The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  Wherever William was, he was also somewhere else. At Misenum he was with Pliny the Elder. At the entrance to the Sibyl’s cave he was with Virgil. Or just with his indescribable feelings. The dauntless churn of bookish references, the eager transformation of every reality into a dream or a vision, seemed less of an enchantment in his letters. No doubt this was because she was no longer the co-author of his fantasies but only the recipient of them.

  She expected everything of herself: index of a strong character. (She had never thought it remarkable that she played the harpsichord as superbly as she did.) But she tried not to expect much from others, so as not to be corrupted by disappointment. She did not expect anything of William. She was William … or he was she. To love someone was to tolerate imperfections one would never excuse in oneself. And had she thought the egocentricity of his reactions needed defending, she would probably have invoked his youth, or simply his sex.

  It was like a dream, he would say of something he had just seen. I dreamed, I cast myself back in the time of. I walked on, musing at every step. I lay for an hour gazing on the smooth level waters. I was vexed to be aroused from my visions.

  He described every stop on his journey as a pilgrimage. And each place could be an occasion of inspired seclusion, of voluptuous disorientation. Wherever he went, there would be a moment when he would be able to ask: Where am I?

  And, Catherine, Catherine, I have not forgotten. Where are you?

  Their intimacy, this seemed like a dream, too.

  I used to listen to her like one entranced, William said of Catherine’s music-making, many years later. Transported, as I have been by no other performer. You cannot imagine how beautifully she played—referring, as he did whenever he evoked her at her instruments, only to how she played the music of others. It seemed, he said, as if she had thrown her own essence into the music, whose effects were the emanations of a pure, uncontaminated mind. The art and the person were one. She lived, uncorrupted, an angel of purity in the midst of the Neapolitan court, William remembered. Since to praise a woman then was invariably to call her an angel or a saint, William was anxious that his words be heard as more than the usual homage. You must have known what that court was, he wrote, to comprehend this in its full meaning. I never saw so heavenly-minded a creature.

  Throughout his rapid journey up the peninsula, which included a futile stop in Venice (to sigh once more over the Cornaro boy), William continued to write Catherine, evoking the wild fantastic imaginings he could share only with her, and declaring that had he but sufficient strength of mind—I care not a farthing whether the world thought me whimsical or no!—he should change his resolution to proceed to England and instead would retrace his steps immediately to Naples. Nothing would make him happier than to spend a few more months in Catherine’s company, and greet the spring with her, read to her under their favorite cliff at Posillipo, and listen to her music.

  From Switzerland, he spoke of the music he has been composing.

  Did you ever read of certain gnomes who lurk in the chasms of tremendous mountains? The strange exotic tunes I have just now been playing on the harpsichord were exactly what I imagine elves and pygmies dance to—brisk and humming—moody and subterranean. Few mortals except ourselves, dear Catherine, have ears to catch the low whisperings which issue in dark hours from the rocks.

  And once again: How sorry I am, dear Catherine, to give up hopes of passing the spring in Portici and visiting the wild thickets of Calabria at your side. All my prayers will be to return and listen to you whole hours without interruption, my greatest anxiety that we shall not see each other again for some time. Never can I expect to meet another human being who so perfectly comprehends me. Let me hear constantly from you if you have any pity upon your most obliged and affectionate—

  Crossing the Alps, he told her, he felt the air to be purer and more transparent than any he had ever breathed. He described long walks in which he traversed an infinity of vales, skirted with rocks and blooming with aromatic vegetation, and voyages in his head in which he shot from rock to rock and built castles in the style of Pirariesi upon their pinnacles. And he told her that he never stopped thinking of her. Only you can conceive of the solemn thoughts I have on a clear frosty night, he wrote, when every star is visible. And: I wish you could hear what the winds are whispering to me. I hear the strangest things in the Universe and my ear is filled with aerial conversations. What a multitude of Voices are borne to me by the chill winds that blow on these vast fantastic mountains. I think of you, where it is always summer.

