Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

And from the word go, Jonas, who had really just come along for the fun of it, was hooked, in spite of the fact that he was the only person in that auditorium who had not read a word of Dante — he had never been any closer to a classical text than his big brother’s Illustrated Classics . He wasn’t entirely ignorant, though. As a little boy at Aunt Laura’s he had — speaking of picture books — found a volume containing Gustav Doré’s engravings for Dante’s Inferno , and these illustrations were still clear in his mind; indeed they enabled him, perhaps to a greater extent than the others, to follow Suzanne I.’s increasingly complex constructions and tempestuous zigzagging between the allegorical and the literal planes, which, by the way, showed him that hell, like the eroticism in Agnar Mykle’s books, was on the whole a matter of metaphor.

That said, there is no concealing the fact that for Jonas the most fascinating part of it all was Suzanne I. herself; she fascinated him as only very few women did, more specifically: those who could lift him up onto a higher level — to stick to the Dantean imagery. While Suzanne I. was talking about the hideous torments of hell and the striking correlation between crime and punishment, while she was explaining Dante’s overall plan and the conflict between Aristotelian philosophy and the teachings of the Church, Jonas, sitting in the front row, felt a button in his spine being pressed, felt his entire nervous system being put on red alert. While the rest were reading Dante, he was studying her, not least the austere face in which one eye seemed to look inward while the other gazed outward. There was something oddly anachronistic, not to say aristocratic, about her, partly also because of the way in which her hair was pinned up, like an elaborate snail’s shell, and her rather old-fashioned, though stylish, taste in clothes, which made her look like a wealthy, conservative, middle-class lady. It was winter, and exceptionally cold, with ice everywhere — a fitting climatic backdrop to the lectures, inspired by the nethermost circle of the Inferno — and usually, when she stepped out of the lift, always bang on time, so punctual that you could have set your watch by her, she was clad in an almost demonstratively voluminous fur, making no attempt to hide her vanity. Axel said she was reckoned to be something of an eccentric and that she had only recently come home to live in Norway after many years abroad, in Italy among other places — hence the reason that she was liable, every now and again, to recite a few stanzas in vibrant Italian, making Jonas feel that behind her mask she concealed many more passionate sides to her character.

The lectures were hard going, and student and after student dropped out — including, fortunately, those Pharisaic pains in the neck who found it necessary to argue about everything from improbabilities in the chronology of the work to impossibilities in the topography. Only a fraction of the students were still sticking with it by the time the colourful and relatively entertaining Inferno section had been completed and they moved on to the much greyer Purgatorio , in which Suzanne I.’s longwinded expositions and scholastic leanings came more into their own — and had a soporific effect on quite a few listeners. But Jonas — who was not all that impressed with the Inferno — he had, after all, spent several hours in a pitch-black grave — was growing more and more interested and looked forward — I was about to say: like a sinner — to Tuesdays, to Suzanne I.’s monologues about free will and the nature of the soul, not to mention her interpretations of Dante’s three dreams and Virgil’s discourses on love; he half-ran down the hill from the university — not to the Student Union at Chateau Neuf, where Axel and he occasionally attended one of the riotous gatherings in the amphitheatre-style auditorium and had no trouble imagining that they had been consigned to some wailing circle in the Inferno — but to the building next door, the old Divinity School, the top floor of which was home to the Institute for General Literary Studies, as if it had by some divine irony been set on a higher ledge on the Mountain of Purgatory than the theologians themselves.

By the time they got to the Paradise section, that pretty rarefied and by no means readily accessible ascension, fraught with transparent faces, indistinct souls and star-like spirits capable of choreographing their points of light into all manner of forms, only Jonas and three others were still sticking it out in the blue auditorium — even Axel the bookworm had opted out, muttering some sheepish excuse about a tough end-of-term exam. But Jonas sat there, still in the front row, and let himself be held transfixed, let the pressure build up inside him; he did not merely listen to what Suzanne I. was saying but paid as much attention to the way she said it, her gestures, the look on her face, especially when she was talking about light, about how Dante used light — as a kind of visual music — and even more so when she got onto the subject of Beatrice’s strange and problematic part in the whole thing, all while Suzanne I.’s amber necklace smouldered like embers at her throat. There was also something in what she said that tied in, in some strange way, with his own area of study, astrophysics, the exploration of the heavens, of the cosmos, those vast entities which were just about driving him round the bend with their staggering, nebulous dimensions, their billions upon billions of galaxies. You could say that in some ways Jonas found Dante’s text just as enlightening, even if it was six hundred years old. It seemed to him that Dante’s observations on the celestial spheres, based on Ptolemy’s theories, were at least as right or wrong as the theories about the universe with which he was confronted in his astrophysical studies. In six hundred years, today’s hypotheses would seem every bit as arbitrary as Dante’s, he thought. And I ought perhaps to mention here that it may have been Suzanne I., with her highlighting of the architectonic and symmetrical aspects of Dante’s work, who led Jonas Wergeland to cut short his astronomy studies and begin, instead, on a course which revolved around architecture.

Meanwhile, the days were growing longer and lighter, although the weather was still cold. At the last lecture, held appropriately enough just before Easter — which, of course, also plays a part in the Comedy — only Jonas and one other student turned up. Suzanne I. did not seem the least put out, although she had long been intrigued by Jonas Wergeland, a student who had sat steadfastly through all her lectures, without making a single note, it’s true, but apparently hanging on every word she said about the progress from darkness to light, as if it really mattered to him, gazing at her the whole time, gazing at her with something close to rapture, a look which could not fail to make an impression. Jonas, for his part, felt that during that last lecture she lifted him from one heaven to the next with her eyes alone, much as Beatrice’s radiant and loving eyes had done for Dante: felt also, again like Beatrice, that she looked much lovelier now than she had the first time he took his seat in the auditorium. So after this concluding lecture, in which she quite surpassed herself with her interpretation of the medieval view of woman as a possible channel to knowledge about the hereafter, not least in her discussion of the huge revelation in the last canto, the stream of effulgent images designed to help the mind reach out to a point beyond time and space — and after these expositions, which ought to have accorded any interested listener an insight into the whole of the Comedy , as the vault doors of national banks are occasionally opened to allow the man in the street a peek at the unforgettable splendour of the gold reserves, after all this she asks Jonas what he is going to do next.