Aegypt Read online

  He was awake, but unable to get up. He turned on the lamp beside his bed; it had a shade that showed a dim landscape, and an outer shade, transparent, on which a train was pictured. There was a book beneath the lamp, overturned open the night before, and he picked it up. He almost always filled the time between having to wake up and having to get up with the book he had put down the night before. He was eleven years old.

  Often in later life Giordano Bruno would recall his Nolan childhood with affection. It appears frequently in his works: the Neapolitan sun on its golden fields and the vineyards that clad Mt. Cicala; the cuckoos, the melons, the taste of mangiaguerra, the thick black wine of the region. Nola was an ancient town, between Vesuvius and Mt. Cicala; in the sixteenth century its Roman ruins were still visible, the temple, the theater, small shrines of mysterious provenance. Ambrosius Leo had come to Nola early in the century, to plot the town, its circular walls, its twelve towers, and discover the geometries on which – like all ancient towns – Leo believed it must be based.

  Bruno grew up in the suburb of Cicala, four or five houses clustered outside the old Nolan walls. His father, Gioan, was an old soldier, poor but proud, who had a pension and kept a garden plot. He used to take his son on expeditions up the mountainsides. Bruno recalled how, from the green slopes of Mt. Cicala, old Vesuvius looked bare and grim; but when they climbed Vesuvius, it turned out to be just as green, just as tilled, the grapes just as sweet; and when, at evening, he and his father looked back toward Mt. Cicala, from where they had come, Cicala was the one that seemed stony and deserted.

  Bruno said at his trial that it was then he discovered that sight could deceive. Actually, he had discovered something far more central to his later thought: he had discovered Relativity.

  Now the train on his lampshade, heated by the bulb, had begun with great slowness to advance through the dim landscape. The clock pointed at late numbers. Mass was at six-forty-five on weekday mornings, and he was serving every day for a week; after he served the earliest Sunday Mass, someone else would take over the daily duty, and he would do just Sundays, climbing the ladder of Mass hours up to the sung Mass at eleven. Then he’d begin again with a week of dark mornings.

  This system was peculiar to the tiny clapboard church in the holler, invented by its priest to make the most of the only five or six altar boys he had; to the boys, though, it had the force of natural law: like the progress of the Mass itself, ineffectual, the priest said, unless every word was spoken.

  He was a boy who saw spirits in the beech and laurel woods; but he also could sit patiently at the feet of Father Teofilo of Nola, who taught him Latin and the laws of logic, and told him that the world was round. In his Dialogues Bruno sometimes gives the spokesman for his own philosophy that priest’s name: Teofilo. He writes in the De monade, his last long Latin poem: Far back in my boyhood the struggle began.

  By the time he had pulled on his sneakers and jeans and the two flannel shirts he wore one over the other, and gone the dim long journey through the house to the kitchen, his mother had appeared there, and had poured him milk. They spoke only the few words required, both too sleepy still to do more than ask and answer. He was aware that his mother resented the priest’s insistence that a boy of eleven was old enough to get up and walk to Mass at such an hour. Boys of eleven, the priest had said, are up and working in these parts at that hour, working hard, too. His mother thought, though she didn’t say it, that the priest had condemned himself out of his own mouth. Working!

  In the light of the kitchen lamp, the day was night, but when he went out the door, the sky had a soft bloom, and the road down the hill was patent between dark hedges. The day was the eighth of March in 1952. From the broad porch he could see over the valley to the next hilltop, gray, leafless, and lifeless-seeming; yet he knew that people were living over there, had daffodils in their yards, were now plowing and planting, had fires lit. The church couldn’t be seen, but it was there, under the wing of that hill. From the church, the porch he stood on couldn’t be seen.

  Relativity.

  He wondered if, as well as Latin, the priest knew the laws of logic. The laws of logic! They tasted strangely rich to his thought, within the chewy consonants of the phrase. The priest had taught him only the Latin of the Mass, to be memorized phonetically. Introibo ad altare Dei.

