Endless Things (14 page)

Leaving the Piazza de Rotonda we follow the Via dei Cestari along the west side of the Piazza della Minerva. We will stop there to study the grand Bernini monument, which legend has it was inspired by a pair of ponderous pachyderms that visited Rome with a circus, where they attracted the attention of the greatest of all Baroque sculptors, Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini. In a neighborhood rich in obelisks—the obelisk of Psametticus, which we passed in the Piazza de Montecitorio; the obelisk of Rameses II, rising before the Pantheon—the one borne on an elephant's back in the Piazza della Minerva is the most beloved.

It had already begun to grow dark; the frantic crowds of careening vehicles in the streets, though oblivious of foot traffic or signals, had turned on their lights; Pierce was, he recalled, still in the Northern Hemisphere, in fact at about the same latitude as the Faraway Hills from which he had come, where it was also darkening now to a winter night. He walked on. There was no piazza, no elephant, no Via dei Cestari. He went into a café. It was apparently not the hour for coffee; the beautiful bright bar was empty. With its cellophane-wrapped boxes of chocolates and biscotti, its alchemist's row of colored bottles, its shiny steel counter and great angel-surmounted shrine-like machine, it was exactly like the hundreds of others he passed or drank in, one on almost every corner, enough for every Roman in the streets to rush into at once when necessary, to toss down a miniature coffee and be off again. He asked for a whisky.
Sit Down, Sorrow
was in his bag, and he fished it out.

The idea that Bernini was inspired to make an elephant by an actual famous elephant, a sort of Roman Jumbo, is inadequate. The absurd but compelling idea of an elephant that bears on his back a granite obelisk actually derives from Francesco Colonna's 1499 novel
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
. As Colonna's eponymous hero Poliphilus wanders in a
hortus conclusus
, fast asleep and in search of love, he comes upon a great marble elephant with an obelisk on his back. Within the hollow elephant (Poliphilus finds a door to go in by) lie the corpses or images of a naked man and woman,
Sponsus
and
Sponsa
, Matter and Form. The Rosicrucians would later make much of these weird allegories.

Pierce had found a folio edition of the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
on Kraft's own bookshelf, though he had read it first in college. The same edition even.

Bernini must have liked this conception; he first designed an elephant cum obelisk for the gardens of Pope Alexander VII, where it would have been better suited than the Piazza Minerva. But no, it is here, midtown, somewhat lumpish and graceless as nothing else of Bernini's ever was, with no insides of course, or only imaginable ones. The obelisk is a real one, Roman booty; the famed Egyptologist Father Athanasius Kircher was called in to try to decode the hieroglyphics. The pope himself wrote the inscription for the base, which speaks of what great strength it requires to bear the wisdom of Egypt. Stand at its backside and you face the Dominican Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, built over an ancient temple site; in its abbey next door Giordano Bruno was arraigned, condemned, defrocked, stripped, and sent to his death. Wisdom's great weight!

But after all it was almost seven decades after Bruno's death when the little wrinkled marble animal went up in the piazza. It was all unimportant then, Egypt, mere decoration, artifice, no harm in it; it was all over, gone, put away, annulled, no force in it any longer; Bruno's ashes scattered, unrecoverable; the world's page turned.

Out again into the evening. If Pierce could just know where he stood, which way was north, or east. Maybe he'd taken the wrong turn, a right not a left, at that Via Arco della Ciambella.

If we have in error taken a right rather than a left at the Via Arco della Ciambella, we will soon enter the small Piazza della Pigna, where the famed great bronze pinecone of Rome again adorns the lost, the fallen but not forgotten Temple of Isis, yes her sacred
pigna
once stolen by the gloating triumphant popes for their own Temple of Peter over the river

No, no, he could no longer make out words. He turned, entered not a small piazza with or without a pinecone but a great boulevard, the Corso, traffic streaming beneath high dark palaces but the sidewalks empty, night come on now, his feet leaden but still able to feel pain; he had utterly lost his way and walked on anyway, nothing else to do. Turning away from the blinding headlights, he went only farther into the wrong Rome, until at last—near tears for more reasons than he could name—he surrendered, and seeing a rank of taxis, he took one to his
pensione
. Tomorrow, tomorrow.
Cras, cras
, the old Romans said. But Pierce was never to go that way again; and when he left Rome he still had not seen the elephant.

