The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  The constables were summoned and the young man was taken to the Bow Street Police Station, where he gave a false name and address; the director of the museum set out to break the unpleasant news to the duke; the curators went to their knees to gather up all the little pieces. Careful not to miss any!

  The malefactor, discovered to be an Irish divinity student who had dropped out of Trinity College after a few weeks’ study, was considerably less jaunty when brought before a magistrate. When asked to explain what had possessed him to commit this senseless act of vandalism, he said that he was drunk … or that he was suffering from a kind of nervous excitement, a continual fear of everything he saw … or that he heard voices telling him to do it … or that he envied the maker of the vase … or that he had found himself aroused by the figure of Thetis, recumbent, awaiting her bridegroom … or that he thought the vase’s depiction of erotic longing a sacrilege, an offense to Christian morals … or that he couldn’t stand to see such a beautiful thing be so admired while he was poor and lonely and unsuccessful. The usual reasons given for destroying objects of incalculable value, admired by everyone. These are always stories of a haunting. Self-defined outcasts and solitaries, almost always men, begin to be haunted by a supremely beautiful building, like the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, or by representations of a languorous female beauty, like Thetis on the Portland Vase or the Rokeby Venus of Velázquez, or of ideal, naked male beauty, like the David of Michelangelo—begin to be haunted, continue to be haunted, rise to a state of congested, fabulous misery, the inverse of the goal of nonstop ecstasy, and become convinced that they have a right to be relieved of this feeling. They must strike out, smash their way out of it. The ravishing object is there. The object is provoking them. The object is insolent. The object is, ah, worst of all, indifferent.

  Torch a temple. Pulverize a vase. Slash a Venus. Smash a perfect ephebe’s toes.

  Then lapse back into a shame-ridden, baleful torpor: from now on, the malefactor is likely to be a danger only to himself. For this is not a crime one commits more than once. This form of obsession with an object, the obsession to destroy it, is monogamous. We know Mr. *** won’t come back to the British Museum and take a thwack at the Rosetta Stone or the Elgin Marbles—nor is it likely that anyone else will either, for it appears there are no more than ten or fifteen works of art in the whole world that create obsessions (this recent estimate, probably low, by the Superintendent of Fine Arts in Florence, whose city has the honor to harbor two of these, Michelangelo’s statue and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus). The Portland Vase is not on the list.

  No one can repair Mr. ***, whom the magistrate sentenced to a fine of three pounds or two months’ hard labor. Having only ninepence in his pocket, he was taken to prison, and released a few days later when someone paid the fine. (His benefactor, it was rumored, was a clement aristocrat, none other than the Duke of Portland himself, who declared that he did not wish to appear to be persecuting a young man who might be mad.) But the vase, in one hundred and eighty-nine pieces on a table in the museum’s basement, being examined with tweezers and loupe, was put back together by one intrepid, skillful employee and assistant in seven months.

  Can something shattered, then expertly repaired, be the same, the same as it was? Yes, to the eye, yes, if one doesn’t look too closely. No, to the mind.

  Back inside its glass case, this new vase, neither replica nor original, was enough like its former incarnation that no visitors to the museum observed it had been broken and restored unless it was pointed out to them. A perfect job of reconstruction, for the time. Until time wears it out. Transparent glue yellows and bulges, making seamless joints visible. The jeopardous decision to attempt a better reconstruction of the vase was made in 1989. First, it had to be restored to its shattered condition. A team of experts immersed the vase in a desiccating solvent to soften the old adhesive, peeled off the one hundred and eighty-nine fragments one by one, washed each in a solution of warm water and non-ionic soap, and reassembled them with a new adhesive, which hardens naturally, and resin, which can be cured with ultraviolet light in thirty seconds. The work, checked by electron microscope and photographed at every stage, took nine months. The result is optimal. The vase will last forever, now. Well, at least another hundred years.

  * * *

  Some things can never be put back together again: someone’s life, someone’s reputation.

  In the first weeks of January, the hero was made second in command of the Channel Fleet—he still had a moment more to linger under the shadow of official disapproval of his reprehensible conduct during the last two years—and given a new flagship. Gillray celebrated the hero’s return to his hero’s destiny with an etching entitled “Dido in Despair.” Dido is an unsightly mountain of a woman starting up from a bed, her gargantuan legs asprawl, her mammoth arms and meaty paws flung wide to a window that opens onto the sea and a squadron of departing warships.

  Ah, where, & ah where, is my gallant Sailor gone?

  He’s gone to Fight the Frenchmen, for George upon the Throne,

  He’s gone to fight the Frenchmen, t’lose t’other Arm & Eye,

  And left me here with old Antique, to lay me down & Cry.

  And indeed, in a dusky corner of the bed, one can just make out the wizened head of a small, sleeping spouse.

  There are a few people, such as the hero, whose lives and reputations are like the Portland Vase, already in a museum and too valuable to be allowed to disappear.

  He is a warrior, the best that his bellicose country, about to become the greatest imperial power the world has ever known, has produced. Everyone admires him. The creation of his reputation has gone too far. It cannot be allowed to be destroyed.

