The Dante Game

by Jane Langton

What good did it do to look at something, and then move on to look at something else? It was too passive. She wanted to live in the famous buildings, she wanted to move into one of the monks’ cells decorated by Fra Angelico at San Marco, she wanted to pluck the bronze pears from Ghiberti’s Doors of Paradise. She wanted to do something with the city of Florence. It was no good just gawking.

  Then one day in the Bargello she came upon a flock of American kids standing in a semicircle before Donatello’s Saint George. They were listening to a lecture. They were going to school in Florence.

  Enviously Julia stood on the sidelines. When the lecture was over, she asked the instructor about the school.

  “I’m sorry, but our list is filled for next fall. But there’s a new American school over across the river in Bellosguardo. You might try there.”

  He gave her the address, then watched her go, cursing his limited enrollment. How that stunning woman would have ornamented his class of stupid girls!

  “Oh, Mr. Braithwaite,” tittered Melanie Bulger, “Cynthia and I think you look just like Saint George.”

  There was a chorus of giggles. Julia disappeared down the stairs.

  CHAPTER 9

  O Tuscan, walking thus with words discreet

  Alive through the city of fire.…

  Inferno X, 22, 23.

  Once again the bell in the Campanile was ringing for ten o’clock mass. The bell had a deep vigorous note, one that thrilled the archbishop and shook the delicate membranes of his spirit, even after all these years.

  Taking his place at the altar, the old man noticed that attendance was larger than usual this morning. Some of the communicants were tourists, coming forward self-consciously, humbly trying to follow local practice. The archbishop ignored their strange sporty clothing, their bare legs. One American girl with yellow hair was wearing too many clothes on this warm day—men’s shirts and pants, how odd! The archbishop refrained from making judgments. He was grateful, as always, that these people were here at all.

  Once again he was glad to see the young officer of the polizia among them. As the boy put up his homely face to receive the host, the archbishop smiled at him, enjoying his modesty, his avoidance of any unctuous show of piety.

  The service was a momentary relief from the increasing pressure on the archbishop. Preparations for the celebration of the seven hundredth anniversary of the cathedral had mushroomed. Committees were springing up around him like weeds, proliferating and exfoliating in all directions. He had never heard of Parkinson’s Law, but the growth of his committees was a perfect example of its inexorable sway.

  There were promotional committees to oversee publicity in the newspapers and on television, artistic committees to design banners to hang over the city streets, construction committees to set up bleachers for important people in front of the Duomo, tactful committees to choose the important people, sacred committees to increase the splendor of the Easter service, floral committees, traffic committees, tradesmen’s committees, Vatican liaison committees, papal protocol committees, clean-up committees, and of course the all-important committees concerned with the safety of the Holy Father.

  Over the entire writhing mass one faithful overseer exercised control, the manager of the Banca degli Innocenti, Leonardo Bindo. The archbishop had come to rely on his calm authority and swift decisiveness, and now he leaned on him more and more. Signor Bindo was his rod and staff.

  This morning the subject under discussion was the Scoppio del Carro, the Explosion of the Cart.

  “But surely we don’t need a committee for that,” said the archbishop. “It’s always been well managed. After all, for how many centuries has it been part of the Easter celebration at the cathedral?”

  “Nevertheless I think it should be placed under the oversight of a special artistic director. I suspect the cart could do with a repainting, and perhaps a regilding of the Pazzi dolphins. Surely it suffers damage every year from the explosion.”

  “Ah, yes, I see. Of course.” In the end the archbishop always agreed with Signor Bindo.

  “And the oxen to pull the cart through the streets, they must be the finest in Tuscany, the whitest, the biggest. I suggest we send someone to Arezzo to choose among the very best. Perfection above all.”

  It was their watchword. “Of course,” sighed the archbishop. “Perfection above all.”

  Leonardo Bindo kept all these matters in hand. He had a way of ordering things in his head, masterfully controlling every detail. Like an artist he dabbed a little here and a little there, preserving at every moment the balance of the picture as a whole.

  Some of the picture, of course, was private, indecipherable to anyone but himself. His correspondence with Roberto Mori was a matter of this kind.

  Composing the letters for a fictional prelate in the Vatican called for all his enterprise and cleverness. He enjoyed the intellectual challenge of warping his mind in a direction completely at odds with his own conservative belief. At the Biblioteca Nazionale he spent an entire day ferreting out articles by dissident churchmen, by Hans Küng of Austria, by Leonardo Boff of Brazil, by a certain rebellious priest in California, by truculent nuns in Chicago. His notes were full of distasteful phrases to be sprinkled into his letters like cherries in a cake—“the language of modern man,” “the courage to be Christian,” “the apostolic succession of every member of the church,” “the internationalization of the Roman Curia,” “the participation of the laity,” “the need for spontaneity in worship.” What nonsense! Idiotic phrases rattled out of his typewriter, day after day.

  But Bindo threw the whole force of his gifted imagination into his lying letters. They were more than clever, they were magical. They were alive with brilliant touches, sincere with high purpose, homely with personality—“Ah, I have spilled coffee on this letter! Forgive me, Father!”

  Matteo Luzzi took them to Roberto Mori one at a time.

  Matteo’s second appointment was for the lunch hour, but once again he was late. This time it was the fault of a stunning American girl among the tourists waiting to see the Michelangelo sculptures at San Lorenzo. Matteo hung around for half an hour, flirting with her in English, extracting only monosyllables in reply. The girl had covered half her face with sunglasses, she had hidden most of her golden hair under a man’s hat, and disguised her delicious curves with a couple of long shirts. But Matteo was a connoisseur of classy girls. He could see the goddess underneath.

  Not until the door opened and the waiting tourists were admitted did he release her and turn languidly away, remembering his mission to Roberto Mori.

  Father Roberto was delighted to see him. At once he reached for the letter in Matteo’s hand. “From the cardinal?” he said eagerly.

  “Si, si, of course it is from the cardinal.”

  Matteo watched as Father Roberto tore open the envelope and read Bindo’s clever concoction of insane mellifluous phrases.

  “Can you wait while I compose a reply?” Roberto’s face was flushed with pleasure.

  “Of course.”

  Roberto sat down at a narrow table and drove his pen swiftly over a sheet of paper. His letter was different from Bindo’s. It poured out of him without calculation—earnest, reverent, charged with his ardent willingness to serve. As he handed it to Matteo, his face was transfigured.

  Matteo took the letter and promised to send it by the proper channels at once. Then he lingered. He had begun to fall under the spell of the passionate and handsome priest, who had been silenced by the Vatican just as he, Matteo, had been expelled from the seminary. There was something compelling about him, a kind of authority very different from that of Signor Bindo.

  “I have to get a job,” he complained to Roberto. “And a new place to live.”

  He did not explain that it was Leonardo Bindo who was insisting that he be usefully occupied, that he should not hang around all day doing nothing.

  Nor did he go into the grubby details of his landlady’s outrage. The usual thing ha
d happened. Matteo had begun by charming her, but after a few months she was no longer charmed, she was infuriated, and now he had frightened the poor woman out of her wits. This morning when she had complained about his delinquent rent, he had sprayed her sofa with birdshot. She had thrown him out.

  “The cardinal wants you to get a job?” said Roberto innocently.

  “The cardinal? Oh, si, si, the cardinal.” Matteo lied easily. “He wishes to conceal my involvement. I’m to be occupied with ordinary things.”

  “But I think I can solve your problem. There’s a school here, a new school. They’re looking for a secretary. See, here’s the ad in La Nazione. And you could live there too, I think.”

  It was the new American school at Villa L’Ombrellino. Matteo rode out to Bellosguardo on the bus and climbed the hill. He was interviewed by Lucretia Van Ott, who hired him at once.

  Returning to Bindo’s office, Matteo bragged of his success. “And I’ll be living there,” he said proudly. “It’s a big villa, a new American school on the other side of the river.”

  “Not the Villa L’Ombrellino?” Bindo was mildly astonished. “But I have recently prepared their lease. Professor Zibo signed it. It’s a lovely place, vero?”

  Matteo made a face. “Beh, it is old.” More to his taste would have been a brand-new structure of glass and steel like a hotel in Milan, with color-coordinated furnishings and everything push-button—the television, the air conditioning, the stereo, the shower.

  After Matteo left him, Roberto unfolded the cardinal’s letter and read it eagerly once again, tasting the sweetness of the words of praise. But he shook his head at the caution scribbled at the bottom of the page, “Destroy.”

  Soon, perhaps, but not yet. For the moment he couldn’t bear to lose it. Carefully Roberto put the letter back in its envelope and hid it with the first in the table drawer.

  CHAPTER 10

  Beatrice gazed on heav’n and I on her.…

  Paradiso II, 22.

  There was no great rush of applications from would-be students to the American School of Florentine Studies. “The announcement came out too late,” said the president of the trustees. “Everything was too rushed. Next year it will be different.”

  Nine of the accepted students were juniors at the university, two were older women alumnae. At the last minute, during the final week of preparations in August, two of the younger applicants dropped out, leaving holes in the enrollment.

  The first was filled when an American girl wandered up the driveway of the villa one day and spoke to Franco Spoleto, the gardener, who was working with a bucket of patching plaster, repairing cracks in the wall.

  “The office?” she said, and then she tried it clumsily in Italian. “Il uffizio?”

  Franco looked at her openmouthed, then pointed at the villa. “Là,” he said. “Wait, I take you.” Putting down his trowel, he hurried gallantly ahead of her, sweeping open the door, staring avidly as she entered ahead of him.

  Lucretia and Zee looked up as Julia paused in the doorway of the office and inspected the ceiling of blue clouds. “I’d like to come to your school this fall. Am I too late to apply?”

  “Well, it just so happens,” said Lucretia, “that we’ve had a cancellation. I don’t suppose you have a transcript with you?”

  “No, I’m sorry.” But when Julia described her background as a graduate student in art history at N.Y.U., they accepted her at once.

  “What do you think?” said Lucretia to Zee, after she went away.

  Zee was speechless. He gestured feebly and tried to go back to his class notes, then gave up and began drawing in the margin a portrait of the girl from New York City.

  The second replacement was a graduate of the University of Padua. He phoned one day from Florence, having heard about the school, he said, from a friend.

  Lucretia was delighted. “He speaks both English and Italian,” she told Zee. “His father’s from Pittsburgh, his mother from Bergamo, which explains his name, Tommaso O’Toole.”

  “Why would a kid with his background want to come here?”

  “Heaven knows, but let’s be grateful that he does. Now the roster is full again.”

  “And you found us a secretary, Matteo what’s-his-name. How did he happen to turn up?”

  “Luzzi, Matteo Luzzi. He answered our ad. He’s a seminarian who changed his mind about being a priest.”

  “Well, he looks like an angel,” said Zee. “It’s too bad he can’t spell.”

  CHAPTER 11

  … my spirit now is burning

  So to go on, and see this venture through.

  Inferno 11,136–137.

  On the thirty-first of August, Homer and Mary Kelly had worked their way through Dante’s entire Divine Comedy, all the way through Hell and Purgatory to the topmost realms of Paradise.

  Hoarsely Mary read the last line of the last canto—

  The love that moves the sun and the other stars—

  and then they packed their bags and books and flew to Milan and spent the night in a hotel, and took the train to Florence and climbed wearily into a taxi. While they gawked out the window, turning their heads left and right, pointing and exclaiming, the taxi found its way across the Arno, raced out to the Porta Romana, zoomed up the winding streets to the Piazza di Bellosguardo and turned into the driveway of the Villa L’Ombrellino.

  Homer and Mary jounced in the backseat and stared. The surface of the road was a morass of careening tire tracks. There were marble nymphs and goddesses at every turn. Shrubbery sprang up waist-high around Cupid and Psyche. As the taxi rounded a curve, the villa reared up on their left, an expanse of sunlit buildings partly covered with scaffolding. At one side rose a pockmarked tower.

  They pulled up behind another taxi. A portly man in a rumpled seersucker suit was getting out. “Himmelfahrt,” said Homer, “the Italian history man from the University of Chicago.”

