In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love. Joseph Luzzi

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СКАЧАТЬ just aim for something steady,” my typical harangue would go, “something more than a few hours of Pilates here and there.”

      Shortly after moving to North Carolina, we went shopping on a gorgeous September day. We separated for a bit and made plans to meet at the car. A half hour after our appointed time, Katherine bounced over, apologizing for being late, but happily clutching a bag full of expensive cosmetics. My worry at her lateness turned to anger and I started shouting at her, asking where she’d been and why she hadn’t answered my calls. I said that we couldn’t afford the two hundred dollars of facial creams and exfoliants, that she had to change her ways and handle money better.

      “You need to make some instead of just spending it!” I cried.

      She burst into tears. I had struck a nerve in Katherine much deeper than her questionable home economics. Ever since renouncing acting, she had been trying to recover from the loss of her youthful dreams. Now, in her thirties, she feared that what she imagined to be her greatest gift, her beauty, which she had relied upon her entire life, would one day fade. The cosmetics were a cry for help—a plea I mistook for vanity. Instead of intuiting her needs, I made it about my fears of not being able to provide fully for her and our family. Katherine needed a loving word, and instead I played the part of the perfect brute, ruining a beautiful sunny day just as we were starting our life together.

      Katherine was a dreamer—we both were, except that, unlike mine, her dreams weren’t tethered to the icy logic of credentials and connections. She lived in the moment, a place I rarely visited. This is why I had fallen in love with her. This is also why our otherwise happy relationship could plague me with worry about our future together.

      My decision that first night in the hospital to move back “home”—I still used the word to describe my hometown of Westerly, even though I hadn’t truly lived there since high school—was partly because Katherine and I had felt so comfortable there as a couple. When she spent time with my family, Katherine experienced none of the tension and insecurity that rankled her when she was with my colleagues and academic friends. Loving Katherine had enabled me to reconnect to the person that I had been when I was growing up. I had spent years trying to smother my Rhode Island accent (“How fah from the pahk ah we?”). But when I had a bit to drink, or when I woke up first thing in the morning, the R would instinctively fade into H. I was a Luzzi, after all, Westerly High class of ’85, no matter how far I traveled away from the South County coast or how many degrees I collected. To understand how far I had tried to run from Westerly before circling back, all you had to do was ask my name. For years I had been pronouncing it differently from my family, preferring the Italianized “LOO-tsie” to their staunchly American “luz-zy” (rhymes with “fuz-zy”). As they were trying to assimilate to their new American life, I insisted on reclaiming legendary Calabria, looking for an Italianate pronunciation to distinguish myself. On paper, I had the same name as my mother and sisters—but I had taken to announcing it differently to the world, to show how much distance I had placed between my point of origin and myself.

      A FEW WEEKS AFTER MOVING to Westerly I idled in the parking lot of a downtown bookstore, listening to an audiobook of Homer’s Odyssey, with the gravelly voice of Ian McKellen as Odysseus. I needed stories to get me through the long days in my hometown. I drove around for hours with the CD playing, skirting the coast and avoiding my mother, my sisters, and the fortress they were building around Isabel. I parked by the beaches and stopped to look out into the surf, listening to McKellen narrate how Odysseus negotiated one obstacle after another on his way back to Ithaca from the Trojan war. A seagull landed near my car and gutted a crab; Odysseus wandered while his wife, Penelope, waited, spinning wool and fending off suitors. Katherine had only been gone a few months, and I was back in the Calabrian bosom that I had left behind as a teenager, when I was determined to leave my Italian American immigrant world and never return. I was also back to teaching at Bard, doing all I could to remain connected to the college community that had closed ranks around me, just as my family had, to help me make it through the Underworld in one piece. McKellen continued his tale of Odysseus’s winding journey, splitting the waves of the Aegean and plowing its foam as he hurried in the direction of a home that had been entirely transformed, crowded with gluttonous and conniving suitors hoping to win Penelope’s hand.

      “The queenly nymph [Calypso] sought out the great Odysseus,” McKellen spoke, “and found him there on the headland, sitting, still, / weeping, his eyes never dry, his sweet life flowing away / with the tears he wept for his foiled journey home.”

      Odysseus looked out to sea by Calypso’s cave, tears streaming from him like summer rain over the Aegean. Calypso was a stunning sea nymph who had taken Odysseus prisoner and fallen in love with him, fulfilling his every desire but one: the irrepressible need he felt to return to his homeland. I had made it back to Westerly, my Ithaca. But when I drove along the coast, walked through the historic downtown, and ran along the beach, I felt as invisible as one of Dante’s shades in the afterworld. I wasn’t returning or revisiting the world of my childhood; I was haunting it.

      I sat in my car for another hour, waiting for Odysseus’s ship to make landfall. Meanwhile, the seagull abandoned the crab as the purple and orange dusk spread over the winter ocean, reminding me that it was time to return to Batterson Avenue, where my mother was warming bottles of Similac formula for Isabel’s dinner.

      WE MEET DANTE’S ULISSE—FOR ULYSSES, the Roman form of Homer’s Greek hero Odysseus—in Malebolge, a moral black hole consisting of ten concentric ditches toward the bottom of Inferno. According to Dante, the farther you get from God’s love, the colder it gets, so the pit of Inferno is all ice. And the deeper one goes into Dante’s hell, the smarter the sinners. In Malebolge, the greatest holding pit of human evil in the universe, the sin of fraud is punished. The previous sins in hell, including the lust of Paolo and Francesca, were failures of will, as the body’s appetites overwhelmed the mind that was supposed to constrain them. But in Malebolge the sinners abuse a greater gift than the body: here the intellect has turned sour.

      Throughout The Divine Comedy, Dante engages in intense conversations with his characters, from the sinners in hell to the blessed in heaven. Most everyone he meets, including the eloquent chatterbox Francesca da Rimini, talks Dante’s ear off, as they desperately recount how they had been wronged or how they had been saved. Everyone except Ulysses. He is unapproachable. Transformed into a tongue of flame, he hisses words at a starstruck Dante, who listens but doesn’t dare speak back, heeding Virgil’s words that the great Greek hero might hold him in scorn.

      In Homer’s epic telling, Odysseus endured ten years of war in Troy, then ten years of wandering through the wine-dark waters separating him from his island of Ithaca and his wife, Penelope. But nothing could stop him from returning home. He ran a spike through the eye of the drunken Cyclops; he stopped his ears with wax against the song of the Sirens; he rescued his crew from the seductive drug of forgetfulness in the Land of the Lotus-eaters; he cried an Aegean Sea of protest against Calypso and her enticements. Homer’s Odysseus embodies devotion to home; Dante’s Ulysses is as restless as his flaming tongue, as he describes the overwhelming sense of displacement he felt upon returning to Ithaca:

      neither fondness for my son, nor devotion

      to my old father, nor the love I owed

      Penelope that would have contented her,

      could overcome the lust

      I felt inside to become an expert

      on the world’s vices and its virtues.

      Nothing can calm Ulysses’ yearning soul: he burns to return to the high seas and his wanderer’s life. He convenes a meeting with his former comrades, asking them to join him in leaving Ithaca and setting sail for new adventures.

      Remember, СКАЧАТЬ