The Volcano Lover (36 page)

His hiding place, in the chambers of a bishop who was one of his informers, was a secure one. But, of course, no hiding place is entirely secure; he would have known how to track himself down (the right bribes, the right application of torture). He knew the revolutionaries must be looking for him. Wasn't he responsible for the deaths of some of the premature conspirators? Hadn't he persecuted many of those now leading the republic? Jurists, scholars, defrocked priests, professors of mathematics and chemistry—the twenty-five men appointed by the French general to serve as a provisional government were like a roll call of the kind of cosmopolites and subversives Scarpia had been putting in jail whenever he had a pretext. But apparently they didn't know how to find him. Unstimulated by fear, Scarpia felt the acrid essence of himself each day more diluted by the bishop's tiresome I-always-knew and But-never-did-I-expect and, not least, by this unaccustomed stint of celibacy. The first time he ventured out, to get a woman, he was sure he was recognized. The second time, to exhibit himself watching the curious crowd watching a large pine tree being planted in front of the ex-royal palace, he was not so sure. He spent a few more days with the bishop and then went home, wrote a long report to the Queen, and waited to be arrested. And waited. His enemies, it seemed, were too high-minded for anything like revenge.

Now he was biding his time while these protégés of self-styled enlightenment put on their ridiculous floppy red Phrygian caps and addressed each other as Citizen and made speeches and took down royal emblems and planted their Tree of Liberty in squares throughout the city and went into committee to write a constitution modeled on that of the French republic. They were dreamers, all of them. They would see. He would have his revenge.

You can always count on the gullibility of the benevolent. They go along, marching ahead, thinking they have the people behind them, and then they turn around and … nobody there. The mob has peeled off, looking for food or wine or sex or a nap or a good brawl. The mob is unwilling to be high-minded. A mob wants to fight or to disperse. The Jacobin lords and ladies with their sentimental ideas of justice and liberty—they thought they were giving the people what they wanted, or what was good for them. Which, in their sonorous naïveté, they believed to be the same thing. No, the lash, and punctual displays of pomp glorifying state and ecclesiastical power, that's what the people want. Of course, these professors and liberal aristocrats thought they understood the people's need for pageantry, and were planning a festival celebrating the Goddess of Reason. Reason! What kind of spectacle is that! Did they really expect the people to love reason—no, Reason—as they loved the King? Did they really expect the people to take to the new calendar that had been decreed, with Italianized versions of the names of the French revolutionary calendar?

Scarpia noted with glee that the republicans were soon forced to recognize that these borrowed rites and nomenclature were not enough to inspire loyalty in the ignorant masses. An article in the revolutionary newspaper edited by Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel on the value to the revolution of a successful performance of the city's famous biannual miracle was the first sign of realism. But such open patronizing of the people's faith showed how far these prisoners of Reason were from the understanding needed to dominate the people. Scarpia, cleverest of manipulators and bigots, knew that once you cease talking about faith and start talking about religion—even more indiscreetly, about the role of religion in upholding order and maintaining public morale—faith is being discredited, and the true authority of the Church compromised, fatally so. The value of religion! That was a secret never to be mentioned in public. How guileless they were.

And impotent. For the traditional rites and local omens that alarmed or pacified the superstitious masses were not under the control of the republicans. Take the miracle of the liquefaction of the ampule of dried saint's blood: the republicans were right to worry that, to demonstrate the withdrawal of heavenly protection from the city, the royalist archbishop would prevent the miracle from taking place. And of course no one could control Vesuvius, all-purpose omen and supreme expression of the force and autonomy of nature. True, the mountain had been behaving well recently. The republicans hoped the people would notice that even if San Gennaro withheld his benediction, the mountain was on the patriots' side. Vesuvius, quiet ever since 1794, sent up a placid flame, as of rejoicing, on the evening of the fireworks celebrating the proclamation of the republic, wrote the Fonseca woman. More poet's fancies! But the people were not reassured so easily, although they could always be made more fearful than they already were. What a pity, thought Scarpia, that there is not some way to bring about an eruption. A big eruption. Now.

