In the lobby of the Danteum, a sculpture of a large metal bird carried on its back the naked body of a person whose face looked like Dante, but who also had breasts — Dante and Beatrice as one. The bird loomed over a modest wooden stand, which had built in it a tiny drawer. The drawer was meant to hold Dante's ashes, but Dante's ashes were not there. The drawer was empty, waiting, like the tiny little drawer in which one might put one's matchbooks, small screwdrivers, and pencil stubs. "I miss you," said the empty drawer in the Danteum to Dante, who had been dead a long time.
We had lost the key to purgatory. "This is for A." the motorbike driver said to the man at the reception desk who then called everyone with his name, but A. was not yet there. The driver left to return the key to A.'s apartment, but T., his partner, was giving their baby a bath. It was all irreconcilable: knowing the keys were at the door, knowing that the door cannot be answered. "I miss you" said everyone to the keys, the driver, the motorbike, Dante, his dust.
We rode the cage elevator to a middle floor of purgatory and walked down the long pale hallway to the office which we could not enter. I looked through the textured glass window of the door and could only see a subtle light. A. said he did not believe in ghosts until he was in the Danteum at night. We knocked on the door of his neighbor, who announced, first in Spanish, then in English, that we were, despite being in purgatory, also always in hell.
I’d been praying to the saint of motorbikes and keys as I was walking toward the Palacio Barolo. I had boarded the plane in winter, woke up in summer. The buses rolling past, sighing exhaust fumes. The men strode past, too, in tailored pants crisp white shirts, stubs of cigarettes between their elegant fingers. The artist, the son of a poet who was in the circle of Borges, made pictures in his office in the Danteum: all of the pictures were poetry – Dante's hell.
Welcome to Buenos Aires said the drawer awaiting Dante's ashes, said the over warm office air of purgatory as we sat on its broken chairs, said the artist drawing hell, said the stories of the dead poets, said the missing objects, said the vanished motorbike driver, said the heat, said the restaurant later, where we drank beer in the sweltering un-airconditioning while men played billiards in the basement
The men played billiards in the basement. We talked about Rousseau. Which would you rather have, I asked A., philosophy or astrology? A. had blamed something about the transit of the moon and planets for the lost keys to purgatory, and I had looked up at the moon above the city. It looked innocent. I objected. The moon didn't know anything about keys. That we have them, and lose them, is our own business. And besides, like the empty drawer that called to Dante's ashes, the office of a literary press I couldn't see was probably more evocative. As for me, I would rather have philosophy. To be a lover of the heavenly bodies in themselves and not their uses. A. would not commit to an answer to the insult of my either/or, but at least, we agreed, poetry was off the table.
With the artist, we had spoken about why it was that Paradise, in Dante, is so boring. I said it was because Dante had never really known Beatrice, only laid eyes on her and run back to his room for the hot flush of fantasy. She was an absence, not a person, as contentless as every other abstracted desire – "and betaking me to the loneliness of mine own room, I fell to thinking." The artist disagreed, then told us about Marta, his Beatrice, with whom he fell in love and for whom he wrote eight poems, after which she moved to Patagonia and he forgot her. He couldn't remember her last name.
This is why heaven is boring: there is nothing substantial in it, only a ghost of a hope. Marta ?, aging in Patagonia. I wish I knew her. "I fell to thinking" — a morbid diversion of lust. It is so perverse: poetry, poets, and edging. Everyone else just wants what they wants and sets out to possess it, but the poet bends, veers, falls to thinking, and in the La Vita Nuova, at least, the height of romance, when the spotty glamor of surface desire has dissipated into the brighter light, is to explain the shape of stanzas, poetic technique. My Danteum would always be in the shape of La Vita Nuova, not the Divine Comedy. It would be all basements, tents, canopy beds, and closets, in which there was always a deranged poetics lecture being broadcast from a loudspeaker and the shards of the real were pulsating, sanctified, in heart shape valentine boxes. “Is being left ‘forever panting’ forever held at bay from bliss, actually ideal?” writes Anahid Nersessian in Keat’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, about Ode on a Grecian Urn. And then I blushed, because I am a poet, and I had mistaken the universal answer for “yes.” (And if you haven’t read it — the correct answer, as far as I could tell -- was supposed to be “no.”)
But in this Danteum, the highest point of heaven was a cocktail bar. It was empty that night, and closed. A few days later, at a bookstore, helpful friends put Sergio Raimondi's book, Lexicon, in my hands. From his poem, Danteum, my quick translation:
"Although it is possible to ascend a ladder whose number of rungs is an equation of the total number of verses of the poem the suspicion that these are not the times for a strenuous pilgrimage most favored the placement of elevators that allow one to rise to the fourteenth floor like someone who quickly turns the pages: the exact point at which the latin poet and father can not continue."