The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  He left. History promoted him. It was a time for concentrated men of preposterous ambition and small stature who needed no more than four hours of sleep a night. Under the canopy of many skies, on the rocking sea and the lurching ship, he gave chase to the enemy. He had many battles to his credit now. War confiscated parts of his body. The Captain, mounting seventy-four guns, then another seventy-four, the Theseus, was his island, kingdom, vehicle, platform. Five years passed. He became a hero, the hero to the rulers of Naples, who lived in terror of the small concentrated man who had taken over a fractured revolution and transposed its energies into a seemingly invincible campaign for the French conquest of Europe and the dethroning of old monarchies everywhere. He will save us, only he can save us, said the Queen. The King assented. The British envoy, representing the extension of British power, could only agree. In the last two years he had exchanged many letters with the young captain, now an admiral, in which the Cavaliere described his efforts to win cowardly Naples to the British cause. The Cavaliere’s wife had been writing him, too. She loved to admire, and here was someone really worth admiring. She needs her fix of rapture. She needs it more and more often.

  Ricocheting around the Mediterranean, the lake of war, he kept them informed, succinctly, of his accumulation of fearful injuries.

  Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements—land and water, firepower and distancing air. Of the many sail-of-the-line whose command he coveted, each with its resonant name, history, seasoned in sweat and blood, his was now the seventy-four-gun Vanguard, carrying more than six hundred officers and men. He spent as little time as possible in his large, luxuriously furnished admiral’s cabin. Day and night he paced the deck. He had the privilege of always seeing the sun rise and set. He had unobstructed views. In the water you are always moving, even when you are still. Birds floated above like tiny kites and vertical canvas clouds unfurled, tilted, crumpled, pivoted, arched into the wind, dragging the ship forward into the weather; movement is always into the weather. Cycles of light, cycles of duties—he oversaw them all. When he grew very tired, he stood on the quarter-deck, immobile, and let himself be seen. He believed that the sight of him standing there had a certain magic—he had seen it work on his men, and not only at the height of battle—and he believed it frightened the enemy. It did.

  Avenged, cried the Queen, when news reached Naples that the young admiral’s fleet had destroyed the French fleet on the Nile. Hype hype hype ma chere Miledy Je suis folle de joye, she wrote to her dear friend, the English ambassador’s wife, who had fainted when she heard the news, the joyful news of his victory. I fell on my side & I hurt myself but what of that, she wrote the admiral. I shall feal it a glory to dye in such a cause—no I wood not like to dye untill I see & embrace the Victor of the Nile.

  * * *

  And the hero vaulted into their lives.

  September 22, 1798. Leading the small flotilla of impressive boats swathed with emblems that came out in the midday heat to meet the Vanguard was the royal barge, piloted by the admiral of the Neapolitan fleet, Caracciolo, with the King and Queen and several of their children under its spangled awnings, followed by a barge with musicians from the royal chapel. The barge with the British flag carried the Cavaliere and his lady, sumptuous in blue and gold, the Bourbon colors: a blue dress with gold lace, a shawl of naval blue with gold anchors, and gold anchor earrings. The royal band had got the tune of “Rule, Britannia” right, and the Cavaliere was smiling, thinking of the words.

  All thine shall be the subject main;

  And every shore it circles, thine.

  Close behind mingled some five hundred feluccas, barges, yachts, and fishing boats swaying and bumping into one another, filled with shouting, waving people. As the royal party and the Cavaliere and his wife started to board the ship, they cheered the King, and the hero took off the green eye shield he wore and put it in his pocket.

  Our liberator, said the King. Deliverer and preserver, said the Queen. Oh, cried the Cavaliere’s wife when she saw him, haggard, coughing, his hair powdered but too long, his empty right sleeve pinned to the breast of his dress uniform, a red gash above his blind eye where he had been struck by a fragment of grapeshot during the Battle of the Nile. Oh! And she fell against him.

