Love and Sleep (26 page)
No no no.
Frank Barr had once pointed out to his class in the History of History a particular feature of wastelands in myth and literature: a wasteland is made not so much of barrenness as of repetition, pointless, endless, mechanical repetition. A wasteland even if what is endlessly repeated is the story of the wasteland redeemed, and made to flower.
What he precisely was
not
, Pierce knew, was a hero. He hadn't ever felt himself to be as much at the center of things as that; did not always feel himself to be in the center even of his own existence. And anyway the moment was passed when it was possible to believe that the world is made of stories.
Pierce Moffett, lost in conflicting thoughts, mouth ajar, leaned back in Kraft's creaking and untrustworthy chair (the kind that might continue easing back until too late, and drop the sitter backward) and turned a lock of his hair in his fingers.
The powers of that age looked down upon him where he sat. They shook their great heads slowly, and tsk'd their great tongues against their teeth. Yes doubtless it would take much to forge the man into anything like a hero; he would have to pass through some sort of refining fire before he was capable of carrying any precious thing into the future. To those who have, much will be given, even to abundance; but from those who have not will be taken even the little that they have. He was likely to lose all, every knowledge, every certainty, even the companionable regard he held himself in, even the comfort he still took in the taste of his own nature.
Face front,
those aged powers wanted to call out to him, in need of redemption themselves.
Wake up,
they wanted to shout. But even if they had spoken, Pierce would not have been able to hear them; for they could not, as yet, be heard.
Books, like certain gems, can be fragile despite their great density and weight. As pearls darken against the skin of certain antipathetic wearers, there are books that time will darken; time will dissolve a book entirely, as vinegar will dissolve a diamond, whose name is the name of indestructibility, adamant.
Books disintegrate; their fires go out, which burned the senses of readers once, and leave only cinders: hard to see how they could ever have been read with reverent ardor. It comes to seem they were never read at all, that they were never even really written, that writers only accumulated them, covering pages with what looked like prose, numbering their chapters, marking their subsections, seeing them into print, where they started fires in the minds of those who only handled them, and dreamed of their insides.
Amphitheatrum sapientiAE AEternAE. Basil valentinus his Triumphant Chariot of Antimony. Utriusque cosmi historiAE.
It can't really be so, that people were so very different from the way they are now, and loved and needed so much inert printed paper. So it must be that once the books were different.
Which ones, for instance?
A lover of books who walked in the yard of St. Paul's in London in the spring of the year 1583, looking among the bookstalls there for something truly new, passing up the tables of religious tracts and tales of horrible murder uncovered, and the stalls of stationers who issued almanacs and books of prophecy mostly outdated, and those who sold sober histories of the late wars of the barons or the jars in religion, would have been able to put his hand on a folio volume in Latin, no date or place of publication, though it looked like an English book.
Ars reminiscendi et in phantastico campo exarandi
, and much more on a crowded title page.
The art of remembering, and how to lay it out on an imaginary field. Wrapped in parchment covers, sewn but unbound, its pages uncut and therefore not easily searchable,
Caveat emptor
. The book lover (this one is a young Scot of good family, his name is Alexander Dicson, he is in the service of Sir Philip Sidney) has seen books of this kind before, books which seem to offer instruction in some useful art, how to remember, how to write in secret codes, how to find ores and gems in the earth, but which to the reader who persists begin to offer more, as though stirring out of bonds of sleep.
The Scot even knew of this art of remembering, though he had never practiced it: places, and things cast on them, by which the order, say, of a sermon or a lecture might be remembered. In this book the place is termed
subjectus
and the thing
adjectus
.
There was also included a book of “seals,” whatever they might be,
ad omnium scientiarum et artium inventionem dispositionem et memoriam
, for discovering and arranging as well as remembering all arts and sciences. How could memory discover knowledge? Was not a seal a shutting and not an opening?
Then an Explanation of the thirty seals. Then a Seal of Seals. Last.