  He knew the earth was round, though; nobody had to tell him that.

  Down in the valley beyond the town, a coal train that had lain unmoving all night, a caravan of dark beasts all alike, started with a long shudder. It might be a hundred cars long: he had often counted trains longer than that. The cars were being filled at the breaker near the pithead of the mine, and the train would take hours to be loaded and pass out of the town and the valley to wherever it went. The locomotive pulling it puffed slow and hard as an old man taking steps uphill: One. One. One. One.

  His road led downward to the main road by the crick, which went to town and past the church and beyond. Thinking of early-morning dogs, he set out, thrusting his hands into the grimy familiar pockets of his jacket, familiar but not somehow his own. I’m not from here, he thought: and because that was true, it seemed to account for the shrinking he felt of the tender aliveness within him from the touch of this: this raw twilight, this road, that black train and its smoke. I’m not from here; I’m from someplace different from this. The road seemed longer than it ever did by day; at the bottom of the hill, the world was still dark, and dawn was far away.

  THE SOLITUDES

  I

  VITA

  ONE

  If ever some power with three wishes to grant were to appear before Pierce Moffett, he or she or it (djinn, fairy godmother, ring curiously inscribed) would find him not entirely unprepared, but not entirely ready either.

  Once upon a time there had seemed to him no difficulty: you simply used the third of your three wishes to gain three more, and so on ad infinitum. And once upon a time too he had had no compunctions about making wishes that would result in horrendous distortions of his own and others’ universes: that he could change heads with someone else for a day; that the British could have won the War of Independence (he had been profoundly Anglophile as a child); that the ocean could dry up, so that he could see from its shore the fabulous mountains and valleys, higher and deeper than any on land, which he had read lay in its depths.

  With an endless chain of wishes, of course, he could theoretically repair the damage he inflicted; but as he grew older he became less sure of his wisdom and power to make all things come out right. And as the lessons of the dozens of cautionary tales he read sank in, tales of wishes horribly misused, wishes trickily turned against their wishers, misspoken or carelessly framed wishes tumbling the greedy, the thoughtless, the stupid into self-made abysses, he began to consider the question at more length. The monkey’s paw: bring back my dead son: and the dreadful thing come knocking at the door. All right, make me a martini. And Midas, first and most terrible exemplar of all. It was not, Pierce decided, that those powers which grant wishes intend our destruction, or even our moral instruction: they are only compelled, by whatever circumstances, to do what we ask of them, no more, no less. Midas was not being taught a lesson about false and true values; the dæmon who granted his wish knew nothing of such values, did not know why Midas would wish his own destruction, and didn’t care. The wish was granted, Midas embraced his wife – perhaps the dæmon was puzzled for a moment by Midas’s despair, but, not being human himself, being power only, gave it little thought, and went away to other wishers, wise or foolish.

  Literal-minded, deeply stupid from man’s point of view, strong children able thoughtlessly to break the ordinary courses of things like toys, and break human hearts too that were unwise enough not to know how much they loved and needed the ordinary courses of things, such powers had to be dealt with carefully. Pierce Moffett, discovering in himself as he grew older a streak of caution, even fearfulness, coloring a mostly impulsive and greedy nature, saw tha
t he would have to lay plans if he were to escape harmless with what he desired.

  There turned out to be so many angles to consider – his changing desires even aside – that, a grown man now, professor, historian, he still hadn’t completed his formulations. In the useless, vacant spaces of time that litter every life, in waiting rooms or holding patterns or – as on this particular August morning – when he sat staring out the tinted windows of long-distance buses, he often found himself mulling over possibilities, negotiating tricky turns of phrase, sharpening his clauses.

