Kitabı oku: «Galileo’s Dream»

Chapter One The Stranger

All of a sudden Galileo felt that this moment had happened before-that he had been standing in the artisans’ Friday market outside Venice’s Arsenale and felt someone’s gaze on him, and looked up to see a man staring at him, a tall stranger with a beaky narrow face. As before (but what before?) the stranger acknowledged Galileo’s gaze with a lift of the chin, then walked toward him through the market, threading through the crowded blankets and tables and stalls spread all over the Campiello del Malvasia. The sense of repetition was strong enough to make Galileo a little dizzy, although a part of his mind was also detached enough to wonder how it might be that you could sense someone’s gaze resting on you.

The stranger came up to Galileo, stopped and bowed stiffly, held out his right hand. Galileo bowed in return, took the offered hand and squeezed; it was narrow and long, like the man’s face.

In guttural Latin, very strangely accented, the stranger croaked, ‘Are you Domino Signor Galileo Galilei, professor of mathematics at the University of Padua?’

‘I am. Who are you?’

The man let go of his hand. ‘I am a colleague of Johannes Kepler. He and I recently examined one of your very useful military compasses.’

‘I am glad to hear it,’ Galileo said, surprised. ‘I have corresponded with Signor Kepler, as he probably told you, but he did not write to me about this. When and where did you meet him?’

‘Last year, in Prague.’

Galileo nodded. Kepler’s places of residence had shifted through the years in ways Galileo had not tried to keep track of. In fact he had not answered Kepler’s last letter, having failed to get through the book that had accompanied it. ‘And where are you from?’

‘Northern Europe.’

Alta Europa. The man’s Latin was really strange, unlike other transalpine versions Galileo had heard. He examined the man more closely, noted his extreme height and thinness, his stoop, his intent close-set eyes. He would have had a heavy beard, but he was very finely shaved. His expensive dark jacket and cloak were so clean they looked new. The hoarse voice, beaky nose, narrow face, and black hair made the man seem like a crow turned into a man. Again Galileo felt the uncanny sensation that this meeting had happened before. A crow talking to a bear-

‘What city, what country?’ Galileo persisted.

‘Echion Linea. Near Morvran.’

‘I don’t know those towns.’

‘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?’

‘We do. We need lenses. As many as you can find.’

‘Lenses?’

‘Someone told me today that if you look through a tube that holds two of them, you can see things at a distance as if they were nearby.’

‘How would that work?’

‘That’s what we have to find out.’

Mazzoleni nodded. With arthritic care he levered himself off the bench. ‘There’s a box of them in the workshop.’

Galileo stood jiggling the box back and forth, watching the lamps’ light bounce on the shifting glasses. ‘A lens surface is either convex, concave, or flat.’

‘If it isn’t defective.’

‘Yes yes. Two lenses means four surfaces; so there are how many possible combinations?’

‘Sounds like twelve, maestro.’

‘Yes. But some are obviously not going to work.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Flat surfaces on all four sides are not going to work.’

‘Granted.’

‘And convex surfaces on all four sides would be like stacking two magnifying lenses. We already know that doesn’t work.’

Mazzoleni drew himself up: ‘I concede nothing. Everything should be tried in the usual way.’

‘Yes yes.’

This was Mazzoleni’s stock phrase for such situations. Galileo nodded absently, putting the box down on the work-shop’s biggest table. He reached up to dust off the folios lying aslant on the shelf over it; they looked like guards who had died on watch. While Mazzoleni gathered lenses scattered in pigeonholes around the workshop, Galileo lifted down the current working folio, a big volume nearly filled with notes and sketches. He opened it to the first empty pages, ignoring the rest of the volumes above, the hundreds of pages, the twenty years of his life mouldering away, never to be written up and given to the world, the great work as lost as if it were the scribblings of some poor mad alchemist. When he thought of the glorious hours they had spent working with the inclined planes they had built, a pain stuck him like a needle to the heart.

He opened an ink bottle and dipped a quill in it, and began to sketch his thoughts about this device the stranger had described, figuring out as he did how to proceed. This was how he always worked when thinking over problems of motion or balance or the force of percussion; but light was peculiar. He did not sketch any pattern that looked immediately promising. Well, they would simply try every combination, as Mazzoleni had said, and see what they found.

