The Volcano Lover (3 page)

Catherine laughed softly. The smiling Cavaliere, thinking of naked buttocks—first women's, then a monkey's—looked up. They were often in harmony, even if for different reasons. You're feeling better, he asked. The Cavaliere had not married a monkey. The carriage rolled on. It began to rain. London expired behind them. The Cavaliere's entourage was wending its way back to his passions—ruling passions. The Cavaliere went on with Candide and valet to El Dorado, Catherine stared down at her own book, the maid's chin dropped to her breast, the panting horses tried to pull ahead of the whip, the servants in the rear coach giggled and tippled, Catherine continued to labor for breath, and soon London was only a road.

2

They had been married, and childless, for sixteen years.

If the Cavaliere, who like so many obsessive collectors was a natural bachelor, married the only child of a wealthy Pembrokeshire squire to finance the political career he embarked on after ten time-serving years in military regalia, it was not a good reason. The House of Commons, four years representing a borough in Sussex in which he never set foot, turned out to offer no more scope for his distinctive talents than the army. A better reason: it had brought him money to buy pictures. He also had something richer than money. Yielding to the necessity of marrying—somewhat against my inclination, he was to tell another impecunious younger son, his nephew, many years later—he had found what he called lasting comfort. On the day of their marriage Catherine locked a bracelet on her wrist containing some of his hair. She loved him abjectly but without self-pity. He developed the improbable but just reputation for being an uxorious husband. Time evaporates, money is always needed, comforts found where they were not expected, and excitement dug up in barren ground.

He can't know what we know about him. For us he is a piece of the past, austerely outlined in powdered wig and long elegant coat and buckled shoes, beaky profile cocked intelligently, looking, observing, firm in his detachment. Does he seem cold? He is simply managing, managing brilliantly. He is absorbed, entertained by what he sees—he has an important, if not front-rank, diplomatic posting abroad—and he keeps himself busy. His is the hyperactivity of the heroic depressive. He ferried himself past one vortex of melancholy after another by means of an astonishing spread of enthusiasms.

He is interested in everything. And he lives in a place that for sheer volume of curiosities—historical, natural, social—could hardly be surpassed. It was bigger than Rome, it was the wealthiest as well as the most populous city on the Italian peninsula and, after Paris, the second largest city on the European continent, it was the capital of natural disaster and it has the most indecorous, plebeian monarch, the best ices, the merriest loafers, the most vapid torpor, and, among the younger aristocrats, the largest number of future Jacobins. Its incomparable bay was home to freakish fish as well as the usual bounty. It had streets paved with blocks of lava and, some miles away, the gruesomely intact remains, recently rediscovered, of two dead cities. Its opera house, the biggest in Italy, provided a continual ravishment of castrati, another local product of international renown. Its handsome, highly sexed aristocracy gathered in one another's mansions at nightly card parties, misleadingly called
conversazioni,
which often did not break up until dawn. On the streets life piled up, extruded, overflowed. Certain court celebrations included the building in front of the royal palace of an artificial mountain festooned with meat, game, cakes, and fruit, whose dismantling by the ravenous mob, unleashed by a salvo of cannon, was applauded by the overfed from balconies. During the great famine of the spring of 1764, people went off to the baker's with long knives inside their shirts for the killing and maiming needed to get a small ration of bread.