If I chose Bruno by chance, I came to love him profoundly; he is one of those historical figures who is at once instantly accessible and yet permanently mysterious—just like our living friends and lovers, you see. When I came to read his works in Italian, I encountered a writer who was less a philosopher, it often seems, than a playwright, or even a novelist. His cosmologies are all dialogues; everybody gets to talk, himself or his stand-in only one among them. Some of the speakers we know to be fools, but others are merely in disagreement, and make some good points. The character who represents Bruno's thoughts is often only reporting what “the Nolan” believes or was heard to say; he may or may not be getting it entirely right, and there's no one to say for sure. We are reading Hamlet's story as reported by Horatio, as Hamlet might write it.

Another morning, and Pierce read on the bus. He was going the wrong way along the Via de Lungara, aiming for the Vatican and St. Peter's, but soon he would lift his eyes and sense something was wrong; get off, and set off on foot.

I found it impossible not to take the man's side. He could be hugely Promethean—he was, after all, out to overthrow the entire religious conception of the universe, not only of its shape, like Copernicus, but of its structure, meaning, and reason for being—and at the same time a rude comedian, who wouldn't shut up and sit down no matter what heckling he got; who wrote a titanic epic of the Reformation of the Heavens by the Græco-Roman pantheon that ends up as a satire on reform, on men, on gods, on the heavens themselves. No one ever after understood it, maybe because its ironies are too enthusiastic, or because Bruno keeps taking everybody's side in turn almost too fast to follow. And when they had him at last in prison, at the Castel St. Angelo (you can see the room today, or could when I was there), he kept on asking to see the Pope, and explain everything: and there's no way to know if this was anything but one last impossible joke.

Pierce lowered the book. Why couldn't
he
take Bruno's side? He had once, hadn't he? What he felt compelled to do now was to counsel the man to sit down and shut up, he almost wanted to take the side of the authorities
against
him just in order to protect him. Pick a small universe, and go there and hide. Tell them you're sorry, that you didn't really mean it, that you'll take your medicine. Don't tease them, don't quibble, don't die.

He stood now at the end of a bridge, a great round tower over the river ahead, which the guidebook now reluctantly identified for him:

If we have refreshed ourselves with a light lunch, we are now prepared to visit the Castel St. Angelo, which will take nearly all the afternoon. The emperor Hadrian began his mausoleum here in 135 AD. Square base, circular tower covered in earth, as was the Roman custom; atop that was put the great bronze pinecone that is now in the Vatican. A tomb for only a few decades, it has been most famously a fortress, the popes’ stronghold for a thousand years.

The fun way to get into the Castel St. Angelo, the guidebook promised, was to go from the Vatican Palace, way over there, down into a narrow corridor that tunneled right through a wall, the popes’ own bolt-hole. Narrow. Pierce's throat seized at the thought. In dreams he was invited into such places, or needed to enter them, and they grew smaller and tighter as he went, until panic woke him. No. He approached the
castello
instead sensibly over this bridge, the Ponte St. Angelo, past the lineup of Bernini's wind-tossed angels.

Great glowering shapeless mound. Its classical columns and decorations gone for centuries. A group was just then entering, led by a guide speaking in a language Pierce couldn't identify; he followed along with his book open.
We find ourselves first in an open courtyard; from here steps descend into the burial chamber of Hadrian
. And on the wall of the chamber, empty now—Pierce almost passed by it without noticing—was a stone plaque, carved with Hadrian's own little verse, his address to his own soul at parting.

Animula vagula blandula

Hospes comesque corporis

Quæ nunc abibis in loca

Pallidula rigida nudula

Nec ut soles dabis iocos

Pierce felt a shudder of pity. How could you ever translate those lines, so gently chilling, so un-Roman, so mild. Probably it couldn't be done.
Animula vagula blandula:
sweet little wandering spirit, little spirit wanderer, his soul like a child, like his own baby son.
Hospes
was the Latin word for stranger, and also for the shelter offered such a one: a word that ends up as both guest and ghost, host rather. Somewhere deep in Indo-European history, or in the heart, they had all the same root.

