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

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