The Volcano Lover

by Susan Sontag

  The daily killing of many animals raised the King’s spirits, and he was looking forward to riding at the head of an army in a handsome uniform. The Queen, some of whose intelligence had survived the gradual wearing down of her spirits, began to have doubts about the wisdom of the expedition. It was the Cavaliere’s wife, as she related to the hero in her letters, who persuaded the Queen not to lose heart. She had vividly evoked the alternative to taking the offensive now: the Queen, her husband, and her children led to the guillotine, and the eternal dishonor to her memory for not fighting bravely to the last to save her family, her religion, her country from the hands of the rapacious murderers of her sister and the royal family of France. You shood have seen me, wrote the Cavaliere’s wife. I stood up & put out my left arm like you & made a wonderfull speach & the dear Queen cryed & said I was right. She often spoke frankly of his missing arm, for the hero was not one of those people who involve you in the obstinate ignoring of a mutilation or a disablement: the blind woman who tells you how well you look and admires your red blouse, the one-armed man who exclaims that he couldn’t stop applauding last night at the opera. In the letters the hero retired to his cabin to write every evening, addressed jointly to both his friends, he spoke of it too. I have enough correspondence for two arms, he said. And it often fatigues me to write. But apart from the ultimate happiness of seeing you both again, there is nothing I can look forward to each day but the pleasure of writing you. He thanked the Cavaliere’s wife for raising the martial spirits of the Queen. And he repeated how much he missed them both, how grateful he was for their friendship, his gratitude is more than he can express, how they had honored him beyond what he deserved—it’s as if no one had ever before been kind to him—and that having lived with them and known their affection had spoiled him for any other company, that the world now seems a barren place when he is separated from them, that his dearest wish was to come back and never leave them. I love Mrs. Cadogan too, he added.

  * * *

  Ill again and in need of nursing, the hero returned three weeks later and joined his friends in Caserta. From there he and the Cavaliere’s wife each sent letters to the hero’s wife. She wrote about the hero’s health, and sent more poems, more presents. He, in his weekly letter, told his wife that, with the exception of herself and his father, he counted the Cavaliere and his wife as the dearest friends he had in the world. I live here as the son of the house. The Cavaliere is kind enough to undertake my instruction in many interesting scientific questions, and his wife is an honor to her sex. Her equal I never saw in any country.

  In another two weeks everyone was obliged to return to Naples, from which an army of thirty-two thousand inexperienced men—commanded by an incompetent Austrian general, nominally headed by the King, and including among its conscripts the Cavaliere’s one-eyed guide, Bartolomeo Pumo—marched north to Rome. The Cavaliere and his wife are down at the quay with the cheering crowds seeing off the hero, who is to take four thousand more troops to seize neutral Leghorn and interrupt communication between Rome and the French armies occupying most of the northern part of the peninsula.

  The hero noted with some concern that the Cavaliere looks rather frail, his back is stooped, and his wife is pale and clearly trying to be very brave. Come back to us soon, says the Cavaliere. With more laurels on your brow, says his wife.

  A few hours ago she had given him a note which she’d made him promise he would not read until he was aboard the Vanguard. He had kissed the note and put it next to his heart.

  He opened it a few moments after he stepped into the boat that would bring him out to his flagship.

  There it was in her adorable hand: a torrent of wishes for his safety, protestations of eternal friendship, expressions of gratitude. But he was becoming greedy. He wanted more—something more. That she would tell him she loved him? But she told him that all the time, how much she, she and the good Cavaliere, loved him. Something more. Avidly he reached the last page, clasping the sea-sprayed pages he’d already read between his knees, as his men rowed him toward the Vanguard. Something more. Ah, there it was.

  Do not spend time ashore wile in Leghorn. Forgive me dear frend if I say their is no comfort for you in that citty.

  He winced. So she had heard the story of his only dalliance in all the years of his marriage; he knew it had been much remarked on. In Leghorn four years ago with the Captain, he had met a charming woman married to a cold, neglectful husband, a naval officer, and felt sorry for her, and then admired her, and then thought he might be in love with her—for five weeks.