  In Naples the winter turned unseasonably cold. Catherine began to decline. Her physician, an elderly Scot with leathery skin (she thought of William’s smooth cheeks) who had settled in Naples years ago, drove out most days to see her. Am I that ill, she said. A mere ten miles, I am fond of the exercise, he replied, smiling. The softness in his glance made her uncomfortable.

  Now I am in Paris, William wrote. My delicious seclusion is over. England awaits me. But oh, Catherine, I fear I shall never be good for anything in this world but composing exotic tunes, building towers, designing gardens, collecting Old Japan, and imagining trips to China or the moon.

  In Naples it snowed for the first time in thirty years.

  Far as Naples was from England, it was even farther from India, Jack’s homeland. The Cavaliere observed with a tightening of his heart that the monkey was ailing. Jack no longer pranced about but dragged himself from table to chair, bust to vase. He lifted his head slowly when the Cavaliere called. From his tiny chest came a crinkly wheeze. The Cavaliere wondered if it was too cold in the storeroom. He meant to tell Valerio to have Jack’s quarters moved to an upper story, but it slipped his mind. He would miss his little co-mocker. He had started to cut him out of his heart. And there were more than the usual distractions.

  It was time for the King’s campaign of boar hunting. The Cavaliere transferred the core of his household—Catherine, the indispensable musical instruments and choice books, and a reduced staff of thirty-four servants—to the lodge at Caserta, where the wind blew colder still. To spare him the further rigors of the upland climate, Jack was left in town in the care of young Gaetano, who was instructed not to let the animal out of his sight. The King summoned the Cavaliere for a week’s shooting in the Apennine foothills. Oh I am accustomed to his absences, Catherine said to Doctor Drummond, who came every other day to visit her. And: I don’t wish my husband to worry about me.

  She wanted him not to worry about poor Jack, either. How to prepare him for the inevitable? For she thought with concern of that, even that, too. News was brought on a Sunday that Jack had not awakened that morning. The Cavaliere turned away and was silent for a long moment. He rebuttoned his hunting jacket and turned back. Was the ground still frozen, he inquired. No, came the answer. The Cavaliere sighed and ordered him buried in the garden.

  She was relieved that he didn’t seem too distressed, but found herself saddened by the fate of the little alien creature who had served the Cavaliere so ardently. She remembered how he sat in the shape of a treble clef, his hairy tail coiled neatly under his rump.

  From England, William wrote that he had started and nearly finished a new book. It was an account of his travels and all his fantasies and imaginary encounters with the spirits of place. But he hastened to assure her, lest she worry, that although it will be entirely suffused with her visionary accents, she will not be mentioned. He will assume full responsibility for all the ideas they have engendered together, shielding her from the world’s malice and envy. No one will be able to criticize or implicate her. Her role in his life will forever remain a secret, a sacred mystery. He will represent them both to the world.

  Indeed.

  She feels annihilated. But at least something that represents both of them will exist.

  He has had five hundred copies printed, he announced. Then he wrote that he has reconsidered and has ordered the edition destroyed, all but fifty copies. She was protected, he
was not. In the wrong hands, the book could be misunderstood. He did not want to expose himself to ridicule.

  But it will always belong to you, Catherine, he wrote.

  She did not want to feel abandoned, but she did.

  He wrote her that he was rereading his—no, their—favorite book.

  Catherine, Catherine, do you remember the passage at the beginning of Werther, after the hero says, “It is the fate of a man like myself to be misunderstood,” where he recalls the friend of his youth. Of course you remember. But I cannot resist copying it out, so perfectly does it express what I feel. “I say to myself: You are a fool to search for something that cannot be found on this earth. But she was mine, I felt her heart, her great soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was because I was all that I could be. Good God, was there a single force in my soul then unused? Could I not unfold in her presence all the wonderful emotions with which my heart embraces Nature? Was not our relationship a perpetual interweaving of the most subtle feeling with the keenest wit, whose modifications, however extravagant, all bore the mark of genius? And now?—Alas, the years she had lived in advance of my own brought her to the grave before me. I shall never forget her—neither her unwavering mind nor her divine fortitude.”

