Galileo's Dream

It was a shock to see how much thinner Maria Celeste had become in his absence. She had driven herself hard those eleven months, running the convent and also helping to take care of Il Gioièllo. Geppo had fallen ill, and afterward suffered a truly noxious skin rash; Maria Celeste had cured it with a salve of her own devise. She had authorized for La Piera the extra spending needed to get through a three-month flour shortage, and late in that bad time had instructed the housekeeper to shut down the house’s oven and get their bread from the convent, setting the price at eight quattrini a loaf. She never ate unless everyone else had.

As a result of all this she was skinnier than ever. No doubt her incessant worry about Galileo had also had its effect. She had tried to help him with his trial, which from her position was a little futile, but she had written repeatedly to Caterina Niccolini, asking her to petition a particular sister-in-law of the pope to intercede. Pursuing these chains of female influence, which were everywhere even though invisible to the men and to the history books, may or may not have helped his cause; it was even possible this had been the crucial intervention, and Caterina the architect of the strategy that got Galileo out of Rome alive. But there was no way to tell from outside that network. In one of her last letters to him before his return, Maria Celeste had mentioned her efforts, saying of them, I know, as I freely admit to you, that these are poorly drawn plans, yet still I would not rule out the possibility that the prayers of a pious daughter could outweigh even the protection of great personages.

She went on to address another matter brought up in his last letter, one of his feeble attempts at a joke in such dismal circumstances:

Now, thinking this over, as I said, when your letter came telling me that one of the reasons why I desired your return was that I wanted a present you had for me, oh then I can tell you I did get angry! But such an anger as King David speaks of in the psalm, Irascimini et nolite peccare—be angry, but do not sin. For it seemed to me that you thought I wanted to see the present more than to see you; which is as far from my thoughts as darkness is from light. Perhaps I did not quite understand your letter, and I try to keep quiet with that thought. But if indeed you meant that, I do not know what I should say or do. Do see if you cannot come back to your tower, which cannot bear to remain so desolate any longer! And now it is time to think about the wine casks as well. La Piera begs to be remembered to you, and says that if her wish to see you and your wish to return were put in the scales, her scale would go down to the ground and yours up to the ceiling.

So the women in his life had joked with him, teased him back when he teased them, sent their love in the rough buffa style that he liked best—Maria Celeste’s burst of temper like something out of Marina herself, back in the day. Question my love and I’ll beat the shit out of you! This amorevolezza had given him heart in a bad time.

Now, as he stood there before her in the convent, she collapsed in his arms and wept. Even Arcangela, looking down to the side, sidled up and touched him briefly on the arm. Galileo touched her back, on the shoulder, gently, then seized up Maria Celeste and lifted her in a hug, kissed away her tears of joy. She was like a bird in his hands, he too wept to feel her lightness. “My little Virginia,” he said into her ribs, shocked and afraid.

In the weeks following his homecoming, he devoted himself to the sisters at the convent. Arcangela reverted to her usual distance; she looked away whenever he spoke to her. She too was more gaunt and angular than ever. Uneasily Galileo tried yet again to befriend her, this time with bits of candied fruit, in the way you would tame a crow; and she would duck her head and snatch the food and drift away.

Meanwhile Maria Celeste talked incessantly, as if to make up for lost time; and though Galileo knew that time lost could never be regained, he indulged her happily. It was good to be home again, and responsible for real things—for physical objects, not only for the ovens and chimneys and windows and roofs of his own house, but also for the ramshackle convent of the Clares, which at this point was nearing a material collapse to match the mental collapse long since suffered.

So he spent many days inside the place, the old prohibition against men’s presence long forgotten. He measured beams for the servants to cut, and augured in the peg holes and hammered in the pegs himself. What joy to pop a dovetail into place like a key in a lock. Theorems you could hit with a hammer. With materials less prone to rot he could have made a roof that would hold off rain for a thousand years. But lead was expensive, and cedar too; pine shakes would have to do.

There weren’t so many chores to accomplish in his garden. It had been tended closely by La Piera, as being one of the things that kept them alive. Now there was little to do except decide on which varieties of cedros and lemons to put in the broken wine casks that had been cut in half for use as tubs.

Then San Matteo came into an agricultural inheritance. “First your prayer was answered and then mine!” Galileo said to Maria Celeste. The elder brother of Suor Clarice Burci had left the sisters a farm at Ambrogiana worth five thousand scudi. Maria Celeste estimated it would yield them annually 290 bushels of wheat, fifty barrels of wine, and seventy sacks of millet. “It was my prayer too, believe me,” she replied with a dark expression. “My ten thousand prayers.” Burci had attached a farm crew to the bequest, as well as an obligation to the nuns to say a mass for him every day for the next four hundred years, and to absolve him three times a year for the next two hundred years. That was fine, but the land had been neglected and was now nearly wild, crew or no.

