by Susan Sontag
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Three
6 April 1803
Part Four
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
By Susan Sontag
Copyright
FOR DAVID
beloved son, comrade
My Cavaliere is Sir William Hamilton’s double, a fictional character on whose behalf I have taken what liberties suited his nature, as I have with other historical persons given their proper names. I wish to acknowledge the stimulation given by and information gleaned from the many modern historical studies and biographies as well as from memoirs and letters of the period.
I am grateful to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), which brought me to Berlin in 1989, when I began The Volcano Lover, and again in 1990; to Robert Walsh and Peter Perrone; and, most of all, to Karla Eoff.
DORABELLA (aside): Nel petto un Vesuvio d’avere mi par.
Così fan tutte, Act II
PROLOGUE
It is the entrance to a flea market. No charge. Admittance free. Sloppy crowds. Vulpine, larking. Why enter? What do you expect to see? I’m seeing. I’m checking on what’s in the world. What’s left. What’s discarded. What’s no longer cherished. What had to be sacrificed. What someone thought might interest someone else. But it’s rubbish. If there, here, it’s already been sifted through. But there may be something valuable, there. Not valuable, exactly. But something I would want. Want to rescue. Something that speaks to me. To my longings. Speaks to, speaks of. Ah …
Why enter? Have you that much spare time? You’ll look. You’ll stray. You’ll lose track of the time. You think you have enough time. It always takes more time than you think. Then you’ll be late. You’ll be annoyed with yourself. You’ll want to stay. You’ll be tempted. You’ll be repelled. The things are grimy. Some are broken. Badly patched or not at all. They will tell me of passions, fancies I don’t need to know about. Need. Ah, no. None of this do I need. Some I will caress with my eye. Some I must pick up, fondle. While being watched, expertly, by their seller. I am not a thief. Most likely, I am not a buyer.
Why enter? Only to play. A game of recognitions. To know what, and to know how much it was, how much it ought to be, how much it will be. But perhaps not to bid, haggle, not to acquire. Just to look. Just to wander. I’m feeling lighthearted. I don’t have anything in mind.
Why enter? There are many places like this one. A field, a square, a hooded street, an armory, a parking lot, a pier. This could be anywhere, though it happens to be here. It will be full of everywhere. But I would be entering it here. In my jeans and silk blouse and tennis shoes: Manhattan, spring of 1992. A degraded experience of pure possibility. This one with his postcards of movie stars, that one with her tray of Navajo rings, this one with the rack of World War II bomber jackets, that one with the knives. His model cars, her cut-glass dishes, his rattan chairs, her top hats, his Roman coins, and there … a gem, a treasure. It could happen, I could see it, I might want it. I might buy it as a gift, yes, for someone else. At the least, I would have learned that it existed, and turned up here.
Why enter? Is there already enough? I could find out it’s not here. Whatever it is, often I am not sure, I could put it back down on the table. Desire leads me. I tell myself what I want to hear. Yes, there’s enough.
I go in.
* * *
It is the end of a picture auction. London, autumn of 1772. The picture in its bulging gold-leaf frame stands against the wall near the front of the huge room, a Venus Disarming Cupid thought to be by Correggio on which its owner had placed such high hopes—unsold. Thought wrongly to be by Correggio. The room gradually clears. A tall, sharp-faced man of forty-two (he was a tall man for that time) comes forward slowly, followed at a respectful distance by a man half his age bearing a marked family resemblance. Both are thin, with pale skin and cold patrician expressions.
My Venus, says the older man. I was confident it would sell. There was much interest.
But, alas, observed the younger man.
Hard to understand, mused the older man, when the distinction of the picture seems self-evident. He is genuinely puzzled. The younger man was listening with a becoming frown.
Because it grieved me to part with her, I suppose I should also be glad it failed to sell, continued the older man. But necessity obliged, and I don’t consider the price I asked too high.
