Galileo's Dream

  Then they moved two planes into a V shape and placed a little ivory curve at the bottom to connect them, so that the ball would shift smoothly from down to up. At the top of the second plane, Mazzoleni placed the workshop bell on its side. The Lady Alessandra, her head touching the vault of the dome, reached down and released a ball from the top of the first plane: a steep drop, a long decelerating rise, and then the ball hit the edge of the bell. And Galileo heard the bell ring over all the worlds.

  THEN HE FELL SICK AGAIN. He had gone to bed ill so many times before that it took a while to understand that this time was different. His kidneys hurt, his urine was cloudy. The doctors were called, but there was nothing they could do. His kidneys were failing. They forbade him wine, but La Piera slipped him a cup or two at night anyway.

  When it got really bad, such that he resumed his moaning as he never had since Maria Celeste’s death, we sent a letter out, and Lady Alessandra showed up unannounced. She sat by his bed and washed his face with a cloth dipped in cold water. Sometimes he would hand her the basket, and she would read Maria Celeste’s letters aloud to him. Somehow all the news of food shortages and pulled teeth and catarrhs and madness were gone, leaving only the shared recipes, the devotional prayers, the snippy comments about her brother, the expressions of love, of amorevolezza. Alessandra’s reading voice was calm and distant. She spoke of other things, and made dry little jokes, and Momus, the god of laughter, briefly touched down.

  “You remind me of someone,” Galileo said. “I wish I could remember.”

  “We are all everyone. And we all remember everything.”

  On her way out she looked at me and shook her head. “I have to go,” she said. “I can’t do this anymore. Not when he could be fixed in a day.”

  She didn’t come the next day, sending a letter instead. Viviani read it to Galileo, and he heard it silently. He dictated his reply.

  Your letter found me in bed gravely indisposed. Many, many thanks for the courtesy that you have always shown to me, and for your condolences that visit me now in my misery and my misfortune.

  That was his last letter. A few days later he fell unconscious. That night the wolves out on the hills howled, and he struggled on his bed such that it seemed to us that he heard them calling. At dawn he died.

  The household wandered around in the raw morning light. Of course it was true that we had just lost our employer, and this was no small part of our despair: Sestilia notwithstanding, Vincenzio could be counted on for nothing. But it was more than that: it was also immediately obvious that with the maestro gone the world would never again be so interesting. We had lost our hero, our genius, our own Pulcinella.

  It was La Piera who pushed us through the awful duties of that day and those that followed. “Come on, get on with it,” she would say. “We are all souls, remember? We exist in each other. To get him back you just have to think of what he would do, what he would say.”

  “Ha,” Mazzoleni said mournfully. “Good luck with that!”

  FERDINANDO II APPROVED Viviani’s plan for a grand memorial to Galileo, which would have included public funeral orations and the construction of a marble mausoleum; but Pope Urban VIII denied permission for either. Ferdinando submitted to this denial, and so Galileo’s body was buried privately, in the novice’s chapel of the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, in a chapel room under the campanile. This impromptu crypt was almost an unmarked grave.

  But Pope Urban was sixty-four, while Vincenzio Viviani was only nineteen. When Urban died, in 1644 (at quarter after eleven one morning, and it was said that by noon his statues in Rome had all been pulled down and pulverized by angry mobs), Viviani had fifty-five more years of life to live, and every day of those years he devoted to the memory of the maestro. He paid for the design of a monument, to be located in San Croce across from the tomb of the great Michelangelo; their tombs would then make a matched pair, Art and Science together holding up the Church. While he worked to get this monument approved and built, Viviani spent many years collecting all of Galileo’s papers that he could find; and somewhere along the way he began writing a biography.

  Once while he was at work on this project, he found me in Arcetri and enlisted my help. “What can you tell me about Signor Galileo, Cartophilus?”

  “Nothing, Signor Viviani.”

  “Come on, nothing? You must know something we don’t know.”

  “He had a hernia. And he had trouble sleeping.”

  “All right, shut up then. But help me now to make a search of San Matteo.”

