Читать книгу In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love - Joseph Luzzi - Страница 9

La bocca sollevò dal fiero pasto.

He lifted up his mouth from the savage meal.

My uncle Giorgio recited this line to me when I was a college student visiting Italy for the first time, on my junior year abroad in Florence in 1987. A shepherd and rail worker who had never spent a day in school, Giorgio spoke neither English nor standard Italian—yet he spoke Dante. We were sitting around the table in his tiny kitchen, my ears buzzing with the dialect phrases of my childhood. Giorgio decanted glasses of his homemade wine as he welcomed me to Calabria, the region on the toe of the Italian peninsula whose la miseria—an untranslatable term meaning relentless hardship—my parents had escaped thirty years earlier when they immigrated to America.

For three days, I followed Giorgio and his son Giuseppe from one village to the next. Everyone we met—women in sackcloth, men with missing teeth—welcomed me as though I were a foreign dignitary. I never asked Giorgio how he had managed to learn some Dante by heart, and I doubt that he knew any of the actual plot of The Divine Comedy. It didn’t matter: he knew its music. Here, in the south of Italy, as far from the Renaissance splendor of Florence as you could get, he was a living and breathing trace of Dante’s presence.

Giorgio’s words stayed with me on the long train ride back to Florence, bringing me inside one of the most chilling scenes in The Divine Comedy: the one in which the traitor Ugolino lifts up his head from the man he has been condemned to cannibalize for eternity, Archbishop Ruggieri, to tell Dante how he ended up devouring his own children in the prison tower where Ruggieri had locked them. I was reading Dante for the first time, in a black Signet paperback translation by John Ciardi, while also trying to get through the original Tuscan. But nothing brought him to life like my uncle’s declaration.

Back in Florence, Dante was everywhere. Outside the Basilica of Santa Croce, a few blocks from my school, a nineteen-foot-high statue of the poet looked down sternly on the square, as though guarding the church where Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Galileo, and the nation’s founding fathers are buried. A few blocks north, the neighborhood where Dante grew up spread toward Brunelleschi’s Duomo. I had never taken a class on The Divine Comedy before my trip to Florence, but my visit to Calabria had shown me that its verses could live outside of libraries and museums and inside the huts and fields of my parents’ homeland. Dante’s simple, sober Tuscan-Italian made me feel the ground beneath me. I could smell his language.

S’ïo avessi le rime aspre e chiocce, / come si converrebbe al tristo buco . . .

“If I had verses harsh and grating enough / to describe this wretched hole,” Dante writes at the beginning of Inferno 32 to describe the depths of hell. He was as gritty and local as the Calabrian world my parents had abandoned. I plowed through the Ciardi and muddled through the Tuscan. For the first time in my life, I was inhabiting a book.

The capaciousness of The Divine Comedy—with its high poetry, dirty jokes, literary allusions, farting noises—floored me. I marveled at Dante’s universe of good and evil, love and hate, all ordered by unfaltering eleven-syllable lines in rhyming tercets. He communicated vast amounts of knowledge, medieval and ancient, without drowning out the music of his verse. He knew his Bible and his classics cold. He distilled the latest gossip about promiscuous poets, gluttonous pals, and treacherous politicians. He knew which acclaimed thirteenth-century humanist had been accused of sodomy, and he dared write about the birth of the soul and the prestige of his own Tuscan. In The Divine Comedy, I had discovered my guide, from the high culture of the Florentine cobblestones to the earthy customs of the Calabrian shepherds.

The Divine Comedy, I had come to learn, was a book of many firsts: one of the the first epic poems written in a local European language instead of Latin or Greek; the first work to speak about the Christian afterlife while paying an equal amount of attention to our life on earth; the first to elevate a woman, Beatrice, into a full-fledged guide to heaven. But these weren’t the innovations that most enthralled me—it was Dante’s groundbreaking ability to speak intimately with his readers. His twenty addresses leapt off the page and into my daydream: “O you who have sound reasoning, / consider the meaning that is hidden / beneath the veil of these strange verses,” he writes in Inferno 9. I could feel him speaking to me directly as I sat in my apartment in Piazza della Libertà, his rasping consonants and singing vowels drowning out the roar of the Vespas and the rumble of the traffic converging on the city’s nearby ring roads. I felt I could spend a lifetime exploring the mystery of his versi stani, strange verses.

Soon after my visit to Calabria, Dante’s words and his image had become, as he writes at the opening of Paradiso, a blessed kingdom stamped on my mind. I pictured him in Botticelli’s famous portrait: in regal profile, with his magnificent aquiline nose launched ahead of his piercing stare, his body swathed in a crimson cloak, and his head crowned with a black laurel, the symbol of poetic excellence given an otherworldly gravitas by the brooding color. It was a face that had been to hell and back, visited the dead and lived to tell. And it was a burning gaze that would buckle under none of life’s mysteries.

One late night in Florence I was out walking when I was arrested by a smell. I followed the scent and landed inside one of the city’s pasticcerie, pastry shops, making the next morning’s delicacies. I ordered a few brioches and took them to Santa Croce. In an empty square, I put the warm, achingly delicious pastry into my mouth as I leaned against the base of Dante’s statue. I was in Italy, I thought—not my parents’ Italy but another one, hundreds of miles from Zio Giorgio’s Calabria and light years from the mud and sorrow that my family had left behind. Dante had somehow appeared in both places.

With my mouth filled with flakes of buttery pastry, I pressed my back against Dante and stared onto the silent stones of Santa Croce.

I was falling in love.

THE DAY AFTER KATHERINE DIED, I returned to our home after spending the night in the hospital. Her morning coffee was still out by the bathroom sink, where strands of her hair lay in coils. The bed was unmade and the drawers flung open, suggesting a day open to all sorts of possibilities. She had left the apartment to attend class at a local university, where she was completing her degree after giving up on acting. We had plans to meet for dinner, and she had used my favorite coffee cup, the Deruta ceramic mug with the dragon design that I had paid too much for in Florence.

I took the sheets in my arms and breathed in her smell one last time.

My family, who had come from Rhode Island the moment they heard the news, surrounded me. Choking back sobs, my mother and sisters put on latex gloves and set out to erase Katherine’s last traces with Lysol and Formula 409.

The snow was falling outside—the first storm of the year.

Meanwhile, Isabel slept in a sterile forest of incubators in the neonatal unit of Poughkeepsie’s Vassar Brothers Hospital, its machines nourishing her after an improbable birth. They would keep her safe while I went out walking, looking for souls bunched up like fallen leaves on the shores of the dead.

The snow fell nonstop after Katherine’s accident, covering our village and announcing an early winter. The chaplain had told me I was in hell, but in my many walks around a dim, gloomy Tivoli, I felt more like I was in Virgil’s Underworld—a place of shadows, no brimstone and fire. I thought of Dante losing his “bello ovile,” “fair sheepfold.” During his lifetime, two political parties, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, dominated Florentine politics and were perpetually at war with each other. Dante was a Guelph, which was usually pro-papacy. But in the intensely factional and family-based world of Florentine politics, a split in Dante’s party emerged, and he joined the group that resisted Pope Boniface VIII’s meddling in the city’s affairs. This infuriated Boniface, who arranged to have Dante detained while he was in Rome on a diplomatic mission in 1302. Meanwhile, back in Florence, Dante’s White Guelph party lost control of the city to the pro-papacy Black Guelphs, who falsely accused Dante of selling political favors and sentenced him to exile in absentia, ordering him to pay an exorbitant fine. Dante insisted that he was innocent and refused to pay. The Black Guelphs responded with an edict condemning Dante to permanent exile. If you come back to Florence, they warned, you will be burned alive. As I walked through the winterscape pondering Dante’s fate, fire was the last element on my mind. But I could feel the edict’s heat burn inside as the reality of my own exile descended upon me with each snowflake.

Dante would spend the first thirty-four cantos of The Divine Comedy at the degree zero of humanity, Inferno. His guide Virgil had also sung of hell in The Aeneid, of the Trojan hero Aeneas who watched Troy, sacked by the Greeks, burn to the ground, and then abandoned his lover Dido, Queen of Carthage, because the gods had decreed that he must forsake all entanglements to found Rome. At the book’s end, Aeneas confronts his defenseless enemy Turnus, who had killed his friend Pallas. “Go no further down the road of hatred,” Turnus begs him, and for a moment Aeneas relaxes the grip on his sword. But then he drives his sword into Turnus’s breast, burying the hilt in his throat—ira terribilis. Terrible in his rage.

My own grief wasn’t so ferocious. I could feel myself retreating into a cocoon, just like the one my mother made each night when she went to sleep, even in the dead of summer: the door shut, the windows sealed, the blankets pulled over her head. I wondered how she managed not to suffocate. Now I too needed total darkness. I started sleeping in the fetal position like my infant daughter.

One night I dreamed that I was back in the hospital the day of Katherine’s accident, and someone was telling me that she was alive. In critical condition, but alive. I ran out of the room and shouted to my mother and four sisters, “Is it true? Is she okay?” The adrenaline surged through me, my heart nearly exploding out of my chest.

I woke up coated in sweat, a pool of vomit welling in my stomach. It had only been a dream, not a premonition.

I became so frightened of these visions that I tried to prepare for them. Katherine is gone, Katherine is gone, I repeated to myself each night before I went to sleep, just as I had on the day she died, when I slept in a hospital room adjacent to the incubating Isabel, my mother and sister beside me. Yet the reel would not stop. One dream had Katherine and me in a car, her flesh creamy to the touch, a life-breathing pink. I asked her why she had gone, how she could do such a thing, but she just sat there in impenetrable, lunar silence. In another dream we were in a crisis, on the brink of a breakup, a situation we had never remotely approached.

I know what you’re doing, I’m saying to her, you’re trying to split up with me, for my own good, but I just can’t do it. I’m not ready. Please don’t leave me . . .

I’m begging her, just as I had begged the neurosurgeon to save her when he and his team operated on Katherine’s pummeled brain after Isabel was born.

Please, I said to him, do anything. Hook her up to a machine, I don’t care, just keep her alive!

I sat waiting in a small room in Poughkeepsie’s Saint Francis Hospital while they operated. A social worker was there beside me, along with a gray unsmiling nun who muttered something about the power of prayer. I left the room and found the hospital chapel, where I got down on my knees on a yellow polyurethane pew. A jaundiced-looking Jesus hung on a suspended cross.

Please, God. I beg you. Just keep her alive . . .

Then I made the fatal mistake of allowing myself a daydream.

“You gave us quite a scare,” I’m saying, while I hold Katherine’s hand and stroke her bruised body. But she doesn’t answer. As in the dreams that would follow, she can no longer speak.

I left the chapel. The neurosurgeon appeared in tears.

ALL YE WHO ENTER ABANDON HOPE—Dante inscribed these words on the gates of hell. But after Katherine died it wasn’t the lack of hope that was crushing me. It was the memory of what I had lost.

In 2004, Katherine and I began living together in North Carolina, where I had received a one-year fellowship at the National Humanities Center, enabling me to take a leave of absence from my regular teaching duties at Bard and focus on my scholarly research. Katherine had finally said good-bye to acting and given up her life in New York to join me in the South, as I gave up my apartment in Brooklyn with plans to move to the Bard area with Katherine after the fellowship ended. I arrived in North Carolina a few weeks before she did and set up our home while she completed a Pilates training course in New York. On the day she joined me, we went for a walk on Duke’s East Campus, the struggles of living in New York with too little money dissolving in the warm air as we walked past the colonial facades and scattered gazebos. I thought, If only we could stay here forever, extend my one-year fellowship into an eternity. I had recently turned thirty-seven, nearly the same age as Dante when he found himself in the dark wood. Unlike Dante, however, I had little to show for myself—no family of my own, no relationship where I had given of myself completely, until I met Katherine.

Soon after we arrived, I came home on a warm fall afternoon to watch game three of the Red Sox’s divisional playoff against the Yankees. My team was sure to lose, I told myself as I left my car and walked toward our warehouse loft in one of Durham’s former tobacco factories, but I still savored the anticipation of the game. I grew up loving the Boston Red Sox, an experience that taught me we can’t bend the world to our will, that life is in large part learning how to manage disappointment. In 1978, as a sixth grader on my way home from school, I listened as the neighborhood rang with the news: Yaz just homered! The Red Sox took a brief lead in their one-game playoff against the Yankees, only to fritter it away on an improbable home run by the beefcake Bucky Dent in the seventh. The great Carl Yastrzemski himself would seal the inevitable disaster, popping up on the blur of a Goose Gossage fastball that I knew was unhittable even before it skimmed harmlessly off his bat. It would take another twenty-six years for the curse of the Red Sox to lift.

Sitting in our North Carolina home, I watched helplessly as, by the ninth inning and down 4–3, it looked as though fate would hand the star-crossed Red Sox another loss. But then, after a startling rally against the otherwise invincible Mariano Rivera, the Red Sox’s Big Papi Ortiz ended it all in extra innings with a mammoth game-winning home run. The Red Sox went on to win game four of seven as part of their improbable run to their first World Series title in nearly a hundred years.

Three years later, in fall 2007, Katherine and I were husband and wife and awaiting our first child, and the Red Sox were back in the playoffs. As I watched Game Six of their American League Championship against the Cleveland Indians, Katherine spoke on the phone with her mom. Our spacious apartment looked out onto Tivoli’s main street and was perched above a gallery. There was an art opening that evening, so our floor hummed with voices and the shuffling of feet. The streets were filled with people walking to bars and restaurants. With the count three balls and a strike, the Red Sox’s J. D. Drew was offered a fastball down the middle of the plate. With a graceful swing, he sent the ball sailing over the center field wall to give the Red Sox an insurmountable lead.

After Drew’s hit, I walked out onto our porch and stood against the railing with a glass of wine in my hand. It was a pleasant November night, the air moist. The scraping of chairs and scuffling of feet in the gallery below had ceased, as the artists and guests spilled onto the sidewalk below me. Across the street, a vegetarian restaurant and country hotel gave off a warm glow through their frosted windows. The world felt small and ordered. I lived in a two-room loft that stood a short drive from the garden-like campus where I taught great books and a beautiful language, and inside our well-lit home my wife held our future in the perfect dome of her expanding belly. All I needed and wanted was right here in the life my wife and I had built amid the stacks of books and stray tennis rackets. While Katherine talked and J. D. Drew circled, I thought: I have it all. Not in the grand sense—no fame, fortune, or power. But in a good, simple way that was all I could hope for. For the first time, I could feel the sawed-off halves of my life—the family-oriented immigrant warmth I had grown up with and the striving, exciting, but exhausting climb up the academic mountain—coalescing into a whole. The great is the enemy of the good, according to an old Italian proverb, warning us away from chasing an unreachable ideal. Finally, at the age of forty, I was ready to accept the good.

This was October 2007, and the Red Sox eventually took the game and went on to win another World Series—their second in three years.

IN DECEMBER OF 2007, JUST two months after J. D. Drew sent the Red Sox into the World Series, I returned to the same spot where I had sipped my wine and contemplated my happiness. Then it had been a warm and moist early fall night; now snow covered the main street. Isabel slept in my bedroom and my mother was watching Two and a Half Men in the living room. The white desert outside my window brought to mind the words of Dante’s greatest lover: “There is no greater pain / than to remember happy times / in misery.” I was awake, but there was little difference between my daydreams and the dreams I had at night. Everything I imagined was a picture from the past that carried ominous implications for the future. It was like prophecy in reverse, with my greatest sorrow hidden in the folds of what had been my happiest thoughts—in a mind now held in fixed orbit by death.

“Tu pur morrai.” You will die.

That’s what the ladies with the crazy hair said to Dante in his first book, La Vita Nuova (The New Life), an autobiography that he wrote when he was in his twenties (about 1293)—a book about daydreams too terrible for words and the overpowering enigma of first love. A mixture of poetry and prose, the Vita Nuova narrates how Dante came to discover poetry as his life’s calling, and how his love for writing was fueled by his passion for a young Florentine woman named Beatrice Portinari, who also went by her nickname, Bice. Both Dante and Beatrice belonged to Florence’s nobility—but Beatrice’s family stood on a higher ledge than Dante’s, making him jealous.

On May 1, 1274, Beatrice’s father, the wealthy banker Folco Portinari, invited the nine-year-old Dante and his family to a party celebrating the coming of spring. All it took was one look at Beatrice, Dante writes in the Vita Nuova, for him to fall headlong and hopelessly in love. The feeling wracked his body like a deadly airborne virus, nearly killing him:

At that very moment, and I speak the truth, the vital spirit, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that even the most minute veins of my body were strangely affected; and trembling, it spoke these words: Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi.

“Here is a god stronger than I who comes to rule over me.” With these Latin words—the ancient language meant to convey the authority of his new master, Love—Dante proclaims Beatrice’s dominion over his heart. He would not see her again for another nine years, when he was eighteen and she seventeen. When he finally does, the illness returns, reducing him to uncontrollable tears and forcing him into the shameful privacy of his bedroom.

The Vita Nuova describes how these visions of Beatrice continue to inspire a mix of ecstasy and anguish in Dante. One day he falls ill, very ill, afflicted by a painful disease that makes him languish in bed for nine days. On the ninth day, he has a vision that is even more terrifying than his illness: the wild-haired ladies appear in his delirium, announcing, “Tu pur morrai.”

One even tells him that he is already dead. Another says to him that Beatrice, his miraculous lady, has departed from this world.

The delirium breaks. He realizes it was all a dream: Beatrice still lives. But not for long. The vision was actually a premonition. They may have been wearing sumptuous robes, Dante realizes, but the women with the disheveled hair were witches.

Terrified of my own daydreams and desperate for help, I left the chilled balcony and phoned the chaplain whom I had encountered my first snowy day in the Underworld.

A FEW DAYS AFTER I called the chaplain, she and I met at a coffee shop near campus in the village of Red Hook.

An ordained minister, Georgia was a curly-haired woman in her fifties, with gentle eyes and small shoulders that sat incongruously on a large lower frame. She lived just up the road from my apartment. I often saw her out walking and would occasionally run into her at the Tivoli library. During the memorial service for Katherine at Bard she had been a calm, dignified presence, and when I saw her walking in the snow I felt as though she had been sent to help me.

I told her that I had been trying to connect with God. I had been reading the Bible, annotating the margins of the edition I had been given for my Catholic confirmation. I tried to identify with Job, but he was too old, his suffering impossibly extravagant. I tried to pray, I told Georgia, even got down on my knees on the hardwood floor of my apartment, just as I was taught to do as a child—just as I had in the yellow chapel of St. Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie as the neurosurgeons worked on Katherine’s traumatized brain. Dante believed that prayer expedited your way through Purgatory to Paradise, with hundreds of years lopped off in a single fervent supplication. Countless letters were arriving, from my friends, Katherine’s friends, our families, my colleagues, people I grew up with, long-lost connections. I even received consoling words from Leila Cooper, a playmate from my childhood and the first girl I ever had a crush on. The mother of one of my students, a woman I had never met, wrote to say that I was in her prayers. During the funeral in Detroit, hundreds of my father-in-law’s friends told me that they were praying for me. I would instinctively answer: pray for Isabel. But my own praying felt too staged to be genuine.

I confessed my guilt to Georgia. I knew it was irrational, but I somehow felt responsible for my wife’s death. I regretted that I wasn’t with her that morning. And, although I had tried to take good care of Katherine, I could not shake the feeling that I had failed to protect her.

“A better man would not have pushed Katherine so hard to succeed in school, to bring in extra money, right?” I asked.

“You’re a victim, not a culprit,” she answered.

She said that when someone God loves dies, he too feels unbearable sorrow. He watched His own son die, she said, sensing that I was neither a natural believer nor a committed atheist. She saw me for what I was: someone who hates confrontation and seeks the middle way, a person who had never professed his faith explicitly and categorically. I had always treated religion like a buffet—a little prayer here, a bit of compassion there, a sampling of cosmic love to top off the meal. But I knew that real faith meant choices, which required admitting what you did not believe in as much as what you did believe. In a realm calling for decisive feeling, I was hedging my spiritual bets. I was a diplomat even with faith.

Only the terror of my wife’s death could bring me to my knees in prayer. But that didn’t bother Georgia. She knew I needed to hear the words of a believer. By the end of our coffee, she was telling me about her favorite Italian films. We made plans to meet again soon.

But that would be our last conversation. I had revealed my darkest thoughts because she was a stranger, but this also stopped me from telling her more. For that, I would have to find someone I shared a history with, someone familiar. Like the man I had leaned against in Piazza Santa Croce. Ever since that night in Florence, I had turned to Dante with demanding questions, none more so than the ones I was now facing. Could I love Katherine now that her body was gone? I wondered. The question reminded me of a phrase that haunted me: There is no love that is not physical. I had encountered the words in a reading long ago whose source I no longer remembered, and its mysterious wisdom had remained lodged in my brain. Dante did not write it, but his poetry led me back to those words. For he had done the unthinkable: he made his most erotic lover a woman without a body.

THE VISIONS OF LOVE THAT terrified Dante in the Vita Nuova returned when he began his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, about ten years later. Unlike most artists and writers in his Christian world, Dante understood that the sinners in hell and the saints in heaven burn with an equal amount of love. The difference between these two groups was not in the intensity of love’s flames but in what kindled them. And in hell, passion’s fire found an especially dry, combustible source in the heart of Francesca da Rimini.

Before Dante’s imagination got hold of her, Francesca had been mentioned only once in a written source: a line in her father’s will. Dante crafted her story out of legend, hearsay, and gossip. He didn’t exactly make her up—but his poetry immortalized her. He did so around 1305, when he started to write The Divine Comedy after a few years wandering around Tuscany, trying to get back to Florence—living in the past and incapable of imagining a life outside of Florence. Once he finally accepted that he was never going to make it back, he embraced his own exile and the new perspective it offered. He reignited his imagination with a poetic fire that blazed with Francesca’s love for Paolo.

Francesca was born in 1255, ten years before Dante. She was the daughter of Guido da Polenta, the ruler of Ravenna, a small city on the Adriatic with close ties to the Byzantine Empire. As the daughter of her city’s first family, she enjoyed all the status and wealth a young woman could hope for. But as a thinking and feeling creature, Francesca endured nothing but obstacles. Her patriarchal society didn’t allow her to apply her talents to a career or calling. Worst of all, in matters of the heart she had to follow orders, not her heart.

The courtly love ethos of her time separated love from marriage: since most unions among the wealthy classes were based on dowries and social standing, the marital bed was the last place to look for passion. To love someone, it was understood by the educated classes, meant to worship from afar and to suffer. You could never possess your lover. But as you surrendered to the magnetic attractions of the one you loved—those virtues that actual sexual contact would only sully—your heartbroken spirit soared with the angels.

Francesca’s father, Guido, brokered a marriage between her and Giovanni Malatesta, scion of a rival family. In uniting his daughter with the enemy, the pragmatic Guido aimed to bring peace to his people. His plan worked—as long as Francesca paid the price. Giovanni and Francesca were a grinding mismatch. She was beautiful; his nickname was Gianciotto, John the Lame, a reference to his disfigured body. Worse still, Francesca was a dreamer, easily enraptured by romantic sentiments and melodious turns of phrase. The soldierly Gianciotto would have scorned such reverie.

Francesca came of age during a poetic movement called the Dolce Stil Novo (Sweet New Style). For these poets, love wasn’t an emotional state. It was an illness that crippled the body and clouded the mind. Sospiri, sighs. Sbigottito, bewildered. Dolente, suffering. Paura, fear. Francesca encountered these Sweet New Style words each time she turned the page and read of love. This language of desire filled her thoughts that fateful day in 1275 when she, a bride of twenty, first set eyes on Paolo—Gianciotto’s handsome younger brother.

One of Dante’s most astute readers, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, said that it takes a modern novel hundreds of pages to lay bare a character’s soul, but Dante needs only a few lines. Borges must have been thinking of Francesca. No character enters The Divine Comedy as magnificently. In Inferno 5, Dante sees a couple in the distance who seem to float on the air, impervious to the gale-force winds that punish the lustful. Dante begs Virgil to speak to these windswept lovers, who approach him like doves. The woman speaks, thanking Dante for his invitation, calling him an animal grazïoso. Literally: gracious animal. What could be more flattering?

She tells Dante she was born on the shores of the Po River, and asks him the line that would come to haunt me: is there anything more horrible than remembering happy times in times of misery? Meanwhile, her beautiful partner Paolo stands beside her in total silence, streaming tears. Francesca even recites a poem for Dante: Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende. Love, which is quick to claim the gentle heart. As we listen to her speak, we begin to understand that Francesca’s “love” isn’t such a lofty emotion after all. It’s a bona fide Sweet New Style sickness. She describes how one day she and Paolo were reading King Arthur’s tales, and they came across the passage where Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, gives the knight Lancelot a fateful, adulterous kiss. The scene inspires her and Paolo to do the same:

This man, who will never be parted from me,

kissed me on my mouth all trembling . . .

That day we read no further . . .

La bocca mi basciò tutto tremante, Francesca says, the quivering Paolo kisses her right on the lips. That’s as close to medieval erotica as we’re likely to get. The seemingly perfect, polite Francesca utters words that would never leave the mouth of a well-bred lady. What’s more, she is unrepentant: in Dante’s hell, the sinners would have you believe that it’s never their fault—it’s always someone else’s.

In a tour de force of showing over telling, Dante gives Francesca just enough verbal rope to hang herself.

Francesca’s plight has confounded readers for centuries. How could Dante punish her for doing only what comes naturally—for pursuing what is often best in us, the part that loses itself in love? To punish lust is one thing—but shouldn’t true love earn a divine pass? In condemning Francesca, many readers believe, Dante is attacking love. A kindred soul of the lustful in Inferno 5, the poet Byron became so obsessed with Francesca that he made a pilgrimage to Rimini looking for traces of her. “But tell me, in the season of sweet sighs, / By what and how thy love to passion rose,” he writes in his gorgeous translation of Dante’s words to Francesca. You can feel Francesca’s breath on his shoulders as he writes. Modern poetry’s love god meets Dante’s greatest lover.

Locked forever in their love, Francesca and Paolo are an indivisible pair. But their reward is damnation. Even worse, these lovers lack the one thing that makes passion possible: the body. They float through the afterlife like two weeping doves—condemned to a love that is not physical. Trying to love each other without a body.

Trattando, Dante would write, l’ombre come cosa salda.

Treating shades as solid things.

That’s a challenge of life in the Underworld: accepting that the beloved ghost you burn for is no longer flesh and blood. And accepting that your conversation with the dead is actually a monologue, a love letter never to reach its destination.

ONE WEEK AFTER ISABEL’S BIRTH, I brought her home from the hospital with my sisters, Margaret, Mary, Rose, and Tina. We drove in separate cars, a Calabrian funeral procession incongruously transporting a new life. On the way back we went to lunch at a local diner, where I ordered the Cobb salad, just as I had many times with Katherine. The day was supposed to have been the happiest of our life. Instead, I was sitting in a dingy restaurant with my four sisters, eating wilted leaves. At home waiting was not my beautiful wife, but my seventy-six-year-old Calabrian mother, Yolanda—who now kept her false teeth in an empty glass on the bathroom sink, in the spot where Katherine had left her Deruta mug.

After her eight days in the neonatal unit, Isabel now weighed four pounds and seven ounces.

“She’s ready to go now,” the chief pediatrician had told me the day before.

I stared at him speechless.

“But . . .” I finally muttered, “wouldn’t she be safer here?” I thought of all the whirring and beeping machines surrounding Isabel with antiseptic indifference and knew, in my terrified heart, the answer.

“The hospital’s no place for healthy babies,” he said smiling. “Your daughter’s fine.”

Although she was six weeks premature, Isabel had indeed faced down all the dangers posed by her extraordinary birth—first and foremost, the impact of the accident. The paramedics found Katherine hunched over her belly as if to protect her child. In the transition from the womb to the world, Isabel was denied oxygen as Katherine’s brain shut down, and the doctors were concerned that this might affect the baby’s own developing brain. But again, Isabel came through with surprising normalcy. After her revival through intubation, she was voracious, alert, breathing—everything that a newborn baby should be, although in a tiny package. Still, the idea of bringing her home frightened me. She was no bigger than a loaf of bread, and I didn’t know the first thing about caring for a baby—let alone one that weighed less than five pounds. The head nurse could sense my naked fear. She took extra time to detail all the things I would need to do while Isabel was under my care, but the cascading items on her list overwhelmed me. It was impossible for me to concentrate. I made her repeat the routines several times the morning that we left, a cold December day whose air, I imagined, would shock the hard-won equilibrium of Isabel’s vital signs. Bundling her in extra layers of heavy blanket, I said good-bye to her team of doctors and nurses and made my way to the car park abutting Vassar Brothers Hospital, which stood two miles from Saint Francis Hospital, where Isabel had been born and her mother died.

And then we went home.

Katherine and I had set up Isabel’s crib in our bedroom. We had wanted her sex to be a surprise, so there was no predominance of either blue or pink in the piles of baby clothes we had amassed. A few days before the accident, my family gave Katherine a baby shower in Rhode Island over the Thanksgiving holiday, lavishing us with boxes of linens, bottles, and bibs that were now stacked over my volumes of Petrarch and Leopardi.

Back from the diner, I laid Isabel down gently on a blue and white blanket that my aged neighbor, Carmela DeSantis, had given to my mother to celebrate my birth. My daughter lay sleeping on her mother’s side of the bed. The joy of hearing Isabel’s newborn breath struggled to break through the grief that was pulling all my emotions into a vacuum, leaving me numb and empty—beyond love. I wanted to be elated, to feel connected to my child. But a wrecking ball had smashed the beams connecting me to my natural world, crushing the bond between father and daughter into the same pile of rubble that was filled with the other remains of my life with Katherine. I took Isabel’s tiny hand in my own. Even in miniature, I could see the tapering outline of Katherine’s long elegant fingers. Isabel had my clump of dark hair and full features on the fair skin she had inherited from her mother—a chiaroscuro baby mixing shadow and light.

“They’ll probably turn brown,” a nurse in the neonatal unit had told me, pointing to Isabel’s blue eyes, and I imagined how, soon enough, all vestiges of her mother would fade from this Italianate child. But there was a fine shape to the head that was Katherine’s and not mine, and her slender, elongated body was also a miniaturized form of her mother’s. I felt a rational love for the hand I held and stroked, but nothing instinctual and visceral. I was a ghost haunting what had been my own life.

Later that day, my sisters had to return to their husbands and jobs, while my mother remained in Tivoli with Isabel and me. From that day forward my mom did the bulk of the diaper changing, bottle feeding, babysitting, and other double-barreled chores that go into child care. That left me time to walk in the snow and mark up my dog-eared edition of The Divine Comedy, which I had taken to reading aloud to myself, the poem’s soothing sounds one of the few things that could calm me. Meanwhile, my colleagues taught my classes for me while I went on leave for the final few weeks of the semester.

“Just leave Isabel with us and pick her up when she’s sixteen,” my sister Margaret joked before returning to Rhode Island. She was only partly kidding. Katherine had made it clear to me that she wanted to be a stay-at-home mother, while I would roam free to hunt my academic woolly mammoths. Now I was about to relinquish Katherine’s maternal role to a phalanx of capable Calabrian matrons: my sisters commandeered by generalissima Yolanda Luzzi. She had six children and, with Isabel, thirteen grandchildren. Now, at the age of seventy-six, she was becoming a mother once again.

After a month of this new routine, classes ended for the holiday break. I made a second fateful decision that followed the grief-struck logic of my earlier decision to enlist my family in raising Isabel: I would move back to Rhode Island with my mom and Isabel and make our base there, while coming to Bard and Tivoli only on the few days each week I needed to teach, Tuesday to Thursday, a commute of roughly 175 miles each way. When I told my college president my plan, he had one word for it: harebrained. I also asked him that day if he believed in the eternal life of the soul. I was now anguishing over this question to which I had never given a second thought before.

The idea that Katherine was utterly and completely no more, in spirit as well as in flesh, tormented me after I saw her body for the last time at her funeral in Detroit, when I was shown her open casket before the mass in her parents’ church. I stood in the room with her mother and father as well as her siblings, all of us there to say our final good-byes. My sleek wife was now puffy and embalmed, all the definition gone from her features. I tried desperately to find her somewhere in there, to feel some communion as I held her hand and caressed her skin for the last time. But her forehead was as cold as marble when I kissed it, and I swore to her that I would protect and nurture our daughter, and that she, Katherine, would be a living presence for our little girl. But there was nothing left of the person I had loved in that body—that corpse in a red dress. If Katherine was anywhere in this universe, it had to be in some other form.

