The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  With a squawk, the glossy black Indian monkey scrambled through the falling boards and leapt onto the Cavaliere’s shoulder. The servants shrank back and crossed themselves.

  You see. See how friendly he is.

  The monkey put his paw on the Cavaliere’s wig and uttered a small cry. He patted the wig, then inspected his black palm, tensing and unfurling it. The Cavaliere reached up to pluck him from his shoulder, but the monkey was quicker and jumped to the floor. The Cavaliere called for a rope. He gave orders for the monkey to be housed in the principal storeroom below, tied up, made comfortable. Then he went back to his study. He finished his dispatch to Lord Palmerston, consulted one of the volumes on monkeys he had received from his London bookseller, the chapter on diet, and started a letter to Charles. When Catherine came an hour later to summon him to dinner, the Cavaliere gave orders that the monkey was to be fed as well. A bowl of rice and a bowl of goat’s milk diluted with water and sweetened with sugar, he said authoritatively.

  In the afternoon he descended into the cellar vault to visit his new charge. A space had been cleared under a high corner window, bedding had been laid, and the two bowls were empty. The monkey lunged toward the Cavaliere but was restrained by his chain. I meant a rope, thought the Cavaliere. A rope is enough. The monkey was rattling the chain and emitting a shrill whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo, which he kept up for some ten minutes, hardly pausing to take a breath. Finally, panting, exhausted, he lay down. The Cavaliere approached him and squatted to stroke his head, to brush the long hair on the monkey’s arms, and to run his fingers down the monkey’s belly and legs. The monkey rocked from side to side and made a soft gurgling wrrr, and when the caresses stopped the monkey seized the Cavaliere’s thumb and pulled it to his belly. The Cavaliere unfastened the chain, stood up, and waited for what the monkey would do. He looked at the Cavaliere, looked around at the huge room, the forest of objects. The Cavaliere braced himself for a running leap at his own person. The monkey seemed to nod sagely at his new master, and then hopped on top of a large antique bust of Cicero (actually a seventeenth-century copy, as the Cavaliere knew) and began licking his marble curls. The Cavaliere laughed.

  * * *

  The Cavaliere in his study, finishing another letter to Charles. The monkey curled around the feet of a statue of Minerva, dozing or pretending to doze. Dressed in a sleeveless magenta jacket such as the natives wear, leaving bare his hairy rump and long thick tail—quite at home. The littlest citizen of the Cavaliere’s private kingdom. The Cavaliere has added a brief postscript about the arrival of the monkey: I have become quite inseparable from an East Indian monkey, a charming alert creature less than a year old who provides me with a new source of entertainment and observation.

  Connoisseurs of the natural in the Cavaliere’s era relished pointing out, avowing themselves struck by, the affinities between monkeys and human beings. But monkeys, even more than people, are social animals. One monkey can’t express a monkey’s nature. A single monkey is an exile—and fits of depression sharpen his innate cleverness. A single monkey is good at parodying the human.

  Jack, the Cavaliere is continuing his description to Charles, Jack, so I call him, has an intelligent very black face, set off by a light brown beard. On the subject of intelligence he was more explicit with correspondents whose intelligence he respected. He, Jack, is more intelligent than most of the people it is my lot to consort with here, wrote the Cavaliere in a letter to Walpole. And his movements are more genteel, his manners more fastidious.

  * * *

  The Cavaliere in the room where he takes breakfast. Nearby a table covered with cameos, intaglios, shards of lava and pumice harvested from the crater, a new vase he has just purchased. Jack is with him. In less than a month the monkey had become so tame and manageable that he would come at the Cavaliere’s call, seat himself in a chair by his side at the breakfast table, and help himself daintily to an egg or a piece of fish from the Cavaliere’s plate. His usual mode of taking liquids—he liked coffee, chocolate, tea, lemonade—was to dip his black hairy knuckles in the cup and lick them. But when especially thirsty he would grasp the cup with both hands and drink like his master. Of what the Cavaliere ate, he particularly liked oranges, figs, fish, and anything sweet. In the evening he was sometimes given a glass of Maraschino or the local Vesuvian wine. The Cavaliere, who hardly drank at all, enjoyed watching his guests watching Jack dip and lick, dip and lick. He became tipsy as a child does, this wizened child with a beard, a little rambunctious, and then suddenly, awkwardly, he fell asleep.

