A few pages later—Galileo groaned aloud—worse yet: Kepler spoke of the difference Galileo had noted through his spyglass between the light of the planets and that of the fixed stars: What other conclusion shall we draw from this difference, Galileo, than that the fixed stars generate their light from within, whereas the planets, being opaque, are illuminated from without; that is, to use Bruno’s terms, the former are suns, the latter, moons or earths?
Just the sight of Bruno’s name in the same sentence as his own was enough to churn his stomach.
Then he came to a passage that made him go chill and hot at the same time. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry:
The conclusion is quite clear. Our moon exists for us on the earth, not for the other globes. Those four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us. Each planet in turn, together with its occupants, is served by its own satellites. From this line of reason we deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited.
Galileo threw this pretzel craziness to the floor with a curse and stalked out into his garden, wondering why his hilarity had so quickly turned to dread. ‘Kepler is some kind of idiot!’ he shouted at Mazzoleni. ‘His reasoning is completely deranged! Inhabitants of Jupiter? Where the hell did that come from?’
And why was it so disturbing to read it?
The stranger…the man who had told him about the occhialino, that afternoon in Venice…who had appeared after the great demonstration to the Venetian Senate, and suggested he take a look at the moon-had he not said something about coming from Kepler? Quick flashes of something more-a blue like twilight-Had the stranger not come knocking at the gate one night some time ago? Had Cartophilus not joined the household soon after?
Galileo was not used to having a vague memory for anything. Normally he would have said that he remembered basically everything that had ever happened to him, or that he had read or thought; that, in fact, he remembered too much, as quite a bit of what he recalled stuck in his brain like splinters of glass, stealing his sleep. He kept his thoughts busy partly in order not to be stuck by anything too sharp. But in this matter that clarity did not exist. There were blurs, as if he had been sick.
Cartophilus appeared and picked up Kepler’s book from the floor of the arcade, dusted it off, looked at it curiously. He glanced at Galileo, who glared at him as if he could drag the truth from the old man by look alone. A nameless fear pierced Galileo: ‘What does this mean!’ he shouted at the wizened old man, striding toward him as if to beat him. ‘What’s going on?’
Cartophilus shrugged furtively, almost sullenly, and put the book on a side table, closed so that the page Galileo had been reading was lost. Inhabitants of Jupiter! He said, ‘I’m supposed to be packing the pots.’ And he left the arcade and went inside, as if Galileo were not his master and had not just asked a question of him.
Galileo’s return to Florence was now being called a breach of contract by the outspoken Priuli, as well as a personal betrayal: the Doge should ask Galileo for some of his salary to be returned.
With the mood turning so hard against him, it was a great comfort to Galileo to know that Fra Paolo Sarpi was a steadfast friend and supporter, as he had always been. Having Sarpi on his side was important.
The great Servite visited the Via Vignali when he was passing through Padua, to give support to Galileo, and to see how his combustible friend was doing. He brought with him a letter to Galileo from their mutual friend Sagredo, who was returning from Syria and had found out by mail about Galileo’s decision to move to Florence. Sagredo, concerned, had written, Who can invent a visorio which can tell the crazy person from the sane, the good neighbour from the bad?
Sarpi, it quickly became clear, felt much the same. Galileo sat with him on the terrace overlooking the garden, fruit and some jugs of new wine on a table beside them. Relaxing in this little hole in the city under its stucco walls was something they had done many times before, for Sarpi was no ordinary priestly mentor. Like Galileo, he was a philosopher, and in the same years Galileo had worked on mechanics he had made investigations of his own, discovering such things as the little valves inside human veins, and the oscillations of the pupil of the eye, and the polar attraction of magnets. Galileo had helped him with this last, and Sarpi had helped Galileo with his military compass, and even with the laws of motion.
Now the great Fra Paolo drank deeply, put his feet up, and sighed. ‘I’m very sorry to see you go,’ he said. ‘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, his disfigured smile. ‘You know my joke,’ he reminded Galileo, putting his hand to his wounds. ‘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 at the same time it was 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 counsellor. When Sarpi had announced to the world his intention to write a full history of the Council of Trent, using as source material the secret files of the Venetian representatives to the Council, Paul was alarmed as well as angered. The files were certain to contain many ugly revelations about the Vatican’s desperate campaign in the previous century to stem the tide of Protestantism. It would be an exposé, in short. Assassins were authorized by the Pope to go to Venice to murder Sarpi; but the Venetian government had many spies in Rome, and they heard of the plan in advance, with some of the assassins even identified by name. The Venetian authorities had arrested them on their appearance on the docks, and thrown them in 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.
The attack took place on the night of 7th October, 1607. A fire broke out near San 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 a while for the man, then left for the Servite monastery accompanied only by an elderly servant and a Venetian senator, also elderly. 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 north 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 and ran-later we counted fifteen wounds, but it took only a couple of seconds and they were off into the night.
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. A stiletto had been left in his right temple, apparently bent on his upper jawbone, re-emerging 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