  There were few things Pierce liked less than long rides on buses. He disliked being in motion at all, and when forced to travel tried to choose the briefest though most grinding means (the plane) or the most leisurely, with the greatest number of respites and amenities (the train). The bus was a poor third, tedious, protracted, and without any amenities at all. (The car, most people’s choice, he couldn’t take: Pierce had never learned to drive.) And his disdain and loathing for the bus was usually repaid in how it treated him: if he was not forced to wait for hours in squalid terminals for connections, he would be thrust in among colicky infants or seated next to liars with pungent breath who bent his ear and then slept on his shoulder; it was inevitable. This time, though, he had tried to meet the awful necessity halfway: having an appointment today in the city of Conurbana, a job offer at Peter Ramus College there, he had decided to take the slow uncrowded local, to travel in a leisurely way through the Faraway Hills, have a glimpse of places long known to him by name but still more or less imaginary; at least to get out into the country for a day, for sure he needed a break. And it did seem to him, as the bus left the expressways and carried him into summer lands, that he had chosen rightly; he felt suddenly able to shed by sheer motion a state of himself that had become binding and flavorless, and enter into another, or many others, like these scenes now being shown to him one by one, each seeming to be a threshold of happy possibilities.

  He rose from his seat, taking from his canvas bag the book he had brought to beguile the time (it was the Soledades of Luis de Góngora in a new translation; he was to review it for a small quarterly), and made his way to the back of the bus, where smoking was permitted. He opened the book, but didn’t look at it; he looked out at opulent August, shaded lawns where householders watered their grass, children dabbled in bright plastic pools, dogs panted on cool porches. At the outskirts of town the bus paused at a juncture, considering the possibilities offered by a tall green sign: New York City, but that’s where they had come from; Conurbana, which Pierce did not yet want to contemplate; the Faraways. With a thoughtful shifting of gears, they chose the Faraway Hills, and when the bus after a series of smooth ascensions gained a height, Pierce supposed that those hills, green then blue, then so faint as to meld into the pale horizon and disappear, were they.

  He rolled a cigarette and lit it.

  The first two of his three wishes (and of course there would be three, Pierce had studied the triads that cluster everywhere in Northern mythology – whence it seemed most likely his fortune would come – and had his own ideas as to why it had to be three and not more or fewer) had for some time been in their present form. They seemed airtight, clinker-built, foolproof to him, he had even recommended them to others, like standard legal forms.

  He wished, first of all, for the lifelong and long-lived mental and physical health and safety of himself and those whom he loved, nothing asked for in a subsequent wish to abrogate this. Something of a portmanteau wish, but an absolutely necessary piece of caution, considering.

  Next he wished for an income, not burdensomely immense but sufficient, safe from the fluctuations of economic life, requiring next to no attention on his part and not distorting his natural career: a winning lottery ticket, along with some careful investment advice, being more the idea than, say, having some book he might write thrust magically onto the bestseller list with all the attendant talk-show and interview business, awful, whatever pleasure he might have in such fame and fortune spoiled by his knowledge that it was fake – that would be selling his soul to the devil, which by definition works out badly; no, he wanted something much more neutral.

  Which left one more, the third wish, the odd one, the rogue wish. Pierce shuddered to think what would have become of him if one or another of his adolescent versions of this wish had been granted; at later times in his life he would have wasted it getting himself out of jams and troubles which he had got out of anyway without a wish’s help. And even if, now, he could decide what he wanted, which he had never finally done, wisdom would be needed, and courage, and wits; here was danger, and the chance for strange bliss. The third wish was the world-changing one of the triad, and it was hedged around in his mind with strictures, taboos, imperatives moral and categorical: because, for Pierce Moffett anyway, the game was no fun unless all the consequences of any tentative third wish could be taken into account; unless he could imagine, with great and true vividness, what it would really be like to have it come true.

  World peace and suchlike enormous altruisms he had long dismissed as unworkable or worse, at bottom solipsistic delusions of the Midas kind, only unselfish instead of selfish: obverse of the same counterfeit coin. No one could be wise enough to gauge the results of imposing such abstractions on the world, there was no way of knowing what alterations in human nature and life might be required to bring about such an end, and as the CVD Brothers had taught him at St. Guinefort’s, if you will the end you must axiomatically will the means. Any power strong enough to remold the whole great world nearer to the heart’s desire Pierce had in any case no desire to match wits with. No: whatever destiny a man’s three wishes compelled him to, hilarious or tragic or sweet, it was his destiny, as they were his wishes: he should leave the world alone to wish its own.

