1There was a baker in Rome named Matteo, a Florentine by birth, who had his oven in a lane behind the river. He was a plain man and a good one. He gave short weight to no one, and he had one son, Lapo, nine years old, who asked more questions than there are stars.
2Matteo belonged to a brotherhood of his countrymen called the Company of Saint John the Beheaded. It had one work, and it was a hard one. When a man was to be put to death in Rome, the brothers went to him in his cell the night before. They wore black robes and black hoods, so that no one knew which neighbour was under the cloth. They stayed with the condemned man until morning, and prayed with him, and walked beside him to the place, so that he should not die alone. Afterward they buried him.
3They did this for murderers and thieves. They believed that no one is past mercy while he breathes. Matteo had done it eleven times. He never got used to it, and he thought a man who got used to it should stop.
4In the winter of the great Jubilee, when the city was full of pilgrims from every country, the word came to the brothers on a Wednesday evening. A man would be handed over at dawn. They were to go to the prison of the Tor di Nona at the second hour after midnight.
5"Who is it?" Matteo asked.
6"The friar from Nola," said the brother who brought the word. "The one they have kept seven years."
7Matteo had heard of him, as everyone had, a little. Hear what the baker knew, and then what was true.
8The man's name was Giordano Bruno. He had been a friar of Saint Dominic in Naples, a small dark quick man with a memory like a net. As a young friar he had read forbidden books in the privy, and argued, and asked aloud things that were not to be asked. When he was twenty-eight he threw off the white robe and ran.
9For sixteen years he wandered. He taught, and wrote, and quarrelled with every school that took him in, for he had a tongue like a whip and could not keep it still. The followers of Calvin shut him out. The followers of Luther shut him out.
10And wherever he went he taught a thing that made men dizzy.
11He had read the book of the old canon of Frauenburg, and he believed it. The earth goes round the sun. But the canon had still put the sun in the middle of everything, with the fixed stars set in a shell around it like lamps on a wall. Bruno looked at that shell and did not believe in it.
12There is no wall, he said. The stars are not lamps. They are suns, each one, as great as ours, and so far off that they look small. Round those suns go other earths. There is no end to them in any direction. And where there is no end there is no middle. Our sun is not the centre of the world. Nothing is. Everywhere is.
13He had no proof. He had no instrument. He had thought his way there, and he was sure of it.
14Then a nobleman of Venice asked him home to Italy to teach the art of memory. Bruno went. The nobleman grew angry with his teacher, locked him in an attic one night, and gave him to the Inquisition.
15That had been eight years ago. One year in the prison of Venice, seven in the prison of Rome.
16Now this must be told straight, for it is often told crooked. The friar was not judged only for the stars. He had said many things in his sixteen years, and most of what the judges held against him was about the faith itself: about Christ, and the bread of the altar, and what the soul is. Of these he had spoken as no friar may. The worlds without number were on the list, but lower down.
17And the judges were not monsters. They were learned men, and some were holy. They believed that a soul lives for ever, and that a teacher who leads souls astray does a worse murder than a man with a knife. If you believed that, you would fear such a teacher too. They did not want him dead. They wanted him to take it back. For seven years they sent the best minds in Rome to reason with him.
18For a time he gave ground. He said he would unsay what the Church found false. Then they brought him the list written out, eight things he must call errors.
19He read the list. And somewhere in that reading he stopped, as a mule stops on a bridge. He said he had nothing to take back. He said he did not know what he was being asked to take back. They gave him forty days more. He gave the same answer.
20So they read his sentence in a cardinal's palace, with him on his knees. He was to be handed to the governor of the city, which meant the fire. It is written by a man who stood in that room that when the reading was done the friar got to his feet and looked at the judges and said:
21"Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it."
22That was nine days ago. Now it was the last night.
23Matteo put on the black robe in the dark of the Company's chapel. He took up the thing each brother carried, a small painted board on a handle, with the suffering Christ on it. It was held before the condemned man's eyes all the way to the place, so that the last thing he saw would be mercy and not the faces of the crowd.
24There were seven priests with them that night, of four different orders, the most persuasive men in the city. They went into the cell at the second hour. Matteo stood by the wall with his board and listened.
25He had expected a madman. The friar was fifty-two, grey, thin as a rake from seven years without the sun. He listened to each priest to the end. Then he answered, point by point, in good Latin, and Matteo, who had little Latin, could follow only the shape of it: the priests leaning in, urgent, almost begging; the small man shaking his head.
26One of them, a young Jesuit, had tears on his face. "Brother," he said in plain Italian, "it is only a word. Say it and live. Say it and argue with us for another thirty years."
27The friar answered him low, and gently, and Matteo did not catch the words. He saw only the young priest's shoulders drop.
28It went on until the window turned grey. Nothing moved him. The record of the Company, which is still kept, says only that he stayed fixed in his stubbornness to the end, and that is how it looked to those who loved him enough to sit up all night trying to save him.
