I sat in my car for another hour, waiting for Odysseus’s ship to make landfall. Meanwhile, the seagull abandoned the crab as the purple and orange dusk spread over the winter ocean, reminding me that it was time to return to Batterson Avenue, where my mother was warming bottles of Similac formula for Isabel’s dinner.
WE MEET DANTE’S ULISSE—FOR ULYSSES, the Roman form of Homer’s Greek hero Odysseus—in Malebolge, a moral black hole consisting of ten concentric ditches toward the bottom of Inferno. According to Dante, the farther you get from God’s love, the colder it gets, so the pit of Inferno is all ice. And the deeper one goes into Dante’s hell, the smarter the sinners. In Malebolge, the greatest holding pit of human evil in the universe, the sin of fraud is punished. The previous sins in hell, including the lust of Paolo and Francesca, were failures of will, as the body’s appetites overwhelmed the mind that was supposed to constrain them. But in Malebolge the sinners abuse a greater gift than the body: here the intellect has turned sour.
Throughout The Divine Comedy, Dante engages in intense conversations with his characters, from the sinners in hell to the blessed in heaven. Most everyone he meets, including the eloquent chatterbox Francesca da Rimini, talks Dante’s ear off, as they desperately recount how they had been wronged or how they had been saved. Everyone except Ulysses. He is unapproachable. Transformed into a tongue of flame, he hisses words at a starstruck Dante, who listens but doesn’t dare speak back, heeding Virgil’s words that the great Greek hero might hold him in scorn.
In Homer’s epic telling, Odysseus endured ten years of war in Troy, then ten years of wandering through the wine-dark waters separating him from his island of Ithaca and his wife, Penelope. But nothing could stop him from returning home. He ran a spike through the eye of the drunken Cyclops; he stopped his ears with wax against the song of the Sirens; he rescued his crew from the seductive drug of forgetfulness in the Land of the Lotus-eaters; he cried an Aegean Sea of protest against Calypso and her enticements. Homer’s Odysseus embodies devotion to home; Dante’s Ulysses is as restless as his flaming tongue, as he describes the overwhelming sense of displacement he felt upon returning to Ithaca:
neither fondness for my son, nor devotion
to my old father, nor the love I owed
Penelope that would have contented her,
could overcome the lust
I felt inside to become an expert
on the world’s vices and its virtues.
Nothing can calm Ulysses’ yearning soul: he burns to return to the high seas and his wanderer’s life. He convenes a meeting with his former comrades, asking them to join him in leaving Ithaca and setting sail for new adventures.
Remember, he tells them: “you were not made to live like brutes, / but to pursue virtue and knowledge.”
They succumb to his magical words and rush to join him at sea. But their joy soon turns to fright. Within a fortnight, a terrible storm strikes their vessel. No honeyed words can save them now. The sea closes over them—“com’ altrui piacque,” Dante writes, “as pleased another,” implying that the heavens were not on Ulysses’ side.
Francesca made Dante wonder: how do you love a person without a body—when you are so heartbroken that you can’t imagine her alive anymore? Ulysses’ lesson is even more bitter: once you lose your former life—to use that wooden term—you can never get it back. In a complete reversal of Homer, Dante sends Ulysses back to sea after he has returned home—because the home he finds back in Ithaca is no longer home.
AS I GAZED OUT TO the Atlantic and listened to McKellen narrate the Odyssey, I pictured Dante’s Ulysses coming home to Ithaca and created my own version of the story, just as Dante had. In my telling, Ulysses’ tale went like this:
In the twenty years since he had left his wife, Ulysses had known other women and he had wept a sea of tears. Yet he had forsaken all of them, human and divine, for this very moment. He had made it back to the home he was born in. He was standing in his bedroom—the place where he had left the things of childhood and later slept as a man. His hair stood on end. Nothing had changed: the rooms were filled with everything he had left behind. And there it was, in the center of the room, the bed on a platform of a massive oak tree trunk. He took the sheets in his arms: they smelled of sandalwood and soap.
He smelled his wife on the sheets, for the first time in twenty years. His pulse raced: they were finally together in the same house, and within hours he would smell her flesh and touch her skin. He would make love to the wife who had become a woman without a body—a perfect, remote shadow in his dreams and daydreams.
He had killed countless rivals (and was about to slaughter his wife’s suitors), had matched wits with the most brilliant, and crossed swords with the most ferocious. He had lived in Calypso’s cave for seven years, captive to a jealous lover who provided him with everything he could ever hope for, but did not want. Amid the nymphs wreathed in seaweed, the suckling pigs, and the writhing dancers, he would wander to a clump of rocks that jutted out into the sea. And he would weep, rivers of tears that soaked his tunic and splashed against the stone. All the while, he stared in the direction of the house that smelled of sandalwood and soap.
Now he had made it home.
The sandalwood and soap filled his body, first with sweetness.
Then with nausea.
Back in my own childhood home after twenty years—falling asleep on my mom’s living room sofa while Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes duked it out over gun control and health care—I could feel Ulysses’ nausea in the pit of my stomach.
Nausea: that’s the sensation Dante used to describe his exile, which he said teaches you “come sa di sale / lo pane altrui”—“how salty is the taste / of another man’s bread.” He wasn’t waxing metaphorical: they have made bread without salt in Florence from Dante’s time until today, and nothing reminds a Florentine more of home than this desalinated staple.
A FEW MONTHS INTO MY stay in Westerly, I returned to Katherine’s hometown outside Detroit to celebrate her father’s retirement from the bench. The day I arrived, her parents and I drove to the cemetery on a rainy day similar to the one when we had buried Katherine months earlier. That night, her father gave his farewell speech to hundreds of power brokers at the Oakland Hills Country Club, a site that has hosted the U.S. Open golf championships. He ended his talk by clapping for the audience, saying that the applause should be for them, not him, and many cried, partly because they were inspired by his words, partly because of the pity they felt for him, for me seated beside him, and for Isabel back in Rhode Island with her nonna. I looked around the table as he spoke. Katherine’s mother had aged beyond recognition. More than anyone else, she could not accept what happened. At first, she didn’t react to the news. At the hospital in Poughkeepsie the day after Katherine died she showed up making small talk, even cracking jokes.
“I can’t believe that kid is gone,” she kept repeating, but there were no tears, only a faraway look in her eyes. We all knew it wasn’t because she didn’t care—it was because she cared too much. A husband who loses his wife may one day have the chance to rebuild, perhaps even get a second chance at happiness. A parent gets no such reprieve. The sight of Katherine’s parents standing by their daughter’s grave brought to mind Virgil’s description of the families in the Underworld, harrowing words that Dante knew by heart:
mothers and grown men and ghosts of great-souled heroes,
their bodies stripped of life, and boys and unwed girls
and sons laid on the pyre before their parents’ eyes.
I felt no connection to the mossy patch where Katherine’s body lay in Royal Oak Cemetery. The facticity—now there’s an ugly word—of death was all I found. My tears didn’t even feel genuine. I knew I was supposed to cry and so, bravo ragazzo, clever boy, that I was, I played the part of the grieving husband to a T. Her parents—fine, broken people who would never recover, who had abandoned all hope—also wept, streaming