The Volcano Lover (29 page)

The dinner was under way, with the exhausted hero not eating at all, the nauseated Cavaliere attempting to eat, and the two women (Mrs. Cadogan had slept only an hour) eating heartily, when they were interrupted by someone knocking, hitting, beating the door. It was one of the Queen's maids, who between sobs begged the Cavaliere's wife to come quickly to the Queen's cabin. Mrs. Cadogan excused herself and followed her daughter. They arrived to see the Queen and a doctor bent over the little boy. Look, cried the Queen. Il meurt! The child's eyes had rolled back in his head, and he was shaking spasmodically and clenching his quivering fists, thumbs inserted into the palms of his hands. The Cavaliere's wife folded the child in her arms and kissed his cold forehead.

Convulsions are a common effect of fear, said the doctor. When the young prince comes to his senses and realizes that the storm has subsided—

No, the Cavaliere's wife shouted. No!

She rocked the stiffening child, while the Queen railed against her fate, and Mrs. Cadogan wedged a piece of towel between his teeth and wiped the foam from his mouth. The shouts of sailors told them Palermo had been sighted. Palermo! As the intervals between one paroxysm and the next became shorter, the Cavaliere's wife held the boy more firmly to her breast, rocking him, breathing with him, as if she could make his breathing unite with hers, and crooning English hymns from her childhood. He died that evening in her arms.

Shortly after midnight the
Vanguard
dropped anchor, and an hour later the drowsy weeping Queen boarded a small boat with two of her daughters and a few servants. The King refused to leave the ship until a proper welcome by his Sicilian subjects had been organized on the splendid marina; he had never before visited his second capital.

The Cavaliere's wife wanted to accompany the Queen, but worried that the hero might need her services as an interpreter in the morning.

She was depleted. It was all right to sleep now.

Toward noon the next day, to the cheers of a boisterous, inquisitive throng and a deafening salvo of cannon, the King went ashore. The admiral, flanked by his two friends, watched dourly from the quarter-deck. He was not in a good mood. Although everyone in his custody except the unfortunate prince was alive and safe, this did not feel like one of his triumphs. The other warships and the twenty merchant ships that had left Naples—transporting in abominable discomfort but without incident some two thousand refugees, the King's favorite servants and hounds, and the Queen's maids—had already arrived. The storm had ambushed only his ship, the flagship. Three topsails were split, the mainmast and rigging badly damaged. He felt needlessly buffeted. Perhaps he was simply very tired. The Cavaliere's wife was wide awake, pleased with her conduct during the emergency—she had behaved well, she had thought only of others—and enjoying the spectacle of the royalist crowd. She was having an adventure. She felt irresponsible. She wished they could remain a while longer on the ship. The Cavaliere stood between them—the ghostly trio of which he had been a member during the storm replaced by the real one, he with his wife and their friend. He felt light-headed, relieved not to be retching, impatient to put his feet on land again. They congratulated one another on their good fortune.

5

Another storm.

After leaving Naples in October, plodding nervily across the Mediterranean, past the ships of warring nations, through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the ocean, up the Iberian, then the French coast, clinging to the western ledge of Europe, the storeship
Colossus,
carrying two thousand rare antique vases in its entrails, had struck out for England and near the end of its two-month-long journey, off the Scilly Isles, ran into a merciless, protean storm, shuddered, rocked, took on water, fractured, foundered, and was wrecked. There was time to save all members of the crew. Time even to dump into a lifeboat one crate from the hold believed by the sailors to contain treasure—not one of the crates bearing the Cavaliere's seal. The roiling waters rose over real treasure, the second and greater collection of vases that the Cavaliere had assembled.