Per cabalam, naturalem magiam, artes magnas atque breves
whispered the title page in its smallest type. By cabala, natural magic, great arts and small ones. Shifting from foot to foot Master Dicson dug through the pages, glimpsing diagrams, Hebrew letters, the Adam drawn in a square, the Adam drawn in a circle. He pulled open his purse (it was supposed to pay his month's lodgings) and raised his eyebrows inquiringly to the bookseller.
O you haunters of bookstalls and shops, you searchers in libraries; who conceive of entering in at some big title page and not thereafter ever returning—one of those title pages where wise
putti
display the bones of the heavens, the Divine Name in Hebrew sheds effulgence over Earth, Hermes puts his finger to his lips, the Seven Arts are spread over the floor (viol, compasses, chisel and mallet) and a Searcher in robes draws a triangle, gazing at the figured stars—no matter how often you are disappointed, turned back perforce into your own chair in your old cold city, there are always further books, always other doors, shake their knobs and pound for admission. Whose book anyway is this? Master Dicson turned back to the forematter. Dedication, to the French Ambassador to England. Then an address to the Vice Chancellor of Oxford and to its celebrated doctors and teachers:
Philotheus Jordanus Brunus Nolanus, Doctor (but of a more recondite theology), Professor (but of a pure and more innocent wisdom), noted in the best academies of Europe, a philosopher lauded and honorably received everywhere, a stranger nowhere but among the barbarous and low, waker of sleeping souls, scourge of presumptuous and obdurate ignorance, herald of a general benevolence; who does not approve the Italian more than the Briton, the male more than the female, the miter more than the crown, the senator's toga more than the general's armor, the cowled monk more than the layman, but only him who is the more peaceable, civil, faithful, useful; who cares nothing for the anointed head, the cross-thumbed forehead, the holy-water-washed hands, the circumcised member, but—what his face can indeed show—the cultured mind and soul. Who is hated by the spewers of foolishness and the hypocrites, but sought out by the honest, those willing to study...
What on earth, or rather who. He shut up the big book, his now in any case, and went home through the crowds of the barbarous and the low, feeling vaguely fleeced. Who was this Bruno Nolano he had taken up, or been taken by?
He was just then (he had been other things) a gentleman servant in the household of Michel de Castelnau, Seigneur de Mauvissiere, the ambassador of King Henri III of France to the court of Elizabeth. He had been recommended to the Ambassador by the King himself, who had made Bruno his reader
extraordinaire
, and who had for a time been entranced by the Italian, by his powers, by the possibilities he shadowed forth.
So Giordano Bruno Nolano, born under a kindlier sky, had crossed the channel and come into this country, more barbarous and dirtier than some, and closer to Thule than he had got before, closer than he liked to be. He had a room in the French Embassy on Salisbury Court, near the river, a room high up under the eaves, out whose window he could watch the river traffic, the foreign ships and the merchantmen, and see the weather come in too, gray rain and pale sun alternating.
His duties, insofar as he had any that could be named, were to be in attendance at dinner, to be amusing and learned, to fill out the Ambassador's suite when the Ambassador went to court. So much could be said aloud. He learned to read English in a few weeks’ time and to understand it when it was spoken, at least as it was spoken at court. No one but the Ambassador and his children's private tutor, the Italian John Florio, knew this about the
gentiluomo servante
in the upper storey. He committed the greater part of Florio's dictionary of English and Italian to memory by transforming the words inwardly into dancers, the Italians the men, the English their ladies, so that whenever he summoned an Italian word in his mind (
tradutto
, all in black, with a poison-ring on his finger) there would come along his partner (
treachery
, her gown sewn with eyes and tongues). He never learned to say many words; he only knew them by sight, he knew their faces.
When the Ambassador and his party returned late to Salisbury Court, late from a dinner at some magnate's house on the Strand, or from an investiture or an entertainment at court, he would dismiss his other attendants, order wine brought to his private chamber, and there he and John Florio would sit and listen while the Nolan recounted what had taken place.