  He smiled. If his dear friend was jealous, then he knew he was loved.

  * * *

  Fools! Fools! That he had been a fool did not enter the Cavaliere’s mind. Though he had been the first to believe the Bourbon government could create and field an army competent enough to take on the French, the Cavaliere was not used to blaming himself.

  The hero had done his part, depositing his troops at Leghorn, where he remained for a chaste three days. But how could the hero have thought that France would permit Rome to fall to the Neapolitans?

  Having signed a treaty of peace with France two years ago (Farce! Shame! Ignominy! raged the Queen), officially the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was neutral, and the King and his advisers—astutely, as they think—have not declared war on France. This expedition, they announce, is not directed against France. It is only a fraternal response to an appeal from the people of Rome—suffering under the republican government imposed on them nine months ago by Jacobin fanatics—to restore law and order. The French general who had occupied Rome since February and under whose aegis the Roman Republic has been declared, prudently withdrew his soldiers to a few miles outside the city. After the Neapolitan army took Rome without needing to fire a shot, the King entered with the pomp he considered his due, went to his residence, the Palazzo Farnese, issued a call for the Pope, who had been banished by the republic, to return, and started to enjoy himself. Two weeks later France declared war on the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the French army started back toward the city.

  The evening of the day that the King heard the French were returning, he changed from his royal garments into an ill-fitting disguise of commoner’s clothes several sizes too small for his corpulent figure and left for home. That ignominious fiasco, the Neapolitan occupation of Rome, lasted barely another week. The hero had predicted that if the march on Rome failed, Naples was lost. His prediction was correct.

  When most of the chapfallen Neapolitan army had reached home, after the King but ahead of the French, who were heading south in an orderly fashion, the Cavaliere sent for Pumo. He had worried about him. Had he survived his stint as a soldier, or was he lying somewhere in a ditch with a bullet in his head? Word came back that his guide had not returned. The Cavaliere was more incredulous than distressed. It was unthinkable that Tolo, his lucky Tolo, should not have known how to cope with this peril, as he had coped with so many others, but the rest of what was happening was exactly what he had feared.

  The King was cursing and whining and crossing himself. The Queen, in fierce reaction against her fling with enlightened views, had lately become almost as superstitious as her husband, and was writing out prayers on small pieces of paper, which she stuffed in her stays or swallowed. To all about her, she declared that only an army of Neapolitans would flee from an enemy they outnumbered six to one, that she’d always known that these shiftless Neapolitans never had a chance to hold Rome. Antiroyalist slogans appear each morning on walls: the French are coming and, anticipating their protection, the kind of protection they had given the patriots in Rome, the Jacobin sympathizers were making themselves visible. The King’s fiercely loyal subjects, the city’s poor, paint the republican slogans out and gather in the great square before the palace to demand a denial of the rumors circulating that the royal family is about to flee to Palermo. They care nothing about their foreign Queen, but they want their beloved King to stay, he must promise them he wil
l stay. Come out, show yourself, Beggar King! And the King was obliged to appear on the balcony, the Queen at his side, to show the mob that they are still there—that he will stay and fight the French and protect them—while the Queen, gazing out at the square, blinked back her visions of the guillotine rising where the cuccagna used to be erected. The hero, to whom everyone looks for salvation, must evacuate them immediately. Life and death is in the hero’s hands.

  * * *

  The Queen would not hear of entrusting the crown jewels and her diamonds and nearly seven hundred casks filled with bar and coined gold (worth about twenty million pounds) to anyone but the Cavaliere’s wife. These were conveyed by night to the British envoy’s residence, repacked with British naval seals, and then brought down to the port where they were taken out to the hero’s flagship. And it was the Cavaliere’s wife who found and explored a forgotten tunnel leading from the royal palace to the nearby small harbor, through which the rest of the portable royal assets, including the choicest paintings and other valuables of the palaces of Caserta and Naples and the best objects of the museum at Portici, as well as the royal clothes and linen, were carried on the backs of British sailors in trunks and crates and coffers, each consignment accompanied by a note from the Queen, and stowed on board the merchant ships in the bay.

  The Cavaliere’s wife, a torrent of energy and courage, was shuttling between the Queen and home, where she and her mother are supervising the sorting of clothes and linen and medicines—what women are supposed to know how to pack—while the Cavaliere gave orders for the crating of the cultural goods: his correspondence and papers, instruments and music scores, maps and books. Those servants who could be spared from the packing were sent off with notes in the hand of the Cavaliere’s wife to all the British residents, telling them to start their own packing and be ready to leave on a day’s notice.

  The Cavaliere has retired to his study and reads, trying not to think about what is going on around him—one of the principal uses of a book.

  Luckily, he had sent off all the vases two months ago, and most of the three hundred and forty-seven paintings were already packed. All of collecting Italy lived in terror of that insatiable art predator, Napoleon, who had obliged the cities he conquered to surrender paintings and other works of art as a kind of war tax. Parma and Modena, Milan and Venice, each had been assessed twenty selected masterpieces, and the Pope ordered to furnish one hundred of the Vatican’s treasures, all for a “Triumphal Entry of Objects of the Sciences and Arts Collected in Italy” into the French capital staged this past July, two weeks after the Cavaliere had made his inventory, when a long procession of priceless artifacts, including the Vatican’s Laocoön and the four bronze horses of San Marco, was paraded through the Paris boulevards, presented in an official ceremony to the minister of the interior, and then conveyed to the Louvre.

  The French would have none of his pictures. But what about his collections of volcanic minerals, his statues, bronzes, and the other antiquities? Only some could be taken with him. What a burden it is, finally, to be a collector!

  He had sometimes dreamed of a fire in which he stood paralyzed with indecision, unable to give the orders to his servants naming the few objects to be saved. And now the dream of loss has come true. But fleeing before the fire of war is still better than being caught in an eruption, in which he would have to rush into the street in his nightgown, carrying nothing, or attempt to carry out some of his things and be trapped by the descending lava. He can take a great deal. But not all. And everything is so dear to him.

  * * *

  The people are angry—and the hero has thought it prudent to move his ships farther out in the gulf, beyond the range of Neapolitan guns, where they are berthed now, rising and dropping in the turbulent water. On the cold rainy night of December 21st he landed with three barges, went to the palace, led King, Queen, children, including their eldest son, his wife, the newborn baby and wet nurse, the royal doctor, royal chaplain, head gamekeeper, and eighteen gentlemen- and ladies-in-waiting through the secret tunnel to the harbor, and guided them across the craggy swell to the Vanguard. The Cavaliere and his wife and mother-in-law, to disguise their flight, had gone that evening to a reception at the Turkish ambassador’s residence from which they slipped away and came on foot to the port. There they went aboard their own barge and were welcomed with shrieks of relief by those of their household chosen to accompany them. The Cavaliere’s English secretaries seemed almost as overwrought as one expected the Neapolitans to be: the major-domo, two cooks, two grooms, three valets, and several maids in the service of the Cavaliere’s wife. And Fatima, her new favorite—a beautiful black Copt, chastely held trophy from the Battle of the Nile which the hero had presented to her—broke down in sobs when she saw her mistress. Another barge carrying two ex-prime ministers of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Austrian ambassador, the Russian ambassador, and their dependents and servants, followed them out into the rising gale.

  The hero hoped to sail early next morning: Neptune’s trident was digging into his throbbing stump, there was going to be a storm. But the King would not permit the Vanguard to weigh anchor until seventy of his hounds were brought from Caserta and boarded onto one of the other British ships waiting to leave for Palermo. The King, who would not entrust even his hounds to a Neapolitan ship, stood on the deck of the Vanguard and chattered excitedly to the Cavaliere about the grouse hunting they would do in Sicily, while Admiral Caracciolo paced the deck of the Sannita, enduring his final humiliation. Not only had the royal family elected to be transported by the British admiral, but they had not confided a single crate of their belongings to the Neapolitan flagship. Finally, on the evening of the following day, the Vanguard was allowed to venture out of the gulf into the tremendous sea. It was following rather than leading a flotilla that included the two other warships in the hero’s squadron; the Sannita and another Neapolitan warship, most of whose crews had deserted and which were now manned by British sailors; a Portuguese man-of-war; and the merchant ships, on which had been distributed two cardinals, a number of Neapolitan noble families, all the British residents, the French residents, many of them aristocrats who had fled the revolution, a vast number of servants, and most of the possessions of the Cavaliere and his entourage.

  In all the many trunks that the Queen has insisted must accompany her, she had not thought to put bed linen. When this was noticed the Cavaliere’s wife promptly gave up hers, Mrs. Cadogan made up a bed for the King, and he went to sleep. The Cavaliere’s wife sat with the Queen on a portmanteau containing sixty thousand ducats in royal savings and held her hand. Her youngest child, six-year-old Carlo Alberto, lay on a mattress in a corner of the cabin in an unnatural-looking sleep, wheezing and sighing. Before leaving the Queen, the Cavaliere’s wife brushed away the secretions of sleep from his eyes and wiped the clammy moisture from his pale face. The older royal children were out on the tilting decks, trailing the British sea-slaves as they frantically crisscrossed the ship to prepare it for the storm’s attack, and getting in their way. They were fascinated by the tattoos and unhealed scurvy ulcers on the sailors’ faces, necks, biceps, and forearms.

  By the next morning the storm was at full strength, and each pitch of the ship seemed more extreme. The waves lashed the hull. The sky punched the sails. The oak of the hull cracked and groaned. The sailors cursed one another. The adult passengers did the mostly noisy things people do when they think they are going to die—praying, weeping, jesting, sitting tight-lipped. The hero, who avowed that he had never seen as fierce a storm in all his years of seafaring, remained on deck. The Cavaliere’s wife went from cabin to cabin with towels and bowls, assisting passengers who were sick. The Cavaliere stayed in their sleeping cabin and retched until there was nothing left in his stomach. He tried to sip some water from a flask and noticed the tremor in his hand.

  * * *

  To the blind, every happening is sudden. To the terrified, every event is happening too soon.
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  They are coming for you, to take you to the firing squad, the gallows, the stake, the electric chair, the gas chamber. You have to stand up; but you can’t. Your body, gorged with fear, is too heavy to move. You’d like to be able to rise and walk between them out the open door of your cell with dignity; but you can’t. So they have to drag you away.

  Or, it is coming, it is upon you, you and the others; bells or sirens have gone off (air raid, hurricane, rising flood), and you’ve taken shelter in this cell-like space, as out of harm’s way as you can be, and out of the way of those trained to cope with the emergency. But you don’t feel safer; you feel trapped. There’s no place to run, and even if there were, fear has made your limbs too heavy, you can barely move. It’s an alien weight that you shift from the bed to the chair, the chair to the floor. And you are shivering with fear or cold; and there is absolutely nothing you can do except try not to be any more terrified than you already are. If you remain very still, you pretend that this is what you have decided to do.

  The Cavaliere wasn’t sure what he minded most about the storm. Perhaps it was having to huddle in the semi-darkness of the cramped, clanking, clattery cabin—the smallest cabin in the world. Perhaps it was his sodden clothes and the cold; it was terribly cold. Perhaps it was the noise: the creaking of the ship, as wood shuddered and ground against wood, and that terrible crash, which could be a mast tipping over; that blast, which must be the topsails being blown to pieces; the screaming of the storm, and the cacophony of human shouts and cries. No, it was the revolting odors. All the portholes and hatches have been closed. In the entire ship, which is a little wider than and twice the length of a lawn tennis court, with some fifty passengers added to its crew of more than six hundred, there were only four latrines, all unusable. He wants to breathe sharp, stinging, pure air. Instead, what assails his nostrils are rank intestinal smells.