The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  Lamps in the shape of a human or animal limb.

  Tables constructed of shards of tile and made too tall to be of use.

  Columns and pyramids, at least forty of them, made of different kinds of china and pottery; one column has a chamber pot for its plinth, a circle of little flowerpots for its capital, and a four-foot-long shaft composed entirely of teapots that diminish gradually in size from plinth to capital.

  Chandeliers whose many-tiered components, suspended like drop earrings, were the bottoms, necks, and handles of broken bottles and barometers.

  Candelabra, more than three feet high, jerry-built out of pieces of caudle cups, saucers, bowls, jugs, kettles, and tilting ominously. Examining one of the candelabra more closely, the Cavaliere saw to his surprise that among the shards of humble crockery stuck together at random were segments of exceptionally fine porcelain.

  Vases, each of which disgorges a mutant creature or a scroll from its belly or base.

  The Cavaliere was starting to feel queasy, finally, as the impression of the grotesque was replaced by the impression of an immense sarcasm. He had been prepared for the grotesque. He had not been prepared for the recognition that the prince’s temperament was a demented variant of the collector’s—though what this fellow collector had amassed were not objects found or purchased but made, according to his designs. To piece together fragments of costly porcelain with chunks of kitchenware—was this not merely a mocking echo of the democracy of objects found in many aristocratic collections, such as the Duchess of Portland’s, which displayed exquisite paintings alongside branches of coral and seashells. Like any collector, the prince had surrounded himself with things for people to pay attention to, marvel at when they visited him. They defined him. He was, above all, the proprietor of these objects—which spoke for him, which announced the way he saw the world. They did not say what the Cavaliere, like all great collectors, wished to say with objects: look at all the beauty and interest there is in the world. They said: the world is mad. Ordinary life is ridiculous, if you take some distance from it. Anything can turn into anything else, anything can be dangerous, anything can collapse, give way. An ordinary object can be made from … anything. Any shape can be deformed. Any common purpose served by objects balked.

  How many of them there were! As the trio followed the chamberlain through room after room, their ability to respond to what they were seeing began to buckle under the emotional weight, the sheer profusion of assertive objects. Like any obsessed collector, the prince could not get enough of what he coveted. Like a collector, he lived in a crowded space—the objects accumulated, multiplied. And the prince had devised a way to make them multiply further.

  They had been brought into the great salon, one of the many rooms whose ceiling, walls, doors, even locks were covered with mirrors.

  Where are the monsters, said the Cavaliere’s wife. There’s no monsters here.

  The Cavaliere explained that some of the late prince’s more fanciful creations had already been taken away and destroyed by his half brother, the present head of the family, who did not enjoy the villa’s continuing notoriety.

  Servants were bringing in tea and setting it on a great sideboard with panels made from hundreds of sawn-off pieces of antique gilt frames in different styles of carving. The black-garbed chamberlain had become more animated since they had entered the room.

  Ah, if you could have seen the villa in the days when my late master was alive, the chamberlain broke out. The chandeliers ablaze, the room full of His Highness’s friends dancing and enjoying themselves.

  Did the prince give balls? asked the Cavaliere sharply. I am surprised to hear it. I should have thought a man of his tastes and temperament would have preferred seclusion.

  True, Excellency, said the chamberlain. My master preferred the villa to himself. But his wife sometimes longed for company.

  His wife, exclaimed the Cavaliere’s wife. Did he have a wife?

  Did they have children? asked the hero, who could not help wondering if a pregnant woman confined in these surroundings would not give birth to a monster.

  My master lacked nothing that makes a man happy, said the chamberlain.

  One would hardly suppose that, thought the Cavaliere, who had begun to examine the room.

  May I humbly suggest, said the chamberlain, that Their Excellencies not sit—

  Not sit?

  He was pointing. There.

  Oh. Indeed, one would have little incentive to do so. Not on chairs with legs of different lengths, ensuring that no one could sit on them.

