I confessed my guilt to Georgia. I knew it was irrational, but I somehow felt responsible for my wife’s death. I regretted that I wasn’t with her that morning. And, although I had tried to take good care of Katherine, I could not shake the feeling that I had failed to protect her.
“A better man would not have pushed Katherine so hard to succeed in school, to bring in extra money, right?” I asked.
“You’re a victim, not a culprit,” she answered.
She said that when someone God loves dies, he too feels unbearable sorrow. He watched His own son die, she said, sensing that I was neither a natural believer nor a committed atheist. She saw me for what I was: someone who hates confrontation and seeks the middle way, a person who had never professed his faith explicitly and categorically. I had always treated religion like a buffet—a little prayer here, a bit of compassion there, a sampling of cosmic love to top off the meal. But I knew that real faith meant choices, which required admitting what you did not believe in as much as what you did believe. In a realm calling for decisive feeling, I was hedging my spiritual bets. I was a diplomat even with faith.
Only the terror of my wife’s death could bring me to my knees in prayer. But that didn’t bother Georgia. She knew I needed to hear the words of a believer. By the end of our coffee, she was telling me about her favorite Italian films. We made plans to meet again soon.
But that would be our last conversation. I had revealed my darkest thoughts because she was a stranger, but this also stopped me from telling her more. For that, I would have to find someone I shared a history with, someone familiar. Like the man I had leaned against in Piazza Santa Croce. Ever since that night in Florence, I had turned to Dante with demanding questions, none more so than the ones I was now facing. Could I love Katherine now that her body was gone? I wondered. The question reminded me of a phrase that haunted me: There is no love that is not physical. I had encountered the words in a reading long ago whose source I no longer remembered, and its mysterious wisdom had remained lodged in my brain. Dante did not write it, but his poetry led me back to those words. For he had done the unthinkable: he made his most erotic lover a woman without a body.
THE VISIONS OF LOVE THAT terrified Dante in the Vita Nuova returned when he began his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, about ten years later. Unlike most artists and writers in his Christian world, Dante understood that the sinners in hell and the saints in heaven burn with an equal amount of love. The difference between these two groups was not in the intensity of love’s flames but in what kindled them. And in hell, passion’s fire found an especially dry, combustible source in the heart of Francesca da Rimini.
Before Dante’s imagination got hold of her, Francesca had been mentioned only once in a written source: a line in her father’s will. Dante crafted her story out of legend, hearsay, and gossip. He didn’t exactly make her up—but his poetry immortalized her. He did so around 1305, when he started to write The Divine Comedy after a few years wandering around Tuscany, trying to get back to Florence—living in the past and incapable of imagining a life outside of Florence. Once he finally accepted that he was never going to make it back, he embraced his own exile and the new perspective it offered. He reignited his imagination with a poetic fire that blazed with Francesca’s love for Paolo.
Francesca was born in 1255, ten years before Dante. She was the daughter of Guido da Polenta, the ruler of Ravenna, a small city on the Adriatic with close ties to the Byzantine Empire. As the daughter of her city’s first family, she enjoyed all the status and wealth a young woman could hope for. But as a thinking and feeling creature, Francesca endured nothing but obstacles. Her patriarchal society didn’t allow her to apply her talents to a career or calling. Worst of all, in matters of the heart she had to follow orders, not her heart.
The courtly love ethos of her time separated love from marriage: since most unions among the wealthy classes were based on dowries and social standing, the marital bed was the last place to look for passion. To love someone, it was understood by the educated classes, meant to worship from afar and to suffer. You could never possess your lover. But as you surrendered to the magnetic attractions of the one you loved—those virtues that actual sexual contact would only sully—your heartbroken spirit soared with the angels.
Francesca’s father, Guido, brokered a marriage between her and Giovanni Malatesta, scion of a rival family. In uniting his daughter with the enemy, the pragmatic Guido aimed to bring peace to his people. His plan worked—as long as Francesca paid the price. Giovanni and Francesca were a grinding mismatch. She was beautiful; his nickname was Gianciotto, John the Lame, a reference to his disfigured body. Worse still, Francesca was a dreamer, easily enraptured by romantic sentiments and melodious turns of phrase. The soldierly Gianciotto would have scorned such reverie.
Francesca came of age during a poetic movement called the Dolce Stil Novo (Sweet New Style). For these poets, love wasn’t an emotional state. It was an illness that crippled the body and clouded the mind. Sospiri, sighs. Sbigottito, bewildered. Dolente, suffering. Paura, fear. Francesca encountered these Sweet New Style words each time she turned the page and read of love. This language of desire filled her thoughts that fateful day in 1275 when she, a bride of twenty, first set eyes on Paolo—Gianciotto’s handsome younger brother.
One of Dante’s most astute readers, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, said that it takes a modern novel hundreds of pages to lay bare a character’s soul, but Dante needs only a few lines. Borges must have been thinking of Francesca. No character enters The Divine Comedy as magnificently. In Inferno 5, Dante sees a couple in the distance who seem to float on the air, impervious to the gale-force winds that punish the lustful. Dante begs Virgil to speak to these windswept lovers, who approach him like doves. The woman speaks, thanking Dante for his invitation, calling him an animal grazïoso. Literally: gracious animal. What could be more flattering?
She tells Dante she was born on the shores of the Po River, and asks him the line that would come to haunt me: is there anything more horrible than remembering happy times in times of misery? Meanwhile, her beautiful partner Paolo stands beside her in total silence, streaming tears. Francesca even recites a poem for Dante: Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende. Love, which is quick to claim the gentle heart. As we listen to her speak, we begin to understand that Francesca’s “love” isn’t such a lofty emotion after all. It’s a bona fide Sweet New Style sickness. She describes how one day she and Paolo were reading King Arthur’s tales, and they came across the passage where Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, gives the knight Lancelot a fateful, adulterous kiss. The scene inspires her and Paolo to do the same:
This man, who will never be parted from me,
kissed me on my mouth all trembling . . .
That day we read no further . . .
La bocca mi basciò tutto tremante, Francesca says, the quivering Paolo kisses her right on the lips. That’s as close to medieval erotica as we’re likely to get. The seemingly perfect, polite Francesca utters words that would never leave the mouth of a well-bred lady. What’s more, she is unrepentant: in Dante’s hell, the sinners would have you believe that it’s never their fault—it’s always someone else’s.
In a tour de force of showing over telling, Dante gives Francesca just enough verbal rope to hang herself.
Francesca’s plight has confounded readers for centuries. How could Dante punish her for doing only what comes naturally—for pursuing what is often best in us, the part that loses itself in love? To punish lust is one thing—but shouldn’t true love earn a divine pass? In condemning Francesca, many readers believe, Dante is attacking love. A kindred soul of the lustful in Inferno 5, the poet Byron became so obsessed with Francesca that he made a pilgrimage to Rimini looking for traces of her. “But tell me, in the season of sweet