Quickly the ancient artisan knocked together some little wooden frames they could clamp different lenses into. These could then be attached to the ends of a lead tube Mazzoleni found in a box of odds and ends. While he did that Galileo laid out their collection of lenses by type, fingering each, holding up two at a time and peering through them. Some he gave to Mazzoleni to attach to the ends of the tube.

They only had the lamplit workshop to look at, and the area of the garden and arbour illuminated by the house windows; but it was enough to check for possibilities. Galileo looked at the lenses in the box, held them in the air. Inward, outward: the images blurred, went absent, grew diffuse, even made things smaller than what one saw with the eye alone. Although an effect the reverse of what one wanted was always suggestive.

He wrote down their results on the open page of the work book. Two particular convex lenses gave the image upside down. That cried out for a geometrical explanation, and he noted it with a question mark. The inverted image was enlarged, and sharp. He had to admit to himself that he did not understand light, or what it was doing between the lenses in the tube. He had only ventured to give classes on optics twice in seventeen years, and had been unhappy both times.

Then: hold up two lenses, look: and the potted citron at the edge of the garden appeared distinctly larger in the glass closest to his eye. Green leaf lit from the side by lantern light, big and sharp-

‘Hey!’ Galileo said. ‘Try this pair,’ he told Mazzoleni. ‘Concave near the eye, convex at the far end of the tube.’

Mazzoleni slotted the lenses into the frames and gave the tube to Galileo, who took it and pointed it at the first tree branch in the arbour, illuminated by the lit windows of the house. Only a small part of the branch appeared in the tube, but it was definitely enlarged: the leaves big and distinct, the bark minutely corrugated. The image was slightly blurred at the bottom, and he shifted the outside frame to tilt the glass, then rotated it, then moved it further out on the tube. The image became sharper still.

‘By God it works! This is strange!’

He waved at the old man. ‘Go to the house and stand in the doorway, in the lamp light.’ He himself walked through the garden out into the arbour. He trained the tube on Mazzoleni in the doorway. ‘Mother of God.’ There in the middle of the glass swam the old man’s wrinkled face, half-bright and halfshadowed, as close as if Galileo could touch him; and they were fifty feet apart or more. The image burned into Galileo’s mind, the artisan’s familiar gap-toothed grin shimmery and flat, but big and clear-the very emblem of their many happy days in the workshop, trying new things.

‘My God!’ he shouted, deeply surprised. ‘It works!’

Mazzoleni hurried out to give it a try. He rotated the frames, looked through it backwards, tipped the frames, moved them back and forth on the tube. ‘There are blurry patches,’ he noted.

‘We need better lenses.’

‘You could order a batch from Murano.’

‘From Florence. The best optical glass is Florentine. Murano glass is for coloured trinkets.’

‘If you say so. I have friends who would contest that.’

‘Friends from Murano?’

‘Yes.’

Galileo’s real laugh was a low huh huh huh huh huh. ‘We’ll grind our own lenses if we have to. We can buy blanks from Florence. I wonder what would happen if we had a longer tube.’

‘This one is about as long as we’ve got. I guess we could make some longer sheets of lead and roll them up, but we would have to make the moulds.’

‘Any kind of tube will do.’ Here Galileo was as good as Mazzoleni or any artisan-good at seeing what mattered, quick to imagine different ways of getting it. ‘It doesn’t have to be lead. We could try a tube of cloth or leather, reinforced to keep it straight. Glue a long tube of leather to slats. Or just use cardboard.’

Mazzoleni frowned, hefting a lens in his hand. It was about the same size as a Venetian florin, say three fingers wide. ‘Would it stay straight enough?’

‘I think so.’

‘Would the inside surface be smooth?’

‘Does it need to be?’

‘I don’t know, does it?’

They stared at each other. Mazzoleni grinned again, his weathered face an entire topography of wrinkles, delta on delta, the white burn mark on his left temple raising that eyebrow in an impish expression. Galileo tousled the man’s hair as he would a child’s. This work they did together was unlike any other human bond he knew, unlike that with mistress or child, colleague or student, friend or confessor-unlike anyone-because they made new things together, they learned new things. Now once again they were on the hunt.