29At first light the governor's men came. They stripped him, as the law was. And they put a wooden clamp upon his tongue, so that he could not speak to the people. Matteo saw them do it. Of all he saw that day, that stayed with him longest. Seven years they had asked this man to speak. Now that they were going to kill him, they were afraid of what he would say.
30They walked through the waking streets with torches, the brothers chanting the litany. The place was the Campo de' Fiori, the Field of Flowers, where the market was. The stalls had been cleared. There was a stake, and wood.
31Matteo walked beside him the whole way and held the painted board before his face. At the stake he held it up once more, high, on its handle. The friar looked at it. Then he turned his head away.
32A brother next to Matteo groaned aloud. To him it meant a soul was lost. Matteo did not know what it meant. He only saw that the man did not take what he was offered, even then, even to make dying easier.
33He did not cry out. He could not, for the clamp. It was soon over, and nothing more will be said of it here.
34They threw his ashes in the river.
35Matteo went home and could not eat. But bread must be made, so that night he fired the oven as on any night, and sat before it on a flour sack, waiting for the bricks to heat, with the dough rising under a cloth.
36There was a sound at the lane door. A woman stood there, very old, with a pilgrim's staff and the shell of Saint James sewn on her hat.
37"I saw your light," she said. "It is cold to sleep in a doorway."
38He let her in to the warmth. She had a little hard cheese and some dried figs in a cloth, and she set them on the bench between them as if she had come for supper and been asked. He broke yesterday's loaf. They ate without much talk. She did not say what country she was from, and her speech did not tell him.
39She looked at his face for a while in the oven-light.
40"You were there this morning," she said. "Under one of the hoods."
41He did not ask how she knew. A man carries a morning like that on him. "I was there."
42"Was he right? About the stars?"
43"How should I know? I am a baker." He found he was angry. "My boy asked me the same at noon. He had it from the street. Father, is it true each star is a sun with a world? I told him to hold his tongue or I would take the strap to him. I never strike him. I told him those words killed a man today, and he was never to say them again, not in my house, not anywhere."
44"That was to keep him safe."
45"Yes."
46The old woman nodded, and ate a fig, and looked into the mouth of the oven where the fire was settling to red.
47"What have you left open?" she said.
48He did not understand her, and said so. She did not say it again. She pulled her cloak around her and lay down on the flour sacks by the warm bricks, and was asleep, or seemed so, at once.
49Matteo baked. All through the night he slid the loaves in and drew them out, and the question lay in him like a stone in dough.
50He thought of the clamp. He thought: I did that. Today, at noon, in my own kitchen. I am not a judge or a governor, and I did the same thing they did, to a child of nine, for the same reason. I was afraid.
51He thought of the priests leaning in, and the small man shaking his head. He did not know who had been right. He was a man of the Church and would die one. But he had seen with his eyes which side was sure enough to let the other speak.
52Some time before dawn he went to see if the old woman wanted bread for the road. The sacks were empty and still warm. The lane door was on the latch. He had not heard her go.
53When the last batch was out, he did not go to his bed. He went up the ladder to where Lapo slept and shook him by the foot.
54"Get up. Put your coat on."
55The boy came down stiff with fear, thinking of the strap. Matteo took him by the hand and led him up the outside stair to the flat roof where the wood was stacked. It was the dark before morning, clear and bitter cold. Over the roofs of Rome the stars stood thick as flour spilled on a black cloth.
56"You asked me a thing yesterday," Matteo said, "and I shut your mouth. I was wrong to do it. Here is the true answer. I do not know. No one in this city knows. A man said they are suns. Wiser men than I said he was wrong. Not one of them has been there to look."
57Lapo stared up with his mouth open, his breath smoking.
58"You may ask it," his father said. "Not in the street. Not yet, and not loudly, for it is dangerous, and I will not have you burned. But here, to me, you may ask anything. And if a day comes when someone finds a way to look, then look. Do you hear me? Look, and say what you see."
59"Yes, father."
60They stood on the roof until the east went pale and the stars put themselves out one by one. Then they went down and opened the shop.
61Three years after, the Church set every book of the friar's on the list of books no one might read. But they had been printed, in London and Paris and Frankfurt, and the copies were in too many houses to gather in. You know now why that could not have been done a hundred and fifty years before.
62And long, long after, the people of Rome set up a figure of him in dark bronze, hooded, with a book in his hands, on the stones of the Field of Flowers where the stake had stood.
63He had no proof, remember. He had only thought, and a stubborn neck. It would have been easy to say he was a fool who died for a guess.
64But in that same Jubilee winter there were three men alive who were going to find a way to look. One was a nobleman with a nose of metal, in Prague, who had measured the sky for thirty years. One was a poor schoolmaster with bad eyes, a follower of Luther in a Catholic town of Austria, who would be driven from his home before the year was out. And one was a professor in Padua, thirty-six years old, with debts, who did not yet own a glass.
65Now hear what came after.