How much more to the point was the Queen's appeal to the people's faith. She had entrusted her fellow exile and closest confidante, the wife of the British minister, with the task of diffusing packets of the fake republican proclamations she had devised.
EASTER ABOLISHED! ALL VENERATION OF THE VIRGIN HEREBY PROHIBITED! BAPTISM AT THE AGE OF SEVEN! MARRIAGE NO LONGER A SACRAMENT
! All the English had to do was throw them in the post at Leghorn for Naples, the Queen had told her friend. The Cavaliere, when informed of the plan by his wife, inquired if the Queen expected the English, that is, himself, to pay the postage. No, no, said the Cavaliere's wife, she pays, out of her own purse. I wonder how many will arrive, said the Cavaliere. Oh, the Queen don't care if they all arrive or not. She says some will arrive. Some did arrive; Scarpia had seen them passed from hand to hand. Proclamations that flattered the people and praised their courage would be less convincing, he knew, than those that incited fear. People, look what these agents of the French Antichrist have in store for you! For the better-off, money is more effective: the large sums from her own purse the Queen was sending him to retain the loyalty of aristocrats who might have concluded they had no choice but to cooperate with the self-styled patriots.

Their fairy-tale revolution was under siege from the beginning but, Scarpia saw, although they knew they would be obliged to take up arms, they would never understand the necessary role of state violence. While their constitution invokes the martial spirit of ancient Greece and Rome, they hadn't a clue how to organize a militia, let alone an army. And what kind of police, thought the former head of the secret police in Naples, was a citizens' police? No police at all. In fact, their revolution was defenseless.

*   *   *

Alas, Scarpia's predictions were correct.

A revolution made by members of the privileged classes in the metropolis, lacking any support in the countryside or among the urban masses, now further pauperized by the exit of capital with the flight of the old regime and the loss of revenues brought in by tourism … a revolution led by the honorable and the scrupulous, who are not only unwilling to use force to suppress popular discontent but have no ambition to increase state power … a revolution threatened with imminent invasion and already encircled by a naval blockade of the capital city (worsening the food shortages) mounted by the great empire of the counter-revolution supporting the government in exile … a revolution protected by occupying troops, hated by the people, of the continent-conquering rival empire … a revolution challenged by a large guerrilla insurgency in the rural areas financed by the government in exile and commanded by a popular émigré grandee … a revolution subverted by the smuggling to its potential supporters among the privileged classes of large cash gifts from abroad, and by a disinformation campaign devised by the government in exile to persuade the people that their most cherished customs are about to be abolished … a revolution immobilized because its leaders, who fully recognize the need for economic reform, include both radicals and moderates, neither of whom gains the upper hand. A revolution without the time to work it all out.

Such a revolution doesn't have a chance. Indeed, it is the classic design, confected in that decade, reused many times since, for a revolution that doesn't have a chance. And will go down in history as naïve. Well-intentioned. Idealistic. Premature. The sort of revolution that gives, to some, a good name to revolution; and to everyone else confirms the impossibility of a governance that lacks an appetite for repression.

Of course the future will prove these patriots right. The future will make of the doomed leaders of the Vesuvian republic heroes, martyrs, forerunners. But the future is another country.

In the country that is the only one the revolutionaries have, there is dearth and unfamiliar kinds of disorder. The revolutionaries have not exactly inherited a balanced economy. Everything had to be imported except silk stockings, soap, tortoiseshell snuffboxes, marble tables, ornamental furniture, and porcelain figure groups, the kingdom's principal manufactures. The silk and ceramic factories offered paid drudgery to a select few; many were servants or artisans; and a large portion of the city's population was accustomed to subsisting on beggary, theft, and tips for menial services rendered to nobs and to tourists. But the robbery of the entire treasury by the King and Queen, which had left the kingdom without any money, had shriveled patronage, halted the construction boom that had begun with the arrival of the Bourbon monarchy in 1734 (the building of new public works, of palaces and residences for the rich, of churches and theatres, had been one of the few steady sources of employment), and suspended tourism (there was no Grand Tour of revolution). Food prices soared. Hardly anyone had work now.

