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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