by Susan Sontag
Each felt instantly appreciated by the other. He told her. She told him. They revelled in all the ways they were alike—the handsome, full-hipped young man with curly hair and chewed fingernails, the thin woman of forty-two with her wide, slightly staring eyes. They belong to different generations, have had such different lives. Yet they have so many of the same tastes, the same disappointments. From stories they passed to confidences, each unwrapping a package of grief and yearning. William, being younger and a man, thought it his right to go first.
He spoke of his inner life, filled with (so he tells her now) vague longings. He described his life at home, at Fonthill, moodily pacing in his rooms, reading books that made him weep, full of dissatisfaction with himself and foolish dreams (which he plans never to give up no matter how old he becomes), raging against the stupidity of his mother, his tutors, all those around him.
Have you read a book called The Sorrows of Young Werther? I think every line resplendent with genius.
This was a test that Catherine had to pass.
Yes, she said. I love it, too.
It happened quickly, as it so often happens. There is So-and-so, an acquaintance you meet from time to time at parties or at concerts and never think of. Then one day a door flies open and you tumble into a pit of infinity. Amazed as well as grateful, you ask: Can this deep soul be the person I thought merely … a mere…? Yes.
I want to be alone with you. And I, my dear, with you.
From his study in the villa near Portici, the Cavaliere saw them lingering side by side on the terrace without speaking. From the terrace he saw them strolling slowly in the arbor surrounded by myrtle and vines. From the corridor he saw them at the piano together. Or Catherine played and William lounged on a settee beside a little tripod table and leafed through the Cavaliere’s books. The Cavaliere was glad Catherine should have someone of her own, someone who preferred her to the Cavaliere himself.
They did not simply play together, as Catherine and the Cavaliere did. They improvised together, vying with each other to produce the most expressive sound, the most heart-rending decrescendo.
Catherine confessed that she composed, in secret. She had never played her “little movements” for anyone. William begged her to play them for him. The first was a minuet, with a darting gleeful melody. The others—his appreciation of the minuet gave her courage—had a freer form, a graver cast: slow, questioning, with long plaintive chords.
William avowed that he had always wanted to compose but knew he lacked the creative fire. She told him he was too young to know that.
No—he shook his head—I am good only for dreaming, but—he looked up—this is not flattery. You are a great musician, Catherine. I have never heard anyone feel music as you do.
When I played for Mozart, she said, I trembled as I sat down. His father noticed, I saw him noticing.
I tremble at everything, said William.
Each feels understood (at last!) by the other. William considered that it was the fate of a man like himself to be misunderstood by everyone. Now there was this angelic woman who understood him perfectly. Catherine may have thought, wrongly, that she was escaping male egotism.
He brought her flattering presents. A very cosmopolitan relation. He had found a wise, cultivated, stylish, encouraging older woman: every young man needs an authority. And she, at an age when she thought that no longer possible, has a new man in her life: every woman needs, or thinks she needs, an escort.
Catherine had taken a visceral dislike to the whole court from the beginning—this grande bourgeoise was more fastidious than the arrantly patrician Cavaliere. Her husband accommodated this by thinking of Catherine as reclusive, and respecting her the more for it. Catherine prefers the life of a hermit, was the Cavaliere’s fond exaggeration in a letter to Charles, while he had often to be away with the King. Their union was designed to confirm their being different, in the way that most couples—two siblings, a wife and husband, a boss and secretary—divide up roles. You be retiring, I’ll be gregarious; you be talkative, I’ll be laconic; you be fleshy, I’ll be thin; you read poetry, I’ll tinker with my motorcycle. With William, Catherine was experiencing the rarer form of coupledom in which two people, different as they can be, claim to be as alike as possible.
She wants to do what pleases him and he wants to do what pleases her. They are moved by, admire the same music and poetry; are repelled by the same things (killing animals, vulgar conversation, the intrigues of aristocratic salons and an antic court).