Galileo said, ‘It looks like we’ll want to be able to move one lens back and forth.’

‘You could fix one glass to the tube, and set the other one in a slightly smaller tube that fitted inside the main one, so you could move that one back and forth but keep it aligned vertically. You could rotate it too, if you wanted.’

‘That’s good.’ Galileo would have come to some such arrangement eventually, but Mazzoleni was especially quick concerning things he could see and touch. ‘Can you bang something like that together? By tomorrow morning?’

Mazzoleni cackled. By now it was the middle of the night, the town was quiet. ‘Simple stuff, compared to your damned compass.’

‘Watch what you say. That thing has paid your salary for years.’

‘Yours too!’

Galileo swatted at him. The compass had become a pain, there was no denying it. ‘You have the materials you need?’

‘No. I think we’ll need more lead tubes, and thinner staves than what we’ve got around, and longer, if you want leather tubes. More cardboard too. And you’ll want more lenses.’

‘I’ll send an order to Florence. Meanwhile let’s work with what we’ve got.’

In the days that followed, every moment was given over to the new project. Galileo neglected his collegial obligations, made his boarding students teach each other, ate his meals in the workshop while he worked: nothing mattered but the project. At times like these it became obvious that the workshop was the centre of the house. The maestro was about as irritable as always, but with his attention elsewhere it got a bit easier for the servants.

While the various efforts of manufacture and assemblage and testing went on, Galileo also took time to write his Venetian friends and allies to set the stage for a presentation of the device. Here was where his career up until this point finally helped him in something. Known mostly as an eccentric if ingenious professor of mathematics, broke and frustrated at forty-five, he had also spent twenty years working and playing with many of the leading intellectuals of Venice, including, crucially, his great friend and mentor Fra Paolo Sarpi. Sarpi was not currently running Venice for the Doge, as he was still recovering from wounds suffered in an assault two years before, but he continued to advise both the Doge and the Senate, especially on technical and philosophical matters. He could not have been better positioned to help Galileo now.

So Galileo wrote to him about what he was working on. What he read in Sarpi’s reply startled him, even frightened him. Apparently the stranger from the artisans’ market had gone to others as well. And his news of a successful spyglass, Sarpi wrote, was apparently already widespread in northern Europe. Sarpi himself had heard a rumour of such a thing nine months before, but had not considered it significant enough to tell Galileo about it.

Galileo cursed as he read this. ‘Not significant, my God!’ It was hard to believe; it was so lame it suggested that his old friend had been mentally damaged by the knives that had been stuck in his head during the assault.

Nothing to be done about that now. People in northern Europe, especially the Flemish and Dutch, were already producing little spyglasses. This Dutch stranger, Sarpi wrote, had contacted the Venetian Senate, offering to sell them such a glass for a thousand florins. Sarpi had advised the Senate against the purchase, certain that Galileo could do as well or better in manufacturing any such object.

‘I could if you would have mentioned it to me,’ Galileo muttered.

But he hadn’t, and now news of the device was in the air. It was a phenomenon Galileo had noticed before; improvements at the artisanal level passed from workshop to workshop without scholars or princes knowing anything about them, and so it often happened that suddenly workshops everywhere could all make a smaller gear, or a stronger steel. This time it was a little spyglass. The claim going around was that they enlarged things by about three times.

Quickly Galileo wrote back to Sarpi, asking him to convene a meeting with the Doge and his senators in order to examine a new and improved spyglass that Galileo was inventing. He also asked him to ask the Doge to refuse to entertain any other such offers during that time. Sarpi replied the next day with a note saying he had done as asked, and the requested meeting was set for 21st August. It was now 5th August. Two weeks to make a better glass.

The action in the workshop intensified. Galileo told his frantic students they were on their own, even Count Alessandro Montalban, who had recently moved in to the house to study for his doctoral exams, and was not pleased at being neglected. But Galileo had tutored many sons of the nobility by now, and brusquely he told the young man to study with the others, to lead them, that it would be good for him. Galileo then moved out into the workshop, where he examined very closely the devices they had made already, trying to figure out how to better them.