AEgypt (52 page)

Giordano Bruno, Nolan, lay on his satchel and did not sleep.

Genoa, a city of palaces and churches, orgulous and gay. He went up from the harbor along avenues of palaces, palaces half-built or half-rebuilt; every one different. He took the lefts and rights he had in memory; he found an archway into the gardens of a palazzo, he crossed a geometric pleasure-ground, he walked between ranks of dark topiary beasts (centaur, sphinx) down to a grotto where water dropped musically: there he found the man he had been sent to, master of these gardens, who was supervising the installation of a waterwork within the grotto.

To this man he spoke the phrase he had committed to memory, a meaningless but odd little compliment. The man's face did not change, but he held out his hand to Bruno.

—Yes, he said. Yes, I see. Welcome.

He drew Bruno within the clammy cool shell of the grotto, stuck full of glittering stones, bits of mirror, shells, crystal. A leaden statue had been set up above the marble pool; workmen fussed with the pipes that led in and out of it, but the god took no notice of them, he looked down at Giordano, arched brows witty and wise, goat's feet crossed.

—Pan, the gardener said.

—Yes.

—And with the water, brought up from below by these pipes, and circulating
here
, and then
here
, Pan will play his pipes. Syrinx.

He looked deeply into Bruno with ash-colored eyes, light in his garden-brown face.

—
Magia naturalis
, he said, smiling like his Pan.

—Yes, said Bruno.

The workmen opened their pipes; a spectral hooting sounded within the grotto. Bruno shivered. The aquatect took his wrist, and Giordano saw that he wore a gold seal-ring on his strong brown hand, a seal-ring carved with a curious figure.

—Now come, he said. Come to my lodge, and tell me what you need.

He was fed and bedded in Genoa for a few days; then he was handed on to the family of a doctor in the Genoese town of Noli, and a place was found for him in the shabby little
accademia
, lecturing to whoever wished to listen on the
Sphere
of Sacrobosco.

—You have traveled much? the doctor who had taken him in asked at dinner.

—No.

—Ah.

The doctor passed him wine.

—I should say
yes
, said Giordano. I have traveled infinitely. In my mind.

—Aha, said the doctor, without a smile. In your mind.

His lectures on astronomy began simply enough, spherical geometry, the colures and equators, Giordano was not particularly easy with this; then he began to draw on Cecco, and attendance improved. His fame spread. Only a few months had passed when the doctor came to him in his little room and said that it would be best if he moved on now.

—Why?

—Travel broadens, said the doctor. Travel not only in the mind.

—But.

—You have been noticed, the doctor said. Our little town is not often in the eye of the Holy Office. But you have been noticed.

—I've said only the truth, Giordano said, rising. The truth.

The doctor raised a hand to calm him.

—Best to leave after moonset, he said. I will come then to wake you.

Another sleeping courtyard, another wallet full of bread, a pouch of coins, a book. Night. A frontier to cross. It was a world full of dangers: and to all of them a young man on foot, with a monk's robe in his satchel and a headful of notions, not used to keeping still, was subject.

Southward he could not go. Northward, in the Spanish kingdom of Milan, the Inquisition was busy and the Spanish soldier, the
tercio
, stood—grinning and most likely drunk—astride every road Giordano might take. Giordano had known the
tercio
all his life, had laughed at him in the
commedie
in his old city:
Capitano Sangre y Fuego, El Cocodrillo
, the eternal bragging soldier, ragged fiery and mad, loyal only to a Spanish honor incomprehensible to all the rest of the world, and to a Catholic church whose every moral law he flouted. Killing heretics—and their servants and children if necessary, their oxen and geese for his sustenance—was what the
tercio
lived to do; after that to drink, and lie, and have his way with women. The Milanese girls didn't leave their shuttered houses even to go to Mass.

