Sixth Ledge: the Gluttonous. — Forese Donati. — Nella. — Rebuke of the women of Florence.
While I was fixing my eyes upon the green leafage, just as he who wastes his life following the little bird is wont to do, my more than Father said to me, “Son, come on now, for the time that is assigned to us must be parcelled out more usefully.” I turned my face, and no less quickly my step after the Sages, who were speaking so that they made the going of no cost to me; and ho! a lament and song were heard, “Labia mea, Domine,”1 in such fashion that it gave birth to delight and pain. “O sweet Father, what is that which I hear?” I began, and he, “Shades which go, perhaps loosing the knot of their debt.”
1 “Lord, open thou my lips.” — Psalm li. 15.
Even as do pilgrims rapt in thought, who, overtaking on the road unknown folk, turn themselves to them, and stay not; so behind us, moving more quickly, coming up and passing by, a crowd of souls, silent and devout, gazed at us. Each was dark and hollow in the eyes, pallid in the face, and so wasted that the skin took its shape from the bones. I do not think that Erisichthon1 was so dried up to utter rind by hunger, when he had most fear of it. I said to myself in thought, “Behold the people who lost Jerusalem, when Mary struck her beak into her son.”2 The sockets of their eyes seemed rings without gems. Whoso in the face of men reads OMO,3 would surely there have recognized the M. Who would believe that the scent of an apple, begetting longing, and that of a water, could have such mastery, if he knew not how?
1 Punished for sacrilege by Ceres with insatiable hunger, so that at last he turned his teeth upon himself. See Ovid, Metam.,viii. 738 sqq.
2 The story of this wretched woman is told by Josephus in his narrative of the siege of Jerusalem by Titus: De Bello Jud., vi. 3.
3 Finding in each eye an O, and an M in the lines of the brows and nose, making the word for “man.”
I was now wondering what so famished them, the cause of their meagreness and of their wretched husk not yet being manifest, and lo! from the depths of its head, a shade turned his eyes on me, and looked fixedly, then cried out loudly, “What grace to me is this!” Never should I have recognized him by his face; but in his voice that was disclosed to me which his aspect in itself had suppressed.1 This spark rekindled in me all my knowledge of the altered visage, and I recognized the face of Forese.2
1 His voice revealed who he was, which his actual aspect concealed.
2 Brother of the famous Corso Donati, and related to Dante, whose wife was Gemma de’ Donati.
“Ah, strive not 1 with the dry scab that discolors my skin,” he prayed, “nor with my lack of flesh, but tell me the truth about thyself; and who are these two souls, who yonder make an escort for thee: stay not thou from speaking to me.” “Thy face, which once I wept for dead, now gives me for weeping no less a grief,” replied I, “seeing it so disfigured; therefore, tell me, for God’s sake, what so despoils you; make me not speak while I am marvelling; for ill can he speak who is full of another wish.” And he to me, “From the eternal council falls a power into the water and into the plant, now left behind, whereby I become so thin. All this folk who sing weeping, because of following their appetite beyond measure, here in hunger and in thirst make themselves holy again. The odour which issues from the apple and from the spray that spreads over the verdure kindles in us desire to eat and drink. And not once only as we circle this floor is our pain renewed; I say pain, and ought to say solace, for that will leads us to the tree which led Christ gladly to say, ‘Eli,’2 when with his blood he delivered us.” And I to him, “Forese, from that day on which thou didst change world to a better life, up to this time five years have not rolled round. If the power of sinning further had ended in thee, ere the hour supervened of the good grief that to God reweds us, how hast thou come up hither?3 I thought to find thee still down there below, where time is made good by time.” And he to me, “My Nella with her bursting tears has brought me thus quickly to drink of the sweet wormwood of these torments. With her devout prayers and with sighs has she drawn me from the shore where one waits, and has delivered me from the other circles. So much the more dear and more beloved of God is my little widow, whom I loved so much, as she is the more solitary in good works; for the Barbagia4 of Sardinia is far more modest in its women than the Barbagia where I left her. O sweet brother, what wouldst thou that I say? A future time is already in my sight, to which this hour will not be very old, in which from the pulpit it shall be forbidden to the brazen-faced dames of Florence to go displaying the bosom with the paps. What Barbarian, what Saracen women were there ever who required either spiritual or other discipline to make them go covered? But if the shameless ones were aware of that which the swift heaven is preparing for them, already would they have their mouths open for howling. For if foresight here deceives me not, they will be sad ere he who is now consoled with the lullaby covers his cheeks with hair. Ak brother, now no longer conceal thyself from me; thou seest that not only I but all these people are gazing there where thou dost veil the sun.” Whereon I to him: “If thou bring back to mind what thou wast with me, and what I was with thee, the present remembrance will even now be grievous. From that life he who goes before me turned me the other day, when the sister of him yonder,” and I pointed to the sun, “showed herself round. Through the deep night, from the truly dead, he has led me, with this true flesh which follows him. Thence his counsels have drawn me up, ascending and circling the mountain that sets you straight whom the world made crooked. So long he says that he will bear me company till I shall be there where Beatrice will be; there it behoves that I remain without him. Virgil is he who says thus to me,” and I pointed to him, “and this other is that shade for whom just now your realm, which from itself releases him, shook every slope.”
1 Do not, for striving to see me through my changed look, delay to speak.
2 Willingly to accept his suffering, even when he exclaimed, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” — Matthew, xxvii. 46.
3 If thou didst delay repentance until thou couldst sin no more, how is it that so speedily thou hast arrived here?
4 A mountainous district in Sardinia, inhabited by people of barbarous customs.