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In Dante's Country

© Billy Marshall Stoneking

Some days, having completed all my tasks, I would seek escape in long walks. Every day I managed to walk somewhere. Every second or third day I'd walk into Petroio to replenish supplies. By now my body had become lean and stronger than it had been in years. No more panting and struggling for breath. Five miles was nothing. Walking uphill was just as easy as walking down. My mind seemed clearer too.

One morning, I woke up and went to the kitchen, which was where I brushed my teeth. I turned the tap, the same as I done every morning, but nothing came out, only a distant sigh, as if dust had grown a throat and was trying to clear it. So I got myself dressed walked up to Senor Bindi's place and told him I had no drinking water. He frowned and went to investigate. I went with him. Halfway between his place and mine, on a flat plateau a hundred feet higher than the roof of my house, we unbolted the trapdoor that covered the cistern, and flung it open. It was dry. Senor Bindi sighed and scratched his head, then shrugged. Maybe a blockage, maybe a pump somewhere. He had no idea. He would ring the Commune. He couldn't tell me when I would have water again.

Thus began several weeks of me carrying water from the village to my house. A daily event. I remembered Jean de Florette, and suddenly understood what he had been faced with. It was so hot, I usually ended up drinking half the water before I got home. Next morning, it was all gone, and I'd have to make the trip again.

Poetry, as much as anything, had led me here. Later, I would buy a cheap Vespa, and explore some of Dante's country more fully. The landscape near Sovana, which had provided inspiration for Dante's concept of the Inferno, is one of the places that will always remain in my memory. Sheer cliffs fall on all sides into a tangle of dark ravines and crevasses. It was while Dante had been journeying on this road that he had had chanced upon this image of Hell. The volcanic rocks and escarpments present a cruel, unrelenting aspect that is only neutralized by one's arrival in the village at the top. But whose Hell was it really?

I re-read Dante during my time at Trove, and imagined that what had led him to write The Divine Comedy was not so very different from what had led me to seek refuge in the wilds of the Italian countryside. Both of us had felt thwarted, both had fallen from grace, both had come to a "pathless wood", and the empyrean plain, which all true poets have some inkling of, seemed unreachable. Caught in the suspense of Limbo, stuck between torment and bliss, I could only marvel at his words, standing on the brink of the very cliffs where he had dreamed his great poem, seen visions and heard voices. "Why harbourest cowardice in thy heart? Why act thou not bold and free...?"