THERE IS NO LOVE THAT IS NOT PHYSICAL.
You learn this when you’re faced with the sudden death of your beloved.
From the time that the nine-year-old Dante first laid eyes on an eight-year-old Florentine girl named Beatrice Portinari in 1274, you can just imagine him holding the syllables of her nickname on his tongue: BEE-chay. When he saw her again, nine years later, Bice had become a woman. In all likelihood, he had seen her in the interim, but the book he wrote about their unusual love story, the Vita Nuova, needed something more symbolic to drive the narrative. So Beatrice became her full name, the “thrice-blessed one”—just like the Trinity, the holy number three that, when squared, gave Dante the magical number nine.
When Dante was eighteen, he had a Francesca da Rimini moment: Beatrice came to him in a dream, naked except for a crimson and white cloth draped around her. She was sleeping, carried in the arms of the God of Love. The imposing figure, who went by his Latin name Amor, was brandishing something in flames. He announced to Dante: Vide cor tuum. Behold your heart. Then Amor woke up the sleeping Beatrice, who proceeded to eat the burning heart. It was Dante’s.
This vision of the burning heart incited Dante to write a sonnet. He circulated it among the leading poets of Florence, none of whom could understand it (one, a doctor, told Dante to wash his testicles in cold water to calm himself). There was one who got it, however: Guido Cavalcanti, like Beatrice a richer and better-connected Florentine whom Dante regarded with a mixture of adoration and jealousy. Guido was the unofficial leader of the Sweet New Style, the poetic movement that spoke of love as a lacerating illness that elevated the soul but destroyed the body. Guido immediately responded with a sonnet of his own to Dante: “I think that you beheld all goodness,” he wrote of Dante’s terrifying vision.
Guido’s poem made it official: Dante was now accepted into the Sweet New Style, beginning his career as a Florentine poet.
But Dante’s Beatrice, unlike other Sweet New Style muses, actually had a personality. She was no mere object of worship—someone lovely to look at but impossible to know. When Beatrice saw Dante paying too much attention to his donna-schermo, the “screen lady” whom he pretended to love so as to hide his feelings for Beatrice, she refused to greet him in the street. No other Sweet New Style woman would have shamed her poet like this. Dante was different from his fellow poets in other ways. He addressed a poem about Beatrice to Donne ch’avete intelletto di amore, “Ladies who have knowledge of love,” choosing female readers over the typical male audience. He saw women as more than just beautiful bodies.
Then, at the center of the Vita Nuova, the beautiful witch-ladies with the crazy hair tell Dante that he too will die, and that Beatrice has gone to the other side. He woke up to find it was all a dream. Or was it? Soon after his vision, Dante writes, Beatrice dies. Florence is now a widower; Dante is a widower—to a woman who was never his wife. And indeed, the real-life Beatrice Portinari died on June 8, 1290, at age twenty-four.
The strangest thing in the Vita Nuova, perhaps in all of Dante’s career, happens next. Instead of expressing his grief, he writes that when Beatrice died, the heavens aligned in a symbol of perfect holiness. In his sadness, he tried to transform Beatrice into one of those angelic, interchangeable, and ultimately forgettable, Sweet New Style muses. After all, had his fellow poets faced her death, they would have moved on quickly to another muse and found another body to love once Beatrice’s was gone.
Or maybe idealizing her was a survival mechanism for Dante, a reflexive turn to some familiar and reassuring way of explaining Beatrice’s devastating loss.
Either way, the plan breaks down. Dante’s grief is unrelenting, and he mopes around the city of Florence, too distracted to write poetry, too heartbroken to hide his sorrow. His fellow poets, especially Cavalcanti, tell him basta, enough is enough: excessive mourning is unnatural; even worse, it’s vulgar. Volgare. Time to move on. Write about another woman, they tell him. Find another body to love.
We read in the Vita Nuova that, a year after Beatrice’s death, Dante finds himself in the center of Florence among the city’s leading citizens. I picture him sitting with a paintbrush, drawing an angel, oblivious to the commotion in the piazza.
“Someone was with me just now,” he tells a passerby who stops to look at his picture, “that’s why I was so deep in thought.”
Then I see him pick up his brush and walk away—an hour with the angels is all he can take.
Soon afterward, in the midst of his drawing and despair, he sees a pretty face and all the promise it holds. She takes pity on Dante, he reads it in her eyes and wonders: maybe she can replace Beatrice. His poetry takes aim at her, his verses bursting with grateful tears. This donna gentile, gentle lady, was looking at Dante from a window above him, beckoning him to fall in love again. Dante understood that the logical, even natural thing to do would be to give himself over to this gentle lady and leave Beatrice to her early, unfortunate grave. Let her die in peace. Then he has a vision, a miraculous vision. Beatrice appears to him dressed in that same crimson and white cloth that draped her figure when she devoured Dante’s burning heart. Suddenly, Dante is riven with shame. How could he have even considered taking up with the beautiful lady in the window? No, he would devote his feelings—and his poetry—to the blessed Beatrice. The Vita Nuova ends with Dante promising silence: he will only write again when he is capable of describing Beatrice in a fitting way. First, he says, he must study.
Long study and great love—the same words that would bring Dante to Virgil in the dark wood, and that would bring me to Dante in my time of greatest woe.
JUST BEFORE I RETURNED TO Rhode Island, my editor at the university press that was about to publish my first book asked me if I could handle editing the final proofs of my manuscript. The book, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, was a study of the myth of Italy and its pull on foreign exiles such as Byron, that worshiper of Francesca da Rimini. It had taken me ten years to write the book, ever since I began my dissertation in the cement and steel of a library carrel filled with hundreds of books on Dante when I was a graduate student. I said yes to my editor. I would let nothing derail my career—that was the gauntlet I threw in the face of tragedy.
Back in Westerly, Rhode Island, with Isabel and my mother, I spent hours alone each day with the page proofs in an apartment I had rented a few minutes’ drive from my mom’s, checking citations, eliminating adverbs, and shortening footnotes. The mechanical work gave me the thing I desperately needed: solitude. Grinding away on my manuscript with pencil and eraser, vetting my words so meticulously that it must have shocked even my editor, I squirreled myself away for hours at a stretch. Meanwhile, I had outsourced the one job that could have given me a new home: being a father to Isabel.
In her new Westerly home, Isabel would sleep with her arms flung backward and her lips slightly open, a pose of absolute surrender to an unknown world. Like all babies, she was helpless, and yet she did not look like other babies, with that girlish fineness to her features and searching gaze. I don’t know what, if anything, she was looking for, and I couldn’t help but trace her sight line out toward Katherine, the natural mother she had been separated from forever. My daughter’s baby smell, its mix of powder, formula, and new skin, would melt me, and I was astonished by her newborn beauty. But my thoughts were too busy following Isabel’s gaze into Katherine’s absence for any of these sights, smells, and sounds to break grief’s hermetic seal.
No matter how many diapers I changed, or how much baby spittle fell on my collar, I didn’t feel like a real dad. Part of me was elsewhere. Obsessed with my work. Dreaming of a new home. Speaking with the dead. Kicking at the sandy beaches of my Rhode Island exile. And sounding Dante’s rhyming tercets over and over, as if they were a charm to ward off evil spirits.
After editing all day, I would return to my mother’s house and play with Isabel for a while before my mom fed her and got her ready for bed. Then, after reading or watching