The Volcano Lover (20 page)

Perhaps you are having a dream and you wake up. Or, perhaps, you are experiencing this in a more modern way.

He enters, the stony guest. But he is not going to kill you, and he's probably younger, even young. He is not coming to take revenge. He even thinks that he wanted to go to a party (he can't be a monument all the time) and he is not above wanting to enjoy himself. But he can't help being himself, which means bringing along his higher idea, his better standards. He, the stony guest, reminds the revelers of the existence of another, more serious way of experiencing. And this, of course, will interfere with their pleasures.

You did invite him, but now you wish you hadn't, and if you don't take the necessary precautions, he will break up the party.

After meeting a few of your guests, he starts giving up on the evening. Too quickly, perhaps. But he's used to scything through such matters. He doesn't think your party is all that much fun. He doesn't dissemble—mingle. He keeps to corners of the room. Perhaps he looks at the books, or fingers the art. He doesn't resonate with the party. It doesn't resonate with him. He has too much on his mind. Bored, he asks himself why he came. His answer now: he was curious. He enjoys experiencing his own superiority. His own difference. He looks at his watch. His every gesture is a reproach.

You, one of the guests—or, better, the host—make light of this scowling presence. You try to be charming. He refuses to be charmed. He excuses himself and goes for something to drink. (Is he moping or getting ready to denounce you?) He returns, sipping a glass of water. You turn away and make common cause with the others. You make fun of him—he's easy to make fun of. What a prig. What an egotist. How pompous. Doesn't he know how to have a good time.

Lighten up, stony guest!

He continues to contradict what is said to him, to make plain that he is not amused. And he can't really get your attention. You flit from guest to guest. For a party is not a tête-à-tête. A party is supposed to reconcile its participants, to conceal their differences. And he has the bad manners to want to expose them. Doesn't he know about the civilizing practice of hypocrisy?

You can't both be right. The fact is that if he is right, you are wrong. Your life is revealed as shallow, your standards as opportunistic.

He wants to kidnap your mind. You won't let him. You tell yourself that frivolity is a noble pursuit. That a party, too, is an ideal world.

Sooner or later he leaves. He shakes your hand. It's chilling. You settle back. The music is louder again. What a relief. You like your life. You're not going to change. He is pretentious, overbearing, humorless, aggressive, condescending. A monster of egotism. Alas, he's also the real thing.

*   *   *

On another visit, the poet asked the Cavaliere to recommend one of the lava dealers in Naples, so that he could take back with him a proper range of specimens.

To travel is to shop. To travel is to loot. No one who came here left without a collection of some sort. Naples made amateur collectors of everyone. It made a collector even of the Marquis de Sade, who, fleeing arrest in France, had arrived eleven years earlier under a pseudonym—though his false identity was unmasked by the French envoy, and he had to submit to being presented at the Neapolitan court under his true, already infamous name. When Sade left the city five months later to return to France, he sent ahead two huge chests filled with antiques and curiosities.

Before leaving for Sicily, the poet paid several more visits to the royal museum at Portici, which he proclaimed the alpha and omega of all collections of antiquities. He visited Paestum and avowed himself irritated by the stumpy Doric columns. (After his return from Sicily, on a second visit, he was able to appreciate them.) He did not, however, return to Pompeii and Herculaneum, which he had toured rapidly soon after arriving and had disliked. Better to observe the movements of crabs in the breakwater. What a delightfully splendid thing is something
living,
he wrote. Better to stroll in the garden at Caserta of which the Cavaliere was so proud, and look at the rose bushes and camphor trees. I am a friend to plants, he wrote. I love the rose. And he felt a wave of health and self-approval sweep over him. How pleased I am to keep up my little study of life in all its multifarious forms. Away with death—this hideous mountain, these cities whose cramped dwellings seem to foretell that they would become tombs.

