The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  * * *

  Impossible to Describe …

  It is impossible to describe her beauty, said the Cavaliere; impossible to describe how happy she makes me.

  It is impossible to describe how much I miss you, Charles, wrote the girl. Impossible to describe how angry I am.

  And of the volcano, erupting, in which the Cavaliere delighted anew: It is impossible to describe the beautiful appearance of the girandoles of red-hot stones, far surpassing the most astonishing fireworks, wrote the Cavaliere, who then went on to offer a batch of comparisons, none of which do justice to what he sees. For, like any object of grand passion, the volcano unites many contradictory attributes. Entertainment and apocalypse. A cycle of substance displaying all four elements: starting with smoke, then fire, then flowing lava, ending in lava rock, the most earth-solid of all.

  Of the girl, the Cavaliere would often say to himself, to others: She resembles … she is like … she could play.… It is more than resemblance. Embodiment. Hers was the beauty he had adored on canvas, as a statue, on the side of a vase. She the Venus with the arrows, she the reclining Thetis awaiting her bridegroom. Nothing had ever seemed to him as beautiful as certain objects and images—the reflection, no, the memorial, of a beauty that never really existed, or existed no longer. Now he realized the images were not only the record of beauty but its harbinger, its forerunner. Reality splintered into innumerable images, and images burned in one’s heart because they all spoke of one beauty.

  The Cavaliere has beauty and the beast.

  People were bound to say, because of the substantial loan he had made to Charles, that his nephew had sold the girl to him. Let them think what they will. If there was one advantage to living so far from home, in this capital of backwardness and sensual indulgence, it was that he could do what he wanted.

  In the promenade of carriages at sunset on the Chiaia, he introduced her to the local society and, one Sunday, to the King and Queen. He could not take her to the palace, but outdoors, under the sky, she could be presented to everyone. All true lovers of beauty were captivated by her, he could see that. So were ordinary people, beggars and washerwomen in the streets, who took her for an angel. When he showed her Ischia, some peasants knelt before her, and a priest who came to the house made the sign of the cross and declared that she had been sent among them for a special purpose. The maids the Cavaliere had given her came to beg for intercession in her prayers, because, they said, she resembled the Virgin. She clapped her hands with glee at the sight of horses decorated with artificial flowers, crimson tassels, plumes on their heads. The driver gravely leaned forward, extracted a plume, and handed it to her. When people saw her, they brightened. She was so blithe, so full of joy. Anyone who didn’t like her was a damned snob. How could one not admire her and be joyful in her presence?

  Young as she was and without the advantages of birth and education, she had a kind of natural authority. Mrs. Cadogan seemed almost intimidated by her, treating her more like a mistress than a daughter. One could have taken this self-effacing, plain countrywoman who liked her drink for a more distant relative whom the girl had taken in as an unsalaried chaperone and companion. That her mother invariably accompanied them when they went out allowed him to cherish even more deeply inside himself the excitement he was feeling. Routine pleasures became suspenseful, acquired sweep and intensity. In the harsh sun of an early July morning, they rode along the piney hill road to his little day cottage in Posillipo, to wait out the heat of the day on the terrace under great curtains of orange cloth swelling and flapping in the sea breeze. With delight he watched her savoring the chilled fruit, the strong Vesuvian wine; remained in the shade of the terrace when she descended the stairs cut in the rock to bathe, and watched her standing breast-high in the water, first bravely splashing her arms, then cupping the nape of her neck with her wet hand and remaining in that adorable pose for a long moment, while some boys spied on her from behind the rocks and her mother and two maids waited nearby with robe and towels. It did not matter if she loved him, so much did he love her, love watching her.

  He never tired of cataloguing the play of her moods, the flow of one appearance into another, the variety, the inclusiveness of her appearance. Sometimes she was provocative, sometimes chastely shy. Sometimes full, almost matronly; sometimes like a fidgety little girl, waiting to be plied with presents. How charming she was when she tried on a bonnet or a sash or a gown he had designed for her, laughing unaffectedly, admiring herself.

  Shall I turn my head like this? she said to the young German painter the Cavaliere had installed in the house to paint her portrait.

  Or like this?

  Like an actress, she was used to having an effect on people when she came into a room. It was included in the way she walked, the exact slowness of the way she turned her head, put her hand to her cheek … just so. The authority of beauty.

  What kind of beauty?

  Not the beauty which is linear, and requires a purging of the flesh: beauty of contour, of bone, of profile, of silky hair and the flare of delicate nostrils. (The beauty that, after first youth, must diet, that wills itself to be thin.) This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

  Not that beauty, the beauty arising from privilege, from will, from artifice … but one almost as authoritative: the beauty of someone who has to fight for a place and can take nothing for granted. Beauty which is about volume, which is willing to be, cannot choose to be other than, flesh. (And eventually runs to fat.) Beauty which strokes itself with parted full lips, inviting the touch of others. Beauty which is generous and leans toward the admirer. I can change, yes, because I want to please you.

  Her beauty, of the second kind, both naïve and sovereign, needed no completing or polishing. Yet she seemed to have become, if possible, even lovelier since she arrived, her beauty expanding as it chimed with something sensual, moist, sparkling in the air, under a sun so unlike the English sun. Perhaps she needed this new setting, these new modes of appreciation; needed to suffer, even (she wept for Charles, she really loved him); needed the luxury she had never enjoyed; needed to be—instead of some cautious, nervous dilettante’s little jewel sequestered in a London suburb, obediently pouring his tea—the proud possession, publicly displayed, of a great collector.

  * * *

  What do you do with beauty? You admire it, you praise it, you embellish it (or try to), you display it; or you conceal it.

  Could you have something supremely beautiful and not want to show it to others? Possibly, if you fear their envy, if you worry that someone will come and take it away. Someone who steals a painting from a museum or a mediaeval manuscript from a church must keep it hidden. But how deprived the thief must feel. It seems most natural to exhibit beauty, to frame it, to stage it—and hear others admire, echo your admiration.

  You smile. Yes. She is quite marvelous.

  Marvelous? She is much more than that.

  What is beauty without a chorus, without the whispers, the sighs, the murmurs?

  But who knows better than the Cavaliere what beauty is, beauty into which one falls. I am cut, I am felled. I fall, cover me with your mouth.

  * * *

  Beauty must be exhibited. And beauty can be taught how best to exhibit itself.

  Her perfections and his happiness did not mean he did not want to improve her. The Cavaliere’s mansion was stocked with tutors from morning to night. She had her singing teacher, her drawing teacher, her Italian teacher, her piano teacher. A natural student, she soon became fluent in Italian—speaking it better than the Cavaliere did, after more than twenty years of residence—so he added lessons in French, which he spoke well, with an English drawl. She quickly mastered French, and with less accent, which testified to the excellence of her ear. The Cavaliere himself gave the rain-in-Spain lessons to make her accent in her own language more acceptable, and ceaselessly reproved her for her childish spell
ing.

  Her English remains incorrigible, a flurry of dropped aitches and puerile yelps, no matter how firmly he instructs her. She can add new skills, like French and Italian; learn arts, such as singing and drawing, that she has never practiced before. She can become accomplished on top of being vulgar, she cannot pull out the supporting layer of vulgarity. She cannot walk over her own feet.

  She had thought herself abandoned. She had been passed on. She moves on, rapidly. All around her were women of her age, highborn women, each more languid than the next. She does not walk, she rushes. She was also naturally very intelligent, which compounded the energy at her disposal. She asked for more lessons: she wants everything, starting with days, to be filled. Eight o’clock … nine o’clock … ten o’clock … and so forth, as many as can be crammed into a day. The Cavaliere asked if she was tired.

  She laughed boisterously, then covered her full mouth with her palm.

  Tired!

  The Cavaliere added botany and geology lessons. She has a dancing master now. She learns to play the piano, passably. But she sings like an angel. The castrato Aprile, engaged to give her advanced singing lessons, three a day, said that he had never heard so natural a voice, which the Cavaliere did not take as gross flattery but as the simple truth. He loved hearing her airy melismas as he worked on his morning correspondence. When she was not studying languages or music, she was feeding at his library. She hoped to please the Cavaliere, and did, by telling him she liked Sterne and Voltaire.

  Flushed with pleasure, pitching her voice up and over the guests’ heads to the torches and footmen at the rear of the room, she sang at the Cavaliere’s assemblies. She longed to go to a ball at the palace. Although she accompanies the Cavaliere everywhere, she can’t be received at the court. But she met the King often with his al fresco train of loafers and louts. He pulls at her hand and kisses her fingers. Even the Queen has smiled at her. Everyone pays her the most lavish compliments. She sits beside the Cavaliere in his silk-hung box at the San Carlo.

  Mrs. Hart she calls herself.

  She does not know who she is anymore, but she knows herself to be ascending. She sees how much the Cavaliere loves her. She feels her mastery. Skills fly in like birds and settle in her head. She drinks, she laughs loudly. She is hectic, full of blood. She warms the Cavaliere at night, he lays his angular head on her ripe soft bosom and slips his knees between hers.

  * * *

  Like many legendary beauties, she did not look for beauty in those with whom she fell in love. (A truly great beauty always has enough beauty for two.) She had not loved Charles more for his smug good looks, she did not love the Cavaliere less because he was a hollow-chested old man.

  Insatiably eager for the Cavaliere’s approval, she read him aloud passages from a manual of self-control for women which Charles had given her, The Triumphs of Temper. She knew its author, Mr. Hayley. He was one of Romney’s friends. He had encouraged her. I am triumphing over my temper, she said to the Cavaliere. I have become reasonable. You will see. My adorable darling, said the Cavaliere.

  Was it the way her eyes followed him? Not meek, like Catherine’s; not pleading for attention, hoping to be met, drawn in, by an answering gaze—but playful, ardent, drawing him inside her gaze.

  Her talent for enjoyment, her lack of fastidiousness, her superb health, delighted him. He was done forever with putting up with a woman’s frailty, a woman’s complaints.

  In Mr. Hayley’s poem, which she pointedly kept by her bed, Serena, the protagonist, is always calm, good-natured, obliging, unfazed by rebuke or difficulty. In a word, serene. That was the way the Cavaliere wanted her—not all the time of course, for then she would be bland and unseductive and without charm, but whenever he opposes her will or disappoints her. She was not to complain when he left her, because he must leave her now, even though he doesn’t want to, must join the King to hunt or play billiards. In January, when the King’s hunting lust was at its peak, the Cavaliere brought her out with him to the lodge at Caserta, where Catherine had spent so many lonely weeks. It was a test, which she passed splendidly. When he had to absent himself to be with the King, she wrote him little notes about how she studied to please him and how happy he made her. He dreamed of her full thighs.

  Even her imperfections were dear to him: her small receding chin, the blush of eczema on her elbows that showed through the sleeves of a muslin dress, the stretchmarks of pregnancy on her belly, her laugh that sometimes became a guffaw. Which means he really loved her.

  His passion defied what everyone knows about passion: that it is stimulated (indeed, kept alive) by doubt, separation, menace, withholding, frustration; and is incompatible with possession, security. But possession diminished nothing. The Cavaliere was bewitched sexually. He had not known he wanted so badly to be embraced.

  Out of habit, out of affection, out of incapacity to hold a grudge, she continued to write to Charles—about her triumphs. I have a sweet of four rooms overlooking the bay & my own carridge & my own footmen & servents & cloathes are being made for me. All the ladys of the court admire my hair. I sang at a musical assembley 2 searous songs & 2 buffos & was told my voyce is as good as a castrato. Their was such claping. People wept when they herd me. And your uncle really loves me & I love him & my onely study is to make him happy. We walk in the public garden evry evening. We go to the oppera all the time, & have taken some foreyners to see the Greke temples at Pesto.… Besides the “we” of the couple (as in “We think the Dorick colums two heavy and not so ellegant”), there is the “we” of a place (as in “We may have some very large erruption soon, I wish we may”). She has adopted the mountain, seeing how much the Cavaliere’s thoughts dwell on it, and speaks offhandedly of the eruption that took place soon after his arrival twenty-three years ago (“It was most memerable but not so terrable”), as if she had been there too. Your uncle laughs at me, she wrote to Charles, & says I shall rival him with the mountan now.

  She is displacing the volcano.

  She is becoming a local marvel with an international reputation, like the volcano. The Russian ambassador, Count Scavronsky, must have thought her beauty worth a description in a dispatch to his sovereign, for Catherine the Great has asked for a likeness of the girl to be sent to Saint Petersburg.

  How could the Cavaliere not cherish her?

  He began to trust her. Horrible to think of all she had suffered. An object is not sullied because it has been in the possession of less worthy owners. What counts is that it has reached its destination, been locked into the circle of possessions of the one who most deserved to own it.

  * * *

  Pity the uniquely valuable objects whose destiny is to be made available, in toy form, to everyone. Being safe in some great private collection or museum will not prevent this shadow despoliation.

  Such was the fate of the celebrated object whose sale had been the Cavaliere’s greatest coup as an art dealer. A year after yielding to the allure of his exquisite Roman cameo vase, the Dowager Duchess of Portland died and the vase passed to her son, the Third Duke, who leased it for a spell to the Cavaliere’s alert accomplice in the great project of elevating public taste, Josiah Wedgwood. Some twenty replicas of the midnight-blue glass vase were made in smooth black stoneware—the industrial potter and professed lover of simplified forms was to consider it his masterpiece. Wedgwood did not even attempt to match the color or patina of the original and, by simplifying, vitiated its aristocratic contours. The vase’s handles lean inward instead of following the curve of the body, the shoulders are more rounded, the neck is shortened. Perhaps the Cavaliere found the slightly dumpy rendering acceptable, having long ago overcome any patrician resistance to this new, mercantile way of spreading the influence of his collections. But he would surely have been startled by the progeny of the vase that the Wedgwood firm began turning out by the tens of thousands in the next century. Olive-green, yellow, pale pink, lilac, lavender-blue, grey, black, and brown Portland vases; Portland vases in man
y sizes, including small, medium, and large. Everyone could have, should have a Portland vase—and however desired: that was the company’s plan. It grew, it shrank, it could be any color. The vase became a notion, a tribute to itself.

  Who can really love the Portland Vase now?

  The most valuable possession is always identical with itself. She is now his most valuable possession. And a valuable object confers value on its owner. A collector is happy to be known, mainly known, as the proprietor of what—through so much effort—has been collected.

  * * *

  So the old man collected the young woman; it could not have been the other way around. Collecting is both a sociable and a piratical activity. Women are reared not to feel competent at or gratified by the questing, the competing, the outbidding that collecting (as distinct from large-scale acquiring) demands. The great collectors are not women, any more than are the great joke-tellers. Collecting, like telling jokes, implies belonging to the world in which already-made objects circulate, are competed for, are transmitted. It presumes confident, full membership in such a world. Women are trained to be marginal or supporting players in that world, as in many others. To compete for approbation—not to compete as such.

  * * *

  You tell me a joke. I love your joke. It makes me laugh so much my sides ache, and my eyes moist over. And so witty and subtle. Rather deep, even. All this in a joke. I must pass it on.

  Here comes somebody else. I’ll tell your joke. I mean the joke. It isn’t yours, of course. Someone told it to you. And now I’ll tell it to someone else if I can remember it. Before I forget it I want to share it with someone, see that person have my reaction (roar with laughter, nod with appreciation, eyes moistening a little), but in order to be the pitcher, not the catcher, I have to not botch the telling. I have to tell it the way you told it, at least as well. I have to get behind the joke’s wheel and drive it properly without jamming the gears or running into a ditch.

  Being a woman, I’ll worry more about my ability to get the joke out and into this new person’s mind than if I were a man. (You, of course, are a man.) I may start by apologizing, and explaining that although I’m not good at remembering jokes and hardly ever tell jokes, I can’t resist telling this one. And then I start, nervously, trying to recall exactly how you did it. I imitate your intonations. I make your emphases, your pauses.