The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  No one in England had been surprised that he continued to collect paintings or went after antiquities once he arrived in Naples. But his interest in the volcano displayed a new side of his nature. Being volcano-mad was madder than being picture-mad. Perhaps the sun had gone to his head, or the fabled laxity of the south. Then the passion was quickly rationalized as a scientific interest, and also an aesthetic one, for the eruption of a volcano could be called, stretching the term, beautiful. There was nothing odd in his evenings with guests invited to view the spectacle from the terrace of his country villa near the mountain, like the moon-viewing parties of courtiers in Heian Japan. What was odd was that he wanted to be even closer.

  The Cavaliere had discovered in himself a taste for the mildly plutonian. He started by riding with one groom out to the sulphurous ground west of the city, and bathing naked in the lake in the cone of a submerged extinct volcano. Walking onto his terrace those first months to see in the distance the well-behaved mountain sitting under the sun might provoke a reverie about the calm that follows catastrophe. Its plume of white smoke, the occasional rumblings and jets of steam seemed that perennial, unthreatening. Eighteen thousand villagers in Torre del Greco had died in 1631, an eruption even more lethal than the one in which Herculaneum and Pompeii were entombed and the scholarly admiral of the Roman fleet, the Elder Pliny, famously lost his life, but since then, nothing that could merit the name of disaster.

  The mountain had to wake up and start spitting to get the full attention of this much-occupied, much-diverted man. And did so, the year after he arrived. The vapors that drifted up from the summit thickened and grew. Then black smoke mixed with the steam clouds and at night the cone’s halo was tinted red. Hitherto absorbed by the hunt for vases and what minor finds from the excavations he could illicitly lay his hands on, he began to climb the mountain and take notes. On his fourth climb, reaching the upper slope, he passed a six-foot hillock of sulphur that hadn’t been there the week before. On his next climb up the snow-covered mountain—it was November—the top of the hillock was emitting a blue flame. He drew closer, stood on tiptoe, then a noise like artillery fire above him—behind?—gripped his heart and he leapt backward. Some forty yards higher, at the opening of the crater, a column of black smoke had shot up, followed by an arc of stones, one of which sank near him. Yes.

  He was seeing something he had always imagined, always wanted to know.

  When an actual eruption began in March of the following year, when a cloud in the shape of a colossal umbrella pine—exactly as described in the letter of Pliny’s nephew to Tacitus—poured upward from the mountain, he was at home practicing the cello. Watching from the roof that night, he saw the smoke go flame-red. A few days later there was a thunderous explosion and a gush of red-hot rocks, and that evening at seven o’clock lava began to boil over the top, coursing toward Portici. Taking with him only valet, groom, and local guide, he left the city on horseback and remained all night on the flank of the mountain. Hissing liquid metal on which fiery cinders floated like boats cascaded past him a mere twenty yards away. He experienced himself as fearless, always an agreeable illusion. Dawn rose and he started down. A mile below he caught up with the front of the lava stream, which had pooled in a deep hollow and been stopped.

  From then on, the mountain was never free of its smoking wreath, the occasional toss of blazing scoriae, the spurt of fire, the dribble of lava. And now he knew what to do whenever he climbed the mountain. He gathered specimens of cooling lava in a leather pouch lined with lead, he bottled samples of the salts and sulphurs (deep yellow, red, orange) that he fetched from scorchingly hot crevices in the crater top. With the Cavaliere any passion sought the form of, was justified by becoming, a collection. (Soon other people were taking away pieces of the newly interesting volcano, on their one climb up; but accumulating souvenirs is not collecting.) This was pure collecting, shorn of the prospect of profit. Nothing to buy or sell here. Of the volcano he could only make a gift, to his glory and the glory of the volcano.

  Fire again appeared at the top: a much more violent display of the mountain’s energies was preparing. It grumbled, rattled, and hissed; its emissions of stones more than once obliged even this hardiest of observers to quit the summit. When a great eruption took place the following year, the first full-scale eruption since 1631, he had more booty, a collection of volcanic rocks large and varied enough to be worth presenting to the British Museum, which he shipped back at his own expense. Collecting the volcano was his disinterested passion.

  Naples had been added to the Grand Tour, and everybody who came hoped to marvel at the dead cities under the guidance of the learned British envoy. Now that the mountain had shown itself capable of being dangerous again, they wanted to have the great, terrifying experience. It had become another attraction and creator of employment for the ever needy: guides, litter bearers, porters, furnishers of victuals, grooms, and lantern carriers if the ascent was made at night—the best time to see the worst. Anything but impregnable by the standards of real mountains like the Alps, or even of Mount Etna, almost three times as high, Vesuvius offered at most an exertion, sport only for amateurs. The exterminator could be mounted by anyone. For the Cavaliere the volcano was a familiar. He did not find the ascent very strenuous nor the dangers too frightening, whereas most people, underestimating the effort, were appalled by its arduousness, frightened by its vision of injury. Upon their return he would hear the stories of the great risks they had run, of the girandoles of fire, the hail (or shower) of stones, the accompanying racket (cannon, thunder), the infernal, mephitic, sulphurous stench. The very mouth of hell, that’s what it is! So people believe it to be here, he would say. Oh, I don’t mean literally, the visitor (if English, therefore usually Protestant) would reply.

