The Portable Dante (22 page)

I do not know, perhaps I was too bold here, but I answered him in tune with his own words: “Well, tell me now: what was the sum of money

that holy Peter had to pay our Lord before He gave the keys into his keeping? Certainly He asked no more than ‘Follow me. ’

Nor did Peter or the rest extort gold coins or silver from Matthias when he was picked to fill the place the evil one had lost.

So stay stuck there, for you are rightly punished, and guard with care the money wrongly gained that made you stand courageous against Charles.

And were it not for the reverence I have for those highest of all keys that you once held in the happy life—if this did not restrain me,

I would use even harsher words than these, for your avarice brings grief upon the world, crushing the good, exalting the depraved.

You shepherds it was the Evangelist had in mind when the vision came to him of her who sits upon the waters playing whore with kings:

that one who with the seven heads was born and from her ten horns managed to draw strength so long as virtue was her bridegroom’s joy.

You have built yourselves a God of gold and silver! How do you differ from the idolator, except he worships one, you worship hundreds?

O Constantine, what evil did you sire, not by your conversion, but by the dower that the first wealthy Father got from you!”

And while I sang these very notes to him, his big flat feet kicked fiercely out of anger, —or perhaps it was his conscience gnawing him.

I think my master liked what I was saying, for all the while he smiled and was intent on hearing the ring of truly spoken words.

Then he took hold of me with both his arms, and when he had me firm against his breast, he climbed back up the path he had come down.

He did not tire of the weight clasped tight to him, but brought me to the top of the bridge’s arch, the one that joins the fourth bank to the fifth.

And here he gently set his burden down— gently, for the ridge, so steep and rugged, would have been hard even for goats to cross.

From there another valley opened to me.

Now I must turn strange torments into verse to form the matter of the twentieth canto of the first chant, the one about the damned.

Already I was where I could look down into the depths of the ditch: I saw its floor was wet with anguished tears shed by the sinners,

and I saw people in the valley’s circle, silent, weeping, walking at a litany pace the way processions push along in our world.

And when my gaze moved down below their faces, I saw all were incredibly distorted, the chin was not above the chest, the neck

was twisted—their faces looked down on their backs; they had to move ahead by moving backward, for they never saw what was ahead of them.

Perhaps there was a case of someone once in a palsy fit becoming so distorted, but none that
I
know of! I doubt there could be!

So may God grant you, Reader, benefit from reading of my poem, just ask yourself how I could keep my eyes dry when, close by,

I saw the image of our human form so twisted—the tears their eyes were shedding streamed down to wet their buttocks at the cleft.

Indeed I did weep, as I leaned my body against a jut of rugged rock. My guide: “So you are still like all the other fools?

In this place piety lives when pity is dead, for who could be more wicked than that man who tries to bend divine will to his own!

Lift your head up, lift it, see him for whom the earth split wide before the Thebans’ eyes, while they all shouted, ‘Where are you rushing off to,

Amphiaraus? Why do you quit the war?’ He kept on rushing downward through the gap until Minos, who gets them all, got him.

You see how he has made his back his chest: because he wished to see too far ahead, he sees behind and walks a backward track.

Behold Tiresias, who changed his looks: from a man he turned himself into a woman, transforming all his body, part for part;

then later on he had to take the wand and strike once more those two snakes making love before he could get back his virile parts.

Backing up to this one’s chest comes Aruns, who, in the hills of Luni, worked by peasants of Carrara dwelling in the valley’s plain,

lived in white marble cut into a cave, and from this site, where nothing blocked his view, he could observe the sea and stars with ease.

And that one, with her hair loose, flowing back to cover both her breasts you cannot see, and with her hairy parts in front behind her,

was Manto, who had searched through many lands before she came to dwell where I was born; now let me tell you something of her story.

When her father had departed from the living, and Bacchus’ sacred city fell enslaved, she wandered through the world for many years.

High in fair Italy there spreads a lake, beneath the mountains bounding Germany beyond the Tyrol, known as Lake Benaco;

by a thousand streams and more, I think, the Alps are bathed from Garda to the Val Camonica with the waters flowing down into that lake;

at its center is a place where all three bishops of Trent and Brescia and Verona could, if they would ever visit there, say Mass;

Peschiera sits, a handsome well-built fortress, to ward off Brescians and the Bergamese, along the lowest point of that lake’s shore,

where all the water that Benaco’s basin cannot hold must overflow to make a stream that winds its way through countrysides of green;

but when the water starts to flow, its name is not Benaco but Mencio, all the way to Governol, where it falls into the Po;

but before its course is run it strikes a lowland, on which it spreads and turns into a marsh that can become unbearable in summer.

Passing this place one day the savage virgin saw land that lay in the center of the mire, untilled and empty of inhabitants.

There, to escape all human intercourse, she stopped to practice magic with her servants; there she lived, and there she left her corpse.

Later on, the men who lived around there gathered on that very spot, for it was well protected by the bog that girded it on every side.

They built a city over her dead bones, and for her, the first to choose that place, they named it Mantua, without recourse to sorcery.

Once, there were far more people living there, before the foolish Casalodi listened to the fraudulent advice of Pinamonte.

And so, I warn you, should you ever hear my city’s origin told otherwise, let no false tales adulterate the truth. ”

And I replied: “Master, your explanations are truth for me, winning my faith entirely; any others would be just like burned-out coals.

But speak to me of these shades passing by, if you see anyone that is worth noting; for now my mind is set on only that. ”

He said: “That one, whose beard flows from his cheeks and settles on his back and makes it dark, was (when the war stripped Greece of all its males,

so that the few there were still rocked in cradles) an augur who, with Calchas, called the moment to cut the first ship’s cable free at Aulis:

he is Eurypylus. I sang his story this way, somewhere in my high tragedy: you should know where—you know it, every line.

That other one, whose thighs are scarcely fleshed, was Michael Scot, who most assuredly knew every trick of magic fraudulence.