by Susan Sontag
The first example was to be Admiral Caracciolo, who in early March had returned to Naples and offered his services to the republic, and when Ruffo’s army arrived and the republic fell had gone into hiding on one of his estates in the country. The hero ordered Ruffo to deliver the admiral to him; Ruffo refused. We are awaiting news of Caracciolo, who will be executed as soon as he is captured, the Cavaliere wrote to the Foreign Office.
The Cavaliere hardly recognized as the forty-seven-year-old Neapolitan admiral and prince the old man with the grey face and long beard and peasant clothes worn to disguise himself, who had been abducted the following day by British soldiers, returned to the city, and immediately taken aboard the Foudroyant in shackles and brought before its commander.
Caracciolo thought his rank—he belonged to one of the most ancient and public-spirited noble families in the kingdom—as well as his decades of faithful service to the Bourbon monarchs might count in his favor. And his good friends the British minister and his wife would surely intercede for him with the gallant victor of the Battle of the Nile. Never could he have imagined that there would be no trial, that he would have no counsel, that no evidence would be admitted, and that the verdict would be the ignominious sentence of death reserved for common sailors. Caracciolo pleaded for a proper trial (no), implored to be allowed to introduce testimony in his favor (no), begged to be shot (no). And never could the Cavaliere have imagined, as he sat in the Great Cabin writing another dispatch, how quickly it would all go. Sometimes everything goes so quickly. It seemed only minutes since Caracciolo had been pulled into the next room for the travesty of a court-martial ordered by the hero. When the verdict the hero had requested was announced, the Cavaliere took his friend to the long bay window to suggest that it might be well to follow custom and defer the execution for another twenty-four hours. The hero nodded and returned to his desk. Caracciolo was brought before him, head bowed. Sentence to be carried out immediately, said the hero. Already a living corpse, sweat pouring from his armpits, Caracciolo was hurried onto the deck and lowered into a small boat which took him to a Sicilian frigate, where he was pulled on board and hanged. At the British admiral’s orders, the Neapolitan admiral’s body dangled from the yardarm into the evening. Only when the June sun set around nine o’clock did the hero give the order that iron weights be attached to each foot, the rope be cut, and the body let drop, shroudless, straight down into the sea.
By the rules of war the hero had no right to abrogate Ruffo’s treaty with the rebels, no right to abduct and execute the Bourbon monarchs’ senior naval officer or even to receive him on board an English ship as a prisoner; but this was not war. This was the administration of punishment.
I wish we could hang Ruffo, he exclaimed to the Cavaliere. The Cavaliere counseled prudence. But there were plenty of other prisoners, at least twenty thousand of them now languishing in the forts and state prisons, who would have to be vetted to see who needed punishment. After lynching comes judicial murder, which involves a good deal of paperwork. In the Great Cabin the Cavaliere’s wife sat at a desk near the admiral’s, drawing up lists of prisoners to submit to the Queen for her verdict.
We are restoring happiness to the Kingdom of Naples, and doing good to millions, the hero wrote to Mrs. Cadogan, whom they had left behind in Palermo, of the work initiated from his headquarters in the bay in June 1799. Your daughter is well, but she is very tired with all she has to do.
When the Cavaliere’s wife is not busy assisting the hero, and writing the Queen three times a day, she receives the Neapolitan grandees who have come to pay their homage and ask her to transmit their professions of loyalty to the Queen. I am the Queen’s deputy, she wrote to Charles. Unfortunately, the Cavaliere could not lay claim to a symmetrical role. He could hardly call himself the King’s deputy. The King wrote no letters. Indeed, the King, as the Queen reported to her deputy, had gone out to one of their Palermitan country palaces and, though he knows that he must soon make an appearance to receive the allegiance of his subjects, does not want to be bothered with any news from Naples. But what does the King really think, asked the hero earnestly. Laughing, the Cavaliere’s wife translated a line from the Queen’s morning letter. As far as the King is concerned, the Queen had written, the Neapolitans might just as well be Hottentots.
* * *
More examples.
