eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781495640117 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 752 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
ROME: THE PRISON OF THE HOLY OFFICE 21 DECEMBER 1599
I know this place very well. I have lived here for nearly seven years since they extradited me from Venice – a miserable winter journey which I still remember in my aching bones.
In prison one loses count of time. One tries at first to measure it by the pale light that penetrates through a high barred window. Then one abandons the effort. Why connive with the gaolers to torment oneself?
Nevertheless, I am sure of today's date because the Notary announced it when I was brought before the Congregation of the Office of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition.
They make an impressive assembly: nine Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord Cardinals, six high and reverend clerics – religious and regular – and, of course, the Notary, meticulous recorder of the proceedings, which today are minuted under the heading: Visitation of Those Incarcerated in the Holy Roman Office. I am only one of the prisoners; but today they tell me I am the sole object of my lords' attentions.
First I am required to identify myself. God! How many times have I done this? How many notaries have recorded it in how many documents? My family name is Bruno. I was born in 1548 in the city of Nola, in the kingdom of Naples. My father's name was Giovanni. My mother's name was Fraulisa. My baptismal name is Filippo. However, I am characterised in all documents by my name in religion, Giordano. I am an ordained priest, a monk in the Order of Friars Preachers, a Master in sacred theology.
Each of these titles is authentic. Each provides a separate noose to hang me. I no longer practise my ministry, therefore I am accused for my 'loose and licentious life'. I have fled my order, therefore I am an 'apostate monk'. I am accused of perverting the Divine science of theology into outright heresy. For that, they can have me executed.
Today the man who addresses me on behalf of the Inquisitors is the Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a Jesuit said to stand high in favour with the Pontiff. Unlike some of his colleagues, he is mild-mannered and courteous – though I am too old in prison life to trust him too far.
What he tells me is very simple. He and his colleagues have finished their enquiries into my life, my writings and my opinions. There will be no more interrogations. Immediately after Christmas the Congregation will make its decision. When next I am summoned it will be to hear the verdict.
Meantime – and this is the core of a very sour apple – I should use the coming weeks to reconsider my position most carefully. Bellarmine emphasises the expression with a grammarian's precision. The word resipiscere means to 'rethink with wisdom'.
I feel a sudden anger rising in me. What in God's name have I been doing all these years in prison but thinking and rethinking, testing one argument against another – even when my mind was fuddled with fever, my body racked with rheumatic pains? I manage to control myself and answer firmly but with respect. I have no wish and I feel no obligation to reconsider any matter. I have answered all the questions that have been put to me over months and years. I do not understand what is now expected of me.
My Lord Cardinal Bellarmine explains. He and his colleagues understand the impediment I feel. It is a state not uncommon on the difficult journey to repentance and spiritual enlightenment. For this reason they have asked the Master General of my Order and his Vicar to meet privately with me in my cell and help me to see the vanity of my way of life and the doctrinal errors into which I have fallen. He asks whether I am prepared to receive them and reason with them openly.
Of course I am prepared to talk – anything to defer the final fateful day of decision! However, I tell him I can make no promise of change. He understands that. He even commends my honesty. Then in the same mild fashion, he reminds me that my liberty, my life and my eternal salvation all hang upon the outcome.
What can I say? I know that I am two steps away from the moment I have always dreaded. They have squeezed me like an orange, down to the pips and skin. I bow my head in silence and wait to be dismissed. To my surprise I am offered some small indulgences.
Henceforth I am to lodge alone in my cell. I am grateful for that. I have learned many times to my cost that cellmates may turn out to be informers, like that sad fellow Celestine the Capuchin who traduced me to save his own skin. He caused me months of trouble with his reports of our cell talk, and his accounts of my blasphemous and licentious mockeries. It availed him nothing. Three months ago they took him out and burned him for heresy in the Campo dei Fiori.
So my privacy is a comfort; but there is still a drop of gall in the wine cup. I know, and the Inquisitors know, that solitude breeds fear, uncertainty and doubt and nightmare terrors. I am much pleased when Bellarmine tells me that I am to be given quills and ink and paper and candles to help my failing eyesight. Again there is a dash of wormwood in the cup. I may not write any matters not connected with my case. I may not possess or read any other book than that which has been provided to me: the breviary approved for the special use of the Order of Friars Preachers. For the rest, I shall have to keep my mind alive with a daily harvest of memories.
I make bold at this point to express some simpler needs. My robe is thin and threadbare. My cell is cold as a tomb. My joints are swollen and painful, my hands raw with chilblains. I ask for a woollen robe and cloak, mittens for my hands and socks to temper the chill of the stone paving.
Some of the Inquisitors clearly disapprove these mitigations. Bellarmine reduces them swiftly to compliance. The Notary is directed to issue a procurement order to the Master of the Wardrobe. Money is provided so that I may bathe and scrub myself in heated water and pay the barber to trim my hair and beard.
