The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  But it can be done, said the Queen irritably. Yes, it can be done. Then we shall do it, if we so decide. Remote as they were from the god-kings of the ancient Mediterranean, these enlightened despots still laid claim to rule with absolute power sanctioned by a divine mandate. In fact, their authority had been steadily undermined by mockery, by enlightenment. In fact, they no longer had anything resembling absolute power at all.

  3

  It had been freakishly cold that winter throughout the peninsula, from Venice, where the lagoon froze over and could be crossed on foot, even skated on as in a Dutch painting, down to Naples, whose winter was even harsher than the one seven years ago that had done in poor Jack. Snow stayed for weeks on the lava-paved streets and covered the mountain. The hail was as withering as a rain of hot ash. Orchards and gardens perished, along with the less hardy of the tens of thousands of the city’s poorest, who lacked even a roof between them and the icy wind. Among the well-sheltered the unprecedented rigors of the season stirred up a mood of apprehension. Surely such anomalies were not mere facts of nature. These were emblems, equivalents, harbingers of a catastrophe that was on its way.

  * * *

  Like a wind, like a storm, like a fire, like an earthquake, like a mud slide, like a deluge, like a tree falling, a torrent roaring, an ice floe breaking, like a tidal wave, like a shipwreck, like an explosion, like a lid blown off, like a consuming fire, like spreading blight, like a sky darkening, a bridge collapsing, a hole opening. Like a volcano erupting.

  Surely more than just the actions of people: choosing, yielding, braving, lying, understanding, being right, being deceived, being consistent, being visionary, being reckless, being cruel, being mistaken, being original, being afraid …

  * * *

  That spring, Vesuvius continued to be active, bringing more travelers to the city to marvel at it, sketch it, when possible climb it, and creating an ever greater demand for pictures of the volcano in all its moods, which skilled artists and local image-purveyors stepped up their production to supply. And by late July, as news of the fall of the Bastille spread, demand fell sharply for images of the volcano as the crowning element of a serene landscape. Now everyone craved an image of Vesuvius erupting. Indeed, for a while hardly anyone painted the volcano another way. Both to the revolution’s partisans and to the horrified ruling class of every European country, no image for what was happening in France seemed as apt as that of a volcano in action—violent convulsion, upheaval from below, and waves of lethal force that harrow and permanently alter the landscape.

  Like Vesuvius, the French Revolution was also a phenomenon. But a volcanic eruption is something perennial. While the French Revolution was perceived as unprecedented, Vesuvius has been erupting for a long time, is erupting now, and will erupt again: the continuity and repetitiveness of nature. To treat the force of history as a force of nature was reassuring as well as distracting. It suggests that though this may be only the beginning, the beginning of an age of revolutions, this too will pass.

  The Cavaliere and those he knew did not seem directly threatened. Statistically speaking, most disasters happen elsewhere, and our capacity for imagining the plight of those disaster strikes, when they are numerous, is limited. For the time being we are safe and, as they say, life (usually meaning the life of the privileged) goes on. We are safe, though everything may be different afterward.

  To love volcanoes was to put the revolution in its place. To live in proximity to the memory of a disaster, to live among ruins—Naples, or Berlin today—is to be reassured that one can survive any disaster, even the greatest.

  * * *

  The Cavaliere’s beloved had never stopped writing to Charles. She had written to plead with him, reproach him, denounce him, threaten him, and attempt to rouse his pity. Three years later, she still wrote almost as often. If Charles was not her lover, then he had to be her friend. So large was her gift for fidelity that she rarely understood when people didn’t like her or had had enough of her. She had such an aptitude for being pleased that she couldn’t imagine Charles would not welcome her letters, be glad to know about her doings and those of his dear uncle, whom she was doing her best to make happy (wasn’t that what Charles wanted?) and who was so kind, so generous to her.