  Nor there, observed the hero, waving his arm at some normally constructed chairs grouped with their backs to one another. Most unfriendly, wouldn’t you agree?

  Nor there, continued the chamberlain solemnly, indicating three handsome ornate chairs arranged in the proper way, so that those conversing could face one another.

  Why not, hooted the Cavaliere’s wife, rolling her eyes at her husband in the familiar language of marital complicity.

  If her ladyship will touch one of the chairs …

  She went toward it.

  Carefully, my lady!

  She ran her beringed hand over the velvet-cushioned seat, and burst out laughing.

  What is it, said the hero.

  There’s a spike under the cushion!

  Perhaps, said the Cavaliere, we will forgo tea and venture out into the park. It is a fine day.

  So my master would have wished it, said the chamberlain.

  The Cavaliere, displeased with the chamberlain’s tone, which since their arrival had seemed to him slightly impertinent, turned with a reproving stare to make the gesture that dismissed him (one of the rare occasions for looking closely at a servant’s face), and only then observed that the man had a steely blue eye and a lustrous brown one—rhyming as it were with the hybrid objects the late prince had designed.

  The Cavaliere’s wife, trained by years of womanly solicitude to read every shift of her husband’s attention, instantly saw what the Cavaliere was noticing. As the chamberlain bowed gravely and backed toward a door, she murmured something to the hero, who smiled, waited until the chamberlain had left, and then said he would be happy to have a brown and a blue eye if he could see with both of them. The Cavaliere’s wife exclaimed how handsome he would be with eyes of different color.

  Shall we go out, said the Cavaliere.

  Forgive me if I do not join you both for a while, said the hero, who was looking a little wan. He was tired, he was often tired. It seemed an exertion even to have to put the shield back on his poor eye, to protect it from the roasting effulgence of Sicilian sun.

  Please remain with our friend, said the Cavaliere to his wife. I shall enjoy looking by myself.

  Before leaving them, however, he could not resist providing one more observation, to make sure that they fully appreciated the originality of the room in which they stood.

  Looking up at the irregular panes of smoky mirror on the ceiling, he explained that the prevalence of mirrors is what he regarded as most novel in the prince’s conception. I myself had once thought, he said—then paused, recalling with vexation the mirrored wall and lost vistas of his observatory room in Naples.

  And note, he continued, stifling the pang, note how skillfully it is done. Taking sheets of mirror and breaking them into a multitude of little mirrors, each a different size, then ingeniously fitting them together, creates effects that are undoubtedly bizarre. Since each of them makes a small angle with the other, the effect is like that of multiplying glass, so that the three of us walking below make three hundred of us walking above. But I find this abundance of effects preferable to the monotony that would result from covering so vast a room with unbroken expanses of glass.

  The Cavaliere’s wife and the hero were listening attentively, respectfully. They are both genuinely interested in what the Cavaliere had to say. At the same time they see each other—they spy on each other—while the Cavaliere goes on talking. A room wi
th mirrors is a fearful temptation. Even more so a room with a canopy of broken mirrors, as faceted as a fly’s eye, in which they see themselves multiplied, superimposed, deformed—but deformities created by mirrors only make them laugh.

  And when the Cavaliere went off to look at some other rooms and tour the park, and they realize it is just the two of them now, when father has gone and the children are left alone in the funhouse, they stand there in silence, the fat lady and the short man with one arm, and try to look only at the mirrors, but a gust of happiness that seems to have no borders, bliss without an edge, envelops them, and exhausted by the stress of desire, hilarious with happiness, they turn toward each other and kiss (and kiss and kiss), and their turn, their kiss, was shattered, multiplied in the mirrors above.

  * * *

  In these surroundings, which bespeak reclusiveness, refusal of ordinary sentiments, whose only romance is with objects, two people who have long loved each other have given way to the most ordinary and powerful of passions, from which there is no turning back.

