The Volcano Lover (15 page)

Or, he would have liked to conjure up a lofty vision of the past, such as William had regaled Catherine with. But all that comes to mind is catastrophe. Say, a panoramic view of the great eruption of
A.D
. 79. The fearsome noise, the cloud in the shape of an umbrella pine, the death of the sun, the mountain burst open, disgorging fire and poisonous vapors. The rat-grey ash, the brown mud descending. And the terror of the denizens of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Like a more recent double urbanicide, one murdered city is much more famous worldwide than the other. (As one wag put it, Nagasaki had a bad press agent.) So let him choose to be in Pompeii, watching death rain down, perhaps unwilling to flee while there is still time because he is, even then, some kind of doughty collector. And how can he leave without his things? So perhaps as his street, then his knees, vanish beneath the ashes, it would have been he who had recalled the line from the
Aeneid
the excavators found that someone had written on a wall of his house:
Conticuere omn
 … (“All fell silent”). Gasping for breath, he had not lived to finish it.

As in a dream (just as one is about to die), he vaults out of the doomed city and tries to be someone watching. Why not be the most famous observer, and victim, of the eruption? For if, yielding to the obvious, he could imagine himself not like but really Pliny the Elder, if he could feel the slap of the wind on the prow of the admiral's boat rounding the cape of Misenum, if he could stay with Pliny right up to the end when, his lungs enfeebled by his asthma (O Catherine!), he succumbed to the lethal fumes … But unlike his young cousin, who is always imagining himself as someone else (and at the age of forty will congratulate himself for being forever young), the Cavaliere is hard put to imagine that he is anyone but himself.

That night, he slept on the flank of the volcano.

If he dreams, he dreams of the future—jumping over the future that remains to him (he knows it holds neither great interest nor happiness) to the future that amounts to his own death. Thinking about the future, the Cavaliere is peering into his own nonexistence. Even the mountain can die. And the bay, too—though the Cavaliere cannot imagine that. He cannot imagine the bay polluted, the marine life dead. He saw nature endangering, cannot imagine nature as endangered. He cannot imagine how much death lies in wait for this nature: what will happen to the caressing air, to the blue-green water in which swimmers frolic and boys hired by the Cavaliere dive for marine specimens. If children jumped into the bay now, the skin would slide from their bones.

People in the Cavaliere's time had higher standards of ruin. They thought it worth pointing out that the world is not as smooth as an egg. Fretted coastlines gave onto inchoate seas, and the dry land had broken, lumpy surfaces; and there were rude heaps: mountains. Blotched, stained, rutted—yes, compared to Eden or to the primordial sphere, this world is a mighty ruin. People then did not know what ruin could be!

*   *   *

He waited for a clarifying wind. And torpor hardened over everything, like the lava stream.

He looked into the hole, and like any hole it said, Jump. The Cavaliere recalled taking Catherine after the death of her father to Etna, then in full eruption, and stopping on the lower slope at the cabin of a hermit (there is always a hermit), who insisted on retelling the legend of the ancient philosopher who jumped into the boiling crater to test whether he was immortal. Presumably, he was not.

*   *   *

He was waiting for catastrophe. This is the corruption of deep melancholy, that its sense of helplessness reaches out to include others, that it so easily imagines (and therefore wills) a more general calamity.

Ominous rumblings, which tourists as well as the Cavaliere welcomed. Every visitor wanted the volcano to explode, to “do something.” They wanted their ration of apocalypse. A stay in Naples between outpourings of cataclysm, when the volcano seemed inert, was bound to be a little disappointing.

*   *   *

It was the time when all ethical obligations were first put up for scrutiny, the beginning of the time we call modern. If by merely pressing a button, one could, without any consequences to oneself, cause the death of a mandarin on the other side of the world (clever to have picked someone that far away), could one resist the temptation?

People can perform the weightiest actions if these are made to feel weightless.

How thin the line between the will to live and the will to die. How slight the membrane between energy and torpor. So many more could give way to the temptation to commit suicide if it were made easy. How about … a hole, a really deep hole, which you put in a public place, for general use. In Manhattan, say, at the corner of Seventieth and Fifth. Where the Frick Collection is. (Or a prole-ier address?) A sign beside the hole reads: 4
PM
–8
PM
/
MON WED
&
FRI
/
SUICIDE PERMITTED
. Just that. A sign. Why, surely people would jump who had hardly thought of it before. Any pit is an abyss, if properly labeled. Coming home from work, out buying a pack of wicked cigarettes, detouring to pick up the laundry, scanning the pavement for the red silk scarf the wind must have sucked off your shoulders, you remember the sign, you look down, you inhale quickly, exhale slowly, and you say—like Empedocles at Etna—why not.

1

Nothing can match the elation of the chronically melancholy when joy arrives. But before being allowed to arrive, it must lay siege to the weary heart. Let me in, it mews, it bellows. The heart must be forced.

That came four years later. First Catherine's death had to be absorbed by the Cavaliere's finely tuned metabolism. He requested another leave, to bring the body back for interment in Wales. There was no one here whose consolation consoled. Catherine's death brought him perilously close to a condition he did not enjoy, that of thinking about himself. He applied his usual remedy, which was thinking about the world. With what time he had to spare after the usual duties and distractions, he busied himself with a visit to some new excavations in stony Calabria (
Catherine is no more
). There he was taken to a festival in a nearby village honoring Saints Cosmas and Damian which culminated in a church service to bless a foot-long object, much revered by barren women, known as the Great Toe.
No more!
Dusty, exhilarated, the Cavaliere returned to Naples. To a learned society devoted to the study of antiquity (
Catherine is dead
), the Cavaliere sent a paper reporting on this savory discovery of traces of an ancient priapic cult still existing under the cover of Christianity, which furnished fresh proof of the similitude of the popish and pagan religions; recalling the prevalence of effigies of the female and male organs of generation uncovered in the digs; and speculating that the secret of all religions was worship of vital forces—the four elements, sexual energy—and that the cross itself was probably a stylized phallus.
Dead!
With Catherine gone, he had no reason to rein in the sceptic and blasphemer.

Everything has changed and nothing is changed. He did not acknowledge his need for company. But when his friend and protégé the painter Thomas Jones, about to return for good to England, gave up the house he rented, the Cavaliere offered him hospitality for a few months and came often in the morning to the room fitted out as a studio for Jones. He watched him filling small monochromatic canvases on his pretty olivewood easel with what seemed to him studies of emptiness: the corner of a roof or a row of top-floor windows of the building opposite.

How curious—but Jones must have his reasons. Everything rhymed with the Cavaliere's condition.

But what are you painting, said the Cavaliere politely. I do not understand the subject.

Moments of slippage, when anything seems possible and not everything makes sense.

Permission from the Foreign Office for his third leave home came in June, and he set sail. With Catherine's body in the hold of the ship and in his cabin a Roman cameo vase thought to have been made early in the reign of the Emperor Augustus, one of the rarest antiquities to come on the market for decades, which he had bought last year in Rome and was bringing back to England to sell. It was the most valuable item that would ever pass through his hands.

The Cavaliere had felt the bite of passion when he first saw it. Brought up two centuries earlier out of a newly excavated imperial burial mound just south of the boundary of ancient Rome, it was then and still is considered the finest piece of Roman cameo glass in existence. Nothing could be lovelier than the Thetis depicted on the frieze, reclining languidly on the nuptial couch. After he brought it back from Rome, the vase was often in his mind. He never tired of gazing at it, of holding it aloft so as to see the true color of the ground, a midnight blue indistinguishable from black except when pierced by light, and brushing the tips of his fingers over the low-relief figures incised in the creamy white glass. Alas, this was not an object he could afford to be in love with. Though Catherine's will had left everything, unencumbered, to him, he always needed more money. The vase was too famous for him to think of keeping it. Having got it for rather a good price, a thousand pounds, the Cavaliere had high hopes of making a substantial profit.

After depositing the vase in London, and receiving condolence visits from some friends and relations, he had brought the casket to the estate in Wales, now his in title as well as fact, set off in a light rain with Charles to see it slotted into the floor of the church, sent Charles away, and lingered in the house for several weeks. It was high summer. The rain pumped Catherine's native earth with green. He walked the estate and sometimes far out into the countryside every day, often with his pockets filled with small plums, and sat for a while staring at the sea. Mourning brought its distinctive languor. Mourning-thoughts, fond memories of Catherine, mingled with self-pity. Peace, peace for Catherine, poor Catherine. Peace for us all. The green leaves rustled over his head. This was the sun and temperate light that would prosper one day over his rotting body; and this—he'd entered the cool church for a moment—the tombstone that one day would bear his name as well.

Even before he had arrived, the London of collectors was astir about his Roman vase. News from Charles that the willful elderly Dowager Duchess of Portland coveted his prize brought him back to London. He asked for two thousand pounds. The duchess flinched. She said she would think it over. A month or two went by; the Cavaliere knew not to insist. Amusing himself as best he could, he toured her private museum of branches of coral, cases of iridescent butterflies and jewel-like seashells, insect fossils, mammoth bones (thought to be those of a Roman elephant), rare folio volumes on astronomy, antique medallions and buckles, and Etruscan vases. A grouping of objects no odder than many other collections of the period (its main oddity was that the collector was a woman), but decidedly too whimsical for the Cavaliere's taste. The duchess's son, already middle-aged and mindful of his inheritance, advised her against the purchase, for what was then a staggeringly high price. The duchess began seriously to want to buy the vase.

The Cavaliere spent less time at court and more with Charles, and allowed himself to be flattered and coddled by the exuberant, charming girl whom Charles had taken to live with him three years ago, and who, on Charles's instruction, called him Uncle Pliny and kissed him daintily on the cheek. She was tall and full-figured and her head, with its auburn hair, blue eyes, and ripe mouth, would rival the beauty of certain classical statues, thought the Cavaliere, if her chin were not so small. He already knew her story from his nephew: a village blacksmith's daughter, who had come to London at fourteen as an under-housemaid, was seduced by the son of the house, soon found more dubious employment, including posing semi-dressed as a “nymph of health” in the chambers of a doctor who claimed to cure impotence, was taken to the country estate of a baronet who cast her out when she became pregnant (her small daughter was being boarded in the country), and whose close friend, to whom the girl turned in despair, was … Charles. Sixteen years older than she, her rescuer did not marvel that so many eras had been crowded into a mere nineteen years. Women like her were supposed to climb as far as they could and be used up, quickly. There was, then, nothing special about her, apart from her physical charms. But there was. Charles wanted to be fair. He also wanted to boast. Just imagine, said Charles. She is actually quite gifted, Charles said. I've taught her to read and write and now she reads whole books of the self-improving sort, she's very fond of reading, and remembers everything she's read. The Cavaliere noticed that she remembered every word said in her presence. While her speech was vulgar and her laugh too hearty, when she was silent she seemed transformed. The Cavaliere saw her watching, observing, her eyes humid with attentiveness. And her judgment about pictures is rather fine, Charles went on, as well it might be, since she has lived with me for three years and since our friend Romney is obsessed with her. He has used her for dozens of paintings and drawings and will not hear of another model, except when I refuse to lend my girl to him. This reminded the Cavaliere that he must make time to sit again for Romney, for he wanted another portrait of himself.