He gazed fixedly at his Venus. Most difficult, the older man went on, now referring not to the difficulty of understanding why the picture had not sold (nor to the hardship of keeping creditors at bay) but to the decision to sell; for I doted on this picture, he said. Then I knew I should sell it and so made myself apt to relinquish it; and now, since no one offered what I know it to be worth and it remains mine, should love it as before, but won’t, I wager. Having stopped loving it in order to sell it, I can’t enjoy it in the same way, but if I am unable to sell it I do want to love it again. It would be churlish of me to find its beauties spoiled by this misadventure.
What to do? How much to love it? he mused. How to love it now.
I should think, sir, said the younger man, that the only question is where to store it. Surely a buyer will be found. Have I your permission to try on your behalf among collectors of my acquaintance perhaps not known to you? I would be happy to make these discreet inquiries after your departure.
Yes, it’s time to go, said the older man.
They went out.
* * *
It’s the mouth of a volcano. Yes, mouth; and lava tongue. A body, a monstrous living body, both male and female. It emits, ejects. It is also an interior, an abyss. Something alive, that can die. Something inert that becomes agitated, now and then. Existing only intermittently. A constant menace. If predictable, usually not predicted. Capricious, untameable, malodorous. Is that what’s meant by the primitive? Nevado del Ruiz, Mount Saint Helens, La Soufrière, Mount Pelée, Krakatoa, Tambora. The slumbering giant that wakes. The lumbering giant who turns his attentions to you. King Kong. Vomiting destruction, and then sinking back into somnolence.
Me? But I’ve done nothing. I just happened to be there, mired in my rustic routines. Where else should I live, I was born here, wails the dark-skinned villager. Everyone has to live somewhere.
Of course we can regard it as a grand pyrotechnical show. It’s all a question of means. A long enough view. There are charms made only for distant admiration, says Dr. Johnson; no spectacle is nobler than a blaze. At a safe distance, it is the ultimate spectacle, instructive as well as thrilling. After a collation at Sir ***’s villa we go onto the terrace, fitted out with telescopes, to watch. The plume of white smoke, the rumbling often compared to a distant roll of timpani: overture. Then the colossal show begins, the plume reddens, bloats, soars, a tree of ash that climbs h
igher, higher, until it flattens out under the weight of the stratosphere (if we are lucky we’ll see ski runs of orange and red start down the slope)—hours, days of this. Then, calando, it subsides. But up close, fear churns the guts. This noise, this gagging noise, it’s something you could never imagine, cannot take in. A steady pour of grainy, titanically thunderous sound that seems always to be mounting in volume yet cannot possibly be any louder than it already is; a sky-wide ear-inundating vomitous roar that flushes the marrow out of your bones and topples your soul. Even those who designate themselves as spectators cannot escape an onrush of revulsion and terror, as you’ve never known them before. In a village at the foot of the mountain—we might venture there—what appeared from afar as a torrential flow is a creeping field of viscous black and red ooze, nudging walls that for a moment still stand, then devolve with a shuddering sucking plop into its heaving front; pushing into, inhaling, devouring, unfastening the atoms of houses, cars, wagons, trees, one by one. So this is the inexorable.
Watch out. Cover your mouth with a cloth. Duck! A nighttime ascent of a moderately, punctually active volcano is one of the great excursions. After the trudge up the side of the cone, we stand on the crater’s lip (yes, lip) and peer down, waiting for the burning innermost core to disport itself. As it does, every twelve minutes. Not too close! It’s starting. We hear a basso-profundo gurgling, the crust of grey slag begins to glow. The giant is about to exhale. And the suffocating sulphur stench is unbearable, almost. Lava pools but does not overflow. Fiery rocks and cinders soar, not very high. The danger, when not too dangerous, fascinates.
Naples, March 19, 1944, afternoon, four o’clock. In the villa the hands of the big English pendulum clock stop at another fatal hour. Again? It had been quiet for so long.
