The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  Following supper and the entertainment offered by the Cavaliere’s wife, the evenings usually devolved into late-night card parties and relays of gossip and condescending observations about the wantonness of local manners. The refugees told their old stories to each other, and made light of the inconveniences of their new situation. Nothing should seem to impair their capacity for pleasure—their pleasures. They saved their complaints, their vehement complaints, for letters, especially those to friends and family back in England. But that’s what letters were for: to say something new, and say it eloquently. Society was for saying something old—predictable, throwaway, offhand—which would not startle the auditor. (Only savages blurted out what they felt.) Letters were for saying—I confess, I admit, I must avow. Letters took a long time to arrive, which encouraged their recipients to hope that in the meantime the sender’s misfortunes had eased.

  Some were making arrangements to return to England. For the news was bad—that is, it was just what the refugees expected. Two weeks after the flight of the government from Naples, the French moved an army of six thousand soldiers into the city, and by late January a cabal of enlightened aristocrats and professors had engendered a monstrosity that called itself the Parthenopean or Vesuvian Republic.

  Most of the refugees were inclined to consider Naples lost. A foreigner who has enjoyed the good life in a poor country, life before the revolution—such an expatriate is quick to see the direst outcome for the whole country when his privileges have been rescinded. Even the Cavaliere reluctantly began to think of retirement and returning to England. But he did not see how he could extricate himself from Palermo. Not yet. Their magnificent friend, on whom all depended, spoke no foreign languages and could not be expected to understand, like a professional diplomat, the doublespeak of a court. They could not leave the King and Queen, as long as the fate of the country still hung in the balance. He had spoken to the King, but the King, he reported with more asperity than he intended, had given in to inarticulate gloom—whenever obliged by fresh news from Naples to ignore how much he was enjoying himself.

  In fact the King, whenever he remembered to forget his pleasures, was in a fury. None of this would have happened if Naples had remained neutral, he bellowed at his wife. It was all her fault—it was because of her partiality to the English; that is, to the Cavaliere’s wife. The Queen heard out the King’s tirade in silence, the dense silence of a woman who knows that, although more intelligent than her husband, she is still only a wife, subject to his whim. She—despite her undiminished mistrust of the people, for all their vaunted loyalty to the royal family and the Church—was convinced that the French occupation, and this charade of a republic which had come into existence under French patronage and protection, could not possibly last. The people were picking off French soldiers who were foolhardy enough to wander at night in the byways of the city. Two soldiers had been murdered in a brothel by some neighborhood customers, and a mob had attacked one of the French barracks, managing to butcher twelve of the sleeping soldiers. And then, said the Queen to the Cavaliere’s wife, there is our ally, syphilis. In that time often rapidly disabling or fatal, the horrifying illness which the Italians called the French disease and the French called le mal de Naples could be relied on to deduct at least a thousand soldiers.

  The activities of the hero, rather than the Cavaliere’s affairs, had become the main concern of the household. Commanders of other ships arrived for consultation. There was the defense of Sicily to organize, lest Napoleon be tempted to launch an invasion of the island. And Cardinal Ruffo, who had come with them to Palermo, was volunteering to return and lead an organized armed resistance to the French occupation. He proposed to make a clandestine landing on the coast of his native Calabria, where he owned a number of vast estates. From his own peasants he would levy an army—he told the Queen that, with promises of a tax amnesty and the right of unrestrained looting once Naples was retaken, he expected to raise between fifteen and twenty thousand men. The Queen had given her support to Ruffo’s plan even though, with one exception, she trusted none of her subjects. She was counting more on a British blockade of Naples, which would compel the already overextended French forces to withdraw. With the French gone, the republicans would be left defenseless before the righteous wrath of the people. Thank God—the Queen crossed herself—the people had found an appropriate target for their vicious energies.

  So far the French had not moved farther south than Naples; it seemed unlikely that they were planning to cross the Strait of Messina. But fear of revolution had come to Palermo. Although no revolutionary voices were yet audible, the look of fellow travelers had already arrived: shorter hair for women, longer hair for men. Watch the evolution of hair styles among the educated class! The King gave orders that anyone who appeared in a box at the opera or theatre with unpowdered hair was to be expelled. Men who had grown their hair below their ears were to be seized and shaved; any among them who wrote articles or books were imprisoned, while their dwellings were searched for further proof of revolutionary sympathies. One proof was finding a book, any book, by Voltaire, whose work—ever since 1791, when his remains were borne to the Pantheon in a great ceremony of apotheosis—was now synonymous with the Jacobin cause.

  Odd to think that possession of a book by Voltaire could procure a gentle reader three years in the galleys. What a churl this illiterate King was! The Cavaliere, in the privacy of his own study, still felt the greatest admiration for the sage of Ferney, who would surely have been appalled to find himself a patron saint of Revolution and Terror. Who could have predicted that Voltaire’s delightful mockery of received ideas would one day be taken as an invitation to tear down lawful arrangements in the best interests of order and stability? Who, other than the naïve or the benighted, felt they must put into practice what they had enjoyed in a book? (Had his passion for the artifacts of ancient Rome led him to the worship of Jupiter and Minerva?) Unfortunately, some of his distinguished friends in Naples had done just that. He feared they would pay a heavy price for their naïveté.

