Loneliness propelled him into a strange kind of trance, a numbed isolation that left him lying on his back day after day, staring up at the blurry sky with his arms crossed behind his head for a pillow on the undersized bed. Time passed differently here: it went very slowly. After a while he forgot the life he’d left behind. Even in his dreams he had always been here. He was adrift, cut free from anything familiar.
And then, perhaps a month into his term, he began to notice inexplicable repetitions in the sky. Each day around lunchtime there would come a self-similar formation of clouds, or what he had thought were clouds until their regularity caught hold of his curiosity and began to rouse him from torpid no-thoughts. Clouds never repeated from day to day. Clouds weren’t always, always tinted with the same hues of pink and blue, or accompanied by vast atmospheric streamers of hazy reddish gold that defied meteorological explanation.
He stared and stared, thoughts brightening, slowly emerging from his trance to puzzle out this strange natural phenomenon, spirit quickening day by day until at last he realized what it was.
Who it was.
Each day at noon, as she had promised, Liss came to visit him.
“The Farmer on the Wall” copyright 1989 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Synergy 4, edited by George Zebrowski (1989)
BRUNO’S SHADOW
Through the light which shines in natural things, one mounts up to the life which presides over them.
Creaking, the heavy door swung open, and I stepped into the darkened cell. The old gatekeeper waited at my back. Two hundred years ago he would have been a jailer, and this might have been my cell. I straightened up slowly, uncertain of the ceiling height, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dimness. I had an electric lantern with me, but I wanted my first impressions of the cell to match those of its last tenant. What had he felt as the door closed behind him and the key turned in the lock? In the end, had his eyes turned huge and sightless from staring into shadows? Had he seen the pyre to which they led him after so many years in the dark? Or had that final dawn burned out his eyes, even before the flames of the auto-da-fe came leaping from below?
Poor Bruno. Burned alive, a conflagration, no more shadows.
“It’s on the wall behind you,” my guide called after me. “I’ll close the door so you can see it whole.”
I spun around in time to see the doorway closing up: “No!”
But he hadn’t heard me. The old man was possibly quite deaf. Of course, I had wanted him to shut the door eventually— but not so soon. Not until I’d had time to grow used to my surroundings.
I could not bear the darkness. Quickly I switched on the lantern. And found myself staring at Bruno’s masterpiece.
It was a composition in black and white and tones of gray, applied with a hand steadier and more revealing than that of any painter. At first it seemed to me no more than a subtle arrangement of dark and light planes, perfectly abstract, broken by slanting lines and gray arcs, with a row of dappled, feathery shapes suspended from above. It covered the entire wall, including the door through which I had entered the cell. As my eye grew more familiar with the piece, I realized that it was not abstract but had been taken directly from life. The image was merely inverted.
Turning on my heel, I regarded the opposite wall. Yes, there was the window he had used, long since boarded up. In Bruno’s day it had looked out on a square enclosed by imposing white walls, with arches along one side and slender trees lining the far end. It was this scene which he had captured, in inverse, on the wall of his cell.
All that architecture had long since been destroyed. Where the courtyard had been, there now rose a squat, gray monument to Roman finance. From the street one could see this modern monstrosity and the old prison of the Inquisition hulking shoulder to shoulder, like conspirators.
In that small window, now sightless and dark, Bruno had inserted a wooden shutter which completely sealed the cell from light. In the midst of the shutter was a circular aperture, over which he tacked a sheet of gold leaf. And in the very center of that sheet was the tiniest possible hole, no more than a pinprick, admitting only the faintest imaginable light.
Faint, but suitable for his purposes.
I wondered what his jailers had thought when he dispatched them to search for the various strange materials his camera required. He must have had some friend outside the prison to furnish the gold leaf and chemicals. His requests should have surprised no one—he was already thought a sorcerer, after all—but I was amazed that they had ever been honored. What mightn’t he have concocted in the years he spent in prison? Gunpowder? Poison gases? Why not the philosophers’ stone?
But his materials were actually quite harmless and must have seemed so even to the warden: silver salts, bitumen of Judaea, pewter sheets, and lavender oil. A lesser man would have given up after months, perhaps even days of frustrated experimentation. But here, for once, Bruno’s muscular ego served him in good stead. He had eight years in which to work without interruption, undistracted. Eventually he succeeded in rediscovering principles he had previously taken for granted. Leonardo’s own processes had been kept a careful secret by his estate, which dispensed fine cameras, paper, and premixed chemicals to those who dared to purchase them in violation of Church decrees. It was not until more than a century after Bruno’s death that Da Vinci’s self-imposed patents expired, and the chemical principles of chiaroscurography became widely understood. But long before that time, following the brilliant suspicions that had made him such a terror to the Church, Bruno had managed to duplicate Da Vinci’s findings and develop his own ingenious techniques.
Imprisonment had slowed his pace but not his mind. It took the flames of the Inquisition to make that engine fail.
No record remains of the trials he conducted. History has not preserved his failures. All that remains is Bruno’s triumph, cast in light and shadow on the wall of his living tomb. He must have labored all through the year’s shortest night, painting the wall with the mixture he finally settled upon as ideal, namely an asphalt which hardened on exposure to light.
The entire wall beneath that bituminous layer was covered with sheets of polished pewter, tacked up edge to edge to form a seamless canvas. He had pewter-plated even the door.
At dawn he took his position. The waxing sunlight pierced the tiny hole in the sheet of gold leaf, throwing thin rays over Bruno’s wall. It was Midsummer Day, the trees in leaf, the shadows stark and simple on the plaza as the sun crawled overhead. Those shadows were conducted into the dark cell by the pinhole and focused on the light-sensitive coating. Bruno never moved, not for an instant of the year’s longest day. Sunlight poured through the golden hole, hardening the asphalt wherever it touched. Gradually, invisibly, the bright image of the outer world, that expansive courtyard, was frozen in the hardening bitumen of Judaea, while all the shadows remained soft—none softer than the region directly behind Bruno, which bore his umbral shape. When at last the pinhole went dark, had he collapsed exhausted on the floor of his camera? I do not think so. There was much to do while the asphalt was still soft; he had to act quickly to reveal the mystery hidden on the wall.
He worked through another night with a rag or brush soaked in lavender oil, gently dabbing the coated pewter to remove the soft bitumen, taking microscopic care not to destroy the hardened areas. By candlelight he watched the image emerge: The lines of walls and columns, the sweep of the arches, the sun-flecked leaves of inverted trees—these were captured in dark pewter and white asphalt. And last of all, his own form emerged.