Like passion, whose emblem it is, it can die. It’s now known, more or less, when a remission should start counting as a cure, but experts hesitate to pronounce a long-inactive volcano dead. Haleakala, which last erupted in 1790, is still officially classified as dormant. Serene because somnolent? Or because dead? As good as dead—unless it’s not. The river of fire, after consuming all in its path, will become a river of black stone. Trees will never again grow here, ever. The mountain becomes the graveyard of its own violence: the ruin the volcano causes includes its own. Each time Vesuvius erupts, a chunk of the summit is lopped off. It becomes less shapely, smaller, bleaker.
Pompeii was buried under a rain of ash, Herculaneum under a mud slide that raced downslope at thirty miles an hour. But lava eats a street slowly enough, a few yards an hour, for everyone to get out of its way. We also have time to save our things, some of them. The altar with the holy images? The uneaten piece of chicken? The children’s toys? My new tunic? Whatever is handmade? The computer? The pots? The manuscript? The cow? All we need to begin again is our lives.
I don’t believe we’re in danger. It’s going that way. Look.
Are you going? I’m staying. Unless it reaches … there.
It has happened. It is over.
They fled. They mourned. Until grief had turned stony, too, and they came back. Awed by the completeness of the erasure, they gazed upon the fattened ground below which their world lay entombed. The ash under their feet, still warm, no longer seared their shoes. It cooled further. Hesitations vaporized. Not long after A.D. 79—when their fragrant mountain, matted with vines, crowned by the forests where Spartacus and thousands of slaves who joined him had sought to hide from the pursuing legions, first revealed itself to be a volcano—most of those who had survived set about rebuilding, reliving; there. Their mountain now had an ugly hole at the top. The forests had been incinerated. But they, too, would grow again.
One view of catastrophe. This had happened. Who would have expected such a thing. Never, never. No one. It is the worst. And if the worst, then unique. Which means unrepeatable. Let’s put it behind us. Let’s not be doomsayers.
The other view. Unique for now: what happens once can happen again. You’ll see. Just wait. To be sure, you may have to wait a long time.
We come back. We come back.
1
His first leave home was over. The man to be known in polite Naples from now on as II Cavaliere, the Chevalier, was starting the long journey back to his post, to “the kingdom of cinders.” So one of his friends in London called it.
When he had arrived, he was thought to look much older. He was still as lean: a body swollen by macaroni and lemon pastries would have ill suited such a narrow clever face, with the aquiline nose and bushy eyebrows. But he had lost his caste’s pallor. The darkening of his white skin since he’d left seven years ago was remarked with something approaching disapproval. Only the poor—that is, most people—were sunburned. Not the grandson of a duke, youngest son of a lord, the childhood companion of the king himself.
Nine months in England had restored his bony face to a pleasing wheyness, bleached the sun creases in his slender music-mastering hands.
The capacious trunks, the new Adam chimney-piece, the three cases of furniture, ten chests of books, eight cases of dishes, medicines, household provisions, two kegs of dark beer, the cello, and Catherine’s Shudi harpsichord, refurbished, had left a fortnight ago on a storeship that would reach Naples within two months, while he would board a hired barque that would deposit him and his at Boulogne for an overland journey almost as long—with stops for visits and picture-viewing in Paris, Ferney, Vienna, Venice, Florence, and Rome.
Leaning on his walking stick in the courtyard of the hotel in King Street where his uncle and aunt had lodged these last busy weeks in London, the Cavaliere’s nephew, Charles, contributed his sulky presence to the final readying of the two traveling coaches. Everyone is relieved when demanding older relatives who live abroad conclude their visit. But no one likes to be left.
