Galileo's Dream

  And yet here he had gone and done the same thing as his dad. Probably it was a mistake to couple with a younger woman, as they both had; no doubt it led to some fundamental imbalance, or just the natural contempt of youth for age. In any case, here he was, another Galilei standing at the door about to get thrashed, hesitating to knock. Fearful to knock.

  He knocked. She answered with a shout, knowing by the rap who it was.

  He entered. She kept the place clean, there was no doubt of that. Perhaps she did it to emphasize the paucity of furniture, or the confusion and squalor of his place. In any case there she stood in the kitchen doorway wiping her hands, as beautiful as ever, even though the years had been hard on her. Black hair, black eyes, a face that still caught Galileo’s breath; the body he loved, her hand on her hip, washcloth flung over her shoulder.

  “I heard,” she told him.

  “I figured you would.”

  “So—what now?”

  She watched him, expecting nothing. It wasn’t like the time he had explained what their arrangement would be, sitting on the fondamenta in Venice with her five months pregnant. That had been hard. This was merely awkward and tedious. They hadn’t been in love for many years. She was seeing a man out near the docks on the canal—a butcher, he thought it was. He had what he wanted. Still, that look, that time in Venice—it shot through into this time too, it was still there between them. He had a particular sensitivity to looks, no doubt the result of growing up with Medusa for a mother.

  “The girls will come with me,” he said. “Vincenzio is too young. He still needs you.”

  “They all need me.”

  “I’m taking the girls to Florence.”

  “Livia won’t like it. She hates your place. It’s too loud for her, there are too many people.”

  Galileo sighed. “It will be a bigger place. And I won’t be taking in students anymore.”

  “So now you’re a court creature.”

  “I am the prince’s philosopher.”

  She laughed. “No more compasses.”

  “That’s right.”

  They both went silent, thinking perhaps about how his compass had been an ongoing joke between them.

  “All right then,” she said. “We’ll be in touch.”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll keep paying for this place. And I’ll need to see Vincenzio. In a few years he’ll move to Florence too. Maybe you can move to Florence then too, if you want.”

  She stared at him. She could still flay him with a look. The tightness at the corners of her mouth reminded him of his father, and he felt a stab of remorse, thinking that maybe now he was the Giulia. A horrible thought—but there was nothing for it but to nod and take his leave, the back of his neck crawling under the heat of that fiery gaze.

  All during this time he continued to make his nightly observations, and to spread the word concerning the usefulness of his glass. Occhialino, visorio, perspicillum—different people called it different things, and he did, too. He sent excellent glasses to the Duke of Bavaria, the Elector of Cologne, and Cardinal del Monte, among other nobles of court and church. He was now in the service of the Medici, of course, but the Medici would want the capabilities of his glass advertised to as many of the powers in Europe as possible. And it was important to establish the legitimacy of what Galileo had reported in his book by having it confirmed in other places by influential figures. He had heard there were people like Cremonini refusing to look through a glass, and others claiming his new discoveries were merely optical illusions, artifacts of the instrument itself. Indeed, he had suffered an unfortunate demonstration in Bologna, when he had tried to show the famous astronomer Giovanni Magini the Medicean Stars, and only been able to see one himself—which may have been because three were behind Jupiter, but it was a hard case to make, especially with the odious Bohemian climber Martin Horky there smirking at every word, obviously delighted that things weren’t going as planned. Afterward he heard that Horky had written to Kepler telling him that the visorio was a fraud, useless for astronomy.

  Kepler was experienced enough to ignore backstabbing by such a loathsome toad, but his characteristically long and incoherent letter in support of Galileo’s discoveries, published as a book for the world to read under the title Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo, was in some ways as bad as the Horky nonsense. Confusions from Kepler were nothing new—although up until this point they had always made Galileo laugh. One time for the sake of his artisans he had translated into Tuscan Kepler’s claim that the music of the spheres was a literal sound made by the planets, a six-note chord that moved from major to minor depending on whether Mars was at perihelia or aphelia. This idea made Galileo laugh so hard he could barely read. “The chapter’s title is ‘Which Planet Sings Soprano, Which Alto, Which Tenor, and Which Bass!’ I swear to God! The greatest astronomer of our time! He admits he has no basis for this stuff except his own desire for it, and then concludes that Jupiter and Saturn must sing bass, Mars tenor, Earth and Venus alto, and Mercury soprano.”

  The workshop gang then sang, in their usual four-part harmony, one of their rudest love songs, replacing all the usual girls’ names with “Venus.”

  That was Kepler: a good source for jokes. Now, reading Kepler’s defense of Galileo’s spyglass discoveries, Galileo felt an uneasiness that sharpened the further he read. Lots of people would read this book, but much of Kepler’s praise was so harebrained it cut both ways:

  I may perhaps seem rash in accepting your claims so readily with no support from my own experience. But why should I not believe a most learned mathematician, whose very style attests to the soundness of his judgment? He has no intention of practicing deception in a bid for vulgar publicity, nor does he pretend to have seen what he has not seen. Because he loves the truth, he does not hesitate to oppose even the most familiar opinions, and to bear the jeers of the crowd with equanimity.

