AEgypt (47 page)

He sighed, an ashen taste in his mind like the burnt summer day's. Why is changelessness better than change? Life is change, and life is better than death. This world of perfect spheres was like the world that painters show, where they pretend that some few leagues above the mountains a moon like a melon and stars like sparks go by, and just above them God bends down across the spheres to peek inside. It was a universe too small, made of too little; an empty trunk, bound in iron straps.

But there were other books.

Like many monkish libraries, San Domenico's was a midden of a thousand years’ writing; no one knew all that the monastery contained, or what had become of all that the monks had copied, bought, written, commented on, given away, and collected over centuries. The old librarian, Fra’ Benedetto, had a long catalogue in his head, which he could remember because he had composed it in rhyme, but there were books that weren't in this catalogue because they didn't rhyme. There was a Memory Palace in which all the categories of books and all the subdivisions of those categories had places, but it had long ago filled up and been shuttered and abandoned. There was a written catalogue too, into which every book was entered as it was acquired, and if you happened to know when a book was acquired, you might find it there. Unless, that is, it had been bound with another, or several others; for usually only the incipit of the first would be put into the catalogue. The others were lost.

So within the library which Fra’ Benedetto and the prior and the abbot knew about there had grown up another library, a library which those who read in it did not catalogue, and did not want catalogued. Fra’ Benedetto knew he had the
Summa theologiae
of Albertus Magnus and his book
On Sleeping and Being Awake
; he didn't know he had Albertus's
Book of Secrets
or his treatise on alchemy. But Fra’ Giordano knew. Fra’ Benedetto knew he had the
Sphere
of Sacrobosco, for every institution of learning had the
Sphere
of Sacrobosco, it was the universal textbook of Aristotelian astronomy. He had several copies, and some printed texts as well. He did not know that bound up with one manuscript was the
Commentary on the Sphere
by Cecco of Ascoli, he whom the Church had burned at the stake for heresy two hundred years before.

He didn't know it, but Fra’ Giordano did. Fra’ Giordano read Cecco's commentary shut up in the privy, swallowing it like sweetened wine. The stars alter the four elements, and through the elements our bodies are altered, and through our bodies our souls: in the stars are the Reasons of the World, and Jesus's own horoscope was set at his birth by God so that he would suffer the fate that he did. Under certain constellations and conjunctions happy divine men are born, Moses, Simon Magus, Merlin, Hermes the Thrice-great (Giordano read this assortment of names with a deep thrill of wonder, that they could be listed together, as people of the same kind). Countless spirits good and evil fill up the heavens, constantly in motion, criss-crossing the zodiac; founders of new religions are actually born of them, of incubi and succubi who live in the colures, the bands that separate solstice and equinox.

Those perfect spheres were coming to contain a busy populace.

In the library, Brother Giordano read the books that a doctor of theology must read; he read the Fathers, he read Jerome and Ambrose and Augustine and Aquinas. He chewed and swallowed them like a goat eating paper, and excreted them in
examenes
and
recitationes
.

In the privy he read Cecco. He read Solomon's book on the Shadows of Ideas. He read Marsilio Ficino,
De vita coelitis comparanda
, on drawing down the life of heaven by talismans and incantations. The privy was the secret library of San Domenico; there the books were read, and changed hands; there they were hidden; there they were traded in for others. Giordano was its librarian. He knew and remembered every book, where it lay in Fra’ Benedetto's cases, who had asked for it, and what was in it. In his vast and growing memory palace, the whole heavens in small, all that took up next to no room at all.

His brothers marveled at Giordano's memory, and whispered how he had come by it. Giordano let them whisper. Addicted to gossip and sausages, they would never dare to put the stars to use: but Giordano dared.

