The Volcano Lover (24 page)

(How can the puny Kingdom of the Two Sicilies punish mighty France?)

God will punish France, and the English will help God, and we will help the English, said the Queen.

(You mean the English will help us, said the prime minister.)

Yes, said the Queen. Our friends.

And so they—he—did.

*   *   *

The Cavaliere's mazy backwater, so rewardingly isolated from transforming events, was being dragged into what passed then for the real world, the one defined by the threat of France. As was this fastidious spectator himself.

A club calling itself the Society for the Friends of Liberty and Equality began to meet in secret to draw up plans for modernizing the kingdom, and quickly divided into two clubs, one in favor of a constitutional monarchy and the other determined to go all the way to a republic. Someone was indiscreet, a plot to assassinate the King was discovered or concocted, and of those arrested, who included jurists, professors, men of letters, doctors, and scions of some of the oldest noble families in the kingdom, nine were sentenced to severe prison terms and three were executed. The Queen boasted bitterly of the extreme clemency of Neapolitan justice, in contrast to the carnage in France. The lava of the revolution was flowing, the Terror was just reaching its climax—and in June 1794, nature rhyming with history, Vesuvius erupted with a violence that had no precedent in the Cavaliere's experience. It was the worst, or best, eruption since 1631, and would be counted the third greatest in the nearly two millennia of the volcano's modern history.

The volcano was not to be patronized, after all, by such stale categories as grandeur and interest and beauty. This was terror—blackening day and bloodying night. In the evening sky, a roar of broad flame streamed sideways and upward, as if seeking to flee the thin diagonal orange slash of the descending lava. The inky sea turned red and the moon blood-orange. All night the swath of descending lava widened. In the brief interregnum of pale dawn, ropes of pitchy smoke were unfurling, climbing, fattening at the top into a sky-high funnel of smoke and fire, which became steadily more columnar, first materializing a stack of bulging rings of smoke around its stem, then widening to engulf them. By midday the sky had gone dark and the sun was a cloud-blackened moon. But the roiling bay was still blood red.

A paralyzing, silencing vista.

The greatest shock to the Cavaliere came when a more indifferent light had washed the sky and the customary distant view had returned. It was as painful as the sight of a leafy, many-branched, centuries-old tree gone diagonal, cleaved through the heart of its trunk. The mountain cannot fall, like a great tree brought down in a hurricane, but a mountain can be mutilated. And like the dismayed homeowner in her yard who has to admit that while winds of such velocity might have been enough to do in the tree, it was already in trouble, and points to the exposed innards of the fallen trunk, a repulsive, termite-rotted, crumbly brown, so the admirer of a shapely volcano has to think that some weakness in the volcano's retaining walls made this indignity inevitable. The force of the eruption had lopped off one-ninth of its height, slicing the summit flat at the top. The Cavaliere's wife wept with pity for the mountain, which had become ugly. The Cavaliere, feeling something not too different, professed to find in the mountain's new shape only a destiny—and a fresh reason for a quick ascent, as soon as the eruption had subsided.

Tolo, are you there?

Yes, my lord.

I should like to see.

Yes, my lord.

At the end of June, attended by a now bearded Bartolomeo Pumo, the sixty-four-year-old Cavaliere reached the top of the dramatically changed mountain he had been climbing for thirty years. The cone was gone. In its place there was now a huge jagged crater.

I would like to stand closer.

Yes, my lord.

But the ground was burning through his thick-soled boots, and he was choking from the noxious exhalations of sulphurous and vitriolic vapors.

Tolo, are you there?

Yes, my lord.

Shall we retreat?

Yes, my lord.

He should have been frightened, but he was not. The mountain had a right to explode. The destructive mission of the volcano inspired in him a satisfaction, an increasing satisfaction, that he would have found hard to acknowledge.