  She wrote of accompanying the Cavaliere on climbs up the mountain, and how she never saw so fine a spectacle, though she pitied the moon, whose light seemed pale and sickly alongside that of the erupting volcano (it took little to get the fountain of her compassion flowing); and of going with him to the excavations at Pompeii, where she mourned the people who had perished so many centuries ago. Unlike Catherine, who had never entertained the idea of climbing Vesuvius and had not enjoyed being taken in her husband’s entourage to contemplate the dead cities (though she had visited them with William), she was ready to do everything, anything the Cavaliere proposed, and seemed to have unlimited energy. If she could, if he would have permitted it, she would have gladly gone, booted and bundled up in furs, on the boar hunt with the Cavaliere (she was an excellent rider, which he did not know). She would have watched the King standing waist-deep in bloody offal and found some way to enjoy the ghastly sight, though she was not in the least voyeuristic—reaching into a not very large personal experience of that kind of savagery (though her lover before Charles, the father of her daughter, who had taught her to ride, had been an animal-slaughtering country squire) or into what she was learning from books.

  Amazing, yes. Once I saw … I mean, it’s like, it’s like, like … Homer, she might have exclaimed. And not have been entirely wrong.

  The Cavaliere watched her fondly as she expanded to her role as his companion, as a lady in training. She had always been a very quick learner. That was how she had survived, and how she triumphed.

  She was, he thought, taking his impress as clay does a sculptor’s thumb. She was buoyantly, expertly accommodating. The ways in which he had to accommodate to her were slight. He had to restrain in her presence some of his natural tendency to ironical statement. Clever as she was, she could not follow him there. Both by temperament and by class, she was not sensitive to irony. Her temperament had virtually nothing in it of melancholy, which is the obverse of irony; and she was not born to that kind of snobbery which prides itself on an indirect expression. Irony is the staple response of the English gentleman expatriate to the weirdness, the uncouthness of the locals among whom he finds himself obliged (even if it be by his own choice) to live. Being ironical is a way of showing one’s superiority without actually being so ill-bred as to be indignant. Or offended. The young woman saw no reason not to show herself offended when she was; or not to be indignant, which she often was—never at injuries done to her (of these she was very indulgent, or easily placated), but at an injury or slight done to others.

  If she had a snobbish reaction, she could only express it directly. Oh lordy how vulgar they was, she would exclaim, returning from an evening out—the Cavaliere took her everywhere, and everyone welcomed her. Nobody is as good, as wise, as attractive as you, she said to the Cavaliere.

  And no one, thought the Cavaliere, was as versatile as she.

  As a woman she has become, like the Cavaliere, another champion intervener. Her sphere of activity is the one usually claimed by women: paying attention to feelings, to ailments. Another talent unfolded: a quickness to divine what others were thinking, feeling, needing; what others wanted, wanted for themselves, wanted her to be. Egocentric though she might be, her most predictable sentiments were admiration, loyalty, sympathy … not the passions of a narcissist. Anyone’s emotional distress brought her to tears. She cried at the spectacle of a child’s funeral in the street, at confidences she received during a party from a young American silk merchant sent abroad on a mission by the family firm to get over the woman who had jilted him. Anyone’s physical distress made her think she could do something about it. She concocted a Welsh folk remedy for Valerio’s headaches. Anyone’s silence made her try to draw the tacitu
rn person out. She tried to talk to the young man with one eye who is the Cavaliere’s guide. Oh, his poor eye!

  * * *

  In 1790, after spending her first post-Bastille year in Rome, the itinerant Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun arrived for a prolonged stay in Naples, inevitably furnished with an introduction to the city’s leading patron of painters both local and foreign, whose companion happened to be a young woman who had been one of the most famous painter’s models of the era. Vigée-Lebrun lost no time in asking the Cavaliere to commission from her a portrait of his much-depicted charmer and the Cavaliere gave his consent with alacrity, agreeing to a substantial fee. He already owned some dozen portraits of her. He could not have too many. Probably he gave no thought to the fact that this would be the first portrait of her by one of the few professional painters who was a woman.

