My taxi arrived and soon I was speeding off to the airport. I wondered how Barry Buster was doing down in Chiapas. I pictured him pulled over on the side of the road ambushed by rebels, gorgeous Gaia smoking a cigarette by the side of their SUV, kicking the dirt with the toe of her boot, interceding in bored, Castilian Spanish. I wondered what the bones would tell.
Seeing Barry Buster made me think about finishing college, but I was too high-minded for an education. Most classes were mental weight-lifting, intended more to tighten the brain muscle than to expand the mind. Why go back? I nearly had enough credits to graduate, which was good enough. I knew an awful lot: parabolas, kinship systems, geographic strata, irregular declensions, parts of the stage, and orbiting electrons. A fine understanding of art. A good grasp of literature.
What I knew of Dante I knew from college. In one of my literature classes we had taken a quick pass at The Inferno. Dante first introduced me to Italy and although The Inferno was squeezed in with The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, and the Bible in a course that lasted eleven weeks, I did manage to retain some of it. My teacher was an earnest woman just out of graduate school, who did not speak English, or at least not a dialect I recognized. All of her arguments were “two-pronged,” everything was a “lens” for something else and “informed” an event that usually happened two centuries earlier. Her hair was frizzy in an intellectual way. Her shoes seemed to have been cobbled by elves. I have no doubt she published in many unread journals and has gone on to be a great success. Her name was Lynn something-or-other and she liked smacking her fist into her palm as if she were FDR. Most things made sense before she explained them to us, and a couple even after her efforts. One concept that fascinated me was the notion that there were two kinds of paternity.
The two kinds of paternity were the Abraham/Isaac variety and the Oedipus/Laius variety. Abraham/Isaac paternity relied on thwarted sacrifice—although the son will sacrifice for the father, in the end this is deemed unnecessary. In fact, the son’s and father’s survival were raveled together like two loving strands of DNA. Israel was founded when God intervened in Isaac’s sacrifice. Father and son were bound in a covenant, which came to be symbolized by—of all things—circumcision.
And then there was the other kind of paternity, the Oedipal variety, wherein the son’s survival was dependent on the father’s death. To this I add the reverse—a mirror image and therefore the same thing—a Saturnine paternity, inspirational to Goya in Saturn Devouring His Children, and that of Count Ugolino, which is the subject matter of the Thirty-Third Canto of The Inferno.
Dante meets Count Ugolino in the Pit of the Ninth Circle. Ugolino is frozen into the ice with another spirit. Only their heads break the surface and despite all he has seen at this point, Dante is stunned. Ugolino is eating his companion, Archbishop Ruggieri, as the “starving gnaw their bread.” Ugolino’s teeth tear wildly at that part where “the brain meets the nape,” which may not seem anatomically correct, but given Ugolino’s hunger, seems possible.
Ugolino was a Pisan aristocrat who lived in the twelfth century. He was Dante’s contemporary and Ugolino’s grandson, Nino Visconte, was a friend to the poet. Ugolino is exiled from Pisa in 1275 for conspiring with the Guelphs against the ruling Ghibellines. In 1284 the Guelphs return Ugolino to Pisa and to political power, but shortly after that Ugolino betrays the Guelphs and somewhere down the road yields three Ghibelline-controlled castles to the enemy—the Guelphs?—and then conspires with Archbishop Ruggieri, in 1284, and prominent Ghibelline families (Gualandi, Sismondi, Lanfranchi) to oust Nino Visconte from Pisan political power. Nino heads to Florence to escape his grandfather and becomes friends with Dante.
Nino whispers in Dante’s ear and thousands read of Count Ugolino, dizzying traitor turned filiacidal cannibal.
I find it hard to believe that Ugolino could be so one-dimensionally bad, but none of the count’s admirable traits have made it into history or literature. Archbishop Ruggieri betrays Ugolino—for having yielded the three Ghibelline castles—and Ugolino is locked in a tower with two sons and two grandsons. He will never again gamble at politics, move the castles, soldiers, and noblemen as carved game pieces. Now his only concern is hunger.
Dante gives us the death-knell thud of each hammer-fall as the door to his cell is nailed shut.
Over the course of the next six days, all but the count starve. He is left groping blindly over the bodies. He hears their words echoing in the dark corners of the Tower of Hunger. “Father, you clothed us in this wretched flesh. We beg you to strip it away.” And strip it away he does, surviving in this manner until all the flesh is gone except his own.
His first night in the tower, Ugolino has a remarkable dream. He sees a wolf with whelps being pursued up a slope by hounds and hunters, and when he wakes up and hears his children whimpering, realizes that the wolf is him. This is not the first wolf that Dante gives us. In the first Canto, Dante pursues a coy leopard with festive skin. Then for one heart-pounding moment a hungry lion rushes him, which is scary, but done with in a matter of three lines. In fact, Dante seems to be doing quite well on his own, not needing Virgil’s or anyone else’s assistance, until he encounters the horrifying she-wolf. He says that “her leanness seemed to compress all of the world’s cravings,” and her image, slinking about the slopes, fills him with such despair that he calls out to, of all things, a ghost—Virgil may be Virgil, but he’s still dead—to help him out.
And I thought Italians were supposed to like she-wolves, or maybe that’s just Romans. Dante was, after all, Florentine.
18
Boris was not pleased with me. I pointed out the fact that the whole Mexico adventure, including plane ticket, had come in under seven hundred dollars and that he should have been glad that I’d decided to go for a trip rather than twelve months of therapy, which would have cost considerably more.
“It’s not the money,” said Boris.
“Then what is it?”
“You’re out of control. You’re like an animal.” Boris took an appraising look at me. “You’re not a child anymore.”
“Then stop treating me like one.”
“You’re uncivilized.”
“Oh, how awful,” I said with all the sarcasm I could muster.
“Why this wild behavior? Why this running off to New Mexico? Why do you need a vacation in Mexico? Isn’t Maine for vacation?”
“You’re right, Boris,” I said. “It was you. I was coming to terms with my feelings for you.” I smiled, proud of myself for having come up with it.
“So you think of me and run away?”
“No,” I said. “I think of you and come back.”
I wrapped my arms around his shoulders—Boris didn’t really have a neck—and kissed him. Boris believed me because if I’d been in love with him, I probably would have done something like that. And people believe what they want to. He needed some tidy ending to our argument, because people were coming over that night. More importantly, Ann was hanging around a lot—party planning and all that—and the last thing he wanted was for Ann to be right about me because that would mean that he was wrong.