—The order at table, he said. Signor Leicester at the Queen's right. Signor Burleigh at the Queen's left. Milord Howard. Signor, signor, Raleigh.
He could see them all well enough, arranged by physiognomic type around the table, a menagerie of cunning and talkative gentlefolk, only the weird names he could not always say aloud. Florio prompted him, as often confusing as helping.
—At the third hour, he continued. Signor Leicester and Signor Walsingham depart for one quarter of an hour. They go out through the arras by the Queen's door.
—Had the Queen spoken yet of Sir Philip Sidney's embassy to France?
—Not then, not then. After the two returned. Signor Leicester danced. Walsingham also, not so well. A galliard. He took the Queen's hand. Then the hour struck. Four.
—So, the Ambassador said. Leicester and he spoke together. And then he had opportunity to tell the Queen. I wonder.
The Nolan only sat, not wondering, only observing the entertainment at court proceeding in the miniature galleries and halls he had constructed for them within his memory palaces, the newest therefore still the smallest of the fourteen distinct royal, civic, and ecclesiastical courts, some of them in disrepair, some shuttered, which he had had occasion to assemble in his memory as he went from country to country.
What astonished the Ambassador about his servant's accountings, besides their minute exactness, was that though he had stood in only one place or a few places at the receptions and affairs, he could tell the story as though he had been everywhere at once: when he retold the events, they seemed not to be merely remembered but to recur within him, and he could change his place in them at will. It was tedious sometimes to listen to his accounts, since he had no idea what was and what was not significant (though he was learning). It was more often illuminating. The King had suggested that it might be.
How the Nolan was able to do the thing that he did for his master (and other things that he did not choose to tell of) his master did not know. The King had described Bruno's arts in a cloudy way; when Bruno himself explained his techniques, smiling as he talked, as though a friendly demeanor could make his matter easier, the Ambassador had tried to listen. The Ambassador's childhood tutor had used the same face when he had tried to teach the boy astronomy, and Bruno got no further than that man had done. For his own part, the Ambassador remembered things by making a memorandum, or asking his secretary to make one. He had heard of men, sometimes mere children, who could do long sums in their heads almost without thinking or tell the date of Ash Wednesday in any past or future year. He supposed the Italian was a person of that sort; he did not see how mere practice in an art could accomplish what Bruno accomplished.
The Seigneur de Mauvissiere kept his strange servant awake and at work for longer than usual on this May night. He was troubled; something was afoot, something which he was not privy to and which he yet stood at the center of: that was the feeling he could not shake. He was being used, and he didn't like it. But by whom?
—The order at departing, Bruno said.
He counted backward on his fingers, starting with the smallest of the left hand. Signor Leicester, Signor Henry Sidney, Signor Raleigh. Milord Henry Howard. Signor Walsingham, who stooped to pick up your glove.
—No, said the Ambassador. That was my own servant.
—No, said Bruno.
The Nolan's head had fallen back against the chair now, and his eyes were closed, though his hands clasped before him were still alert (two fingers raised like a steeple). Whose glove was that?
—It was a pale glove, he said. Of kid, the color of a hand.
—No, said the Ambassador.
He could see it all clearly from where he stood amid the Ambassador's suite. Walsingham the fox, Leicester the goat, the phoenix Queen. Earl Howard the goggling fish. It was fox-faced Walsingham who picked up the. No.
—It leapt when he took it from the floor. It was a severed hand. A right hand, severed for treason. You have been betrayed to Walsingham.
—Betrayed, how, by whom?
—The plot is discovered, Bruno said. No: About to be discovered. Those whom you trusted have been betrayed to the English, and will betray you in turn.
—But there is no plot, said the Ambassador.
Michel de Castelnau closed his own hands as in prayer, and then lifted them to his lips; his troubled eyes looked within, reviewing his own actions, his household. It was past midnight. In his apartment above his wife lay, sleeping he hoped, recovering from a miscarriage, her second.