The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  If he were outside he could see it, brave it: the ship rising, pitching forward, and falling back between two high walls of black water. Was he afraid to die? Yes, like this. It would be better to go up on deck, if his trembling legs could negotiate the slippery passage. He had gone out of the cabin to try to find his wife, wandered down the narrow listing corridor sloshing in several inches of cold sea and excrement and vomit, and turned right. Then the candle he was holding went out. He was afraid of getting lost. He longed for his Ariadne to come and console him—hold out a thread. But he was not Theseus, no, he was the Minotaur trapped in the labyrinth. Not the hero but the monster.

  Steadying himself by holding on to the slimy walls and rough guide ropes, he returned to his tiny cabin. The candle-lantern was still lit. As he shut the door, the ship dipped sickeningly and he was hurled against the wall. He slid to the floor and held on to the frame of the bed, then leaned against it, gasping at the shock, at the stinging pain in his breastbone. The lantern flickered. He rocked violently from side to side. Every piece of furniture was bolted to the floor but he was not. He closed his eyes.

  What had the sibyl said? Breathe.

  Recipe: When you are sad, when you are alone, when no one else comes, you can summon spirits to keep you company. He opened his eyes. Efrosina Pumo was sitting now in the cabin with him, nodding with concern. And Tolo was there too, so it was not true that he had been cut down by a French soldier on the retreat from Rome. Tolo is holding his ankles, steadying him, keeping him from slumping over. And Efrosina is stroking his forehead.

  Do not be afraid, my lord.

  I’m not afraid, he thought. I’m humiliated.

  He had not seen Efrosina in many years. She ought to be very old, but she looks younger than when he first visited her so many years ago. He wondered how that was possible. And Tolo looks young too, not the bearded, brawny fellow with a half-closed eye who had accompanied him up the mountain for twenty years (growing a little less agile, even he), but again the delicate, vulnerable boy with the open milky eye he had once been.

  Am I going to die, murmured the Cavaliere.

  She shook her head.

  But the ship is going to capsize.

  Efrosina has told you when. You still have four more years.

  Only four years, he thought. That’s not so long! He knew he should be relieved.

  I don’t want to die this way, he said sullenly.

  Then he noticed—why hadn’t he noticed before?—that Efrosina was holding out a deck of cards.

  Let me show you your destiny, my lord.

  But he could barely read the card he picked. All he could see was someone upside down. Is that me? he thought. The way the ship pitches and turns, I feel as if I’m upside down.

  Yes, it is His Excellency. Notice the expression of detachment on the face of the Hanged Man. Yes, my lord, it is you.

  The Cavaliere a man hanging head down in the air with his hands tied behind his back, suspended by his right ankle from a wooden gibbet?

  Yes, it is certainly His Excellency. You have cast yourself head first into the void, but you are calm—

  I am not calm!

  You have faith—

  I do not have faith!

  He studied the card for a moment. But this means I will die.

  Not so—and she sighed. The card does not mean what you think. Look with the eye of indifference, my lord. She laughed mirthlessly. Not only will you not hang, my lord, I promise you that you will live to hang other people.

  But he didn’t want to hear about the cards. He wanted Efrosina to distract him, to make the storm into a picture on the wall, make the dark walls white, draw back the space, raise the ceiling.

  The storm swatted the ship again and he heard a crashing sound and shouts from the deck. Another mast fallen? It was tipping more strongly to one side. It’s going over now, he can feel it. Tolo! The air will start to fill with water. Tolo!

  The boy was still there, massaging his feet.

  I cannot find my calm, he muttered.

  Take out your pistol, my lord, you will feel safer. Tolo’s voice. A man’s counsel.

  My pistol?

  Tolo brought him the traveling case, which contained two pistols he always carried with him, while Efrosina wiped the sweat from his brow. He took them out. He closed his eyes.

  Safer now?

  Yes.

  And it was thus that his two companions left him, with a pistol in each hand, trying, despite the swerve and smash of the storm, to hold as still as he can.

  * * *

  The Cavaliere’s wife had just left the cabin of the Austrian ambassador, Prince Esterházy, who had been vomiting and praying, when she realized with a start that she had not seen the Cavaliere for several hours. She made her way down the heaving corridor to their cabin.

  What relief she felt when she pushed the door open and saw him, sitting up on a trunk; and what fright, when she saw he was holding a pistol in each hand.

  Oh, what’s that!

  Guggle guggle guggle, he said in a ghostly toneless voice.

  What?

  The sound of salt water in my throat, he shouted.

  In your throat?

  In the ship! In my throat! The moment I feel the ship sinking—he brandished the pistols—I intend to shoot myself.

  Holding on to the shuddering door frame, she stared at him until he averted his eyes and stopped waving the pistols.

  Guggle guggle, he said.

  She was overcome with pity for his fear and misery. His mouth looked swollen. But she did not rush to comfort him, as she had been comforting so many others on the ship. For the first time she is not his. That is, for the first time she wishes he were other than he is—a doleful elderly man, weakened by vomiting, offended by stink and the proximity of too many human animals and the absence of all decorum.

