Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (15 page)

ONE YOUNG LADY
: Who’s that?

THE OTHER
: The Cardinal Inquisitor.

They giggle and go off. Enter Virginia, looking around for something
.

THE INQUISITOR
from his corner:
Well, my daughter?

VIRGINIA
gives a slight start, not having seen him:
Oh, your Eminence …

Without looking up, the Inquisitor holds out his right hand to her. She approaches and kisses his ring
.

THE INQUISITOR
: A splendid night. Permit me to congratulate you on your engagement. Your future husband comes from a distinguished family. Are you staying long in Rome?

VIRGINIA
: Not this time, your Eminence. A wedding takes so much preparing.

THE INQUISITOR
: Ah, then you’ll be returning to Florence like your father. I am glad of that. I expect that your father needs you. Mathematics is not the warmest of companions in the home, is it? Having a creature of flesh and blood around makes all the difference. It’s easy to get lost in the world of the stars, with its immense distances, if one is a great man.

VIRGINIA
breathlessly:
You are very kind, your Eminence. I really understand practically nothing about such things.

THE INQUISITOR
: Indeed?
He laughs
. In the fisherman’s house no one eats fish, eh? It will tickle your father to hear that almost all your knowledge about the world of the stars comes ultimately from me, my child.
Leafing through the transcript:
It says here that our innovators, whose acknowledged leader is your father – a great man, one of the greatest – consider our present ideas about the significance of the dear old earth to be a little exaggerated. Well, from Ptolemy’s time – and he was a wise man of antiquity – up to the present day we used to reckon that the whole of creation – in other words the entire crystal ball at whose centre the earth lies – measured about twenty thousand diameters of the earth across. Nice and roomy, but not large enough for innovators. Apparently they feel that it is unimaginably far-flung and that the earth’s distance from the sun – quite a respectable distance, we always found it – is so minute compared with its distance from the fixed stars on the outermost sphere that our calculations can simply ignore it. So who can say that the innovators themselves aren’t living on a very grand scale?

Virginia laughs. So does the Inquisitor
.

THE INQUISITOR
: True enough, there are a few gentlemen of the Holy Office who have started objecting, as it were, to such a view of the world, compared with which our picture so far has been a little miniature such as one might hang round the neck of certain young ladies. What worries them is that a prelate or even a cardinal might get lost in such vast distances and the Almighty might lose sight of the Pope
himself. Yes, it’s very amusing, but I am glad to know that you will remain close to your great father whom we all esteem so highly, my dear child. By the way, do I know your Father Confessor …?

VIRGINIA
: Father Christophorus of Saint Ursula.

THE INQUISITOR
: Ah yes, I am glad that you will be going with your father. He will need you; perhaps you cannot imagine this, but the time will come. You are still so young and so very much flesh and blood, and greatness is occasionally a difficult burden for those on whom God has bestowed it; it can be. No mortal is so great that he cannot be contained in a prayer. But I am keeping you, my dear child, and I’ll be making your fiance jealous and maybe your father too by telling you something about the stars which is possibly out of date. Run off and dance; only mind you remember me to Father Christophorus.
Virginia makes a deep bow and goes
.

8

A conversation

Galileo, feeling grim,

A young monk came to visit him.

The monk was born of common folk.

It was of science that they spoke.

In the Florentine Ambassador’s palace in Rome Galileo is listening to the little monk who whispered the papal astronomer’s remark to him after the meeting of the Collegium Romanum
.

GALILEO
: Go on, go on. The habit you’re wearing gives you the right to say whatever you want.

THE LITTLE MONK
: I studied mathematics, Mr Galilei.

GALILEO
: That might come in handy if it led you to admit that two and two sometimes makes four.

THE LITTLE MONK
: Mr Galilei, I have been unable to sleep for three days. I couldn’t see how to reconcile the decree I had read with the moons of Jupiter which I had observed. Today I decided to say an early mass and come to you.