It was something Galileo could do, and he threw himself into it. To be able to get one’s hands on a problem and strangle it was a very satisfying thing. Clever engineering could do a lot. Once he was pacing the floor of the dining hall, considering a difficult problem in counterbalancing, and a nun got in his way. He explained to her very firmly that she shouldn’t do that, that he was fixing the roof, and afterward she told all the other nuns, “He fixes things by thinking about them!” And indeed, when he was done thinking about the new farm, the nuns would have reliable sustenance at last. It was what he had been hoping for when he had asked Maria Celeste about a benefice from the new pope. He should not have asked her, he realized now, but merely requested the land grant he had been thinking of.

Now they had it, and he stumped across the neglected winter field, under low pewter skies, bark-ringing the midsized trees already overgrowing the pasture, then cutting down the smaller ones with hard awkward swipes of his ax, swinging as if taking off the heads of certain Dominicans, Jesuits, Benedictines, and professors. He was an executioner of trees. At age seventy, and despite his truss, he could still strike harder than most of the boys, and his shout on impact was the loudest by far. It was very satisfying. He would bring this farm into production and give them a sustenance. “Things occur in their own time,” he said.

He wished he could help Maria Celeste in the same kind of way. She had pulled her teeth out as they rotted, and now had nearly none, but was at least free from infections of the jaw. But the lack of teeth could not be good for her digestion. He contrived some rending devices for mashing meats, scavenging bits of an old framework of one of the inclined planes with a bitter smile. There was more than one way to chew on reality.

The workshop was much reduced. It was only a small room stuffed with tools and machinery and beams and metal rods and slats. Mazzoleni was ancient and shriveled and slept most of the time, even though he was in fact four years younger than Galileo himself. Of course Galileo was beyond ancient at this point. But Mazzoleni had perhaps been a bit baked in the head by his many hours in the Venetian sun, and next to the fumes of furnaces. His brains had dried out a little, though he still had his cracked cheery grin, the sight of which now sent a stab through Galileo, who recalled so clearly what it used to mean.

So, he did what he could to help Maria Celeste to eat, and worked on the convent, and their farm, and the garden of Il Gioièllo. When he was tired of the garden he went to the workshop and paged through his dusty old folios, making lists of propositions for the book he was now thinking of writing.

This was another good idea that Piccolomini had been inspired to recommend to Galileo: to go through his old experiments and write a book that had nothing to do with Copernicus or the heavens—a book that instead gave to the world what he had learned about local motion, and the strength of materials. He had started one dialogue while still in Siena, using Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio as his speaking characters again, in an obvious act of defiance, even insolence, as he himself recognized with some pleasure. He could decide to keep the names or not, if it ever came to the point of publishing. He would never be allowed to publish anything anyway, at least in Italy, or anywhere the pope held sway. But there were Protestant acquaintances who might be interested. In any case that was not the point. So sometimes he worked on adding new pages to the dialogue.

But the main project was Maria Celeste. He had seen a lot of women’s bodies in his younger days, and like everyone else, he had seen a lot of people sicken and die. And so each day he walked down the lane that was the main street of Arcetri to the convent, and met her at the gate and kissed her cheeks and lifted her up, as if weighing her, as she once observed—and it was true. And each day therefore his stomach clenched, and he thought about the food on hand that could be made attractive that day. Of course for the most part he needed to be providing for all the nuns equally, so it had to be a matter of some bulk, usually something that could be made into a thirty-bowl soup. These soups were often pretty thin gruel, and they usually poured their wine in to give it a little more body. Maria Celeste complained of a cold stomach, and he could well believe it, as she had no fat on her. And so soups were always good. Galileo had suffered so much disease in his life that he knew all the signs of it, and knew what they meant; and so, watching her, although he threw himself into every day, he too always suffered a bit of a cold stomach, chilled by the fear in him. Even the sun beating on him in the garden could not warm that part. In her letters during his time away, she had written of her fear that she would not live long enough to see him return, and she was not the type to exaggerate fears, or even to speak of them. So it had been a true feeling. He knew how that felt, to sense that the end could be near; he had felt it himself more than once, and it was unmistakable. It marked you. And in her closeness to him she had not hesitated to write to him and let him know what she was feeling.

Well, this was life. You never really escape this fear. Once long before he had written,

Men are forced into their strange fancies by attempting to measure the whole universe by means of their tiny scale. Our deep hatred of death need not make fragility such a bad thing. Why should we want to become less mutable? We should thereby suffer the fate caused by the medusa’s head, being converted to marble and losing our senses and the qualities which could not exist in us without bodily changes, and the fact that we are always becoming something new and strange.

Easy to say, when you’re healthy. But healthy or not, it was still true.