But what could be more apt for this great collector of valuable objects than to have also been collecting the very principle of destruction, a volcano. Collectors have a divided consciousness. No one is more naturally allied with the forces in a society that preserve and conserve. But every collector is also an accomplice of the ideal of destruction. For the very excessiveness of the collecting passion makes a collector also a self-despiser. Every collector-passion contains within it the fantasy of its own self-abolition. Worn down by the disparity between the collector's need to idealize and all that is base, purely materialistic, in the soul of a lover of beautiful objects and trophies of the glorious past, he may long to be purged by a consuming fire.

Perhaps every collector has dreamed of a holocaust that will relieve him of his collection—converting all to ashes, or burying it under lava. Destruction is only the strongest form of divestment. The collector may be so disappointed with his life that he wants to divest himself of himself, as in the novel about the book-besotted reclusive scholar with a legendary hoard of twenty-five thousand necessary, irreplaceable volumes (that dream, the perfect library), who pitches himself into the pyre he makes out of what he has most loved. But should such an angry collector survive his fire or fit, he will probably want to start another collection.

4

He was often described as little. Certainly he was short, a good bit shorter than the Cavaliere and his young wife, and thin, with an arresting tanned face set low on his large squarish head, thick brows, heavy-lidded eyes, a deep philtrum below his bold nose, full lips, a wide mouth already missing a fair number of teeth. When they first saw him, he had not fought any important battles. But he had the look, the hungry look that evinces the power to concentrate utterly on something, of one destined to go far. Mark him, said the Cavaliere—an expert on promise, or the lack of it, in younger men—he will be the bravest hero England has ever produced. The Cavaliere's spurt of recognition was not so remarkable. A star is always a star, even before the right vehicle has been found, and even after, when the good parts are no longer available. And the thirty-five-year-old captain was undoubtedly a star—like the Cavaliere's wife.

She, despite her large talent for effusiveness, had not seen
that.
Yes, his arrival had been thrilling, it was thrilling to stand with the Cavaliere at the window of the observatory room and watch the sixty-four-gun two-decker ship he commanded, the
Agamemnon,
sail proudly into the bay only seven months after wicked France had declared war on England. And his brief stay had been memorable—mainly because of the role she had played. He had brought urgent dispatches from Lord Hood for the Cavaliere. Neapolitan troops were needed to reinforce the coalition gathering to defend Toulon, where a royalist faction had seized power, against the advancing republican forces; and it was she who had got him his six thousand troops when the Cavaliere could get neither a yes nor a no from the frightened King and his advisers, got them by the route women use, the back stairs, taking the request to the bedchamber of the most powerful voice on the Council of State, who lay in seclusion, about to give birth to a sixteenth prince or princess, and securing her support. Invited to dine at the royal palace, he had the place of honor at the King's right, and the Cavaliere's wife, seated on his right, translated his attempts to converse with the King about the French menace and the King's long rambling anecdote about a giant boar he'd killed which turned out to have three testicles. She was satisfied that she had impressed him. His visit lasted five days. After came many other distinguished visitors. She did not single him out.

He left. History promoted him. It was a time for concentrated men of preposterous ambition and small stature who needed no more than four hours of sleep a night. Under the canopy of many skies, on the rocking sea and the lurching ship, he gave chase to the enemy. He had many battles to his credit now. War confiscated parts of his body. The
Captain,
mounting seventy-four guns, then another seventy-four, the
Theseus,
was his island, kingdom, vehicle, platform. Five years passed. He became a hero,
the
hero to the rulers of Naples, who lived in terror of the small concentrated man who had taken over a fractured revolution and transposed its energies into a seemingly invincible campaign for the French conquest of Europe and the dethroning of old monarchies everywhere. He will save us, only he can save us, said the Queen. The King assented. The British envoy, representing the extension of British power, could only agree. In the last two years he had exchanged many letters with the young captain, now an admiral, in which the Cavaliere described his efforts to win cowardly Naples to the British cause. The Cavaliere's wife had been writing him, too. She loved to admire, and here was someone really worth admiring. She needs her fix of rapture. She needs it more and more often.

Ricocheting around the Mediterranean, the lake of war, he kept them informed, succinctly, of his accumulation of fearful injuries.

Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements—land and water, firepower and distancing air. Of the many sail-of-the-line whose command he coveted, each with its resonant name, history, seasoned in sweat and blood, his was now the seventy-four-gun
Vanguard,
carrying more than six hundred officers and men. He spent as little time as possible in his large, luxuriously furnished admiral's cabin. Day and night he paced the deck. He had the privilege of always seeing the sun rise and set. He had unobstructed views. In the water you are always moving, even when you are still. Birds floated above like tiny kites and vertical canvas clouds unfurled, tilted, crumpled, pivoted, arched into the wind, dragging the ship forward into the weather; movement is always into the weather. Cycles of light, cycles of duties—he oversaw them all. When he grew very tired, he stood on the quarter-deck, immobile, and let himself be seen. He believed that the sight of him standing there had a certain magic—he had seen it work on his men, and not only at the height of battle—and he believed it frightened the enemy. It did.

Avenged, cried the Queen, when news reached Naples that the young admiral's fleet had destroyed the French fleet on the Nile. Hype hype hype ma chere Miledy Je suis folle de joye, she wrote to her dear friend, the English ambassador's wife, who had fainted when she heard the news, the joyful news of his victory. I fell on my side & I hurt myself but what of that, she wrote the admiral. I shall feal it a glory to dye in such a cause—no I wood not like to dye untill I see & embrace the Victor of the Nile.

*   *   *

And the hero vaulted into their lives.

September 22, 1798. Leading the small flotilla of impressive boats swathed with emblems that came out in the midday heat to meet the
Vanguard
was the royal barge, piloted by the admiral of the Neapolitan fleet, Caracciolo, with the King and Queen and several of their children under its spangled awnings, followed by a barge with musicians from the royal chapel. The barge with the British flag carried the Cavaliere and his lady, sumptuous in blue and gold, the Bourbon colors: a blue dress with gold lace, a shawl of naval blue with gold anchors, and gold anchor earrings. The royal band had got the tune of “Rule, Britannia” right, and the Cavaliere was smiling, thinking of the words.

All thine shall be the subject main;

And every shore it circles, thine.

Close behind mingled some five hundred feluccas, barges, yachts, and fishing boats swaying and bumping into one another, filled with shouting, waving people. As the royal party and the Cavaliere and his wife started to board the ship, they cheered the King, and the hero took off the green eye shield he wore and put it in his pocket.

Our liberator, said the King. Deliverer and preserver, said the Queen. Oh, cried the Cavaliere's wife when she saw him, haggard, coughing, his hair powdered but too long, his empty right sleeve pinned to the breast of his dress uniform, a red gash above his blind eye where he had been struck by a fragment of grapeshot during the Battle of the Nile. Oh! And she fell against him.

She fell into my arm, it was a very affecting scene, the hero told his wife in a long letter describing the magnificence of his reception: the bay teeming with boats to welcome him, the banners, the gun salutes, the cannon booming from the ramparts of Sant'Elmo above the city, and the
vivas
of the crowds bedecked in velvet and braid reaching out to him when he landed, surging after him through the streets. Sunlight hurt his eye when he didn't wear the shield, and Naples was filled with sunlight. But blessed evening came, with its splendid display of fireworks that ended in the British flag and his initials limned across the sky, and bonfires and dancing in the steeply pitched squares. My greeting from the lower classes was truly affecting. In the Cavaliere's mansion three thousand lamps were ablaze for a banquet attended by the deferential Admiral Caracciolo, which he enjoyed and endured.

His right arm ached, the phantom arm that started high up near his right shoulder, he was racked with coughing spasms, he had a fever. He had been holding himself in, he hated to complain. He'd always been small and thin, but he was sturdy. He knew how to endure the unbearable. Feeling ill was like a wave. One had to hold on and it would pass. Even the agony of the amputation, without a swig of rum, and the additional agony, due to the surgeon's ineptness, as the stump suppurated for three months, even that was just a wave.