A little like yours? Subra whispers.
Yeah, come to think of it, a little like mine…
When you left home at last, at age eighteen, you must have solemnly sworn never to resemble your father, a weakling you loved but pitied. A meek, submissive, altruistic, unmanly man who’d given up all hope of having a great destiny here on Earth. You, Simon, would be a real man…
Sliding the Mirandola leaflet back across the table, Rena gently pats her father’s hand.
They’ve made big plans for the day ahead: first the History of Science Museum, and then, following their afternoon siesta, the Ponte Vecchio and the Piazza della Signoria…
Haughtily ignoring the hundreds of tourists lined up at the entrance to the Uffizi, they skirt the Palazzo Vecchio and head down to the Piazza dei Giudici, the Judges’ Square.
‘This is where Savonarola was condemned to death,’ Simon solemnly announces.
‘Who’s that?’ Ingrid asks.
‘A fanatical priest. In the fifteenth century, right on this spot, he built bonfires of the vanities, burned the works of Pico della Mirandola, and was eventually hanged himself, then burned at the stake. Incredible, to think all this happened five hundred years ago, before the first white man ever set foot in Quebec. Before that part of the world was known as Quebec, in fact,’ he adds, savvier than the American lady in Dante’s house.
‘Right,’ Rena nods. ‘The Indians didn’t do bonfires of the vanities, they just did campfires.’
‘And they couldn’t burn books,’ Ingrid puts in, ‘because they were illiterate. Hitler burned books, though…’
Rena hastens to change the subject. She has nothing against Hitler, so to speak, but feels he shouldn’t be allowed to invade the whole world.
Scienza
It’s for Simon’s sake, of course, that they’ve chosen to visit the History of Science Museum.
Once they’ve whisked through the first room, however (wonders of ancient clockwork, tiny crenellated cogs from the workshops of Florence, Geneva and Vienna), Simon decides to peruse the museum pamphlet for a while. No benches — so, oblivious to stares, he sits down on the floor like a tramp, baseball cap on lap, wispy grey hair standing on end.
Ingrid and Rena move on alone — too scared of him to urge him off the floor, too scared of the museum guards to join him there. Astronomy, meteorology, mathematics…but how to discuss these things without Simon? Where to go? What to do? Everything they visit now without him will need to be revisited later with him; the present moment thus becomes absurd.
After a good half hour, they go back to the first room and timorously ask (last thing they’d want to do is offend him, harass him, give him the impression they’re bossing him around), ‘Don’t you want to come and see?’
Rising at last to join them, he strides through one room after another — prisms, magnetism, optical machinery, transmission of energy…
Hey, what’s the hurry, Dad?
You the precocious child, forever top of the class, admitted to university at age sixteen…You the brilliant, curious, gifted young thinker, light of foot and heart. You the insomniac, mad with joy, utterly possessed by your vocation: to fathom and describe the origins of consciousness, the fabulous machinery of the human brain. You who, later on, would initiate me into these rites — thrilled to see my eyes widening in amazement, the light getting passed on. And it did get passed on. Look, Daddy — I inherited all these discoveries! To measure the temperature of the invisible in 1800, Herschel needed both Galileo’s thermometer and Newton’s prism; these allowed him to demonstrate the prodigious fact that the sun emitted infrared rays. I’ve been working on that side of the spectrum for twenty years — the spectral side, yes — the ghostlike, dreamlike universe wherein light waves, so short as to be invisible to the naked eye, start turning into heat. I use my camera to slip beneath people’s skin and show their veins, the warmth of their blood, the life that pulses within them. I reveal their invisible auras, the traces left by the past on their faces, hands and bodies. In rural and urban landscapes, I explore the ethereal detail of shadows, turning foreground into background and the other way around. I set the motionless into motion as no film could ever do, and show how the different periods of our lives echo one another. Connecting past to present, here to there, young to old, dead to living, I capture the fundamental instability of our lives. I try, in every reportage, to make the acquaintance of one person and to do all I can to understand what has shaped them. Leading them away from their official identities, I accompany them home, question them and listen to their answers, play with them and their convictions, watch them change masks, study them in the flow of their existence, love them as they love themselves, leave them freer than I found them…I use infrared to disturb the hic et nunc that is the very essence of photography.
Oh, Dad, why are you walking so fast?
‘I’m mainly interested in Rooms Six and Seven,’ says Simon. ‘The ones devoted to Galileo.’
Bambini
To get to Rooms Six and Seven, though, they must first pass through Room Five — the History of Obstetrics.
Plaster moulds hanging on walls: dozens of life-sized uteruses painted in realistic colours. Nestled amidst the viscera, against the backbones or beneath the ileums: babies babies babies, single or twins, on the verge or in the process of being born, head first, rump first, foot first, arm first, sometimes with the help of forceps.
As they pass through this room, visitors tend to hasten their step.
These gaping wounds are a shock to them. A far cry indeed from the immaculate blue-and-white Virgins of the Nativities. Here, bodies teem, glisten and ooze. Flesh is garish, slippery, awful. Piles of intestines. The parturients’ legs are chopped off at the thighs, bloody steaks.
Simon, too, hastens his step.
Obscene obstetrical obstacles…It was all those naissances, wasn’t it, that prevented your own Renaissance? A giant lets out a roar. A jet of sperm shoots from his stiff cock. Year after year, each jet an embryo-clot — cells which, dividing, multiply. The babies grow, come into the world, grow, drink, grow, eat, grow. Horrified, the giant takes to his heels, pursued by his offspring. He trips and falls headlong. His children devour him.
Galileo had only three children, all with the same non-wife, Marina Gamba. The girls were placed in convents; the boy lived with his mother in Padova. No family life of any sort. It was the tradition for erudites to remain unmarried.
Right, Subra nods. Two wives, six kids — far too many, for a man who hopes to think.
Galileo
Room Six proudly exhibits a framed copy, in both Latin and Italian, of the great scientist’s retractatio.