Robert Masello - The Medusa Amulet

It was many hours till dawn, during which I kept watch, but when it broke, Dr. Strozzi awakened and, rubbing his eyes, said, “My thoughts remain cloudy.”

“As do mine,” I said. Indeed, my head hurt as much as if I had drunk a barrel of wine.

“Did we raise the dead?”

A pair of crows landed in a puddle of mud, squawking.

“And what is that in the bag?” he said, pointing at the sack swinging back and forth on the flogging pole. Water had leaked from its bottom, and the few blades of grass below it had withered and died.

When again I did not reply, the doctor said, “Whatever prize it may be, I promise that you will receive your share.”

But this was no treasure to be divided like coins, and when Strozzi saw that I was not in the giving mood, he wisely busied himself with other things. The trophy was mine, and no man would ever take it from me.

[Translated by David L. Franco, Ph. D., Director of Acquisitions, Newberry Library Collections, Chicago, Illinois. All rights reserved.]

As the guests began to take their chairs, David Franco felt that little flutter of anxiety that he experienced whenever he had to make a speech of any kind. Somewhere he had read that public speaking was one of the most commonplace fears, but that wasn’t a lot of help right then. He glanced at his notes for the hundredth time, told himself that there was nothing to be nervous about, and straightened his tie again.

The room itself-the exhibit hall of the Newberry Library-had been nicely appointed for the event. Lighted display cases held a selection of the rare manuscripts from the library’s collection, and a classical ensemble, playing antique instruments, had only just stopped playing. A computerized lectern was set up on a dais at the front of the hall.

“It’s showtime,” Dr. Armbruster, the matronly chief administrator, whispered in his ear; she was dressed in her usual gray skirt and jacket, but she had enlivened it for the occasion with a rhinestone brooch in the shape of an open book. Stepping out to the lectern, she welcomed everyone to the event. “And thanks, especially,” she added, “for coming out on such a freezing day.”

There was an appreciative murmur, followed by a bit of coughing and rustling as the thirty or forty people present settled into their chairs. Most of them were middle-aged or older-well-heeled and successful book lovers and friends of the library. The men were generally white-haired, and wore bow ties, Harris tweeds, and flannel pants; their wives were in pearls and carried Ferragamo handbags. This was Old Chicago money, from the Gold Coast and the suburbs of the North Shore, along with a smattering of academic types from Northwestern or Loyola. The profs were the ones in the rumpled corduroy trousers and jackets. Later, they’d be the first to hit the buffet line. David had learned never to stand between a professor and a free Swedish meatball.

“And on behalf of the Newberry,” Dr. Armbruster was saying, “one of Chicago’s landmarks since 1883, I want to thank you all for your continued support. Without your generosity, I don’t know what we’d do. As you know, we are a private institution, and we rely upon our friends and associates to sustain the library in every way, from the acquisition of new materials to, well, just paying the electric bill.”

An elderly wag in the front row waved a checkbook in the air, and there was some polite laughter.

“You can put that away for now,” Dr. Armbruster said, then added with a laugh, “But keep it handy.”

David shifted from one foot to the other, nervously awaiting his cue.

“I think most of you know David Franco, who’s not only our youngest but one of our most industrious staff members. A summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College, David was the winner of a Fulbright Scholarship to Italy, where he studied Renaissance art and literature at the Villa I Tatti. Recently, he completed his doctorate at our own University of Chicago, and all this,” she said, turning toward David, “before the age of what? Thirty?”

Blushing fiercely, David said, “Not quite. I turned thirty-one last Friday.”

“Oh, well, in that case,” Dr. Armbruster said, turning back toward the audience, “you’d better get a move on.”

There was a welcome wave of laughter.

“But as you can see,” she continued, “when we received, as an anonymous gift, the 1534 copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, printed in Florence, we knew there was only one person to hand it over to. David has supervised its physical restoration-you would never guess what its binding looked like when we first acquired it-but has also entered its entire text, and its many illustrations, into our digital archive. That way, it can become available to scholars and researchers the world over. Today, he’s going to show us some of the most beautiful and intriguing images from the book, and also, I think,” she said, glancing encouragingly at David, “take us on a brief tour of the poem’s nature imagery?”

David nodded, his stomach doing a quick backflip, as Dr. Armbruster stepped away from the microphone. “David, it’s all yours.”

There was a round of subdued applause as he tilted the microphone higher, spread his papers on the lectern, took a sip from the water glass that had been left for him, and thanked everyone, again, for coming. His voice came out strained and high. Then he said something about the freezing weather outside, before remembering that his boss had already commented on that, too. He looked out at the room of expectant faces, cleared his throat, and decided to cut the small talk and just launch into his lecture.

As he did so, the lights went down, and a screen was lowered to his right.

“Dante, as you might know, had originally titled his book The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, A Florentine by birth but not in character . The title Divine Comedy only came later, when the book became regarded as a masterpiece. It’s a work that can be approached in a thousand different ways, and over the centuries it has been,” he said, his voice gaining strength once he was on firm and familiar ground. “But what we’re going to focus on today is the use of natural imagery in the poem. And this Florentine edition which was recently donated to the Newberry collection-and which I think most of you have now seen in the central display case-is a particularly good way to do that.”

He touched a button on the lectern’s electronic panel and the first image-an etching of a deep forest, with a lone figure, head bent, entering a narrow path-appeared on the screen. “‘In the middle of the journey of our life,’” he recited from memory, “‘I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.’” Looking up, he said, “With the possible exception of ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill,’ there is probably no line of poetry more famous and easily identifiable than that. And you will notice that right here, at the very start of the epic that is to follow, we have a glimpse of the natural world that is both realistic-Dante spends a terrible night in that wood-and metaphorical.”

Turning to the etching, he elaborated on several of its most salient features, including the animals that animated its border-a leopard with a spotted coat, a lion, and a skulking wolf with distended jaws. “Confronted by these creatures, Dante pretty much turns tail and runs, until he bumps into a figure-who turns out of course to be the Roman poet Virgil-who offers to guide him ‘through an eternal place where thou shalt hear the hopeless shrieks, shalt see the ancient spirits in pain so that each calls for a second death.’”

A new image flashed on the screen, of a wide river-Acheron with mobs of the dead huddled on its shores, and a shrouded Charon in the foreground, pointing with one bony finger at a long boat. It was a particularly well-done image and David noted several heads nodding with interest and a low hum of comments. He had thought there might be. This edition of the Divine Comedy was one of the most powerful he had ever seen, and he was making it his mission to find out who the illustrator had been. The title pages of the book had sustained such significant water and smoke damage that no names could be discerned. The book had also had to be intensively treated for mold, and many of the plates bore ineradicable green and blue spots the circumference of a pencil eraser.