The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  We know about the very bad and clever, and the very good and gullible.

  But what about all the others: those who are neither wicked nor innocent. Just normal important people, going about their important business, wanting to think well of themselves, and committing the most atrocious crimes.

  Take the Cavaliere and his wife. Why weren’t they moved by the cries of their victims? Of poor Caracciolo, who, like Angelotti, had been found cowering at the bottom of a well. But unlike Angelotti he didn’t choose to kill himself immediately. Unlike Angelotti, he didn’t think he had the certainty of death before him. Caracciolo thought he had a chance. He was wrong.

  * * *

  You can plead for your life, and it doesn’t do any good. The diva pleading with Scarpia to spare her lover. The elderly doctor Cirillo writing a few days after his arrest from his cell, in irons, to the Cavaliere and his wife: I hope you won’t take it ill if I take this liberty to trouble you with a few lines, in order to make you recollect that nobody in this world can protect and save a miserable being but you …

  You can go with preternatural courage. The young aristocrat Ettore Carafa, sentenced in September to be beheaded, who asked to be placed on the block looking up instead of face down, and kept his eyes open as the ax descended. Or with inspired dispassion and foresight. Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, who, turning to her fellow prisoners as they were waiting to be taken to the cart that would bring them to the gallows, uttered a line from Virgil: Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit—Perhaps one day even this will be a joy to recall.

  Dignity or wretched groveling, nothing will affect what implacable victors decree, turning themselves into a force of nature. As immovable by pity as the volcano. Mercy is what takes us beyond nature, beyond our natures, which are always stocked with cruel feelings. Mercy, which is not forgiveness, means not doing what nature, and self-interest, tells us we have a right to do. And perhaps we do have the right, as well as the power. How sublime not to, anyway. Nothing is more admirable than mercy.

  7

  Politics is all very salient and absorbing. Alas, you have to care about politics, even if you don’t want to. But there are many other important things to care about. For instance, the choice of what to wear may be of great import. What to wear to flatter obesity—no, to hide pregnancy. A pregnancy best hidden, since everyone will correctly assume that the father is the lover, not the elderly husband. A voluminous gown? A loose dress? And perhaps a shawl arranged over it, several shawls despite the heat, since their wearer is the mistress of the art of draping shawls.

  And what to wear to respond to disgrace already made public, to show that you don’t acknowledge what people whose opinion you care about are saying behind your back. If you are a hero, you wear your ribands, orders, stars, and medals. All of them. Sometimes you wear the ankle-length sable-trimmed scarlet pelisse presented to you by the Turkish ambassador. Your diamond aigrette with its rotating star, another gift (they call it a chelengk) from the Grand Signior in Constantinople. And the gold sword with hilt and blade set in diamonds which the King has given you, along with a Sicilian dukedom, to express his gratitude for the actions that have brought disgrace on your head. And always, next to your heart, a lace handkerchief belonging to the woman whose influence is reputed to have made you commit the actions that have brought disgrace on your head.

  It is important, too, how any representation of you is outfitted. For the party the Queen gave in the vast park of the country royal palace to which five thousand were invited, a small Greek temple was erected, inside which were placed life-size wax effigies of the trio garnished with chaplets of laurel. The Queen had requested that the originals of the statues contribute their own clothes. The slender effigy of the Cavaliere’s wife wore the purple satin gown of the last opera gala in Naples on which had been embroidered the names of the captains of the Nile; the youthful-looking effigy of the Cavaliere was in full diplomatic dress with the star and red sash of the Order of the Bath; between them stood the hero-effigy with two bright blue agate eyes, his admiral’s regalia a field of gleaming medals and stars and his Order of the Bath. On the temple roof a musician crouched behind the statue of Fame blowing a trumpet, and when the ceremonies began her trumpet seemed to blow. The Cavaliere received a portrait of the King in a frame encrusted with diamonds; the Cavaliere’s wife was presented with the Queen’s portrait set in diamonds and crowned by the Queen with the laurel chaplet from her effigy; and the King gave the hero a bejeweled double portrait of Their Majesties and inducted him into the Order of Saint Ferdinand, whose members have the privilege of not removing their hats in the King’s presence. The orchestra began to play “Rule, Britannia.” The sky began to thunder: a grand display of fireworks representing the Battle of the Nile which concluded with the spectacular blowing up of the French tricolor. Who could resist such flattery? They gaze at the statues of themselves. Quite lifelike, says the hero, for want of something better to say.