As the days passed, he got used to her new gauntness. It was just the way she looked. She was as rapid and talkative as ever, like some finch turned into a woman, always babbling on about anything and everything, much as she had in her letters, but now it was music too—as if her letters had been only sheet music, written so that he could imagine her saying it all in his head, but only in the same way he could hear his father’s old melodies by looking at the sheet music he had left behind. Being in the presence of the musician herself, as she sang the music of her thoughts aloud in the air, was an entirely different thing. He soaked it up like sunlight, like church music. It was Kepler’s ridiculous music of the spheres, immanent in the world. Her brown eyes burned like Marina’s had. Her skin tone was a little hectic, the cold stomach notwithstanding. She acted hot. There were a lot of ways in which she resembled Marina.

In the tumble of days he watched her flitting around the convent, talking all the while. “The cedros aren’t dry enough to candy yet, and one of them has mold so I’m afraid if it rains we’ll lose them all, and there’s thirty scudi lost to the carpenter who tried to fix the door, Father, you will look at that door’s lower hinge, won’t you? Look at it. I said your penitential psalms for you, by the way, so you don’t have to think of that. Suor Francesca, please, don’t peel those here it will only make more work for Suor Luisa later, move over here if you would, that’s right, you’re a good soul, come with me Father, let’s sit in the garden and pick the lemons while it’s still cool—” and out there, while they picked, under a blue sky and tall puffy white clouds, she would enumerate every quattrini then available to them, this time in the hope of calculating if they had enough to make a first payment on two dozen blankets.

She effervesced. She could not keep up with the pace of her thoughts. It was a wonder that her letters managed to hold their chain of thought together as well as they did, the act of writing being so much slower than the speed of her thinking. When Galileo found his own thoughts racing ahead of him like that, he tended to focus on individual words, fingering them like pebbles to slow himself down; but she did not. She had perhaps inherited some of Galileo’s mental habits, along with her mother’s imperious will; and all of that power had to be vented into the battered confines of San Matteo. It made him think of Ariosto’s stanzas about the princess confined to a walnut shell and yet holding court there just as always. You could not help but love such a gift for sizing one’s ambition in accordance to a real situation. He had never been able to do that.

Once, he stopped work on the gears and pulleys of their balky old clock to sketch out a possible plan for a pendulum-based clock, which would rely on a spring pushing at the very top of the swing to keep it going. A fine idea it seemed on first inspection; the potential force that was forged into a spring, making it a kind of weight always pushing sideways, would be all you would need for a clock that might run for years. When Maria Celeste came in he told her the idea and she laughed to see his face. She looked over his shoulder and asked about the column of numbers he had written beside one sketch of his plan, and he tried to tell her what he had been thinking about. She nodded her comprehension, and so he went on, and eventually came to his rule of falling bodies, and she looked startled at the very idea that there was a ratio of distance to time, in a way that brought a tear to his eye.

“Yes,” he confirmed. “The world works by mathematical rules. This is much more amazing than people usually seem to realize. Consider it—numbers are ideas, they are qualities in our minds that we abstract by looking at the world. So we see that we have two hands, and that there are two sheep in the meadow, but we never see a two anywhere. It’s not a thing but an idea, and therefore intangible. Like souls in this world. And then we teach each other some games we can play with these ideas—we see how you can add them together and get resulting numbers, as if adding sheep to the meadow. We see for instance that any number can be added to itself by its own number of selves, two twos, four fours, we call them squares because they can be put into squared patterns with the same number of sheep on each side, and we see how larger numbers multiplied by themselves grow larger than the previous number very quickly, and that this rapid growth also happens in a proportion. An interesting idea. It makes a nice pattern in the mind or on the page. Then we look at the world around us. We drop a ball and watch it fall to the ground. It seems to be speeding up as it falls, the eye tells us that much, and so we measure the falls in various ways, and lo and behold, we find that all things fall at the same speed, and that the distance that something falls increases by the square of the increase in the time of the fall—this quite precisely!—and despite the fact that time and distance seem to be such very different things. Why should it be so? Why should the ratio be so simple and neat? Why should the two be related at all? All we can say is, they are. Things fall by rules, acting the same always, and the rules are simple—or then later, not so simple. But the world moves by mathematical laws! The world is proportionate to itself across things as disparate as time and distance. How can it be?“

“It can only be because God made the world that way.”

“Yes. God makes the world using mathematics, and He has given us minds that can see it. We can discover the laws He used! It is a most beautiful thing to witness and understand. It’s prayer. It’s more than prayer, it’s a sacrament, a kind of communion. An apprehension—an epiphany—it’s seeing God, while still in this body and in this world! How blessed we are, to be able to experience God like that. Who would not devote their time to understanding more, to seeing deeper into God’s manner of thinking about these things?”

“Not I,” she said, looking at him fondly.