  She fell into my arm, it was a very affecting scene, the hero told his wife in a long letter describing the magnificence of his reception: the bay teeming with boats to welcome him, the banners, the gun salutes, the cannon booming from the ramparts of Sant’Elmo above the city, and the vivas of the crowds bedecked in velvet and braid reaching out to him when he landed, surging after him through the streets. Sunlight hurt his eye when he didn’t wear the shield, and Naples was filled with sunlight. But blessed evening came, with its splendid display of fireworks that ended in the British flag and his initials limned across the sky, and bonfires and dancing in the steeply pitched squares. My greeting from the lower classes was truly affecting. In the Cavaliere’s mansion three thousand lamps were ablaze for a banquet attended by the deferential Admiral Caracciolo, which he enjoyed and endured.

  His right arm ached, the phantom arm that started high up near his right shoulder, he was racked with coughing spasms, he had a fever. He had been holding himself in, he hated to complain. He’d always been small and thin, but he was sturdy. He knew how to endure the unbearable. Feeling ill was like a wave. One had to hold on and it would pass. Even the agony of the amputation, without a swig of rum, and the additional agony, due to the surgeon’s ineptness, as the stump suppurated for three months, even that was just a wave.

  Like the waves rocking the boat of pain—the little boat that rowed the hero away from the battle he never had a chance to fight. The boat he had stepped out of a right-handed hero, drawing his sword to lead a nighttime amphibious assault on a Spanish fort; the boat that received his senseless body as he fell backward, his right elbow shattered by grape, and which his frantic men turned around and out into the bay, hoping to reach the flagship before he died from loss of blood. He had regained consciousness, clawing at the tourniquet near his shoulder, as they were passing one of his cutters, which had been hit below water and was sinking, and he had insisted on stopping to pick up the survivors—more waves, another hour before they reached the darkened Theseus, swaying at anchor. Raging at those who would have helped him, Let me alone! I have my legs left, and one arm! he twisted a rope around his left arm and hauled himself on board, called for the surgeon to come and cut off the right one, high up, where the tourniquet was, and a half hour later was on his feet, giving orders to his flag captain in a severe, calm voice.

  Now he was a left-handed hero.

  And what was his bravery compared to that of the captain of the eighty-gun Tonnant last month at the Battle of the Nile, who lost both arms and a leg to British round shot. Refusing to allow himself to be taken below, this Dupetit Thouars called for a tub of bran to be brought up from the galley and directed that he be immersed in it to his collarbone, and went on issuing gunnery orders for another two hours until blood and consciousness drained out of him. The last words from the head sticking out of the tub of soggy red bran were to implore his crew to sink their ship rather than surrender. Now there was a gallant man! exclaimed the hero—whose hero-world had a large, necessary place for bravery, and abominable pain, bravely borne.

  And for cowardice too: the crew of the Tonnant, after observing that the head of their captain would speak no more, moved the ship out of range, surrendering it to the British victor two days later. But is it not the aim of a hero to make cowards of his enemies?

  A hero was stoical. And a hero was also candid about his thirst for glory. A clergyman’s solemn son whose mother had died when he was nine, he had gone to sea at twelve, his head filled with noble models from books; he loved to quote Shakespeare and saw himself as Hotspur, without the miserable end: gallant, impetuous, warmhearted … and, therefore, covetous of honors. He did not see himself as
gullible and vain. He admired valor, steadfastness, generosity, frankness. He wanted to approve of himself. He wanted not to let himself down. He intended to be a hero. He wanted to deserve praise, to be decorated, remembered, to figure in history books. He saw himself in history paintings, as a portrait bust, as a statue on a pedestal, or even atop a high column in a public square.