  Yet even as he wished for the volcano not to be profaned by the wheezing, the overweight, and the self-congratulatory, he longed—like any collector—to exhibit it. And was obliged to do so, if the visitor was a friend or relation from England or a foreign dignitary, as long as Vesuvius continued to flaunt its expressiveness. It was expected that he would chaperone an ascent. His eccentric friend from school days at Westminster, Frederick Hervey, about to be made a bishop, came for a long month; he took him up on an Easter Sunday, and Hervey’s arm was seared by a morsel of volcanic effluvia; the Cavaliere supposed that he would be boasting about it for the rest of his life.

  Hard to imagine that one could feel proprietary about this legendary menace, double-humped, some five thousand feet tall and eight miles from the city, exposed to the view of everyone, indeed the signature feature of the local landscape. No object could be less ownable. Few natural wonders were more famous. Foreign painters were flocking to Naples: the volcano had many admirers. He set about, by the quality of his attentions, to make it his. He thought about it more than anyone else. My dear mountain. A mountain for a beloved? A monster? With the vases or the paintings or the coins or the statues, he could count on certain conventional recognitions. This passion was about what always surprised, alarmed; what exceeded all expectations; and what never evoked the response that the Cavaliere wanted. But then, to the obsessed collector, the appreciations of other people always seem off-key, withholding, never appreciative enough.

  * * *

  Collections unite. Collections isolate.

  They unite those who love the same thing. (But no one loves the same as I do; enough.) They isolate from those who don’t share the passion. (Alas, almost everyone.)

  Then I’ll try not to talk about what interests me most. I’ll talk about what interests you.

  But this will remind me, often, of what I can’t share with you.

  Oh, listen. Don’t you see. Don’t you see how beautiful it is.

  * * *

  It is not clear whether he was a natural teacher, an explainer (nobody did the tour of Pompeii and Herculaneum better), or learned to be one because so many people he was close to were younger than he and few were as cultivate
d. Indeed, it was the Cavaliere’s destiny to have all the important relations of his life, counting or not counting Catherine, with people much younger than himself. (Catherine was the only predictably younger person, by eight years: a wife is expected to be her husband’s junior.) The royal playmate of his childhood had been seven and a half years his junior; the King of Naples was younger by twenty-one years. Younger people were drawn to the Cavaliere. He always seemed so interested in them, in furthering their talents, whatever these might be; so self-sufficient. Avuncular rather than paternal—he had never wanted to have children—he could be concerned, even responsible, without expecting too much.

  Charles, his sister Elizabeth’s son, was twenty when he arrived for the southernmost stop on his Grand Tour. The pale self-assured little boy whom the Cavaliere had glimpsed a few times had become a highly intelligent, rather disablingly fastidious young man, with a modest, prudent trove of pictures and objects of virtu and an extravagant collection of precious stones and minerals. He wanted to impress his uncle and he did. The Cavaliere recognized the abstracted, wandering, tensely amiable look of the collector—mineralogy was to be the ruling passion of Charles’s life—and took an immediate liking to him. Dutiful in the pursuit of entertainment, Charles procured the sexual services of a local courtesan named Madame Tschudi (distantly related to the harpsichord-making family), sat through a few evenings at the opera in his uncle’s box, bought ices and watermelon from the vendors on the Toledo, and avowed that he found Naples neither charming nor picturesque but squalid, boring, and dirty. He listened devoutly to his aunt at the harpsichord (Kuhnau, Royer, Couperin). He inspected with envy his uncle’s hoard of paintings, statues, and vases; but rough lumps of tufa with pieces of lava or marine shells embedded in them, the fragments of a volcanic bomb, or the bright yellow and orange salts he was shown only made him think with passion of his crystallized rubies, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds—these could be called beautiful. He washed his hands often. And he resolutely refused to climb the mountain.

  A formidable though benevolent uncle would be too intimidating without some large eccentricity that made one feel a little protective. Declining the Cavaliere’s second invitation to accompany him on a climb, Charles pleaded an intestinal weakness, the lack of a taste for danger. He hoped it would be taken as flattering rather than impertinent if he invoked the obvious classical allusion (many of the Cavaliere’s friends in England made it): Remember, I shouldn’t like to hear that you’ve suffered the fate of the Elder Pliny. And now the Cavaliere, having just acquired a favorite nephew, could return the compliment: Then you shall be the Younger Pliny and report my death to the world.

  * * *

  Then as now an ascent had several stages. The road, in our own century turned into a motorway, did not exist then. But there was already a trail on which one came about two-thirds of the way, as far as the natural trough between the central cone and Mount Somma. This valley, now carpeted with black lava from the 1944 eruption, had trees, bramble, and high grasses. There the horses were left to graze while the volcano pilgrims continued up to the crater on foot.

