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Hell’s Borderlands: A Preliminary Cartography Warren Ginsberg (bio) Nothing so well answers Dante’s entering Malebolge as his leaving it. After he had stopped and spoken with sympathy, anger and regret to the three Florentine sodomites as they wheeled about like wrestlers “avvisando lor presa e lor vantaggio, / prima che sien tra lor battuti e punti” (Inf. 16.23–24), the pilgrim and Vergil walked an unspecified distance to reach the ledge where the Phlegethon plummets to the lake of Cocytus. The deafening roar reminded Dante of the Acquacheta in full spate at San Benedetto de l’Alpe. Vergil then tossed his charge’s cord into the abyss; Geryon quickly surfaced through the murk (Inf. 16.130: “quell’ aere grosso e scuro”). While Vergil parleyed with the beast, Dante returned to the outer edge of the seventh circle to speak with the huddled usurers; following his return, Geryon ferried the pair down to the first pit. As soon as he had deposited them there, he disappeared with a speed “come da corda cocca” (Inf. 17.136). Ten bolge later, about to cross the frontier that drops to nethermost Hell, Dante again stands transfixed, without sympathy but very much to his own regret, while Sinon and Master Adam exchange angry taunts and blows. The Romenese counterfeiter, who was burned for his crime, sits anchored to the spot by the watery weight of a dropsy whose parching fever torments him less than ever-present images of “Li ruscelletti che d’i verdi colli / del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno” (Inf. 30.64–65). After Vergil first rebukes and then forgives Dante’s fascination at their scuffle, the poets turned their backs on the miserable valley; as they had before, they silently make their way over a stretch of ground through dark air (Inf. 16.130: “l’aura grossa [End Page S146] e scura”)—again they are deafened, this time by a blast from a horn, which directs Dante’s sight to giants, planted waist down along the rim of a chasm. Following encounters with Nimrod and, a bowshot away (Inf. 31.83: “al trar d’un balestro”), Ephialtes, they come to Antaeus, who, following Vergil’s conversation with him, lowers them to Caina. As soon as he deposits them there, the giant quickly raises himself (Inf. 31.144: “né, sì chinato, lì fece dimora”). At least two allied but distinct sets of resemblances link these border crossings. One network connects the sodomites and usurers to the counterfeiters and falsifiers. The fire that rains down like snowflakes on Brunetto Latini finds its counterpart in the descending “ruscelletti” that parch Master Adam as he imagines them; the cascade of the river of boiling blood that bounds his and the moneylenders’ circle returns as the overflow of fluid that sinks down and pools within his hydroptic body. The century of scorched immobility that awaits the sodomite who halts an instant is echoed by the ardent desire of the immolated Adam to move one inch in a hundred years. The lunge and grapple of wrestlers, to whom Dante compares Iusticucci and his interlocked companions, is matched by the thrust and parry of Sinon and his adversary. For all their flailing of arms and legs, the usurers seem too listless to move from where they sit; despite their fisticuffs and verbal jabs, Adam and Sinon are unable to move. Just as the unidentified usurer whose pouch bears the Scrovegni crest bitterly awaits the coming of Vitaliano and the “cavalier sovrano” (Inf. 17.72) of the Buonamonte, so Adam would set his paunch a-questing to avenge the one son of the Conti Guidi already in Hell and two others yet to arrive. These and other correspondences suggest a continuity between the most severe crimes of violence, which defy God “spregiando natura e sua bontade” (Inf. 11.48), and the worst acts of simple fraud, which “par ch’incida / pur lo vinco d’amor che fa natura” (Inf. 11.56). But the void that separates Malebolge from the upper circles also suggests they are fundamentally unalike. At the same time, a different web of affiliations connects Dante and Vergil’s descent to the pits with their descent...
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