How do you remember your time in the dream? Is it static? – Of course, it is not. It seems it will go on forever and ever. And you never want to wake up.”
Dante was almost euphoric.
“Seriously, have you never experienced it? Time is not there in the dream as we understand it in the everyday. It seems we are in some eternal place.”
Dante looked round at the others.
His wife smirked.
“The sand has run out of the hour glass,” she said. “Shall we get the pudding?”
Guido laughed.
“I’ve been looking forward to those stewed apples with cloves from the Orient.”
“You don’t agree with me,” said Dante, almost confused by their reaction.
“It’s not that we don’t agree with you,” his wife said. “Just that it’s getting late. Soon it will be time to wake up, take the children to school. And – magari! – if only finish your little poem.”
His wife’s tone was breezy in its sarcasm.
Dante shrank back from the vision he dared not name as if indeed the sand had run out of the hourglass. In his bitterness he wanted to break it so that the sands would scatter on the winds. Magari! he thought, if only…
As he was absorbed in these thoughts, he caught the conversation on the other side of the room where his wife and friend continued to fret over him.
“Come, Sandra, you must be patient. Dante is doing everything he can to finish it.”
“Whenever I see him in his study, all he does is stare out of the window. He can barely bring himself to sharpen his nib.”
“I understood he has been given a new quill.”
“Let’s be frank,” she continued. “In his hands it has become a blunt instrument.”
“Sandra, you know what Dante is trying to do is rather complex.”
“Complex!” she rebutted. “If there is complexity in it, it has become utterly obscure.”
Dante could barely bring himself to listen to the cruel barbs, as his friend tried – in vain – to soften the blow with a rather tortuous analogy, so typical of Guido, involving a path that twists and turns through a dark and obscure wood.
But his wife was having none of it. She could barely disguise her disdain.
“I don’t mind the twists and turns,” she said, “the false trails or even the odd treachery. But please, God, give me the ending.”
It was no secret. Dante had writer’s block and could not finish his magnum opus. There was nothing he could do; the muse (indeed all nine of them) had deserted him. He was defeated by his own wretched inability to put plume to paper. Yet each night, after saying goodnight to his wife’s sleeping – and admonishing form, he hoped to return to the dream galley. Yet very often, as now, he could not sleep.
In his restlessness he got up and walked over to the window. He looked out on the garden that was cloaked in darkness. His eyes strained to see down the path, beyond the pergola where his wife would attend to the medicinal herbs and large pots of lemon trees. The path twisted and turned beyond his vision to where even the tall cypresses appeared in shade.
With a deep sigh, he turned and got back into bed beside his wife and closed his eyes, wondering if he would return to the dream galley.
The galley was not unlike a moving library. Books kept falling off unseen shelves, piling up on the fore and aft decks. The galley rocked from side to side; Dante’s stomach swirled and his head spun. He endeavoured to stand, but each time he did he lost his balance. In the end, he could not even stand up. He was caught in some kind of centrifugal force, like a cat, drowning in a barrel. The water washed over him in torrents. And yet still everything was dry. He was still on the floor when everything seemed to right itself. The books that had been falling off the shelves remained where there were.
Although he still felt he was about to wretch, his head began to stop spinning.
Dante struggled to his feet. There was no time for respite, however. Striding towards him with unnerving purpose was a knight in mottled armour. Its silver and red hues glinted in the sunlight. Dante could not see his face because the visor was down. In the knight’s hand was a huge axe of the kind one read about in Manciolino or the Mair Exotica of Paulus Hector.
Dante was rooted to the spot. He could move neither one way or the other.
The Mottled Knight came on wielding his mighty axe. Dante flinched as the knight raised his weapon above his head and swung.
Half of him veered to the left, while the other half veered to the right, and he carried on under the terrible sense that the half of him, perhaps the better half, had been cast asunder and was heading off into the immeasurable distance of the aft deck – where was he heading? What had he left behind?
“Quick,” said a voice. “Follow me.”
The passage was long and narrow in places. Dante had to stoop because of the apparently low-lying ceiling and the occasional stalactite that formed as if indeed the passage was part of the cave that the poet Virgil had mentioned in his long and sometimes dreary poem.
Whoever was leading him had a torch. He was moving fast. Dante struggled to keep up. “Come on,” said his guide. “We must keep on. We don’t want them to catch us. – Hurry!”
