Мэтью Перл - The Dante Chamber

Tudor House, where Gabriel had moved not long after Lizzie’s death, had at first seemed to be a place where he could do anything. He could fill it with useless collections of objects. With exotic and winsome animals. He hosted raucous gatherings, with artists cavorting naked and sliding down the banisters. The house was a wonderland. An escape from a life without Lizzie.

Christina looked back at the monkey on the mirror, then at the armadillos creeping into the doorway. They were waiting.

Hungry.

The house was stuffed with mismatched furniture from all over the globe, which Gabriel collected from junk shops, with every shelf not holding books lined with plates, china (mostly blue and white), and jewelry. Christina knew what happened when a notion took hold of her brother. It was the pursuit of the objects that gave him pleasure rather than the objects themselves. After he’d decided to collect blue and white china because one of his friends was doing it, she had been present at a dinner party with him. When Gabriel noticed a blue and white bowl at the center of the host’s table, he remarked on its exquisite beauty, grabbing it and turning it upside down to examine its mark — spilling soup all over himself, the table, and other guests.

Christina’s eyes landed on a self-portrait Gabriel had sketched to mark his twentieth birthday. With the long, flowing dark hair, the searching eyes, the full lips, he was born to attract attention.

Many kinds and sizes of mirrors reflected and expanded the chaos of artifacts and animals. The searchers next wandered around his library of more than a thousand volumes, where they found an eclectic selection of novels and histories in half a dozen languages, with an especially large selection of Italian books. The vast majority of the latter were editions of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy — divided into Inferno, Purgatory , and Paradise , the segments of the afterlife Dante claimed to traverse — or volumes of the Florentine bard’s shorter works, or books of commentary about Dante, or books of commentary about the commentary on Dante.

They inspected the central room of the house, Gabriel’s large studio that had once been a great dining hall, for signs of sketches or paintings, but of the many they found none could be identified as fresh enough to give them hope he had been there recently. Many of these pieces of art also incorporated scenes and figures from Dante Alighieri’s work. In one corner stood a giant canvas Christina had seen before, which Gabriel called Dante’s Dream . Some parts had been rubbed out; others had multiple layers of paint. There was no progress on it that Christina could detect, though in itself that wasn’t surprising. Gabriel had been working on it for fifteen years.

The painting showed an awestruck Dante Alighieri, the medieval poet, being led by a heavenly figure through Florence to Beatrice, the girl who captured him heart and soul and whose spirit eventually led him to his celebrated journey into the afterlife. The scene took place moments before Beatrice’s death. The room where Beatrice prepares to die did not seem to be any earthly setting in Gabriel’s version. The floor is covered in poppies, symbols of sleep. It seemed the Florentine poet’s chamber of imagination, a dreamy place between his disappointing reality and the better world beyond. Gabriel would often work on this canvas — if sitting and pacing in front of it and staring into it counted as work. He would speak about how he would not be able to finish until he managed to imagine himself in the place of Dante Alighieri.

“It is impossible to do. Impossible! To sufficiently become Dante... Maria was the only true Dante in our family,” Gabriel would say, unintentionally hurting Christina. He would talk about how much he missed their older sister as though Maria were dead rather than in a convent. “You, my darling Christina, are a born apostle. You can learn and can teach, but cannot lead the way as Maria did. None of us can.”

Christina did not say so at the risk of sounding conceited, but Gabriel was mistaken — about the painting, at least. It was Beatrice he would have to come to understand before the painting would allow itself to be finished.

As she searched, she found some other chalk sketches hanging above the fireplace related to Dante, including one depicting the Florentine poet’s point of view of the sixth terrace of Purgatory, containing the souls besieged with gluttony. At the bottom Gabriel had scribbled a note to solicit Christina’s opinion: CR — need your help. In the drawing, a penitent soul with face hidden in the shadows slumps on the ground, unable to nourish himself from fruit high upon a nearby tree.

With more to inspect, the searchers split up. William took on one part of the house, collecting fragments of Gabriel’s poems left scattered like autumn leaves, and Christina and Browning another. Meanwhile, hoarse cries, which seemed to mock their tiptoeing, were identified by Browning, by peering out the window, as two peacocks debating each other in the weed-infested garden, which led down to the banks of the Thames.

“You must find someone to tend to this menagerie,” Browning said to Christina, adding quickly, “until Gabriel returns.”

“He likes to look out every time he passes a window,” she said wistfully, “and if a lovely woman passes, he rushes out and says, ‘I’m a painter and I want to paint you.’”

Browning asked if they assented.

“Sometimes. Usually they scream, and he runs back inside, slams the front door, and hides.”

With candle in hand, Christina entered her brother’s bedroom, kept dark by thick wall hangings and velvet window curtains. She slowly parted the heavy curtain around his bed and paused at her brother’s bedside table. There a small black vial and a small measuring glass sat among other odds and ends.

Browning, coming up behind her, asked what it was.

She smelled the vial. “The skeleton in his cupboard, so to speak. Chloral hydrate.” The room’s heavy décor made their voices sound muffled and weak. She glanced around. The bed was in a disarray that could have been from a day — weeks, months? — earlier. She let out a tiny sigh ending with a choked-back sob.

Browning rushed closer to her with arms out.

“I am well enough,” she insisted, putting out a hand. “Never expect me to faint, Mr. Browning. I will not.”

“Something ailed you just now, Miss Rossetti.”

“There is nothing the matter, only I am tired and have a headache. There is nothing at all the matter.”

Browning swallowed down his protests and turned away.

He deserved better for helping her. “I am overcome not by what is here, but by what is not here, Mr. Browning. To be honest, I feared we might discover my brother here — his body.”

Christina paused before adding, “Please, do not tell anyone.”

He was confused. “Tell them — you mean that Gabriel—?”

Eeeiu! came the peacocks’ hollers. Eeeiu eeeiu!

She wished she didn’t have to say it. “Please don’t tell anyone I almost wept.”

They reconvened downstairs in the cluttered drawing room, where Browning lit a fire and William brewed tea.

“What about the rest of your family?” Browning asked. “Not one of them has spoken with him?”

“From the time we were children, our family never understood our brother,” said Christina, taking a chair to one side of the hearth while Browning settled in at the other. Perhaps their late father, the professore, understood him, Christina thought to herself, though he would never have admitted it. The fact was, their family gave up concerning themselves with Gabriel’s endeavors or whereabouts.