodded then, smiling sweetly, and said: Go on.
Under Rebiba’s questioning, the memory artist (close-mouthed with stage-fright, and having forgotten Cecco) gave an account of his practice of the art, how he had built his palaces, and cast the images he used on them; he said nothing about the stars, or the horoscopi, but he told them how the hieroglyphs of Ægypt could be used, the signs made by Hermes.
—Is this that Hermes, the Pope asked, who gave laws and letters to the Ægyptians?
—It is, Giordano answered.
—And who in his writings spoke of a divine Word, Son of God, through which the world was made, though he lived many generations before Our Savior?
—I have not read his works, said Giordano.
—Come and look here, said Sanctissimus. Come along.
With a bustle of monks and Rebiba, the Pope went into the largest of the stanze, the Stanza della Segnatura, where He was accustomed to sign the decrees of the ecclesiastical court, and stood with Giordano beneath the paintings of the pillared basilica, Plato, sunlight, truth.
—Look up there, said the Pope. Beside the man with the diagram, who is Pythagoras. Who is he in the white?
—I don’t know, said Giordano.
—No one knows, said the Pop
e. Here is Plato. Pythagoras. Epicurus (who is in hell) with his vine leaves in his hair. Could this one in white be Hermes?
Giordano looked up at the personage the Pope pointed to.
—I don’t know, he said.
The Pope moved away, through the crowded room, crowded with the great dead, and Giordano followed.
—Ptolemy, He said, pointing. With a crown, who was a king in Ægypt. Was not that Hermes also a king in Ægypt? And look there. Homer. And Virgil. But who are these, these in armor?
Cardinal Rebiba marveled sourly at them, the little old man, the monk who with his bull neck and tense strut looked more like a brigand or a wrestler than a philosopher. They studied pictures that the cardinal himself had never thought to puzzle over. The afternoon was growing late, and had taken a useless turn; the Neapolitan, instead of astonishing with his art, was advertising his ignorance.
—We live in these rooms, Sanctissimus said. And so do these people. And We don’t know who they are, or what brought them here. Well.
He proffered His ring, and Giordano fell to his knee and, as instructed, came close to but did not kiss the stone on His finger even as the Pope withdrew it.
—Now We must return to Our business. Is there anything you need? Ask Us.
—I would like, Giordano said, to read the writings of that Hermes.
—Is that lawful? the Pope said, and turned to Rebiba. Is it?
Rebiba, blushing, made an ambiguous gesture.
—If it is lawful, the Pope said, you may. Go downstairs. In Our library We have We-don’t-know-how-many books. Hermes et hoc genus omne.
Turning to go, He raised His hand, and a secretary flew to His side.
—The Index librorum prohibitorum, He said as the secretary wrote. It needs looking into. We will appoint a congregatio of Our cardinals. They must take counsel about this. It has been much neglected.
He was gone, leaving Giordano and the others kneeling, and red-faced Rebiba bowing low.
—Go away, Rebiba then said to Giordano. The library is below. You have been worse than useless.