The Dante Game

by Jane Langton

  Striding out of the dining room, Joan suppressed for the moment the harsh truth of the daily ordeal of looking in the mirror every morning. At such times she would have given anything, anything, to see a plump young face looking back at her, not the same old sunken eyes and fallen cheeks, the bitter mouth, the mole on the eyelid. What use in all creation was one more homely woman?

  They talked about Julia in the kitchen too. Matteo Luzzi remembered Julia from the summertime, when he had seen her at the church of San Lorenzo. Now he made exaggerated shapes in the air, and wondered if Signorina Smith was frigida rather than sensuale. Franco compared her with the stone goddesses on the lawn. Her thighs were like this one, her shoulders like that one, her breasts—Franco made balloonlike gestures in front of his chest—like Psyche’s, halfway down the driveway. And then Isabella whispered that Professor Zibo had drawn a picture of the signorina. It was in his sketchbook, hidden in his desk. And she had found a little pair of panties in the wardrobe belonging to Tommaso, the ragazzo from Bergamo. The signorina’s name tag was attached to the elastic. These revelations were greeted with raucous laughter, Isabella’s high scream rising above the rest.

  Julia herself tried to balance good with bad. She was glad to have found the school, glad to be settled, glad to have made up her mind—glad, glad to be learning what she was learning. The emptiness she had felt when she was on her own was gone. The splendors of the city of Florence were no longer a passing show. If she wasn’t exactly climbing into a fresco of the Annunciation, or running with a band of marble children across a choir loft, or dwelling among the columns in a superbly proportioned church, at least she was learning about them and talking about them and tying them together with threads of meaning.

  Therefore she was grateful to her professors, especially to Zee and Lucretia. It was a gratitude that came very close to affection. Julia had always loved her teachers. Now from long practice she kept her enthusiasm mute in the classroom, only glancing up to register the quick changes on Zee’s face, or the rapid strokes of Lucretia’s chalk on the blackboard. For the time being she was content to be a container for information, a jar passively filling.

  All this was to the good. The bad thing for Julia Smith at the American School of Florentine Studies was the presence of Ned Saltmarsh. Here she was, once again, dragging a clumsy weight behind her, a weird little dog nipping at her heels.

  Ned was everywhere. As the regular schedule of courses began in earnest, he established a pattern, right away, of sitting beside her in class. Julia tried to ignore him. She focused on the lectures, she listened intently and wrote everything down. As Zee pointed out the tourist sights of the Inferno, reciting the torments of this individual soul or that, making clear the awful rightness of God’s justice, Julia, assigned Ned to whatever grim punishment was the order of the day. To hell with Ned Saltmarsh!

  Work was piling up. Some of Julia’s classmates fell behind. They were disappointed to discover that school was school on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Lucretia’s two courses were especially rigorous.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays she taught Italian. Her method was traditional, moving through the pronouns, the first conjugation, the second. The star student was Tommaso, who spoke the language like a native. All three Debbies were quick, and so was Julia. Joan Jakes was only fair. Dorothy Orme was the oldest member of the class, and the slowest. Homer was not as old as Dorothy, but he too had lost the spongelike powers of youth. Lucretia’s words rattled past him. He couldn’t tell where one ended and another began.

  He practiced with Isabella and Alberto, Franco and Matteo. He could begin easily enough, with some hearty remark—Buona sera, come sta?—but as soon as they responded, he was sunk.

  Matteo was the worst. He talked too fast.

  “Slow down,” Homer would urge, “lentamente!” And Matteo would grin with contempt and jabber faster than ever, exclusive possessor of the splendors of the Italian language.

  Lucretia’s second course was the art of the Florentine Renaissance. It was less like an ordinary series of lectures than an exploration of the city, something like their class tours on alternate mornings. Her teaching was a kind of poking around the city streets, dodging back and forth among politicians, poets, painters, grammarians, bankers, goat butchers and dyers of wool. Soon all the notebooks were choked with the names of miscellaneous Florentines whose fortunes were intertwined.

  Himmelfahrt’s Italian history class was less successful. At first it met at three, directly after the Dante class. But that proved unsatisfactory.

  “They fell asleep,” reported Himmelfahrt angrily. “They all fell asleep. I insist on teaching first in the afternoon. I didn’t come three thousand miles to lecture to people with their eyes closed.”

  “We’ll trade places,” said Zee, seizing the easiest solution.

  But that didn’t work either. Zee’s students were just as lively at three o’clock as they had been at two, whereas Himmelfahrt’s dozed off in the same puzzling way.

  Homer Kelly’s class in modern Italian literature fared better than it deserved. On the first day he confessed the thinness of his preparation, the superficiality of his reading. To his surprise the students seemed flattered to be taken into his confidence.

  “It’s wonderful,” Homer said to his wife, “the way ignorance provides a firm foundation. If you admit you know nothing, nobody can take you by surprise or point out your mistakes. It’s pitiful, really, that they put up with me.”

  “Well, of course, dear, most teaching is a sleight-of-hand trick, you know that. You’ll be fine. Good God, I’ve lost my cosmetic case. Have you seen it? Oh, here it is.”

  Mary’s possessions were spread out on the bed. She was packing up, leaving for Rome to begin studying her nineteenth-century Americans abroad.

  “I’m leaving too,” said Homer gloomily. “This place is too rich for my blood. I’m going to rent one of those little motorbikes and commute to the school from the town. I’ll find a pensione somewhere.”

  “Well, I’ll miss you, Homer darling. But all those naked people in Rome are calling me.”

  Homer gaped at her. “Naked people?” Then he laughed. “Oh, you mean all that white marble sculpture with the plump fingers and pretty toenails.”

  “Of course a lot of it isn’t in Rome anymore. They shipped it home to Boston. I’m afraid a lot of it is stored in the basement of the Museum of Fine Arts. Oh, Homer, they’re so bad, all those Carrara marble gods and goddesses. So limp, so feeble. But the Americans who went to Rome to make them weren’t limp and feeble, they were fascinating, and I want to find out all about them.” Mary snapped her suitcase shut and looked fiercely at Homer. “Whatever you do, be kind to Zee. That man never murdered his wife.”

  “Of course he didn’t. Of course not.”

  In the days that followed, Homer did as he was told. It was an easy duty. Zee willingly complied with his idea of a late afternoon walk every day. Together they climbed and descended the hill of Bellosguardo, and stared in at the pompous gateways of neighboring villas.

  Before long Homer abandoned false courtesy and began asking his usual nosy questions. He remembered the trial in the Suffolk County Courthouse, he said. What the hell was it all about? Boldly he echoed Mary. “You never murdered your wife.”

  “Oh, my God, I don’t know, Homer. My attorneys thought I was—what do you call it?—the fall guy in some big drug deal. But the jury didn’t believe it. And if my wife had family connections with Italian dealers in narcotics, she never told me. Of course there were a lot of things she never told me.” Zee sounded bitter, and Homer remembered the ugly headlines about his wife’s extramarital adventures.

  “I thought your motive was supposed to have been jealous rage, or something like that. And how were you supposed to have killed her? There was something about a car—”

  “Her car, yes, it blew up in the garage. Afterward they found traces of cocaine in her spare tire. My lawyer thought she was ki
lled because she was moving in on the wrong territory. Her connections, he said, had been purely in heroin, not cocaine. But he couldn’t prove it, and I spent five years in Walpole State Prison.”

  The road was steep. They passed a shrine built into the wall, a memorial to a fatal accident. There was a jar of fresh flowers in front of the weathered Virgin. “And afterward,” said Homer, “you returned to Florence and got a job at the university?”

  “I was lucky. The head of the department was an old friend.” Zee glanced at Homer and tossed his hand skyward, a gesture Homer would remember for the rest of his life. “It was like the passage at the end of the Inferno when Dante comes forth from the darkness of Hell, to look once more upon the stars.”

  The next day Zee talked about his childhood. He was amusing on the subject, describing the discomforts of the fortress-like villa on Via Bolognese in which he had grown up. There had been a library with costly editions of Dante and Petrarch, there was a butler who sang like Elvis Presley, there were ugly gardens of spiny cactuses. As a small boy Zee had sat in a wicker chair in the limonaia at I Tatti, his feet dangling, while his parents had tea with the shawl-wrapped Berenson. Later during his student days at the university he had moved among fashionable people who remembered the Sitwells and Somerset Maugham. One old gentleman had been insulted by Evelyn Waugh.

  “Do you still own the house?”

  “Oh, no. It went to pay my attorneys’ fees. I wasn’t sorry to see it go.” And then Zee talked about his last five years in Florence. Coming back to the city of his birth after his imprisonment in the United States, he had not returned to the cypress drives, the peacocks, the parterres and balustrades of the international set. Until now he had been living cheaply near Porta San Frediano. “But here we are again, grandioso, pomposo.” Zee turned his back on another magnificent wrought iron gate. “Well, it’s a new start.”

  But the next day Homer was dismayed to learn that Zee’s fresh beginning had already been threatened. Professor Himmelfahrt had received a gossiping letter from the United States, relaying the news about Zee’s conviction and prison sentence, and at once he spread it all over the school.

  Lucretia was furious. “It’s envy,” she told Homer. “He knows Zee is more popular with the kids than he is, and he can’t stand it.”

  Homer wondered if the revelation would change things. But in Zee’s Dante class the students remained attentive. The lovely Julia sat among the rest, her head bent over her notebook, Ned Saltmarsh in worshipful attendance.

  Homer worried that Zee’s career might be in jeopardy for other reasons. “Listen, friend,” he said, “what about the drug connection? Don’t you think your wife’s involvement might pursue you here? You know, Italian politicians, businessmen, bankers, they’re all supposed to be in on it. Are you sure nobody’s after you?”

  Zee laughed. “You’re talking about the Italian underworld, the malavita. There’s not much of it here in Florence, nothing on a high level. Oh, there are kids who buy the stuff, a few pushers perhaps. But no big wheels. And now there’s the pope’s crusade against drugs. It seems to be working. Fantastico!”

  CHAPTER 16

  The wondrous truth outstrips my staggering pen.

  Inferno IV, 147.

  By this time the extraordinary success of the pope’s Holy Year Against Drugs was news all over the world.

  In mid-September the holy father flew to New York City to bless thousands of repentant addicts in Yankee Stadium. A week later he was in Rio de Janeiro, then Buenos Aires and Bogota.

  In Rome itself trainloads of grubby pilgrims from the back streets of all the great cities of Europe kept turning up without warning, creating monstrous traffic jams. Ordinary citizens had to make their way through throngs of kids with backpacks heading for Saint Peter’s Square. The kids slept everywhere, clogging the sidewalks.

  It was dumbfounding to the promoters of the campaign in the Vatican, and their elation was mingled with concern. The thing was getting out of hand. At any moment it might change its course and turn ugly. How were they to maintain control, to keep the ball rolling, to hold these cleansed young souls in the paths of righteousness?

  In other quarters there was a different sort of dismay. Leonardo Bindo’s business had fallen off still farther. Trade on the street was slack.

  But Bindo was by nature an optimist. If things went badly, one did something about it. All things could be made to serve, even ill fortune.

  When Homer Kelly wandered into the Banca degli Innocenti, Bindo was attracted by his great height and his amiable American face. Waving aside the teller, he went to the window and waited on Homer himself.

  Homer needed cash for the rental of a motorbike and for the first month’s rent at a pensione. Leaning toward the teller’s window he began bravely, “Vorrei cambiare questi—”

  The smiling man at the window interrupted. He had a round face with shiny rosy cheeks. “You would like to cash your traveler’s checks? Certainly, sir. If you would sign them, please?”

  Then while Homer scribbled his name across check after check, the teller introduced himself and made courteous conversation. His name, he said, was Leonardo Bindo, and he was the manager of the Banca degli Innocenti. He was fascinated to learn that Homer was teaching at the Villa L’Ombrellino. “Ah, what a beauty spot! I went to a wedding there in days gone by. It was I, as a matter of fact, who arranged the lease for the new school. Signor Zibo, is it not, is a professor there?”