Catherine has already settled with her maid in the large post chaise, fortifying herself for the strenuous journey with a potion of laudanum and chalybeate water. The broader, lower-hung coach behind had been laden with most of the luggage. The Cavaliere’s footmen, reluctant to rumple their maroon traveling livery, hung back and fussed with their own compact belongings. It was left to the hotel porters and a lackey in Charles’s employ to clamber over the coach, making sure that the dozen or so small trunks, boxes, portmanteaux, the chest of linen and bedding, the ebony escritoire, and finally the cloth satchels with the servants’ gear were properly secured with ropes and iron chains to the top and rear. Only the long flat crate containing three paintings that the Cavaliere had bought just last week was strapped to the roof of the first carriage, to ensure the smoothest ride to the barque at Dover. One of the servants was checking on it from below with token thoroughness. The carriage with the Cavaliere’s asthmatic wife was not to be jostled.
Meanwhile, another large leather case, almost forgotten, was brought at a run from the hotel and wedged into the load to be borne by the coach, which rocked and sagged a little more. The Cavaliere’s favorite relative thought of the storeship, bearing far more cases of his uncle’s possessions in its hold, which might already be as far as Cádiz.
Even for that time, when the higher the social station the greater the number and weight of things thought indispensable to the traveler, the Cavaliere traveled in exceptional bulk. But less, to the sum of forty-seven large chests, than when he had arrived. One of the purposes of the Cavaliere’s trip, other than to see friends and relations and his beloved nephew, please his homesick wife, renew useful contacts at court, make sure the secretaries of state better appreciated the deftness with which he was representing British interests at that quite different court, attend meetings of the Royal Society and oversee the publication in book form of seven of his letters on volcanic matters, was to bring back most of the treasures he had collected—including seven hundred antique (miscalled Etruscan) vases—and sell them.
He had done the family rounds and had the pleasure of spending a great deal of time with Charles, much of it at Catherine’s estate
in Wales, which Charles now managed for him. He had impressed more than one minister, or so he thought. He had been received twice by, and once dined alone with, the king, who still called him “foster brother,” and who in January had made him a Knight of the Bath, which this fourth son dared regard as but the first step up a ladder of titles to be won through his own accomplishments. Other Fellows of the Royal Society had congratulated him on his daring feats of close-up observation of the monster in full eruption. He had attended a few picture sales and purchased, judiciously. And the British Museum had bought his Etruscan vases, the whole lot, as well as several minor pictures, the gold necklaces and earrings from Herculaneum and Pompeii, some bronze javelins and helmets, amber and ivory dice, small statues and amulets, for the gratifying sum of eight thousand four hundred pounds (a little more than a year’s income from the estate to which Catherine was heiress), although the painting on which he had placed his greatest hopes remained unsold. He was leaving the wanton naked Venus triumphantly holding Cupid’s bow over her head, for which he had asked three thousand pounds, in Wales, with Charles.
He was going back lighter as well as whiter.
Furtively passing a bottle among them, the Cavaliere’s footmen and cook chatted with the porters in a corner of the courtyard. The aureoled September sun was brightening. A northeast wind had carried a smoke cloud and the smell of coal into Whitehall, overriding the usual rank effluvia of early morning. The clatter of other carriages, carts, barrows, departing diligences could be heard from the street. One of the ponies of the first carriage moved restlessly, and the coachman pulled on the reins of the shaft horse and cracked his whip. Charles looked around for Valerio, his uncle’s valet, to restore order among the servants. Frowning, he took out his watch.
A few minutes later the Cavaliere emerged from the hotel, in his train the obsequious proprietor and his wife as well as Valerio, who was carrying the Cavaliere’s favorite violin in an ornate leather case. The servants fell silent. Charles stood waiting for a signal, his long face acquiring a more alert expression, which sharpened the resemblance between them. The deferential silence continued as the Cavaliere paused, looking up at the pale sky, sniffing the malodorous air, distractedly plucking a speck from his sleeve. Then he turned, offering a thin-lipped smile to his nephew, who moved quickly to his side, and the two men walked arm in arm toward the carriage.