The Dante Game

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by Jane Langton


  Drug trafficking had returned with a vengeance. At every level, from the powerful men giving orders at the top to the miserable addicts and dealers on the street, the thing had escalated out of control. Demand had suddenly rocketed. The price of a half kilo of Turkish heroin or Colombian cocaine was right back where it had been before the beginning of the first Holy Year Against Drugs.

  Even among the hordes of young people in Saint Peter’s Square—those very same young men and women who had sworn off, who had come to Rome to declare their commitment to the papal crusade—forbidden substances were circulating. The crusade had gone sour. The worldwide fit of youthful repentance was passing as suddenly as it had begun. It was an embarrassment to the Vatican.

  Inspector Rossi was not surprised. One of the police officers on duty on the rooftops on Easter morning had witnessed something shocking as the Vatican helicopter circled above the square and headed south on its way back to Rome. He had seen joints passing from hand to hand among the young people of the choir, the same pretty boys and girls who had sung their promises of purity so sweetly on the cathedral steps, Mai, mai, mai! Never, never, never!

  It was very sad.

  CHAPTER 57

  Florence, my Florence, laugh!

  … for it galls thee not,

  Thanks to thy citizens, so wise, so zealous!

  Purgatorio VI, 127–129.

  It was the first of June. Homer had turned in his rented Bravo, and therefore he had to walk to the Banca degli Innocenti. He was glad to find the manager himself behind the teller’s window.

  Signor Leonardo Bindo seemed even pinker and more shining than Homer remembered. He laughed joyously when Homer apologized for withdrawing his small account.

  “Ah, we don’t worry our heads about that.” Bindo couldn’t resist the temptation to brag. “We have good luck with our investments.” He pointed a fat finger at the ceiling. “They go up, straight up to the top of the sky.”

  “To the tenth heaven,” exclaimed Homer happily, “and the throne of God, right?”

  Bindo threw back his head and roared. “Si, Signor Kelly. To the very throne of God.” Smiling radiantly, he ushered Homer out of the bank and watched him wander away across the square.

  The poor ignorant sciocco was leaving. The American school had completed its year and closed its doors and gone out of business. The Villa L’Ombrellino was back in the hands of the comune.

  It wasn’t Bindo’s fault that the school had failed. Personally, he had wished it well. It was the idealist who had destroyed it with all his fanciful notions. Well, the whole venture with Roberto Mori had been a mistake.

  Locking the doors of the bank for the noontime closing, Bindo thought about the sad case of the radical priest. It was incredible that the man had really believed in his foolish causes. How could he have embraced the idea of marriage for the clergy and the ordination of women? Marriage for the clergy! Who would accept the body and blood of Christ from a priest who had spent the night in sexual indulgence? Who would receive the Holy Eucharist, consecrated by a woman?

  Once again Leonardo Bindo crossed the square to the church of Santissima Annunziata and knelt before the painting of the Annunciation. If, while he prayed, the miraculous Virgin turned her head to look at him, whether in transport or in sorrow, Bindo’s eyes were cast down at the knees of his trousers, his fingers plucked at a piece of lint, and he failed to see.

  As for Homer Kelly, strolling down Via de’ Servi, he gave no more thought to the Banca degli Innocenti and its amiable manager Leonardo Bindo. He was savoring his final hour in the city of Florence. On the way back to his pensione he lingered in the Piazza del Duomo to enjoy a last view of the great bulk of the cathedral.

  Today it seemed especially giddy with elaborations of colored marble, frisky with gables and pinnacles and running lines of cusps and arches. The huge punctured holes of the round windows were like shadowy lenses surveying the surrounding hills, the eyes of a personified Florence looking out darkly at the clutter of red rooftops and the narrow streets choked with citizens.

  Greedily, with the sense that it was for the last time, Homer stared into the faces of the men and women thronging the sidewalks. The streets were thick with thousands of foreign tourists, but there were plenty of native Florentines shouldering past them, hurrying to appointments, to lunch, to work, to the shops along Via Ginori and Via Cavour. The facial bones of the Tuscan citizens were strong, and as they strode past Homer they met his stare with the same piercing glance that looked out from so many painted walls. They had the same bold physiognomies as the fifteenth-century bankers and guildsmen and merchant princes who stood in such proud clusters to witness an adoration of the shepherds or a beheading of John the Baptist.

  Homer ambled along, imagining Dante coming back to the city of his birth, right now, this very year, recognizing on the street the keen visages of the descendants of his sinners. Surely he would discover among them the selfsame sins—love perverted, love excessive, love defective, fraud simple and complex, pride and anger and covetousness, and violence against God.

  Did Hell still yawn for the souls of these contemporary Florentines? Did Purgatory rise before them like a many-storied mountain?

  The passage of time hardly mattered. In Florence all times were simultaneous. The painted Dominican monks of San Marco knelt before a crucifixion that was always happening, they prayed to the Virgin as though the infant were forever leaping in her womb. The city itself was a majestic representative of that eternity in which justice was forever exacted, Christ forever martyred and yet forever at the right hand of God.

  Homer felt a pang of regret at the thought of returning to the United States, to the plain clapboards of New England houses, the modest steeples of Concord churches. On Walden Street and the Milldam he would find the same range of human iniquity and error—there would still be hoarders and spendthrifts and sowers of discord—but the faces would be different, blander, paler, lacking in virile dignity. Nowhere Would he find the same universal pride of bearing.

  And there would be no stories in stone ornamenting Snow’s Pharmacy, no devils supporting light fixtures on the chaste facade of the public library, no miraculous legends painted on the walls of the First Parish Church. The town of Concord was not a city of the imagination.

  Homer stopped short in the middle of Via Martelli and turned around to look again at the Duomo. A girl cannoned into him, a van swerved violently, a motorcyclist braked and squawked his horn. Oblivious, Homer backed up onto the sidewalk, still staring at the marble mountain blocking out the sunlight.

  As he watched, it swelled and spread, its chapels bulged, it was growing, ballooning, engulfing all Italy, swallowing the entire continent. Before his eyes the Cathedral of Florence turned into a solidified hodgepodge, a jumbled representative of the civilization of the old world, a scrambled conglomeration of all Christian belief. Tumbling into its yawning doors were the prophets and fathers of the church. Thomas Aquinas was striding in, and Martin Luther, shouting. Theologians and saints and artists and musicians were thick on the stairs, thronging into the doorway, Ignatius Loyola and Saint Theresa, Titian and Rembrandt, Palestrina and Johann Sebastian Bach.

  What did poor bare Concord, Massachusetts, have to offer in place of this richness of story and tradition and human suffering and exaltation?

  Homer drifted along Via Cerretani, working his way through the waiting crowd at the bus stop, and tried to think what it was that was drawing him home. The image that rose in his head was that of an ordinary summer morning on the Concord River. He could feel the sun hot on his bare knees, he could smell the dank freshness of the swampy shore, and hear the hollow “tunk” of the paddle on the side of the aluminum canoe, and see the water dripping from the blade.

  Could one compare the flash and sparkle of those falling drops with the miraculous liquefaction in a vial of the blood of Christ, a holy relic in some Italian church? No, they were only drops of water, visible for an instant, then m
ingling with the slow-moving river. The trunks of Concord’s white pine trees were not carved by generations of craftsmen into gargoyles and the heads of kings—they were only lithe timbers throwing out branches decked with puffs of green.

  Nothing in Concord’s rural landscape was miraculous except in the profoundest natural way, in the sense that miracles abound in the unsullied sky, in the purling of water over rocks, in the opening and closing of the fingers of a hand.

  Comforted, Homer pushed the elevator button in the vestibule of his pensione and waited, twiddling his fingers in the pockets of his coat. When the elevator wobbled to a stop he slid open the door and rode upward, balancing in the two pans of a gigantic mental scale the great rock of the Cathedral of Florence and the drops of water falling from the paddle of a canoe on the Concord River, finding them equal—different manifestations of truths so diverse as never to be grasped in a single system.

  The next day Homer and Mary Kelly journeyed to Rome, and within the week they were back in the United States, caught up at once in the life they had abandoned the year before. Local matters closed in on them, Florence receded, their Italian fell away, the levels of Hell grew muddled, and so did the divine heights of Paradise.

  But they kept in touch by letter with Julia and Giovanni Zibo, and took an interest in the further history of the American School of Florentine Studies.

  One of the original students turned up in Cambridge, Joan Jakes. There she was in Homer’s summer session Thoreau class, shooting up her hand as always, eager to ask a cerebral question. It turned out that Joan’s whole life was a string of expensive far-flung courses. In the intervening year she had studied Irish castles in Dublin, the zoology of the outback in Australia, and Hopi archeology in Santa Fe. For Joan there was a precious moment in every course when her fellow students discovered she was smart as a tack.

  As for Tommaso O’Toole, he was now a settled citizen of Florence, a student of business administration at the university. He had left behind him at the Villa L’Ombrellino his crush on Julia Smith. Julia was the reason Tom had come to the American School of Florentine Studies in the first place. He had seen her at the Bargello that day, listening to a talk about Donatello’s Saint George. He had heard her speak to the lecturer, he had watched while she wrote down the name of the new school across the river. At once, abandoning a plan to go to the United States, Tom had signed up too at the American school on the hill of Bellosguardo.

  Now he had a girl at the university. She was not as devastatingly pretty as Julia Smith, but she was sympathetic and amusing. Tom visited her family’s apartment on Sundays, to be petted by her mother, who gave him artichokes stuffed with mortadella, and pisellini alla fiorentina.

  The Villa L’Ombrellino was no longer available for any sort of school. The comune had at last found the money to finish it as a trade center for the city of Florence. Tom went to the opening reception and wandered among the displays, remembering with nostalgia the Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, the Pavilion of the Concubines, the Dining Salon of the Grand Duke. The interior of the villa was almost unrecognizable. The spacious rooms that had seen the descent into Hell, the cleansing of Purgatory, and the felicity of Paradise, now sported smart exhibit spaces for Florentine wholesalers.

  Tom wasn’t shocked. If they were selling word processors there now instead of instructing American kids in The Divine Comedy, what difference did it make, really and truly? Florence had always been a city of merchants eager to profit from the latest novelty.

  Most of the other students had dropped completely out of sight—Kevin Banks, Throppie Snow, Sukey Skinner, Debbie Weiss, Debbie Foster and Debbie Sawyer. Only Dorothy Orme cherished the memory of her time in Florence.

  For the next two years Dorothy stayed close to the nursing home in Worcester where her mother was slowly declining, but when the old woman died at last, Dorothy came into a considerable fortune, and kicked up her heels.

  On the day after her mother’s funeral she jumped into her car and sped to Boston to talk to the trustees. A few days later she flew to Italy to consult with Zee. Before long there was a new American School of Florentine Studies on the hill of Bellosguardo overlooking the city of Florence.

  No longer was it housed in a splendid villa. The new school occupied an ugly modern building. Galileo had never lived in it. No goddesses lined the garden wall. But there were lizards running up and down the reinforced concrete pillars of the loggia, a fig tree dropped its fruit to molder on the lawn, Julia’s little daughter toddled in and out of the office, babbling in two languages, and within the classroom a new band of pilgrims wandered with Zee into the dark wood, to be tormented in Hell, and purified in Purgatory, and at last prepared to leap up to the stars.

  Ay me! how hard to speak of it—that rude

  And rough and stubborn forest! the mere breath

  Of memory stirs the old fear in the blood;

  It is so bitter, it goes nigh to death;

  Yet there I gained such good, that, to convey

  The tale, I’ll write what else I found therewith.…

  Inferno I, 4–9.

