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| Cecco Angiolieri |
CECCO ANGIOLIERI
Poet of Hate
by Marcel Schwob
Cecco Angiolieri was born hateful. His birth at Sienna coincided to the very day with the birth of Dante Alaghieri at Florence. Cecco’s father was a rich wool merchant whose sympathies inclined toward the empire. From his earliest childhood the boy muttered scornful, jealous things against his sire. In those days many of the nobles had reached a point where they were no longer willing to serve the Pope, the Ghibellines having already rebelled while even the Guelphes were divided into factions designated as the Whites and the Blacks. Imperial intervention was not distasteful to the Whites, but the Blacks remained staunchly loyal to Rome and the Holy See. Cecco felt instinctively Black, perhaps because his father was a White.
He hated his father almost from the first breath he drew. When he was fifteen he called for his share of the family fortune just as if old Angiolieri were dead. At the refusal of this request he left the paternal house in a furious wrath, complaining of his wrongs to high heaven and all the world, as he walked the roads to Florence where the Whites were again in power after routing the Ghibellines. Cecco begged bread, told of his father’s cruelty, and settled down finally in a cobbler’s hut. The cobbler had a daughter named Becchina with whom Cecco at once considered himself in love.
He was a simple man, this cobbler, a constant worshiper of the Virgin, whose image he always wore, persuaded that his devotion gave him the right to mend boots with bad leather. Evenings before bedtime, he would sit with Cecco in the candlelight, chatting about the saints and their goodness while Becchina washed the dishes, her hair in an everlasting tangle as she made fun of Cecco for the crooked mouth he had.
About that time all Florence began to talk of Dante’s, wild love for Beatrice, daughter of Folco Ricovero de Portinari, lettered folk having discovered the secret in the songs the poet wrote to his lady. Cecco heard these songs and scoffed at them.
“Oh, Cecco,” said Becchina, “you mock Dante but you cannot write such pretty verses for me.”
“We shall see,” replied young Angiolieri with a sneer.
First he set about composing a sonnet in which he criticized the measure and the sentiment of Dante’s songs. Then he wrote his verses to Becchina. She could not read a word of them, but she shrieked with laughter at the amorous contortions of his mouth when he read them to her.
Poor and bare as a stone in a church, Cecco loved the Mother of God with a true fervor that won the cobbler’s heart. Together they yearned for shabby sacred relics peddled by the bankrupt Blacks. Fired as he was with ardent devotion, Cecco looked like a promising customer at first, but he had no money. And in spite of Cecco’s admirable piety the cobbler betrothed his daughter to a fat neighbor named Barberino, a vender of oils. “Holy oils, perhaps,” explained the cobbler by way of excuse to Cecco. The wedding took place about the same time Beatrice married Simone de Bardi, and Cecco imitated Dante’s woe.
But Becchina did not pine away and die. On June the ninth, 1291, Dante sat idly tracing a picture on a tablet. It was the first anniversary of the death of Beatrice. Gazing at the tablet the poet saw he had drawn the figure of an angel whose face resembled his beloved. On June the twentieth, eleven days later (Barberino being busy among his vats), Cecco Angiolieri obtained from Becchina the favor of a kiss on the mouth— and wrote a burning sonnet. Hatred sat undiminished in his heart, for now he wanted money with his love and he could not get it from the money-lenders. Hoping to wheedle some from his father, he departed for Sienna. Old Angiolieri refused him even so much as a glass of sour wine, leaving him perched on the road in front of the house.
While in his father’s rooms Cecco had seen a sack full of new-struck florins, revenue from their estates in Montegiovi and Arcidosso. Here was he, perishing of thirst and hunger, his clothes in tatters, his shirt dripping! Back he tramped to Florence, arriving so completely worn and disreputable that Barberino put him out of his shop for his raggedness.
So Cecco returned that night to the hut of the cobbler whom he found sitting in the candlelight singing a docile song to the Virgin Mary.
They wept and embraced and Cecco told the cobbler how desperately he hated his father—that old man who threatened to live as long as Botadeo the Wandering Jew. A friar who came for alms persuaded Cecco to await his deliverance in the monastic state, so young Angiolieri followed the pious man to the abbey where they gave him a cell and an/old robe, and the prior named him Fra Henri. In the choir at evensong he would touch the bare stones under him, as cold and grim as himself. Rage choked him when he thought of his father’s wealth. It seemed to him as if the sea would surely go dry before that old man died. There were moments when he even envied the kitchen scullions.
At other times he indulged his pride grandly. “If I were fire,” he thought, “I would burn up the world. Were I the wind I’d smother it with hurricanes. If I were water I’d drown it in a deluge; were I God I’d hurl it into space. If I were the Pope there would he no more peace under the sun; were I the Emperor I’d cut off heads all around. If I were Death I’d find my father, and were I Cecco. . . .No, there is all my wish!” But he was only Fra Henri. Then he remembered his other hate. Procuring a copy of Dante’s songs to Beatrice he compared them diligently to his own verses written for Becchina. When a wandering monk told him how Dante had spoken of him disdainfully he set about searching for some revenge. To him the superiority of his sonnets appeared most evident. The songs to Bice (he gave her that vulgar name) were abstract and white while his songs were strong and colorful. First he sent his insulting verses to Dante, then imagined himself denouncing that poet before the good King Charles, Count of Provence. Finally, when neither letters nor poems consoled him, he threw off his holy garb, put on his old shirt, his worn jacket and weatherbeaten cape and left the monastery, returning to Florence and the Black cause.
A great joy awaited him there. Dante was exiled and only a few of the great poet’s followers were left. Cecco found the cobbler whispering humbly to the Virgin of the next Black triumph and young Angiolieri forgot Becchina in his gratification. Eating dry crusts, he walked the streets all day or ran behind the Church messengers on their way to or from Rome. When the violent Black chief, Corso Donati, became a power in Florence he employed Cecco among others. On the night of June the tenth a mob of cooks, blacksmiths, friars and beggars invaded the aristocratic section of the city where the fine palaces of the Whites were. While the cobbler followed at a distance, admiring the holy sight, Cecco brandished a torch. They burned all. Cecco himself set fire to the wooden balconies on the palace of the Cavalcanti, who had been Dante’s friends. That night he fed his hate with fire and the next day sent his insulting verses to Dante “the Lombard” at the court of Verona where he had taken refuge. During the same day he became at last the Cecco of his heart’s desire. Old as Eli or Enoch, his father finally died.
Speeding to Sienna Cecco threw open the coffers, plunging his hands deep into bags of new-struck florins, repeating a hundred times over now he was no more Fra Henri but Lord of Arcidosso and Montegiovi, richer than Dante and a better poet. Then the sin of having desired his father’s death beset him so he repented. There in the fields he scribbled a sonnet demanding a Pope’s crusade against all who should henceforth insult their parents so. Eager for confession, he returned in haste to Florence and besought the cobbler to intercede in his behalf with the Virgin.
From a dealer in holy waxes he bought a tall taper which the cobbler lighted unctuously. Together they wept over their prayers to Their Lady. Until a very late hour the voice of the cobbler was heard singing songs of praise and rejoicing in his fine candle, as he wiped away his friend’s tears.
Imaginary Lives
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