And then to feel God’s goodness in the sun on his back, in the garden. He had a little rolling seat he could move about between the row of plants, with a groove in it for the bottom of his truss. His knees and back got some relief as he sat on the cart and leaned down and pulled out weeds, feeling the dirt in his fingers. It was feeling the touch of God in the world, just as determining the proportion in nature was seeing the mind of God. He could not help wishing that Maria Celeste would be allowed to come up the lane to Il Gioièllo, to help La Piera around the house, and sit with him in his garden as he sat with her at the convent. He would have to try to arrange that. The new abbess could probably be convinced. Ah the blessed tumble of days.

But he was right to be afraid. Well, we always are. One day, a few months after his return, some tainted meat gave her the runs, and she had not enough flesh to hold water or give her extra strength when she needed it. The dysentery quickly wrung her dry twisting her insides so that she writhed with the pain of it, having already evacuated everything in her. She became parched and began to pass blood, and the various other internal liquids and viscosities that line the gut, and after that there was nothing to do but to sit by her on her bed and call for the other nuns to lift her up if she needed relief, retiring so as not to offend her modesty, returning as soon as he could to wipe her brow and give her citrons to suck on, and then to sit and see how much broth she could hold down, urging sips on her every time he could get her attention. In her fever she became delirious, and her lips cracked. Her body gave up squirming and she lay there breathing shallowly, not even sweating, her pulse faint, and by the fifth day, erratic.

Galileo sat there beside her and stared at the wall. Sarpi was dead, Sagredo was dead, Salviati was dead, Cesi was dead, Marina was dead, his sisters, his parents. The list went on. Cosimo. Cesarini. The Bible spoke of three score and ten, but so few got that, so few. It was a fallen world.

Hours passed pulse by pulse, breath by breath. Hours like weeks, days like months. There aren’t enough things to think about during a time like that.

At the end of the fifth day he hauled himself to his feet and went outside to talk things over with the doctor who visited the convent, a man he had learned to trust more than most doctors. Now the man wiped his sweating pate and squinted with the distress of his news. “It’s gone too far,” he said. He clutched Galileo’s arm as if it were his own daughter he was talking about. “She can’t come back when she’s this dried out.”

“How long?” Galileo said.

“A day, or less.”

“I’ll come back as soon as I get some things. See that she receives the sacrament.”

“She already has. I’ll walk you up to your place.”

He dragged himself up the village lane, already so familiar that it seemed the only lane he had ever known. At Il Gioièllo they found the gateway occupied by a little group of clerics from Florence, led by the local vicar of the Inquisition.

“What do you want?” Galileo demanded roughly.

The vicar drew himself up to indicate the importance of his pronouncement. “His Holiness the Pope forbids you to continue to petition the Holy Office in Florence for freedom of movement, or else you may be removed to your prison at the Holy Office in Rome.”

Galileo stared at him. Geppo and La Piera watched in horror from the yard; surely the maestro was about to erupt in one of his black furies, he would beat these prelates and then where would they be.

Finally Galileo said, “I have been trying to get permission to go into Florence to see my doctors.”

“You are forbidden to try.”

Galileo waved a hand and went inside without a word. We watched as the clerics conferred, red-faced, and then departed.

That night Galileo returned to the convent and sat by Maria Celeste, holding her cold hand. She was unconscious and barely breathing. For a while Arcangela came by and cried with her face in her apron and the crook of her elbow. She even smashed her face against Galileo’s side and cried, without once looking at him. In the tenth hour of the night, after the bell for second matins, Maria Celeste died.

Thirty-three years old. The same age as Christ. A bride of Christ, his little saint, Santa Maria Celeste, now celestial indeed. If he had not made her a nun, if he had found her a husband and a dowry … The poor Clares were too poor; they died of their vows. She could have been raising his grandchildren and running Il Gioièllo, the saint of the jewel.

April 2, 1634.

Silence descended on the sleepless household. This silence was in such contrast to the howls and shrieks that always emerged from Galileo whenever he was sick or miserable, that no one in the household who heard it could believe it. Now they understood that those earlier histrionics had been like the roaring of a lion with a thorn in its foot, the roar of someone intent that no one should sleep when he could not. Nothing like that now. No sound from his closed room. It was acutely painful to the household to hear that silence, it rang in their ears like a blackness in the heart of everything. Please groan, they said to themselves, please shriek, please shout at the sky and curse the pope and even God, please beat us to within an inch of our lives, please, anything but this silence, which was so unbearable that they went into his room and served him impassively and then went outside and put their arms to the wall and sobbed; and in the soundless nights they huddled in the kitchen or curled on their beds, helplessly listening; and even I myself, ancient beyond all feeling and sanity, sick of everything in this world, even I wept. It would have been better for him if he had died in the fire.