  “How can we do that?”

  It turned out he had a certificate from the local priest allowing us into the convent. He was hoping to find Galileo’s letters to Maria Celeste, to add them to the immense collection of papers and notebooks and volumes that now filled an entire room of his house. So far Galileo’s letters to his daughter had not been found, although they had to have numbered at least as many as the ones she had sent to him—a pile that Viviani possessed, still in their basket. Knowing Galileo’s prolixity, and whom he had been writing to, this correspondence presumably formed a unique look into his thinking, and also a considerable physical mass, difficult to conceal. And now, for Viviani, of consuming interest.

  But we couldn’t find them. Viviani speculated that the nuns had burned them for fear of harboring some kind of heresy, or that they had simply been thrown out or used to start kitchen fires, no one could say. But they could not be found. In fact I had found and destroyed them years earlier, for it turned out that during some of his lucid years he had written to her such detailed accounts of his Jovian experiences that there would have been no way to explain them away.

  More years passed, and Viviani wrote his biography of the maestro in the most devoted, hagiographic terms possible. He got it published, but he could see that the big tomb he wanted was not going to get built in his lifetime. The Medici had lost their nerve, if they had ever had any in this matter, and Rome was implacable.

  Finally, when Viviani was getting to be an old man himself, he had a plaque cast and affixed to the entryway to the little room where Galileo was buried in San Croce. He wrote into his will a request that he be buried in that same room. Then he took the front door off of his house, and turned the front façade of the building into a kind of archway. We helped him with the plastering of this façade, as Salvadore and Geppo had become bricklayers, and when that was done we cemented a bust of Galileo over the open doorway. This improvised memorial arch stood forlornly on the street of a shabby residential district of Florence, looking like the occasional architectural oddity you see in modest neighborhoods when a homeowner has lost his mind with pride of ownership. Viviani was a bit like those people, in fact, but he was such a serious man, so devoted to all the good causes of the city, and always writing to scientists all over Europe, that it was hard to joke with him about it. We plastered long marble panels vertically into each side of the arch, and on these Viviani listed Galileo’s accomplishments, painting the words on the marble very carefully as guides for me to chip away at with a chisel.

  While we worked, he and I sometimes talked about the maestro and what was going on with his reputation. Viviani expressed great disdain for the Frenchman Descartes, who had been too chicken to publish anything controversial after Galileo’s condemnation, but who had recently distributed a long critique of the maestro’s Discorsi in which he listed no less than forty supposed mistakes—all but two of which were actually his own mistakes, Viviani judged, with Galileo in the right of it. I had to laugh when Viviani said that one of the things Descartes had gotten right was to scoff at Galileo for believing in the story of the burning mirrors of Archimedes.

  Viviani, still offended by Descartes’ impertinence, only shook his head at my surprised painful laughter. Geppo and Salvadore tried to ignore his seriousness and distract him with teasing remarks about how funny his house was going to look after all this work, and how cold the entryway was going to be without a door, but he only steppe
d back to look at it again, and sighed. “Someone’s got to do it,” he said. “Hopefully my nephews will pick up the torch.” He had never married or had children, and now he shook his head. “I’m not sure about them, but I hope someone will do it.”

  His had been a strange life, it occurred to me. To meet the maestro, blind and old, when you were seventeen; work with him till he died, when you were nineteen; then for the rest of your life, work for him still. I stopped my chipping and put a hand to his shoulder. “Many will do it, Signor. You’ve made a good start. Saving his papers was huge. No one could have done that but you. You’ve been a faithful student, a real Galilean.”

  So I thought, at that point. But the border between devotion and madness is so narrow. Several years later, he came around to the little warren of low houses tucked behind San Matteo, and there he found me again, as ancient as ever, but no more so. It was impossible to tell how old I was. After a while it just seems like forever.

  Viviani, on the other hand, was aging fast. It’s hard to watch such mayfly lives. The end of the seventeenth century was near.

  “Come help me,” he said now, face racked with urgency, but also with that high mystic serenity that people sometimes fall into when they begin a pilgrimage to a place where they believe everything can change.

