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Feb. 23rd, 2019 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dantealighieriskyeventide on tumblr asked:
AUGUST, 1299
When I think back to those days just before the turning of the century, the primary impression that comes to my mind is heat. It was a blistering, brutal summer; the temperature seemed to build and build to a crescendo throughout June and July, and by the time mid-August arrived the entire city seemed to be baking alive. Though the earlier months of the year had been busier than usual, a frantic political nervousness coloring the collective life we lived along the narrow streets, everything now was slow and lethargic, paralyzed by the merciless sun. Those who could escaped to the countryside, the cool banks of the Arno to the west— or in the case of the especially wealthy, the Tyrrhenian coast. Those who could not (and we were among their number, prohibited from travel by the needs of two young boys and a baby girl) stayed, and felt as though we were cooking alive in a giant’s oven.
Even with so many people gone, there was still a sense of tension in the air, though the streets were all but empty and almost everyone spent their days inside, out of the sun. Perhaps it was the steady progression of the heat itself; it just kept getting hotter and hotter. Even as it climbed from uncomfortable to unbearable, and we all thought surely it had to break soon, drop down into a reasonable region and bring with it the first hints of autumn, it only increased. It felt senseless, and profoundly frustrating; my temper was short, and I began to find myself snapping at Dante for no reason at all. (Somehow, he managed never to be cross with me, though whether that was genuine patience or the fact that the heat tended to make him dizzy and faint I don’t know.)
More likely, though, it was a parallel manifestation of that same nervousness that had seized us all earlier in the year. Frantic adrenaline had given way to dread that crept up on us as inexorably as the climbing temperature, and hung low and heavy over the city like storm-clouds pregnant with rain. It was only a matter of time before the deluge began; the air felt ominously still, and a metal tang hung about our mouths, as though we were getting a fore-taste of the blood and steel we all knew was imminent. Sooner or later.
It was on a particularly terrible day that I completely lost my temper with my husband. The heat had started early; by ten o’clock it was completely intolerable, even inside. Sweat stung my eyes as I tried to calm Antonia, who was understandably fussy. Her foul mood reflected my own, but I didn’t have the luxury of throwing a fit about it. Pietro and Jacopo were still in bed; I’d taken to letting them sleep late, so as to avoid at least part of the miserable daylight hours.
It might have been about an hour after that, when the weather had passed “intolerable” and gone directly to “hellish,” that I heard a tremendous crash upstairs.
Naturally, my thoughts immediately flew to the worst-case scenario: my cousin’s men, come to make an example of my husband for this or that ill-timed remark. Or some other political enemy he’d made and not told me; I tried to keep track of them, but he was annoyingly secretive about certain things, not understanding that it was vital for me to know where he stood so that I could prevent things like what I was almost certain by now was going on upstairs from happening. Our quarter, wealthy as it was, was nearly all cleared out; no one would come to help us. It was only me. I set a wailing Antonia down in her bassinet, grabbed a knife from the kitchen, and dashed up the stairs to the room my husband and I shared, where the crash had seemingly originated.
Throwing open the door, knife raised, I expected to find a violent scene— my husband hurt, the room ransacked, other people there at the very least. Instead, it took me a moment to register the fact that the room was empty save for Dante himself, lying still on the floor, with what looked to be the remains of a bookshelf scattered in splinters and battered volumes in front of him. He seemed to have fainted.
I set down the knife on the bedside table, fuming. (I know how this sounds; I ought to have been more concerned with his well-being, but at this point his swoons had become a regular feature of living with him and I couldn’t dredge up the emotional energy to worry.) Not bothering with the remains of what had been our bookshelf, I grabbed him unceremoniously under the shoulders, hauled him upright, and half-dragged, half-carried him to our bed (my husband and I are— were— about the same height, but I was substantially stronger than him) and sat stewing in frustration, waiting for him to wake up.
It took him a few minutes. When he did, blinking blearily into consciousness, I had to resist the urge to slap him across the face to speed up the process.
