I picked up the section that had arrived that morning: “Lo Schermo.” Usually translated as screen, schermo in Vita Nuova also means protection or defense. It refers to the practice of using a “pretend,” or “screen,” love to distract attention from a “real” love.
So, “The Call,” followed by a threshold of sorts, and now “Deception.” Romei could only be following the structure I’d proposed in my paper. I ought to have been flattered, but instead I found it odd — troubling, even.
At this point in the book, Dante, smitten, stares at the now-married Beatrice in church. Another lady, standing between them, believes that Dante stares at her. What an opportunity! He decides to use this second lady as a “screen love,” to deflect attention from Beatrice. For years—years! — he pretends to love this blameless girl; people talk, he writes her poems, a brilliant stratagem! Then she leaves town. What’s a poet to do? Love, disguised as a grubby pilgrim, suggests another who might serve as a substitute “defense.” But when gossip about this new lady reaches Beatrice, Beatrice snubs him.
Dante is devastated — poor Dante! He retires to lament and is again visited by Love, who this time suggests that Dante address Beatrice directly — through the mediation of poetry. Art will thenceforth be his only “screen.”
Critics remind us that screen loves were a convention of the time. Some question the innocence of these affairs, but no one—no one! — asks if Dante’s screen loves (or his wife) are ill-used as a result. No one asks if he was right to make one lady the object of gossip to save the reputation of another.
In what follows, Romei, to his credit, makes explicit the cruelty and deceit glossed over by Dante. The narrator’s courtship depends on an ever-escalating series of deceptions, practiced with increasingly less concern for consequences. The narrator invites himself to parties where Esther is likely to appear, polyglot affairs evoked through cascades of jumbled language: The Wasteland meets La Dolce Vita. Esther drifts toward Romei, a bit high, highball in hand. He grabs the attention of the crowd, tells raucous stories of an invented past — aristocratic loves, artistic coups, meetings with remarkable men — discovers a garrulousness, a facility for fakery, he hadn’t known he’d had. Esther affects indifference but neglects to introduce him to her husband.
His first poem in this section concerns one of these “performances.” An English sonnet, inverted so the all-important couplet, the rima bacciata (the “kissing rhyme”), appears on top, where all couplets secretly feel they belong. Three quatrains follow, subordinate now, a Babel-ing Greek chorus.
I scanned my memory of Romei’s books and concluded that the sonnet was neither an old poem nor a patchwork of old poems. It was a pastiche, a Romei poem playing at being a Romei poem, a parody of the work Stockholm called the “strangulate cry of a remaindered generation.”
Romei, enchanted by his new life, realizes he’s been in hiding, a prisoner still of his grain silo. He liberates clothes from the closets of drunken friends, takes any opportunity to practice his new persona. He watches Esther read and write in the park. Sometimes — a limber man, apparently — he watches her from a tree. Sometimes he comes upon her “by chance,” takes her to the Catacombs, the church of skulls, places where she trembles and must touch his sleeve. Over cappuccino, using half sentences, broken words, she confides a certain unhappiness: her husband is kind but … One doesn’t … He can’t, which is to say he won’t … not really. Her gabbling is captured in an Italian sonnet replete, of course, with weak feminine rhymes.
One day, in front of Masaccio’s Expulsion, in a scene brimming with elevated language, elegant artifice, Romei kisses the back of Esther’s neck. She doesn’t stop him — in fact, she kisses him back. The scene’s artificiality, its nonliterality, is made plain by the fact that the painting in question, a fresco depicting the ejection of Adam and Eve from Eden, is not (in “real life”) in Rome, but attached — firmly, we hope — to the walls of a Florentine chapel.
Esther seeks him out. She waits in Piazza Santa Maria, umbrella in hand, as if they had a date, she calls asking about Italian authors. They meet on weekdays when her husband is away, which is often. When the narrator thinks a man has touched Esther in a tram, he punches him, pulls her out at the next stop, presses her against a building — he can’t stop kissing her face, her neck, her shoulders till poked by a grandma in black: Vergogna! she cries. Shame on you!
Indeed.
Some nights, crazed by the thought of her, the narrator calls, her husband answers, the poet babbles in Romanian, as if that were a disguise. Poem number three, written, appropriately, in twisted terza rima, concerns the language of these calls: three voices, uncomprehending, frantic, hurt, propelled then stalled by rhymes that never quite arrive at their destination.
Then one day in the Vatican, Esther whispers in Romei’s ear: Come to me tonight, I’ll be alone. They stand before Raphael’s Parnassus, the triumph of Poetry, the great ones bearing witness to his victory: Homer, Dante, the muses. Romei is no longer an exile, no longer an isolated poet rejecting tradition. He has slithered his way into the very home of the Pope, he has claimed his place in the confraternity of art. That night, Romei takes Esther by candlelight. Her face is lit by fire, her post-coital languor enflames him to unprecedented acts of virility.
Despite his hyperbole, Romei is reticent about their lovemaking, preferring to dwell on their stratagems and lack of remorse. Art becomes a screen for them both. He’s brought to Esther’s home, is introduced as an expert in the Bible, Hebrew literature — everything he knows exactly nothing about. He’s agreed to help Esther with her translation, she says, not bothering to temper her excitement. Romei acts the fool, tells self-effacing stories, unfunny jokes; he tries to downplay the threat, which must have been as palpable to the husband as the chicken on his plate.
Sonnet number four recounts this dinner conversation.
Later, while washing his back, Esther reminds her husband what she’s given up for him — her studies, her youth, her ambition. She plays on his soft spots: his need to indulge her, to see her as someone who needs indulging. Despite her attention, his “spots” remain soft, described in language that can only be called flaccid. It’s unclear what the husband suspects: they don’t care. Romei tosses stones at her window, misses, shouts apologies to shopkeepers who open their shutters in response, he takes her to restaurants where they might be seen.
The section is honest and peculiar: their passion is plain but there is little evidence of love, certainly not the kind which (I’m told) sustains a couple for forty years. What Esther seems to desire is not Romei so much as escape from marriage: she is stifled, he is free! Romei’s motivation is more complex: he enjoys his new self, it pleases him to see her take risks for him — he has nothing to lose, or so he thinks; also, he likes to see her flush under the pressure of his hand, and when she says, Yes, yes! he begins to feel he’s found a place in this world.