Doctor Copernicus (11 page)

“I cannot help it if I am cold!” Nicolas cried, beside himself with rage and embarrassment. “And I have done nothing to deserve your bitterness.” But Novara had lost
interest, and was shuffling away. The youth Girolamo hesitated between them, glancing with a faint sardonic smile from one of them to the other. Nicolas trembled violently. It was not
fair!—even if he was dying, Novara had no right to cringe like this; his task was to be proud and cold, to intimidate, not to mewl and whimper, not to be weak. It was a scandal! “I
never asked anything of you!” Nicolas howled at the other’s back, ignoring the looks of the passers-by. “It was you that approached me.
Are you listening?
”

“Yes yes,” Novara muttered, without turning. “Just so, indeed. And now farewell. Come, Girolamo, come.”

The young man smiled languorously a last time, and with a small regretful gesture went to the Professor and took his arm. Nicolas turned and fled, with his fury clutched to him like a struggling
captive wild beast. He was frightened, as if he had looked into a mirror and seen reflected there not his own face but an unspeakable horror.

He did not see Novara again. Once or twice their paths might have crossed, but time and circumstance happily intervened to keep them apart; happily, not only because Nicolas feared another
painful scene, but also because he dreaded the possibility of being confronted again by the frightening image of himself he had glimpsed in the looking glass of that incomprehensible fit of naked
fury. When he heard of the Professor’s death he could not even remember clearly what the man had looked like; but by then he was in Padua, and everything had changed.

*

That city at first made little impression on him, he was so busy searching for habitable lodgings, performing the complicated and exasperating rituals of enrolment at the
university, choosing his subjects, his professors. He had also to cope with Andreas, who by now was badly, though still mysteriously, ill, and full of spleen. Early in the summer the brothers
travelled to Frauenburg, their leave of absence having expired. They had asked by letter for an extension, but Bishop Lucas had insisted that they should make the request in person. The extra leave
was granted, of course, and after less than a month in Prussia they set out once more for Italy.

Nicolas paused at Kulm to visit Barbara at the convent. She had not changed much in the years since he had seen her last; in middle age she was still, for him, the ungainly girl who had played
hide and seek with him long ago in the old house in Torun. Perhaps it was these childhood echoes that made their talk so stilted and unreal. There was between them still that familiar melancholy,
that tender hesitant regard, but now there was something more, a faint sense of the ridiculous, of the ponderous, as if they were despite their pretensions really children playing at being
grown-ups. She was, she told him, Abbess of the convent now, in succession to their late Aunt Christina Waczelrodt, but he could not grasp it. How could Barbara, his Barbara, have become a person
of such consequence? She also was puzzled by the elaborate dressing-up that he was trying to pass off as his life. She said:

“You are becoming a famous man. We even hear talk of you here in the provinces.”

He shook his head and smiled. “It is all Andreas’s doing. He thinks it a joke to put it about that I am formulating in secret a revolutionary theory of the planets.”

“And are you not?”

Summer rain was falling outside, and a pallid, faintly flickering light entered half-heartedly by the streaming windows of the high hall where they sat. Even in her loose-fitting habit Barbara
was all knees and knuckles and raw scrubbed skin. She looked away from him shyly. He said:

“I shall come again to see you soon.”

“Yes.”

*

When he returned to Padua he found Andreas, though sick and debilitated already from the Prussian journey, preparing to depart for Rome. “I can abide neither your
sanctimonious stink, brother, nor this cursed Paduan smugness. You will breathe easier without me to disgrace you before your pious friends.”

“I have no friends, Andreas. And I wish you would not go.”

“You are a hypocrite. Do not make me spew, please.”

However much he tried not to be, Nicolas was glad of his brother’s going; now perhaps at last, relieved of the burden of Andreas’s intolerable presence, he would be permitted to
become the real self he had all his life wished to be.

But what was that mysterious self that had eluded him always? He could not say. Yet he was convinced that he had reached a turning point. Those first months alone in Padua were strange. He was
neither happy nor sad, nor much of anything: he was neutral. Life flowed over him, and under the wave he waited, for what he did not know, unless it was rescue. He applied himself with energy to
his studies. He took philosophy and law, mathematics, Greek and astronomy. It was in the faculty of medicine, however, that he surfaced at last, like a spent swimmer flying upward into light, in
whose aching lungs the saving air blossoms like a great dazzling yellow flower.

*

“Signor Fracastoro?”

The young man turned, frowning. “
Si
, I am Fracastoro.”

How handsome he was, how haughty, with those black eyes, that dark narrow arrogant face; how languidly he sprawled on the bench among the twittering band of dandies, with his long legs
negligently crossed. The lecture hall was putrid with the stink of a dissected corpse, the gross gouts and ganglia of which two bloodstained attendants were carting away, but he was
aristocratically indifferent to that carnage, and only now and then bothered to lift to his face the perfume-soaked handkerchief whose pervasive musky scent was the unmistakable trademark of the
medical student. He was dressed with casual elegance in silk and soft leather, booted and spurred, with a white linen shirt open on the frail cage of his chest; he had come late to the lecture that
morning, flushed and smiling, bringing with him into the fetid hall a crisp clean whiff of horses and sweet turf and misty dawn meadows. He was all that Nicolas was not, and Nicolas, sensing
imminent humiliation, cursed himself for having spoken.

“We met last year in Rome, I think,” he said. “You were with Professor Novara.”

“O?”

Fracastoro’s friends nudged each other happily, and gazed at Nicolas with bland sardonic seriousness, trying not to laugh; they too could see humiliation coming.

“Yes yes, in Rome, and before that in Bologna, at the Professor’s house.” He was beginning to babble. Someone sniggered. “I remember it well. You tried to make a drunkard
of Novara’s dog, ha ha. Ha.”

The young man raised an eyebrow. “Yes? A dog, you say? Extraordinary. Certainly I do not remember that.”

Nicolas sighed. Blast you, you young prig. Life is dreadful, really. He stepped back, trying not to bow.

“A mistake,” he muttered. “Forgive me.”

“But wait, wait,” Fracastoro said, “this Novara, it seems to me I do know the man, vaguely.” He lifted a slender hand to his brow. “Ah yes, a mathematician, is he
not?—much given to mysticism? Yes, I know him. Well?”

“You do not remember our meeting.”

“No; but I may do so, if I concentrate. Do you have news of the Professor?”

“No, no, I merely—it is no matter.”

“But—?”

“No matter, no matter.” And he fled, pursued by laughter.

*

They met again some days later, in the vegetable market, of all places, at dawn. Lately Nicolas had begun to suffer from sleeplessness, and went out often at night to walk
about the city and bathe his feverishly spinning brain in the chill dark air. He developed a fondness for the market especially; the colours, the clamour, the heavy honeyed smell of ripeness, all
conspired to cheat of its bleakness that inhuman hour before first light. He was leaning on the damp parapet of the Ponte San Giorgio, idly watching the upriver barges like great ungainly whales
unloading their produce in the bluish gloom of the wharf below, when a voice said at his shoulder:

“Koppernigk, is it not?”

He was wrapped in a dun cloak, and his long fair swathe of hair was hidden under a battered old black slouch hat; even in such dull apparel he could not be less than elegant. He was smiling a
little, not looking at Nicolas, but musing on the still-dark distance beyond the city walls, saying silently, as it were: come, cut me now if you wish, and so have some small revenge. But Nicolas
just as silently declined the offer, and suddenly the Italian laughed softly and said:

“Nicolas Koppernigk—you see? I have been concentrating.”

Nicolas with a faint smile inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Signor Fracastoro.”

The other looked at him directly then, and laughed again.

“O please,” he said, “my friends call me that;
you
may call me Girolamo. Shall we walk this way a little?” They left the bridge and crossed the open piazza, where
the fishwives were hurling amiable abuse from stall to stall. “But tell me, what brings you here at this strange hour?”

Nicolas shrugged. “I do not sleep well. And you?”

“Wine and women, I fear, keep me from my bed. I am for home now after a misspent night.” It was meant as a boast. He was at that age, not quite twenty yet, when the youth he had been
and the man he was becoming both held sway at once, so that in the same breath he could slip disconcertingly from hard cold derisive cynicism into simple silliness. Now he said: “You
disappointed Novara greatly, you know, by not taking seriously his grand schemes to save the world. Ah, poor Domenico!”