  The ship isn’t going to sink, she said. Not with our great friend at the helm.

  Come and sit by me, said the Cavaliere.

  I’ll be back in an hour. The Queen—

  Your dress is stained.

  In no more than an hour I’ll be back. I promise!

  And she was, and that night, it was Christmas Eve, the wind fell. She coaxed the Cavaliere onto the deck to watch a fine sight: the live volcanoes of the Lipari Islands, Stromboli and Vulcano, flaring and flaming skyward. They stood together. The wind slapped and salted their faces, and the volcanic fires lit up the star-speckled sky.

  See, see, she murmured, and put her arm around him. Then she guided him back to the cabin, where the presence of Efrosina and Tolo still lingered.

  She left the Cavaliere to sleep, having resolved not to enter a bed as long as she was needed. At dawn she came back to the cabin to wake him and brought him outside on the debris-strewn deck. The sea had gone flat, the red ball of the rising sun was burnishing the full-out sails with rosy light, and the ghosts of the two who had come to console the Cavaliere began to fade. She showed him a note she had received at four in the morning, while she was in the Queen’s cabin trying to lull the fretful, squirming Carlo Alberto back to sleep. Addressed to her from the hero, it requested the happiness of having the Cavaliere, her ladyship, and Mrs. Cadogan take Christmas dinner with him at midday in the admiral’s cabin. What a beautiful morning, she said.

  The dinner was under way, with the exhausted hero not eating at all, the nauseated Cavaliere attempting to eat, and the two women (Mrs. Cadogan had slept only an hour) eating heartily, when they were interrupted by someone knocking, hitting, beating the door. It was one of the Queen’s maids, who between sobs begged the Cavaliere’s wife to come quickly to the Queen’s cabin. Mrs. Cadogan excused herself and followed her daughter. They arrived to see the Queen and a doctor bent over the little boy. Look, cried the Queen. Il meurt! The child’s eyes had rolled back in his head, and he was shaking spasmodically and clenching his quivering fists, thumbs inserted into the palms of his hands. The Cavaliere’s wife folded the child in her arms an
d kissed his cold forehead.

  Convulsions are a common effect of fear, said the doctor. When the young prince comes to his senses and realizes that the storm has subsided—

  No, the Cavaliere’s wife shouted. No!

  She rocked the stiffening child, while the Queen railed against her fate, and Mrs. Cadogan wedged a piece of towel between his teeth and wiped the foam from his mouth. The shouts of sailors told them Palermo had been sighted. Palermo! As the intervals between one paroxysm and the next became shorter, the Cavaliere’s wife held the boy more firmly to her breast, rocking him, breathing with him, as if she could make his breathing unite with hers, and crooning English hymns from her childhood. He died that evening in her arms.

  Shortly after midnight the Vanguard dropped anchor, and an hour later the drowsy weeping Queen boarded a small boat with two of her daughters and a few servants. The King refused to leave the ship until a proper welcome by his Sicilian subjects had been organized on the splendid marina; he had never before visited his second capital.

  The Cavaliere’s wife wanted to accompany the Queen, but worried that the hero might need her services as an interpreter in the morning.

  She was depleted. It was all right to sleep now.

  Toward noon the next day, to the cheers of a boisterous, inquisitive throng and a deafening salvo of cannon, the King went ashore. The admiral, flanked by his two friends, watched dourly from the quarter-deck. He was not in a good mood. Although everyone in his custody except the unfortunate prince was alive and safe, this did not feel like one of his triumphs. The other warships and the twenty merchant ships that had left Naples—transporting in abominable discomfort but without incident some two thousand refugees, the King’s favorite servants and hounds, and the Queen’s maids—had already arrived. The storm had ambushed only his ship, the flagship. Three topsails were split, the mainmast and rigging badly damaged. He felt needlessly buffeted. Perhaps he was simply very tired. The Cavaliere’s wife was wide awake, pleased with her conduct during the emergency—she had behaved well, she had thought only of others—and enjoying the spectacle of the royalist crowd. She was having an adventure. She felt irresponsible. She wished they could remain a while longer on the ship. The Cavaliere stood between them—the ghostly trio of which he had been a member during the storm replaced by the real one, he with his wife and their friend. He felt light-headed, relieved not to be retching, impatient to put his feet on land again. They congratulated one another on their good fortune.

  5

  Another storm.

  After leaving Naples in October, plodding nervily across the Mediterranean, past the ships of warring nations, through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the ocean, up the Iberian, then the French coast, clinging to the western ledge of Europe, the storeship Colossus, carrying two thousand rare antique vases in its entrails, had struck out for England and near the end of its two-month-long journey, off the Scilly Isles, ran into a merciless, protean storm, shuddered, rocked, took on water, fractured, foundered, and was wrecked. There was time to save all members of the crew. Time even to dump into a lifeboat one crate from the hold believed by the sailors to contain treasure—not one of the crates bearing the Cavaliere’s seal. The roiling waters rose over real treasure, the second and greater collection of vases that the Cavaliere had assembled.