  For the Cavaliere another revelation had been in store. He had been gone for almost an hour, long enough to let his wife and their friend fully savor the force they had unleashed, and, embarrassed by its strength, to want to go look for him. They found him in the park seated on a marble bench, his back to the scarlet hibiscus and crimson bougainvillea climbing over a low wall crowned with more monsters, and listened to him describe in an oddly subdued voice another curious figure he had noted on the way to the park: the Atlas whose broad muscular back bends under the weight of an empty wine barrel. They could not help wondering, guiltily, if the somberness of his mood meant that he had divined what has just happened. But the Cavaliere had not been thinking about his companions at all for some time.

  When he had descended one side of the monumental double-flighted external staircase and made his way to the rear of the villa, he was still thinking about them. Then something he had seen had made him lose himself, and so he lost them too.

  It was in the prince’s chapel. As soon as the Cavaliere entered the dank interior, he was stopped mid-stride. Something, he sensed, was moving high above his head. Probably a bat—he hated bats. Then he realized it was too large, and merely swaying; there was something hanging from the high gilded ceiling which had been agitated by the spring breeze he had let in with him when he opened the door. He could make it out now above him. It was the life-size carved figure of a man kneeling, on nothing, in prayer. As the Cavaliere’s eyes became more accustomed to the dimness, he saw that the man was dangling in the musty void from a long chain fastened to the crown of his head. And this chain continued up to a hook that had been screwed into the navel of a large Christ nailed to his cross, which was fixed flat to the ceiling. Both the Crucified One and the suppliant suspended in the air were painted in disturbingly realistic colors.

  Blasphemy could not distress this fervent atheist. But fear could, his own stab of fear at the sight of the hanging man, and the expression of inconsolable fear in another. The prince’s congeries of grotesque persons and objects did not mean that the prince had been mad. What they signified is that he had been afraid.

  He was more daring than I, thought the Cavaliere as he fled the chapel to wait for his wife and their friend to join him. The prince had taken the curiosity and avidity of the collector to its terminal stage, where the attachment to objects releases an ungovernable spirit of raillery. He had every reason to be afraid, and therefore to want to mock his fears. Weighed down with his objects, he had lowered himself, he had floated down, he had plummeted deep into his own feelings and naturally, because he had descended far enough, he had arrived in hell.

  * * *

  The Cavaliere has finally learned from Charles of the loss of his vases on the Colossus last December 10th. His collection was already under the sea when he was making his own perilous crossing. If they could have saved a few of his chests, only a few! For he learns that the one chest the sailors chose to rescue from the hold, thinking it contained treasure, was found when opened to contain a British admiral preserved in alcohol, who was being shipped home for burial. Damn his body, the Cavaliere wrote to Charles.

  The death of objects can release a grief even more bewildering than the death of a loved person. People are supposed to die, hard as that is to keep in mind. Whether one lived with boring prudence, as the Cavaliere now did, or courted death, as his glorious friend did every time he went into battle, the end is the same, inevitable. But objects as durable and as ancient as the Cavaliere’s magnificent antique vases, especially such objects, which have survived so many centuries, offer a promise of immortality. Part of why we become attached to them, collect them, is that it is not inevitable that they will some day be subtracted from the world. And when the promise is broken, by accident or negligence, our protestations seem pointless. Our grief a mite indecent. But the mourning, which amplifies grief and thereby eases it, still needs to be done.

  Incredulity is our first response to the destruction of something we cherish profoundly. To begin to mourn, one must get past the feeling that this is not happening or has not happened. It helps to be present at the disaster. Having witnessed Catherine’s diminishing, having leaned over her for the last breath, he had seen that his unhappy wife had ceased to exist; he had mourned, he had forgiven her for dying, and stopped mourning. Had his treasures gone in a fire in his own house, had they been devoured by lava, whose onrush he had seen with his own eyes, he would know how to do the mourning appropriate for beloved objects; mourning would do its work—and end, before he was irreparably wounded by the unfairness of the loss.

