She heaved a sigh, looking grim. “Prolepses are awkward,” she said. “I wish Ganymede had not done this to you. Now we need to make a plan. In your own time, you should certainly stop talking about the Copernican theory for a while. Bide your time and work on other things. It isn’t as if you understand very much of basic physics, after all, as you now know all too well. You could focus on that. I tell you what—I’ll give you an amnestic that will obscure short-term memory. It will allow you to retain what you remembered before this little tutorial, but make this trip’s contents hard to recall. Hopefully that will serve to keep your part in the flow of events consistent.”
“I want to know,” Galileo said. “I don’t see how it can hurt.”
“You don’t understand—not us, not time, not yourself.”
Now Ganymede and his gang on the other side of the terrace were pushing Hera’s people to the side, approaching Hera and Galileo in a swirl of tussling and curses. Hera put a forefinger under Galileo’s nose.
“I’m the one helping you to avoid your fate,” she reminded him as she took a pewter box from one of her retainers. “So listen to me. You can’t be one thing here and another there. You need to knit your selves together. You either make yourself whole, or else die in the fire.”
CHAPTER TEN
The Celatone
Alas, what evil fate and malefic star has led you into this dangerous and oppressive darkness, cruelly exposed you to many a mortal anguish and destined you to die from the fierce appetite and violent maw of this terrible dragon? Alas, what if I am swallowed whole to rot inside its foul, filthy and fecal entrails, to be afterwards ejected by an unthinkable exit? What a strange and tragic death, what a poor way to end my life! But here I am, feeling the beast at my back. Who has ever seen such an atrocious and monstrous reversal of fortune?
—FRANCESCO COLONNA, The Strife of Love in a Dream
BACK FROM ROME, Galileo spent most of the year 1616 collapsed in his bed, exhausted and sick of the world. All the usual distempers made their appearance: rheumatism, back pains, dyspepsia, fainting spells, syncopes, catarrhs, nightmares, night sweats, hernias, hemorrhoids, bleeding from the skin and the nose. “If it’s not one thing it’s another thing,” La Piera would say.
The cock’s crow started each day, followed by groans almost as loud from the master’s bed. The servants understood these as the histrionics of a humorous man in the clutches of his black melancholy, but poor little Virginia was frightened by them. She spent many a day running back and forth between the kitchen and his bedroom, ostentatiously nursing him.
Of course his moods had always varied. He had looked into this matter of temperament, and come to believe that Galen was better on it than Aristotle—not a surprise. Galen was the first he knew of to describe the humors—one of the few aspects of ancient medical knowledge that would certainly endure, for one saw evidence of them everywhere, all persons stuck under the rule of one humor or other—or occasionally, as with Sarpi, in a balance of them that led to perfect equipoise. For himself, Galileo Galilei, it appeared he was dominated by each of the four at different times: sanguine when his work was going well, choleric when he was attacked or insulted; melancholy often, as when thinking of his debts, or sailing home at sunset, or insomniac in the hours before dawn; and under all the others phlegmatic, somehow, in that his typical response to all his other states was to shrug them off and mulishly get back to work. To work through everything: his incredible tenacity was ultimately phlegmatic, although sanguine as well, and subject to choler. Up and down, side to side, thus he careened through the tumble of days, moving from one humor to the next, fully inhabiting each in its turn, unable to predict when any of them would strike—even the midnight insomnias, which sometimes instead of black melancholic could be so pure and serene.
Over the years the household had learned to deal with these paradoxical rapid shifts. But this time was the worst ever.
The villa in Bellosguardo was at least a good place to be hypochondri-acal. On its hill, with a good prospect down onto the city, one could sit and rest, and observe the valley of tile rooftops and the great Duomo that appeared to sail east in the midst of a fleet. Villa del Segui, the House of the Pursuit (or the Pursued). He had signed a five-year lease for a hundred scudi a year. La Piera ran the place and disposed of everything to her own satisfaction. She and the whole household enjoyed the not very drafty building and its expansive grounds. It was a good house, and with it their livings were secure.
Giovanfrancesco Sagredo came over from Venice to visit his sick friend in the new home he had not seen yet, and this got Galileo out of bed and out into his new gardens, which were extensive and not too overgrown. Sagredo walked beside him and commiserated with him about Bellarmino’s prohibition, never once saying “I told you so” about his Roman troubles, while also frequently congratulating him on the new house and grounds. Sagredo was a sanguine man, a rare combination of joy and wisdom. How he loved life. In the three years Galileo had taught him in Padua, Galileo had barged into Venice to stay with him at his pink palazzo often, and come to love Francesco’s calm enthusiasm for everything. He ate and drank with a will, swam in the Grand Canal, conducted experiments in magnetism and thermometry tended his menagerie like the abbot of a monastery of beasts; and was always carefree about the task of the moment.
“This is a beautiful place,” he said now. “Look at how you can use the little barn as your workshop, and from there have a view onto the city! What a prospect. You can fly over the people whose lives you will be changing forever by the work in your shop.”
“I don’t know,” Galileo groused, unwilling to be satisfied. Like a lot of melancholics, he could ape a sanguine manner in a sanguine person’s company, but he trusted Francesco enough to reveal his true feelings. “I have this awful feeling of being gagged. I shouldn’t let it bother me, but it does.”
Afterward, recalling Galileo’s moaning and groaning, Sagredo wrote to him: Vivere et laeteri; Hoc est enim donum Dei. Live and enjoy; this is a gift from God. Later he wrote again on the same theme: Philosophize comfortably in your bed and leave the stars alone. Let fools be fools, let the ignorant plume themselves on their ignorance. Why should you court martyrdom for the sake of winning them from their folly? It is not given to everyone to be among the elect. I believe the universe was made for my service, not I for the universe. Live as I do and you will be happy.
That was probably true, but Galileo couldn’t do it. He needed to work; without work he tended to go mad. But now the Copernican theory lay at the base of all he was interested in, and he was forbidden to discuss it. And Galileo had been Copernicanism’s chief advocate—in Italy for sure, and really in Europe generally, Kepler being so betan-gled—so without him, it wouldn’t go anywhere. Everyone understood his silence on the matter to be the result of a specific warning to him, no matter what the written testimonial from Bellarmino said. It was not as if he could whip it out every time he met someone and say, I was not really rebuked, see? And of course much of the tale-telling was happening behind his back anyway, as he well knew. Yet he could not reply to them, for there was a crowd of vigilant enemies all ready to leap on anything he might publish or write privately, or even speak aloud. For the spies were everywhere, and the air of Florence was thick with sacerdotal menace.