Sweet little spiritlet wanderer

My body's ghost-guest and companion

Where will you go now, what will become of you?

Pale little bare little shiverer

No more now the games you liked to play.

He had the sensation as he stood there of a hand slipping into his, and felt the world turn colorless and silent—it
was
colorless and silent here in this tomb, but now another world became so too; he cast no shadow there.
Won't you call me back at last
? He was not asked that, he heard that not, no. But he stood there as devastated as though he had been asked.

Why was he what he was, and not better? Was there still time? He had come to nothing. Why? Why had he not done what he should or could?

There wasn't an answer, only that hand slipping away again. A right hand, which had taken Pierce's left. A hot thread ran from there to where his heart had been. And Pierce thought:
I can't fill myself with only myself
.

The dull echo of shod feet on stone and far voices returned, and Pierce seemed to shrink, or expand, or both at once: to become small in a great world or huge enough to contain a small one. Only a moment had passed, it seemed. His group had gone on, and Pierce followed after. The guide pointed out a grille set into the floor, a dark deep hole below, and the crowd looked down in as they passed and made small sounds of awe and horror.
Prigione di San Marocco
. An oubliette, the only one Pierce had ever seen or would ever see, only excepting the ones within himself. And down there Casanova or Cagliostro or Benvenuto Cellini was briefly thrown, if he understood the guide.

Upward farther. They seemed to be climbing up around the funerary mound or mountain from within. Small doors led off the path to rooms named for various popes who hid there, or rested there; one a bathroom, with marble bath, painted grotesques. And then they came out onto the tower's top, where once the symbolic earth of the original Roman tomb had been laid, deep enough to grow trees; now all stone and a Renaissance fountain. Pleasant for the popes to wander in, refresh themselves. But around the courtyard, just below ground level, cells for celebrity prisoners: the guide showed them the stone air shafts rising here. For the Pope walking in the garden here to contemplate? Historic.
Prigione storiche
, the crowd whispered. Beatrice Cenci, who killed her father. Cardinal Carafa, strangled in his cell. Giordano Bruno. That one.

There was a way to go down into it.

Small. The thick door open, eternally now. In a sort of alcove was a stone shelf where his mat would have been laid. He must have had a table at least, and a stool. A bucket. A crucifix. It was said he was allowed no books except those that related directly to his defense, but that could have been thousands, a library. Not as large as the fluid living library in his head or heart. Hungry, though, maybe: the feeding of a prisoner was the responsibility of his family, and Bruno had none.

Pierce sat down on the stone bed. He touched the rough-smooth walls. He lifted his eyes to the square of sun at the top of the air shaft. Had Bruno suffered from heat in summer, cold in winter? Had they allowed him candles on long winter nights?

He wondered if it was really possible to be certain that this cell had been the one Bruno had been kept in. Had the knowledge somehow actually come down through the years, passed on from keeper to keeper, then archivist to archivist, guide to guide? And was it unchanged since then? It seemed that it could not have altered much: its stone walls, warm Roman stone, almost appealing, feet thick no doubt. He looked for incised initials, like Byron's at Chillon, but there were none, none now. No other mark either of the thousand he might have made.

The record of Bruno's trial before the Inquisition is lost: Pierce knew that. All that exists is a
sommario
of the proceedings prepared by the famed Jesuit cardinal and doctor of the church, Roberto Bellarmino, sainted in 1936, a big figure therefore in Pierce's childhood. Bellarmine apparently talked long with Bruno over the last year of his imprisonment. Winning heretics back to the church was a passion with the gentle ugly cardinal; he engaged in a long theologico-ecclesiastical dispute with King James I of England, father of Elizabeth, the Winter Queen. Getting Bruno to see his errors would have been a coup. With his powers Bruno could have become one of their stars, like Gaspar Schopp, the young Protestant scholar and thinker who turned Catholic, and who was there in the Campo dei Fiori at the end to watch Bruno burn.