So Signor Bruno (new sword at his side) went west, skirting the Milanese borders, and up to Turin in the kingdom of Savoy: which was just as Hapsburg as Milan but not Spanish at least, having fallen to the Holy Roman Empire when old Charles had broken his vast inheritance in two, half for Phillip of Spain, half for Maximilian of Austria. In Turin Giordano taught Latin grammar to children until he could stand it no more; then he packed books, papers, habit, and, one step ahead of the parents who had paid him in advance, found a place on a boatload of Alpine timber going downriver to the Po. The Po went east to Venice. So did Bruno.

It could seem in those years that half the world was in motion, put to flight by the other half. From square to square across the chessboard of the Hapsburg possessions the
tercios
crossed and recrossed, billetted on households in Naples and Milan, rifling the warehouses of Protestant merchants in Antwerp (who packed their goods in trunks and fled to Amsterdam and Geneva); shipped by Armada to the New World, slaying Indians, who had no souls, and looking for El Dorado in Guinea and Brazil; battling the Turks in Transylvania and Crete, holding open the doors of a Spanish corridor from Sicily to the Baltic, starting fugitives like hares wherever they passed.

But there were other armies abroad who also admitted of no boundaries, either geographical or in the hearts of men; forces that could likewise abide no compromise, could not even conceive of it.

—They come out from Geneva with books hidden in the false bottoms of their trunks, said the lean passenger who shared Giordano's perch upon the timber. They come into a city, and never reveal themselves. They are merchants, agents, goldsmiths, printers. They begin to attract others by their secret preaching—the father of a family, who brings in his wife, his children, his servants. In this way many small congregations are established, like the cells built by a honeybee, linked but sealed off from each other; if one is broken into, no matter, others remain whole. They know only the names of those who share with them, so torture cannot wring the names of others from them. And so they grow, in secret, like worms inside a fruit, until one day they are enough; they reveal themselves, the fruit bursts to show the roiling mass inside, the city falls to them. Just in that way.

—How do you come to know so much of it? Giordano, irritated, asked him.

—In France, the lean man said, the Huguenots (which is only another name for them) are now debating whether the believers are justified in killing a monarch who oppresses them.
Killing a monarch.
Why not the Pope then? Why not Jesus Christ himself again?

—Hm, said Giordano.

He pretended to sleep. The riverbanks, crowded with people and carriage, went by him, or he went by them. Later he saw the lean man take from his clothes and open a black book Giordano recognized; his lips moved as he read, and his hand now and then sketched a cross on his bosom.

They were soldiers, and in motion too: the Company of Jesus, soldiers loyal to no crown, no bishop, no territory. No more than the Genevans did they believe that Christ's church could be divisible, and at every breach from Scotland to Macao they were there. They could stab a monarch, Giordano was sure: or pay to have one stabbed. They could. They already had.

In Venice he again found help: a name he knew led him to another name, and that one to a scholarly doctor with a room to spare; there was an academy where he could lecture, money for books.

He lectured on the
Ars memoriae
, and let it be whispered that he had fled a Dominican monastery: the reputation of his order for possessing potent memory arts was old and wide. To his students at the academy he began to seem—as he would seem to many others from that time onward—to have a secret he could impart, a secret that had cost him not a little in the learning, if they would just sit still to hear it. He drew hearers, not all of them sympathetic. He lost—discarded, threw away in a few terrific moments—his old virginity, in a closed gondola rocking on the autumn Adriatic.

His powers continued to grow. Offered a counterfeit coin—not a silver ducat but cast glass silvered with mercury—his fingers knew the difference. Mercury, trickster and thief, speaker and laugher, his own Hermes, was burning to his touch: silver, the moon's metal, was cool and liquid. If he drew on Venus, blew on Venus inwardly as on a coal, then other powers were his: women turned to watch him pass, men deferred to him, there was no hesitancy in him when words needed to be whispered into a small pink ear, when masks—hers frilled and black, his white and long-nosed—were put aside.

