John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

“Ah, Tiedemann, troubles, troubles. .”

I was left to fend for myself, of course, as usual, until one of the serving lads took pity on me. He bounced up under my nose with a saucy grin smeared on his face, Raphaël he was called, hardly more than a child, a pretty fellow with an arse on him like a peach, O, I knew what he was about! — Raphaël, indeed: some angel. But I followed him willingly enough, and not without gratitude. As he scampered along before me, babbling and leering in his childish way, it occurred to me that I should have a chat with him in private, before I left, about the joys of matrimony and so on, and warn him of the tribulations in store for him if he continued to lean in the direction he so obviously leaned, at such a tender age. Had I only known what tribulations were in store for me on his account!

*

And so began our strange sojourn at Löbau. Throughout that long summer we remained there. The magical spell, the first touch of which I had felt out on the empty Prussian plain, settled over all that white castle on its peak, where we, as in an enchanted sleep, wandered amidst the luminous order and music of the planets, dreaming miraculous dreams. Luther had scoffed at Copernicus, calling him the fool who wants to turn the whole science of astronomy upside down , but Luther should have kept to theology, for in the sweat of his worst nightmare he could not have imagined what we would do during those months at Löbau. We turned the whole universe upon its head. We , I say we , for without me he would have kept silent even into the silence of the grave. He had intended to destroy his book: how many of you knew that?

How very skilfully I am telling this tale.

*

Bishop Giese. Bishop Giese was not quite the crusty old pedant I had expected. He was no gay dog, to be sure, but he was not without a certain. . how shall I say, a certain sense of irony — better call it that than humour, for none of those northerners knows how to laugh. In his attitude toward the Canon, a blend of awe and solicitude and an occasional, helpless exasperation that yet was never less than amiable, he revealed a loyal and gentle nature. He was something of an astronomer, and possessed a bronze armillary sphere for observing equinoxes, and a mighty gnomon from England, which I envied. However, it was with an enthusiasm plainly forced that he displayed these and other instruments, and I suspect he kept them chiefly as evidence of the sincerity of his interest in the Canon’s work. He was nearing sixty at the time of which I speak, had been a canon of the Frauenburg Chapter, and was destined one day to take Dantiscus’s place in the Bishopric of Ermland. Of middle height, not stout but not gaunt either, he was one of those middling men who are the unacknowledged proprietors of the world. He was decent, unassuming, diligent — in short, a good man. I loathed him, I still do. He suffered from the ague, which he had contracted in the course of his duties somewhere in the wilds of that enormous bog which is Prussia; Canon Nicolas, playing at medicine (as I do now!), had for some time been treating him for the affliction, hence, officially at least, our presence at Löbau. But it was not on the Bishop alone that the Canon’s skill was to be lavished. .

On the evening of our arrival, after I had lain down briefly to sleep, I awoke drenched in sweat and prey to a nameless panic. My teeth chattered. I rose and for a long time wandered fitfully about the castle, wringing my hands and moaning, lost and frightened in those unfamiliar stone corridors and silent galleries. I knew, but would not acknowledge it, what this mood of mounting urgency and alarm presaged. All my life I have been subject to prolonged bouts of melancholia, which at their most severe bring with them fainting fits and crippling pains, even temporary blindness sometimes, and a host of other lesser demons to plague me. But worst of all is the heartache, the accidie. More than once I have near died of it, and hard to bear indeed would be the fear that at the last the ghost might abandon me in the midst of that drear dark, but, thankfully, my stars have laid in store for me an easier, finer end. The attack that came on that evening was one of the strangest that I have ever known, and was to endure, muted but always there, throughout my stay at Löbau. I have spoken already of enchantment: was it perhaps no more than the effect of viewing the events of that summer through the membrane of melancholy?

Dinner at the castle was always a wearisome and repellent ritual, but on that first evening it was torment. The company gathered and disposed itself hierarchically in a vast hall, whose stained-glass windows trapped the late sunlight in its muddy tints and checked its rude advance into the pious gloom so beloved of popish churchmen. Amid the appalling racket of bells and music and so forth the Bishop entered, in full regalia, and took his place at the head of the highest table. Slatterns with red hands and filthy heels bore in huge trays of pork and baskets of black Prussian bread and jars of wine, and then the uproar began in earnest as the doltish priests and leering clerks stuck their snouts into the prog, gulping and snorting and belching, flinging abuse and gnawed bones at each other, filling the smoky air with shrieks of wild laughter. A bout of fisticuffs broke out at one of the lower tables. In the face of it all, the Bishop, enthroned on my left, maintained a placid mien — and why not? By the standards of the Roman Church his dining-room was a model of polite behaviour. Yes, to him, to them all, everything was just splendid, and I alone could see the ape squatting in our midst and hear his howls. Even if they had seen him, they would have taken him for a messenger from God, an archangel with steaming armpits and blue-black ballocks, and sure enough, after a few prayers directed by the company toward the ceiling, the poor brute would have been pointing a seraphic finger upward in a new annunciation (the Word made Pork!). Thus does Rome transform into ritual the horrors of the world, in order to sustain the fictions. I hate them all, Giese with his mealy-mouthed hypocrisy, Dantiscus and his bastards, but most of all of them I hate — ah but bide, Rheticus, bide! The Bishop was speaking to me, some polite rubbish as usual, but the bread was turning to clay in my mouth, and the plate of meat before me had the look of an haruspex’s bowl of entrails, signifying doom. I could no longer bear to remain in that hall. I rose with a snarl, and fled.

Soulsick and weary, I lay awake for hours by the window of the rathole I had been allotted as a room. Out on the plain faint lights flickered. The sky was eerily aglow. In those northern summers true darkness never falls, and throughout the white nights a pallid twilight endures from dusk to dawn. I longed for kindly death. My eyes ached, my arsehole was clenched, my hands stank of wax and ashes. Here in this barbarous clime was no place for me. Tears filled my eyes, and flowed in torrents down my cheeks. All of my life seemed in that moment inexplicably transfigured, a blackened and useless thing, and there was no comfort for me anywhere. I held my face in my hands as if it were some poor, wounded, suffering creature, and bawled like a baby.

There came a tapping, which I heard without hearing, thinking it was the wind, or a deathwatch beetle at work, but then the door opened a little way and the Canon cautiously put in his head and peered about. He wore the same robe that he had travelled in, a shapeless black thing, but on his head now there was perched an indescribably comic nightcap with a tassle. In his trembling hand he carried a lamp, the quaking light of which sent shadows leaping up the walls like demented ghosts. He seemed surprised, and even a little dismayed, to find me awake. I suspect he had come to spy on me. He mumbled an apology and began to withdraw, but then hesitated, remembering, I suppose, that I was not after all an article of furniture, and that a living creature wide awake and weeping might think himself entitled to an explanation as to why an elderly gentleman in a funny cap should be peering into his room at dead of night. With an impatient little sigh he shuffled in and closed the door behind him, put down the lamp with exaggerated deliberation, and then, carefully averting his gaze from my tears, he spoke thus: