"I don't know,” he said. “I can't say."
He did tell her that the church before which the elephant stood was called Santa Maria sopra Minerva—a church of Mary over a temple of Minerva, and before that a temple of Isis too. He said that in the Dominican priory opposite, Giordano Bruno had been tried and condemned to death when at last the Dominican inquisitors stopped trying to get him to renounce what he believed he knew. He tried to tell her something of what Bruno believed: infinities, transmigrations, relativities. He told her what Bruno had been heard to say when the judges pronounced sentence on him: I think you are more afraid to hand down this sentence than I am to receive it.
"What did he mean?"
"I don't know.” They walked out of the square. The Dominican priory looked like an office building, though perhaps it was church offices. Blue glow of fluorescent bulbs. A blind just then drawn. “It may be he was saying that if the church officials felt they had to kill a philosopher investigating the nature of things in order to keep their power, then it couldn't last as an institution. Someday it would lose. And someday after that it would just dry up and blow away. And he thought they knew it."
"Did it?"
"Yes. It did. A hundred years later it had no power to kill people anymore. And it has less now."
"So he was right?"
"No. If real power could be annihilated by wisdom or shame it would have been, long ago. But look at the Soviet Union today. Still there."
They wandered on. The empires were gone, here where tourists trod.
"Did they really kill him?” Roo asked.
"In public. Here in Rome. At a place called the Campo dei Fiori."
"Oh? And where's that?"
"Well, I guess it can't be far,” he said. A strange burble of laughter arose in his breast or throat. “I guess. Right around here somewhere."
"Have you been there?"
"No."
"Okay,” she said. “First off, I've got to go buy some things. I need some tampons. I don't want to go any farther without some. Dumb I didn't get them before."
"Okay."
"There was a whatchacallit, a farmacia, a few streets back that way.” She turned, her outstretched hand moving like a clock's, and pointed. “That way. I'll go back and get stuff, and meet you."
"Okay."
"So what's the place again we're going?"
"Campo dei Fiori."
She pulled out the map from her bag, and together they found the little square. “Yeah,” she said, “see, it's a triangle from here. So you go on and I'll go back and we'll meet there."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay."
She started to put the map back in her bag—she had glanced at it once that morning to orient herself, then refolded it and put it away, and they had just wandered together—but instead she withdrew it and gave it to Pierce. Then she was gone.
Pierce looked around himself to see where he stood relative to the map. He found the intersection of streets where he was, and could trace with a finger the way to the Campo dei Fiori.
Okay. He set out.
Within minutes he was not where he had thought to be. He walked to the next corner, and it was not the street he expected (or now, rather, hoped and prayed) it would be. He looked from the map to the world, the world to the map, making no connections. He turned the map this way and that, trying to match it to his own stance and the way he faced, but could not. He walked another block. The sun stood at midheaven, no help there. He had no way to choose a way.
He was lost.
He could perceive no reason at all to go one way rather than another. It might be that if he chose a way it would immediately lead him to a place he recognized, where he could make a clear choice: but within himself there was no reason. It was Roo who had made the city intelligible, because it was clear to her; he had only shared in the order she perceived; without her it disintegrated in a moment, he couldn't hold it together.
The thought that he might not find her again at all, or for hours, and have to endure her scorn and her bafflement, was terrible. But what was more remarkable (he still hadn't moved, the chattering young people and burdened tourists passing around him like a tumbling brook around a stone, a pasticceria on one side of him and a store selling religious goods on the other) was the thought, also just unfolding within him, that perhaps after all he was a profoundly limited person. Not just inattentive, or feckless, or forgetful, but actually incomplete. Someone who did not know, and could not by effort truly discern, where he stood in space, or where the things and places around him were in relation to one another. He could learn from experience and habit how to perambulate the places he lived in, and this could sometimes give the appearance that he, like others, had a map of the surrounding space in his brain. But he didn't. He clearly didn't. He was missing it, a part or organ others had, as someone might be missing an eye and be unable to perceive distance.
He turned one way, then the other, and started walking. He walked slowly but not attentively, for he had given up trying to know what to do or where next to go. After a time he stopped again, with a choice of ways to make. The street was named Vietato l'affisione (it said so on the corner building's side, where as he well knew Roman street names are posted, but the crossing street seemed to be named the same, Vietato l'affisione, Old Affliction Street?). He thought of all the times he had stood just as he stood now, ashamed of his bafflement among his fellows, or so ensorcelled he couldn't even notice his fellows. There was a place in the city of Conurbana where two streets crossed, on one corner a photographer's shop, on the corresponding far corner a store selling children's clothing. There he had stood trying to find a way back to Rose Ryder's apartment. There he still stood.
"Hey.” A hand was put upon him. “Wake up."
"Oh Jesus,” he said. “Oh hi. Hi."
"Doing good,” Roo said.
He looked from Roo, slipping her arm in his, to where she pointed, a fingerboard he hadn't seen labeled Campo dei Fiori. They went that way. They passed again the pasticceria, the store selling crosses and incense. He tried to tell her what he had learned, alone on the streets, without her; what he knew now.