John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

Novara stirred. “Yes, Luca, tell us, what do the stars say of our young prince?”

Luca Guarico, he of the large head and hooked nose of a decayed Caesar, sighed fatly, and fatly shrugged. He was fat; he was that kind of fat that conjures up, in the goggling imaginations of thin fastidious men such as Nicolas, hideous and irresistible visions of quaking copulations, and monstrous labours in water closets, and helpless tears at the coming undone of a shoe buckle. He thrashed about briefly on the couch where he sat, and panting brought out from beneath his robes a wrinkled scrap of parchment.

“There is little to tell,” he wheezed. “Had I the facts it would be easy, but I have not. A long life, certainly; good fortune at first, as befits—” he smiled gloomily “—the Pope’s bastard. After his thirtieth year there will come a falling off, but that is not clear. He will conduct a victorious campaign in Lombardy and the Romagna, as that Sforza bitch will learn to her cost. He should beware the French, if Mars is to be trusted.” He shrugged again apologetically and put away the parchment. “So.”

“O brilliant, brilliant,” Ziegler muttered, plucking fiercely at his moustache. Guarico looked at him. Calcagnini hastened to say:

“Jacob, you are so fiery today! As Luca has told us, he has not the necessary facts — and indeed we may ask, who can know the facts concerning that strange and secretive dynasty?”

Bland smiles were exchanged. Novara said:

“But Luca, do you have nothing that touches on our concerns?”

“I can tell you this,” the fat man answered, and looked about him dourly, “this I can tell you: he will never sit on the throne of Peter.”

There was the sense of a slow soft crash, and Ziegler sniggered bitterly.

“Well then,” Novara murmured, “there is nothing for us there.”

Suddenly they all relaxed, and looked at Nicolas, a little bashfully it seemed, like players awaiting his applause. He stared back blankly, baffled. He felt he must have missed something of deep significance. The servants carried on to the terrace small silver trays of choice comestibles, flaked game in aspic, chunks of melon, translucent cuts of the spiced ham of the region. He picked, not without a faint concealed amusement, at a portion of cold quail. The sun had shifted out of the square of sky above the courtyard, and the light there no longer crackled harshly, but was a solid cube of hot bluish brilliance. He was acutely aware of his foreignness, and longed for the cold north. This was not his world, this heat, these strident passions, this stale flat air that sat so heavily in his lungs, like someone else’s breath; nothing touched him here, and he touched nothing. He was a little Prussia in the midst of Italy. An olive-skinned young dandy sitting opposite was eyeing him peculiarly, with a kind of knowing insolence.

Having eaten, the company retired from the terrace to a cool blue high-ceilinged lavish room, with an open archway at one end, and at the other wide windows giving on to a hazy sunlit distance of shimmering cypresses and olive-green hills. An air of expectancy was palpable, and presently the desultory talk stopped abruptly on the entrance of a strange distraught emaciated person with a lyre. He seemed the luckless bearer of a burden of intolerable knowledge, a seer cursed with unspeakable secrets. He stood by patiently, his blurred gaze fixed on some inner vision, while the servants reverently arranged a bank of cushions for him in the centre of the floor, then he settled himself with great care, crossing his pathetically skinny ankles, and began to sing in a weird piping voice. A breeze stirred the silken drapes at the windows, and billows of pale pearly light swayed across the shining floor. The black dog returned and lay down throbbing at Novara’s feet with wet jaws agape. Nicolas felt vaguely alarmed, for what reason he did not know. The song was a sustained sinuous incomprehensible cry that the anguished singer seemed to spin out of his very substance, slowly, painfully, a thin silver thread of sound rippling and weaving hypnotically above the soft dark plashing of the lyre. The company sat rapt, listening with such intensity that it appeared they were in some way assisting in the making of this unearthly music.

At length the song ended, and the singer gazed about him with a lost forsaken look, fretfully fingering the lank yellow strands of his hair. The others rose and went to him quickly, cooing and whispering, solicitous as women. He was given a beaker of wine to drink but took only a sip, and then was helped away, mumbling and sighing. The room was left limp and somehow satiated, as after a debauch. Novara rose, and with a glance invited Nicolas to follow him. Together they went out under the archway with the black dog padding softly behind them. The singer sat alone in an antechamber, ravaged and desolate in the midst of a great light. He looked at them blankly out of his strange pale yellowish eyes, and could not answer when Novara spoke to him, and only shook his head a little and turned away. But he smiled at the dog knowingly, as one conspirator to another. They passed on, and Nicolas asked:

“What is he? Is he ill?”

Novara lifted the lorgnon and looked at him searchingly.

“You do not know? Did you not recognise that music? It was an Orphic hymn to the Sun. He knew Ficino, you see, at the Academy in Firenze. He is not ill, not with what you or I understand as illness. The ancient knowledge to which he is heir consumes him fiercely. Great passion, great wisdom, these cannot be lightly borne by mortal men.”

Nicolas nodded, and said no more. All this was fraught with deep meaning, it seemed; it meant little to him.

They entered the library and walked among the cases of precious manuscripts and incunabula and priceless first editions from Germany and Venice. Novara caressed with his fingertips tenderly the polished spines. He was abstracted, and said little. A bent blade of sunlight from a narrow window clove the gloom. The silence throbbed. Novara produced a tiny gold key with which he unlocked a pearwood chest that Nicolas vaguely felt he had seen somewhere before. Here was the heart of the library, its true treasure, rare and exquisite copies of the Corpus Hermeticum along with Marsilio Ficino’s translations and a host of commentaries and glosses. The Professor began gravely to expatiate on the celestial mysteries. He spoke of decans and angels, of talismans and sympathetic magic, of the spiritus mundi that rules the world in secret. A change came over him and he spoke as one possessed. He was, it seemed, something of a magus.

“Do you believe, Herr Koppernigk?” he asked suddenly.

“I do not know what I believe, maestro. ”

“Ah.”

Nicolas had already heard of the strange aetherial philosophy of this Thrice-Great Hermes, Trismegistus the Egyptian, wherein the universe is conceived as a vast grid of dependencies and sympathetic action controlled by the seven planets, or Seven Governors as Trismegistus called them. It was all altogether too raddled with cabalistic obscurities for Nicolas’s sceptical northern soul, yet he found deeply and mysteriously moving the gnostic’s dreadful need to discern in the chaos of the world a redemptive universal unity.

“The link that bound all things was broken by the will of God,” Novara cried. “That is what is meant by the fall from grace. Only after death shall we be united with the All, when the body dissolves into the four base elements of which it is made, and the spiritual man, the soul free and ablaze, ascends through the seven crystal spheres of the firmament, shedding at each stage a part of his mortal nature, until, shorn of all earthly evil, he shall find redemption in the Empyrean and be united there with the world soul that is everywhere and everything and eternal!” He fixed on Nicolas his burning gaze. “Is this not what you yourself have been saying, however differently you say it, however different your terms? Ah yes, my friend, yes, I think you do believe!”