The Volcano Lover (33 page)

For the Cavaliere another revelation had been in store. He had been gone for almost an hour, long enough to let his wife and their friend fully savor the force they had unleashed, and, embarrassed by its strength, to want to go look for him. They found him in the park seated on a marble bench, his back to the scarlet hibiscus and crimson bougainvillea climbing over a low wall crowned with more monsters, and listened to him describe in an oddly subdued voice another curious figure he had noted on the way to the park: the Atlas whose broad muscular back bends under the weight of an empty wine barrel. They could not help wondering, guiltily, if the somberness of his mood meant that he had divined what has just happened. But the Cavaliere had not been thinking about his companions at all for some time.

When he had descended one side of the monumental double-flighted external staircase and made his way to the rear of the villa, he was still thinking about them. Then something he had seen had made him lose himself, and so he lost them too.

It was in the prince's chapel. As soon as the Cavaliere entered the dank interior, he was stopped mid-stride. Something, he sensed, was moving high above his head. Probably a bat—he hated bats. Then he realized it was too large, and merely swaying; there was something hanging from the high gilded ceiling which had been agitated by the spring breeze he had let in with him when he opened the door. He could make it out now above him. It was the life-size carved figure of a man kneeling, on nothing, in prayer. As the Cavaliere's eyes became more accustomed to the dimness, he saw that the man was dangling in the musty void from a long chain fastened to the crown of his head. And this chain continued up to a hook that had been screwed into the navel of a large Christ nailed to his cross, which was fixed flat to the ceiling. Both the Crucified One and the suppliant suspended in the air were painted in disturbingly realistic colors.

Blasphemy could not distress this fervent atheist. But fear could, his own stab of fear at the sight of the hanging man, and the expression of inconsolable fear in another. The prince's congeries of grotesque persons and objects did not mean that the prince had been mad. What they signified is that he had been afraid.

He was more daring than I, thought the Cavaliere as he fled the chapel to wait for his wife and their friend to join him. The prince had taken the curiosity and avidity of the collector to its terminal stage, where the attachment to objects releases an ungovernable spirit of raillery. He had every reason to be afraid, and therefore to want to mock his fears. Weighed down with his objects, he had lowered himself, he had floated down, he had plummeted deep into his own feelings and naturally, because he had descended far enough, he had arrived in hell.

*   *   *

The Cavaliere has finally learned from Charles of the loss of his vases on the
Colossus
last December 10th. His collection was already under the sea when he was making his own perilous crossing. If they could have saved a few of his chests, only a few! For he learns that the one chest the sailors chose to rescue from the hold, thinking it contained treasure, was found when opened to contain a British admiral preserved in alcohol, who was being shipped home for burial. Damn his body, the Cavaliere wrote to Charles.

The death of objects can release a grief even more bewildering than the death of a loved person. People are supposed to die, hard as that is to keep in mind. Whether one lived with boring prudence, as the Cavaliere now did, or courted death, as his glorious friend did every time he went into battle, the end is the same, inevitable. But objects as durable and as ancient as the Cavaliere's magnificent antique vases, especially such objects, which have survived so many centuries, offer a promise of immortality. Part of why we become attached to them, collect them, is that it is not inevitable that they will some day be subtracted from the world. And when the promise is broken, by accident or negligence, our protestations seem pointless. Our grief a mite indecent. But the mourning, which amplifies grief and thereby eases it, still needs to be done.

Incredulity is our first response to the destruction of something we cherish profoundly. To begin to mourn, one must get past the feeling that this is not happening or has not happened. It helps to be present at the disaster. Having witnessed Catherine's diminishing, having leaned over her for the last breath, he had seen that his unhappy wife had ceased to exist; he had mourned, he had forgiven her for dying, and stopped mourning. Had his treasures gone in a fire in his own house, had they been devoured by lava, whose onrush he had seen with his own eyes, he would know how to do the mourning appropriate for beloved objects; mourning would do its work—and end, before he was irreparably wounded by the unfairness of the loss.

