“Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of Your Eminences and every faithful Christian this vehement suspicion, rightly conceived against me, with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the above-mentioned errors and heresies, and in general each and every other error, heresy, and sect contrary to the Holy Church; and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, orally or in writing, anything which might cause a similar suspicion about me; on the contrary, if I should come to know any heretic or anyone suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office.

“I, the above-mentioned Galileo Galilei, have abjured, sworn, promised, and obliged myself as above; and in witness of the truth I have signed with my own hand the present document of abjuration and have recited it word for word in Rome, at the convent of Minerva, this twenty-second day of June 1633.

“I, Galileo Galilei, have abjured as above, by my own hand.”

And he took the pen from Maculano and carefully signed the bottom of the document.

In the hall outside, Cartophilus collapsed into Buonamici’s arms. Buonamici stood stalwart and held the old man to his chest, whispering to him, “The wound was small, if we consider the force behind the dart.”

Cartophilus could only clutch his mouth and nod. It had been a close-run thing. He could feel the younger man’s heart pounding hard; he too had been shaken. We had seen what could happen. We had seen too much.

At the Villa Medici that night, Ambassador Niccolini wrote to Cioli in Florence to give him the news of the trial’s conclusion. It is a fearful thing to have to do with the Inquisition, he concluded. The poor man has come back more dead than alive.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Eppur Si Muove

Ancora imparo. I’m still learning.

—MICHELANGELO, age 87

CONFINED AGAIN to the Villa Medici, Galileo spent his days smoldering with rage and despair. He did not seem to appreciate that he had escaped a dire fate. He was too bitterly angry for that to matter. He spoke only in low outbursts to himself: “Fake documents—broken promises—betrayal. Liar. Liar! Who could imagine a man breaking his word when he didn’t have to? But that’s just what he did.”

He spent his waking hours in the villa’s big kitchen, eating compulsively. His moaning by day came mostly from the jakes. While in the hands of the Inquisition he had been unable either to eat or shit. Now he made up for lost time at both ends. Occasionally he would afterward limp around the formal garden, looking at plants as if trying to remember what they were. Everyone who approached him heard the same thing. “That lying bastard has eaten my life. From now on when people think of me, they’ll think of his trial. It’s the ultimate power.”

“Ultimate,” Cartophilus would scoff under his breath.

“Shut up,” Galileo would growl, showing Cartophilus the back of his hand and stumping away.

This was all bad enough, although predictable. But at night it was much worse. In the late hours, on his bed half asleep and half awake, he would roll in agitation, groan, moan, even shout—even shriek in agony. No one in that wing of the villa could sleep well in those pathetic hours, and Niccolini and his wife Caterina were beside themselves. The ambassador ignored the usual niceties of protocol, and returned to the Vatican repeatedly to beg some relief for the astronomer. Caterina rallied the servants and the villa’s priest to hold midnight masses, with lots of chanting and singing, the music echoing down the dark halls from the chapel to the east wing. Sometimes it seemed to help him.

Word of Galileo’s nocturnal fits got around, of course, and a couple of weeks after the abjuration, Cardinal Francesco Barberini worked on his uncle in private. The Sanctissimus finally agreed to shift Galileo’s house arrest to the palazzo of Archbishop Ascanio Piccolomini, in Siena. Piccolomini, another ex-student of Galileo’s, had requested it, and Urban agreed to the plan, perhaps hoping to remove Galileo and his histrionics from the rumor mill of Rome, to get rid of him at last.

It was July 2, 1633 when Galileo left Rome for the last time, in a closed ecclesiastical carriage. In Viterbo, just outside the capital, he yelled for the carriage to stop, got out, gestured rudely back at the city, spat at it, and then walked for four or five miles down the road before he would agree to get back in.

In Siena, however, his night terrors only got worse. He seemed to have lost the ability to sleep, except in snatches near dawn. Red-eyed, he would stare up at his caretakers and rehearse all the crimes committed against him, and then rail against all his enemies, a list that now ran well into the scores, so that if he described them all individually and in order of their appearance, as he sometimes did, it could take him close to an hour to run through them. He used set phrases that he always repeated, like Homeric epithets. The lying horsefly. The blind astronomer. The back stabber. That fucking pigeon. Eventually his rants would exhaust him to incoherency, and these epithets would be the only words left that anyone could understand, after which he would fall into bouts of piteous moaning, interspersed with sharp thin cries, even short high screams, as if he were being murdered.

Everyone rushed to him at those times, and tried to comfort him and get him back to bed. Sometimes he didn’t even recognize us, but reacted as if we were jailers, beating at our arms and kicking our shins. There was something upsetting enough about these panics that for a while we would all fall headlong into his nightmare, whatever it was.

But Archbishop Ascanio Piccolomini was a persistent man. He was almost as short as Bellarmino had been, and indeed he resembled what Bellarmino must have looked like in his forties, with the same neat handsome triangular head, sharpened to a point by a trim goatee. This graceful intellectual had never forgotten his childhood lessons with the maestro, when he had been lucky enough to be designated one of young Cosimo’s friends. When teaching Cosimo, Galileo had tried to be as Aristotle to Alexander, authoritative yet charming, entertaining, instructive, transformational—the perfect pedagogue. Piccolomini had been immersed in the bath of that performance, and it was indeed a baptism to a different life, for from that time on, the young aristocrat had explored mathematics and engineering with a passion, and taken a lively interest in everything; in short he had been a better pupil than Cosimo, and become a true Galilean. And so now it was a real shock for him to witness the broken old man wandering like a lunatic through his palazzo. His hope had been to provide a sanctuary for the scientist, something very like the Lincean Academy, but with the added comfort of being located inside the Church, thus implying that Galileo’s sentence was not a unanimous judgment, and definitely not an excommunication, no matter what people said. Now that Piccolomini saw how distressed the old man was, he realized it was going to be a more complicated process of recovery than he had imagined. Every night the spell of insomniac horrors returned. At times Galileo seemed to have lost his wits entirely, even by day.

One morning, after a particularly grueling night, the archbishop drew Galileo’s old servant aside. “Good man, do you think we should restrain him? Should we tie him to his bed to keep him from doing himself a hurt? These fits that come on him are so violent, it seems they could lead to a fatal fall.”