The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  * * *

  The Cavaliere had been infatuated with the woman he made his wife, had been enthralled by her talents and her charms, had loved her, still loves her deeply; but he did not, as the hero did, worship her. As she passed into her thirties, he desired her less. They had not made love for nearly two years. The Cavaliere wondered if she minded very much. Women often were not sorry when a husband’s lust ended. She never reproached him; and on his part there was no diminishment of trust, admiration, dependence—all the things that go by the name of love—nor of his pleasure in being kind to her. But it was her beauty, her unrivaled beauty, that he had desired.

  The hero loved her as she was. Exactly as she was. And that made his love the one this former great beauty had always wanted. He thought her majestic.

  Out there, in the world, they have both put on brave fronts about their less than ideal appearance. In here, inside their love, honesty becomes possible. They have had their tender moments of confessing the embarrassment they feel over their bodies. He said that he worried she found his stump repulsive. She told him his injuries made him more dear to her. She confessed that she was embarrassed to be so much bigger than he, that she hoped he did not mind, for she would do anything to please him, for he deserved the most beautiful woman in the world. He told her he considered her his wife. They pledged their eternal love. As soon as divorce or the other d word (it couldn’t be pronounced) freed them, they would marry.

  The hero had never before known sexual bliss. And she too experienced an unprecedented happiness in his embrace. She made him tell her about all the women he had slept with; there weren’t many. A man who has to admire in order to desire is likely to have led a modest sexual life. He, even more prone to jealousy than she, could not bear to ask her about the men before the Cavaliere. (She had not yet told him she had a daughter.) He confessed that he was jealous of the Cavaliere. He is haunted by the fear of losing her. She makes him shudder.

  Everyone was caught up in some kind of deception.

  The ending of his sexual life had not made the Cavaliere so insensitive to the erotic currents which flow between others that he had failed to take in what has happened between his wife and his friend. In fact, like everyone else, he assumed they were lovers several months before the excursion to the villa of monsters. He’d always known, a man who marries a beauty thirty-six years younger than himself would have to be a fool not to know, that this would happen one day. And he cannot acquit himself of sexual neglect of his wife in the past few years, though it is not really his fault, he tells himself. He can only congratulate himself that his wife has never, until now, given him the slightest cause for jealousy or occasion for public humiliation; and that, after so many years of marriage, her affections have wandered toward the person to whom, after her, the Cavaliere is most attached in all the world.

  The Cavaliere is not someone, like his wife or their friend, who is inclined to shirk the burden of lucidity. He is quite lucid about them. What he is deceived about is his own reactions. He was not aware of being jealous or resentful or humiliated. Since such feelings would be altogether unreasonable, how could he be? He thinks he ought not to mind. Therefore, he does not mind. But he does, for he knows that his wife feels an emotion she has never felt for him. This self-deception—this tendency to live beyond his psychological as well as his financial means—is part of the Cavaliere’s abraded talent for happiness, his wish not to be discouraged by anything other than the terminally undesirable. Someone of the Cavaliere’s temperament is already keeping at bay a great deal of anger, and fear. He was an expert in dismissing dangerous feelings.

  Because he is deceived about his own feelings, it is easier for him to be mistaken about how he can deceive others. With the curious innocence of the obsessed, the Cavaliere imagines that as long as he pretends not to know he can silence the speculation of others. He is banking on his reputation as a judicious man of the world: if such a husband seems convinced there is nothing illicit in his wife’s friendship with another man, then they will believe his dissembling, at which he knows himself to be an expert, rather than their own suspicions. A life spent among rulers has given the Cavaliere a rich experience of the powers of lies to distract from a disgracing reality, of denials to prevail over disagreeable truth. This will be just one more appearance, in which he pretends not to know some inconveniencing fact. It doesn’t occur to him that the more he denies what is going on, the more he will seem like a dupe.

