The Volcano Lover (14 page)

Catherine does not really think that he will ever become devout (and he did not). Her longing for him to yield to religious belief came from her own need for an exalted, rhapsodic language. She wanted him to acknowledge the reality of that dimension, therefore that language, so that they could share it—so that they could finally be truly intimate.

But, of course, he will never know the rhapsodic compensation. For all the dark constricting feelings that … and here she began to gasp for breath and recalled what she had wanted to put in this letter, a true letter of farewell, apart from declaring her love, asking him to forget and forgive her faults, exonerating him for leaving her alone so much, blessing him and asking him to remember her with kindness—yes, she wanted to request something. Let me not be shut up after I am dead till it is absolutely necessary. She finished by reminding him to give directions in his will to carry out the promise he has made to her that his bones will lie by hers, in Slebech Church, when God is pleased to call him, which she hopes will not be for many decades, during which interval—this is an exhausting, long-breathed sentence such as asthmatics take special pleasure in writing—during which interval she hopes that he will not remain alone. May every earthly and heavenly blessing attend you and may you be loved as I have loved you. I am, your faithful wife, &c.

She sealed the letter, felt the weight on her chest lighten, and slept more peacefully than she had in weeks.

Summer came, with its daunting, oppressive heat. The Cavaliere was angry with Catherine for dying—inconveniencing him, abandoning him. When in July they moved out to the Vesuvian villa, her favorite of their three residences, he found many reasons to linger for days at a time at the nearby royal palace. Doctor Drummond came out every morning to see her, with gossip to make her smile, little candies to stimulate her appetite, and, once a week, leeches to bleed her. One early August morning he did not arrive. She sent the dinner away uneaten at three o'clock and dispatched a footman to inquire, who returned with the news that the doctor had not taken his carriage but had decided to ride out on his new hunter and, a mile from the villa, had been thrown from the horse and hauled back on a litter to town. His injuries were serious, she was told. Then, very serious: a broken back and a punctured kidney. He died a week later. When this news was brought to her, Catherine wept for the last time.

The Cavaliere always maintained that her feeling somehow responsible for this frightful accident, incurred as the doctor was on his way to see her, hastened Catherine's death, which took place only twelve days later. Reading in a favorite chair facing the myrtle grove, she fainted and was carried into the house. As she was laid in bed, she opened her eyes and asked for a small oval portrait of the Cavaliere, which she set face down on her breast. She closed her eyes and died that evening without opening them again.

*   *   *

For those who hadn't known her well, he evoked her thus.

My wife, he said, was small, slender, of an elegant appearance and with distinguished manners. She had light blond hair, which age had not whitened, vivacious eyes, fine teeth, a witty smile. She was reserved in bearing, modest in gesture, and adept at contributing a few words to move a conversation forward without any thought of dominating it. Her constitution was delicate, and in the course of her life her poor health greatly influenced her frame of mind. Well-bred, cultivated, and a superb musician, she was much sought after in society, which she often avoided, however, for reasons of health and self-preservation. She was a blessing and a comfort to those who knew her, and will be sorely missed by all.

He reminisced about her virtues, her talents, her preferences. In fact, he mainly talked about himself.

Grief turns one into a queer being, the Cavaliere told Charles in a letter. I am much more bereft, much sadder than I expected to be.

Something terrible had happened to him, for the first time. The world is a treacherous place. You are going about, doing your life, and then it is over, or everything is worse. Just the other day at Portici, one of the royal pages opened the door of a disused chapel, walked into a
mofetta,
as pockets of cold poisonous gas secreted by the volcano are called, and died instantly. Since then the terrified King had talked of little else, and had added a few more amulets and charms to the large assortment normally pinned to his undergarments. And look what happened to old Drummond, while riding out to visit … no, the Cavaliere suddenly remembered, the one to whom something terrible has happened is himself. He had no magic charms; he had his intelligence, his character.

Something terrible. Something to meet with fortitude. I have had a happy life, he thought.