  In seashells, buttons, and flowers Jack found a rich hoard of objects to stare at and play with. He was astonishingly dexterous. He would meticulously peel a grape, put it down, look at it, and sigh, before popping it into his mouth. His sport was hunting insects. He probed in crevices of the masonry for spiders, and could catch flies with one hand. He watched the Cavaliere practicing the cello, his big, utterly round eyes fixed on the instrument, and the Cavaliere began seating him up front during the weekly musical assembly. But often when he listened to music—he clearly liked music—he bit his nails; perhaps music made him nervous too. He yawned, he masturbated, he searched for lice in his tail. Sometimes he just paced, or sat staring at the Cavaliere. Perhaps he was bored. The Cavaliere was never bored.

  The monkey had a most extraordinarily sweet, trusting disposition. He would take hold of the Cavaliere’s hand and walk with him, helping himself along at the same time with his other hand applied to the ground. The Cavaliere had to stoop slightly to accommodate the monkey’s need. He did not like changing his posture, and he did not want a substitute child. He began adding a tiny bit of teasing to his treatment of the monkey, a little bit of cruelty, a touch of deprivation. Salt in his milk. A cuff on the head. Whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo, lamented the monkey, when the Cavaliere visited him in the early morning. Jack seized his hand. The Cavaliere pulled it away.

  One morning, when the Cavaliere went to the cellar storeroom, the monkey’s pallet was empty. He had chewed through his rope. He was hiding. The testy Cavaliere barricaded himself in his study. The servants, cursing, searched every room in the mansion. On the third evening they found him in the wine cellar with a leather-bound folio of Piranesi’s work on chimney-pieces gnawed beyond salvaging. Alessandro stepped forward to put the rope on him; the monkey snarled and bit his hand. The Cavaliere was summoned. Jack cringed but let the Cavaliere pick him up. The monkey pulled at the Cavaliere’s wig. The Cavaliere held him more firmly. It was as if Jack had gone on a retreat, to reconsider his own nature, and reemerged more monkey-like: sly, quarrelsome, prurient, mischievous. The Cavaliere did not want a mock child. He wanted a mock protégé, a jester … and poor Jack loved him abjectly enough to oblige. Now his training, his real use to the Cavaliere could begin.

  He taught Jack to mime the connoisseur’s hooded stare, putting him through his paces when visitors were poring over the Cavaliere’s objects. They would look up and see the Cavaliere’s pet monkey studying a vase through a magnifying glass, or leafing quizzically through a book, or turning a cameo over in his paw and holding it to the light. Very valuable. Yes. Decidedly. Yes, I see. Most interesting.

  Glass to one eye, Jack would squint, look up, scratch his head, then return to his scrutiny.

  Is this a fake?

  Fake!

  Fake!!

  Then Jack would relent and put the object down. (If a monkey could smile, he might have smiled.) Just looking. You can’t be too careful.

  The Cavaliere’s visitors laugh at the monkey. The Cavaliere laughs at himself.

  He let the monkey torment the servants and even Catherine, who, loath to have too many tastes and inclinations that separated her from her husband, professed to be attached to the monkey, too. Jack always seemed to divine when Catherine was retiring from a room to go to the water closet, and would rush after her and clap his eye to the keyhole. Jack diligently masturbated in front of Catherine, kept grabbing the page Gaetano’s cock when the Cava
liere took him fishing. His scabrous antics amused his master. Even when he once knocked over a vase, the Cavaliere was not really upset (to be sure, it was not one of the most valuable and, when repaired, no one would know the difference). Jack was a little footnote to his life that said: all is vanity, all is vanity.

  * * *

  The world seemed made of concentric circles of mockery. At the center the Cavaliere pivots with Jack. Everything in the social zoo could be predicted. He would not get another diplomatic appointment. He knew how his life would go on to the end: tranquil, interesting, unstirred by passion. Only the volcano held a surprise.

