ems, and each poem has nine strophes, ranging from a single line to a para-
graph made of phrases and clauses, oddly punctuated by periods rather than
commas and avoiding all initial capitals. The number scheme—9 × 9 × 9—
gives us 729 sections, which, together with the ¤nal poem, Rien, makes 730
or precisely 2 × 365 or two calendar years. Rien (“Nothing”) is dated 1983 and
marks the event of death itself, whereas the ¤rst poem of part 1 is “Medita-
tion of 5/12/85,” evidently written two years later. The course of the painful
two-year passage is noted throughout, thus ful¤lling Roubaud’s axiom that
“A text written according to a constraint describes the constraint.”^22
But there is more. For nine is of course Beatrice’s number in Dante’s Vita
Nuova. The ¤rst chapter opens with the sentences “Nine times the heaven of
the light had revolved in its own movement since my birth and had almost
returned to the same point when the woman whom my mind beholds in
glory ¤rst appeared before my eyes. She was called Beatrice by many who did
not know what it meant to call her this.”^23 The poet ¤rst lays eyes on his
donna ideale at the start of her ninth year and “almost at the end of his
ninth.” He ¤nally meets her exactly nine years later, when he is eighteen, and
she greets him for the ¤rst time on the ninth hour of that day. So it goes
through a series of visions associated with the number nine until we come
to chapter 29 and read:
Now, according to the Arabic way of reckoning time, her most noble
soul departed from us in the ninth hour of the ninth day of the month.... she departed this life in the year of our Christian era, that is of the
year of Our Lord, in which the perfect number had been completed
nine times in the century in which she had been placed in this world;
for she was born a Christian of the thirteenth century. Why this num-
ber was so closely connected with her might be explained as follows.
Since, according to Ptolemy and according to Christian truth, there
are nine moving heavens, and according to common astrological opin-
ion, these heavens affect the earth below according to their conjunc-
tions, this number was associated with her to show at her generation
of nine of the moving heavens were in perfect conjunction one with
the other. This is one reason. But, thinking more deeply and guided
by infallible truth, I say that she herself was this number nine; I mean
this as an analogy, as I will explain. The number three is the root of
nine, because, independent of any other number, multiplied by itself
alone, it makes nine, as we see quite plainly when we say three threes
are nine; therefore if three is the sole factor of nine, and the sole factor
74 Chapter 4