  What jeers of the crowd? For one thing there hadn’t been that many, and for another, Galileo did not bear them with equanimity. He wanted to kill every critic he had. He liked fights in the same way bulls are attracted to red—not because it looks like blood, or so they say, but because it has the color of the pulsing parts of cows in heat. Galileo loved to fight like that. And so far he had never lost one. So equanimity had nothing to do with it.

  Then further on in Kepler’s sloppy endorsement, he asked what Galileo saw through his perspicillum when he looked at “the left corner of the face of the Man in the Moon,” because it turned out that Kep ler had a theory about that region, which he now propounded to the world—that a mark there was the work of intelligent beings who lived on the moon, who must therefore have to endure days the equal of fourteen days on Earth. Therefore, Kepler wrote:

  They feel insufferable heat. Perhaps they lack stone for erecting shelters against the sun. On the other hand, maybe they have a soil as sticky as clay. Their usual building plan, accordingly, is as follows. Digging up huge fields, they carry out the earth and heap it in a circle, perhaps for the purpose of drawing out the moisture down below. In this way, they may hide in the deep shade behind their excavated mounds and, in keeping with the sun’s motion, shift about inside, clinging to the shadow. They have, as it were, a sort of underground city. They make their homes in numerous caves hewn out of that circular embankment. They place their fields and pastures in the middle, to avoid being forced to go too far away from their farms in their flight from the sun.

  Galileo’s jaw dropped as he read this. He was growing to dread the appearance of the word accordingly in Kepler’s work, a tic that always marked precisely the point where sequential logic was being tossed aside.

  Then a few pages later, worse yet: Kepler spoke of the difference Galileo had noted through his spyglass between the light of the planets and that of the fixed stars: What other conclusion shall we draw from this difference, Galileo, than that the fixed stars generate their light from within, whereas the planets, being opaque, are illuminated from without; that is, t
o use Bruno’s terms, the former are suns, the latter, moons or earths?

  Galileo groaned aloud. Just the sight of Bruno’s name in the same sentence as his own was enough to churn his stomach.

  Then he came to a passage that made him go chill and hot at the same time. After Kepler’s congratulations for discovering the moons of Jupiter, and his ungrounded assertion that there must be a purpose for these new moons—and a false syllogism stating that, since the Earth’s moon existed for the pleasure of the people on Earth, the moons of Jupiter must exist to please the inhabitants of Jupiter, Kepler concluded that these inhabitants—

  —must be very happy to behold this wonderfully varied display. The conclusion is quite clear. Our moon exists for us on the earth, not for the other globes. Those four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us. Each planet in turn, together with its occupants, is served by its own satellites. From this line of reason we deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited.

  Galileo threw this craziness to the floor with a curse and stalked out into his garden, wondering why his hilarity had so quickly turned to dread. “Kepler is some kind of idiot!” he shouted at Mazzoleni. “His reasoning is completely deranged! Inhabitants of Jupiter? Where the hell did that come from?”

  And why was it so disturbing to read it?

  The stranger … the man who had told him about the occhialino that afternoon in Venice … who had appeared after the great demonstration to the Venetian senate, and suggested he take a look at the moon—had he not said something about coming from Kepler? Quick flashes of something more—a blue like twilight—Had the stranger not come knocking at the gate one night some time ago? Had Cartophilus not joined the household soon after? What did all that mean?

  Galileo was not used to having a vague memory of anything. Normally he would have said that he remembered basically everything that had ever happened to him, or that he had read or thought. That, in fact, he remembered too much, as quite a bit of what he recalled stuck in his brain like splinters of glass, stealing his sleep. He kept his thoughts busy partly in order not to be stuck by anything too sharp. But in this matter, clarity did not exist. There were blurs, as if he had been sick.

  Cartophilus was picking up Kepler’s book from the floor of the arcade, dusting it off, looking at it curiously. He glanced at Galileo, who glared at him as if he could drag the truth from the old man by look alone. A nameless fear pierced Galileo: “What does this mean!” he shouted at the wizened old man, striding toward him as if to beat him. “What’s going on?”

  Cartophilus shrugged furtively, almost sullenly, and put the book on a side table, closed so that the page Galileo had been reading was lost. Inhabitants of Jupiter!

  “We have to keep working on the move to Florence, sire,” he said. “I’m supposed to be packing the pots.” And he left the arcade and went inside, as if Galileo were not his master and had not just asked a question of him.

  GALILEO’S RETURN TO FLORENCE, as he was now calling his decision, continued to draw fire in Venice and Padua. Priuli was now terming it a breach of contract as well as a personal betrayal, suggesting to the Doge that it would be appropriate to ask for some salary to be returned.

  With the mood turning so hard against him, it was a great comfort to know that Fra Paolo Sarpi would remain as steadfast a friend and supporter as he had always been. Galileo had referred to him as “father and master” in his letters to him for many years. Having Sarpi on his side was important.