  Oh, thought Catherine, he is killing me off. The thought did not shock her as much as it should.

  The Cavaliere returned, ruddy, nervous, from the hunt. The next morning at breakfast, looking at Catherine’s pale lined face—how used she looked, while he still felt as vigorous as ever, his flesh tingled with exertion and the memory of keen sensations, with wind and shouts and acrid smells and the hard spread of his horse between his legs—and he hated her for becoming old, for always remaining indoors, for looking as vulnerable as she was. For being sad—why, he assumed he knew. And, jealous, he could not resist being cruel.

  May I remind you, my dear, that we are both in mourning.

  She didn’t answer.

  You have lost my young cousin. But I have lost Jack.

  Another letter from William, in which he complained that Catherine did not answer his last and next-to-last. Do not abandon me, angel! Truth was, she was starting the end of mourning. William had begun to seem remote. Did I feel all that? So much? As sound decays into inaudibility, euphoria decays into indifference, and that is always unexpected, the way exalted feelings are weakened, undone by time. It was becoming harder to imagine what she had felt when William was there. That intensity seemed like, like a.… Even she might use the word dream now.

  7

  SYMPTOMS. A difficulty in breathing, a hurt around the heart. Loss of appetite. Complaint in the bowels, pain in her side and breast, chronic retching so that nothing stays on her stomach, feeling of weakness in her right arm—most of these symptoms subdued. Headaches. Want of sleep. Pale hair on the pillow each morning. A great difficulty in breathing. (Women’s weaknesses: inform, generic. A man falls ill, a wellborn woman wanes.) Self-contempt. Anxiety at being a cause of concern to her husband. Revulsion at the futile chatter of other women. Thoughts of heaven. Impression of universal coldness.

  DIAGNOSIS. Doctor Drummond suspects a paralysis. Or that the vital powers are quite worn out. She is only forty-four but she has been ailing for decades.

  PRAYERS. Giving thanks to God for all his mercies, humbly asking pardon for her past sins, imploring indulgence for her impious husband. More thoughts of heaven, where all injury is repaired. Lord, pity and correct.

  LETTERS. To friends and relations back home, of an exceptional dispiritedness. I fear I shall never see you again. And to her husband, in February, when the hunting orgy was still on and the Cavaliere was often away, a letter of excruciating abjection: How tedious are the hours I pass in the absence of the beloved of my heart, and how tiresome is every scene to me. There is the chair in which he sits, I find him not there, and my heart feels a pang and my foolish eyes overflow with tears. The number of years we have been married, instead of diminishing my love, have increased it to that degree and wound it up with my existence in such a manner that it cannot alter. How strong are the efforts I have made to conquer my feelings, but in vain. How I have reasoned with my self, but to no purpose. No one but those who have felt it can know the miserable anxiety of an undivided love. When he is present every object has a different appearance, when he is absent how lonely, how isolated I feel. I seek peace in company, and there I am still more uneasy. Alas, I have but one pleasure, but one satisfaction, and that is all centered in him.

  MUSIC. It is not quite true that she has no interests, none, when he is absent. But the sounds at the harpsichord are more plaintive. Music elevates, but it does not erase.

  PASSION. William’s departure has left her more vulnerable than ever. But such passion in marriage is unnatural. And: it is always right to try to overcome this passion, to distract herself. She inspects some new sites at the dead cities, joins in a musical assembly at the mansion of the Austrian ambassador, and visits a Sicilian lady of high rank who, after dispatching ten, no, eleven people by dagger or poison, was finally denounced by her own family, and as punishment had been confined, luxuriously confined, in a convent near Naples. Her age was around twenty-three, Catherine related to her husband. She received me in bed, sitting up, satin pillows heaped behind her, offered me macaroons and other refreshments, and conversed politely and with great cheerfulness. It seemed unimaginable that someone with her gentle manners was capable of such atrocities. She had a shy, even kind face, Catherine reported in wonderment—a fact that would not have impressed even the most unreflective native of the country in which she was resident, since any peasant knows that rotten wares are often sold under a good signboard; but Catherine was a northerner, and gently reared, neither a peasant nor an aristocrat, and truly pious, a Protestant who assumed the match of inner and outer. She did not look like a murderer, Catherine said softly.

