Now the great Servite drank deeply, put his feet up, and sighed. “I’m very sorry to see you go. Things won’t be the same around here, and that’s the truth. I’ll hope for the best, but like Francesco, I’m concerned about your long-term welfare. In Venice you would have always been protected from Rome.”
Galileo shrugged. “I have to be able to do my work,” he insisted.
Sarpi’s point made him uneasy, nevertheless. No one had better reason to worry about protection from Rome than Sarpi; the evidence of that was right there in Sarpi’s horribly scarred face. Sarpi himself touched his wounds, and smiled his disfigured smile. “You know my joke,” he reminded Galileo. “I recognize the curial style”—style meaning also a kind of stiletto.
It was all part of the ongoing war between Venice and the Vatican, which was partly a public war of words—a matter of curses and imprecations so angry that at one point Pope Paul V had excommunicated the entire population of the Serenissima—but also at the same time a silent nighttime war, a vicious thing of knives and drownings. Leonardo Dona had been elected doge precisely because he was a notorious anti-Romanist, and Dona had appointed Sarpi to be his principal counselor. Then Sarpi had announced to the world his intent to write a full history of the Council of Trent, using as source material the secret files of the Venetian representatives to the Council, which were certain to contain many ugly revelations about the Vatican’s desperate campaign in the previous century to stem the tide of Protestantism. An exposé, in short. When Paul learned of Sarpi’s project, he had been so alarmed and outraged that he had authorized Sarpi’s assassination. Killers were sent to Venice, but the Venetian government had many spies in Rome, and they heard in advance that the assassins were coming, with some of them even identified by name. The Venetian authorities had arrested them on their appearance on the docks, and thrown them into prison.
After that Sarpi had accepted a bodyguard, a man who was to stay with him at all times and sleep on his doorstep.
Some of those involved in the matter were not convinced that a single bodyguard would be enough. They thought more needed to be done to protect him, because Sarpi was more important than he knew; much depended on him. As it turned out these people were proved right, so it was fortunate other protective measures were taken.
The attack on him took place on the night of October 7, 1607. A fire broke out near Santa Maria Formosa, the big church just north of San Marco. Whether the fire was set for this purpose or not, Sarpi’s fool of a bodyguard left his post at the Signoria to go have a look at it. When Sarpi was done with his business, he waited for a while for the man, then left for the Servite monastery accompanied by only an elderly servant and an old Venetian senator. He took his usual route home, which anyone could have determined by watching him for even a week: north on the Merceria, past the Rialto and Sagredo’s palazzo to the Campo di Santa Fosca. Then north over the Ponte della Pugna, the Bridge of Wrestlers, a narrow stepped bridge over the Rio de’ Servi, near the Servite monastery, where Sarpi slept in a simple monk’s cell.
They jumped him on the other side of the bridge, five of them, stabbing his companions first and then chasing Sarpi down the Calle Zancani. When they caught him they smashed him to the ground and stabbed him, but it took only a couple of seconds, then they were off into the night. Later we counted fifteen wounds.
Trailing at a discreet distance as we had been, we could only shriek and race over the bridge and kneel by the old man, applying pressure to the cuts as we found them in the flickering torchlight. The stiletto left in his right temple had apparently bent on his upper jawbone and then reemerged from his right cheek. That wound by itself looked fatal.
But for the moment he was still alive, his breath rapid and shallow, failing fast. Women were screaming from the windows overlooking the bridge, shouting directions for the pursuit of the cutthroats. Very soon we would be joined by others; already people were on the bridge calling out. But it was very dark despite the torches, so we shot him up with antibiotics and glued shut a slashed vein in the groin that was sure to kill him. Then all we could do was help to lift him up, and to carry him as gently as possible to his monastery.
There in his bare stone room he lay hovering on the edge of death, not just that night but for the next three weeks. Acquapendente came over from Padua and watched over him night and day; we could only apply antibiotics when the great doctor slept. He worried that the stiletto had been poisoned, and tried to determine whether it had been by having it stuck into a chicken and then a dog. The animals survived; and Sarpi survived too. We slipped back into our roles.
So now Sarpi could sit with Galileo, and warn him, with an ironic smile given an extra twist by his scars: “Rome can be dangerous.”
“Yes yes.” Galileo nodded unhappily. He had visited Sarpi often as he hovered between life and death. He had even helped Acquapendente to extract the stiletto from him. The pink scars were still livid. They both knew that Pope Paul had given the assailants a pension to reward them, even though they had been unsuccessful, which Galileo and Sarpi had found funny. Of course, what Sarpi was pointing out now was true: Florence was under the thumb of Rome in a way Venice had never been. If Galileo ever offended the Church, as seemed quite possible, given his new astronomical discoveries and some priestly objections to them, not to mention Kepler’s ravings—then Florence might not be far enough away from the long reach of the Dogs of God.
“I know,” Galileo said. But he was already committed to the move, and Sarpi’s example cut both ways, so to speak. Florence was an ally of Rome’s, Venice a fierce opponent, excommunicated en masse. Moving to Florence might give him some cover.
Sarpi seemed to read these thoughts on his face. “A patron is never as secure as a contract with the senate,” he said. “You know what always happens to a patron’s favored ones: they fall. Sooner or later it always happens.”
“Yes yes.” They had both read their Machiavelli and Castiglione, and the fall of the favorite was a standard trope in poetry and song. It was one of the ways that patrons showed their power, and stirred the pot, and kept those on the rise hopeful.
“So that’s another way you will not be as safe.”
“I know. But I have to be able to do my work. I have to be able to make ends meet. Neither has been possible for me in Padua. The senate could have made it possible, but they didn’t. They paid me poorly, and the workload was excessive. And they were never going to pay me just to do my own work.”
“No.” Sarpi smiled at him affectionately. “You need a patron to be able to get money without working for it.”
“I work hard!”
“I know you do.”
“And it will be useful work, both to Cosimo and everyone.”
“I know it will. I want you to do your work, you know that. May God bless you for it; I’m sure He will. But you will have to take care what you say.”
“I know.”
Galileo did not want to agree. He never wanted to agree; agreeing was something other people did, with him, after they had disagreed. People were always giving in to his superior logic and his intense style of disputation. In debate he was boastful and sarcastic, funny and smart—really smart, in that he was not just quick, but penetrating. No one liked arguing with Galileo.
But with Sarpi it was not like that. Up until this point in Galileo’s life, Sarpi himself had been a kind of patron to him, but also much more: a mentor, a confessor, a fellow scientist, a father figure. And now, even when Galileo was leaving Sarpi’s beloved Venice, a close friend. His scarred face, ruined by the pope’s murderous functionaries, held now an expression of grave concern, and of love and indulgent affection—amorevolezza. He did not agree with Galileo, but he was proud of him. It was the look you wanted your father to have when he looked at you. It could not be gainsaid. Galileo could only bow his head and dash the tears from his eyes. For he had to go.