  He had wished to be taller but he loved himself in dress uniform. He had a wife in England, a widow he had married for love and to whom he considered himself devoted, and whom he had last seen when he was sent home a year ago to recover from the botched amputation. He admired her dignified character and her taste in clothes and considered that she had honored him by agreeing to be his wife. He had taken his stepson Josiah, Fanny’s only child by her first husband, to sea with him, and kept her informed in his weekly letters of the youth’s progress and misbehavior. He no longer expected children of his own. His fame would assure the continuation of his name, his great deeds would be his progeny.

  He had begun training himself to write rapidly and legibly with his left hand within two days after the amputation, though he found it hard not to keep watching that new animal, the back of his left hand—it felt as if someone else were writing his letters and dispatches.

  He did not want to feel weak, and up to now he had never felt weak, not even in the boat, nor when the surgeon did as he was ordered. Perhaps he never felt weak because no one had ever really comforted him or treated him as a suffering person. He had announced as a child that he was not to be treated as a child, that he was strong and that no one should worry about him, he was there to worry about them; and ever since, his father, his brothers and sisters, his wife, had taken him at his word. People wanted to believe in him; that was part of being a star.

  He protested to the Cavaliere and his wife that he wished to stay in a hotel. They would not hear of it. He was put to bed in the best, upper apartment in the British envoy’s residence. He begged the Cavaliere’s wife not to fuss over him. All he needed was to be alone for a little while, and he would recover. The house was very large in the Italian way, staffed with more servants than an English mansion of the same standing, as one would expect in a backward country, but she insisted on doing many of the nursing chores herself, assisted by her mother. He fainted soon after he was put to bed, and woke to the country voice and country ministrations of Mrs. Cadogan. ’Ere now, don’t be feared, I’ll not ’urt you, let me lift yer shoulder.… He remembered how his wife flinched when dressing his wound each day, how shocked she had been by the sight of the hot red ulcerous stump. Meanwhile, the Cavaliere’s wife opened the windows wide and described to him the stupendous view of the bay and Capri and the smoking mountain in the distance, which, he knew, was of special interest to the Cavaliere. She told him court gossip. She sang to him. And she touched him. She cut the nails of his left hand and bathed his poor gashed forehead with milk. When she leaned over to wash and trim his hair, the smell from her armpits was like oranges or, sweeter, like lilies; he’d never known a woman could smell like that. He kept his eyes closed and breathed it in through his nostrils.

  She seemed to admire him so much, and he enjoyed that.

  Like everyone else, he knew her story: the fallen woman, taken under the Cavaliere’s protection, who had become an irreproachable wife. But she had a warmth and directness that is never found in the world of courts. And sometimes she asked questions that no well-bred lady would have asked. For instance, she asked him about his dreams, rather an impertinent question, but he enjoyed it. The trouble was that he didn’t have any dreams, none that he could remember, only memories—of battles, of the noise and the blood and the fear. There was one dream that he’d had several times recently: he dreamed that he had both arms. He would be on deck in the thick of battle, feelings clenched, holding the spyglass to his eye with his right hand and beckoning to Captain Hardy with his left; the scene was utterly lifelike, both exactly as it was and as it could be painted, except that since it could no longer be so (he didn’t remember if he had his eye back, too), he knew that it must be a dream and would will himself awake. But he couldn’t relate this dream. It would sound like a plea for sympathy.

  He tried to make up some dreams. Dreams appropriate for a hero. I dreamed, he said, that I was mounting a large staircase. Or: I dreamed, he said, that I was standing on the balcony of a palace. Or, fearing these sounded too vainglorious: I dreamed I was alone, in a valley, wandering in an immense field filled with flowers. And … (Go on!) … I dreamed of galloping on a horse, I dreamed I was crossing a misty lake, I dreamed I was at a great banquet—no, that sounded too insipid.

  What the devil does someone dream? Had he forgotten how to converse with a beautiful woman? Hell and damnation! He was no better than a beast. All he’d thought about for so long was maps and tactics and the readiness of cannon and weather and horizon lines and lines of battle and sometimes the woman in Leghorn and always Napoleon and now the pain in his right arm, the missing arm, the ghostly pain.