The Guide continued to rattle along at a fair old pace. Dante stopped short of breath.
“Hurry!” the Guide exhorted him.
Dante tried his best, but he was really lagging. He began to lose sight of the torch.
The Guide appeared to slow down, but when Dante reached him, the Guide was already moving on again until Dante lost sight of the torch altogether. Now exhausted and in total darkness, Dante stumbled on.
At length, just as he was beginning to think he was the butt of a sick joke, the tunnel began to open out; darkness became subtly lighter. Dante realized they were starting to go up. As he climbed, Dante could see the back of the Guide’s red and brown tunic.
The steps were steep; Dante’s legs began to feel heavy.
“Nearly there,” said the Guide.
They came out into the light. Dante looked around him.
“But we are back where we started.”
“I’ll say!”
The Guide laughed.
“What is going on?”
As Dante’s eyes adjusted to the light, he saw that he was once again on the galley, which was veering towards the far bank of a river.
Dante was somewhat alarmed, but at the last minute the galley turned and veered away from the bank.
“Heave!” someone cried.
“Heave!” came the reply.
On the bank two teams of boys were engaged in what seemed to be a tug of war. The boys kept slipping down and from side to side. From head to foot they were covered in mud. Dante wanted to laugh, but then he understood.
“Why,” he exclaimed, “there’s no mark.”
“Naturally,” said his guide. “It is an unseen mark.”
“I know that boy,” exclaimed Dante suddenly, who had been studying the faces of the muddy boys. “It’s Guido.”
There, in the midst of the competitors, was indeed Guido; not, as he had last seen him after dinner in the library with a glass of Tuaca, but as he had been many years before: a wide-eyed fat boy in a pair of grubby pantaloons.
“Hey, Guido!” he called.
“He won’t hear you,” said the Guide.
“Why ever not?”
Ignoring the Guide, Dante called out again, but Guido was quite oblivious as the tug of war became ever more desperate, and boys, including the young Guido, continued to flounder on either side of the unseen mark.
“I told you,” said the Guide, “people here don’t always hear. – They do not always see.”
Dante stared at the figure before him, as if he was suddenly seeing him for the first time. The colours of his brown and red tunic gleamed in the light of his eyes, and there was a mockery in his expression, accentuated by the long, black pointy shoes that curled up at his brown hose.
Dante held out his hand:
“We have been properly introduced,” he said.
“I am Arnaut,” said the Guide.
“He who gathers up wind,
And chases the hare with ox.”
“And swims against the torrent,” said Dante, completing the verse and quoting it again in translation:
“Ieu sui Arnaut qu’amas l’aura
E chatz le lebre ab lo bou
E nadi contra suberna”
“I have never read your poems, only heard this fragment,” he said. “In fact, it is the only fragment that exists of your work.”
The Guide’s face dropped.
“All my poems are now lost,” he said.
Dante’s heart went to him.
“You can tell them to me,” he said.
“I cannot remember them.”
“Not one?”
“Not a single one.”
The Guide struck an increasingly forlorn figure. As he did, it seemed to Dante that his face began to dissolve before him. Try as he might, he tried to hold onto the clothes of the poet – the red and brown tunic and the black pointy shoes that curled up at his brown hose – but, very soon, he vanished entirely.
For hours, it seemed, Dante remained on the galley between deck and turret; in all that time there was no sign of his guide, the poet, Arnaut. He did not meet a soul unless you counted his other self who would, from time to time, appear on the deck of the galley at a distance.
Dante would run after him – that personage that had been cast asunder by the mottled knight seemed to have a life of his own – and just as he would reach the paladin or the door to the turret he would pull back, as if apprised of some fear that was too terrible to contemplate.
Once, he did pluck up courage to open one of the tented doorways in the hope of catching sight of someone, but there was nothing – only an empty, black room; so he contented himself with watching the banks of the river, which now appeared closer as if they had left the delta under cover of night.
The sky was not always dark, but an in-between, crepuscular colour. From time to time thunder claps and streaks of lightning burst beyond the banks. Once, on the shore, Dante saw a small, pygmy-like man. The pygmy wore a jewel in his mouth and carried a spear. Aware that Dante was staring at him, the pygmy turned to go. In a moment he had disappeared into the forest.
It began to rain. In fact, it began to bucket down.
