The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  The Queen denied she was upset. After all these deaths, what was one more. And then she began to weep, and to say that all the terrible events she had had to endure had made her insensible to human feelings—that is, she felt she was no longer a woman. And then the whole story came out, backward. Apparently the diva was offended by the attentions of the highly sexed baron. Isn’t it amazing, exclaimed the Queen, wiping her eyes, how these Italians overreact to everything? The Cavaliere’s wife, as much a champion of the histrionic reaction as the Queen, said she knew all too well what the Queen meant. My husband has always said that Italians lack common sense, she said to the Queen, judging that disaffection with all things Italian would accord with the Neapolitan Queen’s mood since she had returned to her native city.

  The Queen, a distinctly lesser star in the Hapsburg firmament in Vienna, had been relegated by her nephew’s ministers to quarters in Schönbrunn that she interpreted (not wrongly) as a slight, but the sympathies of the Cavaliere’s wife were no longer as focused on the Queen’s grievances. And the Queen was beginning to learn that her friends were not as esteemed in Vienna as she had thought. More than a few members of the Hapsburg court were relieved when the British party, having exhausted the entertainment and the ovations of the hero that Vienna could provide, had no further excuse not to continue their journey, though the Queen seemed quite distressed at the farewells, adding to the jewelry and portraits of herself she had already given to her friend, as well as presenting a gold snuffbox set in diamonds to the Cavaliere.

  Then whorling through central Europe to Prague, the city where legends are told of statues that come to life, the city once ruled by that multi-obsessed collector Rudolf II, who purchased a long-coveted Dürer in Venice and then couldn’t bear—the Cavaliere recalled as he jolted along in the badly sprung carriage—couldn’t bear to think of his treasure being jolted and jarred across the Alps, and had the thickly sheathed painting walked through the mountains by four hardy young men taking turns holding it upright all the way. In Prague, the reigning duke, another nephew of the Queen, gave a tremendous party to celebrate the hero’s forty-second birthday. Then along the Elbe to Dresden, where they viewed the Elector’s porcelain collection and went to the opera, at which the hero and the Cavaliere’s wife were reported as wholly enwrapped in each other’s conversation; and where, at one of the balls given for the hero, he lost a diamond from the hilt of his gold sword (they advertise, offering a reward, but it is not returned). There, as on other stops, the hero’s appetite for tributes, gifts, and fireworks was amply satisfied. In each city, the diplomatic community and resident English have enough gossip and malicious observations about the trio to enliven many diary entries and letters. He is covered with stars, ribbons, and medals, wrote one of their hosts, more like the prince of an opera than the Conqueror of the Nile. And no one failed to deplore the slavishness of his attendance on the Cavaliere’s wife, whose own outsized presentation of herself, whether in the form of flamboyant performances, appetite for food and drink, or sheer girth, was also caustically noted.

  The one indulgence that the Cavaliere requested on the journey was a detour to Anhalt-Dessau to call on its prince, who had visited him in Naples several times and had been one of the early subscribers to the volumes of his volcanic writings, and ten years ago had constructed his own Vesuvius on an island in a lake at his country domain. Three hundred yards in circumference at its base, rising to a height of eighty feet, it could send out real fire and smoke (when combustible material inside the hollow cone was ignited), and emit its version of molten lava (actually, water pumped over the rim of the cone and streaming down the volcano’s sides past red-tinted glass ports illuminated from within). Unlike the fifty-four-foot-high structure of glass, fiber-glass, and reinforced concrete in front of the hotel in Las Vegas—a generic volcano, which goes off every fifteen minutes (between dusk and 1 a.m.)—the Prince of Anhalt-Dessau’s volcano was specifically Vesuvius and went off only on grand occasions for distinguished guests. Six years ago it had performed for Goethe. The Cavaliere wished it to perform for him. (After all, it was his Vesuvius as well as his volcano viewing that had inspired the prince, who had also built on the island a replica of the Cavaliere’s villa near Portici.) That would be amusing, said his wife, who was not averse to a stop at the court of another petty German principality. The Cavaliere sent word ahead to the prince that they intended to pay him a visit. But, unfortunately, the prince’s private secretary wrote back that his master was away and the machinery could not be activated in his absence. The Cavaliere missed his last volcano.