  * * *

  The hero’s shameful role as the Bourbon executioner was the talk of Europe, the Europe of privilege. Hang the country’s best poet? Most eminent Greek scholar? Leading scientists? Even the most fervent opponents of republicanism and of French ideas were shocked by the butchery of the Neapolitan nobility. Class solidarity easily overrode national enmities.

  Then make the hero a villain? But heroes are useful. No, easier to find some influence on the hero that had warped his judgment, that had corrupted him. The good do not become bad, but the strong may become weak. What has made him weak is that he is no longer separate, solitary—what a hero must be. A hero is one who knows how to leave, to break ties. Bad enough when a hero becomes a married man. If married, he cannot be uxorious. If a lover, he must (like Aeneas) disappoint. If a member of a trio, he must … but a hero must not become a member of a trio. A hero must float, must soar. A hero does not cling.

  * * *

  Disgrace, disgrace, disgrace.

  Triple disgrace. Three united as one.

  The hero, who has in effect gone AWOL, could not be replaced, discarded by his superiors back in London—though this was considered. But those who abetted him, whose pawn he had become, could feel the weight of official displeasure. The Cavaliere’s role in the savage retaliation against the Neapolitan patriots had made him, at the very least, controversial. Some said he was a dupe of his wife; others, of the Bourbon government. Of course, no one expected a diplomat to be a paragon, as they did the hero. But he should not be controversial, either. A diplomat who has become an open partisan of the government to which he is posted has fatally impaired his usefulness to the government that dispatched him and whose interests he is supposed to promote. It is only a matter of time before he is replaced.

  One morning the Cavaliere received a letter from Charles, who regretted having to inform his uncle that he had learned from that damned Whig newspaper the Morning Chronicle that a new envoy to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, young Arthur Paget, had been named. The Cavaliere could no longer conceal from himself the extent of his disfavor. Not only was he dismissed after thirty-seven years in his post instead of being allowed to retire, after being consulted about the choice of his successor; they did not care if he was the last to know. The document from the Foreign Office followed a month later, with a curt subscript informing him that his successor had already left London. Upon hearing the news, the Queen tearfully embraced her dearest confidant, her sister, the ambassador’s wife. Oh what will I do without my friends, she cried. It’s all the fault of the French.

  Fatal Paget, as the Queen calls him, has arrived in Palermo, and after five days was received by the Cavaliere. Here is a young man—Paget is twenty-nine, a full forty years younger than the Cavaliere—to whom the Cavaliere felt no avuncular attraction whatsoever.

  And you come from what post, said the Cavaliere coldly.

  I was envoy extraordinary in Bavaria.

  But not minister plenipotentiary?

  That is correct.

>   I have heard you held this post only one year.

  Yes.

  And before that?

  Bavaria was my first post.

  Of course you speak Italian, said the Cavaliere.

  No, but I will learn. In Munich I learned German quickly.

  And you will need to learn Sicilian, for who knows when Their Majesties will return to their first capital. And the Neapolitan dialect as well, even if you never see Naples, for the King does not speak Italian.

  So I have heard.

  Some moments of silence followed, during which the Cavaliere inwardly berated himself for saying too much. Then, clearing his throat nervously, Paget found the courage to say that he was ready to present his credentials letter to the King and Queen as soon as the Cavaliere presented his letter of recall.

  The Cavaliere replied that since he had no intention of remaining for even a single day in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies as a private person, and has already made plans for a month’s sightseeing trip, he will attend to the matter when he returns. And off he went with his wife, Mrs. Cadogan, and the hero on the Foudroyant, water-borne once again, this time not to engage with history (though the hero must make a stop at Malta) but to float out of history, out of the schedule of their lives.