  No, to read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader’s own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement—not incitement. And reading was mostly what the Cavaliere did in these first weeks while he was still feeling ill, including rereading an essay on happiness by Voltaire. It was the best way to endure the elsewhere of exile: to be in the elsewhere of a book. And as he became stronger, he could gradually be where he was.

  Diarrhea and rheumatism still kept him too indisposed to join the King, who had removed to one of the royal estates in the countryside to hunt. But the sour-sweet charms of this city began to rouse him. The tawny palaces ringing the harbor with their hybrid fantasies (Byzantine–Moorish, Moorish–Norman, Norman–Gothic, Gothic–Baroque). The looming pinkish limestone mass of Mount Pellegrino: one can see mountains or the sea at the end of almost every street. The gardens of oleander, smilax, agave, yucca, bamboo, and banana and pepper trees. Palermo, he admitted, might be thought as beautiful in its own way as Naples, even though it lacked a volcano in the distance, smoking under the brilliant blue and cloudless sky. (Would that he were a few years younger and could look forward to an expedition to Etna, climbed but once and so many years ago.) His sense of beauty had reawakened—and with it the old habits that defined him as an acquirer of the beautiful. Being one of the most famous men in the kingdom and acquainted, at least by correspondence, with all the notables and learned people in the city, he was besieged by invitations to view, to examine, to purchase. Collectors hoped to excite his envy. Antiquarians paraded their treasures. He looked, he allowed himself to be shown, he felt flickers of desire. But he acquired nothing. It was not only alarm about his finances that inhibited him. There was nothing irresistible, there was nothing that he felt he had to buy.

  * * *

  The collector’s temperament is fastidious, sceptical. The authori
ty of the collector lies in his ability to say: no—not that. Though there is a vulgar accumulator in the soul of every collector, his avidity must be matched by the power of his refusals.

  No, thank you. It’s very fine, but it’s not exactly what I was looking for. Almost, but not quite. The lip of the vase has a hairline crack, the painting is not as good as another of the same subject by this painter. I want an earlier work. I want a perfect example.

  The soul of the lover is the opposite of the collector’s. The defect or blemish is part of the charm. A lover is never a sceptic.

  Here is a trio. The eldest member is a great collector who had become, late in life, a lover; and whose instinct for collecting has waned. A thwarted collector who has had to let his collections out of his custody—abandoning some, sending others far away (where they have met the doom the collector most fears), packing up the rest; and who now lives without his collections, without the comfort and distraction of beautiful objects, whose merit derives in part from their belonging to him. And who has not been moved to accumulate anything more.

  The others are two people whose most cherished objects are those that adorn and announce their presence. Emblems of who they are, what they care about, how they are loved by others. He accumulates medals; she accumulates what beautifies her, and what trumpets her love for him. While the Cavaliere, with his finely tuned sense of objects—how they have to breathe, how they inevitably take over any space in which they are set out—found the prince’s palace too saturated with its owner’s personality to think of installing his own treasures, his wife, with the Cavaliere’s approval, quickly distributed the hero’s portraits, flags, trophies, and china, mugs, and glassware made to honor the victor of the Battle of the Nile throughout their new, temporary residence, making it one more museum of his glory. No space was too crowded for her.

  The lover’s involvement with objects is the opposite of the collector’s, whose strategy is one of passionate self-effacement. Don’t look at me, says the collector. I’m nothing. Look at what I have. Isn’t it, aren’t they, beautiful.

  The collector’s world bespeaks the crushingly large existence of other worlds, energies, realms, eras than the one he lives in. The collection annihilates the collector’s little slice of historic existence. The lover’s relation to objects annihilates all but the world of the lovers. This world. My world. My beauty, my glory, my fame.

  * * *

  At first he had pretended not to notice her staring, then stared back, too. Stares like long deep respirations passed between them.

  Their readiness to give themselves to strong emotions, which makes them different from the Cavaliere and so like each other, didn’t mean they understood what they were feeling or what they should do about it. The Cavaliere, who had not known passion until he met the young woman he had made his second wife, had been quick to acknowledge what he felt. But then, the Cavaliere was not interested in being understood. The hero wants to be understood—which for him means being praised and sympathized with and encouraged. And the hero is a romantic: that is, his vanity was matched by an inordinate capacity for humility when his affections were engaged. He felt so honored by the Cavaliere’s friendship, by the friendship and then the love (he dared call it love) of his wife. If I am loved by people of this quality, then I know I am worthwhile. He is infatuated with them both, and reluctant to think beyond his immediate feelings of elation in their company.

  The Cavaliere’s wife knows what she feels, but for the first time in her life doesn’t know what to do about it. She can’t help flirting, it’s as much a part of her nature as her gift for monogamy. Loyalty is one of the virtues she practices most effortlessly, not that she is averse to effort: she too had a heroic temperament. Neither wants to offend, humiliate, or hurt the Cavaliere. Both hesitate to injure their most cherished ideas of themselves. The hero is a man of honor. The Cavaliere’s wife is a reformed courtesan whose genuine devotion and serene fidelity to her husband attested to her having entirely left behind her old identity. The hero wanted to continue to be what he had always been. She wanted to continue to be what she so spectacularly had become.