  Perhaps it is just as well, said the Cavaliere’s wife, who realized that the hero was tired and eager now to reach Hamburg and its festivities. They traveled by river; when they left Dresden, every bridge, every window commanding a view of the Elbe was filled with cheering spectators. From Hamburg, where he also signed many Bibles and prayer books, the hero sent word to the Admiralty that he expected a frigate to come and pick them up and bring them to England. There was no answer to his request.

  * * *

  And what to wear for England, where the hero has not set foot for nearly three years. The worshipful crowds who are there to greet him when the hired packet lands at Yarmouth, and turn out for the hero everywhere he and his party stop on the carriage journey to London, can’t know of their rulers’ displeasure with the hero and the life he has been leading for the past year. They have not read the mocking accounts of the hero’s triumphal progress (only ten thousand people in the country read newspapers). Nor do they know the difference between the Neapolitan stars and the star of the Order of the Bath pinned to the breast of his uniform.

  For the crowd, he was still the greatest hero England had ever known. As for Fanny, he was still her husband. Fanny and the hero’s mildly senile father, who have come from the country to London and taken rooms in a hotel in King Street, have been waiting for more than a week. The hero embraced his father with genuine fervor and his wife with pained reserve. The Cavaliere’s wife, who was wearing a white muslin gown with the hero’s name and BRONTË embroidered round the hem in gold thread and sequins, embraced the wife and the father of her lover. They dined together in the hotel—a painful performance. The Cavaliere’s wife imitated the huzzahs of the acclaiming crowds on their various stops during the three-day trip to London, as well as the ringing of town bells. The morose hero, who was wearing, as he would until his death, a miniature of the Cavaliere’s wife around his neck under his shirt, bit his full lip every time Fanny spoke. The Cavaliere observed on Fanny’s face her soaring arc of dismay and humiliation.

  To pay his respects at the Admiralty the next day, the hero was in half-dress: naval coat, white naval breeches with naval buttons at the knees, silk stockings, shoes with large buckles. That was prudent, and his old friends at the Admiralty, bent on reprimand, softened as they listened to the hero earnestly lecture them on his plans for the defense of the Channel coast should Napoleon be so foolish as to attempt an invasion, and his wish to return to active service as soon as possible. But the hero made a serious miscalculation on the following day when he appeared at the palace for the royal levee with the Grand Signior’s chelengk in his hat, his three stars on his breast (one for the Order of the Bath, two for Sicilian honors), and the bejeweled portrait of the King of Naples hanging from his neck. No wonder he was snubbed by the British king, who barely acknowledged his presence, merely asking him if he had recovered his health, and then turned away to converse animatedly with General *** for some thirty minutes about his desire that the army play a larger role in the war with the French. The British monarch has not acknowledged the hero’s Sicilian title, as its recipient knew perfectly well. (And will not do so until two months later, when the hero receives a new command and goes off to win another famous victory.) Had the hero engaged his sovereign’s attention even for ten minutes, he would no doubt have used some of the time to laud the Cavaliere’s wife and her indispensable patriotic services in
Naples and Palermo, which merited remuneration and public thanks. But it was not the hero’s praise of the woman who was ruining him, nor an effusive testimonial letter from the discredited Queen of Naples, that would make her less of a pariah. These only confirmed what everyone already thought.

  The newspapers had been speculating whether the Cavaliere’s wife would even be deemed presentable at court, and her absence when the Cavaliere made his own impeccable appearance unleashed the relentless evocation of a physical disgrace. If some realized her obesity also concealed a pregnancy—her ladyship has reached these shores just in time, the Morning Post noted tersely—it was less the scandal of her pregnancy that fascinated society than the loss of her beauty. COMPLEXION. So rosy and blooming is her ladyship’s countenance that, as Doctor Graham would say, she appears a perfect Goddess of Health! (A double sneer: both an allusion to the pregnancy and a reminder of her brief employment half a lifetime ago by the once fashionable healer and fertility therapist.) FIGURE. That for which she was particularly celebrated and in consequence of which her reputation commenced, and now so swollen that it has lost all its original beauty. ATTITUDES. Her ladyship is fitting up a room to display her Attitudes and is planning to give Attitude parties. Attitudes will be much more in vogue this winter than shape or feature.

  The caricaturists did not spare her or the Cavaliere. Gillray showed him as a withered old grotesque absorbed by an array of ugly statuettes and a damaged vase; above his head are portraits of a bare-breasted Cleopatra holding a gin bottle and a one-armed Mark Antony wearing a cocked hat, and a picture of Vesuvius in full eruption. But there were no full-scale caricatures of the hero, who is sitting for many busts and portraits, and has been introduced in the House of Lords—only tattle. Rumor has it, and the rumor was true, that the hero now paints his face. Rumor exaggerates, and says he weighs no more than eighty pounds.

  The House of Lords is a stage, the court is a stage, a dinner party is a stage—even a box in a theatre is a stage. The two couples went to the Drury Lane together, and when they took their seats the entire audience stood and cheered, the orchestra struck up “Rule, Britannia,” and the hero had to rise and bow his thanks. The next day the newspapers reported that the hero’s wife appeared in white with a violet satin headdress and small white feather, and the Cavaliere’s wife wore a blue satin gown and headdress, with a fine plume of feathers. In the drama they saw, the leading woman’s role was played by Jane Powell, whom the Cavaliere’s wife told her husband she had known oh so long ago, even before she met Charles—meaning, the Cavaliere supposed, when she was, when she was a … he did not like to think of it. In fact, she had known Jane when she was a servant in the household of Doctor *** at the age of fourteen, when she came to London. Jane, another underhousemaid, had been her first friend. They shared the same room in the attic. They were both going to be actresses.

  Acting is one thing, being civilized (which includes acting) is another. The Cavaliere wished the hero would keep up appearances—as he does. He can understand that the hero is galled by the stubbornness of Fanny’s love, by her pathetic belief that if she is patient and behaves as if nothing is changed, her husband will be content to live with her and his father in the furnished house in Dover Street. But that is no reason for the hero to show what he feels, as he apparently did at a banquet in his honor given by Earl Spencer within the precincts of the Admiralty. While he was explaining to Countess Spencer on his right the four principal weaknesses of French gunnery, Fanny, seated on his left, was taken up by her self-appointed task of cracking walnuts for him and when finished had put them beside his plate in a little glass, which he slapped aside. The glass broke, and Fanny burst into tears and left the table. Continuing to train both dim fixed eye and mobile eye rightward on the wife of the First Lord of the Admiralty, stump thrashing in his empty sleeve, the hero went on being brilliant, original, inimitable, on the subject of naval tactics.

  The pretense of being two couples was over. The hero moved into his friends’ house in Piccadilly, offering to assume half of the Cavaliere’s annual rent of one hundred and fifty pounds; the Cavaliere refused. Soon after, Fanny returned with the hero’s father to the country.

  The Cavaliere felt obliged to economize his energies. Time that he might have spent attending meetings of the Royal Society was now spent conferring with his bankers, who were attempting to create a reasonable schedule for settling his debts. The bounty and novelty of goods in the shops astonished him. London, after nine years of absence, struck him as extraordinarily modern, energetic, opulent—almost a foreign city. He watched a few auctions, though he was in no position to buy anything. He visited his vase collection in the British Museum. Charles was often with him, Charles is always available. With Charles, and without his wife, he made a trip to his estate in Wales, now mortgaged for thirteen thousand pounds. The Cavaliere had submitted to the Foreign Office an accounting of his losses in Naples (furniture, carriages, &c: thirteen thousand pounds), and the enormous expenses (ten thousand pounds) incurred during the year and a half in Palermo. While just managing to keep his creditors at bay, he has applied for an annual pension of two thousand pounds, a modest request. Everyone tells him, especially Charles, that he has a right to expect a peerage as well. But he doubts that he can have both. He would rather have the money than be a lord. It is too late for titles. Charles asks him if he is glad to be back in London. He replies, I shall be at home here as soon as I feel well.

  * * *

  They were rescued from an end of December in London with its plethora of status-evaluating parties by an invitation from William, the Cavaliere’s reclusive, scandal-shrouded kinsman, to spend Christmas week with him in his Palladian country mansion, and see the stupendous building project William has undertaken in the woods of Fonthill.

  He calls it an abbey, which means its architecture is inspired by the Gothic, said the Cavaliere. Pointed arches and painted windows, he added for the hero’s benefit.

  Like Strawberry Hill, cried the Cavaliere’s wife.

  Don’t let William hear you say that, my dear. He is our late friend Walpole’s greatest rival and detractor, and despises his castle.

  They had stopped at nearby Salisbury, where the hero was received by the mayor and presented with the freedom of the city, and their carriage—going slowly, to minimize jolts, in consideration of the delicate condition of the Cavaliere’s wife—was being escorted by a detachment of yeoman cavalry as far as the gates of Fonthill.

  No, said the Cavaliere after a long pause, this is something far more grandiose.

  What’s grandiose, said his wife.

  The Abbey! exclaimed the Cavaliere. Wasn’t he being clear? We are talking about the Abbey, are we not? Its tower, William tells me, will be higher than the spire of Salisbury Cathedral.

  It was snowing, and the Cavaliere felt immured in cold. This is the first English Christmas he has had in, how many years? For when he was last in England, he had started the journey back to Italy in September. Yes. Two days after the wedding. And the time before, when he brought Catherine’s body back and sold the vase, it had been October when he returned. The previous leave home—but that was almost twenty-five years ago, when there was war with the American colonies—hadn’t he and Catherine left before Christmas? He was sure they had left before Christmas. And he busied himself, making the calculations in his head, the numbers and faces slipping in and out of his mind, but it seemed important to get it right. The last Christmas in England, how many years was it? How many?

  How many, said the Cavaliere’s wife.

  The Cavaliere, startled out of his reverie, wondered if his wife could read his mind.

  How many feet, she said. Its height.

  Height?

  How high is the Abbey tower to be?

  Nearly three hundred feet, murmured the Cavaliere.

  I know nothing about architecture, said the hero, but I am sure that without immoderate ambition nothing fine is ever accomplished.

&
nbsp; Agreed, said the Cavaliere, but William’s ambitions are not as well supported as they might be. Eight months ago, at still less than half its eventual height, the tower collapsed in a gale. Apparently he is allowing his architect to build not with stone but with stucco and compo-cement.

  What folly, said the hero. Who would not build to last?

  Ah, but he believes it will last, replied the Cavaliere, and has had it rebuilt in the same material for our visit. I would not be surprised if my kinsman does not intend one day to live in the tower, so he can look down on the world, look down on all of us, and see how small we are.

  * * *

  William, Catherine’s William, the slightly plump, wistful youth now a lean, startlingly juvenile-looking man of forty-one, was still a gifted musician. On the first evening, he played for his guests in the large drawing room for nearly an hour (Mozart, Scarlatti, Couperin). Then, with summary politeness, he ceded the right of musical performance to the Cavaliere’s wife, who offered a Sicilian air, arias by Vivaldi and Handel, and “Ooody Oody Purbum,” a Hindu song she had learned for the occasion, knowing of William’s excessive infatuation with the Orient. She concluded with several martial songs in honor of the hero.

  The three men had moved to the blazing fireplace while the Cavaliere’s wife remained nearby at the piano, softly touching the keys. It was William, speaking with clenched teeth, who broached the subject of happiness, turning first to his celebrated guest for a contribution.

  Happiness! exclaimed the hero. Happiness for me lies first and last in serving my country, if my country still has need of, or even wants, the services of a poor soldier who has already sacrificed health, sight, and much else for her glory. But if my country has no further need of me, nothing would make me happier than a simple rustic dwelling by a little stream, where I may spend the rest of my life with my friends.

  And the lady?