  One day, Sarpi was passing through Padua and dropped by the Via Vignali to visit Galileo and see how his combustible friend was doing. He brought with him a letter to Galileo from their mutual friend Sagredo, who was returning from Syria and had found out by mail about Galileo’s decision to move to Florence. Sagredo, concerned, had written; Who can invent a visario which can tell the crazy person from the sane, the good neighbor from the bad?

  Sarpi, it quickly became clear, felt much the same. Galileo sat down with him on the back terrace overlooking the garden, by a table of fruit and some jugs of new wine. Relaxing in this little hole in the city under the stucco walls surrounding them was something they had done many times before, for Sarpi was no ordinary priestly mentor. Like Galileo, he was a philosopher, and he had made investigations of his own in the same years Galileo had worked on mechanics, and found things such as the little valves inside human veins, and the oscillations of the pupil, and the polar attraction of magnets. Galileo had helped him with this last, and Sarpi had helped Galileo with his military compass, and even with the laws of motion.

  Now the great Servite drank deeply, put his feet up, and sighed. “I’m very sorry to see you go. Things won’t be the same around here, and that’s the truth. I’ll hope for the best, but like Francesco, I’m concerned about your long-term welfare. In Venice you would have always been protected from Rome.”

  Galileo shrugged. “I have to be able to do my work,” he insisted.

  Sarpi’s point made him uneasy, nevertheless. No one had better reason to worry about protection from Rome than Sarpi; the evidence of that was right there in Sarpi’s horribly scarred face. Sarpi himself touched his wounds, and smiled his disfigured smile. “You know my joke,” he reminded Galileo. “I recognize the curial style”—style meaning also a kind of stiletto.

  It was all part of the ongoing war between Venice and the Vatican, which was partly a public war of words—a matter of curses and imprecations so angry that at one point Pope Paul V had excommunicated the entire population of the Serenissima—but also at the same time a silent nighttime war, a vicious thing of knives and drownings. Leonardo Dona had been elected doge precisely because he was a notorious anti-Romanist, and Dona had appointed Sarpi to be his principal counselor. Then Sarpi had announced to the world his intent to write a full history of the Council of Trent, using as source material the secret files of the Venetian representatives to the Council, which were certain to contain many ugly revelations about the Vatican’s desperate campaign in the previous century to stem the tide of Protestantism. An exposé, in short. When Paul learned of Sarpi’s project, he had been so alarmed and outraged that he had authorized Sarpi’s assassination. Killers were sent to Venice, but the Venetian government had many spies in Rome, and they heard in advance that the assassins were coming, with some of them even identified by name. The Venetian authorities had arrested them on their appearance on the docks, and thrown them into prison.

  After that Sarpi had accepted a bodyguard, a man who was to stay with him at all times and sleep on his doorstep.

  Some of those involved in the matter were not convinced that a single bodyguard would be enough. They thought more needed to be done to protect him, because Sarpi was more important than he knew; much depended on him. As it turned out these people were proved right, so it was fortunate other protective measures were taken.

  The attack on him took place on the night of October 7, 1607. A fire broke out near Santa Maria Formosa, the big church just north of San Marco. Whether the fire was set for this purpose or not, Sarpi’s fool of a bodyguard left his post at the Signoria to go have a look at it. When Sarpi was done with his business, he waited for a while for the man, then left for the Servite monastery accompanied by only an elderly servant and an old Venetian senator. He took his usual route home, which anyone could have determined by watching him for even a week: north on the Merceria, past the Rialto and Sagredo’s palazzo to the Campo di Santa Fosca. Then north over the Ponte della Pugna, the Bridge of Wrestlers, a narrow stepped bridge over the Rio de’ Servi, near the Servite monastery, where Sarpi slept in a simple monk’s cell.

  They jumped him on the other side of the bridge, five of them, stabbing his companions first and then chasing Sarpi down the Calle Zancani. When they caught him they smashed him to the ground and stabbed him, but it took only a couple of seconds, then they were off into the night. Later we counted fifteen wounds.

  Trailing at a discreet distance as we had been, we could onl
y shriek and race over the bridge and kneel by the old man, applying pressure to the cuts as we found them in the flickering torchlight. The stiletto left in his right temple had apparently bent on his upper jawbone and then reemerged from his right cheek. That wound by itself looked fatal.

  But for the moment he was still alive, his breath rapid and shallow, failing fast. Women were screaming from the windows overlooking the bridge, shouting directions for the pursuit of the cutthroats. Very soon we would be joined by others; already people were on the bridge calling out. But it was very dark despite the torches, so we shot him up with antibiotics and glued shut a slashed vein in the groin that was sure to kill him. Then all we could do was help to lift him up, and to carry him as gently as possible to his monastery.

  There in his bare stone room he lay hovering on the edge of death, not just that night but for the next three weeks. Acquapendente came over from Padua and watched over him night and day; we could only apply antibiotics when the great doctor slept. He worried that the stiletto had been poisoned, and tried to determine whether it had been by having it stuck into a chicken and then a dog. The animals survived; and Sarpi survived too. We slipped back into our roles.