Galileo's Dream

Again Galileo was saved by a stranger appearing at a crux in his life. This time it was Alessandra, nearly forty now, childless, tall, and rotund. She came to visit almost every day, accompanied only by a servant or two. She brought with her gifts for him that he could feel, or eat: rolls of yarn, different fabrics of linen, dried fruits, scraps of blacksmith metal, polygons made of woodblock, chunks of coral. He would sit forward in his chair and rub swatches between his fingers and against his cheek, or stack cubes, and tell her about cohesion and the strength of wood.

I long to talk to you, he wrote when she could not come. It is so rare to find women who can speak so sensibly as you.

She replied even more boldly: I have been trying to find the way to come there and stay for a day of conversation with you, without creating scandal. She suggested fantasy plans, things that could never happen but that she knew would please him to imagine—that they might go boating on the Arno, that she might slip a small carriage into Arcetri to spirit him away to Prato for several days together, and so on. Patience! she wrote.

I have never doubted your affection for me, he wrote back, certain that you, in this short time that I may have left, know how much affection flows in me for you. He invited her to come with her husband and stay for four days. Somehow this never happened.

Life at Il Gioièllo contracted in on itself, orchestrated by La Piera and performed by the entire household, with the youth Viviani almost always at the maestro’s side, to the point where Galileo sometimes ordered him to go away. Many days he only wanted to lie on the divan in the shade, or sprawl in the dirt of the garden, tugging up weeds. You could see that groveling in the soil, embracing it, was a comfort to him. He curled on his side in a posture just like Arcangela’s.

But he was famous all over Europe, because of his books, and the trial. Foreign travelers often inquired if they could come to visit him. He always agreed to these requests, which flattered his vanity, and also broke the daily routine and helped pass the time. He only requested that the visitors be discreet, and generally they were, at least beforehand. After they left, they often wanted to tell the world the story of their visit. That was gratifying. He was still a figure on the great stage of Europe—an old lion, defanged and blind, but a lion still. To the Protestants he was yet another image of the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church, which was not a role that he liked to play; he felt he was a victim not of the Church but of corruption within the Church, as he tried to make clear if he got the chance.

I do not hope for any relief, he wrote to a supporter named Peiresc, and that is because I have committed no crime. I might hope for a pardon if I had erred. With the guilty a prince can show forbearance, but against one wrongfully sentenced when he is innocent, it is expedient to uphold rigor, so as to put up a show of strict lawfulness. This was like something out of Machiavelli, a writer Galileo knew well. Galileo had met his prince too, and suffered the consequent tortures just as Machiavelli had.

Apparently a translated edition of the Dialogo had been published in England; Galileo had no idea, until Englishmen began to appear at his gate. One of the first of them, a Thomas Hobbes, told him of the translated edition and then wanted to talk philosophy, and get Galileo to say things he didn’t want to say. Because they conversed in Latin (and the English way of pronouncing Latin was very strange, like something he seemed to recall), he was able to bend the talk to topics he was comfortable discussing. Thus Hobbes went away without any denunciations or blasphemies to quote.

A younger pair of Englishmen were more congenial, at least at first. They were traveling around Europe together: a Thomas Hedtke and one John Milton. Hedtke was the more pleasant of the two, but Milton did most of the talking, for along with excellent Latin he spoke a mangled but comprehensible version of Tuscan Italian, a very unusual ability for a foreigner. He talked a lot; he did not appear to have heard that proverb for travelers in foreign lands, that one should proceed with “i pensieri stretti e il viso sciolto,” closed thoughts and an open face. He declared that he was good with languages, and knew how to speak Spanish, French, Tuscan, Latin, and Greek. And he had a thousand questions, most of them leading questions, intended to make the pope look bad, and also the Jesuits, for whom he seemed to harbor a particular dislike, which was funny given how jesuitical he was.

“Do you not agree that the judgment rendered against you was an attempt to assert that the Roman Church has the authority to say what you can think and what you can’t think?”

“Not so much what you can think, as what you can say.”

“Precisely! They claim the right to decide who gets to speak!”

“Yes. But every society has such rules.”

This silenced the young man for a time. He was sitting on a stool drawn up next to Galileo’s divan. Hedtke had gone out to the garden with Galileo’s old student Carlo Dati, who had brought the two Englishmen to Arcetri. Now Milton crouched by his side, asking questions. Were the Medicis tyrants, were they poisoners, did they believe what Machiavelli taught? Did Galileo believe what Machiavelli taught? Did Galileo know who was the greatest Italian poet after the incomparable Dante? Because Milton did—it was Tasso! Did Galileo know what huge benefits were conferred by chastity?

“I haven’t been noticing those,” Galileo muttered.

“And even more so, the benefits conferred by that sage and serious doctrine, virginity?”

Galileo was at a loss for words. He saw again that there were men who were both highly intelligent and deeply stupid. He had been that way himself for much of his life, and so now he was a bit more tolerant than he would have been in years past. He kept steering the conversation back to Dante, for lack of a better subject. He did not want to hear any more about the vast superiority of the reformed Protestant faith, which was the youth’s favorite topic. So he talked about Dante and what made him so great. “Anyone can make hell interesting,” he said. “It’s purgatory that matters.”

Milton laughed at this. “But there is no such thing as purgatory!”

“Yours is a hard creed. You Protestants are not quite human, it seems to me.”

“You still undertake to defend the Church of Rome?”

“Yes.”

The young man could not agree with this, as he explained again at length. Galileo tried to divert him by saying that he had studied as a youth to be a monk, but then had noticed a lamp in the cathedral swinging overhead after being lit by an acolyte, and by timing the period of the swings with his pulse, had confirmed that no matter how widely the lamp swung in its pendular motion, it always took the same amount of time to cross the arc. “As I saw the truth of the situation, I rang like a struck bell.”

“This was God, telling you to leave the Church of Rome.”

“I don’t think so.”

Galileo drank more wine, and felt the old sadness sweep through him like any other pendulum, steady in its cosmic beat. He grew sleepy. In the way of any garden-variety fool, the priggish young virtuoso was overstaying his welcome. Galileo stopped listening to him, drifted off into a light sleep. He came to at something the youth said about blindness being a judgment on him.

“The blind still see inside,” he said. “And those who see are sometimes the blindest of all.”

“Not if they shield themselves by their own prayers, made direct to God.”

“But prayers are not always answered.”

“They are if you have prayed for the right thing.”

Galileo couldn’t stifle a laugh. “I suppose that’s true,” he said. “I want what Jove wants.”

There were no words that would reach the youth. You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson or an equation.

The young foreigner sat there nattering on in his bizarre Italian. For a while Galileo dozed off, and dreamed of plunging through space. When he woke again the youth had gone silent, and Galileo was not even sure he was still in the room. “Pride leads to a fall,” he murmured, “you should remember that. I know, I was proud. But I fell. My mother stole my eyes. And the favorite has to fall, in the end, to make room for more. The fall is our life, our flight. If I could say it properly, you would understand. You would. Because I had such dreams. I had such a daughter.”

But the disagreeable youth apparently had already slipped away.

So Galileo fell back asleep. When he woke again, the house was silent around him, but he could feel that someone stood in his doorway. The person stepped toward him furtively, and he knew it was not the Englishman. He patted the divan. She lay down beside him, the back of her head against his knee, wordless and unforgiving. They lay there like that for a long time.

Eventually he fell asleep again, and while asleep he had a dream. He dreamed he was in church, worshipping with his family and friends. Around him stood Sarpi and Sagredo and Salviati, and Cesi and Castelli and Piccolomini, and Alessandra and Viviani and Mazzoleni; and at the back, Cartophilus and La Piera. At his side stood Maria Celeste. Near the altar he saw that Marina and Maculano were conferring over something, as Maculano prepared the service. Overhead swung the lamp he had seen as a boy, still making its pendulum, and now there was a little spring at the point of attachment, which at every swing gave the pendulum cord a little extra push near the fulcrum, so that the lamp would swing forever, forming a clock keeping God’s own time. That spring device was a good idea.

The altar in this church was a big pair of his inclined planes, and all of them together under Maculano’s direction ran the experiments on falling bodies, moving the beautifully finished frames this way and that, setting balls free, timing their falls by way of water running into chalices. Marina let the balls drop, Mazzoleni grinned his gap-toothed grin, and everyone sang the hymn “All Things Move By God.” Fra Sarpi spread his arms and said, “These ripples expand far into space, and set into vibration not only strings, but also any other body that happens to have the same period,” and Sagredo said, “Sometimes a wonder is obscured by a miracle.”

Then they moved two planes into a V shape and placed a little ivory curve at the bottom to connect them, so that the ball would shift smoothly from down to up. At the top of the second plane, Mazzoleni placed the workshop bell on its side. The Lady Alessandra, her head touching the vault of the dome, reached down and released a ball from the top of the first plane: a steep drop, a long decelerating rise, and then the ball hit the edge of the bell. And Galileo heard the bell ring over all the worlds.

Then he fell sick again. He had gone to bed ill so many times before that it took a while to understand that this time was different. His kidneys hurt, his urine was cloudy. The doctors were called, but there was nothing they could do. His kidneys were failing. They forbade him wine, but La Piera slipped him a cup or two at night anyway.

When it got really bad, such that he resumed his moaning as he never had since Maria Celeste’s death, we sent a letter out, and Lady Alessandra showed up unannounced. She sat by his bed and washed his face with a cloth dipped in cold water. Sometimes he would hand her the basket, and she would read Maria Celeste’s letters aloud to him. Somehow all the news of food shortages and pulled teeth and catarrhs and madness were gone, leaving only the shared recipes, the devotional prayers, the snippy comments about her brother, the expressions of love, of amorevolezza. Alessandra’s reading voice was calm and distant. She spoke of other things, and made dry little jokes, and Momus, the god of laughter, briefly touched down.

“You remind me of someone,” Galileo said. “I wish I could remember.”

“We are all everyone. And we all remember everything.”

On her way out she looked at me and shook her head. “I have to go,” she said. “I can’t do this anymore. Not when he could be fixed in a day.”

She didn’t come the next day, sending a letter instead. Viviani read it to Galileo, and he heard it silently. He dictated his reply.

Your letter found me in bed gravely indisposed. Many, many thanks for the courtesy that you have always shown to me, and for your condolences that visit me now in my misery and my misfortune.

That was his last letter. A few days later he fell unconscious. That night the wolves out on the hills howled, and he struggled on his bed such that it seemed to us that he heard them calling. At dawn he died.

The household wandered around in the raw morning light. Of course it was true that we had just lost our employer, and this was no small part of our despair: Sestilia notwithstanding, Vincenzio could be counted on for nothing. But it was more than that: it was also immediately obvious that with the maestro gone the world would never again be so interesting. We had lost our hero, our genius, our own Pulcinella.

It was La Piera who pushed us through the awful duties of that day and those that followed. “Come on, get on with it,” she would say. “We are all souls, remember? We exist in each other. To get him back you just have to think of what he would do, what he would say.”

“Ha,” Mazzoleni said mournfully. “Good luck with that!”

Ferdinando II approved Viviani’s plan for a grand memorial to Galileo, which would have included public funeral orations and the construction of a marble mausoleum; but Pope Urban VIII denied permission for either. Ferdinando submitted to this denial, and so Galileo’s body was buried privately, in the novice’s chapel of the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, in a chapel room under the campanile. This impromptu crypt was almost an unmarked grave.

