Pierce had found a folio edition of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili on Kraft's own bookshelf, though he had read it first in college. The same edition even.
Bernini must have liked this conception; he first designed an elephant cum obelisk for the gardens of Pope Alexander VII, where it would have been better suited than the Piazza Minerva. But no, it is here, midtown, somewhat lumpish and graceless as nothing else of Bernini's ever was, with no insides of course, or only imaginable ones. The obelisk is a real one, Roman booty; the famed Egyptologist Father Athanasius Kircher was called in to try to decode the hieroglyphics. The pope himself wrote the inscription for the base, which speaks of what great strength it requires to bear the wisdom of Egypt. Stand at its backside and you face the Dominican Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, built over an ancient temple site; in its abbey next door Giordano Bruno was arraigned, condemned, defrocked, stripped, and sent to his death. Wisdom's great weight!
But after all it was almost seven decades after Bruno's death when the little wrinkled marble animal went up in the piazza. It was all unimportant then, Egypt, mere decoration, artifice, no harm in it; it was all over, gone, put away, annulled, no force in it any longer; Bruno's ashes scattered, unrecoverable; the world's page turned.
Out again into the evening. If Pierce could just know where he stood, which way was north, or east. Maybe he'd taken the wrong turn, a right not a left, at that Via Arco della Ciambella.
If we have in error taken a right rather than a left at the Via Arco della Ciambella, we will soon enter the small Piazza della Pigna, where the famed great bronze pinecone of Rome again adorns the lost, the fallen but not forgotten Temple of Isis, yes her sacred pigna once stolen by the gloating triumphant popes for their own Temple of Peter over the river
No, no, he could no longer make out words. He turned, entered not a small piazza with or without a pinecone but a great boulevard, the Corso, traffic streaming beneath high dark palaces but the sidewalks empty, night come on now, his feet leaden but still able to feel pain; he had utterly lost his way and walked on anyway, nothing else to do. Turning away from the blinding headlights, he went only farther into the wrong Rome, until at last—near tears for more reasons than he could name—he surrendered, and seeing a rank of taxis, he took one to his pensione. Tomorrow, tomorrow. Cras, cras, the old Romans said. But Pierce was never to go that way again; and when he left Rome he still had not seen the elephant.
If I chose Bruno by chance, I came to love him profoundly; he is one of those historical figures who is at once instantly accessible and yet permanently mysterious—just like our living friends and lovers, you see. When I came to read his works in Italian, I encountered a writer who was less a philosopher, it often seems, than a playwright, or even a novelist. His cosmologies are all dialogues; everybody gets to talk, himself or his stand-in only one among them. Some of the speakers we know to be fools, but others are merely in disagreement, and make some good points. The character who represents Bruno's thoughts is often only reporting what “the Nolan” believes or was heard to say; he may or may not be getting it entirely right, and there's no one to say for sure. We are reading Hamlet's story as reported by Horatio, as Hamlet might write it.
Another morning, and Pierce read on the bus. He was going the wrong way along the Via de Lungara, aiming for the Vatican and St. Peter's, but soon he would lift his eyes and sense something was wrong; get off, and set off on foot.
I found it impossible not to take the man's side. He could be hugely Promethean—he was, after all, out to overthrow the entire religious conception of the universe, not only of its shape, like Copernicus, but of its structure, meaning, and reason for being—and at the same time a rude comedian, who wouldn't shut up and sit down no matter what heckling he got; who wrote a titanic epic of the Reformation of the Heavens by the Græco-Roman pantheon that ends up as a satire on reform, on men, on gods, on the heavens themselves. No one ever after understood it, maybe because its ironies are too enthusiastic, or because Bruno keeps taking everybody's side in turn almost too fast to follow. And when they had him at last in prison, at the Castel St. Angelo (you can see the room today, or could when I was there), he kept on asking to see the Pope, and explain everything: and there's no way to know if this was anything but one last impossible joke.
Pierce lowered the book. Why couldn't he take Bruno's side? He had once, hadn't he? What he felt compelled to do now was to counsel the man to sit down and shut up, he almost wanted to take the side of the authorities against him just in order to protect him. Pick a small universe, and go there and hide. Tell them you're sorry, that you didn't really mean it, that you'll take your medicine. Don't tease them, don't quibble, don't die.
He stood now at the end of a bridge, a great round tower over the river ahead, which the guidebook now reluctantly identified for him:
If we have refreshed ourselves with a light lunch, we are now prepared to visit the Castel St. Angelo, which will take nearly all the afternoon. The emperor Hadrian began his mausoleum here in 135 AD. Square base, circular tower covered in earth, as was the Roman custom; atop that was put the great bronze pinecone that is now in the Vatican. A tomb for only a few decades, it has been most famously a fortress, the popes’ stronghold for a thousand years.
The fun way to get into the Castel St. Angelo, the guidebook promised, was to go from the Vatican Palace, way over there, down into a narrow corridor that tunneled right through a wall, the popes’ own bolt-hole. Narrow. Pierce's throat seized at the thought. In dreams he was invited into such places, or needed to enter them, and they grew smaller and tighter as he went, until panic woke him. No. He approached the castello instead sensibly over this bridge, the Ponte St. Angelo, past the lineup of Bernini's wind-tossed angels.
Great glowering shapeless mound. Its classical columns and decorations gone for centuries. A group was just then entering, led by a guide speaking in a language Pierce couldn't identify; he followed along with his book open. We find ourselves first in an open courtyard; from here steps descend into the burial chamber of Hadrian. And on the wall of the chamber, empty now—Pierce almost passed by it without noticing—was a stone plaque, carved with Hadrian's own little verse, his address to his own soul at parting.
Animula vagula blandula
Hospes comesque corporis
Quæ nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula rigida nudula
Nec ut soles dabis iocos
Pierce felt a shudder of pity. How could you ever translate those lines, so gently chilling, so un-Roman, so mild. Probably it couldn't be done. Animula vagula blandula: sweet little wandering spirit, little spirit wanderer, his soul like a child, like his own baby son. Hospes was the Latin word for stranger, and also for the shelter offered such a one: a word that ends up as both guest and ghost, host rather. Somewhere deep in Indo-European history, or in the heart, they had all the same root.
Sweet little spiritlet wanderer
My body's ghost-guest and companion
Where will you go now, what will become of you?
Pale little bare little shiverer
No more now the games you liked to play.
He had the sensation as he stood there of a hand slipping into his, and felt the world turn colorless and silent—it was colorless and silent here in this tomb, but now another world became so too; he cast no shadow there. Won't you call me back at last? He was not asked that, he heard that not, no. But he stood there as devastated as though he had been asked.