The necessity of eliminating corruption—indeed, of reorganizing the whole society on a natural, rational basis by the science of legislation—was obvious to all the leaders of the new government, who were not so naïve as to think that there was no more to governing than educating. But the rift widened between moderates and radicals, with the moderates advocating the taxation of the rich and the reduction of Church exemptions, and the radicals urging the abolition of titles and the confiscation of all aristocratic and ecclesiastical property. When one of the government committees proposed public lotteries as a way of replenishing the empty treasury, the proposal was denounced as inadequate or impractical or immoral, the last argument being advanced by Fonseca Pimentel in the pages of her newspaper. The instruction of the people and their conversion to republican ideas—propaganda—was the only one of the revolution's tasks on which everyone could agree. New, uplifting names—Modesty, Silence, Frugality, Triumph—were given to the Toledo, the Chiaia, and other principal streets. Fonseca Pimentel proposed bringing out a gazette and almanacs for the people in Neapolitan dialect. She wrote an article about the need for theatre and opera reform. The people were to have open-air puppet shows with more edifying escapades for their Punchinellos, and at the San Carlo—already renamed the National Theatre—the educated classes would have operas with allegorical subjects such as those being staged in France:
The Triumph of Reason, Sacrifice on the Altar of Liberty, Hymn to the Supreme Being, Republican Discipline,
and
The Crimes of the Old Regime.

The whole thing lasted five months. Five renamed months: Piovoso (rainy), Ventoso (windy), Germile (budding), Fiorile (flowering), and Pratile (meadowed) …

The first acts of resistance were in outlying villages and small towns—there were more than two thousand settled villages and small towns in the kingdom. The patriots in the capital were astonished at the unrest, and went back into committee to discuss their plans for appropriating great estates and distributing them to landless peasants.

The news worsened. The republican forces sent to the provinces proved no match for the small landing parties from English frigates they encountered. Ruffo's self-styled Christian army was taking village after village. It now included thousands of convicts released by royal order from prisons in Sicily and transported in English ships to the Calabrian coast. Besieged from without and confronting increasing disaffection and civil disturbances in Naples itself, the republic redoubled its efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people.

There were food riots. More French soldiers were ambushed. Trees of Liberty burned at night in the public squares.

The Tree of Liberty is an artificial plant, Scarpia wrote the Queen. As it has taken no roots here, it does not need to be uprooted. Even now it is being shaken vigorously by Your Majesty's loyal subjects, and without the protection of the French it will topple on its own, as soon as the enemy departs.

In May, France, defeated in a number of battles with the newly formed Second Coalition in the north of Italy, withdrew its forces from Naples. British frigates occupied Capri and Ischia. A few weeks later Ruffo and his army of sullen peasants and country bandits poured into the city, merged with crowds of the witty urban poor chanting slogans such as “Whoever has anything worth stealing must be a Jacobin,” and embarked on an extraordinary spree of pillage and atrocity. The rich were hunted down in their mansions, the young medical students with republican sympathies in their hospitals, the prelates of conscience in their churches. Nearly fifteen hundred patriots managed to regain their refuge in the sea-forts of Ovo and Nuovo.

The liquid crowd poured into every crevice of the city, sucking into its lethal embrace anyone who did not belong to it. A hunting crowd, looking for the telltale signs of Jacobin identity (apart from having something worth stealing): a soberly dressed man with unpowdered hair; someone with trousers; someone with spectacles; someone who dared to walk on the street alone or seemed to panic at the sight of the crowd surging round the corner. Oh, yes, and since every male patriot had a Tree of Liberty tattooed at the top of one thigh, those not immediately killed or seriously wounded were stripped and then paraded through the streets, to be mocked and reviled by the clothed. It didn't matter that no one had ever found such a tattoo on the naked captives. Don't they invite a pinch, a blow, a jeer. A baiting crowd, loudly enjoying itself. Here comes another Jacobin! Let's look for his tattoo! And here comes a woman strapped in a cart with a sheet barely covering the upper part of her limp naked body in rough allusion to some ideal antique dress: Look, another Goddess of Reason!