John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

“I have no friends, Andreas. And I wish you would not go.”

“You are a hypocrite. Do not make me spew, please.”

However much he tried not to be, Nicolas was glad of his brother’s going; now perhaps at last, relieved of the burden of Andreas’s intolerable presence, he would be permitted to become the real self he had all his life wished to be.

But what was that mysterious self that had eluded him always? He could not say. Yet he was convinced that he had reached a turning point. Those first months alone in Padua were strange. He was neither happy nor sad, nor much of anything: he was neutral. Life flowed over him, and under the wave he waited, for what he did not know, unless it was rescue. He applied himself with energy to his studies. He took philosophy and law, mathematics, Greek and astronomy. It was in the faculty of medicine, however, that he surfaced at last, like a spent swimmer flying upward into light, in whose aching lungs the saving air blossoms like a great dazzling yellow flower.

*

“Signor Fracastoro?”

The young man turned, frowning. “ Si , I am Fracastoro.”

How handsome he was, how haughty, with those black eyes, that dark narrow arrogant face; how languidly he sprawled on the bench among the twittering band of dandies, with his long legs negligently crossed. The lecture hall was putrid with the stink of a dissected corpse, the gross gouts and ganglia of which two bloodstained attendants were carting away, but he was aristocratically indifferent to that carnage, and only now and then bothered to lift to his face the perfume-soaked handkerchief whose pervasive musky scent was the unmistakable trademark of the medical student. He was dressed with casual elegance in silk and soft leather, booted and spurred, with a white linen shirt open on the frail cage of his chest; he had come late to the lecture that morning, flushed and smiling, bringing with him into the fetid hall a crisp clean whiff of horses and sweet turf and misty dawn meadows. He was all that Nicolas was not, and Nicolas, sensing imminent humiliation, cursed himself for having spoken.

“We met last year in Rome, I think,” he said. “You were with Professor Novara.”

“O?”

Fracastoro’s friends nudged each other happily, and gazed at Nicolas with bland sardonic seriousness, trying not to laugh; they too could see humiliation coming.

“Yes yes, in Rome, and before that in Bologna, at the Professor’s house.” He was beginning to babble. Someone sniggered. “I remember it well. You tried to make a drunkard of Novara’s dog, ha ha. Ha.”

The young man raised an eyebrow. “Yes? A dog, you say? Extraordinary. Certainly I do not remember that.”

Nicolas sighed. Blast you, you young prig. Life is dreadful, really. He stepped back, trying not to bow.

“A mistake,” he muttered. “Forgive me.”

“But wait, wait,” Fracastoro said, “this Novara, it seems to me I do know the man, vaguely.” He lifted a slender hand to his brow. “Ah yes, a mathematician, is he not? — much given to mysticism? Yes, I know him. Well?”

“You do not remember our meeting.”

“No; but I may do so, if I concentrate. Do you have news of the Professor?”

“No, no, I merely — it is no matter.”

“But—?”

“No matter, no matter.” And he fled, pursued by laughter.

*

They met again some days later, in the vegetable market, of all places, at dawn. Lately Nicolas had begun to suffer from sleeplessness, and went out often at night to walk about the city and bathe his feverishly spinning brain in the chill dark air. He developed a fondness for the market especially; the colours, the clamour, the heavy honeyed smell of ripeness, all conspired to cheat of its bleakness that inhuman hour before first light. He was leaning on the damp parapet of the Ponte San Giorgio, idly watching the upriver barges like great ungainly whales unloading their produce in the bluish gloom of the wharf below, when a voice said at his shoulder:

“Koppernigk, is it not?”

He was wrapped in a dun cloak, and his long fair swathe of hair was hidden under a battered old black slouch hat; even in such dull apparel he could not be less than elegant. He was smiling a little, not looking at Nicolas, but musing on the still-dark distance beyond the city walls, saying silently, as it were: come, cut me now if you wish, and so have some small revenge. But Nicolas just as silently declined the offer, and suddenly the Italian laughed softly and said:

“Nicolas Koppernigk — you see? I have been concentrating.”

Nicolas with a faint smile inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Signor Fracastoro.”

The other looked at him directly then, and laughed again.

“O please,” he said, “my friends call me that; you may call me Girolamo. Shall we walk this way a little?” They left the bridge and crossed the open piazza, where the fishwives were hurling amiable abuse from stall to stall. “But tell me, what brings you here at this strange hour?”

Nicolas shrugged. “I do not sleep well. And you?”

“Wine and women, I fear, keep me from my bed. I am for home now after a misspent night.” It was meant as a boast. He was at that age, not quite twenty yet, when the youth he had been and the man he was becoming both held sway at once, so that in the same breath he could slip disconcertingly from hard cold derisive cynicism into simple silliness. Now he said: “You disappointed Novara greatly, you know, by not taking seriously his grand schemes to save the world. Ah, poor Domenico!”

They both laughed, a little spitefully, and Nicolas, suddenly stared at out of the sky by the Professor’s pained reproachful eyes, said hastily:

“But they are not without significance, his preoccupations.”

“No, of course; but it is all mere talking. He is too much in love with magic, and despises action. I mean that natural magic for him is all centaurs and chimaeras. Now I, however, understand it in general as the science which applies the knowledge of hidden forms to the production of wonderful operations.” He glanced out quickly from under the downturned brim of his black hat with a candid questioning look, but it was impossible to know if he was being sincere or otherwise. “What do you say, friend?”

But Nicolas only shrugged and murmured warily:

“Perhaps, perhaps. .”

He did not know what to make of this young man; he did not trust him, and did not trust himself, and so determined to go cautiously, even though he could not see where trust came into it, except that he knew he did not care to be made a fool of again. It was all odd, this meeting, this dreamlike morning, these dim figures hurrying here and there and crying out in the gloom. They entered a narrow alleyway given over entirely to the trade in cagebirds. Cascades of bright mad music drenched the dark air. Coming out at the other end they found themselves abruptly in a deserted square. The sky was of a deep illyrian blue, lightening rapidly now to the east, and the towers of the city were tipped with gold.

“May I offer you breakfast?” said Fracastoro. “My rooms are close by.”

He lived in a tumbledown palazzo near the Basilica of St Anthony, the family home of an elderly count who had long ago fled to a villa in the Dolomites for the sake of his ailing lungs. “My uncle, you know,” he said, and winked. They ascended through the shabby splendours of gilt and tempera and stained marble statuary to the fourth floor, where a kind of rambling lair, stretching through five or six large rooms, had been scooped out of the dust and genteel wreckage deposited by years of neglect. Here, under the sagging canopy of a vast four-poster, they came upon a young man asleep in a tangle of soiled sheets. He was naked, his limbs sprawled in touchingly childish abandon, tacked down firmly, as it were, like some exotic specimen, by the enormous erection that reared grotesquely out of his jet-black bush. Fracastoro barely glanced at him, but in passing picked up a tortured shirt from the floor and flung it at his head, crying: