Galileo’s Dream

‘I travel extensively.’ The man’s gaze was fixed on Galileo as if on his first meal in a week. ‘Most recently I was in the Netherlands, and there I saw an instrument that made me think of you, because of your compass, which, as I said, Kepler showed me. This Dutch device was a kind of looking glass.’

‘A mirror?’

‘No. A glass to look through. Or rather, a tube you look through, with a glass lens at each end. It makes things look bigger.’

‘Like a jeweller’s lens?’

‘Yes.’

‘Those only work for things that are close.’

‘This one worked for things that were far away.’

‘How could that be?’

The man shrugged.

This was interesting. ‘Perhaps it was because there were two lenses,’ Galileo said. ‘Were they convex or concave?’

The man almost spoke, hesitated, then shrugged again. His stare went almost cross-eyed. His brown eyes were flecked with green and yellow splashes, like Venice’s canals near sunset. Finally he said, ‘I don’t know.’

Galileo found this unimpressive. ‘Do you have one of these tubes with you?’

‘Not with me.’

‘But you have one?’

‘Not of that type. But yes. But not with me.’

‘And so you thought to tell me about it.’

‘Yes. Because of your compass. We saw that among its other applications, you could use it to calculate certain distances.’

‘Of course.’ One of the compass’s main functions was to range cannon shots. Despite which very few artillery services or officers had ever purchased one. Three hundred and seven of them, to be precise, over a period of twelve years.

The stranger said, ‘Such calculations would be easier if you could see things further away.’

‘Many things would be easier.’

‘Yes. And now it can be done.’

‘Interesting,’ Galileo said. ‘What is your name again, signor?’

The man looked away uneasily. ‘I see the artisans are packing to depart. I am keeping you from them, and I must meet a man from Ragusa. We will see each other again.’

With a quick bow he turned and walked along the tall brick side wall of the campiello, hurrying in the direction of the Arsenale, so that Galileo saw him under the emblem of the winged lion of St Mark which stretched in bas relief over the lintel of the great fortress’s entryway. For a second it looked as if one bird-beast were flying over another. Then the man turned the corner and disappeared.

Galileo turned his attention back to the artisans’ market. Some of them were indeed leaving, in the afternoon shadows folding up their blankets and putting their wares into boxes and baskets. During the fifteen or twenty years he had been advising various groups in the Arsenale, he had often dropped by the Friday market to see what might be on display in the way of new tools or devices, machine parts and so on. Now he wandered around through the familiar faces, moving by habit. But he was distracted. It would be a good thing to be able to see distant objects as if they were close by. Several obvious uses sprang to mind immediately. Obvious military advantages, in fact.

He made his way to one of the lensmakers’ tables, humming a little tune of his father’s that came to him whenever he was on the hunt. There would be better lenses in Murano or Florence; here he found nothing but the usual magnifying glasses. He picked up two, held them in the air before his right eye. St Mark’s lion couchant became a flying ivory blur. It was a poorly done bas relief, he saw again with his other eye, very primitive compared to the worn Roman statues under it on either side of the gate.

Galileo put the lenses back on their table and walked down to the Riva San Biagio, where one of the Padua ferries docked. The splendour of the Serenissima gleamed in the last part of the day. On the riva he sat on his usual post, thinking it over. Most of the people there knew to leave him alone when he was in thought; he could get furious if disturbed. People still reminded him of the time he had shoved a bargeman into the canal for interrupting his solitude.

A magnifying glass was convex on both sides. It made things look larger, but only when they were a few fingers from the glass, as Galileo knew very well. His eyes, often painful to him, had in recent years been losing their sharpness for nearby things. He was getting old: a hairy round old man, with failing eyesight. A lens was a help, especially if ground well.

It was easy to imagine a lens grinder in the course of his work holding up two lenses, one in front of the other, to see what would happen. He was surprised he hadn’t done it himself. Although, as he had just discovered, it didn’t do much. He could not immediately say why. But he could investigate the phenomena in his usual manner. At the very least, for a start, he could look through different kinds of lenses in various combinations, and simply see what he saw.

There was no wind today. The ferry’s crew rowed slowly along the Canale della Giudecca and onto the open lagoon, headed for the fondamente at Porta Maghere. The captain’s ritual cursing of the oarsmen cut through the cries of the trailing seagulls, sounding like lines from Ruzante: you girls, you rag dolls, my mother rows better than you do-‘Mine definitely does,’ Galileo pitched in absently, as he always did. The old bitch still had arms like a stevedore. She had been beating the shit out of Marina until he had intervened, that time the two had fought; and Galileo knew full well that Marina was no slouch when it came to landing a punch. Holding them apart, everyone screaming…

From his spot in the ferry’s bow he faced the setting sun. There had been many years when he would have spent the night in town, usually at Sagredo’s pink palazzo, ‘The Ark’, with its menagerie of wild creatures and its riotous parties; but now Sagredo was in Aleppo on a diplomatic assignment, and Paolo Sarpi lived in a stone monk’s cell, despite his exalted office, and all the rest of Galileo’s partners in mischief had moved away or changed their night habits. No, those years were gone. They had been good years, even though he had been broke (as he still was). Work all day in Padua, party all night in Venice. Thus his rides home had usually been on a dawn barge, standing in the bow buzzing with the afterglow of wine and sex, laughter and sleeplessness. On those mornings the sun would pop over the Lido behind them and pour over his shoulders, illuminating the sky and the mirror surface of the lagoon, a space as simple and clear as a good proof: everything washed clean, etched on the eye, glowing with the promise of a day that could bring anything.

Whereas coming home on the day’s last barge, as now, was always a return to the home fire of his life’s endlessly tangled problems. The more the western sky blazed in his face, the more likely his mood was to plummet. His temperament was volatile, shifting rapidly among the humours, and every histrionic sunset threatened to make it crash like a diving pelican into the lagoon.

On this evening, however, the air was clear, and Venus hung high in a lapis lazuli dusk, gleaming like some kind of emblem. And he was still thinking about the stranger and his strange news. Could it be true? If so, why had no one noticed before?

On the long dock up the estuary he debarked, and walked over to the line of carts starting out on their night journeys. He hopped on the back of one of the regulars that went to Padua, greeting the driver and lying on his back to watch the stars bounce overhead. By the time the cart rolled past Via Vignali, near the centre of Padua, it was the fourth hour of the night, and the stars were obscured by cloud.

With a sigh he opened the gate that led into his garden, a large space inside the L the big old house made. Vegetables, vine trellises, fruit trees: he took a deep breath to absorb the smells of the part of the house he liked best, then steeled himself and slipped into the pandemonium that always existed inside. La Piera had not yet entered his life, and no one before her could ever keep order.

‘Maestro!’ one of the littlest artisans shrieked as Galileo entered the big kitchen, ‘Mazzoleni beat me!’

Galileo smacked him on the head as if driving a tomato stake into the ground. ‘You deserved it, I’m sure,’ he said.

‘Not at all, maestro!’ The undeterred boy got back to his feet and launched into his complaint, but did not get far before a gaggle of Galileo’s students had surrounded him, begging help with a problem they were to be tested on next day in the fortifications course at the university. Galileo waded through them to the kitchen. We don’t understand, they wailed contrapuntally, though it appeared to be a simple problem. ‘Unequal weights weigh equally when suspended from unequal distances having inversely the same ratio as the weights,’ he intoned, something he had tried to teach them just the previous week. But before he could sit down and decipher their professor Mazzoni’s odd notation, Virginia threw herself in his arms to recount in officious detail how her younger sister Livia had misbehaved that day. ‘Give me half an hour,’ he told the students, picking up Virginia and carrying her to the long table. ‘I’m starving for supper, and Virginia is starving for me.’