(He found, after those exertions, as he lay still and glowing beside a sleeping woman, that something was loosened within him; for a few moments or an hour he would perceive the packed contents of his consciousness on the move, streaming together, like with like, rank on rank, like the different troops of an army, horse and foot, artillery, pikemen, fusiliers: each kind in different bright coats and caps, all under the command of the different captains he had set for them, the Reasons of the World; and their general the god Omniform. He would think then: There is only one thing in the universe, and that thing is Becoming. Endless, timeless, ceaseless Becoming, infinite generation exfoliating from the ideas within the mind of God and casting these bright moving shadows in his own soul—and colored, all colored, for if the shadows in his soul were not colored, then nothing is. In a Venetian
bagnio
on the last night of the feast of the Redentore he lay listening to the soft inhalations beside him and the distant revelers, watching within himself the pulse and scintillation of Becoming, like the silver tips of wavelets endlessly becoming on the sea.)

Venice in rain sailed its broad lagoons like an ark of Noah (so he described it in a sonnet) bearing all kinds, two of each. Venice was indulgent: a man could live here, and think. In the bookstalls around the Piazza San Marco, amid the smudgy almanacs and books of prophecy, the pamphlets and
novelle
, he came upon books he had long heard of but had never seen between covers. Iamblichus on the Mysteries. Agrippa,
De occulta philosophia
. Here were the wild hymns of Orpheus to the Sun that were sung in the young age of the world. Here was the
Ars magna
of Ramon Lull, an art of memory like his own but not like his own: he stared at its branching trees and climbing steps and wheels-within-wheels.

Who was publishing these things newly? How did they know he needed them? Why was he seeing books like these in the book presses and cabinets of the kind doctors and scholars who sheltered him? He raised his eyes from the page to see the bookseller, leaning on the back of his bin of books, cheeks in his hands, smiling at him. On his finger he wore a gold ring, a ring cut with that same curious figure the gardener in Genoa had worn:

Image35.jpg

Seeing Bruno baffled and uncertain, the bookseller put before him a thick German volume, sewn but unbound, wrapped in parchment covers. He opened it to the title page.

—Cosmography, the bookseller said.

The book was
On the revolution of the orbs of Heaven
and was by Nicholas Copernicus of Poland.

Copernico
. That was another name Giordano knew, a figure of fun in his Neapolitan schoolrooms, the man who, to explain the heavenly motions, had set the solid earth revolving and staggering around the spheres. He had seemed almost imaginary to Giordano, but here was his book. Nuremberg, A.D. 1547. Dedicated to the Pope. Giordano turned the big pages.

Saturn, the first of the wandering stars, completes its circuit in 30 years. After him comes Jupiter, moving in a duodecennial revolution. Then Mars, which rolls around every two years. The place fourth in order is occupied by the annual revolution of (as we have said) the Earth, carrying with it the orbital circle of the Moon as an epicycle.

He had begun to feel very strange. It was as though, when he read Copernicus's placements of the planets, he felt the same planets in the heavens he kept within him (and their tutelary gods and spirits) open their eyes, and move to their proper places. And then the earth moving too, and all its contents.

In the fifth place, Venus, who completes her revolution in 7½ months. The sixth and final place is occupied by Mercury, who goes around in 88 days. But in the center of all rests the Sun.

As though all the
guglie
of his memory system had been lifted up, at a signal, and put in motion—a motion they had always had, potentially, a motion without which they were asleep, or stopped, like a stopped clock. Giordano laughed. From the sparkling piazza beyond the arcade a flock of pigeons arose, as though suddenly shaken out like a banner: the view of the square was shattered in an instant into a thousand flying particles, fluttering bodies hurtled through the arches of the dark arcade and out again into the light, rousing others to flight.

Wings. Taken wing.

What if it were so? What if it were really so?

—He says, the bookman said in a low voice, he says that it's not new knowledge he has found. It's old knowledge he has brought back again. Pythagoras. Zoroaster. AEgypt. So he says.

And who would place the lamp of this most magnificent of temples anywhere else, who could find a better place for it than there from where it can illuminate all that is at the same time? That's why some, and not improperly either, have called it the Lantern of the World, others the Mind, others the Pilot. And Trismegistus calls it “God visible."

The bookseller had gently put his hands on the book to take it back, but Giordano would not give it up.

—I have no money now, he said. But.

—No money no Cosmography.

Giordano gave the name and street of the house where he was lodging.