I thank my lords for their indulgences. I make a final request that the order be expedited. Once the illustrious visitors have departed, prison life will resume its customary pace – promises will string themselves out into long tomorrows like beads on a long rosary.
Bellarmine accepts the plea. He turns to his colleagues and admonishes them: "It is we who control this place and not the staff. What we order should be executed without delay. And you, Brother Bruno, you too should attend instantly to your soul's wellbeing. Time passes swiftly and you are, every moment, in jeopardy. You may go now."
My gaoler walks me back to my cell and locks me in. I fling myself on my bed and huddle there like a foetus, dead in a dark womb, doomed never to see the light of day. Then, slowly, the madness of despair subsides into a cold, black anger. The anger is good. It affirms that I am alive and still unbroken. They have me caught and penned; but I am not a sheep. They shall know that I am a wolf, who can still snap and snarl and bite the hand of any intruder.
*
The country folk among whom I was born have an old saying: "When you start a vendetta always dig two graves." Well, it is they who have mounted a vendetta against me. They have made me a vagabond among the scholars of Europe; they have libelled me, they have deprived me of liberty; they threaten my life; they seek even to pursue me to the judgement seat of the Almighty. They have all the armoury, all the power.
The only weapons I have are those which they have decreed to me today: pens made from goose feathers, ink from soot and gall, a pile of blank paper and a month of time. What can I do with so little? Very soon my enemies will destroy me; but they, too, are mortal and will die and be buried in due time. At least I can give myself the pleasure of writing our epitaphs.
Already the superscription shapes itself in my head: The Last Confession of Filippo Giordano Bruno, called the Nolan, who now presents himself for the judgement of history.
What am I to tell in this writing? An epitaph, however brief, is a memorial. What do I desire most to be remembered about myself? Of what do I wish to convince those who may, in some obscure future, read it?
I shall not have time and I have in any case no inclination to write a chronicle of my life or a defence of my opinions. These have been covered – God, with what tedious repetition and elaboration! – in the records of my inquisitions in Venice and here in Rome.
Rather I should like to make known – simply and openly, as in casual discourse of friends – who I am, and how I read the destiny which has brought me to this moment. That destiny was written from the beginning on the palm of my own hand, even though I lacked the wit to read or decipher it.
I cannot set this down all in one piece, like an oration or philosopher's argument. I have walked that road before and it leads nowhere. So, the best I can offer is anecdote, allusion, scraps and shards of memory which may reveal themselves in the end as a mosaic portrait of the real Bruno who lives within my skin.
For a moment, I find a tenuous joy in the idea. Then I am stricken with a new horror: if I am condemned then I shall be stripped of every possession except my robe and delivered in chains to the commandant of Nona Tower, who will be charged to hand me in short order to the executioners.
What then will become of my manuscript? How as I write can I conceal it? How shall I get it out of here into safe and friendly hands?
All I can think at this moment is that, even in this place, strictly confined and closely guarded, I have been able to do small favours for humble people: write a note for a lovesick youth, a letter of appeal for patronage for an unlettered guard. Perhaps one of them will oblige me in my turn. For that I have to trust to luck, since, being an apostate monk and under attainder for heresy, I can hardly appeal to Divine Providence. Oh, Brother Giordano! You wrote so confidently of an infinite universe and of plural worlds beyond our view, yet you cannot control even this tiny rat-hole on your own planet.
CHAPTER 2
23 DECEMBER
It has taken two days, but Bellarmine has kept his promise. This morning I am permitted to bathe in a tub of tepid water. When I strip down I can count the bones in my ribcage and the wrinkles in my shrunken belly. My leg muscles are wasting for want of exercise. My skin, once the grime comes off, is pale and yellow like that of a plucked chicken.
My old clothes are taken away and fresh ones tossed on my bed. They are not new – God forbid! They are patched and darned, but at least they are clean and free of prison stink.
A barber comes to trim my hair and beard. I have not met this one before. He is curt and graceless. He talks in grunts and bursts of Romanaccio, a clattering dialect which falls harshly on the ear of a southerner like me, whose language is made for singing.
I ask what has happened to his colleague. He is sick. He has the mal'aria. When will he be back? "Who knows? It is God who arranges such things." I am glad to see the back of this surly brute. I miss the other one who is a Neapolitan like myself, garrulous and full of gossip. He is kind, too. Sometimes he will slip me a piece of fruit or a sweetmeat, and always he has some bawdy scandal to brighten my day.
On my desk there are three candles, one in a sconce, the two others laid side by side on the desk top. I am warned that this is all I shall get until the next visit of the Inquisitors. I calculate carefully how I can make them last. If you laugh at this childish mathematic, let me remind you how precious light is, the joy it brings, the terror when you are robbed of it.