  Bindo failed to mention his connection with the school secretary, although he was in constant touch with Matteo Luzzi. The stupid ragazzo was complaining about the inconvenience of taking the bus, whenever there was a letter “from the cardinal” to be carried by hand to Roberto Mori, or an answer written by Father Roberto to be conveyed to His Fictional Eminence. Matteo was pressing for a car. Well, Bindo might have to rent one for him, something cheap, a modest little Fiat.

  Homer shoved his signed checks across the counter. “Tell me, Signor Bindo, how does this little bank compete with the big ones?”

  “Oh, we are all friends.” Signor Bindo laughed. “How do you say it in English? We’re in cahoots.”

  “Hey, fella, are you through?”

  Homer turned in surprise. Behind him stood a tall American in a Milwaukee Brewers cap. “Oh, sure. Sorry to keep you waiting.” Pocketing his money, Homer nodded at Bindo and moved aside.

  The tourist shuffled forward. “Hey, listen, how many whatchamacallums to the dollar?”

  But after Homer was safely out of the bank Leonardo Bindo beckoned the man in the baseball cap into his office and closed the door. He was furious. “How many times do I have to tell you to stay away from here?”

  “Oh, sure, sure, right. Big deal.”

  “Big deal?” Bindo stared at him suspiciously. “What is a big deal?”

  “Never mind. It’s nothin’. I gotcha.”

  “Gotcha?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, never mind.” And then Earl went on to complain that the kids had disappeared from Piazza Santo Spirito. Hardly anybody wanted to buy.

  “Well, it’s not my fault,” said Bindo. “Blame the Vatican. Blame His Holiness.”

  “Well, Jesus, why don’t somebody blow him away?”

  “Blow him away? What is it, to blow away?”

  And then Earl demonstrated, holding up a mock handgun and uttering a violent noise.

  “Ah, I see,” said Signor Bindo, beaming.

  Homer found a room in a pensione on the Via Fossi. It was a small high chamber, sparsely furnished, but from his window he could look out on the church of Santa Maria Novella, which dated back to Dante’s time.

  The proprietor stood waiting while Homer craned his neck out the window and congratulated himself on being where he was. He thought of his mother, who had never been abroad, although she had taught Latin to generations of adolescents in South Boston. Now, leaning on the windowsill, Homer could feel in the palms of his hands the weight of his mother’s forty
years of teaching. He wanted to push this moment back through his own blood and bones into hers.

  “Si, Signore,” he told the landlord, “prendo la camera,” and handed over a thick wad of ten thousand-lire notes.

  It was ten o’clock, time to meet Zee and the Dante class in Piazza del Duomo.

  A street sweeper was droning down Via Fossi when Homer came out into the sunlight, a huge machine, vibrating and wobbling from side to side, its brushes whirling, catching up the debris of the street. Ahead of it shopkeepers hurried out of their doorways with brooms, sweeping their premises clean, brushing everything into its path.

  Homer galloped across Via Fossi, paused to consult his guidebook, then made his way in the direction of the Duomo, straggling to ignore the thick life of the street, the shoppers, the people waiting for the bus on Via Cerretani, the chic sportswear in the store windows. Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine the streets as they had been in Dante’s time.

  In this city, after all, the past had not been emptied out like water from a pitcher whirling down a sink. It was more like a deep well in which all events and all times hung suspended, poised like fish below the trembling surface of the present moment.

  Opening his eyes again, the lordly citizen of an everlasting Florence, Homer strode across the street as the light changed. But, whoops! he was nearly run down by a pair of pretty girls on gold roller skates. “Scusi,” cried the girls, and they rolled away in their gold tights, carrying gold pocketbooks, their platinum hair streaming behind them, their sandwich boards advertising the perfumes of Estée Lauder. A cavalcade of guys on Suzukis, Yamahas and Hondas thundered in their wake, whistling and catcalling, and Homer’s universal grasp on the entire stretch of time and space fell away, and he nipped up on the sidewalk on the other side, glad to be alive.