GALILEO
: In order to tell me Jupiter has no moons?

THE LITTLE MONK
: No. I have managed to see the wisdom of the decree. It has drawn my attention to the potential dangers for humanity in wholly unrestricted research, and I have decided to give astronomy up. But I also wanted to explain to you the motives which can make even an astronomer renounce pursuing that doctrine any further.

GALILEO
: I can assure you that such motives are familiar to me.

THE LITTLE MONK
: I understand your bitterness. You have in mind certain exceptional powers of enforcement at the Church’s disposal.

GALILEO
: Just call them instruments of torture.

THE LITTLE MONK
: But I am referring to other motives. Let me speak about myself. My parents were peasants in the Campagna, and I grew up there. They are simple people. They know all about olive trees, but not much else. As I study the phases of Venus I can visualise my parents sitting round the fire with my sister, eating their curded cheese. I see the beams above them, blackened by hundreds of years of smoke, and I see every detail of their old worn hands and the little spoons they are holding. They are badly off, but even their misfortunes imply a certain order. There are so many cycles, ranging from washing the floor, through the seasons of the olive crop to the paying of taxes. There is a regularity about the disasters that befall them. My father’s back does not get bent all at once, but more and more each spring he spends in the olive groves; just as the successive childbirths that have made my mother increasingly sexless have followed well-defined intervals. They draw the strength they need to carry their baskets sweating up the stony tracks, to
bear children and even to eat, from the feeling of stability and necessity that comes of looking at the soil, at the annual greening of the trees and at the little church, and of listening to the Bible passages read there every Sunday. They have been assured that God’s eye is always on them – probingly, even anxiously – that the whole drama of the world is constructed around them so that they, the performers, may prove themselves in their greater or lesser roles. What would my people say if I told them that they happen to be on a small knob of stone twisting endlessly through the void round a second-rate star, just one among myriads? What would be the value or necessity then of so much patience, such understanding of their own poverty? What would be the use of Holy Scripture, which has explained and justified it all – the sweat, the patience, the hunger, the submissiveness – and now turns out to be full of errors? No: I can see their eyes wavering, I can see them letting their spoons drop, I can see how betrayed and deceived they will feel. So nobody’s eye is on us, they’ll say. Have we got to look after ourselves, old, uneducated and worn-out as we are? The only part anybody has devised for us is this wretched, earthly one, to be played out on a tiny star wholly dependent on others, with nothing revolving round it. Our poverty has no meaning: hunger is no trial of strength, it’s merely not having eaten: effort is no virtue, it’s just bending and carrying. Can you see now why I read into the Holy Congregation’s decree a noble motherly compassion; a vast goodness of soul?

GALILEO
: Goodness of soul! Aren’t you really saying that there’s nothing for them, the wine has all been drunk, their lips are parched, so they had better kiss the cassock? Why is there nothing for them? Why does order in this country mean the orderliness of a bare cupboard, and necessity nothing but the need to work oneself to death? When there are teeming vineyards and cornfields on every side? Your Campagna peasants are paying for the wars which the representative of gentle Jesus is waging in Germany and Spain. Why does he make the earth the centre of the universe? So that the See of St Peter can be the centre of the
earth! That’s what it is all about. You’re right, it’s not about the planets, it’s about the peasants of the Campagna. And don’t talk to me about the beauty given to phenomena by the patina of age! You know how the Margaritifera oyster produces its pearl? By a mortally dangerous disease which involves taking some unassimilable foreign body, like a grain of sand, and wrapping it in a slimy ball. The process all but kills it. To hell with the pearl, give me the healthy oyster. Virtues are not an offshoot of poverty, my dear fellow. If your people were happy and prosperous they could develop the virtues of happiness and prosperity. At present the virtues of exhaustion derive from exhausted fields, and I reject them. Sir, my new pumps will perform more miracles in that direction than all your ridiculous superhuman slaving. – ‘Be fruitful and multiply’, since your fields are not fruitful and you are being decimated by wars. Am I supposed to tell your people lies?