  Tired and feverish as he was, he would try again.

  I dreamed I was in a theatre—no. I was dreaming that I had gained entrance to a castle and had found a secret room—no. I remember, yes, I was on a cliff, below me a raging flood—no. I was crossing a sea on the back of a dolphin and heard a voice calling me, the voice of a mermaid—no. I dreamed, I dreamed—

  She must have divined he was making them up, to entertain her. He wouldn’t have found these dreams convincing; they sounded like pictures. He didn’t mind making them up. He only wished they were better inventions. He was looking for a poetical manner …

  * * *

  Sometimes it’s acceptable not to tell the truth, the full truth, when relating or rendering the past. Sometimes it is necessary.

  According to the norms of history painting at that time, the artist must preserve the larger truth of a subject from the claims of a literal, that is, inferior, truth. With a great subject, it is that subject’s greatness which the painter must endeavor to depict. So, for instance, Raphael was praised for drawing the Apostles as noble in body and demeanor, not as the mean, lumpish figures he assumed that scripture was telling us they were. “Alexander is said to have been of low stature; a Painter ought not so to represent him,” declared Sir Joshua Reynolds. A great man does not have a mean or vulgar appearance, is not maimed or lame, does not squint or have a bulbous nose or an unsightly wig—or if he does, these aren’t part of his essence. And the essence of a subject is what a painter ought to show.

  We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus of ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones—those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

  * * *

  A mermaid!

  What, dear sir?

  He must have fallen asleep for a moment. She was looking at him tenderly.

  Embarrassed, he murmured, Did I finish telling you?

  Yes, she said, you were in a royal castle where the king and queen was giving a great banquet in your honor, such as we want to give in a few days if you be well enough, to celebrate your birthday and express the eternal gratitude of this drooping but fine country what has been picked up and saved by your valiant self.

  Of course I am well enough, he said, and tried to stand up and groaned and fell back in a faint on the bed.

  * * *

  She loved to watch him sleeping, with his left hand between his thighs, like a child. He looked so small and vulnerable. Fighting back the ache in her womb, she was glad she could say “we”—my husband and I, the Queen and I: we feel, we admire, we care, we are so
grateful, we will show you how grateful we are. Which she did.

  Never had the Cavaliere’s mansion seemed so splendid or been so brightly illuminated as one week later, on the hero’s birthday, when it was turned into a shrine to the hero’s glory.

  It was like one of his boyhood daydreams, everyone calling his name and hailing him, and he raised his glass as toast after toast was offered to the savior of the royalist cause. Just as he imagined it—except that he was lifting his glass with his left arm, and his right arm ached, it burned, and he still felt feverish and a little queasy, perhaps it was the wine. He was normally very abstemious.

  He took in the smiles and the gay dresses of the ladies, the Cavaliere’s wife radiant in a gown of blue satin, and the flowery tributes; above all he saw his name, his initials, his face—on candelabra, vases, medallions, brooches, cameos, sashes—multiplying wherever he turned. His hosts had kept the local pottery works busy these last weeks. He and they and the English residents and the officers from his squadron anchored out in the gulf had dined on plates and drunk from goblets emblazoned with his initials. And when the eighty at table adjourned to the ballroom to join the two thousand more guests whom the Cavaliere and his wife had invited to dance and to take supper, ribbons and buttons decorated with his illustrious name were distributed to everyone. He slipped eight of each inside his right sleeve to send back to Fanny and his father and some of his brothers and sisters, to show how he had been honored.

  How are you, dear sir, the Cavaliere’s wife had whispered, taking his arm as they walked toward the ballroom.

  Very well, very well.

  He felt very faint.

  Under a canopy in the center of the vast room stood something tall draped with the Union Jack and his own blue ensign. For a moment he had the absurd fancy it was a piece of one of the Vanguard’s masts. He approached it, the Cavaliere’s wife still holding his arm. He wished he could lean against it for a moment.