The Cavaliere arrived to take up his post in November of that year. The expiatory processions of women with crowns of thorns and crosses on their backs had passed and the pillaging mobs disbanded. The grandees and foreign diplomats had retrieved the silver that they had hidden in convents. The court, which had fled north sixteen miles to the colossal, grimly horizontal residence at Caserta, was back in the city's royal palace. The air intoxicated with smells of the sea and coffee and honeysuckle and excrement, animal and human, instead of corpses rotting by the hundreds on the streets. The thirty thousand dead in the plague that followed the famine were buried, too. In the Hospital of the Incurables, the thousands dying of epidemic illness no longer starved to death first, at the rate of sixty or seventy a day. Foreign supplies of corn had brought back the acceptable level of destitution. The poor were again cavorting with tambourines and full-throated songs, but many had kept the long knives inside their shirts which they'd worn to scout for bread and now murdered each other more often for the ordinary, civil reasons. And the emaciated peasants who had converged on the city in the spring were lingering, breeding. Once again the
cuccagna
would be built, savagely dismantled, devoured. The Cavaliere presented his credentials to the thirteen-year-old King and the regents, rented a spacious three-story mansion commanding a heart-stopping view of the bay and Capri and the quiescent volcano for, in local money, one hundred fifty pounds a year, and began organizing as much employment as possible for his quickened energies.

Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle—it is one of the reasons that people of means move abroad. Where those stunned by the horror of the famine and the brutality and incompetence of the government's response saw unending inertia, lethargy, a hardened lava of ignorance, the Cavaliere saw a flow. The expatriate's dancing city is often the local reformer's or revolutionary's immobilized one, ill-governed, committed to injustice. Different distance, different cities. The Cavaliere had never been as active, as stimulated, as alive mentally. As pleasurably detached. In the churches, in the narrow, steep streets, at the court—so many performances here. Among the bay's eccentric marine life, he noted with delight (no rivalry between art and nature for this intrepid connoisseur) one fish with tiny feet, an evolutionary overachiever who nevertheless hadn't made it out of the water. The sun beat down relentlessly. He trod steaming, spongy ground that was hot beneath his shoes. And bony ground loaded with rifts of treasure.

The obligations of social life of which so many dutifully complain, the maintenance of a great household with some fifty servants, including several musicians, keep his expenses rising. His envoy's salary was hardly adequate for the lavish entertainments required to impose himself on the imagination of people who counted, a necessary part of his job; for the expectations of the painters on whom he bestows patronage; for the price of antiquities and pictures for which he must compete with a host of rival collectors. Of course he is eventually going to sell the best of what he buys—and he does. A gratifying symmetry, that collecting most things requires money but then the things collected themselves turn into more money. Though money was the faintly disreputable, necessary byproduct of his passion, collecting was still a virile occupation: not merely recognizing but bestowing value on things, by including them in one's collection. It stemmed from a lordly sense of himself that Catherine—indeed, all but a very few women—could not have.

His reputation as a connoisseur and man of learning, his affability, the favor he came to enjoy at court, unmatched by any other of the envoys, had made the Cavaliere the city's leading foreign resident. It was to Catherine's credit that she was no courtier, that she was revolted by the antics of the King, a youth of stupefying coarseness, and by his snobbish, fertile, intelligent wife, who wielded most of the power. As it did him credit that he was able to amuse the King. There was no reason for Catherine to accompany him to the food-slinging banquets at the royal palace to which he was convened three or four times a week. He was never bored when with her; but he was also happy to be alone, out for whole days on the bay in his boat harpooning fish, when his head went quiet in the sun, or gazing at, reviewing, itemizing his treasures in his cool study or the storeroom, or looking through the new books on ichthyology or electricity or ancient history that he had ordered from London. One never could know enough, see enough. Much longing there. A feeling he was spared in his marriage, a wholly successful marriage—one in which all needs were satisfied that had been given permission to arise. There was no frustration, at least on his part, therefore no longing, no desire to be together as much as possible.

High-minded where he was cynical, ailing while he was robust, tender when he forgot to be, correct as her table settings for sixty—the amiable, not too plain, harpsichord-playing heiress he had married seemed to him pure wife, as far as he could imagine such a being. He relished the fact that everyone thought her admirable. Conscientiously dependent rather than weak, she was not lacking in self-confidence. Religion animated her; her dismay at his impiety sometimes made her seem commanding. Besides his own person and career, music was the principal interest they had in common. When Leopold Mozart and his prodigy son had visited the city two years ago Catherine had becomingly trembled as she sat down to play for them, and then performed as superbly as ever. At the weekly concerts given in the British envoy's mansion, to which all of local society aspired to be invited, the very people who most loudly talked and ate through every opera during the season fell silent. Catherine tamed them. The Cavaliere was an accomplished cellist and violinist—he had taken lessons from the great Giardini in London when he was twenty—but she was the better musician, he freely allowed. He liked having reasons to admire her. Even more than wanting to be admired, he liked admiring.