  But who cares about this fat vulgar woman and this emaciated weary old man. They can be destroyed. Society will not be the loser. Nothing important has been invested in them.

  So, from now on, nothing they do will be right.

  Disgrace, disgrace. Double disgrace.

  And for the hero, soon, immortal glory.

  Of course, the hero’s reputation has a crack. Nothing can efface it. Not the great victory he won a few months later, the second of his three great victories, in which he broke Napoleon’s control of the Baltic; not even the final, the supreme victory when, having ignored advice not to make himself a target by wearing all his stars and decorations on deck during battle, he was shattered by a musketball fired from the mizzentop of a nearby French warship. Everyone who relates the story of his life must take a position on the period of misconduct in the Mediterranean, if only in the form of declaring it not worth discussing. One has to maintain the right velocity of narration, as one has to keep the right distance from the dashed and rebuilt Portland Vase. Slow down, or move in for a closer scrutiny, and one cannot help but see it. Speed up, describe only what is essential—and it’s gone.

  * * *

  And what to wear to disguise the reason for a sudden loss of weight, for that is the problem of the Cavaliere’s wife two weeks after the hero sailed off for the Baltic. Luckily, it is early February and extremely cold. Answer: the voluminous clothes of the last months of pregnancy, but padded out a little, in the hope that, as layers are gradually discarded, the change in silhouette may appear the result of a remarkably effective crash diet.

  And what to wear at night when, in the greatest secrecy, you convey your week-old daughter out of the house in Piccadilly and into a hackney carriage to Little Titchfield Street, where she must be left with a wet nurse until you can figure out how to reclaim the baby as another’s offspring who has been committed to your care. Answer: a fur muff.

  News has come of the great victory won at Copenhagen, won by your true husband, the father of your precious daughter, your first child as far as your beloved knows, who is mad with grief that he could not be present at his daughter’s birth, mad with joy at being a father, he tells you, he writes you once or twice a day; you write him three or four times a day. He writes mostl
y about the child now, how she must be christened, there is no question of his not acknowledging her paternity, how worried he is about her health. That and his jealousy. He does not seriously believe that you will be unfaithful to him, but he is convinced that every man in London is attracted to you. And the truth is that several are. You may not be presentable at court, and Miss Knight, warned the very evening of the return to London that any further contact with you will tarnish her reputation, has never once called on you. But others do. You are received, you entertain, there have to be parties and musical evenings, if only because your husband, whom you now regard as the father you never had, you were a girl when you married him, but you really are a woman now, your father-husband must show he is still well-off, with no pressing need to sell his collections. There are plans for a party which the Prince of Wales will attend. And a friend of the hero was delighted to be able to inform him that the prince is saying around town that you have hit his fancy. He will be next to you, telling you soft things, wails the hero. He will put his foot near yours! For you have been exchanging crazy hectic letters, you are both being driven mad by the separation. You make him promise that he will never go ashore whenever his ship is in harbor, no matter how long, or allow any woman to come aboard. He keeps his promise. He makes you promise that you will never allow yourself to be seated next to the Prince of Wales at any party (you didn’t keep this promise), but when the prince did press a leg against yours under the table, you swiftly pulled your leg away, and with the excuse of preparing your performance left the table. He hasn’t made you promise that you won’t exhibit yourself.

  And at the grand dinner party celebrating the news of the hero’s great victory at Copenhagen, after giving a short sedate recital on the harpsichord, you start to dance the tarantella, and then pull toward you Lord *** to dance with you, and when he seems unable to follow you, you seize the hand of Sir ***, and after a few minutes recall that you should have first asked your husband, poor old soul, who gallantly joins you for a few steps, you can feel the trembling of his bandy legs. Then you beckon to Charles, but he refuses. And when you have exhausted the few possible partners in the room, you are still not tired, of course you have been drinking, how else to get through the evening, perhaps you have drunk too much, as you often do, you know that. But you don’t want to stop. You go on dancing for a while by yourself. As an exhibition of Neapolitan folklore, which you thought would impress your guests, you have danced the tarantella many times in Palermo, but this is the first time you dance it in cold grey London. It doesn’t matter, the tarantella is inside you. You always had a pretext for performing, you were a living statue or a painter’s model, reproducing the postures and demeanor of some figure of history or poetry, you impersonated, or Attitudinized, as those who pillory you are now wont to say, you sang, with another’s cry or gaiety in your mouth. Now you have no pretext, no mask. There is just the feeling of joy, now, dancing to this music in your head, here, in London, in your own house, with your old husband sitting over there, not looking at you, looking away, while everyone else is looking, staring, you are making a fool of yourself, it doesn’t matter, you feel so alive. You know you are not as graceful as you once were, but it is you, it is what you have become, you are starting to put on weight again, your mother and your maids are taking out the seams again, and you call for your black Fatima and your blond Marianne, who are standing with some of the other servants in a far doorway watching the masters’ pleasures, to join you in the tarantella. They both come forward shyly, and begin to dance with you, but Marianne has gone all red, and says something you don’t hear, and slips away, while Fatima is dancing as ardently as you are. Perhaps it is the wine, perhaps it is Fatima’s glossy black skin, perhaps it is your elation over Copenhagen, and you now dance holding Fatima’s sweating black hand—faster, your heart thumping, and your engorged, unmilked breasts bumping against your chest. You have no pretext now, you always had a pretext for performing. You are just you. Pure energy, pure defiance, pure foreboding. And you hear the strange cries and screams coming from your mouth, sounds of a most peculiar nature, even you can hear that, and you can see you are creating a scandal, your guests look quite startled. But this is what they wanted. This is what they think of you anyway. You wish you could rip off your clothes and show them your heavy body, the mottling and stretchmarks on your belly, your pale blue-veined huge breasts, the eczema on your elbows and knees. You pull at your clothes, you pull at Fatima’s clothes. This is who they think you really are, twirling, screeching, shrieking, all mouth, all breasts, all thighs, vulgar, unrestrained, lewd, lascivious, fleshy, wet. Let them see what they think they see anyway. And you pull Fatima toward you, receiving in her breath, you imagine, all of Africa, and you kiss her on the mouth, tasting the spices, the scents, all the faraway places, you want to be everywhere, but you are only here, with something filling your body, and you dance faster, faster. Something is bursting out of you, almost like when the child was pushing out of your fundament, it is frightening, as that was, you thought you were going to die, a woman always thinks she is going to die when the contractions come faster, and it seems impossible that you can pass this huge thing out of your body. Like that, it is frightening though not painful, not painful as giving birth to life is. No, it is joy, the aliveness of being alive, you have become a figure of scandal, but you are feeling how happy you are, how proud of him you are, and then how big the world is—he is far away and may have to stay away for months, he may be wounded, he may be killed at any time, he will be killed one day, you know that—and how alone you are, and how always alone you are, not so different from this docile Fatima, a stranger in this world like you, a woman, a helot, who must be what others want her to be. And it is so big, the world, and you have lived so much, but everyone blames you, you know it. But there is his glory, his glory, and you sink to your knees, and Fatima follows, and you embrace and kiss once more and then you both rise and Fatima, her eyes closed, is uttering strange ululating cries, and they pour out of your throat too. And the guests are very embarrassed, but for a long time you have been an embarrassment, you always embarrass people now. You’ve seen it in their eyes, you are anything but unobservant, you just pretend you don’t notice. Let them all be embarrassed even further. It feels so good to sing and stamp and twirl. Why do they criticize you and mock you? Why do you embarrass them? They must sometimes feel as you do now. Why are people always trying to stop you? You’ve tried to be what they wanted you to be.

  * * *

  My dearest wife, the hero writes to the Cavaliere’s wife. Parting from you is literally tearing one’s own flesh. I am so low I cannot hold up my head.

  In February, the hero got three days’ leave and saw his daughter in Little Titchfield Street. He wept when he took the infant and held her against his breast. They wept together when he left to go back to sea.

  She had always meant to tell him about the other daughter, now nineteen, to whom she had given her own first name. But the right moment had never come, and now it was too late. The other daughter was herself, whereas this child bore the hero’s first name, with the feminine a ending. So this tiny babe was her only child.

  Whenever the Cavaliere was out for the day with Charles, she had the baby brought from Little Titchfield Street. She would go back to bed and sleep beside her. It was kind of him never to allude to the child’s existence, she was grateful to him for that. He could have reproached her. No, he will not reproach her. Her mother would knock when the Cavaliere returned. She does not want to impose the child on him, she told herself. The truth was, she did not want to share the child with him, but one day … surely not too far off … he will be … she will no longer be … she will not have to send her child away!

  * * *

  The Cavaliere reproached his wife only about money—the expenses of their entertaining, for instance; a wine bill of four hundred pounds, in particular. But she was as unmercenary as she was extravagant. She volunteered to sell all the prese
nts from the Queen, the diamond necklace given her many years ago by the Cavaliere for her birthday, and the rest of her jewelry. There was a glut of diamonds on the London market (too many penniless French émigré aristocrats selling their jewels); valued in Italy at the equivalent of thirty thousand pounds, they fetched only a twentieth of that. But at least the sum paid for the furnishing of the house in Piccadilly.

  Now he had to sell what he had to sell.

  The inventory had already been made two and a half years ago, a lifetime ago, before they left Naples. The few paintings which had been uncrated and hung in the house in Piccadilly were repacked; and the fourteen cases of pictures and the other boxes were taken out of the house in Piccadilly and conveyed to the auctioneer.

  What’s hard is choosing. I’ll keep this, but I’ll let that go. No, I can’t give that up. That’s hard.

  But once you decide to let everything go, it isn’t so hard. One feels rather reckless, giddy. The important thing is to hold nothing back.

  A collection is, ideally, acquired piece by piece—there is more pleasure that way—but that would be the most unpleasant way of selling it. Instead of the death of a thousand cuts, one clean lethal blow. When Mr. Christie informed him of the result of the first two days of sale, entirely devoted to his pictures, he barely glanced at the breakdown. He did not want to dwell on the fact that the Veronese and the Rubens had gone for more than he had expected, the Titian and the Canaletto for less. The important thing is that he had got far more than he had paid for them, nearly six thousand pounds.