He sat up next to me, rubbing his forehead. (Nastily, I hoped he was feeling a headache coming on. There was certainly a large bruise on his hairline where his temple had hit the ground.)
“You were trying to move the bookshelf?” I asked testily as he squinted at me.
“Yes. I was just trying to get it away from the window, so we could have a little more air circulation—”
“You couldn’t even do that without passing out?”
He flushed pink— or pinker, considering the effect of the heat. “You know how this weather makes me. I overestimated myself, and—”
“And now we don’t have a bookshelf any longer,” I snapped, gesturing to the mess on the floor. “Though that’s more your problem than mine.”
He recoiled as if I had slapped him. “Gemma, I’m sorry—”
I stood up. “It’s fine.” (The tone of my voice evidenced that it was anything but.) “Go check on Antonia, I left her downstairs when I heard the crash. I’ll clean this up.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I would rather do it now than have you try to do it and faint again. Do make an effort to stay conscious until I get downstairs, will you?”
Facing the window, I couldn’t see his expression, but I could tell from the silence that he was biting his lower lip in that way he had when he was anxious or upset. He didn’t move from the bed.
“Well?” I spun on my heel to face him. “Can you not even handle a flight of stairs? Is that it?”
“You’re being cruel,” Dante said quietly, and I noticed with mingled exasperation and guilt that his eyes looked overly bright.
“If you’d like me to be nicer, maybe try being a little bit more helpful, instead of swooning whenever you have to put down that poet’s pen of yours and do the most basic of household tasks!” My voice had gotten shrill near the end, and I realized with fury that there were tears in my eyes, too, and a rapidly forming lump in my throat. I turned away from him, hunching my shoulders.
“Gemma—”
“What!” I screamed— outright screamed, and Dante, who had stood up off the bed and was trying to reach out for me, jumped back so far he nearly tripped.
That— the sight of him looking at me as though I’d hit him, when he was only trying to help— was what pushed me over from anger to frustrated guilt, and I began to cry.
My husband approached me tentatively and put a cautious arm around my shoulders, guiding me back to the bed. His touch was very light, unsure whether or not I was going to lash out again. Instead, I sat down heavily next to him, let myself wrap my arms around him, and wept openly into his shoulder.
This was not a common occurrence between us— or, it was, but usually Dante was the one doing the crying, and I the comforting. He patted my back awkwardly as I sobbed, messily and incoherently, babbling something about how I was sorry, I hadn’t meant to be mean, the stress and the heat and the worry had all gotten to me and I’d just snapped.
Eventually, after perhaps five minutes of unabashed emotion, I managed to get myself under control, pulling back and wiping my eyes. “Sorry,” I rasped.
Dante smiled, that crooked little half-smile he reserved for moments like this one. “Don’t be. You’ve done the same thing for me more times than I can count.”
I laughed at that, and he did too, and then I leaned in and kissed him on the mouth for the first time in almost two months. Let myself kiss him, really. He was surprised for a moment, but then he kissed me back, gentle and chaste.
When he pulled back, he held my gaze for a moment, and I remembered in a sudden rush of fondness why, exactly, I loved him— my sweet, delicate husband, talented and kind and more moral by half than anyone else I’d ever known. The only truly and uncomplicatedly good thing my family had ever given me. What was left of my anger melted away, and I kissed him again, pushing him back down on the bed and throwing a leg over him, holding his wrists while he looked up at me with something very close to adoration.
That night, the heat finally broke, and the next dawn was blessedly cool and clean. I think back on that summer and I remember how swelteringly miserable it was, but mostly I remember that feeling— that momentary respite, small and sweet. Sleeping together for the first time since May, and the morning after the taste of September on the breeze, relieving the sick tension that loomed over us for just a little while. That summer was the last one we would spend together in the city, though of course I didn’t know it at the time; I suppose I wish it had been better, but in a detached way that bears no resemblance to the other, more visceral regrets I harbor. We had that night, laughing next to each other in bed in temporarily fearless defiance of an impending eschatology, and that was— would have to be— enough.