The Cavaliere, whose life is unavoidably much taken up with killing animals, vulgar conversation, the intrigues of salons and the court, was glad that Catherine had someone to talk to, someone to be sensitive with. And it would have had to be a man—oddly, Catherine did not seem to enjoy much the company of her own sex—but one a good deal younger than she, so she could mother him; and, ideally, a lover of other men, so as to spare the Cavaliere concern there might be improper advances.
Without jealousy, no, with approval, the Cavaliere observed that Catherine looked almost youthful in the company of this stripling, and happier.
The two of them had been sitting on the terrace with a view of Naples and the gulf. Now it was six and they had gone indoors, to a room with windows facing Vesuvius. Catherine’s favorite maid brought tea. Light softened, paled. The candles were lit. The bustle of servants and the screech of cicadas were sounds they would not hear. If the mountain made noise, they ignored it.
After a long silence, Catherine went to the piano. William listened with moistening eyes.
Please sing, she said. You have a beautiful voice.
Will you not sing a duet with me?
Oh, she laughed. I don’t sing. I don’t like to, I never could …
What, dear Catherine?
The Cavaliere came at night, booted, bloodstained, sweating, fresh from the King’s animal slaughters, and saw them together at the piano, laughing softly, their eyes shining. But I am sensitive too, he thought. And now I am cast in the role of the one who does not understand.
* * *
William’s light tenor voice held on to the last note, then let it go. The piano’s sound decayed into inaudibility, the heart of this instrument’s expressiveness.
Catherine, William murmured.
She turned to him and nodded.
No one has ever understood me as you have, he said. You angel. You precious woman. If only I could remain here, under your benevolent influence, I should be quite healed.
No, said Catherine. You must return to England, to your duties. I do not doubt that you will master these weaknesses, a product of your extreme sensitivity, which come from having too tender a heart. Such feelings are like a fever that passes.
I don’t want to go home, he said, and wished he dared to take her hand. How beautiful she looked now. Catherine, I want to stay here with you.
William thinks he is suffering from a spiritual distress, which takes the form of a boundless appetite for vague, exotic things. How flattering to himself. What is happening is that he is not allowed to embrace what he wants to embrace. Most restlessness is sexual restlessness. The love of his life was eleven when they met, and William had been courting and fondling for four years before they were found one morning in the boy’s bed. When Viscount Courtenay barred William from his house and threatened to bring suit if he ever dared approach his son again, William crossed the Channel and headed south.
He has sought the shelter of older skies. But no degree of otherness satisfies the restless sexual exile. No place is rude enough, foreign enough. (Until afterward—in the remembrance, in the telling.) In the north of south, he re-created the same scandal, from which he was again obliged to flee: a passion for the fifteen-year-old son of a Venetian noble family, the prompt discovery of which by another irate father had got him driven from the city and hurled him down the chute of the peninsula—into the Neapolitan fascination, the Neapolitan torpor, and into Catherine’s lonely heart.
* * *
She feels stronger, has more energy, and (as the Cavaliere noticed) looks prettier. He was improving himself, under her benevolent influence. They had found a haven, the strongest variant of privacy: a voluntary social ostracism. Each was greedy for the other’s exclusive company.
Of course, they were not literally alone. As befitted a man richer than any lord, William was incapable of traveling without his tutor, his secretary, his personal physician, a major-domo, a cook, a baker, an artist to draw views that he wished to commit to memory, three valets, a page, etc., etc. And Catherine and the Cavaliere had a vast retinue for the mansion in the city, the villa near the royal palace at Portici, and the fifty-room hunting lodge at Caserta. Servants were everywhere, making everything possible, but, like the black figures in Noh plays who enter the stage to adjust a character’s massive costume or furnish a prop, servants didn’t count.
Yes, they were alone.