Whatever does not happen before our eyes must be taken on trust. And trust, for the Cavaliere, is becoming scarce. To learn that his treasures had been lost months ago, and so far away, was no different from learning of the death, similarly distant in time and geography, of a beloved person. Such a death bears a peculiar imprint of doubt. To be told one day that someone who has gone off to the other side of the world, and with whom you expect momentarily to be reunited, has actually been dead for many months, during which you have been going on with your life, unaware of this subtraction that has taken place, makes a mockery of the finality of death. Death is reduced to news. And news is always a little unreal—which is why we can bear to take in so much of it.

The Cavaliere mourned for his treasures. But a mourning that begins so posthumously, and under such conditions of doubt and disbelief, can never be fully experienced. Because he could not really mourn, he raged. His powers of recuperation, his resilience, had already been sorely tested, tested as they had never been, in the dispiriting weeks after his arrival in Palermo. But he had managed to pull himself together and reassemble, on a smaller scale, some of his old enjoyments. The loss of his treasures was a defining blow. He felt an accrual of bitterness, this man who had never before entertained the idea that he might be unlucky.

The Cavaliere's world is shrinking. He longed to be back in England, though such a retirement was not likely to be tranquil: he owed his bankers fifteen thousand pounds which he had expected to repay in large part by the sale of his vase collection. (He would have to borrow more from his friend, who has far less money than he but is so generous.) But, he felt, he could not yet extricate himself from Palermo. If there was a chance that their first capital could be returned to the King and Queen in the coming months, it would be worth waiting. His life in Naples could never be restored, but at least those who disrupted his felicity and set into motion all these losses would be punished.

Distance has betrayed him. And time is his enemy. His view of time, and of change, has become that of most elderly people: he hates change, since for him—for his body—any change is for the worse. And if there is to be change, then he wants it to happen quickly, so it does not use up too much of the time remaining to him. He is impatient to discharge his rage. He follows the news from Naples, and confers often with the royal couple and their ministers. The diplomat's virtue of patience, of waiting for events to season and ripen, has quite left him. He wants everything to happen soon, so he can be free, free to leave this dreadful Palermo and return to England. Why does everything happen so slowly?

For the Cavaliere's wife and the hero the world has shrunk, too, but in the most exalting sense. To each other. Any change from their present situation is fraught with the likelihood of separation. And the Cavaliere's wife is starting to like Palermo, but then she is the only one of the trio with something of the south in her.

Don't change anything!

In May the hero left Palermo for the first time since their arrival five months earlier, taking his squadron off the western tip of Sicily, to see if he can detect any new movements of the French fleet. He reassured his friends that he would be gone only a week. The waters are calm. The weather is excellent. The no-sharper-than-usual pain in the stump of his right arm tells him there will not be a storm.

The Cavaliere was cheered by this sign of their friend's recovery. And the woman supposed responsible for the hero's inaction also rejoiced in this evidence of his renewed health. By making him happy she had been making him well, and that was the point, too; so that he would be able to go back to war and win even greater glory for England, even greater victories. Still, she found his departure unbearable. The daily letters they wrote each other rapidly crisscrossed the space between them. But sending precious things away, out into the world, is always a little sad, even when there is hardly any chance they will be lost. It confirms distance and separation. It was not fully real to her that he had gone until the first time she wrote him, a few hours later. Then the awareness that he was not that far away, that he would not be gone for very long, lost all its power to console. Indeed, it is knowing how soon he would be holding the letter, reading it, that is painful. She stared at the letter, this bird that will fly to his breast. She ought to surrender it to the shiny-faced lieutenant waiting deferentially at the threshold of the drawing room, who will gallop west across the hundred miles that separate them and put it in his hand. But she didn't want to give it up, she didn't want to lose the letter, which could be with him tomorrow, while she is here and can't be with him; and overcome by such a dizzying sense of loss, she burst into tears. Suddenly space and time make no sense to her. Why isn't everything right here? Why doesn't everything happen at once?