  Professor Himmelfahrt was in a state of shock. His first glance at the Villa L’Ombrellino had filled him with dismay. “Good lord,” he mumbled, jerking at his luggage, his breast churning. The taxi driver jabbered at him. Fifteen thousand lire? Good God. Himmelfahrt pawed through his handful of thousand-lire notes, angrily convinced he was being cheated. And where was the welcoming committee? Where were the formal gardens? Nobody had warned him about the rundown condition of the buildings. Dumping his heavy bags on the driveway, Himmelfahrt slicked strands of hair over his bald head, and turned in surprise as Homer and Mary Kelly came up behind him and introduced themselves.

  “We’ve got your history of Italy,” said Homer genially, and Himmelfahrt cheered up at once, not knowing that Homer had merely opened the book and slammed it shut again, because the damned thing was totally impenetrable.

  Ah, here was the welcoming committee. Himmelfahrt beamed at Lucretia Van Ott and Professor Zibo. There were greetings and handshakes. A student took Mary’s heaviest bag. The boxes of books were lugged out of the trunk.

  “Avanti!” said Lucretia, beaming and waving them up the stairs, while Zee made polite remarks, congratulating himself at the same time on his prophetic portrait of Himmelfahrt. The big chin was there, and the tiny nose. But look at the man’s tiny lipless mouth, minuscola! He should have guessed.

  The student carrying Mary Kelly’s bag was Ned Saltmarsh, a plump boy with pink cheeks, striped shorts and orange socks. “Lordy,” he said, heaving and puffing, “it’s heavy.”

  “Let me help,” said Mary.

  “No, no, I’ve got it,” gasped Ned, dragging the bag across the cracked tiles, lacerating its canvas bottom. Mary followed, feeling a momentary dismay. Here on the terrace of this Florentine villa under the gaze of these half-draped marble goddesses, Ned’s orange socks were an affront to the soft Italian sky and the ancient cypress trees and the hillside from which Galileo had looked at the heavens. Was this kid a typical example of the student body? For Homer’s sake, Mary hoped he wasn’t.

  The room assigned to the Kelly
s was on the third level of the dormitory wing, an elegant chamber with painted panelling. It was several doors removed from a modern bath which was to be shared with Professors Zibo and Van Ott.

  Mary looked out the window at the blue haze to the south beyond the statuary around the driveway, and reminded herself that only thirty-six hours ago she had been scraping at the filth behind a radiator in Concord, in a last-minute attempt to make the house fit for a tenant. She was exhausted. “I’ll just close my eyes for a minute,” she said, dropping on the bed.

  Far away across the central mass of the villa in the opposite wing, Himmelfahrt gulped with consternation at the dilapidation of his magnificent private bath.

  Homer went downstairs and found Zee, who hurried him to the door. “The view. We’ll get it over with before lunch.”

  They came out on the north side of the house, passing through a loggia with busts of Galileo and the poet Ugo Foscolo. Zee led Homer across the lawn to a low wall, where another bevy of sculptured nymphs turned contemptuously away from whatever lay below. “Prepare yourself,” said Zee.

  The sky was opening, the distance widening. “Good God,” said Homer.

  In coming to Florence he had assumed he would be let down. A place so ballyhooed couldn’t possibly be everything people said. But here it was, a vision fanciful but real—Brunelleschi’s great dome, church steeples and towers familiar to Dante and Michelangelo and Machiavelli—spread out on a platter.

  “I’m speechless,” he said. “It’s like a fairy city. I’m sorry. That’s a silly thing to say.”

  “It’s all right,” said Zee. “This view is famous for inspiring remarkable people to say commonplace things. Don’t apologize.” He began pointing out landmarks, identifying bell towers and domes.

  Homer listened, and watched the pointing finger. Zee’s speech was almost without accent. He spoke with small pauses, dredging up surprising words from some thesaurus in his mind. He had taught in the United States, Homer knew that. How old was he? And why did he look so familiar? His face was gaunt, but his eyes were clear and curious, and his mouth was enclosed in small parenthetical wrinkles. He gave the impression of a man of sprightly good humor put to the rack, or a starved ascetic like Saint Jerome.