Water. Fire. Earth. Air. Four modes of disaster. Possessions lost to fire disappear. They change into … air. Possessions lost to fire's enemy, water, are not consumed, though they may break (if porous, like paper, bloat and rot). They still exist, possibly intact, but sunk, sequestered, out of reach. They are still there, decaying imperceptibly, encrusted by sea creatures, shifting aimlessly under the tides, buoyed up and sucked back in their little space—an unhappier fate than lying under the earth, for they are much farther down, much more inaccessible. What the ground covers is not so hard to bring up, and may have been uncannily preserved by earth-burial. Look at the cities doomed, then buried, by Vesuvius. But to be covered by water …

Having survived
his
storm, the Cavaliere still doesn't know his vases were already lost to water several weeks before the flight from Naples. The
Vanguard
has made it safely to the Palermo harbor. And the relief at surviving the humiliating, storm-tossed passage dulled his anguish at the precipitous departure, which had allowed him to take only a select number of cherished objects in addition to his pictures. He tried not to think of all that he had left behind in his magnificently furnished houses, which now lie unguarded, awaiting their plunderers. He thought of his horses and seven handsome carriages, and Catherine's spinet, harpsichord, and piano.

But surely he need not conclude that he would never see his abandoned possessions again. Never entertain guests at his Vesuvian villa. Never set out on horseback at dawn from the lodge in Caserta to the cries of beaters and hounds. Never watch beauty bathing from the rocks at Posillipo. Never again stand at the window of his observatory room, admiring the sweep of the bay and his dear mountain. No. No. Yes? No. The Cavaliere was as ill-prepared as any connoisseur of disaster for the real thing.

*   *   *

Temporarily then, for a short time only, they were to live in Palermo: the south of south.

Every culture has its southerners—people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing, brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives—envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibited, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do. Every country, including southern countries, has its south: below the equator, it lies north. Hanoi has Saigon, Sao Paulo has Rio, Delhi has Calcutta, Rome has Naples, and Naples, which to those at the top of this peninsula hanging down from the belly of Europe was already Africa, Naples has Palermo, the crescent-shaped second capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where it is even hotter, more heathenish, more dishonest, more picturesque.

As if to test the stereotype, it was snowing in palmy Palermo when they arrived just after Christmas. During the first weeks of January they camped in a few vast rooms of a villa with hardly any furniture and no fireplaces; a southern city is never prepared for a cold snap. The hero was desk-bound, writing furious dispatches. Wrapped in quilts, the Cavaliere shivered, brooded, and endured a merciless bout of diarrhea. Only his wife, who could not bear to be unoccupied, went out often, mainly to be at the Queen's side as she supervised the installation of her large family in the royal palace. She returned in the evening to report to the Cavaliere and their friend on the slovenliness of the local servants, the Queen's understandably despondent mood, and the defection of the King, who was busy sampling the theatres, masquerades, and other pleasures of his other capital.

Whatever the weather, the Cavaliere and his wife and their friend knew they were farther south, therefore among even more untrustworthy people, rascals and liars, more eccentric, more primitive. The thought that follows is that it was important not to change the way they had always lived. They cautioned themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture: we mustn't let ourselves go, mustn't descend to the level of the … jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it—then you know. The south has got you.

*   *   *

The weather turned warmer by the middle of the month as the Cavaliere reluctantly agreed to the exorbitant sum being asked for renting a palace near the Mole belonging to a Sicilian noble family with a reputation for eccentricity, even by local standards. Imagine a prince whose coat of arms is a satyr holding up a mirror to a woman with the head of a horse! But the palace had a commanding location, and within its walls covered with colored silk and portraits of somber-looking ancestors was generously furnished; it would do as the temporary British embassy. Unfortunately, it was too fraught with its saturnine history for the Cavaliere to make it also a home: that is, a museum of his enthusiasms. Weeks after they occupied it, he still had not unpacked most of what he was able to bring away from Naples.

