John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

“You have been speaking with the Bishop, I can see,” he said. “You are sweating.” He laughed, a faint thin dry scraping sound. Now in the candlelight his face was horrible and horribly fascinating, worse even than it had seemed at first sight in the ill-lit porch, a ghastly ultimate thing, a mud mask set with eyes and emitting a frightful familiar voice. He was almost entirely bald above a knotted suppurating forehead. His upper lip was all eaten away on one side, so that his mouth was set lop-sidedly in what was not a grin and yet not a snarl either. One of his ears was a mess of crumbled white meat, while the other was untouched, a pinkish shell that in its startling perfection appeared far more hideous than its ruined twin. The nose was pallid and swollen, unreal, dead already, as if there, at the ravaged nostrils, Death the Jester had marked the place where when his time came he would force an entry. With such damage, the absence of blood was an unfailing surprise. “I think, brother, our uncle loves me not.”

The Canon nodded, unable to speak. He felt sundered, as if mind and body had come apart, the one writhing here in dazed helpless horror, the other bolt upright there on the floor, a thing of sticks and straw, nodding like a fairground dummy. A dome of turbulent darkness, held aloft only by the frail flame of the candle, pressed down upon the little room. He drew up a chair and very slowly sat. He told himself that this was not Andreas, could not be, was a phantom out of a dream. But it was Andreas, he knew it. What surprised him was that he was not surprised: had he known all along, without admitting it, the nature of his brother’s illness? Suddenly his sundered halves rushed together with a sickening smack, and he wrung his hands and cried:

“Andreas, Andreas, how have you come so low!”

His brother looked at him, amused and gratified by his distress, and lightly said:

“I had suspected, you know, that you would not fail to notice some little change in me since last we met. Have I aged, do you think? Hmm?”

“But what — what—?”

But he knew, only too well. Andreas laughed again.

“Why, it is the pox, brother, the Morbus Gallicus , or as your dear friend Fracastoro would have it in his famous verses, Syphilis , the beautiful boy struck down by the gods. A most troublesome complaint, I assure you.”

“O Christ. Andreas.”

Andreas frowned, if that was what to call this buckling of his maimed face.

“I’ll have none of your pity, damn you,” he said, “your mealy-mouthed concern. I am brought low, am I? You cringing clown. Rather I should rot with the pox than be like you, dead from the neck down. I have lived! Can you understand what that means, you, death-in-life, Poor Pol, can you? When I am dead and in the ground I shall not have been brought so low as you are now, brother!”

Into the globe of light in which they sat dim shapes were pressing, a crouched chair, the couch, a pile of books like clenched teeth, mute timid things, lifeless and yet seemingly alive, aching toward speech. The Canon looked about, unable to sustain the weight of his brother’s burning eyes, and wondered vaguely if these things among which he lived had somehow robbed him of some essential presence, of something vivid and absolutely vital, in order to imbue themselves with a little vicarious life. For certainly (Andreas was right!) he was in a way dead, cold, beyond touching. Even now it was not Andreas really that he pitied, but the pity itself. That seemed to mean something. Between the object and the emotion a third something, for him, must always mediate. Yes, that meant something. He did not know what. And then it all drifted away, those paradoxical fragments of almost-insight, and he was back in the charnel house.

“Why do you hate me so?” he asked, not in anger, nor even sadness much, but wonderingly, with awe.

Andreas did not answer. He fished up from under his cloak a soiled piece of cheese, looked at it doubtfully, and put it away. “Is there wine?” he growled. “Give it here.” And the ghost of the imperious headstrong bright beautiful creature he had once been appeared briefly in the furry yellow light, bowed haughtily, and was gone. He produced a length of hollow reed, and turning away with the fastidious stealth of a wounded animal, inserted one end of it between his lips and sucked up a mouthful of wine. “I suppose you think it only justice,” he mumbled, “that I have no longer a mouth with which to drink? You always disapproved of my drinking.” He wiped his lips carefully on his wrist. “Well, enough of this poking in the past — let us speak of present things. So you have sold yourself to Nuncle Luke, eh? For how much, I wonder. Another fat prebend? I hear he has given you a canonry at Breslau: rich pickings there, I daresay. Still, hardly enough to buy you whole, I should have thought. Or has he promised you Ermland, the bishopric? You’ll have to take Holy Orders for that. Well, say nothing, it’s no matter. You’ll rot here, as surely as I will, elsewhere. Perhaps I shall return to Rome. I have friends there, influence. You do not believe me, I see. But that is no matter either. What else can I tell you? — ah yes: I am a father.” Suddenly his eyes glittered, bright with spite. The Canon flinched. “Yes, the bitch that dosed me redeemed herself somewhat by dropping a son. Imagine that, brother: a son, a little Andreas! That burns your celibate soul, doesn’t it?”

O yes, it burned him, burned him badly, worse than he would ever have suspected it could do. Andreas’s aim was uncanny: he felt as dry as a barren woman. He said:

“Where is he now, your son?”

Andreas took another sip of wine, and looked up, grinning in anguish. “Hard to say where he might be; in Purgatory, I expect, seeing that he was so grossly got. He could not live, not with such parents, no.” He sighed, and glanced about the darkling room abstractedly, then groped under his cloak again and brought up this time a raw carrot with the stalk still on. “I asked your fellow to filch me some food, and look what he brought, the dog.”

“ Max? ” the Canon yelped, “was it Max? Did he see your. . did he see you clearly? He will tell the Bishop how things are with you. Andreas.”

But Andreas was not listening. He let fall the carrot from his fingers, and gazed at it where it lay on the floor as if it were all hope, all happiness lost. “Our lives, brother, are a little journey through God’s guts. We are soon shat. Those hills are not hills but heavenly piles, this earth a mess of consecrated cack, in which we sink at the end.” He grinned again. “Well, what do you say to that? Is it not a merry notion? The world as God’s belly: there is an image to confound your doctors of astronomy. Come, drink some wine. Why do I hate you? But I do not. I hate the world, and you, so to speak, are standing in the way. Come, do take some wine, we might as well be drunk. How the wind blows! Listen! Ah, brother, ah, I am in pain.”

A bitter cold invaded the Canon’s veins. He had emerged on the far side of grief and horror into an icy plain. He said:

“You cannot stay here, Andreas. Max will surely tell the Bishop how things are. He knows you are sick, but not how badly, how. . how obviously. He will drive you out, he has threatened already to have you hanged. You must go now, tonight. I shall send Max with you to the town, he will find lodgings for you.” And in the same dry measured tone he added: “Forgive me.”

Andreas had taken up his ebony cane and was leaning on it heavily, rocking back and forth where he sat. He was drunk.

“But tell me what you think of the world, brother,” he mumbled. “Do you think it a worthy place? Are we incandescent angels inhabiting a heaven? Come now, say, what do you think of it?”