Though his imagination was reasonably lascivious, his blood, so he thought, was temperate. In that time men with his privileges were usually corpulent by their third or fourth decade. But the Cavaliere had not lost a jot of his young man's appetite for physical exertion. He worried about Catherine's delicate, unexercised constitution, to the point of sometimes being made uneasy by the ardor with which she welcomed his punctual embraces. There was little sexual heat between them. He didn't regret not taking a mistress, though—whatever others might make of the oddity. Occasionally, opportunity plumped itself down beside him; the heat rose; and he found himself reaching from moist palm to layered clothes, unhooking, untying, fingering, pushing. But the venture would leave him with no desire to continue; he was drawn to other kinds of acquisition, of possession. That Catherine took no more than a benevolent interest in his collections was just as well, perhaps. It is natural for lovers of music to enjoy collaborating, playing together. Most unnatural to be a co-collector. One wants to possess (and be possessed) alone.

*   *   *

It is my nature to collect, he once told his wife.

“Picture-mad,” a friend from his youth called him—one person's nature being another's idea of madness; of immoderate desire.

As a child he collected coins, then automata, then musical instruments. Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself—it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting. By his early twenties the Cavaliere had already formed and been forced to sell, in order to pay debts, several small collections of paintings.

Upon arriving as envoy he started collecting anew. Within an hour on horseback, Pompeii and Herculaneum were being dug up, stripped, picked over; but everything the ignorant diggers unearthed was supposed to go straight to the storerooms in the nearby royal palace at Portici. He managed to purchase a large collection of Greek vases from a noble family in Rome to whom they had belonged for generations. To collect is to rescue things, valuable things, from neglect, from oblivion, or simply from the ignoble destiny of being in someone else's collection rather than one's own. But buying a whole collection instead of chasing down one's quarry piece by piece—it was not an elegant move. Collecting is also a sport, and its difficulty is part of what gives it honor and zest. A true collector prefers not to acquire in bulk (any more than hunters want the game simply driven past them), is not fulfilled by collecting another's collection: mere acquiring or accumulating is not collecting. But the Cavaliere was impatient. There are not only inner needs and exigencies. And he wanted to get on with what would be but the first of his Neapolitan collections.

No one in England had been surprised that he continued to collect paintings or went after antiquities once he arrived in Naples. But his interest in the volcano displayed a new side of his nature. Being volcano-mad was madder than being picture-mad. Perhaps the sun had gone to his head, or the fabled laxity of the south. Then the passion was quickly rationalized as a scientific interest, and also an aesthetic one, for the eruption of a volcano could be called, stretching the term, beautiful. There was nothing odd in his evenings with guests invited to view the spectacle from the terrace of his country villa near the mountain, like the moon-viewing parties of courtiers in Heian Japan. What was odd was that he wanted to be even closer.

The Cavaliere had discovered in himself a taste for the mildly plutonian. He started by riding with one groom out to the sulphurous ground west of the city, and bathing naked in the lake in the cone of a submerged extinct volcano. Walking onto his terrace those first months to see in the distance the well-behaved mountain sitting under the sun might provoke a reverie about the calm that follows catastrophe. Its plume of white smoke, the occasional rumblings and jets of steam seemed
that
perennial, unthreatening. Eighteen thousand villagers in Torre del Greco had died in 1631, an eruption even more lethal than the one in which Herculaneum and Pompeii were entombed and the scholarly admiral of the Roman fleet, the Elder Pliny, famously lost his life, but since then, nothing that could merit the name of disaster.