Dante retreated into one of the tented rooms.
When he turned round, he saw a man in a priest’s biretta seated at a table. On the table was a set of large cards, arranged like a game of solitaire.
In spite of the biretta; the mand did not have the manner of a priest. Dante had the notion that he was of the new class, a fabulously wealthy merchant profiting off the trade in new fabrics and silk wares. On the table beside him, were a number of large gilt-edged books. It was from one of these that he took his cards and laid them on the table.
When Dante came across the card dealer, he had been on his own. But as soon as he saw the card dealer begin to place a new set of cards on the table, the Guide (though perhaps not entirely Arnaut) appeared at his shoulder.
For a while they watched him placing the cards until Dante’s curiosity got the better of him.
“What are the rules of the game?”
The Guide shrugged.
“The game is different for all.”
“Have you played?”
“No,” he said. “I have never played. He has never invited me.”
“Do I need an invitation?”
The Guide laughed.
“The Merchant does not give out invitations.”
“Does he play dirty?”
Dante did not have time to hear the Guide’s answer; finding himself at the table where the merchant handed him one of the books.
Dante placed it flat on the table and opened it.
He closed it in despair. There were still no words written on the page.
Dante was alone once again on the deck; the galley was adrift on the river.
The sun threatened to burst through one of the black clouds, but in the end it did not.
The dense forest continued to oppress him.
Closing his eyes, Dante sent up a prayer.
When he opened them, he became aware of the turret on the deck. The turret, which up until then had seemed remote and inaccessible to him, presented a draped entrance, decorated with a double-headed eagle blazon.
Slowly and not without trepidation, Dante pulled back the curtain.
In the room was a four-poster bed with a muslin drape. On the table beside the bed was a silver chalice. Beside the chalice there was a leather-bound book. Dante could see no title, but he felt the weight of the tome, and he was overwhelmed by the heaviness of expectation.
Dante began to hear sighs; the veiled figures of a man and a woman began to move on the bed.
The sighs intensified under a quickening rhythm.
The hair cascaded down the woman’s back as she sat astride the man. Aroused by her slender, dancing form, and the veiled outline of her breasts, Dante was overwhelmed with lust and envy for the man who was enjoying the woman.
He shook his head and made the sign of the cross.
When he looked again, it was himself he saw on the bed. The woman above him was his wife. He no longer felt envy but sadness. Indeed, sorrow for the passing of flesh, our temporal life. – The thought came at him as a whisper from some remote cloister until he was shaken from his reverie by the sound of drums.
Dante went back out on to the deck of the galley. An enemy crowd had appeared on the banks of the river. But the lovers – his own self, his wife and indeed soul mate entwined – carried on making love quite oblivious. The forest might encroach and swallow them up. Dante could feel the very trees straining, their branches hanging over the galley. Soon he thought I will suffocate. – The enemy will take me.
Dante retreated back into the room, which now appeared different, as if it had taken the aspect of an arcane library belonging to one of those alchemists about which Guido talked so enthusiastically. Why, he thought, perhaps I will find one of Arnaut’s books! And, if I find one of Arnaut’s books, he told himself, I will be able to give it to him and he will not vanish from my sight or that of history.
Dante began to climb a ladder that had been placed against one of the shelves. As he did so, the library seemed to extend before his eyes. He saw many old books: books of papyrus, ancient books, thick books and thin, grand books and small, books with gilt binding and crumbling leaves, clasped books and forgotten books.
Dante went between shelves until he was so weighed down with books that he was forced to climb back down the ladder.
When he reached the bottom, he looked around – hopefully – for the poet, Arnaut. But the poet was nowhere to be seen.
Dante put the books he had collected down on the table, next to the silver chalice.
With trepidation but also desire, since he was suddenly thirsty, Dante reached for the chalice.
As he brought the chalice to his mouth, the water turned red like wine. His gaze was caught in its surface tension. The red liquid began to bubble and rise up to meet him. In the bubbling liquid he saw a face, a strangled, tortured and angry face.
Shocked, Dante dropped the chalice back down on the table.
He began to shudder. As he did, he felt a cold breath on his shoulder.
Then he heard the voice.
“Lasciate ogne speranza,” the voice said.
“Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”
Dante went to wipe his tears, but all he could see was the face – that of his wife bubbling once again in the chalice of ire.