  * * *

  Catherine spoke in a very low voice, the Cavaliere was to remember. One had to lean forward sometimes to hear her. A plea for intimacy? Yes. And also a sign of her repressed rage.

  * * *

  Spring came, a warm fragrant April. She stayed in bed much of the time. William’s letters spoke, jubilantly, gratingly, of a future. But Catherine knew that for her there was no future. She could only think of, only love the past.

  The Cavaliere had been away on an archaeological expedition in Apulia for more than a week. Catherine, unable to leave her bed, felt herself growing weaker by the hour. On a hot April night, in the throes of a painful asthmatic seizure that she thought might be the beginning of the end, she sought relief in a letter.

  Catherine had never been afraid, and now she was afraid. The long hard work of dying had given new urgency to the asthmatic’s recurrent nightmare of being interred alive. What would help would be to write a note to the Cavaliere, requesting that he not seal up the coffin for three days after she died. But in order to say that, she must start by saying she fears that in a few days, nay, a few hours, she will be incapable of writing him; then declare that it is impossible for her to express the love and tenderness she feels for him, and that he, only he, has been the source of all her joys, he, the dearest of all her earthly blessings, which word, earthly, moves her from these extravagant and entirely unfeigned feelings for the Cavaliere to the thought of even greater heavenly blessings, and an expression of her hope that he might some day become a believer.

  Catherine does not really think that he will ever become devout (and he did not). Her longing for him to yield to religious belief came from her own need for an exalted, rhapsodic language. She wanted him to acknowledge the reality of that dimension, therefore that language, so that they could share it—so that they could finally be truly intimate.

  But, of course, he will never know the rhapsodic compensation. For all the dark constricting feelings that … and here she began to gasp for breath and recalled what she had wanted to put in this letter, a true letter of farewell, apart from declaring
her love, asking him to forget and forgive her faults, exonerating him for leaving her alone so much, blessing him and asking him to remember her with kindness—yes, she wanted to request something. Let me not be shut up after I am dead till it is absolutely necessary. She finished by reminding him to give directions in his will to carry out the promise he has made to her that his bones will lie by hers, in Slebech Church, when God is pleased to call him, which she hopes will not be for many decades, during which interval—this is an exhausting, long-breathed sentence such as asthmatics take special pleasure in writing—during which interval she hopes that he will not remain alone. May every earthly and heavenly blessing attend you and may you be loved as I have loved you. I am, your faithful wife, &c.

  She sealed the letter, felt the weight on her chest lighten, and slept more peacefully than she had in weeks.

  Summer came, with its daunting, oppressive heat. The Cavaliere was angry with Catherine for dying—inconveniencing him, abandoning him. When in July they moved out to the Vesuvian villa, her favorite of their three residences, he found many reasons to linger for days at a time at the nearby royal palace. Doctor Drummond came out every morning to see her, with gossip to make her smile, little candies to stimulate her appetite, and, once a week, leeches to bleed her. One early August morning he did not arrive. She sent the dinner away uneaten at three o’clock and dispatched a footman to inquire, who returned with the news that the doctor had not taken his carriage but had decided to ride out on his new hunter and, a mile from the villa, had been thrown from the horse and hauled back on a litter to town. His injuries were serious, she was told. Then, very serious: a broken back and a punctured kidney. He died a week later. When this news was brought to her, Catherine wept for the last time.

  The Cavaliere always maintained that her feeling somehow responsible for this frightful accident, incurred as the doctor was on his way to see her, hastened Catherine’s death, which took place only twelve days later. Reading in a favorite chair facing the myrtle grove, she fainted and was carried into the house. As she was laid in bed, she opened her eyes and asked for a small oval portrait of the Cavaliere, which she set face down on her breast. She closed her eyes and died that evening without opening them again.