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

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СКАЧАТЬ the other remains of my life with Katherine. I took Isabel’s tiny hand in my own. Even in miniature, I could see the tapering outline of Katherine’s long elegant fingers. Isabel had my clump of dark hair and full features on the fair skin she had inherited from her mother—a chiaroscuro baby mixing shadow and light.

      “They’ll probably turn brown,” a nurse in the neonatal unit had told me, pointing to Isabel’s blue eyes, and I imagined how, soon enough, all vestiges of her mother would fade from this Italianate child. But there was a fine shape to the head that was Katherine’s and not mine, and her slender, elongated body was also a miniaturized form of her mother’s. I felt a rational love for the hand I held and stroked, but nothing instinctual and visceral. I was a ghost haunting what had been my own life.

      Later that day, my sisters had to return to their husbands and jobs, while my mother remained in Tivoli with Isabel and me. From that day forward my mom did the bulk of the diaper changing, bottle feeding, babysitting, and other double-barreled chores that go into child care. That left me time to walk in the snow and mark up my dog-eared edition of The Divine Comedy, which I had taken to reading aloud to myself, the poem’s soothing sounds one of the few things that could calm me. Meanwhile, my colleagues taught my classes for me while I went on leave for the final few weeks of the semester.

      “Just leave Isabel with us and pick her up when she’s sixteen,” my sister Margaret joked before returning to Rhode Island. She was only partly kidding. Katherine had made it clear to me that she wanted to be a stay-at-home mother, while I would roam free to hunt my academic woolly mammoths. Now I was about to relinquish Katherine’s maternal role to a phalanx of capable Calabrian matrons: my sisters commandeered by generalissima Yolanda Luzzi. She had six children and, with Isabel, thirteen grandchildren. Now, at the age of seventy-six, she was becoming a mother once again.

      After a month of this new routine, classes ended for the holiday break. I made a second fateful decision that followed the grief-struck logic of my earlier decision to enlist my family in raising Isabel: I would move back to Rhode Island with my mom and Isabel and make our base there, while coming to Bard and Tivoli only on the few days each week I needed to teach, Tuesday to Thursday, a commute of roughly 175 miles each way. When I told my college president my plan, he had one word for it: harebrained. I also asked him that day if he believed in the eternal life of the soul. I was now anguishing over this question to which I had never given a second thought before.

      The idea that Katherine was utterly and completely no more, in spirit as well as in flesh, tormented me after I saw her body for the last time at her funeral in Detroit, when I was shown her open casket before the mass in her parents’ church. I stood in the room with her mother and father as well as her siblings, all of us there to say our final good-byes. My sleek wife was now puffy and embalmed, all the definition gone from her features. I tried desperately to find her somewhere in there, to feel some communion as I held her hand and caressed her skin for the last time. But her forehead was as cold as marble when I kissed it, and I swore to her that I would protect and nurture our daughter, and that she, Katherine, would be a living presence for our little girl. But there was nothing left of the person I had loved in that body—that corpse in a red dress. If Katherine was anywhere in this universe, it had to be in some other form.

      The fog of grief had descended on me, and I couldn’t see the sense of my college president’s words when he called my plan harebrained. I needed only to feel comforted by my family’s love for me and our collective love for my new daughter. So, on December 23, 2007, I packed up my Tivoli apartment and drove with Isabel and my mother back to my hometown.

      “You will leave behind everything you love.” During Dante’s exile, a scholar from Bologna offered him the title of poet laureate, but he respectfully declined. Only if one day Florence asks me back as its honored poet, he said, then I’ll accept and return victorious to my sheepfold, my bello ovile.

      I had returned to the sheepfold of my childhood, but the soft L sounds of Dante’s twin words could not calm my racing heart, no matter how many times I read aloud the passage about his exile.

      THERE IS NO LOVE THAT IS NOT PHYSICAL.

      You learn this when you’re faced with the sudden death of your beloved.

      From the time that the nine-year-old Dante first laid eyes on an eight-year-old Florentine girl named Beatrice Portinari in 1274, you can just imagine him holding the syllables of her nickname on his tongue: BEE-chay. When he saw her again, nine years later, Bice had become a woman. In all likelihood, he had seen her in the interim, but the book he wrote about their unusual love story, the Vita Nuova, needed something more symbolic to drive the narrative. So Beatrice became her full name, the “thrice-blessed one”—just like the Trinity, the holy number three that, when squared, gave Dante the magical number nine.

      When Dante was eighteen, he had a Francesca da Rimini moment: Beatrice came to him in a dream, naked except for a crimson and white cloth draped around her. She was sleeping, carried in the arms of the God of Love. The imposing figure, who went by his Latin name Amor, was brandishing something in flames. He announced to Dante: Vide cor tuum. Behold your heart. Then Amor woke up the sleeping Beatrice, who proceeded to eat the burning heart. It was Dante’s.

      This vision of the burning heart incited Dante to write a sonnet. He circulated it among the leading poets of Florence, none of whom could understand it (one, a doctor, told Dante to wash his testicles in cold water to calm himself). There was one who got it, however: Guido Cavalcanti, like Beatrice a richer and better-connected Florentine whom Dante regarded with a mixture of adoration and jealousy. Guido was the unofficial leader of the Sweet New Style, the poetic movement that spoke of love as a lacerating illness that elevated the soul but destroyed the body. Guido immediately responded with a sonnet of his own to Dante: “I think that you beheld all goodness,” he wrote of Dante’s terrifying vision.

      Guido’s poem made it official: Dante was now accepted into the Sweet New Style, beginning his career as a Florentine poet.

      But Dante’s Beatrice, unlike other Sweet New Style muses, actually had a personality. She was no mere object of worship—someone lovely to look at but impossible to know. When Beatrice saw Dante paying too much attention to his donna-schermo, the “screen lady” whom he pretended to love so as to hide his feelings for Beatrice, she refused to greet him in the street. No other Sweet New Style woman would have shamed her poet like this. Dante was different from his fellow poets in other ways. He addressed a poem about Beatrice to Donne ch’avete intelletto di amore, “Ladies who have knowledge of love,” choosing female readers over the typical male audience. He saw women as more than just beautiful bodies.

      Then, at the center of the Vita Nuova, the beautiful witch-ladies with the crazy hair tell Dante that he too will die, and that Beatrice has gone to the other side. He woke up to find it was all a dream. Or was it? Soon after his vision, Dante writes, Beatrice dies. Florence is now a widower; Dante is a widower—to a woman who was never his wife. And indeed, the real-life Beatrice Portinari died on June 8, 1290, at age twenty-four.

      The strangest thing in the Vita Nuova, perhaps in all of Dante’s career, happens next. Instead of expressing his grief, he writes that when Beatrice died, the heavens aligned in a symbol of perfect holiness. In his sadness, he tried to transform Beatrice into one of those angelic, interchangeable, and ultimately forgettable, Sweet New Style muses. After all, had his fellow poets faced her death, they would have moved on quickly to another muse and found another body to love once Beatrice’s was gone.

      Or maybe idealizing her was a survival mechanism for Dante, a reflexive turn to some familiar and reassuring way of explaining Beatrice’s devastating loss.

      Either way, the plan breaks down. Dante’s grief is unrelenting, and he mopes around the city of Florence, СКАЧАТЬ