The Portable Dante (46 page)

not visible except as it is made manifest through its workings and effects: as life in plants is proved by their green leaves.

So, man cannot know where his cognizance of primal concepts comes from—or his bent for those primary objects of desire;

these are a part of you, just like the zeal of bees for making honey; the primal will is neither laudable nor blamable.

That other wills conform to this first one, you have the innate faculty of reason, which should defend the threshold of consent.

This is the principle on which is based the judgment of your merit—according as it winnows out the good love from the bad.

Those men who with their reason probed the depths, perceived this liberty innate in man, thereby bequeathing ethics to the world.

Let us assume that every love that burns in you arises through necessity; you still have power to restrain such love.

This noble power Beatrice knows as Freedom of the Will: remember that, if ever she should mention it to you. ”

The moon was shining close to midnight now, like a brass bucket burnished bright as fire, and, thinning out the stars that we could see,

was following that course against the sky made fiery by the sun, when Romans see it set between the Sards and Corsicans.

That noble shade, who had made Pietola renowned above all Mantuan towns, was now free of the burden I had laid on him,

and I, having been privileged to reap such clear, plain answers to my questioning, let my thoughts wander vaguely, sleepily;

but this somnolent mood did not last long, for suddenly we heard a rush of souls coming around the mount behind our backs:

And as Ismenus and Asopus saw in ancient times at night along their banks the rush and rage of Theban bacchanalia,

just such a frenzied urge I thought I saw when that thick rush of souls curved round the bank spurred in their race by good will and just love.

And then they were upon us—that entire, enormous mass of spirits on the run; two out in front were shouting as they wept:

“Mary in haste ran to the hills, ” cried one, the other: “Caesar, Ilerda to subdue, thrust at Marseilles, and then rushed down to Spain. ”

“Faster! faster, we have no time to waste, for time is love, ” cried others from behind, “strive to do good, that grace may bloom again. ”

“O souls in whom keen eagerness atones, perhaps, for past delay and negligence, induced by lukewarm love of doing good—

this man, who is, I swear to you, alive, would like to climb above when day returns; show us the nearest way to reach the cleft. ”

These were my leader’s words. One of the shades called out as he rushed by: “Follow our path, and you will find the passage by yourself.

We cannot stop; desire to race keeps on running through us; we beg your pardon, then, if penance seems to be discourtesy.

I was San Zeno’s abbott in Verona, when the good emperor Barbarossa reigned— of him Milan still speaks with bitterness.

There is a man with one foot in the grave who soon will have good cause to rue the power he wielded once over that monastery:

in place of its true pastor he has put as head a bastardly born son of his, deformed in body and maimed worse in mind. ”

If he said more, I did not hear the words, the two of us were left so far behind; but I was glad to hear as much as this.

And he who always was my help in need said: “Turn around, look at those racing souls straining themselves to put the curb on Sloth. ”

Two at the end were shouting: “All of those for whom the Red Sea’s waters opened wide were dead before the Jordan saw their heirs;

and those who found the task too difficult to keep on striving with Anchises’ son, gave themselves up to an inglorious life. ”

Then, when those souls had sped so far ahead that they were now completely out of sight, a new thought started forming in my mind,

creating others, many different ones: from one to another to another thought I wandered sleepily, then closed my eyes,

letting my floating thoughts melt into dreams.

It was the hour when the heat of day, quenched by Earth’s cold (at times by Saturn’s too), cannot prevail against the lunar chill—

when geomancers see far in the east
Fortuna Major
rise before the dawn along a path soon to be bathed in light.

There came into my dream a woman, stuttering, cross-eyed, stumbling along on her maimed feet, with ugly yellow skin and hands deformed.

I stared at her. And as the sun revives a body numbed by the night’s cold, just so my eyes upon her worked to free her tongue

and straighten out all her deformities, gradually suffusing her wan face with just the color Love would have desired.

And once her tongue was loosened by my gaze, she started singing, and the way she sang captured my mind—it could not free itself.

“I am, ” she sang, “the sweet Siren, I am, whose song beguiles the sailors in mid-sea, enticing them, inviting them to joy!

My singing made Ulysses turn away from his desired course; who dwells with me seldom departs, I satisfy so well. ”

Her lips had not yet closed when there appeared a saintly lady standing at my side, ready to foil the Siren’s stratagem.

“Virgil, O Virgil, who is this?” she cried with indignation. Virgil moved toward her, keeping his gaze fixed on that noble one.

He seized the other, ripped her garment off, exposing her as far down as the paunch! The stench pouring from her woke me from sleep.

I looked at my good master, and he said: “Three times at least I called you. Get up, come, let us find the passageway for you. ”

So, I stood up. Daylight had now spread out through all the circles of the sacred mount as we moved on, the new sun at our back.

Following in his footsteps, brow bent low, so heavy with my thoughts (I must have looked like half a bridge’s arch), I suddenly

heard a voice say, “Come here, here is the pass, ” words spoken in soft tones of graciousness, tones never heard within our mortal bounds.

Then angel’s wings, that could have been a swan’s outstretched, invited us to make our way upward between the two high hard stone walls,

and then he moved his wings and fanned us both, declaring those
qui lugent
to be blest, for consolation shall be theirs in Heaven.

“What is it that disturbs you?” said my guide, “what causes you to stare so at the ground?” (By then we had climbed past the angel’s post.)

I said: “It is that strange dream which I had, a vision that still fills me full of dread—I cannot get the thought out of my mind. ”

“You saw, ” he said, “that ageless sorceress for whom alone the souls above must weep; you also saw how men escape from her.

Let these words be enough. Move faster, now, and look up at the lure of mighty spheres that the Eternal King forever spins. ”

The hawk who has been staring at its feet will, when he hears the cry, stretch wide his wings ready to soar toward food he knows is there;

I did the same: I strained to reach the end of the ascending passage in the rock, and enter on another circling ledge,

When I came out and stood on the Fifth Round, I saw spirits stretched out upon the dust, lying face downward, all of them in tears.