  His superiors and erstwhile friends at the Foreign Office had dismissed him? He would dismiss them for a while from his mind. Take a larger, more mobile view. Watching the coastline unfold, when majestic cloud-crowned Etna came into sight, thundering a little, the Cavaliere recalled the astonishing view from the summit in the blue-tinted dawn, with the whole island of Sicily, Malta, the Liparis, and Calabria outlined below him as on a map. Yes, I have done that. I am the only one here who has done that. What a rich life I have had.

  Passing near Etna, the Foudroyant was not far from Brontë, the fief attached to the hero’s new Sicilian title. The Cavaliere’s wife was eager to go ashore, but the hero said he preferred to inspect the estate, whose volcanic soil yielded revenues, so he had been told, amounting to three thousand pounds a year, when his visit had been properly prepared for. The Duke of Brontë, he declared, should not simply appear, unheralded, on his own domain. The Cavaliere, who suspected some prankishness in the King’s choice of a dukedom to bestow on his British savior, Brontë being the name of the cyclops who forges Etna’s thunder, thought it best to keep this bit of information to himself. The one-eyed hero, who seemed so proud of being a Sicilian duke, might not be amused by the jest. The Cavaliere thought it rather droll.

  The Cavaliere has reached the zero point of pleasure, where pleasure consists in being able to put unpleasant thoughts out of one’s mind. His dismissal, Paget, his debts, the uncertain future awaiting him in England—these erupted in his mind and then were blown backward into the wind, like the sea birds over his head streaming from stern to prow. The relief of not dwelling on what preoccupied him was so pleasurable that he had the impression he truly was enjoying himself. This ship was his home. When they stopped in Syracuse for two days to visit the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter and the celebrated quarries and caverns, the Cavaliere’s wife, despite her morning sickness, refused to remain on board with her mother. She did not wish to miss even one of the Cavaliere’s enthusiastic on-site lectures, and she did not want to be separated for even an hour from the hero. His wife and his friend seemed so happy. Neither a naïve nor a complaisant husband, he really loved his wife and he really loved the man close to his wife’s age, whom she now loved, and they really loved him, so he hadn’t lost a wife but gained a son, isn’t that how it was working out?

  As in the palace in Palermo, as on the flagship during the six weeks anchored in the Bay of Naples, they behave with perfect correctness in the Cavaliere’s presence. That is, they don’t fawn on each other any more than they did before they became lovers. That is, they lie. He has no idea when or how often his wife goes to the hero’s quarters late at night, or he to hers. Nor does he want to know. His wife, with her unassailable intestinal tract and proven resistance to seasickness, now complains at breakfast of having digestive problems and being made queasy by the movement of the ship. Of course, he would not want them to allude openly to their relationship or her to mention the nausea of pregnancy—that would be painful. And yet, perversely, he minds that they are playacting in front of him. It makes him feel excluded, condescended to. It makes him feel ignored, since he is the one with the weak digestion, he is the one who is sometimes seasick, though one could not hope for a more tranquil sea.

  * * *

  And what to wear now that they will almost immediately be traveling again, for the hero is eager to return to England, and the Admiralty is impatient for their greatest weapon against Napoleon to conclude his stint as the Bourbon paladin and yacht captain to the discredited, now former British ambassador and his irresistible wife; and of course, they will go with him. What to wear, for this will be a long, complex journey. First by sea, on the hero’s flagship, as far as Leghorn; then overland in many wheeled vehicles (carriage, state coach, post chaise), going from south to north, heading from heat and long days into a more modest summer, traveling through many states, stopping for many festivities, for each of which one must appear at one’s best.

  There was never any question of their not leaving together. The only question was how many others would depart with the trio and Mrs. Cadogan, besides Miss Knight, who will not hear of being left behind, and Oliver, one of the Cavaliere’s two English secretaries, who had been seconded to the hero, plus the usual passel of servants. How big the cavalcade would be.