Public executions, which were held in the large market square of the city, began on a Sunday, July 7th, the day before the arrival of the King.
Neither the hero nor his friends witnessed any of the executions. They were not slaughter-minded, merely implacable. And distance distances.
And yet sometimes something comes close that you don’t expect. It was two days after the public executions had started, and a day after the King had arrived from Palermo on a Sicilian frigate, wearing a dried heron’s leg in his buttonhole as a charm against the evil eye, and had taken up residence on the Foudroyant. The King had laboriously climbed the quarter-deck ladder to complain to the Cavaliere about how boring Palermo was in the summer, when a shout from some of the sailors drew him to the railing to see what the commotion was about. A fish. It must be a very large fish. There below him, about thirty feet off the stern, the spume-ringleted head and upright water-flayed torso of his old friend Admiral Caracciolo was weaving and lolling, his beard floating in front of his ghastly rotted face. Had the shouting sailors been Neapolitans, they would have been crossing themselves. The terror-struck King crossed himself, cursed, and fled below. The Cavaliere found him, whimpering and giggling to himself in the dark ’tween deck, surrounded by his apprehensive attendants.
Is he there, is he still there? the King bellowed. Push him under!
It will be done, Majesty.
Now!
Majesty, a boat has been lowered to tow the body to shore for burial in the sand.
Why is he doing this to me? screamed this incurably childish man.
The Cavaliere had his last inspiration of the great courtier he once was.
Though Caracciolo may have been a traitor, he explained to the King, he means you no harm now. But having repented he still cannot rest. So he has come to ask your pardon.
* * *
You are a passenger. We are all, often, passengers. The boat, history, is going somewhere. You are not the captain. But you have excellent accommodations.
Of course, down there in the hold are famished immigrants or enslaved Africans or press-ganged tars. You can’t help them—you do feel sorry for them—and you can’t control the captain, either. Cosseted though you may be, you are actually quite powerless. A gesture on your part might relieve your bad conscience, if you have a bad conscience, but would not materially improve their situation. How would it help them to give up your own spacious cabin, with the room you require for your copious belongings, since, although those below have very few belongings, there are so many of them? The food you are eating would never be enough to feed all of them; indeed, if prepared with them in mind as well, it would no longer be as refined; and of course the view would be spoiled (crowds spoil a view, crowds litter, etc.). So you have no choice but to enjoy the excellent food and the view.
Nevertheless, assuming you are not indifferent, you think a lot about what is going on. Even if it is not your responsibility, how can it be your responsibility, you are still a participant and a witness. (First- or second-class passengers, these are the points of view from which most accounts of history are written.) And if those being persecuted are those who might have had accommodations as agreeable as your own, people of your own rank or who have your interests, you are far less likely to be indifferent to their present distress. Of course, you cannot prevent them from being punished if they are in fact guilty. But, assuming you are not indifferent, that you are a decent person, you will try to intervene when you can. Counsel leniency. Or at least prudence.
The Cavaliere had tried to intervene for someone, his old friend Domenico Cirillo. One of the most eminent biologi
sts in Italy, eminent enough to have been made a Fellow of the Royal Society, official physician to the court and personal physician of the Cavaliere and his wife, Cirillo had welcomed the republic’s invitation to carry out much needed reforms in the organization of hospitals and medical care for the poor. There is something to be said in the case of old Cirillo, said the Cavaliere to the hero. I can testify to his benevolence. Unfortunately, we cannot interfere with the course of justice, said the hero. Which meant that Cirillo would be hanged.
* * *
Their passenger life continues, at anchor. For the time being, they are not going anywhere.