  The Cavaliere does not see how he is already viewed, will be regarded for the rest of his life, and beyond: as a famous cuckold. Neither is the hero able to see what he has become in the eyes of others, and how he will be judged: part Lawrence of Arabia, self-appointed rescuer of incompetent native rulers; part Mark Antony, self-destructive lover of his own ruin.

  Unlike the Cavaliere, at least he knew what he was feeling. But he had difficulty in understanding the feelings of others when they were negative about his own person. The only negative attitudes he could understand were neglect and indifference. Usually the last to know when someone was critical of him—he had such a strongly developed sense of his own righteousness—he doesn’t realize that he is mocked and pitied; that his officers and his men consider their adored commander has been bewitched by a siren. Nor did he realize how displeased his superiors at the Admiralty were with his conduct: authorizing the preposterous Neapolitan march on Rome, diverting resources to evacuate the royal family, and delaying reentering the war against the French, remaining in Palermo, giving priority to setting the King and Queen back on the throne. Misjudgment? No, abandonment of judgment, for the personal reason that everybody gossiped about.

  Even the Cavaliere’s wife, although the most clear-sighted of the three, was in her way also self-deceived. Having had such a profound experience of the Cavaliere’s generosity, she cannot believe it will not all work out. They both loved the Cavaliere. He loved them both. Why should they not always live together, with the Cavaliere as the good father. They will be an unusual family, but a family still. (The hero’s wife back in England didn’t enter the equation.) She even dared to hope that she could become pregnant, after all the unfruitful years with Charles and the Cavaliere.

  She had had a dream recently in which she was accompanying the Cavaliere up the side of a volcano, as in the old days. But it did not look like Vesuvius. No, it must be Etna. It seemed they already knew that a minor eruption had started a few hours earlier; and after a while the Cavaliere suggested that they stop to eat and rest, and wait for the eruption to subside. She removed her sweaty blouse to dry, how delicious the wind felt on her skin; and they ate pigeons cooked on an open fire the Cavaliere had built, how succulent they were. Then they continued up the slope, their laboring feet crunching the hot cinders, and she began to feel apprehensive about what she would see when they reached the top. Wasn’t it dangerous if the volcano was still erupting—which it was, despite the Cavaliere’s reassurances. They were pinnacled now, and the crater’s baleful opening lay before them. The Cavaliere told her to stay where she was and moved closer. He seemed to be getting too close. She wanted to call out, to tell him to be careful. But when she opened her mouth no sound came, though she strained until her throat hurt. The Cavaliere was at the very brink of the crater. He was turning into something black, like the burnt pages of a book. He looked back at her and smiled. And then, as she found the voice to scream, he leapt into the fiery chasm.

  Ejecting herself from the horrifying scene, she punched her way up through the roof of sleep and surfaced on the bed, panting, drenched in sweat. Then I would be a widow. The dream was so vivid. She had an impulse to dress and go to the Cavaliere’s room and reassure herself that he was all right. And realizing what she was imagining, she was shaken, shocked, ashamed. Did this mean that she wished the Cavaliere’s death? No, no. It would all work out.

  * * *

  Another night—late, very late. The guests must have departed by now, thought the Cavaliere, who had lo
ng been in his quarters, enduring the insomnia of the aged, and of the aggrieved. He has so much to think about, and even more not to think about: the loss of his treasures, his debts, his uncertainty about the future, the vague aches and pains in his brittle body, a vaguer sense of humiliation. His life, once so full of choices, offers no acceptable choice now.

  He had already been in bed, and sought a comfortable sleep-inducing position, for more than an hour. On the balcony outside the great window, framed by silhouettes of palm trees, he gazed into the heavy scented air. The moonlit clouds were very low, the sky luminous, almost pink. The night itself augments his testy feeling that the hours do not advance, the night seems suspended. It is pure night, it could be night forever. There is not even a movement of clouds to show him night passing. He heard a man’s voice singing a little out of tune, no doubt some caterwauling local complaining about the pains of love; the rumble of a distant carriage; a night bird; and very faintly the voices of British sailors in a vessel crossing the bay, singing hymns. And silence.

