XXXV

Forgiven sins, insincerely given
Cannot , from calumnious hearts, be shriven

I was weightless then, for some slight, unmeasured time, yet the memory of years pressured down upon my lungs. Free, I floated, even as past sins weighted an iron, black anchor to my trailing ankle. In that moment of Beatitude, I felt most guilty. As for the very first time, a dawning sun appeared above, brilliant over the surface of a windswept sea while I, below, only gently tossed and buffeted, was free from those tempestuous forces, and was not cast about by stormed waves, for clamping about my calf was this anchor chain to keep me safe from all tragedy that would befall some soul that surfaced gasping in the rolling sea. Down here, I could not drown. Warm, amniotic waters nurtured my fragility, my mortality, so that I did not long to breathe, while thin shafts of golden light, filtered as through amber, were at once beckoning and terrifying. I could hide. I could deny. I might remain there, forever in the warmest lightless worldless world, secure in this heartbeating hollow by that tenuous cord bound to my belly.

Curled up small, I am safe within my perfect blankets. The morning bedside tiles will be so cold beneath my naked feet, as chill, I fear, as the least of circles where Virgil leads me past the doomed, ice-bound souls that even God will not forgive. We stumble, unfooted in the darkness, against the tragic skull tops of those traitors to their kin. This dark and lidless cavern echoes with the tumult of those men, weeping o'er their deserved woes but regrets, frozen against their falsely rotted flesh, avail them naught. Would that wishes were enough.

I tread past them. I step beyond where they are, even still, rooted. Unforgiven, they are abandoned by I, their superior.

The poet arrests my progress even as I behold, before me, a vast and ugly monument to suffering. Grander than any impudent Titan, The Great Evil remains in that least lit corner of the cosmos, frozen to his torso, where he is free to only ever rail against his justice. Was this the end of my travels? Had Virgil led me here to be among my kind?

Horror unstops me as I stand before the triple-headed monster. No shade of his former splendour can be imagined while in his shadow and I see, in the twitching, twisting, writhing limbs of the traitors that he, eternal, tortures in his triple jaws, a wretchedness that is the final end of a thing made entirely Godless. The screams of Cassius will be carried forever in my memories. Brutus is silent in his gnashed pain and gnawed despair. This was the noblest Roman of them all. The Iscariot too is mute for all his cry attempts are cut short when the demon teeth worry through his rope-scarred throat and rend his flesh from spine, cracking and twisting, spraying his traitor's blood hot down the chin of the frozen giant.

Here, at the final circle, were imprisoned those who had committed treason against their benefactors.

What benefactor, benefactress, had I betrayed?

"Are you still in touch with Anne?" Beatrice asked.

"I … no."

It had been fourteen years since Florence. Fourteen chapters before, in the Piazza della Signoria, I had surrendered to her last words. Twice seven times has the earth spun its course about the Sun while I imagined myself somehow ennobled through abiding by my friends', my former friend's, wish for separation. I would never cease to regard her as a friend. Time and distance and silence could not change her category. It is for friendship that I respected her request.

"We are no longer in touch", was my considered reply with enough concealed to mark it a lie. "And yourself?"

She shook her forehead while shrugging frocked shoulders. "We exchange emails at Christmas, or we did last year, and before. We keep in touch but I miss her."

I nodded, saying, "I do too." Some words needed to be said over her. "Anne is a great girl." was my offer. Beatrice, and Phaedra too, agreed.

Our friend's ghost hovered in the pause between us until Phaedra, mercifully, advanced the dialogue by asking, "Did you enjoy the performance?"

"I did, of course."

"Of course" smiled Beatrice. Phaedra grinned and my cheeks rose, I think.

As though testing her honesty, I mentioned that, "I have always enjoyed your performances. I thank you for them, all of them."

"Really, I enjoy doing them. I sometimes want to thank the audience for indulging us."

The crowds were thinned yet some hovered near to us, onlooking our conversation with but half an ear.

"It is a happy coincidence then," said I, "that our passions can thus collide." I paraphrase.

Between audience and performer there is a fraternity, a confederacy in the almost accidental confluence of desires. Music draws the musician to her fans as magnetism moves magnets. Magnets are dormant without magnetism.

Here we are, sans Anne.

"Could you," I ventured, " remember me to Anne, and, if you do, say that I would cherish a note from her hand?"

"I will" she answered without reservation.

It was Phaedra that best thought ahead, asking "How will she find you?" and so, on a slight slip of paper, Beatrice accepted my email address.

"I am in the book," I added.

The Anne that resided in my memories was before the flourishing of the internet so that Anne wrote letters in a flowing, feminine script and, rather than punctuate her prose with smilies or hearts, she would adhere to all the rules of grammar and employ decisive dictions so rather than truncate, abbreviate, and apostrophate, my friend would, on watermarked pages that were oft times prettily patterned, use her stylus to equally rhapsodize and expand, sparing no ink to elucidate in the interest of whatever narrative she had elected to advocate whether it were but some prosaic anecdote that best developed the theme and arc of her incidental day or if her words described some fresh fondness for a newly unearthed artefact, perhaps a drawing by Burne-Jones or a lyric moment musical, that had never before overtaken her hurrying senses to now endow her view with more perspectives. and every piece of genius or beauty that Anne's intellect collected, by virtue of being described and proselytized by her, was justly elevated.

"She married some fellow and now lives somewhere south of our border."

We were near to equidistant.

"And may I congratulate you on your marriage" I followed.

Her bright eyes dimmed to consider the import of this information before her nature batted doubting shades away and she gave a generous smile to me. "You may. You have. I thank you."

She surely did not, but in my memory, I cannot shake the impression that she then made the slightest of curtseys.

And Phaedra asked me, "Do you still paint?" but I, honestly, could only shake my head.

"Sometimes. Not much. Not really."

"It’s a pity."

And Phaedra told me, "It will return" as though she knew.

So Beatrice bade me good bye and I walked away to the stars.

XXXVI