The fog of grief had descended on me, and I couldn’t see the sense of my college president’s words when he called my plan harebrained. I needed only to feel comforted by my family’s love for me and our collective love for my new daughter. So, on December 23, 2007, I packed up my Tivoli apartment and drove with Isabel and my mother back to my hometown.

“You will leave behind everything you love.” During Dante’s exile, a scholar from Bologna offered him the title of poet laureate, but he respectfully declined. Only if one day Florence asks me back as its honored poet, he said, then I’ll accept and return victorious to my sheepfold, my bello ovile.

I had returned to the sheepfold of my childhood, but the soft L sounds of Dante’s twin words could not calm my racing heart, no matter how many times I read aloud the passage about his exile.

THERE IS NO LOVE THAT IS NOT PHYSICAL.

You learn this when you’re faced with the sudden death of your beloved.

From the time that the nine-year-old Dante first laid eyes on an eight-year-old Florentine girl named Beatrice Portinari in 1274, you can just imagine him holding the syllables of her nickname on his tongue: BEE-chay. When he saw her again, nine years later, Bice had become a woman. In all likelihood, he had seen her in the interim, but the book he wrote about their unusual love story, the Vita Nuova, needed something more symbolic to drive the narrative. So Beatrice became her full name, the “thrice-blessed one”—just like the Trinity, the holy number three that, when squared, gave Dante the magical number nine.

When Dante was eighteen, he had a Francesca da Rimini moment: Beatrice came to him in a dream, naked except for a crimson and white cloth draped around her. She was sleeping, carried in the arms of the God of Love. The imposing figure, who went by his Latin name Amor, was brandishing something in flames. He announced to Dante: Vide cor tuum. Behold your heart. Then Amor woke up the sleeping Beatrice, who proceeded to eat the burning heart. It was Dante’s.

This vision of the burning heart incited Dante to write a sonnet. He circulated it among the leading poets of Florence, none of whom could understand it (one, a doctor, told Dante to wash his testicles in cold water to calm himself). There was one who got it, however: Guido Cavalcanti, like Beatrice a richer and better-connected Florentine whom Dante regarded with a mixture of adoration and jealousy. Guido was the unofficial leader of the Sweet New Style, the poetic movement that spoke of love as a lacerating illness that elevated the soul but destroyed the body. Guido immediately responded with a sonnet of his own to Dante: “I think that you beheld all goodness,” he wrote of Dante’s terrifying vision.

Guido’s poem made it official: Dante was now accepted into the Sweet New Style, beginning his career as a Florentine poet.

But Dante’s Beatrice, unlike other Sweet New Style muses, actually had a personality. She was no mere object of worship—someone lovely to look at but impossible to know. When Beatrice saw Dante paying too much attention to his donna-schermo, the “screen lady” whom he pretended to love so as to hide his feelings for Beatrice, she refused to greet him in the street. No other Sweet New Style woman would have shamed her poet like this. Dante was different from his fellow poets in other ways. He addressed a poem about Beatrice to Donne ch’avete intelletto di amore, “Ladies who have knowledge of love,” choosing female readers over the typical male audience. He saw women as more than just beautiful bodies.

Then, at the center of the Vita Nuova, the beautiful witch-ladies with the crazy hair tell Dante that he too will die, and that Beatrice has gone to the other side. He woke up to find it was all a dream. Or was it? Soon after his vision, Dante writes, Beatrice dies. Florence is now a widower; Dante is a widower—to a woman who was never his wife. And indeed, the real-life Beatrice Portinari died on June 8, 1290, at age twenty-four.

The strangest thing in the Vita Nuova, perhaps in all of Dante’s career, happens next. Instead of expressing his grief, he writes that when Beatrice died, the heavens aligned in a symbol of perfect holiness. In his sadness, he tried to transform Beatrice into one of those angelic, interchangeable, and ultimately forgettable, Sweet New Style muses. After all, had his fellow poets faced her death, they would have moved on quickly to another muse and found another body to love once Beatrice’s was gone.

Or maybe idealizing her was a survival mechanism for Dante, a reflexive turn to some familiar and reassuring way of explaining Beatrice’s devastating loss.

Either way, the plan breaks down. Dante’s grief is unrelenting, and he mopes around the city of Florence, too distracted to write poetry, too heartbroken to hide his sorrow. His fellow poets, especially Cavalcanti, tell him basta, enough is enough: excessive mourning is unnatural; even worse, it’s vulgar. Volgare. Time to move on. Write about another woman, they tell him. Find another body to love.

We read in the Vita Nuova that, a year after Beatrice’s death, Dante finds himself in the center of Florence among the city’s leading citizens. I picture him sitting with a paintbrush, drawing an angel, oblivious to the commotion in the piazza.

“Someone was with me just now,” he tells a passerby who stops to look at his picture, “that’s why I was so deep in thought.”

Then I see him pick up his brush and walk away—an hour with the angels is all he can take.

Soon afterward, in the midst of his drawing and despair, he sees a pretty face and all the promise it holds. She takes pity on Dante, he reads it in her eyes and wonders: maybe she can replace Beatrice. His poetry takes aim at her, his verses bursting with grateful tears. This donna gentile, gentle lady, was looking at Dante from a window above him, beckoning him to fall in love again. Dante understood that the logical, even natural thing to do would be to give himself over to this gentle lady and leave Beatrice to her early, unfortunate grave. Let her die in peace. Then he has a vision, a miraculous vision. Beatrice appears to him dressed in that same crimson and white cloth that draped her figure when she devoured Dante’s burning heart. Suddenly, Dante is riven with shame. How could he have even considered taking up with the beautiful lady in the window? No, he would devote his feelings—and his poetry—to the blessed Beatrice. The Vita Nuova ends with Dante promising silence: he will only write again when he is capable of describing Beatrice in a fitting way. First, he says, he must study.