Here, in this unexpected and alarmingly costly exile, they were even more intensely a trio. A large woman and a small man who are full of feeling for each other, and a tall emaciated man who loves them both ardently and rejoices in their company. Though sometimes the Cavaliere was glad to see his wife and their friend go out, because their animation exhausts him, when they were absent for more than a few hours he longed for their return. But he wished there were not always so many at his table. A fair number of the colony of English residents in Naples who had become refugees with them found their way to his house each evening. These unpredictably large suppers for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty would end only when the Cavaliere's wife rose from the table, or fell, or knelt—she needed no props to initiate a sample of her Attitudes—or went to the piano to play and sing; she had already learned a few sad, graceful Sicilian airs. The evenings seemed very long to the Cavaliere. But he could hardly refuse to welcome his compatriots, none of whom were as well housed as he—in all Palermo there was only one overcrowded hotel up to their standards—and at the jumped-up rates exacted from these captive tourists, double or triple what they were before. Their discomforts required that the Cavaliere flourish the standard to which they were accustomed. Arriving from their makeshift lodgings in the rented carriages for which they had been disagreeably overcharged, they thought as they entered the British envoy's brightly illuminated residence: This is how we live. What we have a right to. This luxury, this extravagance, this refinement, this overeating; this obligation to amuse ourselves.

Following supper and the entertainment offered by the Cavaliere's wife, the evenings usually devolved into late-night card parties and relays of gossip and condescending observations about the wantonness of local manners. The refugees told their old stories to each other, and made light of the inconveniences of their new situation. Nothing should seem to impair their capacity for pleasure—their pleasures. They saved their complaints, their vehement complaints, for letters, especially those to friends and family back in England. But that's what letters were for: to say something new, and say it eloquently. Society was for saying something old—predictable, throwaway, offhand—which would not startle the auditor. (Only savages blurted out what they felt.) Letters were for saying—I confess, I admit, I must avow. Letters took a long time to arrive, which encouraged their recipients to hope that in the meantime the sender's misfortunes had eased.

Some were making arrangements to return to England. For the news was bad—that is, it was just what the refugees expected. Two weeks after the flight of the government from Naples, the French moved an army of six thousand soldiers into the city, and by late January a cabal of enlightened aristocrats and professors had engendered a monstrosity that called itself the Parthenopean or Vesuvian Republic.

Most of the refugees were inclined to consider Naples lost. A foreigner who has enjoyed the good life in a poor country, life before the revolution—such an expatriate is quick to see the direst outcome for the whole country when his privileges have been rescinded. Even the Cavaliere reluctantly began to think of retirement and returning to England. But he did not see how he could extricate himself from Palermo. Not yet. Their magnificent friend, on whom all depended, spoke no foreign languages and could not be expected to understand, like a professional diplomat, the doublespeak of a court. They could not leave the King and Queen, as long as the fate of the country still hung in the balance. He had spoken to the King, but the King, he reported with more asperity than he intended, had given in to inarticulate gloom—whenever obliged by fresh news from Naples to ignore how much he was enjoying himself.

In fact the King, whenever he remembered to forget his pleasures, was in a fury. None of this would have happened if Naples had remained neutral, he bellowed at his wife. It was all her fault—it was because of her partiality to the English; that is, to the Cavaliere's wife. The Queen heard out the King's tirade in silence, the dense silence of a woman who knows that, although more intelligent than her husband, she is still only a wife, subject to his whim. She—despite her undiminished mistrust of the people, for all their vaunted loyalty to the royal family and the Church—was convinced that the French occupation, and this charade of a republic which had come into existence under French patronage and protection, could not possibly last. The people were picking off French soldiers who were foolhardy enough to wander at night in the byways of the city. Two soldiers had been murdered in a brothel by some neighborhood customers, and a mob had attacked one of the French barracks, managing to butcher twelve of the sleeping soldiers. And then, said the Queen to the Cavaliere's wife, there is our ally, syphilis. In that time often rapidly disabling or fatal, the horrifying illness which the Italians called the French disease and the French called
le mal de Naples
could be relied on to deduct at least a thousand soldiers.