  Whatever does not happen before our eyes must be taken on trust. And trust, for the Cavaliere, is becoming scarce. To learn that his treasures had been lost months ago, and so far away, was no different from learning of the death, similarly distant in time and geography, of a beloved person. Such a death bears a peculiar imprint of doubt. To be told one day that someone who has gone off to the other side of the world, and with whom you expect momentarily to be reunited, has actually been dead for many months, during which you have been going on with your life, unaware of this subtraction that has taken place, makes a mockery of the finality of death. Death is reduced to news. And news is always a little unreal—which is why we can bear to take in so much of it.

  The Cavaliere mourned for his treasures. But a mourning that begins so posthumously, and under such conditions of doubt and disbelief, can never be fully experienced. Because he could not really mourn, he raged. His powers of recuperation, his resilience, had already been sorely tested, tested as they had never been, in the dispiriting weeks after his arrival in Palermo. But he had managed to pull himself together and reassemble, on a smaller scale, some of his old enjoyments. The loss of his treasures was a defining blow. He felt an accrual of bitterness, this man who had never before entertained the idea that he might be unlucky.

  The Cavaliere’s world is shrinking. He longed to be back in England, though such a retirement was not likely to be tranquil: he owed his bankers fifteen thousand pounds which he had expected to repay in large part by the sale of his vase collection. (He would have to borrow more from his friend, who has far less money than he but is so generous.) But, he felt, he could not yet extricate himself from Palermo. If there was a chance that their first capital could be returned to the King and Queen in the coming months, it would be worth waiting. His life in Naples could never be restored, but at least those who disrupted his felicity and set into motion all these losses would be punished.

  Distance has betrayed him. And time is his enemy. His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him—for his body—any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him. He is impatient to discharge his rage. He follows the news from Naples, and confers often with the royal couple and their ministers. The diplomat’s virt
ue of patience, of waiting for events to season and ripen, has quite left him. He wants everything to happen soon, so he can be free, free to leave this dreadful Palermo and return to England. Why does everything happen so slowly?

  For the Cavaliere’s wife and the hero the world has shrunk, too, but in the most exalting sense. To each other. Any change from their present situation is fraught with the likelihood of separation. And the Cavaliere’s wife is starting to like Palermo, but then she is the only one of the trio with something of the south in her.

  Don’t change anything!

  In May the hero left Palermo for the first time since their arrival five months earlier, taking his squadron off the western tip of Sicily, to see if he can detect any new movements of the French fleet. He reassured his friends that he would be gone only a week. The waters are calm. The weather is excellent. The no-sharper-than-usual pain in the stump of his right arm tells him there will not be a storm.

  The Cavaliere was cheered by this sign of their friend’s recovery. And the woman supposed responsible for the hero’s inaction also rejoiced in this evidence of his renewed health. By making him happy she had been making him well, and that was the point, too; so that he would be able to go back to war and win even greater glory for England, even greater victories. Still, she found his departure unbearable. The daily letters they wrote each other rapidly crisscrossed the space between them. But sending precious things away, out into the world, is always a little sad, even when there is hardly any chance they will be lost. It confirms distance and separation. It was not fully real to her that he had gone until the first time she wrote him, a few hours later. Then the awareness that he was not that far away, that he would not be gone for very long, lost all its power to console. Indeed, it is knowing how soon he would be holding the letter, reading it, that is painful. She stared at the letter, this bird that will fly to his breast. She ought to surrender it to the shiny-faced lieutenant waiting deferentially at the threshold of the drawing room, who will gallop west across the hundred miles that separate them and put it in his hand. But she didn’t want to give it up, she didn’t want to lose the letter, which could be with him tomorrow, while she is here and can’t be with him; and overcome by such a dizzying sense of loss, she burst into tears. Suddenly space and time make no sense to her. Why isn’t everything right here? Why doesn’t everything happen at once?