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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