But Pope Urban was sixty-four, while Vincenzio Viviani was only nineteen. When Urban died, in 1644 (at quarter after eleven one morning, and it was said that by noon his statues in Rome had all been pulled down and pulverized by angry mobs), Viviani had fifty-five more years of life to live, and every day of those years he devoted to the memory of the maestro. He paid for the design of a monument, to be located in San Croce across from the tomb of the great Michelangelo; their tombs would then make a matched pair, Art and Science together holding up the Church. While he worked to get this monument approved and built, Viviani spent many years collecting all of Galileo’s papers that he could find; and somewhere along the way he began writing a biography.

Once while he was at work on this project, he found me in Arcetri and enlisted my help. “What can you tell me about Signor Galileo, Cartophilus?”

“Nothing, Signor Viviani.”

“Come on, nothing? You must know something we don’t know.”

“He had a hernia. And he had trouble sleeping.”

“All right, shut up then. But help me now to make a search of San Matteo.”

“How can we do that?”

It turned out he had a certificate from the local priest allowing us into the convent. He was hoping to find Galileo’s letters to Maria Celeste, to add them to the immense collection of papers and notebooks and volumes that now filled an entire room of his house. So far Galileo’s letters to his daughter had not been found, although they had to have numbered at least as many as the ones she had sent to him—a pile that Viviani possessed, still in their basket. Knowing Galileo’s prolixity, and whom he had been writing to, this correspondence presumably formed a unique look into his thinking, and also a considerable physical mass, difficult to conceal. And now, for Viviani, of consuming interest.

But we couldn’t find them. Viviani speculated that the nuns had burned them for fear of harboring some kind of heresy, or that they had simply been thrown out or used to start kitchen fires, no one could say. But they could not be found. In fact I had found and destroyed them years earlier, for it turned out that during some of his lucid years he had written to her such detailed accounts of his Jovian experiences that there would have been no way to explain them away.

More years passed, and Viviani wrote his biography of the maestro in the most devoted, hagiographic terms possible. He got it published, but he could see that the big tomb he wanted was not going to get built in his lifetime. The Medici had lost their nerve, if they had ever had any in this matter, and Rome was implacable.

Finally, when Viviani was getting to be an old man himself, he had a plaque cast and affixed to the entryway to the little room where Galileo was buried in San Croce. He wrote into his will a request that he be buried in that same room. Then he took the front door off of his house, and turned the front façade of the building into a kind of archway. We helped him with the plastering of this façade, as Salvadore and Geppo had become bricklayers, and when that was done we cemented a bust of Galileo over the open doorway. This improvised memorial arch stood forlornly on the street of a shabby residential district of Florence, looking like the occasional architectural oddity you see in modest neighborhoods when a homeowner has lost his mind with pride of ownership. Viviani was a bit like those people, in fact, but he was such a serious man, so devoted to all the good causes of the city, and always writing to scientists all over Europe, that it was hard to joke with him about it. We plastered long marble panels vertically into each side of the arch, and on these Viviani listed Galileo’s accomplishments, painting the words on the marble very carefully as guides for me to chip away at with a chisel.

While we worked, he and I sometimes talked about the maestro and what was going on with his reputation. Viviani expressed great disdain for the Frenchman Descartes, who had been too chicken to publish anything controversial after Galileo’s condemnation, but who had recently distributed a long critique of the maestro’s Discorsi in which he listed no less than forty supposed mistakes—all but two of which were actually his own mistakes, Viviani judged, with Galileo in the right of it. I had to laugh when Viviani said that one of the things Descartes had gotten right was to scoff at Galileo for believing in the story of the burning mirrors of Archimedes.

Viviani, still offended by Descartes’ impertinence, only shook his head at my surprised painful laughter. Geppo and Salvadore tried to ignore his seriousness and distract him with teasing remarks about how funny his house was going to look after all this work, and how cold the entryway was going to be without a door, but he only stepped back to look at it again, and sighed. “Someone’s got to do it,” he said. “Hopefully my nephews will pick up the torch.” He had never married or had children, and now he shook his head. “I’m not sure about them, but I hope someone will do it.”

