by Susan Sontag
I will mention one of the stories told about me which is not true. I am said to have felt guilty afterward for not intervening to save Doctor Cirillo, and to have known at the time that innocent blood was being shed at Naples. It was told that I had nightmares until the end of my life and, on some nights, like Lady Macbeth I would walk in my sleep and cry out and raise my hands to look for the blood. I do not believe I felt guilty. What was I supposed to feel guilty for?
In the end, everyone repudiated me. I wrote to the Queen, my friend. She did not answer. I was sent to debtors’ prison. As soon as I was let out conditionally, I packed two trunks of clothes and a few pieces of jewelry and mementoes and bought passage on the packet for Calais that left from the Tower for myself and my child—who knew no more than that she was her father’s daughter and I, his friend, was her guardian. In Calais I took the best rooms in the best hotel for two weeks and spent half the money I had brought with me. Then we moved to a farm a few miles beyond the town. Since there was no school for her, I gave the lessons, teaching her German and Spanish—her French was already acceptable—and reading Greek and Roman history with her. And I hired a woman in the village to take her for rides on an ass, so she would have some exercise.
My daughter was fourteen when we fled England. I was fourteen when I came up to London from my village, so eager and happy to begin my life and rise in the world. I was born of nobody. She was the daughter of the greatest hero and the once-greatest beauty of the age. I had a mother who always praised me, whatever I did—an ignorant fool of a mother whose company and whose love afforded me great pleasure and comfort. My daughter had a mother who never praised her, who told her constantly to be mindful of who her father was, that he was looking down from heaven on her, and must at all moments see only what could make him proud of her—a sharp-witted mother whose presence terrified and appalled her.
No one crossed from England to see us. I had become so repulsive I never looked in a mirror. I was orange with jaundice and bloated with fluids. When I became too ill, we returned to town and went into a dark room in a miserable pension. My bed was in the alcove. I sent the child to the pawnbroker each week, first with a watch, then with a gold pin, then with my dresses, so there was food for her and I could go on drinking. I taught her to play backgammon with me. I slept much of the time. My one visitor was a priest from a nearby church.
There was no one but a child to tend to an ill-smelling, weeping, snoring, dying woman, no one but she to empty bedpans and wash out the sheets. I was quite cruel to her and she was very dutiful.
At the very end I asked my daughter to fetch the priest from the Church of Saint Pierre for the last rites. Only then, and for the first time, did the solemn oppressed creature, who would grow up to marry a vicar and remember the terrible last six months in France with grim charity, try to oppose my will.
You will not deny me this consolation, I shouted. How dare you!
I will go for the priest if you tell me who my mother is, replied the wretched girl.
Your mother, I hissed, is an unfortunate woman who wishes to remain unnamed. I shall not betray her trust.
She waited. I closed my eyes. She touched my hand. I pulled it away. I began to sing to myself. I felt the acrid stream of vomit run down the side of my mouth. Nothing, not even the certainty of losing heaven, could have made me tell her the truth. Why should I have consoled her when there was no one to console me. I heard the door close. She had gone for the priest.
4
I could see their ship in the bay from the window of my cell.
My friends and I had already boarded one of the transports leaving for Toulon when they arrived on the 24th of June and annulled the treaty that had been signed with the Cardinal Monster: we were dragged off the transport and taken to the Vicaria. As one of the few women in the prison, I was allotted a scummy cell of my own, ten steps by seven, with a cot to sleep on and no chains. Two of my friends spent the summer shackled to the wall by iron collars, and others were hunched five in a cell, and slept body to body on the floor. Some of us went through the farce of hearings called trials, but our guilt had already been decided.
Day after day I watched the black ship riding the water. I would not send them a letter greasy with sweat or tears. I would not beg for my life.
At night I saw the lanterns and the white masts gleaming in the moonlight. Sometimes I stared for so long at the ship that I could make the swaying masts stand still and feel the prison move.
I saw the small craft coming to and fro which brought them food and wine and musicians for their evening’s entertainment. I could hear the shouts and the laughter. I remembered the many sumptuous repasts at their table. I remembered the assemblies for which the British ambassador and his wife were celebrated. On several of the evenings that she had performed her Attitudes, I read my poems. In my cell I wrote several verses, two in Neapolitan and an elegy to the blue sky and the gulls composed in homage to my master Virgil in Latin.
How glorious to be a ship cleaving the thick summer sea. How glorious to be a gull soaring in the blue summer air. As a child, I often gave myself in fantasy the power to fly. But the body acquires gravity in a prison. Although quite diminished by the meager ration of bread and soup brought twice a day to my cell, I had never felt so earth-bound. My spirit wanted to climb, but I could not even daydream myself into flying with the body I had become. I could only imagine that, no sooner aloft, I would plummet—aside their ship, their ship—directly into the sea.
At dawn on the sixth of August, when I went to my window, I saw that the flagship was gone. Their work of authorizing and giving legitimacy to the murder of the Neapolitan patriots having been concluded, they had sailed back to Palermo. The hangings and beheadings were to continue until the following spring.
I was executed two weeks later.
When I saw that I could not escape execution, I demanded to be beheaded rather than hanged. It was the only right pertaining to my class I would have liked to exercise. My request was denied by the Junta of State on the grounds that I was a foreigner. And I was a foreigner. I was born in Rome and had lived in Naples since the age of eight. I had been naturalized when my Portuguese father received a Neapolitan patent of nobility and assumed Neapolitan citizenship. I had been married to a Neapolitan noble and officer. Yes, I was a foreigner.
For the performance of my death, I had chosen a long black gown which narrowed at my ankles, last worn four years ago to my husband’s funeral. I chose this garment not to present myself as in mourning for our dashed hopes, but because my monthly flow had started and I preferred to wear something that would not show any stain when I stood at the foot of the scaffold.
I spent my last night trying to master my fear.
First, I was afraid I would lose my dignity. I had heard that those about to be hanged often lose control of their bowels. I was afraid that my knees would buckle as I was led through the square to the platform on which the gallows and its ladder stood. I feared a convulsion of unseemly terror at the sight of the hangman advancing toward me with the blindfold, and his assistant holding the long rope with a noose. The crowd’s shouts of Long Live the King had provoked some of my friends to make their last words Long Live the Republic. But I wanted to go to my death in silence.
Then, I was afraid of being choked before they hanged me. For I knew that after the hangman tied a dirty rag around my head, he or his assistant would drop a heavy hairy ring of rope over my head onto my shoulders. Unseen hands would pull it tighter, and where it tugged I must go, to the foot of the ladder, and then upward—I would have to follow the rope. I imagined the ladder sagging with the weight of three. The hangman above me, pulling me up by the head. His assistant below me, holding my ankles and guiding, thrusting them from one rung up to the next.
Then, I was afraid I would not die after the hangman scrambled onto the crossbeam to make fast his end of the rope, and his assistant, tightening his grip on my ankles, pushed off into the air, taking
me with him. Could I still be alive when there were two of us swinging in the air, his weight stretching downward from my feet? Still alive when the hangman leapt from the crossbeam to straddle my shoulders, and we became a dangling, swaying chain of three?
Dawn came. I dressed. I was brought from my cell to a room near the office of the director of the prison, and my joy at seeing my friends again—I was to be hanged in good company, with seven of my fellow patriots—suddenly gave me the impression that I was not afraid to die.
The air was already torrid. We were offered water. I asked for coffee. A guard went to the director of the prison and he gave his permission. But my coffee arrived scalding, and while I waited for it to cool, those at the door were waiting too. They told me I had no more time. I told them that I was allowed to have my coffee first, and that they would have to grant me a few minutes more. There was a poet among us, only twenty-three years old, who used this delay to take out a scrap of paper and write. I wondered if it was another poem, or some words he was preparing to say at the foot of the scaffold. The coffee still burned my tongue when I tried to sip it. I put it down, ignoring the ferocious stares at the door. The poet was still writing. I was glad to afford him these few words more. The bishop was on his knees with his rosary. It was as if I had made time stop—but it would be I who made it go forward again. For meanwhile my coffee was inexorably cooling. The moment I could drink it, the spell would be broken, and we would go forward to our deaths.
I did not move. Any movement on my part, I felt, would have broken the spell. I was famished, and had slipped between my breasts a piece of roll saved from the scant repast of the night before. I could have eaten the roll while waiting for my coffee to cool. But the guards might have said I had permission to take coffee, not to eat.
I lifted the bowl to my lips once more and, alas, the coffee was tepid enough to drink.
I thought—a woman’s thought, perhaps—I should offer a word of consolation to the others, for I saw they were at least as weakened by despair as I was. Some words from the Aeneid came to mind: Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit—Perhaps one day even this will be a joy to recall. I saw a smile cross my young poet’s face.
We were escorted out of the prison and, before being put in the cart, our arms were bound tightly behind our backs. I realized then that my arms would never be unbound again. How I regretted not having been braver and eaten the piece of roll.
The cart brought us under the carefree cloudless sky; through streets crowded with those habituated to the repeated, corrupting spectacle of suffering; to the market square with its gallows-stage and vast audience assembled to watch us dance in the air. These impatient spectators were themselves observed, surrounded by soldiers from regular units and the Cardinal Monster’s army, and two regiments of cavalry. We were taken inside the walls of the Church of the Carmine, where other troops stood in reserve in case of any tumult, and put into a windowless guardhouse.
They took our cavalry officer first. Twenty-four years old, and the scion of one of the great ducal families, he had been second-in-command of the National Guard. It seemed to take no more than twenty minutes. We listened to the shouts of the crowd.
Then they took the seventy-three-year-old priest, a fine hale old man.
As I had watched my friends go one by one, I wondered if—perhaps because I was the only woman—I would be saved for last.
When only the young poet and I were left, I said to him: I hope I do not embarrass you by this request, but since our bodies are shortly to be mangled and defiled, perhaps we can be released a few minutes earlier from the scruples of modesty that ordinarily bind us. I am painfully hungry and have a small piece of roll inside the bodice of my gown. Would you have the kindness to attempt to extract it. Think that you incline your head to the breast of your mother.
I incline my head with reverence to a fellow poet, he said.
I had forgotten how a man’s face felt buried in my breast. How beautiful it was. He lifted his head, the piece of roll between his teeth. He had tears in his eyes as I had in mine. We brought our faces together so we could share the bread between us. And then they took him.
I heard the shouts of the crowd. That meant my poet was hanging. I wished I could use a water closet. Then it was my turn—and, yes, it was exactly as I had imagined it.
* * *
My name is Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel. This is the name I was born to (my father was Don Clemente de Fonseca Pimentel) and the name I am known by (I resumed my family name after the death of my husband)—or some version of it. Usually I am referred to as Eleonora Pimentel. Sometimes as Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca. Occasionally as Eleonora de Fonseca. Often just as Eleonora, when historians go on about me at some length in books and articles, while my colleagues in the Neapolitan revolution of 1799, all men, never are referred to by their first names alone.
I was precocious: prodigies were not rare among the privileged in my time. At fourteen I composed verses in Latin and Italian, corresponded with Metastasio, and wrote a play called The Triumph of Virtue, which I dedicated to the Marquis de Pombal. My verses circulated in manuscript and were praised. I wrote an epithalamium for the marriage of the King and Queen in 1768; I was sixteen, the same age as the Queen. I wrote several economic treatises, including one on a project for establishing a national bank. I married late: I was already twenty-five, and my unsuitable husband was forty-four. I continued my studies of mathematics, physics, and botany. My husband and his friends thought me an odd, an unsuitable wife. I was brave, as a woman, for my time. I did not simply leave my husband seven years later or, what was more common, have my father and brothers speak to him sternly and secure his agreement to our living apart. I sued him for a legal separation. There was a trial, in which I testified about some of his many infidelities, and he counter-charged me with spending most of my time reading, being an atheist, and having an affair with my mathematics tutor, as well as other, more diffused debaucheries. Despite the scandal I had unleashed, I won my decree of separation. Then I stood alone.
I went on reading, writing, translating, studying. I had a stipend from the court for my literary activities. My translation from Latin into Italian of a history of papal influence in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was dedicated to the King when it was published in 1790. I became a republican and broke with my royal patrons. Shall I recite my Ode to Liberty—the one for which I was jailed? No. I was no more than a conventionally gifted poet. My strongest poems were written years earlier—sonnets on the death of my child, Francesco, only eight months old.
The revolution exploded and I exploded with it. I created the principal newspaper of our five-month-long republic. I wrote many articles. Though hardly unaware of practical economic and political problems, I do not think I was wrong to consider education the most imperative task. What is a revolution if it does not change hearts and minds? I know I talk like a woman, though not like every woman. I know I talk like a woman of my class. I had read and admired Mary Wollstonecraft’s book when it was published in Naples in 1794, but I did not, in my newspaper, ever raise the issue of the rights of women. I was independent. I had not sacrificed my mind to some trivial idea of my sex. Indeed I did not think of myself as a woman first of all. I thought of our just cause. I was glad to forget I was only a woman. It was easy to forget that I was, at many of our meetings, the only woman. I wanted to be pure flame.
You cannot imagine the wickedness of life in that kingdom. The depravity of the court, the distress of the people, the falsity of manners. Oh, do not say it was splendid then. It was splendid only for the rich, it was gratifying only if one did not reflect on the lives of the poor.
I was born into that world, I belonged to that class, I experienced the charms of that very agreeable life, I rejoiced in its unlimited vistas of knowledge and skill. How naturally human beings adapt to abjection, to lies, and to unearned prerogatives. Those whom birth or appropriate forms of ambition have placed inside the circle of privilege would h
ave to be dedicated misfits—disablingly sanctimonious or bent on self-deprivation—not to enjoy themselves. But those whom birth or revolt have cast outside, where most beings on this earth live, would have to be obtuse or slavish in temperament not to see how disgraceful it is that so few monopolize both wealth and refinement, and inflict such suffering on others.
I was earnest, I was ecstatic, I did not understand cynicism, I wanted things to be better for more than a few. I was willing to give up my privileges. I was not nostalgic about the past. I believed in the future. I sang my song and my throat was cut. I saw beauty and my eyes were put out. Perhaps I was naïve. But I did not give myself to infatuation. I did not drown in the love of a single person.
I will not deign to speak of my hatred and contempt for the warrior, champion of British imperial power and savior of the Bourbon monarchy, who killed my friends. But I will speak of his friends, who were also so pleased with themselves.
Who was the esteemed Sir William Hamilton but an upper-class dilettante enjoying the many opportunities afforded in a poor and corrupt and interesting country to pilfer the art and make a living out of it and to get himself known as a connoisseur. Did he ever have an original thought, or subject himself to the discipline of writing a poem, or discover or invent something useful to humanity, or burn with zeal for anything except his own pleasures and the privileges annexed to his station? He knew enough to appreciate what the picturesque natives had left, in the way of art and ruins, lying about the ground. He condescended to admire our volcano. His friends at home must have been struck by his fearlessness.
Who was his wife but another talented, overwrought woman who thought herself valuable because men she could admire loved her. Unlike her husband and her lover, she had no genuine convictions. She was an enthusiast, and would have enlisted herself with the same ardor in the cause of whomever she loved. I can easily imagine Emma Hamilton, had her nationality been different, as a republican heroine, who might have ended most courageously at the foot of some gallows. That is the nullity of women like her.