Suddenly – and not unpleasantly – I am reminded of my student days in Naples. We were a rowdy and roistering lot. Most of us were poor and we earned our money by making deliveries for shopkeepers. We paid for our pleasures by running errands for the girls in the brothels. In one of the reports on my candidacy as a novice in the Order I was called a postiglione per le puttane: a postillion for the whores! There was a double edge to the joke. A postillion rides the lead horse in a carriage team. The second meaning was plain. It suggested that I rode the girls as well.
I did, of course. I was a hot-blooded boy and proud of my new manhood. It seemed to please the girls, too. They told me it was a change from old fellows who took an hour to work up an erection. I remember now that the pleasure was always measured by candlelight. The candle by each girl's bed was marked by the brothel master: six sessions to an hour. If you wanted more than ten minutes, or if you needed time to get into action, you paid for it.
When you had paid your money, the girl lit the candle. When the wax melted down to the line which marked your time, the girl snuffed out the candle. The brief season of love was over. You and your credit were exhausted.
You couldn't argue about it. If you did, you took a beating and were thrown out into the street. So there is a phrase in our language: cortigiana a candela, a candle courtesan. And that, come to think of it, is what my Lords Inquisitors would like to make of me, measuring out my life by candle flame and melted wax.
Beside the candles there is a pile of blank paper, a pot of ink and a dozen quills already cut for writing. I prefer to cut my own to fit the shape and slant of my handwriting. In the past I have asked for a small penknife, but this has always been refused. I must not possess any instrument with which I can damage myself or others.
No matter. These few easements have already restored my self-respect and my small stock of courage. So now, I am prepared to sit down, dip quill in inkpot and begin writing my last confession.
*
My father, Giovanni, was a soldier in the service of the viceroy of Naples. Do not misunderstand me. This was no ruffian freelance selling himself to the highest bidder for any of the dirty business of soldiering. He belonged to an elite corps, one of sixteen companies, each of seventy men who were the backbone of the garrison forces of the Duke of Alba. There were strict conditions for their enlistment: they must be gentlemen born, of good appearance, healthy in body, intelligent and of proven valour. They were well paid. My father earned a stipend of eighty ducats a year, out of which he had to furnish two good horses and a groom.
In my childhood he was absent for long periods on service in the Abruzzi, Puglia and the seaboard areas threatened by corsair invasions. In my mind he was a heroic figure, a free spirit, confronting the King's enemies, travelling a world of which I knew nothing. On his rare visits home, I would plead with him to tell me stories of his campaigns, but he was a taciturn man who had no taste for storytelling. So I invented his exploits, about which I boasted to my friends.
My mother fretted over his absences and nagged him when he was at home. Looking back I can hardly blame her. She was a virtual widow and brought me up alone, although she lived in the midst of an extended family of relations. In the end she became subject to fits of melancholy which made her life and mine a domestic misery.
Even so, I did not lack company or diversion. Our house was part of the estate of the Savalino family. It was one of nine dwellings, occupied by fourteen families. We boys were taught reading and writing and simple arithmetic by a local priest, Don Gian Domenico. When we were not in class, we roamed the countryside around the foot of the mountain which was called Cicada. It was a domain rich with olives, chestnuts, oaks, poplars, rosemary, vines, elms and myrtles.
Beyond this Eden lay the sprawling city of Naples, and beyond that – the limit of the world as I knew it – the dark and sinister cone of Vesuvius, with its plume of brown smoke, and, at night, the intermittent glow of its pulsing fiery heart.
The mystery and terror of that mountain was the beginning of all my later questionings about the nature of the world, of the universe itself, of its Maker and of our human destinies. The destruction of the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum was still vivid in our folklore. Every preacher used it as a text, speaking of it as an act of Divine vengeance: God raining down fire on the dissolute inhabitants as once he had done upon Sodom and Gomorrah. Even then the crude proposition stuck in my gullet. When I lived in Naples as a student the notion became even less digestible. Ours was a Christian city, but it was no whit more virtuous than old Pompeii. There was just as much lust and villainy and violence as there had been among the ancients.
So there seemed no good reason why Vesuvius should not, once again, be used as an instrument of Divine punishment. All the land around the Bay of Naples from Sorrento to Pozzuoli was unstable ground, which rose and fell and sent up warning fumaroles from the fires beneath. Sometimes, after a boozy, bawdy night, I dreamed that I was choking on hot dust and noxious vapours.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Last Confession"
by .
Copyright © 2000 The Morris West Collection.
Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
FOREWORD,
EDITOR'S NOTE,
AUTHOR'S NOTE,
ROME: THE PRISON OF THE HOLY OFFICE 21 DECEMBER 1599,
23 DECEMBER,
ROME: THE PRISON OF THE HOLY OFFICE 21 DECEMBER 1599,
25 DECEMBER FEAST OF THE NATIVITY,
26 DECEMBER FEAST OF SAINT STEPHEN, MARTYR,
27 DECEMBER,
29 DECEMBER,
30 DECEMBER,
31 DECEMBER,
1 JANUARY 1600,
2 JANUARY,
3 JANUARY,
4 JANUARY,
EPILOGUE,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,