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

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СКАЧАТЬ tell him basta, enough is enough: excessive mourning is unnatural; even worse, it’s vulgar. Volgare. Time to move on. Write about another woman, they tell him. Find another body to love.

      We read in the Vita Nuova that, a year after Beatrice’s death, Dante finds himself in the center of Florence among the city’s leading citizens. I picture him sitting with a paintbrush, drawing an angel, oblivious to the commotion in the piazza.

      “Someone was with me just now,” he tells a passerby who stops to look at his picture, “that’s why I was so deep in thought.”

      Then I see him pick up his brush and walk away—an hour with the angels is all he can take.

      Soon afterward, in the midst of his drawing and despair, he sees a pretty face and all the promise it holds. She takes pity on Dante, he reads it in her eyes and wonders: maybe she can replace Beatrice. His poetry takes aim at her, his verses bursting with grateful tears. This donna gentile, gentle lady, was looking at Dante from a window above him, beckoning him to fall in love again. Dante understood that the logical, even natural thing to do would be to give himself over to this gentle lady and leave Beatrice to her early, unfortunate grave. Let her die in peace. Then he has a vision, a miraculous vision. Beatrice appears to him dressed in that same crimson and white cloth that draped her figure when she devoured Dante’s burning heart. Suddenly, Dante is riven with shame. How could he have even considered taking up with the beautiful lady in the window? No, he would devote his feelings—and his poetry—to the blessed Beatrice. The Vita Nuova ends with Dante promising silence: he will only write again when he is capable of describing Beatrice in a fitting way. First, he says, he must study.

      Long study and great love—the same words that would bring Dante to Virgil in the dark wood, and that would bring me to Dante in my time of greatest woe.

      JUST BEFORE I RETURNED TO Rhode Island, my editor at the university press that was about to publish my first book asked me if I could handle editing the final proofs of my manuscript. The book, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, was a study of the myth of Italy and its pull on foreign exiles such as Byron, that worshiper of Francesca da Rimini. It had taken me ten years to write the book, ever since I began my dissertation in the cement and steel of a library carrel filled with hundreds of books on Dante when I was a graduate student. I said yes to my editor. I would let nothing derail my career—that was the gauntlet I threw in the face of tragedy.

      Back in Westerly, Rhode Island, with Isabel and my mother, I spent hours alone each day with the page proofs in an apartment I had rented a few minutes’ drive from my mom’s, checking citations, eliminating adverbs, and shortening footnotes. The mechanical work gave me the thing I desperately needed: solitude. Grinding away on my manuscript with pencil and eraser, vetting my words so meticulously that it must have shocked even my editor, I squirreled myself away for hours at a stretch. Meanwhile, I had outsourced the one job that could have given me a new home: being a father to Isabel.

      In her new Westerly home, Isabel would sleep with her arms flung backward and her lips slightly open, a pose of absolute surrender to an unknown world. Like all babies, she was helpless, and yet she did not look like other babies, with that girlish fineness to her features and searching gaze. I don’t know what, if anything, she was looking for, and I couldn’t help but trace her sight line out toward Katherine, the natural mother she had been separated from forever. My daughter’s baby smell, its mix of powder, formula, and new skin, would melt me, and I was astonished by her newborn beauty. But my thoughts were too busy following Isabel’s gaze into Katherine’s absence for any of these sights, smells, and sounds to break grief’s hermetic seal.

      No matter how many diapers I changed, or how much baby spittle fell on my collar, I didn’t feel like a real dad. Part of me was elsewhere. Obsessed with my work. Dreaming of a new home. Speaking with the dead. Kicking at the sandy beaches of my Rhode Island exile. And sounding Dante’s rhyming tercets over and over, as if they were a charm to ward off evil spirits.

      After editing all day, I would return to my mother’s house and play with Isabel for a while before my mom fed her and got her ready for bed. Then, after reading or watching television, I would go to sleep in my high school bed across the hall from my daughter’s room. Katherine’s death had sent me into the dark wood, a new dimension of life that I had never imagined existed. And now, having fallen into that other life, I had splintered off into the most bizarre realm of all: my childhood, which I was reinhabiting as a forty-year-old. I knew that divorce and depression could send grown men back in broken heaps to the homes they had grown up in. I did not expect as much from death. But there I was, watching Hannity and Colmes on Fox, in my pajamas and on my mother’s rust-colored sofa, my feet on her red shag carpeting, the stillness of her dead-end street as impenetrable as the fog that had descended upon me. I was supposed to be taking care of a baby, but now I needed to be taken care of, and I had returned to the safest place I knew.

      At around three a.m. Isabel’s cries would often echo throughout the hallway. I would awake to them, prop my head against the pillow for a moment, and then pad across the hallway to where my mother would already be holding Isabel in her arms.

      “Lassa jera, ci penzo io,” she would say as I loitered by the crib. “Leave her be, I’ll take care of it.” Usually I would demur, sliding past my mother and Isabel and retreating to my bed and fetal sleep.

      But one night, for no reason other than the faint call of that same instinct that had otherwise abandoned me, I awoke with a start as Isabel’s sobs sent me running to the crib.

      “Dai, lascia stare, ci penso io,” I answered in standard Italian to her Calabrian dialect. “Let go please, I’ve got her.”

      My mother scurried off, half in worry that I would drop or mishandle or fail to quiet Isabel, half that I was losing precious sleep when I needed to get my strength back. Ours was not a house where grown men held crying babies at night.

      As I held the chaos of my hysterical baby in the dead of that winter night, I imagined the impact between Katherine’s jeep and the oncoming van, the crunching of metal and explosion of debris along the narrow country road. Isabel’s actual screams merged with Katherine’s imaginary ones, signaling to me that the world was fundamentally a place of disorder and violence. It was a constant reminder that I hadn’t been able to save my wife, that I might not be able to protect my daughter. The ill-fated turns, the undertows, the black ice, the live wires—they were everywhere.

      Seven hundred years earlier, in the throes of his doomed youthful love for Beatrice, Dante too sensed the fragility of life when he dreamed of the ladies with wild hair and their menacing words. Dante intuited his vision as an omen, a sign that his love for Beatrice was star-crossed. Now that the heavens had indeed misaligned in my own life I could not get Dante’s fateful syllables with their rolling R’s out of my head. Tu pur morrai.

      Isabel wasn’t crying out of fear or for her mother at three a.m. But I heard them as fear or longing. My rational mind understood that she blessedly knew nothing of these sentiments, yet her cries gave voice to my own anguish. I was in charge of protecting her, but it was my mother who spent her days holding my daughter in her arms. Grief had compromised my sense of other people’s needs, even my daughter’s—the bundle of life I was now cradling and comforting, our two hearts pounding as we clung to each other, both of us desperate for the human touch as we rode the arrow shot by exile’s bow, neither of us knowing if and where it would ever land.

       CHAPTER 2

       Consider Your СКАЧАТЬ