A wise man is prepared for all, knows how to yield, to resign himself, is grateful for the pleasures life has offered, and does not rage or whimper when felicity (as it must) ends.

And was he not a great collector? Therefore continually absorbed, distracted, diverted. He had not known how deep his feeling for Catherine was, or his need for her. He had not known he needed anyone that much.

Collectors and curators of collections often admit without too much prodding to misanthropic feelings. They confirm that, yes, they have cared more for inanimate things than for people. Let the others be shocked—they know better. You can trust the things. They never change their nature. Their attractions do not pall. Things, rare things, have intrinsic value, people the value your own need obliges you to assign to them. Collecting gives egotism the accents of passion, which is always attractive, while arming you against the passions that make you feel most vulnerable. It makes those who feel deprived, and hate feeling deprived, feel safer. He had not known how much Catherine's love also made him feel safe.

He expected more of his capacity for detachment, which he confused with his temperament. Detachment would not be enough to get him through this sorrow. Stoicism was needed, which implies that one really is in pain. He did not expect to be so slowed down by the press of grief, so darkened. Catherine's love seemed radiant now, now that it had been extinguished. No tears had bathed his eyes as he sat at Catherine's bedside and pulled his picture from her stiffening grasp, nor when he returned it to her, laying it in the casket before it was closed. Though he did not weep, his hair (suddenly greyer), his skin (drier, more lined) spoke for him, mourned for him. But there was no way he knew how to upbraid himself. He had loved as much as he could and had been more faithful than was the custom. The Cavaliere had always been good at self-forgiveness.

He sat beneath a trellis that looked out on the myrtle grove, exactly where Catherine was sitting when she fainted and was brought into the house. Where she had often sat with William. A thick complex web stretched across an ocular opening at the top of the trellis. He gazed absently at it for a while, before thinking to look for the spider, which he finally located hanging motionless from the outermost filament. Then he called for his climbing staff, reached up, and scythed through the web.

His letters speak of a settled, ungovernable melancholy. Heaviness, ennui, indolence—how tedious it was to write the words—is becoming my lot. The Cavaliere did not like to feel too much, but he was alarmed by the evident waning of feeling. He wanted to go on feeling not too much, not too little either (as he wanted to be neither young nor old). He wanted not to change. But he had changed. You would not recognize me now, he wrote to Charles. By nature lively, energetic, receptive, interested in everything, recently I have become indifferent to much of what once gave me pleasure. This is not indifference to you, dear Charles, or to another, but a general enveloping indifference. He lifted his pen, and considered what he had written.

I trust that apathy is not my inescapable condition, he went on, trying to strike the optimistic chord.

He had planned to bring out another edition, with more plates, of his book on volcanoes. The plan has been abandoned, he told Charles; he cannot surmount the feeling of weariness. Of a recent trip to Rome to look at pictures, he reported: Melancholy pursued me here also. My new acquisitions give me little pleasure. He described to Charles one of his acquisitions, a painting by a minor seventeenth-century Tuscan master evoking the transience of human life. Its message was voluptuously pertinent, its execution admirable. He gazed woodenly at the ingenious angle of the flowers and the mirror, at the soft flesh of the young woman gazing at herself. For the first time in his life, adding to one of his collections did not give him pleasure.

His lithe, reliable body allowed him to ride, to swim, to fish, to hunt, to climb the mountain as effortlessly as ever. But it was as if a veil lay between him and whatever he observed, draining everything of sense. Out for a spell of night fishing, attended only by Gaetano and Pietro, he watched the two servants jabbering in their incomprehensible dialect, butting the air as if words and phrases needed to be pushed forward with their jaws. The echoing voices from other boats crossing and recrossing the black bay, the black night, sounded like the cries of animals.

Yes, he still had the same physical robustness. It was an aging of the senses and of his capacity for enthusiasm that he noted. He felt his gaze becoming dull, his hearing and taste less sharp. He decided that it was because he was growing old. The reasons are innumerable for this general cooling, he explained—here the death of Catherine is being acknowledged—but perhaps it is mainly the passage of years. He struggled to resign himself to this reduced capacity.

