Locked forever in their love, Francesca and Paolo are an indivisible pair. But their reward is damnation. Even worse, these lovers lack the one thing that makes passion possible: the body. They float through the afterlife like two weeping doves—condemned to a love that is not physical. Trying to love each other without a body.
Trattando, Dante would write, l’ombre come cosa salda.
Treating shades as solid things.
That’s a challenge of life in the Underworld: accepting that the beloved ghost you burn for is no longer flesh and blood. And accepting that your conversation with the dead is actually a monologue, a love letter never to reach its destination.
ONE WEEK AFTER ISABEL’S BIRTH, I brought her home from the hospital with my sisters, Margaret, Mary, Rose, and Tina. We drove in separate cars, a Calabrian funeral procession incongruously transporting a new life. On the way back we went to lunch at a local diner, where I ordered the Cobb salad, just as I had many times with Katherine. The day was supposed to have been the happiest of our life. Instead, I was sitting in a dingy restaurant with my four sisters, eating wilted leaves. At home waiting was not my beautiful wife, but my seventy-six-year-old Calabrian mother, Yolanda—who now kept her false teeth in an empty glass on the bathroom sink, in the spot where Katherine had left her Deruta mug.
After her eight days in the neonatal unit, Isabel now weighed four pounds and seven ounces.
“She’s ready to go now,” the chief pediatrician had told me the day before.
I stared at him speechless.
“But . . .” I finally muttered, “wouldn’t she be safer here?” I thought of all the whirring and beeping machines surrounding Isabel with antiseptic indifference and knew, in my terrified heart, the answer.
“The hospital’s no place for healthy babies,” he said smiling. “Your daughter’s fine.”
Although she was six weeks premature, Isabel had indeed faced down all the dangers posed by her extraordinary birth—first and foremost, the impact of the accident. The paramedics found Katherine hunched over her belly as if to protect her child. In the transition from the womb to the world, Isabel was denied oxygen as Katherine’s brain shut down, and the doctors were concerned that this might affect the baby’s own developing brain. But again, Isabel came through with surprising normalcy. After her revival through intubation, she was voracious, alert, breathing—everything that a newborn baby should be, although in a tiny package. Still, the idea of bringing her home frightened me. She was no bigger than a loaf of bread, and I didn’t know the first thing about caring for a baby—let alone one that weighed less than five pounds. The head nurse could sense my naked fear. She took extra time to detail all the things I would need to do while Isabel was under my care, but the cascading items on her list overwhelmed me. It was impossible for me to concentrate. I made her repeat the routines several times the morning that we left, a cold December day whose air, I imagined, would shock the hard-won equilibrium of Isabel’s vital signs. Bundling her in extra layers of heavy blanket, I said good-bye to her team of doctors and nurses and made my way to the car park abutting Vassar Brothers Hospital, which stood two miles from Saint Francis Hospital, where Isabel had been born and her mother died.
And then we went home.
Katherine and I had set up Isabel’s crib in our bedroom. We had wanted her sex to be a surprise, so there was no predominance of either blue or pink in the piles of baby clothes we had amassed. A few days before the accident, my family gave Katherine a baby shower in Rhode Island over the Thanksgiving holiday, lavishing us with boxes of linens, bottles, and bibs that were now stacked over my volumes of Petrarch and Leopardi.
Back from the diner, I laid Isabel down gently on a blue and white blanket that my aged neighbor, Carmela DeSantis, had given to my mother to celebrate my birth. My daughter lay sleeping on her mother’s side of the bed. The joy of hearing Isabel’s newborn breath struggled to break through the grief that was pulling all my emotions into a vacuum, leaving me numb and empty—beyond love. I wanted to be elated, to feel connected to my child. But a wrecking ball had smashed the beams connecting me to my natural world, crushing the bond between father and daughter into the same pile of rubble that was filled with the other remains of my life with Katherine. I took Isabel’s tiny hand in my own. Even in miniature, I could see the tapering outline of Katherine’s long elegant fingers. Isabel had my clump of dark hair and full features on the fair skin she had inherited from her mother—a chiaroscuro baby mixing shadow and light.
“They’ll probably turn brown,” a nurse in the neonatal unit had told me, pointing to Isabel’s blue eyes, and I imagined how, soon enough, all vestiges of her mother would fade from this Italianate child. But there was a fine shape to the head that was Katherine’s and not mine, and her slender, elongated body was also a miniaturized form of her mother’s. I felt a rational love for the hand I held and stroked, but nothing instinctual and visceral. I was a ghost haunting what had been my own life.
Later that day, my sisters had to return to their husbands and jobs, while my mother remained in Tivoli with Isabel and me. From that day forward my mom did the bulk of the diaper changing, bottle feeding, babysitting, and other double-barreled chores that go into child care. That left me time to walk in the snow and mark up my dog-eared edition of The Divine Comedy, which I had taken to reading aloud to myself, the poem’s soothing sounds one of the few things that could calm me. Meanwhile, my colleagues taught my classes for me while I went on leave for the final few weeks of the semester.
“Just leave Isabel with us and pick her up when she’s sixteen,” my sister Margaret joked before returning to Rhode Island. She was only partly kidding. Katherine had made it clear to me that she wanted to be a stay-at-home mother, while I would roam free to hunt my academic woolly mammoths. Now I was about to relinquish Katherine’s maternal role to a phalanx of capable Calabrian matrons: my sisters commandeered by generalissima Yolanda Luzzi. She had six children and, with Isabel, thirteen grandchildren. Now, at the age of seventy-six, she was becoming a mother once again.
After a month of this new routine, classes ended for the holiday break. I made a second fateful decision that followed the grief-struck logic of my earlier decision to enlist my family in raising Isabel: I would move back to Rhode Island with my mom and Isabel and make our base there, while coming to Bard and Tivoli only on the few days each week I needed to teach, Tuesday to Thursday, a commute of roughly 175 miles each way. When I told my college president my plan, he had one word for it: harebrained. I also asked him that day if he believed in the eternal life of the soul. I was now anguishing over this question to which I had never given a second thought before.
The idea that Katherine was utterly and completely no more, in spirit as well as in flesh, tormented me after I saw her body for the last time at her funeral in Detroit, when I was shown her open casket before the mass in her parents’ church. I stood in the room with her mother and father as well as her siblings, all of us there to say our final good-byes. My sleek wife was now puffy and embalmed, all the definition gone from her features. I tried desperately to find her somewhere in there, to feel some communion as I held her hand and caressed her skin for the last time. But her forehead was as cold as marble when I kissed it, and I swore to her that I would protect and nurture our daughter, and that she, Katherine, would be a living presence for our little girl. But there was nothing left of the person I had loved in that body—that corpse in a red dress. If Katherine was anywhere in this universe, it had to be in some other form.
The fog of grief had descended on me, and I couldn’t see the sense of my college president’s words when he called my plan harebrained. I needed only to feel comforted by my family’s love for me and our collective love for my new daughter. So, on December 23, 2007, I packed up my Tivoli apartment and drove with Isabel and my mother back to my hometown.
“You will leave behind everything you love.” During Dante’s exile, a scholar from Bologna offered him the title of poet laureate, but he respectfully declined. Only if one day Florence asks me back as its honored poet, he said, then