Relieved of the stress of war, the flagship is entirely devoted to command, to its own maintenance, and to the diversions of its leading passengers. The hardest to keep diverted is, of course, the King. When the sailors sluice the decks under the hot dawn sun and hoist a rose-colored awning over most of the quarter-deck, where the King will hold his levee in the middle of the morning, they usually find the King already up and somewhere on the deck shooting sea gulls or fishing in a boat a few hundred yards from the ship. During the levee, from time to time he breaks away from his courtiers and, belly to the railing, shouts down at the victualers from the city in their small boats below. He is thinking about the lavish dinners each day at noon in the admiral’s cabin with the hero, his old friend the British envoy, and his charming wife with the long white arms, who vies with him in appreciating the heaps of excellent fish and game he has chosen for their repast. She is not made logy by the meal, as he is, and afterward provides some delicious entertainment. When she leaves the table to play the harp and sing, he knew she was singing for him. And certainly she was performing for him when she sang “Rule, Britannia” one moonlit night on the poop, with the Foudroyant’s whole crew as chorus. The inspiring verses and the singer’s beautiful voice seemed to dulcify the King. I like her better fat, he thought sleepily, as his Brava, brava, brava! subsided into snores.
Since they did not go to the city, the city must come to them. Heads of noble families arrive in barges to pay their respects to the King and the hero and the Cavaliere and his wife, and explain that they had never cooperated with the republic, or only cooperated under duress. The city’s tradesfolk keep the ship surrounded with their motley craft: butchers and greengrocers and vintners and bakers offering the day’s fare, clothiers with bolts of silk and milliners with new hats for the Cavaliere’s wife, booksellers with old books or the latest volumes on the natural sciences to tempt the Cavaliere. He was easily tempted; it had been hard to procure new books in Palermo. Among the books he was offered were rare folios which the Cavaliere recognized, he had perused them in the libraries of friends who were now languishing in prison, awaiting—but it was not certain what would happen to them. Distressing to think of how the books had become homeless, though this was not a reason not to purchase them. No, he was not the kind of collector who without any pangs of conscience scoops up what other collectors have been unjustly dispossessed of or had confiscated. Still, wasn’t it better that he buy the folios, he who knows their worth and will treasure them, than that they disappear or be broken up for their plates.
The bay is a forest of ships—the hero’s have hulls freshly painted black with a yellow streak along each tier of ports and white masts, his colors. And everywhere white, white sails that go pink each evening with the sunset over Capri. Gaily decorated small boats bring musicians out each evening to play for the trio and the King; plainer boats carry out parties of whores for the sailors (everyone knows not to tell the hero). The King’s sexual amusements arrive at any hour.
Some days the fidgety King has himself taken farther out in the bay, to shoot African quail on Capri. The Cavaliere never went with him. His legs are no longer strong enough for the island’s steep, rocky slopes. Nor did the Cavaliere ever accompany the King when he went to harpoon swordfish out in the gulf, or fish on his own (much as he loved fishing), but spent his afternoons on the shaded quarter-deck reading and met his wife and the hero again at supper. Sometimes they went up to the poop afterward to look at the night sky and the phantom ships rocking nearby. Although the Cavaliere knew perfectly well why only the Foudroyant’s poop has three lanterns—it is the mark of the flagship—he sometimes imagined for a moment, and then chided himself for thinking such a fond, foolish thought, that the three lanterns stand for his wife, the hero, and himself.
Each has a reverie of self-importance and an experience, perhaps enhanced by living on water, of the ego’s boundlessness. The hero considers his activities on behalf of the Bourbon monarchs another theatre of his own glory. The Cavaliere’s wife regards it as theatre and as glory. And as the unremitting adventure of love. One night when she sat with the hero in his quarters, she took his eye shield from the shelf beside the bed and put it over her own right eye. Shocked, he begged her to remove it immediately. No, let me keep it on for a while, she said. I wish I only had one eye. I want to be like you. You are me, he said, as lovers have always said and felt. But she was not only he. Sometimes, when they were alone, she was many others, too. She could waddle like the King, and mime him attacking his food, and render a sample of his wayward patter in singsong Neapolitan (which the hero could appreciate without understanding a word); she could do the wily Ruffo with his hooded eyes and aristocratic accent (Yes, exactly! exclaimed the hero); she could make herself British-solemn and naval-officer-masculine like his faithful Captain Hardy and the ambitious Troubridge; she could change mien, shape, and voice to mimic the shouts and rolling gait of his illiterate tars. How she made the hero laugh. And then she paused, and somehow the hero knew what she was going to do, and she became the Cavaliere, perfectly imitated the stiff, careful way he walked, his near-reproachful, watchful silences, then it was exactly his voice going on about the beauties of some vase or painting, slightly rising in pitch as he tried to keep his enthusiasm under control. The hero was startled, and wondered if it was cruel for the woman he loved to mock the man he revered, and condescended to, as a father—he, the man who every day was issuing orders to kill, worried about being cruel to someone behind his back—but finally, after a moment’s earnest examination of his conscience, decided that it was all right for her to imitate the Cavaliere, to make innocent fun of the way he walked and talked. That they were not cruel, not cruel at all.
