Jonathan Levi - Septimania

Gently, the Pole examined the book. Malory wondered what the Pole made of what he read — wondered whether he read Italian? Whether he read English? Did he know enough maths, enough physics, did he know enough history and even religion to realize the importance of Newton’s declaration:

I have found the One True Rule that guides Mathematics, the One True Rule that guides Science, that guides the Universe. I have found the One True Rule. But the Rule is too weighty to fit on one page of this Chapbook.

Gently the Pole led Malory, in green cape and hiking boots, from the Pietà into the center of the nave of the basilica. And gently the Pole placed one of Malory’s palms upon the Newton Chapbook and raised the other.

“I’m afraid,” Malory whispered to the Pole.

“I too,” the Cardinal said. “I am also afraid.”

“I’m afraid,” Malory continued. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” The Cardinal smiled. Malory felt a moment of calm. “I hope that if I make a mistake, you will correct me.”

The Polish Cardinal thought for a moment. And then, with a gentle touch on the shoulder, he pressed Malory down onto his knees, onto a purple stone set into the floor of the basilica, into the center of a perfect circle of porphyry.

It was only later that Malory discovered that the perfect circle of porphyry just inside the entrance to St. Peter’s was the very stone on which, nearly twelve hundred years before, his great-great ancestor, Charlemagne, had knelt before Pope Leo III. It was only later that Malory learned all the various titles that his inheritance, leading from his grandmother back to Charlemagne, and through Charlemagne’s son-in-law back to King David himself, had brought upon him, including Holy Roman Emperor, King of the Jews, and King of Septimania. For now, as he listened to the Polish Cardinal, the man whom he, by his innocent Turn, had crowned Pope John Paul II, as he repeated oaths in several unintelligible languages, one hand on the Chapbook and the other in the air, Malory merely felt that this extraordinary day must, in some way, be a prelude to a new life, with Louiza and her — could it really be their? — baby. Somewhere, he hoped, if not in the vastness of St. Peter’s or the howl of the crowd waiting in the piazza, his mother, his grandmother, and Sir Isaac were watching him.

“Mazel tov,” the Polish Cardinal said, raising Malory up and kissing him on both cheeks.

“Excuse me?” Malory said.

“Ah, my poor boy,” the Pole sighed. “I know very little. But you know even less.”

And thirty minutes later, when Malory arrived at the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli and, despite the assistance of Settimio and the Driver, could find no trace of Louiza, La Principessa , Tibor, or the red-haired American, Malory — the newly crowned king of kingdoms he never knew existed — knew even less than that.

6 September 1666

hat is the first thing one wishes to see upon waking and the last before closing one’s eyes?

My love? My loved one?

The simple is the sign of the nearer truth.

Light. We wish to see the light. In the beginning, if we are believers, there was light. Before the end, even if we believe not, there is light as well.

In the early morning, when the light hurdles the Tevere and joins me in my solitary bed, and in that hour before dusk when I stand alone in the garden, hidden from the nuns of the Aventino, and the sun is at nearest sympathy with the horizon, I have often had cause to ponder on the nature of light. There is no element as quick and powerful. Yet no element as easy to deflect. A mirror crazed with age, a summer lagoon dusty with neglect, an eyeball moistened with solitude, or a boot polished with spit will shift the direction of the swiftest ray of light without breaking a sweat.

I was bending light with a simple glass prism when Isaac descended to breakfast on the fifth morning of our journey. We had stopped in Troyes for the night in an inn attached to the Broce-aux-Juifs where I had a few friendly connections and knew the meat would not upset Isaac’s Lincolnshire digestion. I had picked up the toy in Cambridge before the Plague — a piece of glass carved into two triangles connected by three narrow rectangles. As I waited for Isaac, the morning brightening the steam from my coffee, I twisted the prism in the light from the doorway and watched the colors form, the seven colors of the spectrum, on the wall above the innkeeper’s bar.

“Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain!” I looked up. Isaac was beaming on the stair, as happy as I’d seen him since we’d quit his mother’s garden.

“Good morning!” I said, putting the prism down on the table and rising to greet him.

“No, no,” he said and jumped from the stair to the table. “Once more!” And he picked up the prism and caught the morning in a practiced motion. Again the light divided and cast its rainbow upon the wall. “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain!” he crowed again.

I looked perplexed, as sometimes I do when these English schoolboys play history games with me.

“It’s how one remembers the trick of the prism — the seven colors that it paints the light,” Isaac laughed, happy to have an audience that needed a lecture. “Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet … Richard Of York Gave Battle …”

“But, Isaac,” I interrupted gently.

“R for Richard and Red, O for Of and Orange …”

“I understand,” I said. “But surely you don’t believe that this clear piece of glass gives color to the light.”

“Of course it does,” Isaac said, twisting the prism again. “Look! Richard Of York …”

It was then that I removed a second prism from its hiding place in my jacket pocket. Intercepting the seven-colored band from Isaac’s prism, my new prism captured the color and projected the light into a single, clear, colorless beam on the innkeeper’s wall.

Of the many virtues that attracted me to the multi-hued Isaac Newton, my favorite is his desire to know the truth. In an instant, all thoughts of Richard, Duke of York, vanished. Isaac sat at the table, the first prism in his left hand. He took my wrist gently between his fingers and moved my hand closer to his and then farther away. He laid the prisms down on the table while he reached for the eternal chapbook in his own jacket pocket and a stub of pencil and drew a rough sketch. Coffee and breakfast gave way to experiment and measurement.

I knew the truth before Isaac descended. Still, I was happy to watch him in the flight of discovery and description, calculating angles, drawing rays, holding my wrist oblivious to the rising temperature of my blood, the beating velocity of my heart. “The prism does not color the light,” Isaac declared finally with the light-giving pride of conquest in his eyes. “The light is made up of colors!” Meanwhile, I had made a deflection of my own.