Michael Dibdin - A Rich Full Death

R.B.

Of the many thoughts which streamed through my mind as I scanned these lines, the uppermost was simply a sense of shock at the realisation that Browning still had not the slightest inkling of what had happened. Here he was, dashing me off a hasty summons, quite as though he could dispose of my time and person in the same old free and easy way as ever; as though I were still his acolyte, to be ordered to appointments when it suited him, and then dismissed and scorned and sniggered at by his high-class friends when the situation changed!

Well, he was mistaken, very much so-and the time had come to let him know, to make him feel it. For a moment I was tempted to return a delicately wounding letter in reply-as short and pointed as a stiletto.

But I soon thought better of it. Not that I wished to spare his feelings-had he spared mine? — but rather I saw that I had to deliver much more than just a smart rejoinder, a neat snub. There was too much at stake for that. I had to cut all my involvement with Mr Robert Browning, to disassociate myself from his ‘investigations’ before it was too late.

Playing the amateur police detective had seemed a worthwhile price to pay for sharing Browning’s company, back in the days when that had been the summum bonum of my existence-and when the truth behind poor Isabel’s death had been the sole object of our quest. How long ago and far away all that seemed now! My idol had proved to have feet not just of clay but of mud and grime and every sort of filth; while the jealous lover we had originally sought had swollen up, as in a dream, out of all proportion, and become a homicidal maniac whose atrocities were turning ‘our’ Florence into a slaughter-house.

It was high time to withdraw, to get out from under-while I still could! And to do that-to make Browning understand that I was in earnest, and would not be swayed-I should have to see him one last time in person.

I took a leaf out of Beatrice’s book, and arrived for our appointment dressed in my most sombre and formal apparel. If I hoped Mr Browning might be given pause for thought and reflection by this, I was quickly disappointed, for he just hailed me with all his characteristic gusto, and thrust his pass-a privilege which comes of living in the Guidi Palace-under the nose of the guard, who duly admitted us into the Grand-Duke’s domain.

It soon became clear that Browning was in his most energetic form. He hurried me along a promenade, between massive shiny evergreen hedges, so fast that I thought there must be something he wished to show me at the end. Once we got there, however, he merely turned down another alley-this one covered in trellises, where in a few months the vines will bud and leaf — and I began to realise that my companion’s haste was an index not of any urgency in our goal, but of his state of nervous excitement. And so we went on, circumnavigating the magnificent gardens at a cracking pace, passing the bold vistas and romantic prospects so artfully arranged to catch the eye without so much as a glance, while Browning talked, and talked, and talked.

I found it extremely odd to be trotting along beside the man, knowing what I knew; and odder still to think how recently I used to idolise him, and to dread nothing so much as the one thing I now sought above all: to be rid of him and his never-ending talk full of allusions in half a dozen languages I do not know to half a hundred books I have never read and do not wish to read.

How his self-indulgent verbosity used to inspire me when I thought he was the real right thing I had found at last! And how it disgusts me now I know what manner of thing he is. Listen:

‘It was the word “manto” first set me thinking. The Italian of course means a coat, from the Latin mantellum , cognate with the familiar “mande”. Greek, on the other hand, has mantis: a prophet or soothsayer, whence all our compounds that terminate in “-mancy”. ‘By your necromancy you have disturbed him, and raised his ghost’ and so on-this of course being just what the late Miss Edith Chauncey was at when she met with her unfortunate accident. It is however unlikely, despite her fame, that our local soothsayer will have a city named after her-as was the case with the daughter of blind Tiresias, one of her predecessors. The city in question is Mantova Gloriosa , the birthplace of the Mantuan Swan sung by Cowper …’

And so on, and so on. But do not fear-I shall spare you any more of the facetious riddles and learned references and pedantic explications I had to suffer, and bring you immediately where he in the end came out.

‘Does not this garden, on such a day as this, seem a vision of paradise?’ Browning rhetorically enquired. ‘And yet, in that note I sent you, I suggested it might bear a slightly-adapted motto from a celebrated account of another place. You took the hint, I trust? There is no need for me to explain further. No?’

I did not speak.

‘Why, man, that’s the key!’ Browning cried impatiently. ‘Old Dante and his Inferno!’

Browning stood gazing triumphantly at me, his chest pushed out and hands working away in his capacious pockets-the very image of a provincial shopkeeper who has backed the Derby winner. What an odious little man, I thought. Him, great? Him, a genius? Never, plainly, had I been further from the mark than when I had somehow contrived to persuade myself of that .

‘Dante!’ he repeated enthusiastically, when I failed to respond. The thing is so plain now that it seems hardly possible I did not see it long ago-but who would have thought to look for such a freakish association? There is no longer the slightest doubt about it, however. Take Chauncey, for example. She was found, you remember, with a broken neck. The maid-a lass of imagination, evidently; I should like to meet her! — described her mistress’s head as having been turned around like an owl’s. Dante put it more prosaically:

Come ‘l viso mi scese in lor piu basso ,

mirabilmente apparve esser travolto

ciascun tra ‘l mento e ‘l principio del casso

‘ “As on them more direct mine eye descends, each wonderously seem’d to be reversed at the neck-bone … “: such is the poet’s terrifying vision of the soothsayers, who are punished in the eighth circle of his hell. The leader of this pack was a woman-Manto.

The correspondence is clear. Miss Chauncey pretended to be what Manto was: one who seeks to push aside the curtain of mortality, to see further than God judges proper for His creatures-what Dante would have called un ‘indovina . The poet imaged such people grotesquely mutilated as a fit punishment for their temerity, their heads so wrenched out of place that they, who presumed to scan the secrets of futurity, could not even see where they were walking. Those who scorned man’s limits, mercifully imposed by a just and loving God to shield us from knowledge we are not strong enough to bear, are denied in eternity even that degree of foresight which is proper to man.

‘But now-and here’s the true devilry of the thing-what Dante imagined and wrote, someone in Florence is putting into practice! Thus Edith Chauncey is found dead, her neck broken like Manto’s, and a piece of paper thrust into her hand like the sign hung about the neck of an executed felon, spelling out the nature of her offence. On it appears the name of her archetype in Dante’s poem-MANTO-and the number of the circle in which that personage is to be found-8.

‘Once I had found this key, unlocking the remaining inscriptions was of course child’s play, and each served to confirm the pattern until all possibility of doubt was extinguished. Thus at the spot where Maurice Purdy was savaged by an enormous rabid dog we found the figure 3 and the word CIACCO. We were told that this means a pig, as indeed it does. But Dante employs it not as a noun but a name-it was the nickname of a notorious Florentine glutton, who also features in Boccaccio’s Decameron . In the third circle of hell the poet saw him punished “per la dannosa colpa de la gola” , “for the pernicious vice of gluttony”-but how much better those yawning Tuscan vowels draw the gorging craw ever calling for more and more! There lay Ciacco, wallowing in the mud, his flesh ripped and flayed by the Hound of Hell itself-”red of eye and slimy black of pelt, his paunch distended and cruelly hooked his claws”. I think you will agree that the hydrophobic beast that savaged Purdy made a very acceptable Cerberus, all things considered. As for his victim, belly-worship was his religion-he lived to eat, and died eaten.