This relationship, which had the thrill of something illicit, was conducted in front of, with the blessing of, the Cavaliere. Though designed not to be consummated, it was still a romance. What released them to love each other was that each was unsatisfactorily in love with someone else. Indeed, it was Catherine’s being abjectly in love with the Cavaliere after twenty-two years of marriage and William’s convulsive passions for closely guarded pubescent boys in his own circles that allowed them to fall in love with each other, without having to worry about it or do anything about it.
Being in love and unable to acknowledge it, they were fond of generalizing about love. Is there anything crueler and sweeter, mused William. The heart so full it cannot speak, it can only dream and sing—you’ve known that feeling, Catherine, I know you have. Otherwise, you could not understand so well what I feel but must hide from everyone.
Love is always a sacrifice, said Catherine, who knew whereof she spoke. But the one who loves, she added, has the better part than one who lets himself be loved.
I hate being unhappy, said William.
Oh, Catherine sighed, and contemplated her long history of being unhappy without having any right to consider herself such, so grateful was she still to the Cavaliere for having married her. Thinking of herself as homely—and despising herself for the vanity this thought disclosed—she had an ugly duckling’s reverence for her elegant husband, whom she found so attractive with his long beaky nose, his thin legs, his crisp sentences, his unwavering gaze. She still pined for him whenever he was absent for more than a day, still felt weak-kneed whenever he entered a room and came toward her. She loved his silhouette.
You don’t judge me? murmured William.
You have already judged yourself, dear boy. You have only to continue on the better path to which you aspire. Your candor, your delicacy of feeling, the music we play, these tell me that your heart is pure.
Mutual avowals of each other’s essential purity, innocence, however different their lives and impure his.
William, resist the lures of a soft, criminal passion! So she called the youth’s love for his own sex, which could not fail to rouse Catherine’s ever-ready talent for disapproval. It did not shock the Cavaliere, friend of Walpole and Gray, patron of that rogue scholar who had renamed himself the Baron d’Hancarville (he compiled the volumes on the Cavaliere’s vases): even then the world of collectors and connoisseurs, particularly of the antique, featured a disproportionate number of men who loved their own sex. The Cavaliere prided himself on being free of vulgar sexual bigotry but thought the taste a handicap, exposing its adept to socially inconvenient situations and sometimes, alas, to danger. No one could forget the gruesome end of the great Winckelmann in a raffish hotel in Trieste twelve years ago, stabbed to death by a young hustler to whom he had shown some of the treasures he was taking back to Rome. William, beware! Stick to boys from your own class.
* * *
They are both misfits, loving what they can’t have. And they are allies. She protects him; he makes her feel desirable. Each needs the other in such a congenial way. How flattering to them both if it is thought they are lovers. That means he is seen as capable of being a lover of women, she as still attractive. Both as brave souls capable of throwing all caution to the winds. This relationship, which only rarely ends in bed, is one of the classic forms of heterosexual romantic love. In place of consummation, there is elevation. A secret society of two, they were constantly high, exalted, flushed with complicity.
Their voices become deeper, shot through with pauses. Their hands coupled on the keyboard, her face tilted to his, leaning into his. Inner smiles, breathlessness, the piercing beauties of Scarlatti and Schobert and Haydn. Ignoring the volcano’s spasms. Not to be distracted by any views.
When she played, he could see the music. It was an arc surging upward from her delicately tapping feet, streaming through her body, and exiting through her hands. She leaned forward, a strand of unpowdered hair falling across her forehead, her slightly flabby arms bowed as if to embrace the keyboard, her radiant face molded by feeling, her lips parted for soundless moaning and singing.
A lover would have recognized Catherine’s expressions at the piano, and anyone else would have felt privy to an involuntary revelation of how she behaved with a lover. Grimacing, wincing, sighing, nodding, smiling beatifically—she spanned several octaves of abandonment to pleasure. It was then, when William saw her most clearly as a sexual being, that he was most drawn to her, most intimidated, and most touched. She was so innocent, he supposed, about what the music meant to her and did to her.