  I could have begged off then, but I didn’t. He might have tried to haul me along with him bodily. Anyway it was a look that couldn’t be denied, even after all these years. I followed him down to the back of San Matteo where their own little mausoleum was dug into the earth, crowded with dark holes to each side, like a giant honeycomb. It was dusk of the first night of carnival, and everyone in the village had gone down to Florence to see the parades and the fireworks. Everyone except for Geppo and Salvadore, it turned out, and also the short round crone who now swept the floors at San Croce: La Piera. Viviani had stayed in touch with her, as had I.

  And he knew just which hole Maria Celeste’s coffin was in. We heaved up on the end of it and tugged it back a little, by the light of a single candle lantern. The coffin weighed just the same as it would have if it were empty, but in that narrow passage we had a bad angle on it.

  “Signor Viviani,” I said, “this isn’t a good idea.”

  “Pull!”

  So I kept pulling with them, until we had it out and turned so we could carry it out of the mausoleum. I held the bottom of it, Viviani led the way, Salvadore and Geppo took the sides. La Piera carried the lantern. We walked across the convent yard to a small donkey cart outside the gate, which had in it already some mason’s tools and some dry mortar sand and a few buckets. We lifted up the coffin and placed it beside the sand, then covered it with a tarp.

  Viviani took the donkey’s rope and led us down the lane of Arcetri to the big road from the western hills, where we joined all the late traffic into the city. We looked like four poor servants, following our master and his donkey. Carnival revelers hooted and shouted as they rushed past us.

  Down into Florence and its noise we trudged, across to San Croce, then down the stairs into the novice’s chapel. Inside the small room under the campanile, the brick tomb stood dark and dusty. Viviani took a sledge from Geppo and smashed it down on the top of the tomb.

  “This is a terrible idea,” I said, looking down the stone passageway to the open door to the street. “Someone will see us.”

  “No one cares,” he said bitterly. “No one will notice.”

  “No one at all,” I said. “Not even Galileo! He is dead, Signor.”

  “He will see it from heaven.”

  “In heaven they don’t think about us. They’re done with us, and happy to be so.”

  He shrugged. “You can’t be sure.”

  We pulled Galileo’s heavy coffin out of its opened tomb, a much tougher job than moving his daughter. Following Viviani’s directions, we then placed down in the tomb Maria Celeste’s coffin, so pitifully light. It was like burying a cat. Salvadore and Geppo wedged a few crossbeams into the bricks over her coffin for support. Then we replaced Galileo’s coffin, right there on top of hers, as if to shield her from the sky.

  The old boys brought a bucket of plaster down from their cart, and replaced the bricks at the top of the tomb one by one, plastering them into place over another set of bracing crossbeams.

  There were noises in the street outside, and for a while we all froze in fear.

  “This is so pointless,” I complained. “The maestro is dead and gone. We could get in such trouble, and he’ll never even know about it.”

  “He would like it if he knew,” Viviani said.

  You, Occasion, walk ahead, precede my footsteps, open thousands and thousands of different paths to me. Go irresolutely, unrecognized and hidden, because I do not want my coming to be too easily foreseen. Slap the faces of all seers, prophets, diviners, fortune-tellers, and prognosticators. In one moment and simultaneously, we go and come, rise and sit, stay and move. Let us then flow from all, through all, in all, to all, here with gods, there with heroes, here with people, there with beasts.

  —GIORDANO BRUNO, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

  HE WOULD LIKE IT IF HE KNEW.