  His anger keeps him from going back to bed. Though it might seem childish to imagine Naples being devastated by a volcanic eruption, the Cavaliere is not above having such fantasies sometimes as he is drifting off to sleep. If only he could punish those who had wronged him, if only he could find an event that would answer to his sense of grievance and loss. Then he would return to England. After all, he has to live somewhere. How angry he feels. And how inconsolable.

  The Cavaliere was correct in supposing the guests had departed. Indeed, the servants had almost finished cleaning up in the great salon. His wife and their friend had gone to their separate quarters, and then the Cavaliere’s wife joined the hero in his room at two in the morning. She had brought him some figs of Barbary, pomegranates, and Sicilian cakes covered with white sugar and lemon peel. She worried that he did not eat enough, he was so thin, and that he slept so little. Their hours together—usually from two until five in the morning, when she would return to her own quarters—were the only time they could be alone; she could sleep late, but he always rose at dawn. And they too stood on the balcony and breathed in the warm air scented with laurel and blossoming orange and almond trees, and admired the clouds that had been lowered from heaven, steeped in orange and pink. But there was no longing for what was absent or left behind. Everything was here, complete.

  She loved to undress him, as if he were a child. He had the most beautiful skin of any man she had known, soft as a girl’s. She pressed her lips to the poor scorched stump of his arm. He flinched. She kissed it again. He sighed. She kissed his groin and he laughed and pulled her onto the bed, into their position—they already had habits. She lay her head on his right shoulder, he held her with his left arm. That was the way they always lay: it was so comforting. It is your place. Your body is my arm.

  She stroked his wavy hair, easing his head toward her so her face could receive his breath. She touched his cheek, with its beautiful stubble. She clasped him to her, her fingers scribbling down his back, her palm sliding upward to erase it. Their languid lying side by side began to quicken. She threw her leg over his hip and locked him to her. He groaned, and fell into her body. The work of pleasure began: the drop and push of pelvis, bone sheathed in flesh dissolving, blooming into pure fall. How deep it was. Touch me here, she said. I want your mouth here. And here. Deeper. Pressing, squeezing, at first she had feared she might overwhelm him with the intensity of her desire for him; he seemed so fragile to her. But he wanted to be dominated by her, he wanted to be flooded by her with emotion.

  Weight against weight; fluid with fluid; inside against, filled, packed with outside. He felt she was swallowing him, and he wanted to live inside her.

  She shut her eyes, although she loved nothing more than to watch his face, over hers, under hers; and see him feeling what she is feeling. She can feel him brimming and flooding. She never imagined a man could feel as she did. She always wanted to lose her body in the throes of pleasure, to become pure sensation. But that, she knew, is not the way a man feels. A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way. That was the way men were. But now she knew that a man could feel as she did, in his whole body. That a man could allow himself to groan and cling, just as she did when he mounted her and pierced her. That he wanted to be taken by her as much as she wanted to be taken by him. That she did not have to pretend to feel more pleasure than she did; that he yielded to her as much as she yielded to him. That they both embarked on the adventure of pleasure with the same slight anxiety about their ability to please or be pleased, and the same ease, the same trust. That they were equals in pleasure, because equals in love.

  Meanwhile, the world is still out there: the inexhaustible mystery of simultaneity. While this is happening, that is also happening. Meanwhile, both Vesuvius and Etna flamed and smoked. The members of the trio prepared to drift off to sleep. The Cavaliere in his bed, thinking of his drowned treasures, of the volcano, of his lost world. And his beloved wife and beloved friend interlaced in another bed, thinking of each other in the fullness of satisfied desire. They kissed delicately. Sleep, my love. Sleep, she repeats to him. He says he cannot sleep, he is too happy. Talk to me, he said. I love your voice. She begins to muse astutely about the latest news from Naples: the slow effectiveness of Captain Troubridge’s blockade, which had begun in late March; the surprising progress of Cardinal Ruffo’s Christian army, now seventeen thousand strong; the difficulty of.… He fell asleep while she was talking. The hero loves to sleep now.