  Water. Fire. Earth. Air. Four modes of disaster. Possessions lost to fire disappear. They change into … air. Possessions lost to fire’s enemy, water, are not consumed, though they may break (if porous, like paper, bloat and rot). They still exist, possibly intact, but sunk, sequestered, out of reach. They are still there, decaying imperceptibly, encrusted by sea creatures, shifting aimlessly under the tides, buoyed up and sucked back in their little space—an unhappier fate than lying under the earth, for they are much farther down, much more inaccessible. What the ground covers is not so hard to bring up, and may have been uncannily preserved by earth-burial. Look at the cities doomed, then buried, by Vesuvius. But to be covered by water …

  Having survived his storm, the Cavaliere still doesn’t know his vases were already lost to water several weeks before the flight from Naples. The Vanguard has made it safely to the Palermo harbor. And the relief at surviving the humiliating, storm-tossed passage dulled his anguish at the precipitous departure, which had allowed him to take only a select number of cherished objects in addition to his pictures. He tried not to think of all that he had left behind in his magnificently furnished houses, which now lie unguarded, awaiting their plunderers. He thought of his horses and seven handsome carriages, and Catherine’s spinet, harpsichord, and piano.

  But surely he need not conclude that he would never see his abandoned possessions again. Never entertain guests at his Vesuvian villa. Never set out on horseback at dawn from the lodge in Caserta to the cries of beaters and hounds. Never watch beauty bathing from the rocks at Posillipo. Never again stand at the window of his observatory room, admiring the sweep of the bay and his dear mountain. No. No. Yes? No. The Cavaliere was as ill-prepared as any connoisseur of disaster for the real thing.

  * * *

  Temporarily then, for a short time only, they were to live in Palermo: the south of south.

  Every culture has its southerners—people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing, brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives—envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibited, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do. Every country, including southern countries, has its south: below the equator, it lies north. Hanoi has Saigon, Sao Paulo has Rio, Delhi has Calcutta, Rome has Naples, and Naples, which to those at the top of this peninsula hanging down from the belly of Europe was already Africa, Naples has Palermo, the crescent-shaped second capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where it is even hotter, more heathenish, more dishonest, more picturesque.

  As if to test the stereotype, it was snowing in palmy Palermo when they arrived just after Christmas. During the first weeks of January they camped in a few vast rooms of a villa with hardly any furniture and no fireplaces; a southern city is never prepared for a cold snap. The hero was desk-bound, writing furious dispatches. Wrapped in quilts, the Cavaliere shivered, brooded, and endured a merciless bout of diarrhea. Only his wife, who could not bear to be unoccupied, went out often, mainly to be at the Queen’s side as she supervised the installation of her large family in the royal palace. She returned in the evening to report to the Cavaliere and their friend on the slovenliness of the local servants, the Queen’s understandably despondent mood, and the defection of the King, who was busy sampling the theatres, masquerades, and other pleasures of his other capital.

  Whatever the weather, the Cavaliere and his wife and their friend knew they were farther south, therefore among even more untrustworthy people, rascals and liars, more eccentric, more primitive. The thought that follows is that it was important not to change the way they had always lived. They cautioned themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture: we mustn’t let ourselves go, mustn’t descend to the level of the … jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it—then you know. The south has got you.

  * * *

  The weather turned warmer by the middle of the month as the Cavaliere reluctantly agreed to the exorbitant sum being asked for renting a palace near the Mole belonging to a
Sicilian noble family with a reputation for eccentricity, even by local standards. Imagine a prince whose coat of arms is a satyr holding up a mirror to a woman with the head of a horse! But the palace had a commanding location, and within its walls covered with colored silk and portraits of somber-looking ancestors was generously furnished; it would do as the temporary British embassy. Unfortunately, it was too fraught with its saturnine history for the Cavaliere to make it also a home: that is, a museum of his enthusiasms. Weeks after they occupied it, he still had not unpacked most of what he was able to bring away from Naples.

  Here, in this unexpected and alarmingly costly exile, they were even more intensely a trio. A large woman and a small man who are full of feeling for each other, and a tall emaciated man who loves them both ardently and rejoices in their company. Though sometimes the Cavaliere was glad to see his wife and their friend go out, because their animation exhausts him, when they were absent for more than a few hours he longed for their return. But he wished there were not always so many at his table. A fair number of the colony of English residents in Naples who had become refugees with them found their way to his house each evening. These unpredictably large suppers for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty would end only when the Cavaliere’s wife rose from the table, or fell, or knelt—she needed no props to initiate a sample of her Attitudes—or went to the piano to play and sing; she had already learned a few sad, graceful Sicilian airs. The evenings seemed very long to the Cavaliere. But he could hardly refuse to welcome his compatriots, none of whom were as well housed as he—in all Palermo there was only one overcrowded hotel up to their standards—and at the jumped-up rates exacted from these captive tourists, double or triple what they were before. Their discomforts required that the Cavaliere flourish the standard to which they were accustomed. Arriving from their makeshift lodgings in the rented carriages for which they had been disagreeably overcharged, they thought as they entered the British envoy’s brightly illuminated residence: This is how we live. What we have a right to. This luxury, this extravagance, this refinement, this overeating; this obligation to amuse ourselves.