The letter was already sealed when the secretary understood he was not being asked to carry it abroad. It rested upon the writing-table, between an open treatise on medicine and several sheets covered in calculations; the scholar had set it down with a deliberate care that rendered this modest paper, amidst a chamber encumbered with immense undertakings, the only matter of genuine urgency.
“You will keep it,” he said.
Matteo inquired into which file it should be placed.
“Into none, for the present.”
For three years he had been privy to the habits of Girolamo Cardano, whom the French called Cardan. The master’s papers were not without their disorder, yet this very disarray obeyed an intellect capable of unearthing an ancient memorandum from beneath a pile no man dared disturb. That a letter should belong to no dossier whatever signified something far other than a mere delay in filing.
Upon the envelope, Matteo had read the son’s name.
The Honour of a House
Giambatista had read medicine. He bore a name from which much might be derived, and beneath which it was perhaps more burdensome still to remain a merely mediocre man. His marriage to Brandonia had introduced into the household a succession of tribulations that the father was later to recount with profound bitterness; yet the words of an afflicted father cannot alone furnish the measure of what a wife truly was, and one must needs mistrust those domestic histories wherein one party possesses the books while the other leaves behind only the accusations pronounced against her.
Matteo had met Brandonia but once. She had remained standing in the ante-chamber, though a seat had been offered her, holding a packet she refused to surrender to any hand. He had offered to announce her arrival; she had asked whether he was certain the master was within.
“I saw him enter.”
“That does not signify he will receive me.”
She had not smiled. The secretary, too young to perceive how civil manners may serve the ends of humiliation, had counselled patience. He was to remember that counsel long after he had forgotten what he then believed of his own obliging nature.
The Son Behind the Door
The tidings of the crime stripped the household’s routines of their semblance of solidity. Giambatista had poisoned his wife; arrested, he had confessed. The volumes remained open, visitors continued to arrive, yet all that had once lent labour its imperious necessity seemed henceforth to await the dispensation of another event.
Cardano sought to save his son. Advocates might be retained, an audience obtained, the money and the alliances procured by a lifetime of study brought to bear; every resource had to be pressed into service, lest any delay be afterwards imputed to him who had not striven sufficiently.
Matteo wrote letters. He transcribed names, petitions, explanations whose courtesy grew ever more pressing as the days slipped away. Hitherto, he had believed that a fair hand lent clarity to affairs; he now discovered that one may trace the selfsame words with consummate elegance while their author no longer knows at which door to knock.
One evening, Cardano entered the chamber where he laboured and inquired how many replies had arrived. The secretary announced two missives. The father took them, perused the first, and did not finish the second.
“Tomorrow, you shall write again.”
Matteo bowed his head. He dared not utter that the reply already contained a refusal to which a fresh letter would alter, in all likelihood, nothing save the date.
Brandonia’s Place
He came upon the old envelope while searching for a sheet of fine paper. It had remained where he had laid it, beneath documents of no account; he had been commanded to keep it, and this passive obedience suddenly appeared to him a manner of complicity in something he had not chosen.
He did not break the seal. He bore it to the master.
“You bid me wait, sir.”
Cardano recognised the seal. For a moment, his countenance assumed that peculiar weariness that springs not from want of sleep, but from the necessity of sustaining yet longer a thought one longs to lay down.
“Do you believe a scrap of paper can restore a woman to life?”
Matteo felt the violence of the inquiry. He possessed neither the authority nor the years that might have permitted him to reply without appearing cruel. Yet he thought of Brandonia standing in the ante-chamber, of that patience he had enjoined upon her, and he felt ashamed a second time for those very words.
“No, sir. I fear only that she may be made to vanish still further.”
The scholar made no answer. He took back the envelope and laid it before him, without setting it apart, this time, from the other papers.
Matteo waited to be dismissed. The master remained bent over the paper; in the corridor, a visitor was growing impatient, having arrived to offer yet another piece of counsel toward saving Giambatista. The secretary went out to bid him wait. This time, another would have leisure to be received.
The Books After the Ruin
Giambatista was put to death in 1560. The father survived this bereavement, pursued his labours, and bore his misfortune through an existence that could not wholly cease alongside that of his son. It is one of the less theatrical cruelties of mourning: the world does not content itself with taking someone from you; it requires thereafter that you continue to answer letters and acknowledge the passage of the days.
Matteo returned one morning to the study to put the papers in order. He found the envelope open. Beside it, the master had written a few lines, then struck out a sentence of which one might still decipher the opening words. The secretary averted his gaze, not out of indifference, but because he understood at last that not everything a man permits to be seen is intended to become an explanation.
“Into the family file,” said Cardano.
There was nothing more. Matteo took the letter and filed it under its date, between two ordinary occurrences that no one would remember. The paper saved no one; it merely prevented a house from preserving of its catastrophe a version wherein the son had been the only dead.
When he tied the cardboard portfolio, he wrote upon the cover neither the honour nor the misfortune of the scholar. He wrote two Christian names, one after the other, leaving a space wide enough that they should not overlap: Giambatista. Brandonia.