He wrote letters back to his sovereign and to his friends in Weimar. I carry on looking. I am always studying. And, again: You will not recognize me. I scarcely recognize myself. This is why I came to Italy, why I had to abandon my duties. He had finished the final version of his
Iphigenia,
and added two scenes to the ever-unfinished
Faust
during his sexually revelatory stay in Rome. He had made many observations of plants and Palladio. To stave off the temptations of nostalgia for the lost classical past, he took notes on the picturesque behavior of common people in the streets. He had made progress with his drawing. He was not disappointed in himself. This productivity was yet another sign of his well-being.

It was important not to appreciate too much. Once one takes it upon oneself to go out into the world and enters into close interaction with it, he wrote to one of his friends, one has to be very careful not to be swept away in a trance. Or even to go mad.

He was getting ready to go back. Naples is for those who only live, he wrote—thinking of the Cavaliere. Beautiful and splendid as it is, of course one couldn't settle here. But I look forward to remembering it, he wrote. The memory of such sights will give savor to a whole life.

People saved every scrap of paper on which the poet set down words. His fame had made him an instant antiquity—to be collected by his admirers. This great poet whose thirst for order and seriousness has led him to live as a public official, a courtier, is already one of the immortals. He was performing in public, being a work of art himself. He felt the echo of eternity in every one of his utterances. Every experience was part of his education, his self-perfecting. Nothing could go wrong in a life so happily, so ambitiously, conceived.

What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive. Words of the poet. Words of wisdom. A wisdom and a brand of felicity unavailable to the Cavaliere, and which he would never miss.

*   *   *

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed—that is the modern view. Even the alchemist's projects seem plausible now. The Cavaliere was not trying to understand more than he already did. The collector's impulse does not encourage the lust to understand or to transform. Collecting is a form of union. The collector is acknowledging. He is adding. He is learning. He is noting.

The Cavaliere commissioned a suite of drawings of twelve of the Attitudes from a local German artist.
Drawings Faithfully copied from Nature at Naples,
they were titled. But they conveyed nothing, the Cavaliere thought, of the seductiveness of these performances.

And he commissioned someone to take notes on and to draw the mountain's poses and performances.

Conscientious as the Cavaliere was, he could hardly be a full-time observer. For some years now, ever since the great eruption of 1779, he had been subsidizing a studious reclusive priest from Genoa, who lived alone and servantless near the foot of the mountain, to keep a diary of whatever he saw. This Father Piaggio never left his hermit's post—a mountain is a solicitation to hermits—rising at dawn and performing his observations, regular as devotions, at fixed intervals several times in the day. From the window of his tiny house he had a perfect view. He had already filled four manuscript volumes with his earnestly legible notations on the mountain's behavior and with fluent pencil drawings of the downward splaying and spreading of lava streams, the upward curling and soaring forms of the crater's effusions of smoke.

Much in these notes and drawings was repetitive. How could it be otherwise? Who could change the mountain? The Cavaliere particularly relished a story the priest told him about the natural philosopher from Prague who had arrived at the court forty years ago when Charles of Bourbon, the present King's father, was still on the throne, with a detailed plan for rescuing the villages surrounding Vesuvius from the danger that loomed above them. His various specialties, which he named as mining, metallurgy, and alchemy, had led him to study the volcano for many years in his laboratory in Prague. There he had devised his solution. It was to reduce the mountain to a mere thousand feet above sea level, and then open a narrow channel from its filled-in summit down to the shore, so that if the mountain explodes again, what remains of its fire will be concentrated and run directly into the sea.

Considering the magnitude of the task, the work force he would require was not large, the man from Prague pointed out. Give me twenty-nine thousand men, Majesty, he said, and in three years the monster will be decapitated.

Was the man from Prague just another charlatan? Possibly. Should he be allowed to try anyway? The king, who liked bold projects, consulted with his ministers. They were appalled by the plan. To alter the mountain's shape, they declared, would be a sacrilege. An anathema was read out in the cathedral by the cardinal.

Since this was a new age, with new thoughts, new machines—people were discovering new forms of leveling, making shapely—it was not surprising that the project had been recently revived by a local engineer, armed with a more solid technology, who presented his drawings for the royal couple's inspection. The Queen, who fancied herself a patron of enlightenment, aware of the need for judicious reforms in politics and manufacture, put the proposal out to be studied by competent ministers and local savants. Exclude the thought of sacrilege, she instructed them; think only of feasibility.

The answer came back: Yes, it is feasible. Did not the people of ancient times, without any of our wonderful modern means at their disposal, build higher and with greater precision than one would have thought possible? And to dismantle is easier than to raise up. If a human machine of many tens of thousands of laborers could erect that marvel, the Great Pyramid at Giza, a similar mobilizing of energies and obedience by a visionary ruler could achieve another marvel, the lowering of Vesuvius. But changing the shape, scaling it down, would not alter the mountain's nature. It would not deter an eruption or make it easier to channel. The danger was not the mountain but what lay under the earth-pedestal on which the mountain was set, far below.

But it can be done, said the Queen irritably. Yes, it can be done. Then we shall do it, if we so decide. Remote as they were from the god-kings of the ancient Mediterranean, these enlightened despots still laid claim to rule with absolute power sanctioned by a divine mandate. In fact, their authority had been steadily undermined by mockery, by enlightenment. In fact, they no longer had anything resembling absolute power at all.

3

It had been freakishly cold that winter throughout the peninsula, from Venice, where the lagoon froze over and could be crossed on foot, even skated on as in a Dutch painting, down to Naples, whose winter was even harsher than the one seven years ago that had done in poor Jack. Snow stayed for weeks on the lava-paved streets and covered the mountain. The hail was as withering as a rain of hot ash. Orchards and gardens perished, along with the less hardy of the tens of thousands of the city's poorest, who lacked even a roof between them and the icy wind. Among the well-sheltered the unprecedented rigors of the season stirred up a mood of apprehension. Surely such anomalies were not mere facts of nature. These were emblems, equivalents, harbingers of a catastrophe that was on its way.

*   *   *

Like a wind, like a storm, like a fire, like an earthquake, like a mud slide, like a deluge, like a tree falling, a torrent roaring, an ice floe breaking, like a tidal wave, like a shipwreck, like an explosion, like a lid blown off, like a consuming fire, like spreading blight, like a sky darkening, a bridge collapsing, a hole opening. Like a volcano erupting.

Surely more than just the actions of people: choosing, yielding, braving, lying, understanding, being right, being deceived, being consistent, being visionary, being reckless, being cruel, being mistaken, being original, being afraid …

*   *   *

That spring, Vesuvius continued to be active, bringing more travelers to the city to marvel at it, sketch it, when possible climb it, and creating an ever greater demand for pictures of the volcano in all its moods, which skilled artists and local image-purveyors stepped up their production to supply. And by late July, as news of the fall of the Bastille spread, demand fell sharply for images of the volcano as the crowning element of a serene landscape. Now everyone craved an image of Vesuvius erupting. Indeed, for a while hardly anyone painted the volcano another way. Both to the revolution's partisans and to the horrified ruling class of every European country, no image for what was happening in France seemed as apt as that of a volcano in action—violent convulsion, upheaval from below, and waves of lethal force that harrow and permanently alter the landscape.

Like Vesuvius, the French Revolution was also a phenomenon. But a volcanic eruption is something perennial. While the French Revolution was perceived as unprecedented, Vesuvius has been erupting for a long time, is erupting now, and will erupt again: the continuity and repetitiveness of nature. To treat the force of history as a force of nature was reassuring as well as distracting. It suggests that though this may be only the beginning, the beginning of an age of revolutions, this too will pass.

The Cavaliere and those he knew did not seem directly threatened. Statistically speaking, most disasters happen elsewhere, and our capacity for imagining the plight of those disaster strikes, when they are numerous, is limited. For the time being we are safe and, as they say, life (usually meaning the life of the privileged) goes on. We are safe, though everything may be different afterward.