The Portable Dante (17 page)

extracts the tears the scalding blood produces from Rinier da Corneto and Rinier Pazzo, whose battlefields were highways where they robbed. ”

Then he turned round and crossed the ford again.

Not yet had Nessus reached the other side when we were on our way into a forest that was not marked by any path at all.

No green leaves, but rather black in color, no smooth branches, but twisted and entangled, no fruit, but thorns of poison bloomed instead.

No thick, rough, scrubby home like this exists— not even between Cecina and Corneto— for those wild beasts that hate the run of farmlands.

Here the repulsive Harpies twine their nests, who drove the Trojans from the Strophades with filthy forecasts of their close disaster.

Wide-winged they are, with human necks and faces, their feet are clawed, their bellies fat and feathered; perched in the trees they shriek their strange laments.

“Before we go on farther, ” my guide began, “remember, you are in the second round and shall be till we reach the dreadful sand;

now look around you carefully and see with your own eyes what I will not describe, for if I did, you wouldn’t believe my words. ”

Around me wails of grief were echoing, and I saw no one there to make those sounds; bewildered by all this, I had to stop.

I think perhaps he thought I might be thinking that all the voices coming from those stumps belonged to people hiding there from us,

and so my teacher said, “If you break off a little branch of any of these plants, what you are thinking now will break off too. ”

Then slowly raising up my hand a bit I snapped the tiny branch of a great thornbush, and its trunk cried: “Why are you tearing me?”

And when its blood turned dark around the wound, it started saying more: “Why do you rip me? Have you no sense of pity whatsoever?

Men were we once, now we are changed to scrub; but even if we had been souls of serpents, your hand should have shown more pity than it did. ”

Like a green log burning at one end only, sputtering at the other, oozing sap, and hissing with the air it forces out,

so from that splintered trunk a mixture poured of words and blood. I let the branch I held fall from my hand and stood there stiff with fear.

“O wounded soul, ” my sage replied to him, “if he had only let himself believe what he had read in verses I once wrote,

he never would have raised his hand against you, but the truth itself was so incredible, I urged him on to do the thing that grieves me.

But tell him who you were; he can make amends, and will, by making bloom again your fame in the world above, where his return is sure. ”

And the trunk: “So appealing are your lovely words, I must reply. Be not displeased if I am lured into a little conversation.

I am that one who held both of the keys that fitted Frederick’s heart; I turned them both, locking and unlocking, with such finesse

that I let few into his confidence. I was so faithful to my glorious office, I lost not only sleep but life itself.

Caesar’s household with her adulterous eyes, mankind’s undoing, the special vice of courts,

inflamed the hearts of everyone against me, and these, inflamed, inflamed in turn Augustus, and my happy honors turned to sad laments.

My mind, moved by scornful satisfaction, believing death would free me from all scorn, made me unjust to me, who was all just.

By these strange roots of my own tree I swear to you that never once did I break faith with my lord, who was so worthy of all honor.

If one of you should go back to the world, restore the memory of me, who here remain cut down by the blow that Envy gave. ”

My poet paused awhile, then said to me, “Since he is silent now, don’t lose your chance, ask him, if there is more you wish to know. ”

“Why don’t you keep on questioning, ” I said, “and ask him, for my part, what I would ask, for I cannot, such pity chokes my heart. ”

He began again: “That this man may fulfill generously what your words cry out for, imprisoned soul, may it please you to continue

by telling us just how a soul gets bound into these knots, and tell us, if you know, whether any soul might someday leave his branches. ”

At that the trunk breathed heavily, and then the breath changed to a voice that spoke these words: “Your question will be answered very briefly.

The moment that the violent soul departs the body it has torn itself away from, Minos sends it down to the seventh hole;

it drops to the wood, not in a place allotted, but anywhere that fortune tosses it. There, like a grain of spelt, it germinates,

soon springs into a sapling, then a wild tree; at last the Harpies, feasting on its leaves, create its pain, and for the pain an outlet.

Like the rest, we shall return to claim our bodies, but never again to wear them—wrong it is for a man to have again what he once cast off.

We shall drag them here and, all along the mournful forest, our bodies shall hang forever more, each one on a thorn of its own alien shade. ”

We were standing still attentive to the trunk, thinking perhaps it might have more to say, when we were startled by a rushing sound,

such as the hunter hears from where he stands: first the boar, then all the chase approaching, the crash of hunting dogs and branches smashing,

then, to the left of us appeared two shapes naked and gashed, fleeing with such rough speed they tore away with them the bushes’ branches.

The one ahead: “Come on, come quickly, Death!” The other, who could not keep up the pace, screamed, “Lano, your legs were not so nimble

when you jousted in the tournament of Toppo!” And then, from lack of breath perhaps, he slipped into a bush and wrapped himself in thorns.

Behind these two the wood was overrun by packs of black bitches ravenous and ready, like hunting dogs just broken from their chains;

they sank their fangs in that poor wretch who hid, they ripped him open piece by piece, and then ran off with mouthfuls of his wretched limbs.

Quickly my escort took me by the hand and led me over to the bush that wept its vain laments from every bleeding sore:

“O Giacomo da Sant’ Andrea, ” it said, “what good was it for you to hide in me? What fault have I if you led an evil life?”

My master, standing over it, inquired: “Who were you once that now through many wounds breathes a grieving sermon with your blood?”

He answered us: “O souls who have just come in time to see this unjust mutilation that has separated me from all my leaves,

gather them round the foot of this sad bush. I was from the city that took the Baptist in exchange for her first patron, who, for this,

swears by his art she will have endless sorrow; and were it not that on the Arno’s bridge some vestige of his image still remains,

those citizens who built anew the city on the ashes that Attila left behind would have accomplished such a task in vain;

I turned my home into my hanging place. ”

The love we both shared for our native city moved me to gather up the scattered leaves and give them back to the voice that now had faded.

We reached the confines of the woods that separate the second from the third round. There I saw God’s justice in its dreadful operation.

Now to picture clearly these unheard-of things: we arrived to face an open stretch of flatland whose soil refused the roots of any plant;