  1766, 1767, 1777 … 1779. Each eruption bigger than the previous one, each further embellishing the prospect of catastrophe. This was bigger than ever. The doors and windows of his country villa near Portici were swinging on their hinges. Jack was jumping about nervously, hiding under tables, flinging himself in the Cavaliere’s lap. Catherine, who disliked the monkey almost as much as the servants did, feigned concern for his little person, his little fears. He was given some laudanum. Catherine returned to the harpsichord. Admirable Catherine, thought the Cavaliere.

  Watching from the terrace, the Cavaliere saw bursts of white vapor rising pile over pile to a height and bulk three times as great as the mountain itself, and gradually filling with streaks of black, exactly as the Younger Pliny had described his eruption: candida interdum, interdum sordida et maculosa (sometimes white, sometimes dirty and blotched) according to the amount of soil the cloud carried with it. A summer storm followed, the weather turned torrid, and a few days later a fountain of red fire ascended from the crater. One could read in bed at night by the gloomy blaze of the mountain a few miles away. In a communication to the Royal Society, the Cavaliere described these black stormy clouds and the bright column of fire with flashes of forked lightning as more beautiful than alarming.

  * * *

  You project onto the volcano the amount of rage, of complicity with destructiveness, of anxiety about your ability to feel already in your head. Sade took away from his five-month sojourn in Naples, near then-quiescent Vesuvius, the fantasies of evildoing that anything capable of violence inspired in him. Many years later in his Juliette, he was to write a volcano scene for this champion evildoer in which she climbs to the summit with two companions, a tiresome man whom she promptly casts into the fiery chasm and a desirable man with whom she then copulates at the brink of the crater.

  Sade worried about satiety; he could not conceive of passion without provocation. The Cavaliere did not worry about running out of feeling. For him the volcano was a stimulus for contemplation. Noisy as Vesuvius could be, it offered something like what he experienced with his collections. Islands of silence.

  * * *

  May 1779. On the slope of Vesuvius, illuminated by the orange glow of molten rock. He stood motionless, his pale grey eyes wide open. The earth trembled under his feet. He could feel the hairs of his eyelashes, his eyebrows move with the uprush of burning air. They could climb no higher.

  The danger was not in the ground but in the lethal, unbearable air. Surefooted, pushed down by the billowing smoke and falling rocks at their backs, they moved diagonally, away from the lava stream, keeping upwind to avoid being overcome by smoke. Suddenly the wind shifted, sending scalding jets of sulphur into their faces. The blinding, asphyxiating smoke swirled around them, cutting off their descent.

  To the left, a chasm. To the right, the lava stream. Transfixed, he looked for Bartolomeo, who had vanished into the smoke. Where is the boy? There, going the wrong way, shouting and beckoning him to follow. This way!

  But blocking the way was the enormous, terrifying spread of grainy orange lava, at least sixty feet wide.

  This way, shouted Bartolomeo, pointing to the other side. The Cavaliere’s clothes were starting to smoulder. The smoke was tearing his lungs, singeing his eyes. And before them lay a river of fire. I will not cry out, he said to himself. So this is death.

  Come! shouted Bartolomeo.

  I can’t, groaned the Cavaliere, his mind receding as the boy sprinted toward the lava. The stifling smoke, the boy’s shouts—he was already deep inside himself. Bartolomeo stepped up lightly on the lava ledge and started across. Christ walking on water could not have amazed his followers more. The boy did not sink into the molten surface. The Cavaliere followed. It was like walking on flesh. As long as one kept moving, the lava’s crust would support one’s weight. In moments they had crossed the gauntlet and on the far side were once again upwind, coughing off the fumes. Inspecting his scorched boots, the Cavaliere glanced over at Bartolomeo, who was rubbing his good eye with a dirty fist. It was almost like being invulnerable. The Cavaliere with his Cyclops, the King of Cups with his Fool—perhaps not invulnerable but safe. With him, safe.

