“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.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Dream

A man riding high on Fortune’s wheel

Cannot tell who really loves him

For his friends true and false stand side by side

And show him equal devotion.

But should he fall upon hard times

His crowd of flatterers will slip away.

Only the ones who love from the heart

Will stand by him when he is dead to the world.

—LUDOVICO ARIOSTO, “ORLANDO FURIOSO”

ALONG TIME PASSED and did not pass in that house of grief. The old man lay around in his bed, unable either to sleep or to wake. When he did manage to fall asleep he slept as if dead, and resisted being roused. Then, if La Piera managed to wake him, he dragged himself out to his couch on the patio and lay there. He could not be convinced to eat. Sometimes he would pass through the kitchen and take a loaf of bread with him out to the garden, where he sat on the ground and tore the bread with his teeth and chewed grimly. When he was done he sometimes started to weed under the vegetables, but he pulled his starts as often as his weeds, eyes blinded by tears. His right eye was going bad in any case. Sometimes he gave up and lay on the ground. At his desk he only shuffled his papers around, staring through them. Eventually he wrote some letters, answered some of the sympathy notes. His writing had become his talking now, and maybe it was easier to talk to strangers. To a French correspondent he barely knew he wrote: