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.