dante and/or gemma + c
c: a moment of respite
AUGUST, 1299
When I think back to those days just before the turning of the century, the primary impression that comes to my mind is heat. It was a blistering, brutal summer; the temperature seemed to build and build to a crescendo throughout June and July, and by the time mid-August arrived the entire city seemed to be baking alive. Though the earlier months of the year had been busier than usual, a frantic political nervousness coloring the collective life we lived along the narrow streets, everything now was slow and lethargic, paralyzed by the merciless sun. Those who could escaped to the countryside, the cool banks of the Arno to the west— or in the case of the especially wealthy, the Tyrrhenian coast. Those who could not (and we were among their number, prohibited from travel by the needs of two young boys and a baby girl) stayed, and felt as though we were cooking alive in a giant’s oven.
Even with so many people gone, there was still a sense of tension in the air, though the streets were all but empty and almost everyone spent their days inside, out of the sun. Perhaps it was the steady progression of the heat itself; it just kept getting hotter and hotter. Even as it climbed from uncomfortable to unbearable, and we all thought surely it had to break soon, drop down into a reasonable region and bring with it the first hints of autumn, it only increased. It felt senseless, and profoundly frustrating; my temper was short, and I began to find myself snapping at Dante for no reason at all. (Somehow, he managed never to be cross with me, though whether that was genuine patience or the fact that the heat tended to make him dizzy and faint I don’t know.)
More likely, though, it was a parallel manifestation of that same nervousness that had seized us all earlier in the year. Frantic adrenaline had given way to dread that crept up on us as inexorably as the climbing temperature, and hung low and heavy over the city like storm-clouds pregnant with rain. It was only a matter of time before the deluge began; the air felt ominously still, and a metal tang hung about our mouths, as though we were getting a fore-taste of the blood and steel we all knew was imminent. Sooner or later.
It was on a particularly terrible day that I completely lost my temper with my husband. The heat had started early; by ten o’clock it was completely intolerable, even inside. Sweat stung my eyes as I tried to calm Antonia, who was understandably fussy. Her foul mood reflected my own, but I didn’t have the luxury of throwing a fit about it. Pietro and Jacopo were still in bed; I’d taken to letting them sleep late, so as to avoid at least part of the miserable daylight hours.
It might have been about an hour after that, when the weather had passed “intolerable” and gone directly to “hellish,” that I heard a tremendous crash upstairs.
Naturally, my thoughts immediately flew to the worst-case scenario: my cousin’s men, come to make an example of my husband for this or that ill-timed remark. Or some other political enemy he’d made and not told me; I tried to keep track of them, but he was annoyingly secretive about certain things, not understanding that it was vital for me to know where he stood so that I could prevent things like what I was almost certain by now was going on upstairs from happening. Our quarter, wealthy as it was, was nearly all cleared out; no one would come to help us. It was only me. I set a wailing Antonia down in her bassinet, grabbed a knife from the kitchen, and dashed up the stairs to the room my husband and I shared, where the crash had seemingly originated.
Throwing open the door, knife raised, I expected to find a violent scene— my husband hurt, the room ransacked, other people there at the very least. Instead, it took me a moment to register the fact that the room was empty save for Dante himself, lying still on the floor, with what looked to be the remains of a bookshelf scattered in splinters and battered volumes in front of him. He seemed to have fainted.
I set down the knife on the bedside table, fuming. (I know how this sounds; I ought to have been more concerned with his well-being, but at this point his swoons had become a regular feature of living with him and I couldn’t dredge up the emotional energy to worry.) Not bothering with the remains of what had been our bookshelf, I grabbed him unceremoniously under the shoulders, hauled him upright, and half-dragged, half-carried him to our bed (my husband and I are— were— about the same height, but I was substantially stronger than him) and sat stewing in frustration, waiting for him to wake up.
It took him a few minutes. When he did, blinking blearily into consciousness, I had to resist the urge to slap him across the face to speed up the process.
