|
The sinner raised his mouth from his grim repast and wiped it on the hair of the bloody head whose nape he had all but eaten away. At last he began to speak: "You ask me to renew a grief so desperate that the very thought of speaking it tears my heart in two. But if my words may be a seed that bears the fruit of infamy for him I gnaw, I shall weep, but tell my story through my tears. Who you may be, and by what powers you reach into this underworld, I cannot guess, but you seem to me a Florentine by your speech, I was Count Ugolino, I must explain; this reverend grace is the Archbishop Ruggieri: now I will tell you why I gnaw his brain. That I, who trusted him, had to undergo imprisonment and death through his treachery you will know already. What you cannot know-- that is, the lingering inhumanity of the death I suffered--you shall hear in full: then judge for yourself if he has injured me. A narrow window in that coop of stone now called the Tower of Hunger for my sake (within which others yet must pace alone) had shown me several waning moons already between its bars, when I slept the evil sleep in which the veil of the future parted for me. This beast appeared as master of a hunt chasing the wolf and his whelps across the mountain that hides Luca from Pisa. Out in front of the starved and shrewd and avid pack he had placed Gualandi and Sismondi and Lanfranci to point his prey. The father and sons had raced a brief course only when they failed of breath and seemed to weaken; then I thought I saw their flanks ripped open by the hounds' fierce teeth. Before the dawn, the dream still in my head, I woke and heard my sons, who were there with me, cry from their troubled sleep, asking for bread. You are cruelty itself if you can keep your tears back at the thoughts of what foreboding stirred in my heart; and if you do not weep, at what are you used to weeping?--The hour when food used to be brought, drew near. They were now awake, and each was anxious from his dream's dark mood. And from the base of that horrible tower I heard the sound of hammers nailing up the gates: I stared at my sons' faces without a word. I did not weep: I had turned stone inside. They wept. 'What ails you, Father, you look so strange,' my little Anselm, youngest of them, cried. But I did not speak a word nor shed a tear: not all that day nor all that endless night, until I saw another sun appear. When a tiny ray leaked into that dark prison and I saw staring back from their four faces the terror and wasting of my own, I bit my hands in helpless grief. And they, thinking I chewed myself for hunger, rose suddenly together. I heard them say: 'Father, it would give us much less pain if you ate us: it was you who put upon us this sorry flesh; now strip it off again.' I calmed myself to spare them. Ah! hard earth, why did you not yawn open? All that day and the next we sat in silence. On the fourth, Gaddo, the eldest, fell before me and cried, stretched at my feet upon that prison floor: 'Father, why don't you help me?' There he died And just as you see me, I saw them fall one by one on the fifth day and the sixth. Then, already blind, I began to crawl from body to body shaking them frantically. Two days I called their names, and they were dead. Then fasting overcame my grief and me." His eyes narrowed to slits when he was done, and he seized the skull again between his teeth grinding it as a mastiff grinds a bone. Ah, Pisa! foulest blemish on the land where "si" sounds sweet and clear, since those nearby you are slow to blast the ground on which you stand, may Capara and Gorgona drift from place and dam the flooding Arno at its mouth until it drowns the last of your foul race! For if to Ugolino falls the censure for having betrayed your castles, you for your part should not have put his sons to such a torture: you modern Thebes! those tender lives you split-- Brigata, Uguccione, and the others I mentioned earlier--were too young for guilt! We passed on further, where the frozen mine entombs another crew in greater pain; these wraiths are not bent over, but lie supine. Their very weeping closes up their eyes; and the grief that finds no outlet for its tears turns inward to increase their agonies: for the first tears that they shed knot instantly in their eye-sockets, and as they freeze they form a crystal visor above the cavity. And despite the fact that standing in that place I had become as numb as any callus, and all sensation had faded from my face, somehow I felt a wind begin to blow, whereat I said: "Master, what stirs this wind? Is not all heat extinguished here below?" And then the Master said to me: "Soon you will be where your own eyes will see the source and cause and give you their own answer to the mystery." And one of those locked in that icy mall cried out to us as we passed: "O souls so cruel that you are sent to the last post of all, relieve me for a little from the pain of this hard veil; let my heart weep a while before the weeping freeze my eyes again." And I to him: "If you would have my service, tell me your name; then if I do not help you may I descend to the last rim of the ice." "I am Friar Alberigo," he answered therefore, "the same who call for the fruits from the bad garden. Here I am given dates for figs full store." "What! Are you dead already?" I said to him. And he then: "How my body stands in the world I do not know. So privileged is this rim of Ptolomea, that often souls fall to it before dark Atropos has cut their thread. And that you may more willingly free my spirit of this glaze of frozen tears that shrouds my face, I will tell you this: when a soul betrays as I did, it falls from flesh, and a demon takes its place, ruling the body till its time is spent. The ruined soul rains down into this cistern. So, I believe, there is still evident in the world above, all that is fair and mortal of this black shade who winters here behind me. If you have only recently crossed the portal from that sweet world, you surely must have known his body: Branca d'Oria is its name, and many years have passed since he rained down." "I think you are trying to take me in," I said, "Ser Branca D'Oria is a living man; he eats, he drinks he fills his clothes and his bed." "Michel Zanche had not yet reached the ditch of the Black Talons," the frozen wraith replied, "there where the sinners thicken in hot pitch, when this one left his body to a devil, as did his nephew and second in treachery, and plumbed like lead through space to this dead level. But now reach out your hand, and let me cry." And I did not keep the promise I had made, for to be rude to him was courtesy. Ah, men of Genoa! souls of little worth, corrupted from all custom of righteousness, why have you not been driven from the earth? For there beside the blackest soul of all Romagna's evil plain, lies one of yours bathing his filthy soul in the eternal glacier of Cocytus for his foul crime, while he seems yet alive in world and time! |
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 |