Sometimes, Catherine said, I feel that music invades me to the point of total oblivion, when my will and my intention do not exist any more. The music has penetrated so deeply into me that it alone directs my movements.
Yes, said William, I feel that too.
They had reached that state of perfect vibratory accord where everything they observed seemed a metaphor for their relationship. On an excursion to Herculaneum, they marveled together at the imaginary buildings—They must be imaginary, Catherine!—depicted in frescoes in the Villa degli Misteri, whose slim columns are not asked to support anything but only to frame delicate space: freestanding elements of buildings that exist only for themselves, for light and for grace.
So I would build, said William.
At the entrance to the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl, they felt at one with the whole ancient world.
At Avernus they stood by the dank waters of the submerged crater, in ancient times thought to be the entrance to hell, where Virgil has Aeneas descend into the underworld.
Remember the Sibyl’s warning to Aeneas? Facilis descensus Averno, William proclaimed in his high nervous voice, casting a fond glance at Catherine, Sed revocare … hoc opus, hic labor est.
Yes, dear boy, yes. You must not be idle.
With Virgil I can testify that it is easy to descend to hell. But to come back … Oh Catherine, with you, with your understanding … it is not work, not labor.
To be happy together they no longer need to feel superior to the local pleasures. During the premiere at the San Carlo of yet another opera about a fiancée rescued from a Moorish harem, the castrato Caffarelli makes them weep. Some of the worst music and most beautiful singing I have ever heard, murmured William. Did you mark how he sustained the legato in their duet? I did, I did, she said. It is not possible for any sound to be more beautiful.
Catherine came alive to the sensuality as well as the beauty of the city, seeing it refracted through William’s responses. She had blocked it out until now, so put off was she by the riotous court, the indolent nobility, the heathenish religion, the appalling violence and poverty. With William, she allowed herself to notice the erotic energy coursing through the streets. Parented by William’s lustful stare, she let her own glance linger on the ripe mouth and long dark lashes of a bare-chested young blacksmith. For the first time in her life, when too worn, too old to seduce, she was overwhelmed by the beauty of young men.
And the golden light. And the views. Th
e pomegranate trees. And, my God, the hibiscus!
Beneath the layering of history, everything speaks of love. According to the local folklore, the origin of many Neapolitan sites is an unhappy love story. Once these places were men and women, who, because of unhappy or frustrated love, underwent a metamorphosis into what one sees today. Even the volcano. Vesuvius was once a young man, who saw a nymph lovely as a diamond. She scratched his heart and his soul, he could think of nothing else. Breathing more and more heatedly, he lunged at her. The nymph, scorched by his attentions, jumped into the sea and became the island today called Capri. Seeing this, Vesuvius went mad. He loomed, his sighs of fire spread, little by little he became a mountain. And now, as immobilized as his beloved, forever beyond his reach, he continues to throw fire and makes the city of Naples tremble. How the helpless city regrets that the youth did not get what he desired! Capri lies in the water, in full view of Vesuvius, and the mountain burns and burns and burns …
* * *
How devoted we are to each other, they might have said. (How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!)
Each got to exercise her, his forbearance: that she has her ways, that he has dangerous notions. But she is more cautious than he, because he will leave (he’s young and he’s a man) and she can’t. For it must end. It is the woman, of course, who loses: the young man goes away and will love again, physically as well as romantically. He is her last love.
When he left in January, he was grief-stricken. He wept. She, no doubt sadder than he, was dry-eyed. They embraced.
I shall live for your letters, he said.
* * *
When I left you I was lost in dreams, he said in his first letter. He told her how much he missed her, he described the eloquent landscapes which reminded him of … himself. Each site pitched him into reverie, became a depiction of his own mind (and its powers), his own associations. His hand was wantonly difficult—Catherine found it hard to decipher—and he was a voluble describer.