The Ones Who Stayed, and Duccio di Bencivenni

The bodies at the far mouth of the pass, and the only one still speaking.

The body the game gives to the damned, turning on itself: sixteen views rendered from the game itself. — Not a portrait of this one. The game gives almost every damned soul the same body, and this is it: what tells them apart is where they stand and what they do.

Uno dei rimasti, e l’unico che parli ancora. Dice di chiamarsi Duccio di Bencivenni, mercante: nel passo c’è entrato con la borsa e ne è uscito senza, e più in là di qui non è arrivato. Nel poema non c’è. Il verso 27 dice solo che di qui non è mai uscito nessuno vivo, e il gioco riempie quello che il verso lascia intendere. Il suo cerchio è il quarto, degli avari: «tutto l’oro ch’è sotto la luna» (Inf. VII, 64). La scarsella che la lupa tiene sotto il muso, là sopra, è la sua.

What the game says

lo passoche non lasciò già mai persona viva

Inf. I 26-27

Revealswho speaks at the far mouth of the pass, and what taking his name costs.

From the line «lo passo che non lasciò già mai persona viva» (Inf. I 26-27) the game takes three things and invents none: the bodies lie where they stopped running, they are all turned towards the way out, and the nearest is two and a half metres from the mouth. There are five and not twenty, because a big heap reads as scenery and five can be counted by eye.

One of them still speaks, and he is not in the poem: Duccio di Bencivenni, a merchant, who went into the pass with his purse and came out without it. He is not a free addition, he is the knot that holds the chapter together, because the purse the she wolf keeps under her muzzle is his. His circle would be the fourth, the hoarders’: that is not a sentence invented for him, it is what the poem does to a man who dies for a bag of money.

He is the first name in the book, and this is where the currency of the game shows its price at once. The three answers are three different coins: promise to carry him out and you get goods and take on the promise, lie and say you are staying and you get the rule of the place for free, walk past saying nothing and you get nothing and pay nothing. There is no right answer, which is what makes it a choice. The note the game prints adds one more thing: the purse under the she wolf’s muzzle, back up the slope, is his.

The numbers

What	How much	When
How many bodies	5
The nearest to the mouth	2.5 m	that distance is the line itself

The Ones Who Stayed, and Duccio di Bencivenni

The numbers

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