They both laughed, a little spitefully, and Nicolas, suddenly stared at out of the sky by the Professor’s pained reproachful eyes, said hastily:

“But they are not without significance, his preoccupations.”

“No, of course; but it is all mere talking. He is too much in love with magic, and despises action. I mean that natural magic for him is all centaurs and chimaeras. Now I, however,
understand it in general as the science which applies the knowledge of hidden forms to the production of wonderful operations.” He glanced out quickly from under the downturned brim of his
black hat with a candid questioning look, but it was impossible to know if he was being sincere or otherwise. “What do you say, friend?”

But Nicolas only shrugged and murmured warily:

“Perhaps, perhaps . . .”

He did not know what to make of this young man; he did not trust him, and did not trust himself, and so determined to go cautiously, even though he could not see where trust came into it, except
that he knew he did not care to be made a fool of again. It was all odd, this meeting, this dreamlike morning, these dim figures hurrying here and there and crying out in the gloom. They entered a
narrow alleyway given over entirely to the trade in cagebirds. Cascades of bright mad music drenched the dark air. Coming out at the other end they found themselves abruptly in a deserted square.
The sky was of a deep illyrian blue, lightening rapidly now to the east, and the towers of the city were tipped with gold.

“May I offer you breakfast?” said Fracastoro. “My rooms are close by.”

He lived in a tumbledown palazzo near the Basilica of St Anthony, the family home of an elderly count who had long ago fled to a villa in the Dolomites for the sake of his ailing lungs.
“My uncle, you know,” he said, and winked. They ascended through the shabby splendours of gilt and tempera and stained marble statuary to the fourth floor, where a kind of rambling
lair, stretching through five or six large rooms, had been scooped out of the dust and genteel wreckage deposited by years of neglect. Here, under the sagging canopy of a vast four-poster, they
came upon a young man asleep in a tangle of soiled sheets. He was naked, his limbs sprawled in touchingly childish abandon, tacked down firmly, as it were, like some exotic specimen, by the
enormous erection that reared grotesquely out of his jet-black bush. Fracastoro barely glanced at him, but in passing picked up a tortured shirt from the floor and flung it at his head, crying:

“Up up up! Come!”

The main room was a general disorder of books and clothes and empty wine bottles. Most of the furniture was draped in dustsheets. Here and there amidst the clutter the skeleton of a former glory
was visible in richly patterned panelling and polished marble pillars, gold-embroidered drapes, an inlaid rosewood spinet delicate and tentative as a deer. Magnificent arched windows framed a
triptych of the airy architecture of St Anthony’s soaring motionless against an immaculate blue sky. Fracastoro looked about him, and with a shrug waved his hand in a vague helpless gesture
of apology. How many generations of aristocratic breeding had been necessary, Nicolas wondered, to produce that patrician indifference and ease? He shrank back into his black cloak, a lean grey
troubled soul suddenly aching with envy of this young man’s confidence and carelessness, his disdain for the trivial trappings of the world. They stood a while in silence by the window,
gazing out at the sunlit city and listening to the morning noises that rose to them from the street below, the rattle of cane shutters, rumbling of the watercart, the breadman’s harsh cry.
Nothing happened, they said nothing, but forever afterwards, even when much else had faded, Nicolas was to remember that moment with extraordinary vividness as marking the true beginning of their
friendship.

There was a sound behind them, and Girolamo turned and said:

“Ah, here you are, you dreadful dog.”

It was the handsome young man from the bedroom. He stood in the doorway clad only in his shirt, scratching his head and gazing at them blearily. His name was Tadziu or Tadzio, Nicolas did not
catch it clearly; it hardly mattered, since he was never to see him again. After that first morning he disappeared mysteriously, and Girolamo did not mention him save once, a long time afterwards.
They spoke together rapidly now in a dialect that Nicolas did not understand, and the boy shrugged and went away. Girolamo turned to his guest with a smile. “I must apologise: apparently
there is no food. But we shall have something presently.” He began to glance idly through a disorderly mass of papers overflowing a small ornate table, looking up at Nicolas now and then with
a quizzical, faintly amused expression, seeming each time about to speak but yet remaining silent. At last he laughed, and throwing up his hands said helplessly: