The Volcano Lover (18 page)

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So the old man collected the young woman; it could not have been the other way around. Collecting is both a sociable and a piratical activity. Women are reared not to feel competent at or gratified by the questing, the competing, the outbidding that collecting (as distinct from large-scale acquiring) demands. The great collectors are not women, any more than are the great joke-tellers. Collecting, like telling jokes, implies belonging to the world in which already-made objects circulate, are competed for, are transmitted. It presumes confident, full membership in such a world. Women are trained to be marginal or supporting players in that world, as in many others. To compete for approbation—not to compete as such.

*   *   *

You tell me a joke. I
love
your joke. It makes me laugh so much my sides ache, and my eyes moist over. And so witty and subtle. Rather deep, even. All this in a joke. I must pass it on.

Here comes somebody else. I'll tell your joke. I mean
the
joke. It isn't yours, of course. Someone told it to you. And now I'll tell it to someone else if I can remember it. Before I forget it I want to share it with someone, see that person have my reaction (roar with laughter, nod with appreciation, eyes moistening a little), but in order to be the pitcher, not the catcher, I have to not botch the telling. I have to tell it the way you told it, at least
as
well. I have to get behind the joke's wheel and drive it properly without jamming the gears or running into a ditch.

Being a woman, I'll worry more about my ability to get the joke out and into this new person's mind than if I were a man. (You, of course, are a man.) I may start by apologizing, and explaining that although I'm not good at remembering jokes and hardly ever tell jokes, I can't resist telling this one. And then I start, nervously, trying to recall exactly how you did it. I imitate your intonations. I make your emphases, your pauses.

I get through it, though it doesn't sound just right, not as good as the way you did it. The new person grins, laughs, sighs. But I doubt that I'm getting as much pleasure from telling this joke as you did. I'm doing something that doesn't come naturally to me, that's an imitation of a skill. I like to be witty, I'm good at turning phrases—my way with words. A joke is never mine. Stop me if you've heard this one, says the joke-teller, about to share his latest acquisition. He is right to assume that other people must be telling it too: a joke circulates.

The joke is this impersonal possession. It doesn't have anyone's signature. It was given to me—but you didn't make it up; it was in my custody, and I chose to pass it on, keep it going. It isn't about any of us. It doesn't describe you or me. It has a life of its own.

It goes off—like a pop, like a laugh, a sneeze; like an orgasm; like a little explosion, an overflow. Its telling says, I am here. I knowenough to appreciate this joke. I'm convivial and expressive enough to pass it on. I enjoy entertaining. I enjoy showing off. I enjoy being appreciated. I enjoy feeling competent. I enjoy being behind my face and driving this little vehicle to its quick destination—and then getting off. I'm in the world, which has many things which are not me and which I appreciate.

Pass it on.

2

Tableau. Their backs are toward us, and we see what they are looking at, saluting, pointing out to each other, with one arm stretched out and up, the age's characteristic way of greeting some prospect of the marvelous in long-shot. A spread of ruins; a brilliant moon sailing behind a rim of clouds; the enlarging smoky plume of the mountain.

They have already marveled from afar—experience as promontory—before trudging up the side of the mountain, where they had to keep their eyes trained on the spiky rocks beneath each step so as not to stumble, and now, after the final clamber, they are at the top, they have reached the broad moat surrounding the cone, where once again, on level ground, they are looking up—and they can make the gesture, the gesture that says
there
—but it is
here,
dangerously near. They are being pelted with a shower of stones and ash. The cone is belching black smoke. A fiery rock falls only a few yards away—watch your arm! But they are bent on a view, at least the poet is. Another view. He hasn't climbed this far to continue to look up. He wants to look down, inside.

See, it's stopping. The poet took out his timepiece. You go cower over there, behind that crag. I'm going to see just how long the monster can behave. This stricken monster, it's like the breathing of a stricken monster, with some twelve minutes between each breath, his watch tells him, during which the shower of stones subsides as well; and in one of the intervals, the poet suggested to his timorous friend, the painter, that they might get their guides to pull them swiftly to the top for a quick look into the crater.

It was done and they stood on the lip of the enormous mouth, as the poet was later to write. A light breeze blew the smoke away, the burbling and gurgling and spitting ceased, but the steam that rose from a thousand fissures veiled the interior of the crater, allowing no more than a shifting glimpse of the cracked rock walls. The sight, he wrote, was neither instructive nor agreeable.

Then the monster took another breath and from its entrails came a tremendous thundering roar—no, from the depths of the cauldron rose a cloud of searing steam and dust—no, from the mightiest of bombards hundreds of stones, large and small, were lobbed into the air—

Their guides tugged at their coats. One of them, the one-eyed boy whom the Cavaliere had recommended to the poet, rushed them to a boulder behind which they could shelter. It was too noisy to appreciate the great sweep of the gulf below and the city in the distance, whose contours, like an amphitheatre in oblique view or like a titanic chair, you have the impression you can take in as a whole, in one glance. The painter shouted, I shall descend now. After the poet crouched under the lee of the boulder a few moments more to demonstrate his courage and to turn over in his mind several other images, he too made a prudent retreat.

That was Goethe, with his friend the painter Tischbein, on the first of his three climbs up the mountain. The poet, no longer in his first youth but an exceptionally fit thirty-seven, has dutifully braved the fire-breathing dragon. If the old English knight can do it regularly, then he can too. It's what every able-bodied gentleman tourist does when he comes here. But the poet does not, like the Cavaliere, find it beautiful. He is both cold and hot, and tired, uncomfortable, a little frightened. It all seems a bit foolish. One does not see the feckless, pleasure-loving natives tramping up the awesome hill that rises some miles outside their paradise. Definitely a sport for foreigners. And among foreigners, rather English. Ah, these English. So refined and so coarse. If they did not exist, nobody would ever have invented them. So eccentric, so superficial, so reserved. But how they enjoy themselves.

One must try to enjoy oneself with them.

The poet arrived in the evening. Accompanied by another German painter resident in Naples, he and his friend had already been received by the Cavaliere and been shown the treasures in his public rooms. The walls covered with paintings, gouaches, and drawings, the tables piled high with cameos and vases, the cabinets crammed with geological curiosities. There seemed no method or organization in it, which is the first thing the German visitors noticed. And this created a certain unpleasing impression, not just of abundance but of disorder or chaos. But if you looked closely (the look every collector craves), you could recognize the sensitivity and sensuality of the person who had brought together these expressions of his taste, as Tischbein was to recall many years later. The walls, he said of the Cavaliere's walls, showed his inner life.

Then the poet, the poet alone, was invited to tour the Cavaliere's cellar storerooms. (The privilege of such a visit was reserved for only the most distinguished guests.) And the poet, who reported everything to his painter friend, was amazed at a different kind of profusion. There was an entire small chapel in the cellar. From where had he taken it? The painter shook his head, raised his eyes to heaven. The poet saw two ornate bronze candelabra which he knew had to have come from the excavations at Pompeii. And many objects of no distinction whatever. The collections upstairs were a map of the Cavaliere's fantasies, an ideal world. The cellar was the cavernous underbelly of the Cavaliere's collecting, for every collector soon reaches the point where he is collecting not only what he wants but what he doesn't really want but is afraid to pass up, for fear he might want it, value it, some day. He can't help showing these objects to me, the poet thought, even those he should not.

Of course to show off one's possessions may seem like boasting, but then the collector did not invent or fabricate these things, he is but their humble servant. He does not praise himself in exhibiting them, he offers them humbly for the admiration of others. If the objects a collector has were of his own making, or even if they were a legacy, then it would indeed seem like boasting. But building a collection, the anxious activity of inventing one's own inheritance, frees one from the obligation of reticence. For the collector to show off his collection is not bad manners. Indeed, the collector, like the impostor, has no existence unless he goes public, unless he shows what he is or has decided to be. Unless he puts his passions on display.

*   *   *

People told the poet that the Cavaliere had acquired, then fallen in love with, a young woman who was beautiful enough to be a Greek statue, had begun improving and educating her in the manner of any protector who is a man, older, rich, wellborn (all the things his beloved is not), and had become a kind of Pygmalion in reverse, turning his Fair One into a statue; more accurately, a Pygmalion with a round-trip ticket, for he could change her into a statue and then back into a woman at will.

In conformity with the Cavaliere's taste, she was dressed on these evenings in antique costume, a white tunic with a belt around her waist, her auburn, some say chestnut, hair falling free down her back or turned up by a comb. When she consented to begin a performance, according to one account, two or three cashmere shawls were brought to her by a stout elderly woman, some kind of housekeeper or perhaps a widowed aunt; certainly more than a servant, for she was allowed to sit at the side and watch. Maids would bring an urn, a scent box, a goblet, a lyre, a tambourine, and a dagger. With these few properties, she took her position in the middle of the darkened drawing room. When the Cavaliere came forward, holding a taper, the performance had begun.

Over her head she threw a shawl long enough to reach the ground and cover her entirely. Thus hidden, she wrapped herself with other shawls and started making the inner and outer adjustments (drapery, muscle tone, feelings) that will permit her to emerge as someone else, someone other than she is. To do this—it was not like donning a mask—one must have a very loose relation to one's body. To do this one must have a gift for euphoria. She floated up, she drifted down, she settled—her heart pounding, while she wiped the perspiration from her face. A flurry of grimaces, tightening of tendons, stiffening of hands, head rocketing back or to the side, sharp intake of breath—

And then she suddenly lifted the covering, either throwing it off entirely or half raising it, and making it form part of the garment of the harmonious living statue she had become.

She would hold the pose just long enough for it to be read, then cover herself again. Then she threw off the long shawl to reveal another figure, under a different disposition of shawls—she knew a hundred ways of arranging this drapery. One pose followed another, at least ten or twelve, almost without a break.

*   *   *

The Cavaliere had first asked her to pose inside a tall velvet-lined box open on one side, then within a huge gilt frame. But he soon saw that her artistry was frame enough for these simulations. Her whole life had prepared her to be the Cavaliere's gallery of living statues.

At fourteen, newly arrived in London, she had dreamed of becoming an actress, like the splendorous creatures she watched at night prancing out of the Drury Lane stage door. At fifteen, a scantily-veiled figure in the tableaux vivants staged by a fashionable sex therapist, she learned to stand without moving, breathing shallowly, the muscles in her face tightened to impassivity—expressing obliviousness to the sexual exertions taking place nearby, under Doctor Graham's supervision, in the Celestial Bed. At seventeen the favorite model of one of the great portrait painters of the era, she learned to think inventively about emotions and about how to express them, and then to hold these expressions for a long time. The painter said she often surprised him and inspired his conception of his subject; that she was a true collaborator, not a passive model. For the Cavaliere, she posed as herself posing—in a sequence of poses, a living slide show of the iconic moments of ancient myth and literature.

*   *   *

This was an extremely precise enterprise. First the subject had to be chosen. The Cavaliere would open his books and show the young woman the plates, or lead her to a painting or a statue in his collection. They would discuss the ancient stories. She always wanted to play them all. Then, once she was in possession of the subject, came the challenging part—finding the right moment, the moment that presents meaning, that sums up the essence of a character, a story, an emotion. It was the same hard choice painters were supposed to make. As Diderot wrote, “The painter has but one moment; he may no more record two different moments than two separate movements.”

*   *   *

Illustrate the passion. But don't move. Don't … move. This is not dance. You are not a proto—Isadora Duncan in freeze-frame, for all your bare feet and Greek costume and loose limbs and unbound hair. Illustrate the passion. But as a statue.