  Everyone assumed they were lovers. In fact, they had not yet even kissed.

  As if by mutual accord, they tried to exhaust their passion for each other through quite public and entirely sincere expressions of mutual adulation. On one occasion, a party for the Russian ambassador, she leaned over and kissed his medals. He did not blush. And he recounted to every new guest the stories of her heroic deeds which the others had already heard. All that she had done for him, for the British cause. Her courage during the stormy passage from Naples—she never went to bed during the whole trip—and her selfless attendance on the royal couple: She became their slave, he said. And pronouncing the word slave thrilled him in a way he did not understand. He repeated it again. She became their slave.

  Saint Emma, he called her sometimes, with the most earnest expression on his face. The pattern of perfection! He wanted to admire himself, but he was even quicker to admire anyone he loved. He admired his father, he had admired Fanny, he admired the Cavaliere, and now he admired the woman who was the Cavaliere’s wife. To say that he loved her more than he had loved anyone in his life is to say he admired her more than anyone. She was his religion. Saint Emma! No one dared smile. But the refugees were becoming restless. Gratitude to the hero who had shepherded their flight to Palermo had been replaced by grumbling. They were stranded, he seemed becalmed. Wasn’t it time for him to rejoin the British fleet in the Mediterranean and win a new battle? Or return to Naples and take the city back from the French and overthrow the puppet republican government? Why did he linger?

  Of course, everyone knew why.

  Whenever she performed a suite of her celebrated Attitudes—the same repertory, the same entrancing art, which even her severest critics still judged admirable—he was there, watching raptly, his right sleeve twitching, a beguiling, beatific smile on his full lips. By God, that is splendid, he exclaimed. If only the greatest actresses of Europe could have been among us tonight, how much they could have learned from you.

  The guests exchanged knowing glances. She was not just impersonating Cleopatra now, she was Cleopatra, ensnaring Antony: a Dido whose charms detain Aeneas; an Armida who has bewitched Rinaldo—the familiar stories from ancient history and epic everyone knew, in which a man destined for glory makes a brief stop in the course of his great mission, succumbs to the charms of an irresistible woman, and stays. And stays. And stays.

  The influence of women on men has always been disparaged, feared, for its power to make men gentle, loving—weak; which means that women are thought to pose a particular danger for soldiers. A warrior’s relation to women is supposed to be brutal, or at least callous, so he can go on being battle-ready, violence-primed, brother-bonded, death-resigned. So he can be strong. But this warrior really was battered, and needed time to heal and be cared for. It took time to refit and repair the Vanguard, badly damaged by the storm. And his presence in Palermo was useful. Though not well enough to go back to sea, he stayed busy, drawing up plans to send a squadron under the command of Captain Troubridge to blockade the harbor of Naples. And the Cavaliere’s wife was helping him. It was his glory that she loved. Together they are moving toward a great destiny, for him. And she was not a woman with a lapful of hero but, in her own way, a hero too.

  * * *

  He wanted to please her. She wanted so desperately to please him.

  Ambition and the desire to please—these are not incompatible, for a woman. If you please, you are rewarded. The more you please, the greater your rewards. This is why monogamy can work so well for a woman. You know whom you have to please.

  Now there were two men, her husband and their friend, whom the Cavaliere’s wife wanted to please.

  The Cavaliere’s money worries were accumulating. He had been obliged to ask for several loans from their friend, confident that he could repay the money as soon as his great vase
collection was sold in London, and in the meantime was discreetly selling some cameos, gems, small statues, and other lesser loves among the antiquities he had rescued from Naples. His wife had a plan: she would try to win enough money for their current expenses at the gambling table. But what started as one more dash of intervention in response to someone’s distress turned into a passion. Another passion. Gambling, drinking, eating—all her activities were unstinting, became cravings. And the heightened, doubled desire to please further turned up the volume of her personality, her appetites.

  The Cavaliere knew what she was up to when she played faro and hazard late into the night and began to count on her success, which made it grueling for him either to watch her or to ignore her. He despised anything imploring in himself: on these evenings he usually retired early. The hero remained by her side, whispered in her ear, beamed when she won, staked her to another game when she lost. How brilliantly she played, win or lose, thought the hero. No one would even have a chance against her were it not for an endearing frailty that sometimes made her a bit muddled. He had noticed she became tipsy after the second glass of brandy. How odd, he thought. If he drank two glasses of brandy, he was not affected. As indifferent to drink as he was to cards (the hero was almost as abstemious as the Cavaliere), he didn’t understand that the rapidity with which she became drunk was a sign not of an unusual susceptibility but of advanced alcoholism.

  She is a gifted player, but sometimes continues after a steady run of good fortune, risking her precious winnings, so as to keep him near. For she is never so muddled as to forget his electric presence beside her, or behind her, or across a room talking, gesturing, and, in fact, as aware of her as she is of him.