He sat up next to me, rubbing his forehead. (Nastily, I hoped he was feeling a headache coming on. There was certainly a large bruise on his hairline where his temple had hit the ground.)
“You were trying to move the bookshelf?” I asked testily as he squinted at me.
“Yes. I was just trying to get it away from the window, so we could have a little more air circulation—”
“You couldn’t even do that without passing out?”
He flushed pink— or pinker, considering the effect of the heat. “You know how this weather makes me. I overestimated myself, and—”
“And now we don’t have a bookshelf any longer,” I snapped, gesturing to the mess on the floor. “Though that’s more your problem than mine.”
He recoiled as if I had slapped him. “Gemma, I’m sorry—”
I stood up. “It’s fine.” (The tone of my voice evidenced that it was anything but.) “Go check on Antonia, I left her downstairs when I heard the crash. I’ll clean this up.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I would rather do it now than have you try to do it and faint again. Do make an effort to stay conscious until I get downstairs, will you?”
Facing the window, I couldn’t see his expression, but I could tell from the silence that he was biting his lower lip in that way he had when he was anxious or upset. He didn’t move from the bed.
“Well?” I spun on my heel to face him. “Can you not even handle a flight of stairs? Is that it?”
“You’re being cruel,” Dante said quietly, and I noticed with mingled exasperation and guilt that his eyes looked overly bright.
“If you’d like me to be nicer, maybe try being a little bit more helpful, instead of swooning whenever you have to put down that poet’s pen of yours and do the most basic of household tasks!” My voice had gotten shrill near the end, and I realized with fury that there were tears in my eyes, too, and a rapidly forming lump in my throat. I turned away from him, hunching my shoulders.
“Gemma—”
“What!” I screamed— outright screamed, and Dante, who had stood up off the bed and was trying to reach out for me, jumped back so far he nearly tripped.
That— the sight of him looking at me as though I’d hit him, when he was only trying to help— was what pushed me over from anger to frustrated guilt, and I began to cry.
My husband approached me tentatively and put a cautious arm around my shoulders, guiding me back to the bed. His touch was very light, unsure whether or not I was going to lash out again. Instead, I sat down heavily next to him, let myself wrap my arms around him, and wept openly into his shoulder.
This was not a common occurrence between us— or, it was, but usually Dante was the one doing the crying, and I the comforting. He patted my back awkwardly as I sobbed, messily and incoherently, babbling something about how I was sorry, I hadn’t meant to be mean, the stress and the heat and the worry had all gotten to me and I’d just snapped.
Eventually, after perhaps five minutes of unabashed emotion, I managed to get myself under control, pulling back and wiping my eyes. “Sorry,” I rasped.
Dante smiled, that crooked little half-smile he reserved for moments like this one. “Don’t be. You’ve done the same thing for me more times than I can count.”
I laughed at that, and he did too, and then I leaned in and kissed him on the mouth for the first time in almost two months. Let myself kiss him, really. He was surprised for a moment, but then he kissed me back, gentle and chaste.
When he pulled back, he held my gaze for a moment, and I remembered in a sudden rush of fondness why, exactly, I loved him— my sweet, delicate husband, talented and kind and more moral by half than anyone else I’d ever known. The only truly and uncomplicatedly good thing my family had ever given me. What was left of my anger melted away, and I kissed him again, pushing him back down on the bed and throwing a leg over him, holding his wrists while he looked up at me with something very close to adoration.
That night, the heat finally broke, and the next dawn was blessedly cool and clean. I think back on that summer and I remember how swelteringly miserable it was, but mostly I remember that feeling— that momentary respite, small and sweet. Sleeping together for the first time since May, and the morning after the taste of September on the breeze, relieving the sick tension that loomed over us for just a little while. That summer was the last one we would spend together in the city, though of course I didn’t know it at the time; I suppose I wish it had been better, but in a detached way that bears no resemblance to the other, more visceral regrets I harbor. We had that night, laughing next to each other in bed in temporarily fearless defiance of an impending eschatology, and that was— would have to be— enough.