  6

  Baron Vitellio Scarpia was an exceptionally cruel man. Five years ago he had been put in charge of suppressing republican opposition in Naples by the Queen and, as if his pleasure in dispensing punishment were not credential enough for this appointment, was reputed to be one of her lovers (who close to the Queen was not?). Scarpia pursued his task with zeal. He was glad to concur in the Queen’s view that every aristocrat was probably harboring revolutionary sympathies; a Sicilian himself, and only recently ennobled, he hated the old Neapolitan aristocracy. And of course not only aristocrats but also theologians, chemists, poets, lawyers, scholars, musicians, doctors, indeed anyone, including priests and monks, who possessed more than two or three books, were also suspect. Scarpia estimated there to be at least fifty thousand real or potential enemies of the monarchy, about a tenth of the city’s population.

  That many? exclaimed the Queen, who had to speak to this uncouth baron in Italian.

  Probably more, said Scarpia. And every one of them, Majesty, is under surveillance.

  The vast private army of informers Scarpia had recruited were everywhere. A café might be the site of a secret Jacobin debating club or some other discussion; recent decrees had banned all scientific and literary meetings, as well as the reading of any foreign book or journal. A botanist’s lecture room might be the setting in which someone passed a revolutionary signal, with eyes or hands, to another auditor. A performance at the San Carlo might be the occasion for sporting a scarlet waistcoat or distributing a clandestinely printed republican broadside. The prisons burgeoned with the most respectable—that is, the richest and the best educated—inhabitants of the kingdom.

  That was the only mistake. The only mistake had been to execute a mere thirty or forty. A death sentence has a result, one which closes that particular file. A prison sentence has a term. Most of Scarpia’s files were still open. After doing three years in the galleys for possession of two books by Voltaire (a single forbidden book being worth three years, it should have been six), the Marchese Angelotti had transferred his perfidious activities to Rome, where he had joined in the uprising there against law, order, and the Church. All too rarely did the rigors of imprisonment have a calming effect. The brother of the Duke della ***, after a much shorter term (unpowdered hair, six months), had come out of
prison deranged and had withdrawn to the family palace, which he’d not been seen to leave since; one of Scarpia’s informants in the household, a footman, reported that the duke’s brother was sequestered on his floor, had ordered the shutters nailed shut, and spent most of his time writing unintelligible poems. And as the malefactors were released, others had to be locked up. That Portuguese lady at the court, Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, who used to write sonnets in praise of the Queen, had shown an Ode to Liberty she had composed to a friend and Scarpia had been able to put her away this past October for two years.

  Poets!

  When the royal family fled Naples in late December under the protection of the British admiral, Scarpia had stayed, charged with the duty of being the Queen’s eyes in her absence. He prowled the city in a black cloak, like those worn by lawyers, watching the Queen’s predictions come true. The Marchese Angelotti had hurried back from Rome to rejoice in the anarchy that succeeded the flight of legitimate government in Naples. A mob had stormed the Vicaria to rescue some common criminals. Unfortunately, this was the prison where he had put away Fonseca Pimentel, who had come out head high, prating about liberty and equality and the rights of the people. Hadn’t she looked at the face of the mob that inadvertently liberated her? They thought they were speaking for the people, these poets and professors and liberal aristocrats. But the people had other ideas. The people loved the King (they were too ignorant to love the Queen), and admired the distance between the inordinate luxury and frivolity of the court and the misery and servitude of their own lives. Like the King and Queen, they hated the cultured aristocracy. The French were advancing down the peninsula, and the populace, enraged by the departure of the King, held the aristocrats responsible. Well, they were right. Let the conflagration come. Let Naples be cleansed of these damned malcontents with their atheistic books and French ideas and scientific conceits and humanitarian reforms. Scarpia gave himself over to an ecstasy of vengeful imaginings. The people were pigs but the people were preparing for the return of royal government. He did not have to do all the work. The people did it for him.