Rings

Here, reader, let your eyes look sharp at truth,
for now the veil has grown so very thin...
                               -Dante, Purgatorio, 8:19-21

We fly back to Baltimore tomorrow, and I'll be leaving my wedding ring here. Presumably, it's in the sand that lies beneath the soft waves of the Adriatic, which is where I think I lost it while playing with Cleo two weeks ago, but it may have been snapped up by one of the beachcombers who ply the shore with metal detectors, or by a vacationing Russian housewife. All I know is that as I held Cleo on a sunny seat on the number 2 vaporetto back from the Lido, I noticed it missing, and when we returned to look for it, it did not surface.

It was relatively thick, and made of solid gold; I'd worn it since our wedding, just over seven years ago. And it was inscribed with a passage from Inferno: Inferno 5:138, if you care to look it up.

For the past two weeks, I've felt a bit as though I have a phantom limb; I find myself trying to toy with it, or to turn it - only to realize, again, that it's gone. At this point, it's as though I've lost the ring - or relived losing it - at least a hundred times. But there are also ways in which the loss feels, well, almost poetic. For example, for centuries the Venetian doge annually took a private gondola from San Marco, in order to cast a ring into the sea, commemorating the city's marriage to the water. And he did it on the Lido: precisely where my ring went missing. Admittedly, the doge could count on a local fisher boy to plunge into the water and recover the ring; in my case, no youth presented himself. But then there is also the realization that I likely lost it during a raucous game of Marco Polo with Cleo and an 8-year-old named Zoe. And Marco Polo was from - well, you know the answer to that. In several senses, then, the ring is perhaps where it belongs.

But, still: such a loss can feel heavy. Or, at least, it can feel heavy until one remembers what heaviness truly implies. Today, I took Cleo to the Lido for a final morning romp: we built a castle, punched waves, and piled sand on our legs. And, when Cleo was making sand cakes, I neared the end of Purgatorio, which I've been reading in quiet moments over the past couple of weeks. Canto 31 felt especially appropriate, in two places. Early in the canto, Beatrice challenges Dante, before the river Lethe: "What are you thinking?" she asks. "The water has not yet Obliterated your memories." Indeed not; I still missed the ring. My thumb idly found the paler spot on my ring finger. But then this, in Dante's subsequent confession: "Mere appearances Turned me aside with their false loveliness..." Indeed; why do we find ourselves weighed down with symbols of love, when the real thing is right at hand?

I put down my book and read no more; I jogged to Cleo, who asked me to make balls of sand for her. And tomorrow I will fly, as Beatrice recommends, with wings unweighted by pargoletta o altra novita.