The Portable Dante (29 page)

he held his severed head up by its hair, swinging it in one hand just like a lantern, and as it looked at us it said: “Alas!”

Of his own self he made himself a light and they were two in one and one in two. How could this be? He who ordained it knows.

And when he had arrived below our bridge, he raised the arm that held the head up high to let it speak to us at closer range.

It spoke: “Now see the monstrous punishment, you there still breathing, looking at the dead, see if you find suffering to equal mine!

And that you may report on me up there, know that I am Bertran de Born, the one who evilly encouraged the young king.

Father and son I set against each other: Achitophel with his wicked instigations did not do more with Absalom and David.

Because I cut the bonds of those so joined, I bear my head cut off from its life-source, which is back there, alas, within its trunk.

In me you see the perfect
contrapasso
!”

The crowds, the countless, different mutilations, had stunned my eyes and left them so confused they wanted to keep looking and to weep,

but Virgil said: “What are you staring at? Why do your eyes insist on drowning there below, among those wretched, broken shades?

You did not act this way in other
bolge.
If you hope to count them one by one, remember, the valley winds some twenty-two miles around;

and already the moon is underneath our feet; the time remaining to us now is short— and there is more to see than you see here. ”

“If you had taken time to find out what I was looking for, ” I started telling him, “perhaps you would have let me stay there longer. ”

My guide was moving on, with me behind him, answering as I did while we went on, and adding: “Somewhere down along this ditch

that I was staring at a while ago, I think there is a spirit of my family mourning the guilt that’s paid so dear down there. ”

And then my master said: “From this time on you should not waste another thought on him; think on ahead, and let him stay behind,

for I saw him standing underneath the bridge pointing at you, and threatening with his gesture, and I heard his name called out: Geri del Bello.

That was the moment you were so absorbed with him who was the lord of Altaforte that you did not look his way before he left. ”

“Alas, my guide, ” I answered him, “his death by violence, which has not yet been avenged by anyone who shares in his disgrace,

made him resentful, and I suppose for this he went away without a word to me, and because he did I feel great piety. ”

We spoke of this until we reached the start of the bridge across the next
bolgia,
from which the bottom, with more light, might have been seen.

Having come to stand above the final cloister of Malebolge, we saw it spreading out, revealing to our eyes its congregation.

Weird shrieks of lamentation pierced through me like arrow-shafts whose tips are barbed with pity, so that my hands were covering my ears.

Imagine all the sick in the hospitals of Maremma, Valdichiana, and Sardinia between the months of July and September,

crammed all together rotting in one ditch— such was the misery here; and such a stench was pouring out as comes from flesh decaying.

Still keeping to our left, we made our way down the long bridge onto the final bank, and now my sight was clear enough to find

the bottom where the High Lord’s ministress, Justice infallible, metes out her punishment to falsifiers she registers on earth.

I doubt if all those dying in Aegina when the air was blowing sick with pestilence and the animals, down to the smallest worm,

all perished (later on this ancient race, according to what the poets tell as true, was born again from families of ants)

offered a scene of greater agony than was the sight spread out in that dark valley of heaped-up spirits languishing in clumps.

Some sprawled out on others’ bellies, some on others’ backs, and some, on hands and knees, dragged themselves along that squalid alley.

Slowly, in silence, slowly we moved along, looking, listening to the words of all those sick, who had no strength to raise their bodies up.

I saw two sitting, leaning against each other like pans propped back to back against a fire, and they were blotched from head to foot with scabs.

I never saw a curry-comb applied by a stable-boy who is harried by his master, or simply wants to finish and go to bed,

the way those two applied their nails and dug and dug into their flesh, crazy to ease the itching that can never find relief.

They worked their nails down, scraping off the scabs the way one works a knife to scale a bream or some other fish with larger, tougher scales.

“O you there scraping off your scabs of mail and even making pincers of your fingers, ” my guide began to speak to one of them,

“so may your fingernails eternally suffice their task, tell us: among the many packed in this place is anyone Italian?”

“Both of us whom you see disfigured here, ” one answered through his tears, “we are Italians. But you, who ask about us, who are you?”

“I am one accompanying this living man descending bank from bank, ” my leader said, “and I intend to show him all of Hell. ”

With that each lost the other back’s support and each one, shaky, turned to look at me, as others did who overheard these words.

My gentle master came up close to me and said: “Now ask them what you want to know, ” and since he wanted me to speak, I started:

“So may the memory of you not fade from the minds of men up there in the first world, but rather live on under many suns,

tell me your names and where it was you lived; do not let your dreadful, loathsome punishment discourage you from speaking openly. ”

“I’m from Arezzo, ” one of them replied, “and Albert of Siena had me burned, but I’m not here for what I died for there;

it’s true I told him, jokingly, of course: ’I know the trick of flying through the air, ’ and he, eager to learn and not too bright,

asked me to demonstrate my art; and only just because I didn’t make him Daedalus, he had me burned by one whose child he was.

But here, to the last
bolgia
of the ten, for the alchemy I practiced in the world I was condemned by Minòs, who cannot err. ”

I said to my poet: “Have you ever known people as silly as the Sienese? Even the French cannot compare with them!”

With that the other leper who was listening feigned exception to my quip: “Excluding, of course, Stricca, who lived so frugally,

and Niccolo, the first to introduce the luxury of the clove for condiment into that choice garden where the seed took root,

and surely not that fashionable club where Caccia squandered all his woods and vineyards and Abbagliato flaunted his great wit!

That you may know who this is backing you against the Sienese, look sharply at me so that my face will give you its own answer,

and you will recognize Capocchio’s shade, betrayer of metals with his alchemy; you’ll surely recall—if you’re the one I think—

how fine an ape of nature I once was. ”

In ancient times when Juno was enraged against the Thebans because of Semele (she showed her wrath on more than one occasion),

she made King Athamas go raving mad: so mad that one day when he saw his wife coming with his two sons in either arm,

he cried: “Let’s spread the nets, so I can catch the lioness with her lion cubs at the pass!” Then he spread out his insane hands, like talons,

and, seizing one of his two sons, Learchus, he whirled him round and smashed him on a rock. She drowned herself with the other in her arms.

And when the wheel of Fortune brought down low the immeasurable haughtiness of Trojans, destroying in their downfall king and kingdom,

Hecuba sad, in misery, a slave (after she saw Polyxena lie slain, after this grieving mother found her son

Polydorus left unburied on the shore), now gone quite mad, went barking like a dog— it was the weight of grief that snapped her mind.

But never in Thebes or Troy were madmen seen driven to acts of such ferocity against their victims, animal or human,

as two shades I saw, white with rage and naked, running, snapping crazily at things in sight, like pigs, directionless, broken from their pen.

One, landing on Capocchio, sank his teeth into his neck, and started dragging him along, scraping his belly on the rocky ground.

The Aretine spoke, shaking where he sat: “You see that batty shade? He’s Gianni Schicchi! He’s rabid and he treats us all that way. ”