Meanwhile the enormous sun burned in the blue, blue sky; pleasure craft and oared warships skimmed across the bay, the azure bay prinked with silver points of wavelets. The Spanish viceroy (for the Kingdom of Naples was a possession of the Spanish crown) rode through the city dressed in Spanish black, in his little black chaise; if he met the Host being carried through the streets to someone ill or dying, he would get down and join the procession, following it humbly to its destination. Every year the congealed blood of St. Januarius kept in the cathedral melted and flowed on his feast day as though just shed, and the people and the priests and the cardinal and the viceroy wept and groaned aloud or held their breaths in awe. Some years, the blood was slow in melting, and the mass of people pressed into the cathedral grew restive, and a riot would start to seethe.

There were always riots; there were always the poor, crowded in the tall close houses of the port quarters, in narrow alleys piled with refuse, where children grew like weeds, untended and wild and numerous. They begged with persistence, robbed with skill; they laughed equally at the
pulcinelle
in their booths around the Piazza del Castello and at the extravagant farewells of a brigand about to be hanged in the Piazza del Mercato. All day the naked beggars lay on the quays; at night, fisher-girls danced the tarantella on the flat roofs of cottages that ringed the bay under the moon.

The moon drew humid tears from the earth, attracting them upward by her own watery nature; by her action also, in the mud-flats of river estuaries and in sea-pools, frogs and crabs and snails were generated. When she was full, dogs all over the city turned their faces up to hers, and howled. When their own star Sirius arose with the sun, they went mad, and the dog-killers went out to catch them.

In the wood of dead trees, in the guts of dead dogs, worms were generated; from the guts of dead lions, bees were born—so it was said, though few had ever seen a dead lion. Horsehairs fallen in a horse-trough turned into snakes, and now and then you could see one starting: one hair beginning to whip sinuously amid the floating still ones. The sun shone, and the heliotrope in the gardens of the Pizzofalcone turned their faces to it, and the living lion in the viceroy's menagerie roared in his strength and pride. The moon drew the fogs, the sun drew the heliotrope; the lodestone drew iron, and Saturn in the ascendant tugged terribly at the brain of the melancholic man.

It was all alive, all alive, from the bottom of the sea through the air to the heavens, the stars altering the four elements, the elements the body, the body the soul. Brother Giordano sang his first Mass in Campagna, at the church of San Bartolomeo, whispering
Hoc est enim corpus meum
over the circle of bread he held in his anointed fingers, and in the warmth of his breath it was alive too. The heretics of the North said it was not alive, but of course it was; swallowed, it warmed Giordano's bosom with the small fire of its aliveness. Of course it was alive: for there was nothing that was not.

So the Nolan grew from boy into man, priest, and doctor; so the stars turned over the changeful world; so the memory he had made grew full of treasure, too full for reckoning, yet all of it his. Brother Giordano amazed his brothers, filling the evenings in Chapter after supper with feats that seemed more than human. He had them read out lines of Dante chosen at random, here, there, in any canto; and then the next night he would recite them all, in the order they had been given to him, or backward, or starting from the middle. He asked them to name humble objects, fruits, tools, animals, articles of dress; over months and years the list grew hundreds and hundreds of items long, yet he could remember it all, or any part of it, in any order, starting anywhere: the brothers (who had them all written down) would follow along the lists as Giordano, hands folded in his lap, eyes slightly crossed, named each thing, seeming almost to taste it, to relish it, even as he took it from the hand of the kindly one who leaned from his tower window to proffer it: hoe, shovel, compasses; dog, rose, stone.

His fame spread. Among the Dominicans, at first, who were proud of the ancient art which they were well known for preserving and practicing; but then in the world at large as well. Giordano came to the attention of the
Academia secretorum naturAE
, the School of Nature's Secrets, and of the great magician of Naples who presided there: Giambattista della Porta.

When he was only fifteen years old, this Della Porta had published a huge encyclopAEdia of natural magic; then there had been trouble with the Church, and the young mage had come under the eye of Paul IV, and might very well have ended badly; he was exonerated at length, but now he kept his gaze firmly below the moon's sphere, and practiced only the whitest of white magics—and heard Mass daily, just in case.

He was an ugly, dog-faced, egg-headed man, swarthy and brutal-looking; at his temple a thick vein beat. As though in compensation, his voice was gentle and melodious, and his manners exquisite. With great kindness he led the young monk, defensive and rigid with unease, through the public rooms of the Academy decorated with allegories of the sciences and into an inner chamber where, at dinner, the fellows reclined in the antique style, wearing white robes and vine leaves in their hair.

