John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

“Well now, Herr Kupperdik, here is the drill. Firstly I take you before an assembly of doctors to whom you will swear that you have been through the proper course et cetera, which ha ha you have, I take it? The reverend gentlemen will set you two passages of law, and we retire together to study them. It is all a sham, of course, since I know already what the passages will be — I should be a poor promoter if I didn’t, eh, Herr Kopperdyke? Anyway, after a decent absence we return, the doctors question you, they ballot, and you are made a licentiate. All that remains then is for you to take the public examination for your full doctorate, but that is merely a formality after the oral test, which as I said is really a formality also. And there you are: Doctor Popperdink! Nothing to it!”

But of course it was not so simple. Alberti got the set passages mixed, and coached Nicolas, with admirable diligence, in those intended for another graduate, and on the day of the inquisition Nicolas spent a frantic hour in a hot antechamber, while the doctors fretted next door, trying to memorise the new answers and at the same time block out the distracting apologies of his mortified promoter. The examiners, however, seemed to have had some experience already of Alberti’s organisational powers. It was apparent that they cared less about the indifferent quality of Nicolas’s performance than they did about the fact that the ritual had not been strictly adhered to. They voted, mumbling among themselves, fixed Alberti with a crushing glare, and having announced the result of the examination rose and swept away amid an outraged rustling of gowns. Nicolas, drenched with sweat, closed his eyes and lowered his burning face gently into his hands. His promoter leapt at him and began to thump him on the back in a transport of relief, almost knocking him off his chair. “Congratulations, my dear fellow, congratulations!” Throughout, Nicolas had been able to think of one thing only: the reception he would get from Uncle Lucas if he returned to Ermland without his doctorate. “Herr Poppernik? Are you unwell?”

Girolamo laughed, of course, when he heard of the affair, and then sat in silence, pale and distant, while Nicolas poured over him the scalding bitter brew of the day’s pent-up frustration and rage. And that night along with Alberti they went down to the stews and got vilely drunk in the company of a band of shrieking whores.

The week rolled on inexorably, like a giant engine gone out of control and disintegrating, flinging bits of itself in all directions, bombarding Nicolas, the innocent bystander, with spokes and broken ratchets and gouts of thick black oil. On Sunday the contraption exploded finally, with a deafening report. Arriving at the cathedral for the conferring, he halted in the porch, horror-stricken. “Jesus, what’s this?” The place was full of students, hundreds of them, they were even squatting on the steps of the high altar. Alberti turned to him with a bland enquiring smile. “Yes, Doctor ?” He had taken to using that title at every opportunity, with a proprietary rib-nudging roguishness that made Nicolas want to strike him very hard with his fist.

“This crowd!” he cried. “What does it mean? I came to Ferrara to avoid just this kind of thing!”

Alberti was puzzled; a true Italian, he thrived on crowds and clamour.

“But the students always come to hear the orations,” he said mildly. “It is the custom.”

“God!”

Girolamo was studiously inspecting the architecture, with the solemn look of one shaking inwardly with laughter. He was got up for the occasion in a quilted scarlet doublet and tight black hose, with a long white plume to his cap; like a damned peacock, Nicolas thought bitterly. Now without turning Girolamo murmured:

“It is for the comic possibilities that they come, I imagine?”

Alberti nodded enthusiastically. “ Si, si , the comedy, just so.”

“ God ,” Nicolas groaned again, and, wrapping his gown about him tightly, plunged up the aisle to the pulpit. On the narrow steps he trod upon the liripipe dangling from his neck and almost throttled himself. A sea of rapturous expectant faces greeted him as he peered apprehensively over the brim of the pulpit. Someone at the back of the nave whistled a piercing heraldic flourish, provoking an uproar of catcalls and applause. Nicolas fished about under his gown for the text of his oration. For one appalling moment he thought. . but no, he had not left it behind, it was there, though in a dreadful jumble that his shaking hands at once made worse.

“ Reverendissimi . .”

The rest of his opening address was drowned by shouts and a stamping of feet, and he stopped, quite lost. Alberti and Girolamo, sitting below him, leaned forward with their hands cupped around their mouths and together cried: “They cannot hear your!” After a time some semblance of order returned, and he stuck out his neck like an enraged tortoise and hurled his text at them as if it were an execration. His argument was a defence of the canonical interdict on marriage between a widow and her brother-in-law; it was a purely formal declaration of an accepted doctrine, upon which his audience in like formality was meant to challenge him, but he suspected, rightly as it happened, that these turbulent students had no intention of playing by the rules. Even before he had finished, a dozen of them or more were on their feet, howling abuse at him and at each other amid a general hilarity. He tried to discern even some halfway sensible objection to the contents of his text, but in vain, for his tormentors were mouthing merely nonsense, or obscenities, or both at once, and like a large rag doll being fought over by children he bounced about in the pulpit, throwing up his arms, grinning, opening and closing his mouth in mute helplessness and pain. Never in his life had he known such an exquisite agony of embarrassment.

At length they lost interest in him, and as the uproar subsided and they began to look about for the entrance of a fresh victim, he scrambled shakily down from the pulpit. He was grabbed at once by a pair of burly vestrymen with cruelly barbered skulls, who marched him off smartly to a side altar and thrust him into the master’s chair. There he was presented with the cap, the book and the gold ring and the graduate’s diploma, and Alberti, with the lunatic intensity of a father crazed with pride, his wild hair bristling, advanced limping and planted on his cheek a tacky garlic-scented kiss of peace.

“Ave magister!” he cried; and then, unable to restrain himself, he added rapturously: “ Doctor Peppernik!”

As if from a distance Nicolas looked in anguished amusement at himself, a dazed grotesque figure with cap askew, full of irredeemable foolishness, a lord of misrule propped upon a pretender’s throne. Italy had done this to him, Italy and all that Italy signified. Girolamo came forward to kiss him, but he turned his cheek away.

* * *

The weather was bad that spring, rain and gales for weeks and the muttering of thunder in the mountains. Great fortresses of black cloud rumbled westward ceaselessly, and Lake Garda boiled in leaden rage. This tumult in the air seemed to Nicolas an omen, though what it might signify he could not say. He arrived with Girolamo at the villa at dusk, wet and weary and dispirited. The big old timber and stone house was set among tall cypresses on a steep hill overlooking Incaffi and the lake. It had the look of money about it. There was a spacious courtyard paved with rough-cut marble, and busts of the Caesars set on marble plinths; wide stone steps swept up to a pillared entrance. He had expected something far more modest than this.

“Will your family be here?” he asked, unable to conceal his apprehension.