patterns on the balconies and façades of the buildings: sharply delineated lozenges and triangles of shadow in the slanting rays of the late-afternoon, late-October sun.
Passing in front of a tiny chapel, she reads the sign at the entrance and laughs out loud.
So it was here, on this very spot, in this simple, sober, sombre church with its whitewashed walls, that Dante first laid eyes on Beatrice di Folco Portinari. Electric shock. Love at first lightning-bolt. The year was 1284. He was nineteen and she was eighteen.
Did Beatrice even glance at the young man whose eyes were burning into her? Did she even guess at the tumult in his heart? No one knows. All we know is that he never either touched or spoke to her. The following year he married another woman, who would become the mother of his children…And in 1287, again in this very church, he attended Beatrice’s wedding to a wealthy banker (do poor ones exist?). There was nothing between them!
Ah, the fabulous power of male sublimation! Dante’s love was entire, intact, immaculate; it had no need of Bea! All it needed was itself, a magic stone that gave off sparks when he rubbed it. ‘Beatrice’ was an image, an idea, a compact nucleus of energy that eventually exploded into— La Vita Nuova! La Divina Commedia! All glory to ‘Beatrice’, who revolutionised not only the Italian language but the history of literature! Bea the woman gave up the ghost at twenty-four, most likely during a difficult childbirth. So what? By that time Dante was far away from Florence, in exile in Ravenna, alone with his masterpiece.
Subra rewards her with a laugh.
And what about me, Daddy? Men must have adored me from afar on countless occasions, don’t you think so? Me at twenty, sweet young thing wandering the streets of Naples with my white skin and green eyes, a flowery salmon-pink pantsuit floating on the body you and my mother distractedly made together, eliciting the insults, gropes and pinches of Neapolitan machos…Me at thirty-five, on assignment for a reportage in war-torn ex-Yugoslavia, feeling theKosovars’ eyes glued to my body like melting, sticky, stinky tar…Me only last year, venturing alone into the casbah in Algiers, hearing gazelle at every step and thinking in annoyance that North Africans badly needed to renew their stock of compliments…Who knows how many masterpieces I’ve given rise to, here, there and everywhere, without knowing it?
In the same street, a little farther down—Dante’s house. Ah, yes it is impressive, though of course it’s been rebuilt from top to bottom. And now she has the time. She goes inside.
Standing in front of her at the cash register is an obese American couple. ‘Isn’t it hard to believe,’ the woman says, ‘that the people who built this house had never even heard of the United States?’ Her husband nods gravely. (Those who tourists do become / Must put up with being dumb.)
The second floor contains a pedagogical display on the famous war between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, an episode of European history which for some reason never sticks in Rena’s mind. She deciphers the explanations. Ah, yes, it all comes back to her. Civil wars in Germany and Italy in the late Middle Ages, spiritual versus secular power, Guelphs for the Pope, Ghibellines for the Emperor, their bang-bang-you’re-dead lasting a good two centuries…The usual crap. Infighting, too, naturally. Within the Guelph ranks: moderate Whites versus fundamentalist Blacks, bang-bang-you’re-dead…The Blacks of Florence wound up expelling all the Whites, including Dante Alighieri. Banished from the beloved city of his birth, never to return. All glory to exile, all glory to intolerance—were it not for the war of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, there would have been no Divine Comedy!
On the third floor, she finds visitors seated in semi-darkness watching a slideshow of the Inferno. Illustrations by Blake and Dürer, recorded excerpts…
‘So with
Passing in front of a tiny chapel, she reads the sign at the entrance and laughs out loud.
So it was here, on this very spot, in this simple, sober, sombre church with its whitewashed walls, that Dante first laid eyes on Beatrice di Folco Portinari. Electric shock. Love at first lightning-bolt. The year was 1284. He was nineteen and she was eighteen.
Did Beatrice even glance at the young man whose eyes were burning into her? Did she even guess at the tumult in his heart? No one knows. All we know is that he never either touched or spoke to her. The following year he married another woman, who would become the mother of his children…And in 1287, again in this very church, he attended Beatrice’s wedding to a wealthy banker (do poor ones exist?). There was nothing between them!
Ah, the fabulous power of male sublimation! Dante’s love was entire, intact, immaculate; it had no need of Bea! All it needed was itself, a magic stone that gave off sparks when he rubbed it. ‘Beatrice’ was an image, an idea, a compact nucleus of energy that eventually exploded into— La Vita Nuova! La Divina Commedia! All glory to ‘Beatrice’, who revolutionised not only the Italian language but the history of literature! Bea the woman gave up the ghost at twenty-four, most likely during a difficult childbirth. So what? By that time Dante was far away from Florence, in exile in Ravenna, alone with his masterpiece.
Subra rewards her with a laugh.
And what about me, Daddy? Men must have adored me from afar on countless occasions, don’t you think so? Me at twenty, sweet young thing wandering the streets of Naples with my white skin and green eyes, a flowery salmon-pink pantsuit floating on the body you and my mother distractedly made together, eliciting the insults, gropes and pinches of Neapolitan machos…Me at thirty-five, on assignment for a reportage in war-torn ex-Yugoslavia, feeling theKosovars’ eyes glued to my body like melting, sticky, stinky tar…Me only last year, venturing alone into the casbah in Algiers, hearing gazelle at every step and thinking in annoyance that North Africans badly needed to renew their stock of compliments…Who knows how many masterpieces I’ve given rise to, here, there and everywhere, without knowing it?
In the same street, a little farther down—Dante’s house. Ah, yes it is impressive, though of course it’s been rebuilt from top to bottom. And now she has the time. She goes inside.
Standing in front of her at the cash register is an obese American couple. ‘Isn’t it hard to believe,’ the woman says, ‘that the people who built this house had never even heard of the United States?’ Her husband nods gravely. (Those who tourists do become / Must put up with being dumb.)
The second floor contains a pedagogical display on the famous war between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, an episode of European history which for some reason never sticks in Rena’s mind. She deciphers the explanations. Ah, yes, it all comes back to her. Civil wars in Germany and Italy in the late Middle Ages, spiritual versus secular power, Guelphs for the Pope, Ghibellines for the Emperor, their bang-bang-you’re-dead lasting a good two centuries…The usual crap. Infighting, too, naturally. Within the Guelph ranks: moderate Whites versus fundamentalist Blacks, bang-bang-you’re-dead…The Blacks of Florence wound up expelling all the Whites, including Dante Alighieri. Banished from the beloved city of his birth, never to return. All glory to exile, all glory to intolerance—were it not for the war of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, there would have been no Divine Comedy!
On the third floor, she finds visitors seated in semi-darkness watching a slideshow of the Inferno. Illustrations by Blake and Dürer, recorded excerpts…
‘So with
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