  AFTERWORD

  Many people helped with the writing of this book, and I am grateful to all of them, but most especially to Paul Gehl of Chicago’s Newberry Library.

  J.L.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Homer Kelly Mysteries

  1

  See what a life the gods have given us, set round

  with pain and pleasure. It is too strange for sorrow;

  it is too strange for joy.

  Thoreau’s Journal March 27, 1842

  In the forest of oak and white pine beyond the Pond View Trailer Park, a wood thrush began to sing. Nobody heard it. All the residents of Pond View were inside their Belvederes and Skylines and Caravelles except for Stu LaDue, who sat on his lawn chair beside Route 126 just as usual. If Stu heard the song of the wood thrush above the noise of the passing traffic, he paid it no heed.

  Inside the mobile homes several impulsive things were happening that June morning.

  Norman Peck suddenly decided to put his collection of snapshots into an album. Pulling open a drawer, he rummaged in it for pictures of his deceased wife.

  Mavis and Bernie Buonfesto began yelling at each other over their breakfast coffee.

  Shirley Mills pitched out the leggy geranium she had been keeping alive for five years.

  Charlotte Harris threw herself down at her desk and wrote a letter.

  Of all these impetuous events, the only one that made any real difference afterward was Charlotte’s letter:

  Dear Julian, I want to say three things.

  1. I’ve been unhappy as Pete’s wife my whole married life.

  2. Getting a divorce is awful. You know, such a mess.

  3. I wouldn’t ever do it unless I thought you’d marry me someday.

  If you think this is silly, forget it. I’d rather keep on with Pete. This isn’t a big deal. It’s just that I’ve always loved you.

  Charlotte

  She soon regretted the letter with all her heart.

  2

  … I have been anxious to improve the nick of time

  … to stand on the meeting of two eternities …

  to toe that line.

  Walden, “Economy”

  Charlotte’s letter was a critical point like a change of state, like the instant when a kettle of water starts to boil, or a swelling balloon bursts with a loud report, or an accumulating pile of gravel steepens until the stones rattle thunderously downhill.

  In human affairs there are similar critical points, hours when small things mount to a crisis, moments when anger erupts or tears flow, days when marriages fail. Even the instant when understanding floods the mind can be a crucial turning point.

  Long before the morning when Charlotte wrote her letter the simmering had begun in the kettle, the balloon had begun to expand, the steepening slope of the pile of gravel was becoming more acute.

  I
f there was a single moment of beginning, it was the day Jack Markey rode up in the elevator to the seventieth floor of the Grandison Building on Huntington Avenue in Boston to receive a new assignment from Jefferson Grandison.

  Jack was already immersed in one commercial project for his chief. He was working hard, throwing into it all his enthusiasm, all his skill in matching buildings to a particular site. Flying up in the elevator, he didn’t know how he’d find time for a second undertaking.

  The elevator was attached to the outside of the building, and it was made of glass. It occurred to Jack as he rushed up from the dark canyon of Huntington Avenue into the light-filled upper air that Grandison’s office was not on the seventieth floor at all—it was somewhere in the upper reaches of the sky. Understanding Mr. Grandison’s exalted loftiness was like grasping the concept of infinity. No matter how far away you envisioned the end of space, there was infinite expanse beyond, and no matter how high you imagined Grandison’s dwelling place, he was higher still. Empires rose when Jefferson Grandison nodded his head. He shook it and they fell.

  This morning Mr. Grandison had completed the details of an important contract by telephone. The other party was unctuously grateful. “That is thoroughly satisfactory, Mr. Grandison, sir. I’ll send a messenger directly with the papers and the check, transferring to you the possession of Lot Seventeen. I trust you’ll take it off our hands in the very near future?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Grandison, sir, I don’t want to trouble you, but I wonder if you might be just a little more specific, as far as the timetable?”

 

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