John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

“Why no,” said Girolamo, “they are in Verona. They live there. We do not agree, and so I seldom see them. This is my house.”

“O.”

The Italian laughed. “Come now, my friend, do not look so alarmed. There will be no one here but you and I.”

“I did not think you were so—”

“—Rich? Does it trouble you?”

“No; why should it?”

“Then for God’s sake stop cringing!” he snapped, and slapping his riding gloves against his thigh he turned and strode up the steps to the vestibule, where the servants were gathered to welcome their master. There was a dozen of them or more, from young girls to grey old men. They looked at Nicolas in silence stonily, and all at once he was acutely aware of his shabbiness, his cracked boots and few poor bits of baggage, the decrepit mare trying not to fall over out in the courtyard behind him. We know your kind, those eyes told him, we have seen you come and go many times before, in different versions but all essentially the same. And he wondered how many others there had been. .

Girolamo impatiently performed his signorial duty, pacing up and down the line of attentive servants with a fixed false smile, questioning each one in turn in a detached formal voice on their health and that of their parents or children. And what news of the estate? Everything was in order? Splendid, splendid. Nicolas looked on with envy. At twenty, Girolamo had the ageless self-assurance of the aristocrat. He dropped his wet cloak and gloves on the floor, from whence they were immediately and reverently snatched up by one of the maids, and throwing himself down into a chair he motioned the steward, a bent old gouty brute, to help him off with his boots. He looked up at Nicolas and smiled faintly.

“Well, my friend?” he said.

“What?”

“ Caro Nicolo. ”

They sat down in a richly appointed dining-room to an elaborate veal and champagne supper. A candelabrum of Venetian glass glistened above their heads, its gaudy splendours reflected deep in the dark pool of the polished table on which there sailed a fleet of handcrafted gold and silver serving dishes. The room was hushed, suspended in stillness, except where their bone knives and delicate forks stabbed and sliced the silence above their plates with tiny deft ferocity. Everywhere that Nicolas looked he encountered the Fracastoro monogram, intricately graven in goldleaf on the dishes and the cruets, woven into the napkins, even carved on the facings and reredos of the vast black marble fireplace.

“Tell me,” he said, “how many such establishments as this do you keep up?”

“O, not many; the apartments in Verona, where my books are, and a house in Rome. And of course there is a hunting lodge in the mountains, which we must visit, if the weather clears. Why do you ask?”

“Curiosity.”

“Are you still brooding on my unsuspected wealth? It is not so great as you seem to imagine. You are too easily impressed.”

“Yes.”

“Are you glad you came here?”

“Yes.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“What would you have me say? Indeed, my liege, my humble thanks, sweet lord, I am overwhelmed.” He ground his teeth. “Forgive me, I am tired from the journey, and out of sorts. Forgive me.”

Girolamo gazed at him mildly, more in curiosity it seemed than anger or hurt.

“No, it is my fault,” he said. “I should not have brought you here. We were happier on neutral ground — or should I say, we were happy ?” He smiled. “For we are not happy now, are we?”

“Does happiness seem to you the greatest good?”

At that the Italian laughed. “Come, Nicolas, none of your sham philosophising, not with me. Do you hate me for my wealth and privilege?”

“Hate?” He was genuinely shocked, and a little frightened. “I do not hate you. I. . do not hate you. I am happy to be here, in your—”

“Then do you love me?”

He was sweating. Girolamo continued to gaze at him, with fondness, and amusement, and regret.

“I am happy to be here, in your house; I am grateful, I am glad we came.” He realised suddenly that even yet they did not call each other thou. “Perhaps,” he stammered, “perhaps the weather will clear tomorrow. .”

*

But the weather did not clear, in the world nor in the villa. Nicolas stormed, wrapped in a black silence. His rage had no one cause, not that he could discover, but bubbled up, a poisonous vapour, out of a mess of boiling emotions. He felt constantly slighted, by Girolamo, by the smirking servants, even by the villa itself, whose sumptuous sybaritic splendours reminded him that it was accustomed to entertaining aristocrats, while he was what Novara had said, a mere tradesman’s son. Yet was he in reality being thus sorely scorned? Was he not, in discerning, indeed in cultivating this contempt all round him, merely satisfying some strange hunger within him? It was as if he were being driven to add more and more knots to a lash wielded by his own hand. It was as if he were beating himself into submission, cleansing himself, preparing himself: but for what? He hungered, obscenely, obscurely, as under the lash his flesh flinched, went cold and dead, and at last out of a wracked humiliated body his mind soared slowly upward, into the blue.

Now he saw at last how the plot had been hatching in secret for years, the plot that had brought him without his willing it to this moment of recognition and acceptance; or rather, he had not been brought, had not been made to move at all, but had simply stood and waited while the trivia and the foolishness were shorn away. The Church had offered him a quiet living, the universities had offered academic success, Italy had even offered love. Any or all of these gifts might have seduced him, had not the hideousness intervened to demonstrate the poverty of what they had to offer. At Frauenburg among the doddering canons he had been appalled by the stink of celibacy and clerkly caution. Ferrara had been a farce. Now Italy was making of him an anguished grimacing clown. The Church, academe, love: nothing. Seared and purified, shorn of the encumbering lumber of life, he stood at last like a solitary pine that stands in a wilderness of snow, aching upward fiercely into the sky of fire and ice that was the true concern of the essential selfhood that had eluded him always until now. Beware of these enigmas, Canon Wodka had warned him, for they cannot teach us how to live. But he did not wish to live, not by lessons that the world would teach him.

He had often before retreated into science as a refuge from the ghastliness of life; thus, he saw now, he had made a plaything of science, by demanding from it comfort and consolation. There would be no more of that, no more play. Here was no retreat, but the conscious accepting, on its own terms, of a cold harrowing discipline. Yet even astronomy was not the real issue. He had not spent his life pursuing a vision down the corridors of pain and loneliness in order merely to become a stargazer. No: astronomy was but the knife. What he was after was the deeper, the deepest thing: the kernel, the essence, the true.

*

Rain fell without cease. The world streamed. Lamps were lit at noon, and a great fire of pine logs burned day and night in the main hall. Outside, black phantom cypresses shuddered in the wind.

“The villagers have gone back to the old ways,” Girolamo said. “Christ-come-lately is abandoned, and the ancient cults are revived. Now they are praying to Mercury to carry their appeals to the gods of fair weather.”

They were at table. They dined now four or five times a day. Eating had become a sullen joyless obsession: they fed their guts incessantly in a vain effort to dull the pangs of a hunger that no food would assuage. The tender flesh of fish was as ash in Nicolas’s mouth. He was pained by Girolamo’s gentle puzzled attempts to reach out to him across the chasm that had opened between them, but it was a vague pain, hardly much more than an irritant, and becoming vaguer every day. He nodded absently. “Curious.”