His had been a strange life, it occurred to me. To meet the maestro, blind and old, when you were seventeen; work with him till he died, when you were nineteen; then for the rest of your life, work for him still. I stopped my chipping and put a hand to his shoulder. “Many will do it, Signor. You’ve made a good start. Saving his papers was huge. No one could have done that but you. You’ve been a faithful student, a real Galilean.”

So I thought, at that point. But the border between devotion and madness is so narrow. Several years later, he came around to the little warren of low houses tucked behind San Matteo, and there he found me again, as ancient as ever, but no more so. It was impossible to tell how old I was. After a while it just seems like forever.

Viviani, on the other hand, was aging fast. It’s hard to watch such mayfly lives. The end of the seventeenth century was near.

“Come help me,” he said now, face racked with urgency, but also with that high mystic serenity that people sometimes fall into when they begin a pilgrimage to a place where they believe everything can change.

I could have begged off then, but I didn’t. He might have tried to haul me along with him bodily. Anyway it was a look that couldn’t be denied, even after all these years. I followed him down to the back of San Matteo where their own little mausoleum was dug into the earth, crowded with dark holes to each side, like a giant honeycomb. It was dusk of the first night of carnival, and everyone in the village had gone down to Florence to see the parades and the fireworks. Everyone except for Geppo and Salvadore, it turned out, and also the short round crone who now swept the floors at San Croce: La Piera. Viviani had stayed in touch with her, as had I.

And he knew just which hole Maria Celeste’s coffin was in. We heaved up on the end of it and tugged it back a little, by the light of a single candle lantern. The coffin weighed just the same as it would have if it were empty, but in that narrow passage we had a bad angle on it.

“Signor Viviani,” I said, “this isn’t a good idea.”

“Pull!”

So I kept pulling with them, until we had it out and turned so we could carry it out of the mausoleum. I held the bottom of it, Viviani led the way, Salvadore and Geppo took the sides. La Piera carried the lantern. We walked across the convent yard to a small donkey cart outside the gate, which had in it already some mason’s tools and some dry mortar sand and a few buckets. We lifted up the coffin and placed it beside the sand, then covered it with a tarp.

Viviani took the donkey’s rope and led us down the lane of Arcetri to the big road from the western hills, where we joined all the late traffic into the city. We looked like four poor servants, following our master and his donkey. Carnival revelers hooted and shouted as they rushed past us.

Down into Florence and its noise we trudged, across to San Croce, then down the stairs into the novice’s chapel. Inside the small room under the campanile, the brick tomb stood dark and dusty. Viviani took a sledge from Geppo and smashed it down on the top of the tomb.

“This is a terrible idea,” I said, looking down the stone passageway to the open door to the street. “Someone will see us.”

“No one cares,” he said bitterly. “No one will notice.”

“No one at all,” I said. “Not even Galileo! He is dead, Signor.”

“He will see it from heaven.”

“In heaven they don’t think about us. They’re done with us, and happy to be so.”

He shrugged. “You can’t be sure.”

We pulled Galileo’s heavy coffin out of its opened tomb, a much tougher job than moving his daughter. Following Viviani’s directions, we then placed down in the tomb Maria Celeste’s coffin, so pitifully light. It was like burying a cat. Salvadore and Geppo wedged a few crossbeams into the bricks over her coffin for support. Then we replaced Galileo’s coffin, right there on top of hers, as if to shield her from the sky.

The old boys brought a bucket of plaster down from their cart, and replaced the bricks at the top of the tomb one by one, plastering them into place over another set of bracing crossbeams.

There were noises in the street outside, and for a while we all froze in fear.

“This is so pointless,” I complained. “The maestro is dead and gone. We could get in such trouble, and he’ll never even know about it.”

“He would like it if he knew,” Viviani said.