They didn't giggle, or stare slack-jawed at him when he performed his feats; they considered, and asked questions, and put hard tests to him. One had made a list of long nonsense-words almost identical but not quite—
veriami, veriavi
;
vemivari
;
amiava
—thirty or more of them. Giordano broke them into parts, and for each part he found some visual clue: birds (
avi
), lovers (
ami
), a book of truths (
veri
), a bunch of twigs (
rami
). Then, hands folded in his lap and his eyes with that far-off cast in them (for they watched the scenes he had made out of the clues pass in his inward sight), he gave them all, and again, and differently. A girl gave her lover a white pigeon, in a cage made of sticks, and he sold it for a book. It happened in the piazza before the church in Nola, in scorched August; he could see the girl's shy look, smell the cracked leather of the book, feel the bird's quick heartbeat beneath his fingers: years later he would sometimes dream of these figures and their dramas, the girl, the bird, the boy, the book, the sticks.

He did all that they asked him, and more that they hadn't asked him—smiling at last, and leaning forward to see their amazement—and later when the guests were gone and he sat alone over wine with the ugly magician, he talked about how he did what he did.

—Places, and images cast on them, yes, Della Porta said, who had written a little
Ars reminiscendi
himself which included all the usual rules.

—Yes, said Fra’ Giordano. The church of San Domenico Maggiore and the cloisters and the square before it. But it's not enough.

—Imaginary places can be used.

—Yes. I do.

—And images can be taken for use on them from our painters. From Michelangelo. Raffaello. The divine ones. Images of good and evil, strength, virtue, passion. These vivify the imagination.

Fra’ Giordano said nothing, who had not seen their paintings, though the names seemed to make paintings in his mind, and he found a wall there to put them on.

—I use the stars, he said. The twelve houses. And their denizens. Those are powerful aids.

Della Porta's eyes narrowed.

—That might be lawful, he said carefully.

—But they're not enough, Giordano said. Even now the figures sometimes grow confused to me. Too few to do so much, play so many parts. Like a comedy with too few actors, and the same ones come on again and again in different cloaks and wigs.

—You may use the images of AEgypt, Della Porta said, clutching his knee in his hairy hands and casting his eyes upward. Hieroglyphs.

—Hieroglyphs...

—That is lawful. That much is lawful.

The monk was staring at him so fixedly that Della Porta felt compelled to go on.

—You see, he said, in their wisdom the AEgyptians made multiform images, a man with a dog's head, a baboon with wings. They were not so foolish as to worship such monstrosities. No. They concealed in their images truths for the wise to uncover. The baboon is Man, the Ape of Nature, who reproduces Nature's effects by imitation, but whose wings take him above the material plane as his mind pierces through appearances.

The monk said nothing, only still stared.

—A fly, said Della Porta. It means Impudence, because no matter how often it is driven away, it always returns. You see? And out of these images, linked, they made a language. A language not of words but of corporeal similitudes. Like your memory images. You see? In that book of Horapollo's there are seven dozen of them explained. Hieroglyphs.

The library of San Domenico did not have a book by Horapollo, or Fra’ Giordano did not know of it. He felt—he had felt since Della Porta had begun speaking of hieroglyphs—a weird hunger at the bottom of his being.

—What other books? he asked.

The mage withdrew slightly from the monk, who leaned toward him with an intensity Della Porta disliked.

—Read Hermes, he said. Hermes who gave to AEgypt her laws and letters. It grows late, my young friend.

—Marsilio Ficino, said Giordano. He translated the works of that Hermes.

—Yes.

—Marsilio knew images too. Was he taught by Hermes? Images of the stars, to draw down their power.

—That is
not
lawful, the mage said, standing suddenly.

—He made them in his mind only.

—It is not lawful and it is not safe, the mage said, lifting Fra’ Giordano by a hand on his shoulder, and propelling him toward the door of the chamber.