  Upon their return in early June from the month-long cruise, the Cavaliere submitted his letter of recall and Paget was allowed to present his credentials at court. The Queen ground her teeth and did not once look at him. Much more than the imminent loss of her loyal friends was on the Queen’s mind, for she understood that the replacement of the Cavaliere with a new envoy signified British displeasure with her. Slighting Paget and showing solidarity with her friends is one of her reasons for resolving to leave Palermo, for Vienna, to visit her daughter (as well as her nephew and son-in-law)—her first-born, Maria Theresa, is now the Hapsburg empress. (The other reason for a departure: her bitter awareness of how much her influence over the King has waned.) The hero had hoped to return by sea to England with the Cavaliere and his wife, their entourage, and all their belongings, which would permit him to bring the Queen and her train of ladies-in-waiting, chaplains, doctors, and servants as far north as Leghorn. When his request to take the Foudroyant to England was refused, the hero saw no reason for them not to make it a long journey through Europe, and accede to the Queen’s desire that her friends escort her all the way to Vienna.

  When they arrived in Leghorn, where the irate Lord Keith at last recovered the wayward Foudroyant for the military purposes for which it was intended, and while arrangements were being made to continue the journey, there was news of an impending engagement of the Austrian forces with Napoleon at Marengo, and the Queen impulsively decided not to proceed to Vienna directly but to go for a short stay at the Palazzo Farnese in Rome (she sends word for Baron Scarpia to join her there) to await the outcome of the battle. She will join her British friends in Vienna in a few weeks.

  On then, in seven carriages followed by four baggage wagons, onto which have been loaded all the Cavaliere’s pictures and other possessions saved from Naples. The bone-bruising ride on the road along the Arno proves more strenuous than the Cavaliere anticipated. He was unable to read, he could only close his eyes and try to shut out the pain in his back and hips and knees, while Mrs. Cadogan held a damp cloth to his forehead. At Florence they stopped for two days of receptions and calls. The Cavaliere had wanted to stay longer. It was not only because he is not feeling well at all. He would like to visit the Uffizi again, whose treasures have unaccountably been spared by Napoleon—one can’t stop in Florence and not see the pictures—but his wife and his friend will not hear of it. If you are so ill and tired, then surely you aren�
�t strong enough to go around and look at pictures. I am always strong enough to look at pictures, he said weakly. How I feel does not matter. It gives me pleasure.

  No, no, said his wife. You are ill. We are worried about you. You must rest. And then we will continue the journey. And so he rested dispiritedly, efficiently, without the stab of pleasure he had been anticipating. How boring just to be a body. And then in Trieste, where there are very few notable pictures, they stopped for almost a week. The Cavaliere could not understand the delay.

  The disconsolate Queen arrived a week after they reached Vienna, having cut short her visit to Rome upon hearing the news of Napoleon’s victory. The stay of the hero, the Cavaliere, and his wife was prolonged to another month of parties and balls in honor of the hero. The Cavaliere’s wife has her triumphs, too. One night she won five hundred pounds at the faro table. Their four-day stay on the Esterházy country estate ended with a festivity for which the prince’s celebrated composer-in-residence produced a musical tribute to the hero; the composer was at the keyboard, and it was sung by the Cavaliere’s wife.

  A few days later she sang Haydn’s The Battle of the Nile again, accompanying herself, for her royal friend, who was living in resentful seclusion at Schönbrunn Palace. Très beau, très émouvant, exclaimed the Queen, who could not help recalling a voice she had heard in Rome almost as beautiful as that of the Cavaliere’s wife. Unfortunately, describing this voice would mean mixing her opinion of the fortunate Haydn, author of a cantata celebrating a victory over the French that actually took place, with the memory of the boring Paisiello and his cantata. It might necessitate mentioning that the diva, a woman of great charm, had committed suicide under the most melodramatic circumstances the very morning after the performance, after murdering the clearly incompetent police chief.

  Baron Scarpia est mort, Miledy, vous l’avez entendu.

  How terrible, exclaimed the Cavaliere’s wife. I mean, how upset you must be!