Мэтью Перл: The Dante Chamber

Christina and Browning called on every art studio in London and beyond where Gabriel had leased space in the past — sometimes, during those periods, he’d painted with such fury that he would sleep on floors not to lose time, content as a seal on a sandbank — and at the residences of half a dozen of his old friends. Some friends, they learned, had turned into ex-friends because of Gabriel’s erratic behavior. The questioners heard about his being warm, generous, and inspiring from some; from others, that he was selfish, spoiled, and a broken-down devil who was mad as a March hare.

Some people they spoke to were almost as anxious as they were to know where they could find Gabriel. One of these was a man who had bought paintings by Gabriel, A. R. Gibson.

On their way to the art exhibit where they were told they could find Gibson, Browning asked Christina if she knew much about the art lover.

“His actual initials were R. A. Gibson,” Christina explained to Browning with the slightest hint of disdain that, coming from her, landed with the thud of a raging insult. “But he did not like that the letters of his name spelled something as common and dirty as ‘rag,’ so he changed it. He is rather infamous for his bossiness toward the painters he commissions.”

Browning seemed to find the idea of Gibson’s changed name wildly amusing until Christina pointed out Gabriel had done something similar. “Dante was actually one of my brother’s middle names.”

“Was it?”

“He was born Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, but around age twenty shortened it by removing the Charles and changed the order to Dante Gabriel to honor Dante Alighieri. That is why only his artist friends call him Dante — he instructs them to do so, but we wouldn’t. To us, he is always Gabriel.”

They found the original subject of their conversation smoking a long, thin cigarette and directing the ashes away from his orange-brown velvet collar. Smoking was not allowed in the gallery, but Gibson was too important to be reprimanded. “Your brother owes me two paintings, but you might say I am patient to a fault,” Gibson reported to them. “Oh, you know him. When Dante thinks he is unappreciated, he demands attention, but when he knows something is wanted of him, he — what’s the word a versifier, like one of you, might use? — recoils .”

Browning asked Gibson why he still did business with Gabriel, if he had been so difficult.

“Mr. Browning, you must know Dante Gabriel Rossetti is” — he sent out a cloud of smoke as he searched for another word — “irresistible. We have had our battles over the price of my commissions from him. Still, it is rare to find one who is as excellent a poet as a painter, and such a capable imagination improves his craft in both. He always says you could have been a great artist yourself, my dear.”

“Me?” Christina replied, aghast at the idea.

“Dante says you have the artistic imagination of a hundred men, but that you can hide more easily in your poetry. He adores you, you know. I always picture you, Miss Rossetti, as something of a caged bird, waiting to be freed. Do you ever feel that way?”

The stare Christina returned at Gibson could have made a murderer confess at Old Bailey.

When after many similar interviews they failed to make progress tracing where Gabriel could have gone, Browning suggested they consult the police, but Christina refused. She didn’t give a reason. In part, she was thinking of Gabriel, who would fume at the idea of a bobby looking for him.

More than that, asking for help from the police would confirm there was a problem, and, in spite of herself, she was not ready to admit that to more people. She continued to go to Tudor House, sometimes on her own and sometimes with Browning or William, organizing and examining her brother’s letters and notebooks and sketches, hoping a clue would appear. William brought her letters from Gabriel that he could find for her to review.

She found old neglected documents, including some writing and sketches from around the time he’d met Lizzie. The sketches, usually preparations for paintings that would never be completed, often experimented with transforming the visage of Lizzie into the image of Beatrice.

Beatrice Portinari — the real Beatrice, many scholars believed — was one of many girls known for her beauty around Florence of the late thirteenth century, but for whatever reason she, not one of the others, captured the young poet’s heart and imagination. When Beatrice’s father died, Dante observed her tenderly grieving. This, in turn, filled Dante with grief and with a startling idea that invaded his every waking thought: There will come a day when beautiful, tender Beatrice, too, must die . If he had dared look right into her eyes, he would have dropped dead right there, drowned in sorrow. Perhaps the most peculiar part of Beatrice’s destiny was that she probably never knew about her poetic admirer’s extraordinary preoccupation. Her life was, by all accounts, perfectly ordinary, marrying at twenty and dying of illness a few years later.

Dante and Beatrice had met when she was so young. At that age, men imagine girls as paragons of purity and perfection. No wonder she became an angelic figure in Dante Alighieri’s mind, a figure whose only purpose was to rescue Dante from darkness and despair. If they never had to age, all women would be mistaken for angels by men. Dante, however, was a brilliant enough poet not to leave it so simple. When Beatrice finally reappears to Dante atop the mountain of Purgatory on Holy Wednesday, 1300 — as he describes in the second canticle of his Divine Comedy — she is armed with far more than she had appeared in the vision of a heartsick young poet; she roars with intelligence, anger, determination, righteousness. What Beatrice gains in power at the top of the mountain she loses in compassion, no longer speaking to Dante but at him.

Strangely, several times when Christina returned to Tudor House to continue journeying through Gabriel’s memories and thoughts, it seemed as if some of the books or papers had been moved just slightly — as if by one of the ghostly apparitions so popular with the professional mediums Gabriel sometimes patronized. Every time she opened the door to the house, she held her breath, hoping against hope he would be standing in the hall beyond the threshold. Or, more likely, sprawled on a sofa, head low and feet propped up, staring at the vast ceiling — dreaming of his next painting.

Once, she heard footsteps on the stairs and looked over, thinking of Gabriel, only to see his raccoon scampering down. Tap tap tap. When the raccoon, with its shining eyes, would trot by, she could only envision the kangaroo’s joey torn apart by its long claws in retaliation. She shooed the animal away. She formed a better relationship with Bobby, an owl with a large face and eggshell green beak. He was her favorite among the wonderland of animals.

Another time, as she read at the table looking for clues, she heard a shout: “You should be in church!” A search turned up Gabriel’s parrot, repeating the advice.

“I will not disagree, Parrot,” Christina had said with a frown, returning to memories of Gabriel she had tried so desperately to forget.

Gabriel first encountered the woman who would change his life when she was as still as a stone. She was sitting as Viola from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night for a painting by one of Gabriel’s artistic conspirators and studio mates, Arthur Hughes. But she could not help but follow Gabriel with her eyes as he lumbered around the studio staring at her. “Do not move your eyes so much,” shouted Hughes. “Keep your damned eyes over here!” She began to sit for Gabriel’s paintings and they remained entranced by each other. As with everything that affected Gabriel, her charm and beauty pleased him not just in themselves but as symbols of something he’d searched for his whole life. He convinced her to change the spelling of her surname from Siddall to Siddal, which he said improved it. More elegant.