  Since the Cavaliere’s companion was still a model, not yet a subject, the question was which figure from myth, literature, or ancient history she would represent. Vigée-Lebrun decided, not without a little malice, to paint her as Ariadne. The moment chosen is after Ariadne has been unceremoniously dropped off by Theseus, much against her will, at Naxos. Though it must be soon after, Ariadne looks anything but desperate. In the foreground, just inside a grotto, wearing a long loose white dress partly covered by the meandering fall of her luxuriant auburn hair from her shoulders, over her belly, to her plump knees, she is sitting on a leopard-skin rug, leaning against a rock, one hand held decoratively against her cheek while the other clasps a brass goblet. She has her back to the entrance, facing the grotto’s interior, as if both the spectator, whose gaze she meets with wide-eyed inane candor, and the source of the brilliant light that irradiates her face, her bosom, her bare arms, were farther inside the grotto. Behind her lies the open sea and far in the distance, on the horizon line, a tiny ship. Presumably it is the one commanded by Theseus, the hero whose life she had saved and who had promised to take her back to his homeland and marry her, but who, instead, has cast her off in mid-passage and left her to die on this deserted island.

  Yes, it must be her lover’s ship—just picking up wind in its sails after the treacherous, cowardly deed. It cannot be the ship of Dionysus, the god of pleasure and wine, who will rescue her, and make her his consort, thereby supplying her with a destiny far more glorious than the one she had thought the best she could do. Not being a mere mortal, Dionysus does not need to arrive by ship. He can just fly in. But perhaps he has already flown in, and it is he in the rear of the cave, preparing to make love to Ariadne, and she has already forgotten Theseus, who is barely out of sight (and, though relieved to be rid of her, feeling a bit remorseful, as remorseful as a cad who also thinks of himself as a gentleman ever gets), and she has already drunk the wine the god had proffered to become more dry-eyed (Forget Theseus! But I have…), more loose-limbed, in anticipation of their embraces.

  Or is it just the spectator who is being seduced, here in the rear of the cave, as the real woman seduced everyone, shone her bright glorious emphatic smile on everyone. But not with the directly suggestive smile in the painting. She is more wholesome, more anxious to please, less self-confident than that. Never, in all the portraits made of her, was she depicted so patently as a courtesan. Unpleasant depiction by one independent woman surviving out in the great world by her wits and talents, of another woman at the same perilous game. But impudent as the portrait was, it was a success. The artist knew her patrons. She must have wagered that the Cavaliere (infatuated) and the young woman (innocently vain) would not see the portrait as others might see it, would see only one more tribute to her all-conquering beauty.

  Among the large number of roles and personae that she deemed herself suited to play, there was a special pleasure in portraying women whose destiny was so unlike her own happy one, such as Ariadne and Medea, princesses who sacrificed all—past, family, social position—for a foreign lover and then were betrayed. She saw them not as victims but as persons who were inordinately expressive: persons affecting and heroic in the intensity of their feeling, in the recklessness and wholeheartedness with which they gave themselves to a single emotion.

  She elaborated her Attitudes, improved the stagecraft and the dramaturgy. It was not necessary anymore for the Cavaliere to stand nearby, holding a taper. She was lit by two tall thick candles, placed on either side behind screens. Sometimes she used human as well as physical props. The Countess de ***, another refugee from the appalling events in Paris, who had settled in Naples, near the court ruled by the French queen’s sister, to await the prompt punishment of the godless revolutionaries and the restoration to their full, divinely prescribed powers of their revered majesties Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette—this countess had a daughter, a sallow clever child of seven or eight, about the same age as the daughter whom the Cavaliere’s companion had not seen for more than four years (and the small sum for whose yearly board Charles now paid, on the Cavaliere’s instruction, from the revenues of the estate in Wales) and who, she fancied, resembled her daughter, or what her daughter (poor abandoned babe!) must look like now. She wept thinking of her daughter, and conscripted the countess’s daughter into the Attitudes. Before the Cavaliere’s guests one evening she constructed three tableaux vivants with the child. These materialized in strobe-like succession, for she no longer needed even the slight pause afforded by covering herself between one Attitude and the next.

