John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

Nicolas smiled nervously and turned away, alarmed by this man’s sudden tentacled intensity. It was mad, all mad! yet when he imagined that fiery soul flying upward, aching upward into light, a nameless elation filled him, and that word glowed in his head like a talisman, that greatest of all words: redemption .

“I believe in mathematics,” he muttered, “nothing more.”

At that suddenly the Professor checked himself, his fire abated, and he was once again his former urbane studied self. “Exactly, my dear fellow,” he said, smiling, “just my point!” And he touched his guest lightly on the shoulder and led him back to join the waiting company.

Luca Guarico, squatting on a delicate ebony and velvet couch, shifted his vast bulk to make a little space beside him which he patted with a pudgy hand in roguish invitation, and Nicolas had no choice but to lower himself with a shiver into the faintly perfumed puddle of warmth that the fat man had left behind him. Novara paced the floor deep in thought, tapping the folded lorgnon against a thumbnail. No one spoke. Nicolas suspected that Guarico was watching him, and he would not turn for fear of what frightful intimacies he might be forced to share by meeting those pinkish porcine eyes. The insolent dandy who had stared at him before was now deep in whispered dark confabulation with two others of his kind. Celio Calcagnini sighed a brief bored melody and considered the ceiling, peeling off his immaculate white linen gloves finger by finger. The fiery Ziegler gnawed his nails in a furious abstraction. Nicolas was suddenly beset out of the blue by a sense of general absurdity. He rose hastily, propelled to his feet by the force of a soft fart inadvertently let slip by Guarico, and at that moment Novara turned to him and said: “Herr Koppernigk. .” He stopped, perplexed, finding his guest apparently on the point of fleeing. Nicolas leered apologetically and slowly subsided, while just above his head he fancied he could hear rumblings of muffled celestial merriment. “Herr Koppernigk,” Novara continued, “I feel I am not wrong in thinking that you are one of us at heart. You have realised by now, of course, that this is no mere aimless gathering of friends; we are, you may say, men with a purpose. We marked how closely you attended to that brief exchange between Celio here and our dear impetuous Jacob, and so we suspect that you have some little notion of the nature of our purpose?”

“O yes,” Nicolas said brightly, quite at a loss; finding himself stared at he beat an immediate retreat. “That is to say I feel I understand—”

“Yes yes, I see.” Novara waved a languid hand and resumed his pacing. “Let me explain. I say we have a purpose, but from this you must not imagine that you have stumbled upon a nest of conspirators. No doubt in the north they tell terrible tales of us here in Italy, but I assure you, we have no stilettos under our cloaks, no poisons secreted in our signet rings. We are, simply, a group of men dissatisfied with the state of things, frightened by the state of things. The world, my dear friend, is flying headlong to disaster, driven thither by the corruption that is all too evident in Church and State. There is the decay of the aristocracy, and along with it the collapse of the manorial system. There is the diminution of the standards of education, so that mere tradesmen’s sons are now allowed into our greatest univ. .” He caught Nicolas’s eye, and winced. “Ahem. In short, Herr von Koppernigk, there is the decadence of the age. Decadence. Ah. Is it not greatly to be feared? Is it not a plague, is it not worse than war? For decadence is the attendant midwife at a brute birth, and the beast that is being born, here, now, in this very city, is — I shudder to say it—”

“He m-means,” piped Nono, eager as the clever boy in the classroom, “the c-concept of lullul lullul lu-liberty!”

Novara looked at him coldly. “Just so,” he said, and turned away.

Calcagnini was still dreamily considering the ceiling, where pink plaster cherubs rioted in buttocky abandon.

“Ah, liberty,” he murmured, smacking his lips delicately, “that fearful word.” For the first time that day he turned his cool sardonic gaze directly on Nicolas, and smiled. “You see, my dear sir, we believe that when the people are allowed to entertain notions of individual freedom — nay when they are encouraged to it! — then begins the swift decline of civilised values.”

At that for some reason Guarico chortled. Nicolas’s heart sank into a quag of gloom. He was tired, he wanted to be elsewhere. His glass was full again, and already he had drunk too much. He shook his head and mumbled dully:

“I do not understand.”

“The point is—” Novara began, but once again he was interrupted, this time by Ziegler who lunged forward and jabbed a trembling finger at Nicolas’s breastbone, crying:

“The point is that the rot can be stopped! Yes yes, it can be stopped by a few determined men, a few good minds— we , sir, we can stop it!”

“How, pray?” Nicolas snapped. He disliked intensely this rabid young man, whose face under the force of his passion had turned a kind of furious purple.

“Jacob,” Novara said softly. “Calm now, calm.” He turned to Nicolas. “You see how strongly our feelings run? How should it be otherwise? We are, as Jacob has already remarked, outcasts in this city. O there is no conspiracy against us, no pressures are brought to bear on us, we are free to come and go, to congregate, to hatch plots even, if we wish; we are—” he shrugged “—free. But what does it signify, this objectless freedom? Only that we are not feared, because the times themselves ensure that men such as we shall not be heeded. In a bad age the wise man is scorned.” He paused in his pacing and looked about him at the company with a fond melancholy smile. “Regard us, sir: we are scholars, we are philosophers and scientists and poets, but we are not activists. Yet now, here in Bologna and throughout Italy and all Europe, action is necessary. Who will act if we do not? As Platonists we know that justice and good government are possible only when power rests in the hands of the philosophers. Therefore we must have power. How are we to achieve it? Herr Koppernigk, let me be specific: we seek—” Calcagnini stirred nervously, but Novara disregarded him “—we seek, sir, firstly union between our city state and Rome, and beyond that, O far beyond that, a Europe united under papal rule. A new, strong and united Holy Roman Empire — that is our aim, no less than that.”

Nicolas blinked. Calcagnini coughed drily.

“I think, Domenico,” he murmured, “I think you have forgotten a most important thing.” He looked at Nicolas. “We seek, yes, a Europe united, but only under a Pope of our making. His Holiness Alexander will not do, he will not do at all.” A ripple of bitter amusement passed through the room. Novara nodded.

“Of course,” he said, not without a trace of irritation, and bowed to the poet, “a most important point assuredly. A Pope, yes, of our making. We have even considered candidates; does that surprise you, Herr Koppernigk? We are in earnest, you see. We have for instance considered Alexander’s bastard Cesare. Luca’s horoscope, however, is not encouraging, and tends to confirm the grave doubts we have for some time been entertaining in that quarter. I think we must look elsewhere.” And he looked with a smile upon Nicolas, who after a moment’s reflection sat upright suddenly and said:

“O but you cannot imagine that I–I mean, surely not!”

They stared at him, and then Novara laughed somewhat uneasily.

“Ah,” he said, “a joke; I see. I did not at first — very droll, yes.”