The Portable Dante (26 page)

When he had finished saying this, the thief shaped his fists into figs and raised them high and cried: “Here, God, I’ve shaped them just for you!”

From then on all those snakes became my friends, for one of them at once coiled round his neck as if to say, “That’s all you’re going to say, ”

while another twisted round his arms in front; it tied itself into so tight a knot, between the two he could not move a muscle.

Pistoia, ah, Pistoia! why not resolve to burn yourself to ashes, ending all, since you have done more evil than your founders?

Throughout the circles of this dark inferno I saw no shade so haughty toward his God, not even he who fell from Thebes’ high walls.

Without another word he fled, and then I saw a raging centaur gallop up roaring: “Where is he, where is that untamed beast?”

I think that all Maremma does not have as many snakes as he had on his back, right up to where his human form begins.

Upon his shoulders, just behind the nape, a dragon with its wings spread wide was crouching and spitting fire at whoever came its way.

My master said to me: “That one is Cacus, who more than once in the grotto far beneath Mount Aventine spilled blood to fill a lake.

He does not go the same road as his brothers because of the cunning way he committed theft when he stole his neighbor’s famous cattle-herd;

and then his evil deeds came to an end beneath the club of Hercules, who struck a hundred blows, and he, perhaps, felt ten. ”

While he was speaking Cacus galloped off; at the same time three shades appeared below us; my guide and I would not have seen them there

if they had not cried out: “Who are you two?” At this we cut our conversation short to give our full attention to these three.

I didn’t know who they were, but then it happened, as often it will happen just by chance, that one of them was forced to name another:

“Where did Cianfa go off to?” he asked. And then, to keep my guide from saying anything, I put my finger tight against my lips.

Now if, my reader, you should hesitate to believe what I shall say, there’s little wonder, for I, the witness, scarcely can believe it.

While I was watching them, all of a sudden a serpent—and it had six feet—shot up and hooked one of these wretches with all six.

With the middle feet it hugged the sinner’s stomach and, with the front ones, grabbed him by the arms, and bit him first through one cheek, then the other;

the serpent spread its hind feet round both thighs, then stuck its tail between the sinner’s legs, and up against his back the tail slid stiff.

No ivy ever grew to any tree so tight entwined, as the way that hideous beast had woven in and out its limbs with his;

and then both started melting like hot wax and, fusing, they began to mix their colors (so neither one seemed what he was before),

just as a brownish tint, ahead of flame, creeps up a burning page that is not black completely, even though the white is dying.

The other two who watched began to shout: “O Agnèl! If you could see how you are changing! You’re not yourself, and you’re not both of you!”

The two heads had already fused to one and features from each flowed and blended into one face where two were lost in one another;

two arms of each were four blurred strips of flesh; and thighs with legs, then stomach and the chest sprouted limbs that human eyes have never seen.

Each former likeness now was blotted out: both, and neither one it seemed—this picture of deformity. And then it sneaked off slowly.

Just as a lizard darting from hedge to hedge, under the stinging lash of the dog-days’ heat, zips across the road, like a flash of lightning,

so, rushing toward the two remaining thieves, aiming at their guts, a little serpent, fiery with rage and black as pepper-corn,

shot up and sank its teeth in one of them, right where the embryo receives its food, then back it fell and lay stretched out before him.

The wounded thief stared speechless at the beast, and standing motionless began to yawn as though he needed sleep, or had a fever.

The snake and he were staring at each other; one from his wound, the other from its mouth fumed violently, and smoke with smoke was mingling.

Let Lucan from this moment on be silent, who tells of poor Nasidius and Sabellus, and wait to hear what I still have in store;

and Ovid, too, with his Cadmus and Arethusa— though he metamorphosed one into a snake, the other to a fountain, I feel no envy,

for never did he interchange two beings face to face so that both forms were ready to exchange their substance, each one for the other’s,

an interchange of perfect symmetry: the serpent split its tail into a fork, and the wounded sinner drew his feet together;

the legs, with both the thighs, closed in to join and in a short time fused, so that the juncture didn’t show signs of ever having been there,

the while the cloven tail assumed the features that the other one was losing, and its skin was growing soft, the other’s getting scaly;

I saw his arms retreating to the armpits, and the reptile’s two front feet, that had been short, began to stretch the length the man’s had shortened;

the beast’s hind feet then twisted round each other and turned into the member man conceals, while from the wretch’s member grew two legs.

The smoke from each was swirling round the other, exchanging colors, bringing out the hair where there was none, and stripping off the other’s.

The one rose up, the other sank, but neither dissolved the bond between their evil stares, fixed eye to eye, exchanging face for face;

the standing creature’s face began receding toward the temples; from the excess stuff pulled back, the ears were growing out of flattened cheeks,

while from the excess flesh that did not flee the front, a nose was fashioned for the face, and lips puffed out to just the normal size.

The prostrate creature strains his face out long and makes his ears withdraw into his head, the way a snail pulls in its horns. The tongue,

that once had been one piece and capable of forming words, divides into a fork, while the other’s fork heals up. The smoke subsides.

The soul that had been changed into a beast went hissing off along the valley’s floor, the other close behind him, spitting words.

Then he turned his new-formed back on him and said to the shade left standing there: “Let Buoso run the valley on all fours, the way I did. ”

Thus I saw the cargo of the seventh hold exchange and interchange; and let the strangeness of it all excuse me, if my pen has failed.

And though this spectacle confused my eyes and stunned my mind, the two thieves could not flee so secretly I did not recognize

that one was certainly Puccio Sciancato (and he alone, of that company of three that first appeared, did not change to something else),

the other, he who made you mourn, Gaville.

Be joyful, Florence, since you are so great that your outstretched wings beat over land and sea, and your name is spread throughout the realm of Hell!

I was ashamed to find among the thieves five of your most eminent citizens, a fact which does you very little honor

But if early morning dreams have any truth, you will have the fate, in not too long a time, that Prato and the others crave for you.

And were this the day, it would not be too soon! Would it had come to pass, since pass it must! The longer the delay, the more my grief.

We started climbing up the stairs of boulders that had brought us to the place from where we watched; my guide went first and pulled me up behind him.

We went along our solitary way among the rocks, among the ridge’s crags, where the foot could not advance without the hand.

I know that I grieved then, and now again I grieve when I remember what I saw, and more than ever I restrain my talent

lest it run a course that virtue has not set; for if a lucky star or something better has given me this good, I must not misuse it.

As many fireflies (in the season when the one who lights the world hides his face least, in the hour when the flies yield to mosquitoes)

as the peasant on the hillside at his ease sees, flickering in the valley down below, where perhaps he gathers grapes or tills the soil—

with just so many flames all the eighth
bolgia
shone brilliantly, as I became aware when at last I stood where the depths were visible.

As he who was avenged by bears beheld Elijah’s chariot at its departure, when the rearing horses took to flight toward Heaven,

and though he tried to follow with his eyes, he could not see more than the flame alone like a small cloud once it had risen high—

so each flame moves itself along the throat of the abyss, none showing what it steals but each one stealing nonetheless a sinner.

I was on the bridge, leaning far over—so far that if I had not grabbed some jut of rock I could easily have fallen to the bottom.

And my guide, who saw me so absorbed, explained: “There are souls concealed within these moving fires, each one swathed in his burning punishment. ”

“O master, ” I replied, “from what you say I know now I was right; I had guessed already it might be so, and I was about to ask you:

Who’s in that flame with its tip split in two, like that one which once sprang up from the pyre where Eteocles was placed beside his brother?”