The Portable Dante (21 page)

I’m not the only Bolognese who weeps here— hardly! This place is packed with us; in fact, there are more of us here than there are living tongues,

between Savena and Reno, saying ‘Sipa’; I call on your own memory as witness: remember we have avaricious hearts. ”

Just at that point a devil let him have the feel of his tailed whip and cried: “Move on, you pimp, you can’t cash in on women here!”

I turned and hurried to rejoin my guide; we walked a few more steps and then we reached the rocky bridge that juts out from the bank.

We had no difficulty climbing up, and turning right, along the jagged ridge, we left those shades to their eternal circlings.

When we were where the ditch yawned wide below the ridge, to make a passage for the scourged, my guide said: “Stop and stand where you can see

these other misbegotten souls, whose faces you could not see before, for they were moving in the same direction we were, over there. ”

So from the ancient bridge we viewed the train that hurried toward us along the other tract— kept moving, like the first, by stinging whips.

And the good master, without my asking him, said, “Look at that imposing one approaching, who does not shed a single tear of pain:

what majesty he still maintains down there! He is Jason, who by courage and sharp wits, fleeced the Colchians of their golden ram.

He later journeyed through the isle of Lemnos, whose bold and heartless females, earlier, had slaughtered every male upon the island;

there with his words of love, and loving looks, he succeeded in deceiving young Hypsipyle, who had in turn deceived the other women.

He left her there, with child, and all alone: such sin condemns him to such punishment, and Medea, too, gets her revenge on him.

With him go all deceivers of this type, and let this be enough to know concerning the first valley and the souls locked in its jaws. ”

We were already where the narrow ridge begins to cross the second bank, to make it an abutment for another ditch’s arch.

Now we could hear the shades in the next pouch whimpering, making snorting grunting sounds and sounds of blows, slapping with open palms.

From a steaming stench below, the banks were coated with a slimy mold that stuck to them like glue, disgusting to behold and worse to smell.

The bottom was so hollowed out of sight, we saw it only when we climbed the arch and looked down from the bridge’s highest point:

there we were, and from where I stood I saw souls in the ditch plunged into excrement that might well have been flushed from our latrines;

my eyes were searching hard along the bottom, and I saw somebody’s head so smirched with shit, you could not tell if he were priest or layman.

He shouted up: “Why do you feast your eyes on me more than these other dirty beasts?” And I replied: “Because, remembering well,

I’ve seen you with your hair dry once or twice. You are Alessio Interminei from Lucca; that’s why I stare at you more than the rest. ”

He beat his slimy forehead as he answered: “I am stuck down here by all those flatteries that rolled unceasing off my tongue up there. ”

He finished speaking, and my guide began: “Lean out a little more, look hard down there so you can get a good look at the face

of that repulsive and disheveled tramp scratching herself with shitty fingernails, spreading her legs while squatting up and down:

it is Thaïs the whore, who gave this answer to her lover when he asked: ‘Am I very worthy of your thanks?’: ‘Very? Nay, incredibly so!’

I think our eyes have had their fill of this. ”

O Simon Magus! O scum that followed him! Those things of God that rightly should be wed to holiness, you, rapacious creatures,

for the price of gold and silver, prostitute. Now, in your honor, I must sound my trumpet for here in the third pouch is where you dwell.

We had already climbed to see this tomb, and were standing high above it on the bridge, exactly at the mid-point of the ditch.

O Highest Wisdom, how you demonstrate your art in Heaven, on earth, and here in Hell! How justly does your power make awards!

I saw along the sides and on the bottom the livid-colored rock all full of holes; all were the same in size, and each was round.

To me they seemed no wider and no deeper than those inside my lovely San Giovanni, in which the priest would stand or baptize from;

and one of these, not many years ago, I smashed for someone who was drowning in it: let this be mankind’s picture of the truth!

From the mouth of every hole were sticking out a single sinner’s feet, and then the legs up to the calf—the rest was stuffed inside.

The soles of every sinner’s feet were flaming; their naked legs were twitching frenziedly— they would have broken any chain or rope.

Just as a flame will only move along an object’s oily outer peel, so here the fire slid from heel to toe and back.

“Who is that one, Master, that angry wretch, who is writhing more than any of his comrades, ” I asked, “the one licked by a redder flame?”

And he to me, “If you want to be carried down along that lower bank to where he is, you can ask him who he is and why he’s here. ”

And I, “My pleasure is what pleases you: you are my lord, you know that from your will I would not swerve. You even know my thoughts. ”

When we reached the fourth bank, we began to turn and, keeping to the left, made our way down to the bottom of the holed and narrow ditch.

The good guide did not drop me from his side until he brought me to the broken rock of that one who was fretting with his shanks.

“Whatever you are, holding your upside down, O wretched soul, stuck like a stake in ground, make a sound or something, ” I said, “if you can. ”

I stood there like a priest who is confessing some vile assassin who, fixed in his ditch, has called him back again to put off dying.

He cried: “Is that
you,
here, already, upright? Is that you here already upright, Boniface? By many years the book has lied to me!

Are you fed up so soon with all that wealth for which you did not fear to take by guile the Lovely Lady, then tear her asunder?”

I stood there like a person just made fun of, dumbfounded by a question for an answer, not knowing how to answer the reply.

Then Virgil said: “Quick, hurry up and tell him: ’I’m not the one, I’m not the one you think!’ “ And I answered just the way he told me to.

The spirit heard, and twisted both his feet, then, sighing with a grieving, tearful voice, he said: “Well then, what do you want of me?

If it concerns you so to learn my name that for this reason you came down the bank, know that I once was dressed in the great mantle.

But actually I was the she-bear’s son, so greedy to advance my cubs, that wealth I pocketed in life, and here, myself.

Beneath my head are pushed down all the others who came, sinning in simony, before me, squeezed tightly in the fissures of the rock.

I, in my turn, shall join the rest below as soon as
he
comes, the one I thought you were when, all too quick, I put my question to you.

But already my feet have baked a longer time (and I have been stuck upside-down like this) than he will stay here planted with feet aflame:

soon after him shall come one from the West, a lawless shepherd, one whose fouler deeds make him a fitting cover for us both.

He shall be another Jason, like the one in Maccabees: just as his king was pliant, so France’s king shall soften to this priest. ”