John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

With a sinking heart he heard his name called from the courtyard of a tavern close by, but when he made to hurry on he was prevented by a grinning drab, black as pitch, who planted herself in his path, smacking her blubber lips. A roar of tipsy laughter gushed out of the tavern.

“Come join us, brother, in a cup of wine,” Andreas called. He sat with a band of blades, good Germans all, his friends. “See, fellows, how pale and gaunt he looks. You are too much at the books.”

They regarded him merrily, delighted with him, provider of fine sport. One said:

“Too much at the rod, more like.”

“Aye, been galloping the maggot, have you, Canon?”

“Bashing the venerable bishop, eh?”

“Haw haw.”

“O sit down!” Andreas snapped, flushed and petulant; drink did not agree with him very well. Nicolas had often wondered at his brother’s uncanny knack of gathering about him the same friends wherever he went. The names varied, and the faces a little, but otherwise they were the same at Torun or Cracow or here in Bologna, idlers and whoremasters, pretender poets, rich men’s sons with too much money, bullyboys all. There was of course this difference, that they got progressively older. Among this present lot there was not a one under thirty. Perennial students! Nicolas smiled wryly to himself: he was not so young that he could afford to scoff at others. Yet he was different, he knew it, a different species; why else did he fit so ill among them, perched here on the edge of this bench, hugging himself in a transport of embarrassment and repugnance, grinning like an idiot?

“Tell us, brother, who was that fair wench we spied you with just now? Likely you were discussing the motions of the spheres? Venus rising and suchlike?” Nicolas shrugged and squirmed, simpering foolishly; he was no match for his brother at this kind of cutting banter. Andreas turned to the others with his languorous smile. “He is very hot on stargazing, you know, the pearly orbs, the globes of night, and so forth.”

A pimply fellow with straw-coloured locks and a wispy beard, the son of a Swabian count, took his sharp little nose out of his pintpot and leaned across the table seriously, and seriously said:

“Canon, have you heard tell of the unfortunate astronomer who got his sums mixed, and ended up with two planets where there should have been only one? Why, he made a ballocks of the orbit of Mars!”

There was more hawing and hohoing then, and more wine, and landlord! landlord! come fellow, a bowl of your best stewed tripe, for blind me but I have a longing for innards tonight. They left off baiting Nicolas. He was a poor foil for their wit, a poor punchbag. The last light of evening faded and the night came on apace, and stars, hesitant and dainty, glimmered in the trellis of vineleaves above their heads. A boy with a bunch of smoking tapers went among the tables. Here comes our young Prometheus, bringer of fire. What a sweet arse he has, look where he bends; here, boy, a ducat for your favours. The child backed off, smiling in fright. Music swelled in the street, wild caterwauling of fifes and the rattle of kettledrums, and a band of minstrels entered the courtyard in search of free wine. Nicolas grew dizzy in the noise and the smoke of the shaking rushlight. He drank. The Tuscan red was dark and tawny as old blood. Andreas mounted the table, wild-eyed and unsteady, roaring of freedom and rebirth, the new age, l’uomo nuovo. He staggered, clutching the air, and fell with a scream and a clatter into his brother’s lap. Nicolas, suddenly stricken by sad helpless love, rocked in his arms this slack damp drunken lump, this grotesque babe, who leaned out over the table and gawked— Ork! — upon the straw-strewn floor a dollop of tripe and wine.

Later they were in a narrow ill-lit stinking street, and someone was lying in an open drain being strenuously kicked. The count’s son stood by sniggering, until he was punched smartly out of the darkness by a disembodied fist and went down with a cry, gushing blood from a smashed nose. Nicolas found himself unaccountably on his knees in a low room or kind of little hut. The place was loud with grunting and moaning, and tangles of humped pale phosphorescent flesh writhed on the earthen floor. In the ghastly candlelight a woman lay on a pallet before him spreadeagled like an anatomical specimen, grinning and whimpering. She smelled of garlic and fish. He fell upon her with a moan and sank his teeth into her shoulder. It was a messy business, quickly done. Only afterwards did it strike him, when he put it to himself formally as it were, that he had at last relinquished his virginity. It had been just as he had imagined it would be.

*

Next morning he crept into the Aula Maxima bleared and crapulous, and late; his fellow students, elderly earnest young men, glared at him in disapproval and reproach. The Professor ignored him — what was a student’s tardiness to Domenico Maria da Novara, astronomer, scholar of Greek, devotee of Plato and Pythagoras? Perched in his high pulpit he was as ever supremely, magisterially bored. The dry sombre voice strolled weary and indifferent through the lecture, pacing out the sentences as if they were so many ells of fallow land; only later would the significance and peculiar brilliance of his thought be made manifest, when their notes exploded slowly, like an unfolding myriad-petalled flower, in the mean rooms and minds of his students. He was a cold queer fastidious man, tall and swart, in his middle years, with a cruel face like a sharp dark blade. At Bologna, where it was not uncommon for an arrogant lecturer to be humbled by a hail of brickbats, or even run through by a playful rapier, Novara commanded universal fear and respect.

“Koppernigk — a word, if I might.” Nicolas halted in alarm. The class had ended, and the last of his fellows were shuffling out of the hall. He tried to smile, and leering waited, sick-shotten, quaking. The Professor descended thoughtfully from the pulpit, and on the last step stopped and looked at him. “I am told that you have been putting about some, how shall I say, some curious ideas. Is it so, hmm?”

“Forgive me, maestro , I do not understand.”

“No?” Novara smiled thinly. They walked together down a sunlit corridor. Narrow stone arches to their right gave on to a paved courtyard and a marble statue with one arm raised in mysterious hieratic greeting; jagged shadows bristled under their feet. The Professor went on: “I mean of course astronomical ideas, speculations on the shape and size of the universe, that kind of thing. I am interested, you understand. They tell me that you have expressed doubts on certain parts of the Ptolemaic doctrine of planetary motion?”

“I have taken part, it is true, in some discussions, in the taverns, but I have done no more than echo what has been said already, many times, by you yourself among others.” Novara pursed his lips and nodded. Something seemed to amuse him. Nicolas said: “I do not believe that I have anything original to say. I am a dabbler. And I am not well this morning,” he finished wanly.

They strolled in silence for a time. The corridor was loud with the tramp of students, who eyed with furtive speculation this ill-assorted pair. Novara brooded. Presently he said:

“But your ideas on the dimensions of the universe, the intervals between planets, these seem to me original, or at least to promise great originality.” Nicolas wondered uneasily how the man could have come to hear of these things. His encounter with Brudzewski in Cracow had taught him discretion. He had admitted taking part in tavern talk, but surely he had never been more than a silent sharer? Who then knew enough of his thinking to betray him? The Professor watched him sidelong with a calculating look. “What interests me,” he said, “is whether or not you have the mathematics to support your theories?” There was of course one only who could have betrayed him; well, no matter. He was both pained and pleased, as if he had been caught in the commission of a clever crime. The few notions he had managed to put into words, gross ungainly travesties of the inexpressibly elegant concepts blazing in his brain, were suddenly made to seem far finer things than he had imagined by the attentions of the authoritative Novara.