Long study and great love—the same words that would bring Dante to Virgil in the dark wood, and that would bring me to Dante in my time of greatest woe.

JUST BEFORE I RETURNED TO Rhode Island, my editor at the university press that was about to publish my first book asked me if I could handle editing the final proofs of my manuscript. The book, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, was a study of the myth of Italy and its pull on foreign exiles such as Byron, that worshiper of Francesca da Rimini. It had taken me ten years to write the book, ever since I began my dissertation in the cement and steel of a library carrel filled with hundreds of books on Dante when I was a graduate student. I said yes to my editor. I would let nothing derail my career—that was the gauntlet I threw in the face of tragedy.

Back in Westerly, Rhode Island, with Isabel and my mother, I spent hours alone each day with the page proofs in an apartment I had rented a few minutes’ drive from my mom’s, checking citations, eliminating adverbs, and shortening footnotes. The mechanical work gave me the thing I desperately needed: solitude. Grinding away on my manuscript with pencil and eraser, vetting my words so meticulously that it must have shocked even my editor, I squirreled myself away for hours at a stretch. Meanwhile, I had outsourced the one job that could have given me a new home: being a father to Isabel.

In her new Westerly home, Isabel would sleep with her arms flung backward and her lips slightly open, a pose of absolute surrender to an unknown world. Like all babies, she was helpless, and yet she did not look like other babies, with that girlish fineness to her features and searching gaze. I don’t know what, if anything, she was looking for, and I couldn’t help but trace her sight line out toward Katherine, the natural mother she had been separated from forever. My daughter’s baby smell, its mix of powder, formula, and new skin, would melt me, and I was astonished by her newborn beauty. But my thoughts were too busy following Isabel’s gaze into Katherine’s absence for any of these sights, smells, and sounds to break grief’s hermetic seal.

No matter how many diapers I changed, or how much baby spittle fell on my collar, I didn’t feel like a real dad. Part of me was elsewhere. Obsessed with my work. Dreaming of a new home. Speaking with the dead. Kicking at the sandy beaches of my Rhode Island exile. And sounding Dante’s rhyming tercets over and over, as if they were a charm to ward off evil spirits.

After editing all day, I would return to my mother’s house and play with Isabel for a while before my mom fed her and got her ready for bed. Then, after reading or watching television, I would go to sleep in my high school bed across the hall from my daughter’s room. Katherine’s death had sent me into the dark wood, a new dimension of life that I had never imagined existed. And now, having fallen into that other life, I had splintered off into the most bizarre realm of all: my childhood, which I was reinhabiting as a forty-year-old. I knew that divorce and depression could send grown men back in broken heaps to the homes they had grown up in. I did not expect as much from death. But there I was, watching Hannity and Colmes on Fox, in my pajamas and on my mother’s rust-colored sofa, my feet on her red shag carpeting, the stillness of her dead-end street as impenetrable as the fog that had descended upon me. I was supposed to be taking care of a baby, but now I needed to be taken care of, and I had returned to the safest place I knew.

At around three a.m. Isabel’s cries would often echo throughout the hallway. I would awake to them, prop my head against the pillow for a moment, and then pad across the hallway to where my mother would already be holding Isabel in her arms.

“Lassa jera, ci penzo io,” she would say as I loitered by the crib. “Leave her be, I’ll take care of it.” Usually I would demur, sliding past my mother and Isabel and retreating to my bed and fetal sleep.

But one night, for no reason other than the faint call of that same instinct that had otherwise abandoned me, I awoke with a start as Isabel’s sobs sent me running to the crib.

“Dai, lascia stare, ci penso io,” I answered in standard Italian to her Calabrian dialect. “Let go please, I’ve got her.”

My mother scurried off, half in worry that I would drop or mishandle or fail to quiet Isabel, half that I was losing precious sleep when I needed to get my strength back. Ours was not a house where grown men held crying babies at night.

As I held the chaos of my hysterical baby in the dead of that winter night, I imagined the impact between Katherine’s jeep and the oncoming van, the crunching of metal and explosion of debris along the narrow country road. Isabel’s actual screams merged with Katherine’s imaginary ones, signaling to me that the world was fundamentally a place of disorder and violence. It was a constant reminder that I hadn’t been able to save my wife, that I might not be able to protect my daughter. The ill-fated turns, the undertows, the black ice, the live wires—they were everywhere.

Seven hundred years earlier, in the throes of his doomed youthful love for Beatrice, Dante too sensed the fragility of life when he dreamed of the ladies with wild hair and their menacing words. Dante intuited his vision as an omen, a sign that his love for Beatrice was star-crossed. Now that the heavens had indeed misaligned in my own life I could not get Dante’s fateful syllables with their rolling R’s out of my head. Tu pur morrai.

Isabel wasn’t crying out of fear or for her mother at three a.m. But I heard them as fear or longing. My rational mind understood that she blessedly knew nothing of these sentiments, yet her cries gave voice to my own anguish. I was in charge of protecting her, but it was my mother who spent her days holding my daughter in her arms. Grief had compromised my sense of other people’s needs, even my daughter’s—the bundle of life I was now cradling and comforting, our two hearts pounding as we clung to each other, both of us desperate for the human touch as we rode the arrow shot by exile’s bow, neither of us knowing if and where it would ever land.