  The first subject was the rape of the Sabine women, the emotion was terror, and the moment was the mid-flight capture of a young Roman matron, vainly attempting to escape with her child clasped to her bosom. She had prepared the nervous, trusting child for this subject, showing her pictures from the Cavaliere’s books. But the two subjects that followed were inspired improvisations. In a single movement, she pushed the child’s body to the floor and pulled upward on the little arms, locking the hands in prayer, took one step back, seized her by the hair, and pressed a dagger against her throat. Applause and “Brava, Medea!” Then she fell to her knees, enveloping the petrified swooning girl with her whole body, her frame contorted by a silent frozen sob, and received the consecration of “Viva la Niobe!”

  It was beyond acting, thought the Cavaliere, watching with his guests. And once again he was struck by how extraordinary were her powers of imagination, of sympathy, for emotions that she could not have known, and basked in the bravas as if they were praise for himself. What an amazing creature she was.

  * * *

  It was the beginning of the age of revolutions, it was the beginning of the age of exaggeration.

  The young woman was becoming everything he wanted her to be. It occurred to the Cavaliere that he might consider the hitherto unthinkable, becoming the one thing she wanted him to be—though she had the grace never to mention it.

  What more could he want to possess in the autumn of his life than this adorable, and adoring, creature?

  Look how she won everyone over.

  A small party, only fifty guests, in honor of the Duke del ***. The Cavaliere’s consort presiding on her side of the long table. She was wearing a Greek robe, a chiton, which the Cavaliere had ordered made for her, after the robe worn by Helen of Troy on one of his vases. While she was dressing, Mrs. Cadogan had refused to let him enter. And when she appeared he was overcome. She looked as beautiful as ever—could one say more?

  On her right was the rubicund, perfumed Prince ***, a notorious local seducer; on her left, Count ***, a notorious local bore. She had an amazing talent for pleasing, bending her lovely face now to one, now to the other. She counter-seduced the seducer, by talking to him of the charms of his wife, and with such ingenuity and fervor that even he began to think fondly of that much ignored woman, becoming more interested in his dinner partner’s astuteness than in her snowy bosom. She enthralled the bore, too, with less difficulty, by listening to him go on about each one of his social triumphs on a recent trip to Paris, and how he had met a lawyer named Danton and the journalist Marat and, though it was not well though
t of here to say so, found the revolutionaries not the ogres and would-be regicides he had expected but men of common sense, who wanted only to bring some much needed reforms, such as could be carried out under a constitutional monarchy. Yes, she said. Yes. I see. And then? And what did you say? Oh. What a clever reply.

  She laughed loudly, and lifted her glass first to one, then the other. The Cavaliere listened to her voice, relished the sheen of her cheek. From time to time she looked at him, received the nod of his approval. No matter how busy she was with others—and no one listened more ardently than she—he felt she never ceased to be aware of, passionately concentrated on, his existence, as if to say: I do all this for you, so you will be proud of me. What more could a Pygmalion ask than that?

  Now the count was boring the woman on his left, the Princess ***, with his ideas about the turmoil in France: that the revolutionaries were anything but hotheads, and would pull back from the brink, you’ll see, had no interest in plunging the country into chaos or disturbing the relations of France with the other powers of Europe, etc., etc.; and while the princess was still in the middle of her vaguely assenting reply, the man on her left, Sir ***, who had been listening to the count’s words, and had just taken in what was meant by them, interrupted impetuously and, talking past the head of the princess, over her head actually, as if she did not exist, as a man will often do when his interest is piqued by what another man has just said, denounced the count as a damned republican and subversive, and spilled his wine, and caused the whole table to stop talking, and while the Cavaliere interposed his calming affability and the Cavaliere’s consort added her earnest agreement with what Sir *** had said about the dangers of the situation in France (the opposite of what Count *** had said), but said it in such a warmhearted and innocent way that the boring count did not feel betrayed; indeed, each man felt that the Cavaliere’s spirited and lovely young companion was in agreement with him on that vexatious subject. So winning were her social skills—in spite of, no, even because of, the indelible streak of commonness, thought the bewitched Cavaliere. She was warm, she was bounteous. He could not live outside the summer of her smile. And he tipped his fine dry smile toward her as the uproar about the damned events in France subsided, and she swung back to him, cheeks flushed, glorying in his approval, and raised her glass of red wine to him, blew him a kiss, and drank it in one endearing, admittedly less than elegant, draught.