THE LITTLE MONK
much agitated:
We have the highest of all motives for keeping our mouths shut – the peace of mind of the less fortunate.

GALILEO
: Would you like me to show you a Cellini clock that Cardinal Bellarmin’s coachman brought round this morning? My dear fellow, authority is rewarding me for not disturbing the peace of mind of people like your parents, by offering me the wine they press in the sweat of their countenance which we all know to have been made in God’s image. If I were to agree to keep my mouth shut my motives would be thoroughly low ones: an easy life, freedom from persecution, and so on.

THE LITTLE MONK
: Mr Galilei, I am a priest.

GALILEO
: You’re also a physicist. And you can see that Venus has phases. Here, look out there!
He points at the window
. Can you see the little Priapus on the fountain next the laurel bush? The god of gardens, birds and thieves, rich in two thousand years of bucolic indecency. Even he was less of a liar. All right, let’s drop it. I too am a son of the Church. But do you know the eighth Satire of Horace? I’ve been rereading it again lately, it acts as a kind of counterweight.
He picks up
a small book
. He makes his Priapus speak – a little statue which was then in the Esquiline gardens. Starting:

Stump of a figtree, useless kind of wood

Was I once; then the carpenter, not sure

Whether to make a Priapus or a stool

Opted for the god …

Can you imagine Horace being told not to mention stools and agreeing to put a table in the poem instead? Sir, it offends my sense of beauty if my cosmogony has a Venus without phases. We cannot invent mechanisms to pump water up from rivers if we are not to be allowed to study the greatest of all mechanisms right under our nose, that of the heavenly bodies. The sum of the angles in a triangle cannot be varied to suit the Vatican’s convenience. I can’t calculate the courses of flying bodies in such a way as also to explain witches taking trips on broomsticks.

THE LITTLE MONK
: But don’t you think that the truth will get through without us, so long as it’s true?

GALILEO
: No, no, no. The only truth that gets through will be what we force through: the victory of reason will be the victory of people who are prepared to reason, nothing else. Your picture of the Campagna peasants makes them look like the moss on their own huts. How can anyone imagine that the sum of the angles in a triangle conflicts with
their
needs? But unless they get moving and learn how to think, they will find even the finest irrigation systems won’t help them. Oh, to hell with it: I see your people’s divine patience, but where is their divine anger?

THE LITTLE MONK
: They are tired.

GALILEO
tosses him a bundle of manuscripts:
Are you a physicist, my son? Here you have the reasons why the ocean moves, ebbing and flowing. But you’re not supposed to read it, d’you hear? Oh, you’ve already started. You are a physicist, then?
The little monk is absorbed in the papers
.

GALILEO
: An apple from the tree of knowledge! He’s wolfing it
down. He is damned for ever, but he has got to wolf it down, the poor glutton. I sometimes think I’ll have myself shut up in a dungeon ten fathoms below ground in complete darkness if only it will help me to find out what light is. And the worst thing is that what I know I have to tell people, like a lover, like a drunkard, like a traitor. It is an absolute vice and leads to disaster. How long can I go on shouting it into the void, that’s the question.

THE LITTLE MONK
indicating a passage in the papers:
I don’t understand this sentence.

GALILEO
: I’ll explain it to you, I’ll explain it to you.

9

After keeping silent for eight years, Galileo is encouraged by the accession of a new pope, himself a scientist, to resume his researches into the forbidden area: the sunspots

Eight long years with tongue in cheek

Of what he knew he did not speak.

Then temptation grew too great

And Galileo challenged fate.

Galileo’s home in Florence. Galileo’s pupils – Federzoni, the little monk and Andrea Sarti, a young man now – have gathered to see an experiment demonstrated. Galileo himself is standing reading a book. Virginia and Mrs Sarti are sewing her trousseau
.