Wartime lies - Louis Begley [28]
PITY is no stranger to hell. Hell brims over with self-pity. The case of the vulgar damned, outside the precincts of the enameled green, verde smalto, where congregate the biblical and intellectual elite, is clear-cut. They wail and gnash their teeth as they suffer the ghoulish punishments devised by supreme wisdom, somma sapienza, working hand in hand with primal love, primo amore. Sometimes they feel they have been entrapped: if only one had forborne from giving that last bit of evil counsel or had repented earlier, eternity would not be filled with the same unbearable pain, guaranteed to augment when, after the Last Judgment, the flesh shall be rejoined with the spirit. The self-pity of Dante and his Mantuan guide is more interesting.
Virgil, like his colleagues of the verde smalto, with slow-moving and grave eyes, con occhi tardi e gravi, resembles a Jew with technical qualifications indispensable to the Reich; no Barbariccia or other devil will sink a fork into his rump; not for him the cesspool of the Malebolge. Comparing his situation with that of the other damned, he might consider himself pretty lucky. But not in the least—at the mere thought of it he turns pale, tutto smorto; his problem is that he and his colleagues live without hope in desire, sanza speme vivemo in disio.
Dante’s capacity for self-pity is equally colossal, although he enjoys highest-level protection. Early on, he learns on unimpeachable authority that he is only a tourist in Inferno and does not need to come back. Just in case the reader missed it, the point is made over and over again. Yet Dante never stops complaining. He alone endures the fatigue of the monstrous journey; he is undone by the stench and stunned by the local light and noise effects; he sorrows over the prediction of his future exile.
Pity for others who are suffering in hell is generally repressed: when Dante sees the sorcerers march backward through their valley, because their faces, twisted to look over the loins, deny them the power of seeing forward, he weeps at the vision of our image so contorted. The hem of self-pity is showing. Virgil immediately administers a tongue-lashing. Who is more wicked than he that sorrows at God’s judgment? Pity for the rich and famous, although analytically no more defensible, is apt to escape censure: witness the treatment of Brunetto Latini, Farinata and Ulysses, among others. In this manner tenderhearted anti-Semites will find infinitely more pitiful the indignities or, worse yet, financial ruin suffered by a Jewish member of the upper set than the death of some little furrier from Tarnopol who was shot and then shoved into a common grave he had helped to dig. Dante’s rejoicing when he sees the hapless Filippo Argenti drowning in mud is such that Virgil cannot contain himself. Blessed is the mother, he exclaims, that bore this virtuously indignant son.
But poetry has its own power, and a poet’s words overcome even the hardness of his own heart. In that place mute of all light, as the two poets trudge on, setting their feet on the emptiness of sufferers that seems like real bodies, sopra lor vanità che par persona, one question reverberates louder than all others: Who piles on these travails and pains, and why does our guilt waste us so? Perché nostra colpa sì ne scipa?
ON FRIDAY, the next morning, I was in our kitchen. It was a large, bright room, painted white, with a square table in the middle. The stove, like all kitchen stoves in Poland at that time, was a black, iron box, itself