But they were more afraid of Mazzoni than they were of him, and he ended up reviewing the relevant equations for them, and insisting they work out the solution for themselves, while eating the leftovers from their dinner, all the while bouncing Virginia on his knee. She was light as a bird. He had banned Marina from the house five years before, a relief in many ways, but now it was up to him and the servants to raise the girls and find them a way in the world. Inquiries at the nearby convents, asking for prenovitiate admissions, had not been well-received. So there were some years yet to go. Two more mouths, lost among all the rest. Among thirty-two mouths, to be exact. It was like a hostel in Boccacio, three storeys of rooms all over-occupied, and every person there dependent on Galileo and his salary of five hundred and twenty florins a year. Of course the nineteen students boarding in house paid a tuition fee plus room and board, but they were so ravenous he almost always fed them at a loss. Worse, they cost time. He had priced his military compasses at five scudi each, with twenty more charged for a two-month instructional period in house on the Via Vagnali, but considering the time it took from him, it had become clear that he made each sale at a loss. Really the compasses had not turned out as he had hoped.

One of the house boys brought him a small stack of letters a courier had brought, which he read as he ate, and tutored, and played with Virginia. First up was another letter from his sponge of a brother, begging money to help support him and his large family in Munich, where he was trying to make a living as a musician. Their father’s failure in that same endeavour, and the old dragon’s constant excoriation of him for it, had somehow failed to teach his brother Michelangelo the obvious lesson that it couldn’t be done, even if you did have a musical genius, which his brother did not. He dropped the letter on the floor without finishing it.

The next one was worse: from his sister’s unspeakable husband Galetti, demanding again the remainder of her dowry, which in fact was Michelangelo’s share, but Galetti had seen that the only chance for payment was from Galileo, and it was a family obligation. If Galileo did not pay it, Galetti promised to sue Galileo yet again; he hoped Galileo would remember the last time, when Galileo had been forced to stay away from Florence for a year to avoid arrest.

That letter too Galileo dropped on the floor. He focused on a half-eaten chicken, then looked in the pot of soup hanging over the fire, fishing around for the hunk of smoked pork that ballasted it. His poor father had been driven to an early grave by letters just like these, and by his Xantippe ferreting them out and reading them aloud fortissimo. Five children, and nothing left even to his eldest son, except a lute. A very good lute, it was true, one that Galileo treasured and often played, but it was no help when it came to supporting all his younger siblings. And mathematics was like music in this, alas: it would never make enough money. 520 florins a year for teaching the most practical science at the university, while Cremonini was paid a thousand for elaborating Aristotle’s every throat-clearing.

But he could not think of that, or his digestion would be ruined. The students were still badgering him. Hostel Galileo rang with voices, crazy as a convent and running at a loss. If he did not invent something a little more lucrative than the military compass, he would never escape his debts.

This caused him to remember the stranger. He put Virginia down and rose to his feet. The students’ faces turned up to him like baby birds jammed in a nest.

‘Go,’ he said with an imperious wave of the hand. ‘Leave me.’

Sometimes, when he got really angry, not just exploding like gunpowder but shaking like an earthquake, he would roar in such a way that everyone in the house knew to run. At those times he would stride cursing through the emptied rooms, knocking over furniture and calling for people to stay and be beaten as they deserved. All the servants and most of the students knew him well enough to hear the leading edge of that kind of anger, contained in a particular flat disgusted tone, at which point they would slip away before it came on in full. Now they hesitated, hearing not that tone, but rather the sound of the maestro on the hunt. In that mood there would be nothing to fear.

He took a bottle of wine from the table, polished it off, kicked one of the boys in order to tip the balance of their judgement toward flight. ‘Mazzoleni!’ he bellowed. ‘MAT! ZO! LEN! EEEEEEEEEE!’

Well, no earthquake tonight; this was one of the good sounds of the house, like the cock crowing at dawn. The old artisan, asleep on the bench by the oven, pushed his whiskery face off the wood. ‘Maestro?’

Galileo stood over him. ‘We have a new problem.’

‘Ah.’ Mazzoleni shook his head like a dog coming out of a pond, looked around for a wine bottle. ‘We do?’