He has never felt young, as he had told the sibyl. But when Catherine died he felt, suddenly, old. He is fifty-two. How many years had Efrosina told him he had to live? He had dealt himself his hand and played it. He wondered how the devil he would occupy the eternity of twenty-one years to come.

*   *   *

To be unaccompanied. To be alone. To lower yourself into your own feelings.

There to find mists and vapors. Then little protuberances of old angers and longings. Then a large emptiness. You think of what you have done, done with brio—great slabs of actions, enterprises. All that energy has drained away. Everything becomes an effort.

Surfeited, his appetite for surfeit. Now it's enough.

*   *   *

A few months after Catherine's death, touring the devastation left by an earthquake in Calabria, gazing at the stiffened, dusty bodies dug out of the ruins, at their convulsed features and clawed hands—depressed people are often voyeuristic—then at a child brought up still alive, who for eight days had been lying under a collapsed house with her fist pressed against the right side of her face and had pushed a hole through her cheek.

Yes, show me more horrors. I will not flinch.

*   *   *

For a moment, just a moment, he saw himself as a madman, disguised as a rational being. How many times has he already climbed this mountain? Forty? Fifty? A hundred?

Panting, broad hat shielding his meager face against the sun, he paused and looked up at the cone. From the volcano's summit—far above the city, the gulf, its islands.

He was high up, looking down. A human dot. Far from all obligation of sympathy, of identification: the game of distance.

Before, everything affirmed him. I know, therefore I am. I collect, therefore I am. I am interested in everything, therefore I am. Look at all that I know, all that I care about, all that I preserve and transmit. I construct my own inheritance.

The things had turned on him. They say, You do not exist.

The mountain says, You do not exist.

The priests say, The volcano is the mouth of hell.

No! These monstrosities, volcanoes or “ignivomous mountains,” far from being emblems or presages of hell, are safety valves for the fires and vapors that would otherwise wreak havoc even more often than they do.

He knelt in the moat-like surround of the cone, placed his palms upon the dusty rubble, then stretched out, belly down, out of the wind, and lay his cheek to the ground. It was silent. The silence spoke of death. So did the thick, stagnant, yellowish light, as did the smell of the sulphur drifting up from the fissures, the rocks piled up, the tephra and dry grass, the slabs of clouds lying in the indigo-grey sky, the flattened sea. Everything speaks of death.

Let's take a positive view. The mountain is an emblem of all the forms of wholesale death: the deluge, the great conflagration (
sterminator Vesevo,
as the great poet was to say), but also of survival, of human persistence. In this instance, nature run amok also makes culture, makes artifacts, by murdering, petrifying history. In such disasters there is much to appreciate.

Under the ground were stretches of slag and clumps of bright minerals and fossil-studded rock and murky obsidian on its way to becoming transparent, beneath which lay more inert strata that enclosed the core of molten rock, as the mountain each time it exploded further deformed and layered and thickened the ground. And down the slope, under the tilted saliences of rock and the swatches of yellow broom, underneath, all the way to the villages below and riding out to the sea are ever more layers of human things, artifacts, treasures. Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried and now—a miracle of the age—have been exhumed. But offshore lies the Tyrrhenian Sea, which closed over the kingdom of Atlantis. There is always something more to be uncovered.

The ground holds treasures for collectors.

The ground is where the dead live, stacked in layers.

Cheek to the ground, the Cavaliere has descended to the mineral level of existence. Gone the court and the thuggish, jovial King, gone the beautiful treasures he has brought into his keeping. Is it possible he is not attached to them any more? Yes, at this moment he no longer cares.

*   *   *

The Cavaliere would have liked to have had a vision of redeeming plenitude and grace, such as one often has on mountain tops. But all he can think of is going higher still. He imagined taking to the air in that newfangled French marvel, the balloon, with a train of attendants; no, just young Pumo; and being able to look down on Vesuvius, from above watch the mountain becoming smaller and smaller. The cold bliss of effortless ascent, moving up, up, into the haven of pure sky.