  * * *

  August 1779. Saturday, at six o’clock. The great concussion must have rocked the foundations of the Cavaliere’s villa at the foot of the mountain, if not worse. But he was at home in town, and from the safety of the observatory room watched the mountain flinging showers of red-hot stones into the air. An hour later a column of liquid fire began to rise and quickly reached an amazing height, twice that of the mountain, a fiery pillar ten thousand feet high, mottled with puffs of black smoke, scored by flashing zigzag lines of lightning. The sun went out. Black clouds descended over Naples. Theatres, closed, churches opened, processions formed, people clustered at candlelit street shrines to Saint Januarius on their knees. In the cathedral the cardinal held aloft the vial of the saint’s blood for all to see and began warming it with his hands. This is worth seeing up close, said the Cavaliere—meaning the mountain, not the miracle. He had Bartolomeo sent for, and set out on horseback along the glowing streets, into the country night, down black roads, past fields of blasted leafless trees and carbonized vines, toward the burning mountain.

  Suddenly the eruption ceased and, except for the glowing cinder-heaps on Vesuvius and small lava rills on the upper slopes, all was dark.

  An hour later, as the full moon was rising, the Cavaliere arrived in a village on a lower slope which lay half silted up under black scoriae and dust, shriveled with heat. The moon rose higher. The dark, dented, scaly village turned pale—lunarized.

  After dismounting and turning his horse over to Bartolomeo, the Cavaliere was shown the moonlit lanes clogged with gleaming ashes and dingy rocks. The village had been pelted with stones weighing up to a hundred pounds; few of the houses had burned, but every window he saw was broken and some of the roofs had collapsed. Filthy-headed people holding flaming brands walked with him, eager to tell their stories. Yes, they had stayed in their houses, what choice did they have? Those who stirred out with pillows, tables, chairs, or the lids of wine casks on their heads were driven back, wounded by the stones or stifled with heat and dust and sulphur. He heard the horrors. Then he was taken to gaze at a family that had sought refuge prematurely, the day before, and had mysteriously perished. (“No one told them to go to the cellar, Excellency, or to stay there!”) At the low entrance to the cellar, one of the villagers moved ahead with his brand to illuminate an artless tableau. Mother, father, nine children, several cousins, and a pair of grandparents: all sitting upright against the earth wall and staring straight ahead. Their clothes undisturbed. Their faces not contorted—so they could not have died from asphyxiation. Their appearance perfectly normal except for their hair, lifeless-looking hair thickened with white dust, which, since peasants don’t wear wigs, gave them the appearance of statues.

  It would be interesting to ascertain what killed them, the Cavaliere thought to himself. One sharp concussive strike of the volcano from deep under the earth? The swift suffusion of a lethal volcanic gas? From behind him the boy, his young Bartolomeo, answered his thought firmly. They died of fear, my lord.

  6

  The Knave of Cups arrived in late October. Of course, who else but he. The Cavaliere felt annoyed with himself for not having divined who it would be.

/>   Indeed a relation, a second cousin of the Cavaliere, William Beckford was then twenty years old, stupendously rich, already the author of a slim ironic book of imaginary biographies, a militant collector and connoisseur, willful, self-pitying, greedy for sights, temptations, treasures. A restless, abbreviated version of the Grand Tour (he had left England only two months earlier) had brought him to its southernmost station with record speed, casting him on the shore of the Cavaliere’s hospitality just in time for the hot wind, one of the great winds of southern Europe (mistral, Föhn, sirocco, tramontana) that are used, like the days leading up to menstruation, to explain restlessness, neurasthenia, emotional fragility: a collective PMS that comes on seasonally. The atmosphere was nervous. Whining dogs prowled the filthy steep streets. Women left newborn infants at church doors. Bright-eyed, exhausted, pulsing with dreams of the ever more exotic, William stretched out on a brocaded couch and said, Surely this is not all. Show me more. More. More.

  The Cavaliere recognized in his young relation someone like himself, that rare species who would never, not for one moment in the course of a long life, be bored. He showed him his collections, his booty, his self-bestowed inheritance. (He could hardly forget that this boy was, or would soon be, the richest man in England.) The cabinets full of wonders. The paintings in three or four tiers on the walls, most of them seventeenth-century and Italian. My Etruscan vases, said the Cavaliere. Splendid, said William. A sampling of my collection of volcanic rocks. Objects to dream over, said William. And this is my Leonardo, said the Cavaliere. Really, said William. The youth’s comments were wonderfully acute, appreciative. A genuine liking on both sides was astir. But the Cavaliere did not need a new (grander, more difficult) nephew. It was Catherine who was needy, Catherine who reached out humbly, passionately to acquire a soul mate and shadow son.