* * *
The hero and the Cavaliere’s wife have more than enough to divert them. The hero spent most of his time in the Great Cabin, conferring with the captains of his squadron. For his parleys with Neapolitan officers he needed the Cavaliere’s wife at his side. My faithful interpreter on all occasions, he called her in public. And there are moments when they can be alone, even there, and kiss and beam and sigh.
I hope this country will be happier than ever, the hero wrote to the new commander in chief of the British fleet in the Mediterranean. Lord Keith replied, summoning the hero and his squadron (a sizable portion of all the British ships available for warfare against the French in the Mediterranean) to Minorca, where the British were expecting an engagement with the French fleet. The hero wrote back insolently that Naples was more important than Minorca, that the mission he had undertaken in Naples made it impossible for him to bring his fleet to the rendezvous, adding that he hoped his judgment would be respected but knew he could be tried for disobeying orders and was prepared to take the consequences.
There was still so much to do! For the sake of the civilized world, and as the best act of our lives, the hero said to the Cavaliere, let us hang Ruffo and all those cabaling against our English king of Naples.
A week later, Keith summoned the hero once again, once again the hero refused, though this time he did let four ships in his squadron depart to join the engagement, which, as it happened, never took place.
* * *
The hot wind of southern summer, and the hot wind of history.
The ship, like the Cavaliere’s observatory room, gives a commanding view.
From the ship,
Naples is like a picture. Always seen from the same point of view. Orders issue from the ship, cross the water, are put into effect; travesties of trials take place in which the accused is sometimes not even present; the condemned are brought to the market square and mount the scaffold. There was no single method of execution. Hanging, the ugliest and most humiliating, had preference. But some were shot. Others were beheaded.
If those who were responsible for their deaths wanted to set an example, those who went to die wanted to show an example. They too saw themselves as future citizens of the world of history painting, of the didactic art of the significant moment. This is the way we suffer, surmount suffering, die. Showing an example meant being stoical. Although they could not control the paleness of their faces, the trembling lips and shaking knees, their insubordinate bowels, the head was held high. When they were about to die, they made themselves brave by thinking (and they were not wrong) that they were becoming an image. An image, even of the most lamentable events, should also give hope. Even the most horrifying stories can be told in a way that does not make us despair.
* * *
Because an image can show only a moment, the painter or sculptor must choose the moment that presents what the viewer most needs to know and feel about the subject.
But what does the viewer need to know and feel?
Take the doom of the Trojan priest, Laocoön, who protested the decision to draw the wooden horse inside the city’s walls, sensing a trap set by the Greeks, and whom Athena punished for his astuteness with a terrible death inflicted on him and his two sons. Take the representation of their death agony in the famous sculpture from the first century which Pliny the Elder had considered superior to any painting or any bronze for its technical virtuosity, and which tastemakers in the Cavaliere’s era admired for its discretion—because it evoked the worst without showing us the worst. This was the reigning cliché about the achievement of classical art: that it showed suffering with decorum, dignity in the midst of horror. Instead of depicting the priest and the children as they might have looked, transfixed by the two giant serpents slithering toward them, their mouths torn open with screams—or worse still, in a tableau of disfiguring death, faces bloated, eyes bulging from their sockets—we see manly strain and heroic resistance to enveloping death. “As the bottom of the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming surface,” Winckelmann wrote, evoking the standard offered by the Laocoön, “so a great soul remains calm amid the strife of passions.”