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

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СКАЧАТЬ succumb to his magical words and rush to join him at sea. But their joy soon turns to fright. Within a fortnight, a terrible storm strikes their vessel. No honeyed words can save them now. The sea closes over them—“com’ altrui piacque,” Dante writes, “as pleased another,” implying that the heavens were not on Ulysses’ side.

      Francesca made Dante wonder: how do you love a person without a body—when you are so heartbroken that you can’t imagine her alive anymore? Ulysses’ lesson is even more bitter: once you lose your former life—to use that wooden term—you can never get it back. In a complete reversal of Homer, Dante sends Ulysses back to sea after he has returned home—because the home he finds back in Ithaca is no longer home.

      AS I GAZED OUT TO the Atlantic and listened to McKellen narrate the Odyssey, I pictured Dante’s Ulysses coming home to Ithaca and created my own version of the story, just as Dante had. In my telling, Ulysses’ tale went like this:

      In the twenty years since he had left his wife, Ulysses had known other women and he had wept a sea of tears. Yet he had forsaken all of them, human and divine, for this very moment. He had made it back to the home he was born in. He was standing in his bedroom—the place where he had left the things of childhood and later slept as a man. His hair stood on end. Nothing had changed: the rooms were filled with everything he had left behind. And there it was, in the center of the room, the bed on a platform of a massive oak tree trunk. He took the sheets in his arms: they smelled of sandalwood and soap.

      He smelled his wife on the sheets, for the first time in twenty years. His pulse raced: they were finally together in the same house, and within hours he would smell her flesh and touch her skin. He would make love to the wife who had become a woman without a body—a perfect, remote shadow in his dreams and daydreams.

      He had killed countless rivals (and was about to slaughter his wife’s suitors), had matched wits with the most brilliant, and crossed swords with the most ferocious. He had lived in Calypso’s cave for seven years, captive to a jealous lover who provided him with everything he could ever hope for, but did not want. Amid the nymphs wreathed in seaweed, the suckling pigs, and the writhing dancers, he would wander to a clump of rocks that jutted out into the sea. And he would weep, rivers of tears that soaked his tunic and splashed against the stone. All the while, he stared in the direction of the house that smelled of sandalwood and soap.

      Now he had made it home.

      The sandalwood and soap filled his body, first with sweetness.

      Then with nausea.

      Back in my own childhood home after twenty years—falling asleep on my mom’s living room sofa while Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes duked it out over gun control and health care—I could feel Ulysses’ nausea in the pit of my stomach.

      Nausea: that’s the sensation Dante used to describe his exile, which he said teaches you “come sa di sale / lo pane altrui”—“how salty is the taste / of another man’s bread.” He wasn’t waxing metaphorical: they have made bread without salt in Florence from Dante’s time until today, and nothing reminds a Florentine more of home than this desalinated staple.

      A FEW MONTHS INTO MY stay in Westerly, I returned to Katherine’s hometown outside Detroit to celebrate her father’s retirement from the bench. The day I arrived, her parents and I drove to the cemetery on a rainy day similar to the one when we had buried Katherine months earlier. That night, her father gave his farewell speech to hundreds of power brokers at the Oakland Hills Country Club, a site that has hosted the U.S. Open golf championships. He ended his talk by clapping for the audience, saying that the applause should be for them, not him, and many cried, partly because they were inspired by his words, partly because of the pity they felt for him, for me seated beside him, and for Isabel back in Rhode Island with her nonna. I looked around the table as he spoke. Katherine’s mother had aged beyond recognition. More than anyone else, she could not accept what happened. At first, she didn’t react to the news. At the hospital in Poughkeepsie the day after Katherine died she showed up making small talk, even cracking jokes.

      “I can’t believe that kid is gone,” she kept repeating, but there were no tears, only a faraway look in her eyes. We all knew it wasn’t because she didn’t care—it was because she cared too much. A husband who loses his wife may one day have the chance to rebuild, perhaps even get a second chance at happiness. A parent gets no such reprieve. The sight of Katherine’s parents standing by their daughter’s grave brought to mind Virgil’s description of the families in the Underworld, harrowing words that Dante knew by heart:

      mothers and grown men and ghosts of great-souled heroes,

      their bodies stripped of life, and boys and unwed girls

      and sons laid on the pyre before their parents’ eyes.

      I felt no connection to the mossy patch where Katherine’s body lay in Royal Oak Cemetery. The facticity—now there’s an ugly word—of death was all I found. My tears didn’t even feel genuine. I knew I was supposed to cry and so, bravo ragazzo, clever boy, that I was, I played the part of the grieving husband to a T. Her parents—fine, broken people who would never recover, who had abandoned all hope—also wept, streaming frightening tears and groans that seemed to emanate, raw and animal-like, from the pit of their stomachs. Their daughter had been returned to her people. But this expanse of stones, flags, and flowers meant nothing to me. I was still numb from the shock of Katherine’s sudden death. She was like a phantom limb, the pain of something not there. Worse still, guilt ravaged my insides, as I felt as though I had failed my wife and this kindly couple. Their daughter died on my watch, I had said to Georgia. I said the right things to whoever would listen—and there were many caring people who paused to hear—about how I missed her, how she lived on in our daughter. But the purifying tears would not flow, as I turned inward, home only inside Dante’s verses or the long walks I took alone in my upstate village, on icy streets as bereft of life as the frozen lakes of Inferno.

      I needed help—more help than any priest could give. I had no clue how to love somebody without a body, and so I reached out to another great-souled woman.

      “I’M TRYING TO HOLD IT together,” I said to my grief counselor, Rosalind, at the start of our first meeting. Her office was in a nondescript development off coastal Route 1, about an hour from my mom’s house in Westerly. I had deliberately chosen someplace far enough from home to ensure that I wouldn’t be recognized. In my macho Calabrian culture, a man was expected to keep his problems locked inside, not bare them to a stranger, however qualified. For a man like my father, confession was something you did before a priest, in the privacy of the confessional, and psychoanalysis was for sissies. Other than my family, the only people who knew I was getting help of this kind were the anonymous patients I passed by in Rosalind’s waiting room before and after my appointments. But we understood the rules and never made eye contact.

      Trying not to look like a broken-down soul, I wore a striped oxford shirt and wide-wale cords. After a few minutes of conversation, it was clear that, like my chaplain Georgia, Rosalind was put on earth to help others. I had never known such people until Katherine died. My family had granted me unusual kindnesses, but that was a primal, Casa Luzzi thing, decidedly intramural. Living with my tyrannical father, getting by with very little, inheriting Calabrian reservoirs of la miseria—it had all made these Batterson Avenue women tough and pragmatic. They saw life as a struggle and acted accordingly.

      Like Georgia, Rosalind was schooled in the love of humanity. She had become a mother at a young age, raised well-adjusted and high-achieving children, and chosen her career for karma, not profit. That first meeting she told me it was too soon to try and get my life together and come to terms with what had happened. Too soon for everything. СКАЧАТЬ