  Maybe this is as a good a way to put it as any. Just do what the maestro would like. Viviani, who believed that the soul of the dying Michelangelo had flown into baby Galileo at the moment of his birth, the two having happened at nearly the same hour, followed that principle all his life. He died a few years after our carnival night, and he was buried next to Galileo, as he had requested, without anyone noticing that the scientist’s tomb had been rebricked. By the time his nephew’s heirs finally succeeded in getting the approval of a pope—Clement XII, a Florentine—for the construction of the elaborate tomb that Viviani had advocated, it was 1737. When that tomb’s construction was finished, they moved the coffins, and were surprised to find three together in Galileo’s little tomb. It was pretty obvious then what had happened, and all three of the coffins were placed in the new monument, right across the nave from Michelangelo’s. Art and Science, buried side by side! With a student and a poor Clare included, wisping through the world unnoticed. From Galileo’s body they took a vertebra, a tooth, and three detached fingers, for use as relics. The remainer of the three bodies are still there: Galileo, Maria Celeste, and Vincenzio Viviani.

  The rest of us moved on: forward, backward, sideways. I went to Holland, then England, then France, where I have been most of the time since. I’ve tended the entangler, and kept in touch with La Piera and Buonamici and Sestilia. The wars have been almost continuous. Huy-gens was a good man, Leibniz too. All in all we helped several people. All over Europe, Galileo’s ideas were taken up by the philosophers, and his methods by the scientists. Nevertheless very little scientific progress has been made, or progress of any kind, to be frank. And yet I notice no one is coming back in the entangler anymore. Sometimes Hera checks in, but she doesn’t tell me much, and it’s painful to report to her what I’ve seen. The suffering is if anything getting worse, as populations rebound from the Black Death but epidemics remain virulent and unchecked. And people keep killing each other.

  Somehow in all this protraction of years, watching all the lives rush by, Galileo keeps coming back to me. If La Piera was right, and we are alive when people are thinking about us, then Galileo is definitely still alive, coming back in us as I suppose he keeps coming back to that poisoned cellar floor: unkillable, boastful, sarcastic, self-regarding—all the obvious flaws, sure.

  The good that he fought for is not so easy to express. But put it this way: he believed in reality. He believed in paying attention to it, and in learning what he could of it, and then saying what he had learned, even insisting on it. Then in trying to apply that knowledge to make things better, if he could. Put it this way: he believed in science.

  But listen to me, because I saw it myself: science began as a Poor Clare. Science was broke and so it got bought. Science was scared and so did what it was told. It designed the gun and gave the gun
to power, and power then held the gun to science’s head and told it to make some more. How smart was that? Now science is in the position of having to invent a secret disabler of guns, and then start the whole process over. It’s not clear it can work. Because all scientists are Galileos, poor, scared, gun to our head. Power lies elsewhere. If we can shift that power … that’s the if. If we can shift history into a new channel, and avoid the nightmare centuries. If we can keep the promise of science, a promise hard to keep.

  In fact, so far, so bad. When I made my first analepsis, so long ago that I shudder to think of it, human history was little more than a long descent toward extinction, a matter of evermore devastating wars and genocides, famines and epidemics—growing immiseration for the bulk of humanity and the rest of life on Earth. When I taught young children history, and saw the look on their faces when they understood, I was ashamed.

  So I left all that, and went with Ganymede. I joined his attempt to make a retrojection that would shove the nightmare a different way. If people would only understand earlier, we thought, that science is a religion, the most ethical religion, the most devoted and worshipful religion … Clearly I was wrong even to try. It isn’t really possible. The paradoxes and entangled potentialities are the least of the problems. Worse by far is the enormous inertia of human weakness, greed, fear—all the sheer bloody mass of us. It’s been a nightmare. I joined the nightmare, I helped to dream it. We went back and interfered with Archimedes, we taught him things that got him killed; I got him killed. I could have saved him if I’d been fast enough, but I wasn’t. I was too scared. I watched the soldier spear him, paralyzed by fear. So I went back again with Ganymede, thinking I could make up for that—then, when I saw Ganymede doing his best to get Galileo burned at the stake, I started trying to make up for that too, trying to undo it, to stop it. Even though everything that happens happens. All at cross purposes. So many mistakes, so much misery. And yet here I am still. Why do I stay? It’s not as if I’ve helped in any noticeable way. So far it seems I’ve mostly done harm. I stay for the sunlight, I suppose, for the wind and the rain and for Italy. But mostly I stay because I don’t know what else to do.