The Weight of Unfinished Business — Divine Comedy

Virgil has to drag Dante away from the ninth chasm. Dante has been staring at the maimed and weeping and cannot stop. Virgil is impatient: the valley winds twenty-two miles; the moon is already below them; time is short. Dante explains: he thought he saw a kinsman down there. Virgil confirms it after the fact, it was Geri del Bello, Dante's father's first cousin, who was pointing at him menacingly before he left. Dante missed him because he was focused on Bertrand. Geri's murder was never avenged, Dante says, so he passed in silent contempt. That is the last anyone speaks of him. They reach the final chasm of Malebolge, the tenth, and Dante has to cover his ears against the sound. The stench is like all the plague hospitals of Valdichiana, Sardinia, and the Maremma heaped into one ditch in midsummer. The comparison Dante reaches for is the plague of Aegina, when the air turned malicious and every living thing died, and the people had to be grown again from ants. Here the forgers lie piled on each other, unable to move, scratching their scab-covered bodies with such fury that the crust comes off in scales like bream. Virgil addresses two scratching spirits propped against each other like pans on a fire. They are both Italian. One introduces himself: Griffolino of Arezzo, burned at the stake by the bishop of Siena, not for alchemy, but because he joked that he could teach a rich fool named Albero to fly, failed to make him a Daedalus, and Albero persuaded his supposed father the bishop to burn him. That got him killed; what put him in this chasm is that he actually did practice alchemy. The other is Capocchio, who mocked Dante for the benefit of Siena's waste of talent. He spends a speech defending particular Sienese spendthrifts from Dante's generalizing contempt. His credential: he forged transmuted metals through alchemy, and, if Dante remembers him, he was good at aping creative nature by his subtle art. The tone is sardonic to the end. Capocchio is here for the same reason as Griffolino: not for lying, but for the deeper fraud of counterfeiting nature itself.