*   *   *

The Cavaliere had been infatuated with the woman he made his wife, had been enthralled by her talents and her charms, had loved her, still loves her deeply; but he did not, as the hero did, worship her. As she passed into her thirties, he desired her less. They had not made love for nearly two years. The Cavaliere wondered if she minded very much. Women often were not sorry when a husband's lust ended. She never reproached him; and on his part there was no diminishment of trust, admiration, dependence—all the things that go by the name of love—nor of his pleasure in being kind to her. But it was her beauty, her unrivaled beauty, that he had desired.

The hero loved her as she was. Exactly as she was. And that made his love the one this former great beauty had always wanted. He thought her majestic.

Out there, in the world, they have both put on brave fronts about their less than ideal appearance. In here, inside their love, honesty becomes possible. They have had their tender moments of confessing the embarrassment they feel over their bodies. He said that he worried she found his stump repulsive. She told him his injuries made him more dear to her. She confessed that she was embarrassed to be so much bigger than he, that she hoped he did not mind, for she would do anything to please him, for he deserved the most beautiful woman in the world. He told her he considered her his wife. They pledged their eternal love. As soon as divorce or the other
d
word (it couldn't be pronounced) freed them, they would marry.

The hero had never before known sexual bliss. And she too experienced an unprecedented happiness in his embrace. She made him tell her about all the women he had slept with; there weren't many. A man who has to admire in order to desire is likely to have led a modest sexual life. He, even more prone to jealousy than she, could not bear to ask her about the men before the Cavaliere. (She had not yet told him she had a daughter.) He confessed that he was jealous of the Cavaliere. He is haunted by the fear of losing her. She makes him shudder.

Everyone was caught up in some kind of deception.

The ending of his sexual life had not made the Cavaliere so insensitive to the erotic currents which flow between others that he had failed to take in what has happened between his wife and his friend. In fact, like everyone else, he assumed they were lovers several months before the excursion to the villa of monsters. He'd always known, a man who marries a beauty thirty-six years younger than himself would have to be a fool not to know, that this would happen one day. And he cannot acquit himself of sexual neglect of his wife in the past few years, though it is not really his fault, he tells himself. He can only congratulate himself that his wife has never, until now, given him the slightest cause for jealousy or occasion for public humiliation; and that, after so many years of marriage, her affections have wandered toward the person to whom, after her, the Cavaliere is most attached in all the world.

The Cavaliere is not someone, like his wife or their friend, who is inclined to shirk the burden of lucidity. He is quite lucid about them. What he is deceived about is his own reactions. He was not aware of being jealous or resentful or humiliated. Since such feelings would be altogether unreasonable, how could he be? He thinks he ought not to mind. Therefore, he does not mind. But he does, for he knows that his wife feels an emotion she has never felt for him. This self-deception—this tendency to live beyond his psychological as well as his financial means—is part of the Cavaliere's abraded talent for happiness, his wish not to be discouraged by anything other than the terminally undesirable. Someone of the Cavaliere's temperament is already keeping at bay a great deal of anger, and fear. He was an expert in dismissing dangerous feelings.

Because he is deceived about his own feelings, it is easier for him to be mistaken about how he can deceive others. With the curious innocence of the obsessed, the Cavaliere imagines that as long as he pretends not to know he can silence the speculation of others. He is banking on his reputation as a judicious man of the world: if such a husband seems convinced there is nothing illicit in his wife's friendship with another man, then they will believe his dissembling, at which he knows himself to be an expert, rather than their own suspicions. A life spent among rulers has given the Cavaliere a rich experience of the powers of lies to distract from a disgracing reality, of denials to prevail over disagreeable truth. This will be just one more appearance, in which he pretends not to know some inconveniencing fact. It doesn't occur to him that the more he denies what is going on, the more he will seem like a dupe.