  Power: there was a sense in which, of course, all wishing was wishing for power, power over the ordinary circumstances of life one is subject to; but that was a different matter from actually wishing for power in the narrower sense, strength, subjection of others to your will, your enemies your footstool. This whole huge field of human desire was in some way alien to Pierce, power had never figured in his daydreams, he could somehow never manage to imagine power very vividly in his own hands, but only as it might be used against him; freedom from power was his only true wish in this line, and negative wishes had always seemed to him mean.

  It had occurred to him (as it occurred to the Fisherman’s Wife in the story) that it might be nice to be Pope. He happened to have a number of ideas about natural law, liturgy, and hermeneutics, and he thought a lot of good, in small ways, might be able to be done by a man of large historical sensibilities in such a job, able to enunciate God’s will and impose it by fiat, no long-drawn-out contest of wills interposed between Sanctissimus and the carrying out of His pronouncements. But those gratifications could never make up for the awful tedium of official position; and in any case the hierarchy was probably not so responsive now to bulls and encyclicals as they ought to be, or had once been. Who the hell knew.

  Love. Pierce Moffett had been both lucky and unlucky in love, his luck good and bad was among the causes of his being on this bus now through the Faraway Hills, love took up the greater part of his daydreaming one way or another; and no more than any man was he able not to toy with thoughts of hypnotic powers, unrefusable charms, the world his harem – or, conversely, of a single perfect being shaped exactly to his wants, of the kind that lonely academics described at such self-revealing length in the Personals columns of certain journals Pierce subscribed to. But no: it was no good using his third wish to compel the heart. It was wrong. Worse, it wouldn’t work. There was no joy Pierce knew like the joy of finding himself freely chosen by the object of his desire, no joy even remotely like it. The astonished gratification of it, the sudden certainty, as though a hawk had chosen to fall out of the sky and settle on his wrist, still wild, still free, but his. Who would, who could compel that? The closed hearts of call-girls
, the glum faces of last-chance pickups: Pierce drunk or coked enough could pretend for an hour or a night, as they could. But.

  And if hawks flew then, choosing to fly as they had chosen to alight, and if he failed to understand why – well, he hadn’t understood why they alighted in the first place, had he? And that was, that must be, all right, if one were going to love hawks in the first place. Gentle hawks, kind-unkind.

  Chalkokrotos.

  I wish, he thought, I wish, I wish . . .

  Chalkokrotos, ‘bronze-rustling,’ where had he come up with that epithet, some goddess’s: chalkokrotos for her bronze-colored hair and the rustle of her bangles on a certain night; chalkokrotos for her weapons and her wings.

  Good lord, he thought, and fumbled with his book, crossing his legs. He tossed his cigarette to the floor amid the sordid litter there of other butts, and counseled himself that perhaps daydreaming was not a thing he should indulge himself in just now, this week, this summer. He looked out the window, but the day had ceased to flow in toward him, or rather he outward toward it. For the first time since he had decided on this jaunt, he felt that he was fleeing and not journeying, and what he fled took up all his attention.

  When he was a boy, traveling from the fastness of his Kentucky home east and northward to New York City where his father lived, he had seen signs directing people to these very Faraway Hills he now rode through, though the immense Nash crowded with his kinfolk never followed the arrows that pointed that way.

  It was Uncle Sam at the wheel (Uncle Sam looked a lot like the Uncle Sam who wears red white and blue, except for the goat’s beard, and his suit, which was brown or gray, or wrinkled seersucker on these summer trips) and Pierce’s mother beside him with the map, to navigate; and next to her, in strict rotation, one or another of the kids: Pierce, or one of Sam’s four. The rest contested for space along the wide sofa of the back seat.