  Having left his horse with a groom, grasping his walking stick, pouch slung over one shoulder, the Cavaliere marched firmly up the slope. The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as in a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants. And that is happening this morning, early morning on this occasion, except for the cold, except for the pain in his ears, from which his broad hat doesn’t protect him. For the work of mindlessness there should not be any pain. He passed through the trees (a century earlier the slopes had been thick with forests and teeming with game), and beyond the tree line, where the wind cut more sharply. The trail darkened, steepened, past tracks of black lava and rises of volcanic boulders. It began to feel like climbing now, his stride slowed, the stretch of muscles became pleasantly perceptible. He didn’t have to stop to catch his breath but he did halt several times to scan the reddish-brown ground, looking for the spiky rocks with seams of color.

  The ground turned grey, loose, quaggy—hindering, by yielding to, every step. The wind pushed against his head. Nearing the top, his ears hurt so much he stuffed them with wax.

  Reaching the boulder-rimmed summit, he paused and rubbed his soft, icy ears. He gazed out and down at the iridescent blue skin of the bay. Then he turned. He never approached the crater without apprehension—partly the fear of danger, partly the fear of disappointment. If the mountain spat fire, hurled itself into the air, turned to flame and a moving wall of ash, that was an invitation to look. The mountain was exhibiting itself. But when the mountain was relatively quiet as it has been for several months, when it invited a closer look, he was looking for something new as well as checking to see that everything is the same. The prying look wishes to be rewarded. Even in the most pacified souls the volcano inspires a lust to see destructiveness.

  He scrambled to the top of the cone and looked down. The vast hole, hundreds of feet deep, was still abrim with early-morning fog. He took the hammer from his pouch and looked about for a layer of color in the edge of the chasm. The fog was lifting as the sun warmed the air. With each gust of clarifying wind the view dropped farther and farther, without disclosing any fire. Dirty white jets of steam drifted upward from fissures in the lengthening crater walls. The burning innermost core lay hidden below the crust of slag. Not a glimmer. Pure massiveness—grey, inert. The Cavaliere sighed, and put his hammer back in the pouch. Inorganic matter makes a very melancholy impression on us.

  Maybe it is not the destructiveness of the volcano that pleases most, though everyone loves a conflagration, but its defiance of the law of gravity to which every inorganic mass is subject. What pleases first at the sight of the plant world is its vertical upward direction. That is why we love trees. Perhaps we attend to a volcano for its elevation, like ballet. How high the molten rocks soar, how far above the mushrooming cloud. The thrill is that the mountain blows itself up, even if it must then like the dancer return to earth; even if it does not simply descend—it falls, falls on us. But first it goes up, it flies. Whereas everything pulls, drags down. Down.

  3

  Summer. Indeed, by meaningless coincidence, August 24th—an anniversary of the great eruption of A.D. 79. The weather: clammily close, infested with flies. The stench of sulphur in the air. High windows opening out to the entire bay. Birds singing in the palace garden. A delicate column of smoke balancing on the mountain’s tip.

  The King is on the toilet. Breeches at his ankles, frowning as he strains, his fundament spluttering. Although only twenty-four, he is fat, fat. His belly, striated like his wife’s (who has already gone through six of her eventual tally of seventeen pregnancies), rocks from side to side on the immense porcelain chaise percée. He had pawed his way through a copious meal, pork and macaroni and wild boar and zucchini flowers and sherbet, that had begun over two hours earlier. He had spewed wine at a favorite valet and tossed pellets of bread at his withered, disputatious prime minister. The Cavaliere, a spare eater even without these off-putting sights, had already been feeling stomach-heavy. And then the King announced that, having enjoyed an excellent meal, he hoped to have an excellent purge of his bowels, and wished to be escorted by ore of the distinguished guests at his table, his friend and excellent companion of the hunt, the British minister plenipotentiary.

  Oh, oh, my gut! (Groans, farts, sighs.)

  The Cavaliere, in steadily dampening full court dress with his star and red riband, is standing against a wall, taking in the fetid air through his thin lips. It could be worse, thinks the Cavaliere, a thought with which he has consoled himself for much of his life. This time what he means is, the King could have had diarrhea.

  I feel it coming!

  The King’s sottish boy’s game of being disgusting, of trying to shock. The English knight’s patrician game of not responding, of appearing not shocked. It would make a better picture, the Cavalie
re thought, if I were not sweating almost as much as he is.

  No, it’s not. I didn’t! I can’t! Oh what shall I do?

  Perhaps His Majesty could better concentrate on the call of nature if left alone.

  I hate being alone!

  The Cavaliere, blinking back the drops of sweat that had passed the escarpment of his eyebrows, wondered if this were not one of the King’s nasty practical jokes.

  Maybe it wasn’t a good meal, said the King. I was sure it was a good meal. How could it not be a good meal if it was so tasty?

  The Cavaliere said it was very tasty.

  The King said, Tell me a story.

  A story, said the Cavaliere.

  (A courtier: someone who repeats back to you the last word or words that you’ve said.)

  Yes, tell me about a chocolate mountain. A huge mountain all chocolate. That’ what I’d like to climb.

  Once upon a tine there was a mountain dark as night.