John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

“Up up up! Come!”

The main room was a general disorder of books and clothes and empty wine bottles. Most of the furniture was draped in dustsheets. Here and there amidst the clutter the skeleton of a former glory was visible in richly patterned panelling and polished marble pillars, gold-embroidered drapes, an inlaid rosewood spinet delicate and tentative as a deer. Magnificent arched windows framed a triptych of the airy architecture of St Anthony’s soaring motionless against an immaculate blue sky. Fracastoro looked about him, and with a shrug waved his hand in a vague helpless gesture of apology. How many generations of aristocratic breeding had been necessary, Nicolas wondered, to produce that patrician indifference and ease? He shrank back into his black cloak, a lean grey troubled soul suddenly aching with envy of this young man’s confidence and carelessness, his disdain for the trivial trappings of the world. They stood a while in silence by the window, gazing out at the sunlit city and listening to the morning noises that rose to them from the street below, the rattle of cane shutters, rumbling of the watercart, the breadman’s harsh cry. Nothing happened, they said nothing, but forever afterwards, even when much else had faded, Nicolas was to remember that moment with extraordinary vividness as marking the true beginning of their friendship.

There was a sound behind them, and Girolamo turned and said:

“Ah, here you are, you dreadful dog.”

It was the handsome young man from the bedroom. He stood in the doorway clad only in his shirt, scratching his head and gazing at them blearily. His name was Tadziu or Tadzio, Nicolas did not catch it clearly; it hardly mattered, since he was never to see him again. After that first morning he disappeared mysteriously, and Girolamo did not mention him save once, a long time afterwards. They spoke together rapidly now in a dialect that Nicolas did not understand, and the boy shrugged and went away. Girolamo turned to his guest with a smile. “I must apologise: apparently there is no food. But we shall have something presently.” He began to glance idly through a disorderly mass of papers overflowing a small ornate table, looking up at Nicolas now and then with a quizzical, faintly amused expression, seeming each time about to speak but yet remaining silent. At last he laughed, and throwing up his hands said helplessly:

“I do not know what to say!”

Nicolas would not look at him; he knew what he meant.

“Nor I,” he murmured, confused and suddenly happy. “Nor I!”

Tadziu or Tadzio returned then, with a steaming loaf of bread under his arm, and in one hand a magnum of champagne, in the other a platter covered with a napkin which Girolamo lifted gingerly to reveal a greasy mess of griddle cakes. “O disgusting, disgusting!” he cried, laughing, and they sat down and began to eat. Girolamo’s handsome young friend bent on Nicolas bitterly a dark unwavering glare. But Nicolas refused to be intimidated; he had been light-headed already from lack of sleep, but now the champagne and the warm brown stink of the bread and the griddle cakes befuddled him entirely. He was happy.

“Come,” said Girolamo, “tell us your famous theory of the planets.”

Yes, yes, he was happy!

*

But happiness was an inadequate word for the transformation that he underwent that summer — for it was no less than a transformation. His heart thawed. A great soft inexpressible something swelled within him, and there were moments when he felt that this rapture must burst forth, that his cloak would fly open to reveal a huge grotesque foolish gaudy flower sprouting comically from his breast. It was ridiculous, but that was all right; he dared to be ridiculous. He fell in love with the city, its limpid mornings, burning noons, evenings in the piazzas loud with birds, that city fraught now with secret significances. Never again without a unique pang of anguished tenderness would he walk through the market, or stand upon the Ponte San Giorgio at dawn, or smell at the streetcorner stalls the rank humble pungency of frying griddle cakes.

Yet behind all this fine frenzy there was the fear that it could destroy him, for surely it was a kind of sickness. In his studies he thought he might find an antidote. He read Plato in the Greek, and reread Nicolas Cusanus and Ptolemy’s Almagest , which last by now he almost knew by heart. He took up again those texts to which Novara had introduced him, and plunged once more into the thickets of the translation of Trismegistus that Ficino had made for Lorenzo de’ Medici. But it was useless, he could not concentrate, and rushed out and strode through the deserted noonday streets under the throbbing plane trees, distraught and alarmed, until his legs of their own volition brought him to the Palazzo Antonini and that disordered room overlooking the basilica, where Girolamo smiled at him sleepily and said:

“Why, my friend, what is it? You look quite crazed.”

“I am too old for this, too old!”

“For what?”

“All this: you, Italy, everything. Too old!”

“An old greybeard you are, yes, of twice ten years and eight! Come, uncle, sit here. You should not go out in the sun, you know.”

“It is not the sun!”

“No; you are altogether too much a Prussian, too sceptical and cold. You must learn to treasure yourself more dearly.”

“Nonsense.”

“But—”

“Nonsense!”

Girolamo stretched himself and yawned.

“Very well, uncle,” he mumbled, “but it is siesta time now,” and he laid his head down on the couch beside his friend and smiling fell asleep at once. Nicolas gazed at him, and wrung his hands. I am besotted with him, besotted!

*

He was captive to a willing foolishness. Those concerns that up to now he had held to be serious, and worthy of serious considerations, he had with lunatic lightheartedness abandoned; but they had not abandoned him, no, they waited in the outer darkness, gnashing their teeth, ready to come back at him and have a fourfold revenge, he knew it. He knew, but could not care. Had he not liberated himself at last from the pinched mean hegemony of the intellect? Had he not at last set free the physical man that all his life had waited within him for release? The senses now would have their day; they deserved it. Yet strangely, the body whose bonds he had cast off seemed not to know what to do with its newfound liberty. Like a starved stark loony released after years in the dungeons, it reeled about drunkenly in the unaccustomed light, sweating and dribbling, tripping over itself, a gangling spidery pale fork of flesh and fur, faintly repellent, faintly comical, wholly absurd.

Absurd, absurd: he remembered Ferrara particularly, and the day of his conferring.

*

It was for reasons of economy — or stinginess, according to Girolamo — that Nicolas chose to take his doctorate in canon law other than at Padua, for even the most solitary of graduates would find himself surrounded by hitherto unknown friends when the conferring ceremony, and more especially the lavish banquet he would be expected to provide afterwards, were at hand. Nicolas had no intention of allowing a gang of sots to stupefy themselves with drink at his expense, and therefore, although it was a far less prestigious institution than Padua, and he had never studied there, he applied for graduation to the University of Ferrara, and was accepted, and in the autumn of the year travelled south accompanied by Girolamo.

The ritual of conferring took a full week to complete. It was a horrible business. The promoter assigned to him by the college was one Alberti, a harassed apologetic canon lawyer with a limp and a wild fuzz of prematurely grey hair that stood out from his narrow skull like an exclamation of alarm. During a class of his once a student had been stabbed to death while he lectured on oblivious. Nicolas liked him; he was of the same sad endearing tribe as Abstemius of Włocławek.