To claim that I had mastered my temptation before I again saw Father Cambio would be a lie worthy of the worst circle of Dante’s hell, had he reserved it for those driven by lust rather than treachery. I was convinced I’d tried valiantly, but as I ponder my actions now, so many years later, I recognize my effort as barely even half-hearted. At the time, though, I could not have behaved any differently. I had no desire to. The delicious longing I felt for him was the most exciting experience of my life. It consumed me.
And it focused me. Everything I did was carefully crafted to ensure I could see him again, a strange course of action, given that the only occasions on which I was kept from him had stemmed from his own choice. But I did not recognize that in those heady days.
After confession the next week, we did not take a turn around the nave of the church, instead going directly to the room off the cloisters. Father Cambio had left there his copy of Inferno. He directed me to sit down and started to read aloud from it, Canto V, the tragic story of Francesca da Rimini. A high-spirited girl, she was forced to marry a man both deformed and cruel. But Francesca knew nothing of his character, not at first. The wedding took place between her and a proxy: her husband’s kind and handsome brother, Paolo. No one, however, told her he was a proxy, and she fell in love with him at once.
Theirs was a love that could not be denied. Together, they read the story of another pair of doomed lovers, Lancelot and Guinevere. As noble as that other couple, Francesca and Paolo did their best to resist temptation, but when they reached the part in the book where the knight, at last, kissed his fair lady, they were overcome.
Quando leggemmo il disïato riso
esser basciato da cotanto amante,
questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,
la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.
Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse:
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.
When as we read of the much-longed-for smile
Being by such a noble lover kissed,
This one, who ne’er from me shall be divided,
Kissed me upon the mouth all palpitating.
Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it.
That day no farther did we read therein.
That day, we, too, read no further. Like Lancelot, my love came to me and kissed my lips, whispering that I must no longer think of him as Father Cambio but as my own Giacomo. He tasted of wine, sweet and tart. From that moment, everything changed.