The Volcano Lover (37 page)

The crowd doesn't torment like Scarpia. The work of the true torturer is guided by the fact that, in order to register pain, consciousness is necessary. The crowd is no less gratified if the person being tormented is already unconscious. It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.

A rock through the window, the hand tightening around the wrist, the crack of the staff to the head, the blade or the penis intruding in soft flesh, the ear or nose or foot in the gutter or sticking out of someone's pocket. Smite, stomp, shoot, throttle, clobber, stone, impale, hang, burn, dismember, drown. A full debauch of homicidal modes whose purpose is much more than just to exact revenge or express a sense of grievance. The revenge of the country against the city, the uneducated against the educated, the poor against the privileged—these explanations don't name the deeper energy released in such havoc. The river of tears and blood that is swamping, carrying away, engulfing the revolution menaces the restoration as well. For this is something like nature—which, notoriously, does not act in its own interest or make judicious discriminations. Even before this energy exhausts itself, it will doubtless be reined in by the rulers who have sanctioned it.

Ruffo was appalled by the butchery he had unleashed. A moderate amount of looting, battery, rape, and mayhem was what he had in mind. But not wholesale slaughter: that is, the clubbing, knifing, shooting, and burning of several thousand of the inhabitants whom, because of their rank and distinction, he was obliged to regard as individuals. But not so much rape. And not cannibalism, no. He had not envisaged the pyres of bodies, dead and still dying, the smell of burning flesh, the sight of two young boys feasting on the pale arms and legs of a duchess whose confessor and lover he had once been. It was time to rein in this energy. The final act of Ruffo's royalist hordes, just before the cardinal called a halt to the killing and looting, was to attack the royal palace and carry off its contents. Even the lead from the windows was taken.

*   *   *

Now the masters must assume control of what the people have impulsively, justly, but crudely begun. And not shrink from the task that masters must perform.

When the news of the French evacuation and the retreat of the patriots to their Masada reached Palermo, the Queen feared that Ruffo would not treat the rebels with the necessary, defining severity their crimes deserved. She summoned the hero to the royal palace and requested that he go to Naples to receive their unconditional surrender and mete out justice—that is, punishment—in the King's name. She says, said the Cavaliere's wife, who was rendering the Queen's French into English for the monoglot hero, You should treat Naples like it was an Irish town in a similar state of rebellion.

Ah, said the hero.

Ireland had had its French-inspired revolution the year before, and the Queen had been most impressed by the thoroughness with which it had been crushed by the English.

Of course, it was inconceivable that the hero undertake this mission without the aid, counsel, and language skills of the Cavaliere and his wife.

For the Cavaliere's wife, it was an ideal mission, one in which she would prove herself indispensable both to the Queen and to the man she adored. For the Cavaliere, it was a duty he could not refuse. But he wanted nothing to disturb the beautiful images he preserved of Naples. He certainly hoped to be spared the sight of the horrors reported to be taking place in the city. We can force ourselves to look, squirming a little, at a great painting of the flaying of Marsyas, or look with equanimity, especially if we're not women, at a lively rendering of the rape of the Sabine women … these were canonical subjects for painting. And Piranesi had made images of the most unspeakable tortures taking place in corners of ingeniously vast prisons. But it would be something else to see a real flaying, or the mass rape that had been going on in Naples, or the sufferings of the thousands who survived their humiliations and wounds at the hands of the crowds and lay penned in the stifling granaries, without food, sleeping in their excrement.

On June 20th, having shifted his flag from the disabled
Vanguard
to the eighty-gun
Foudroyant,
the hero left Palermo with a squadron of seventeen sail-of-the-line, three more than the number under his command at the Battle of the Nile. Four days later the flagship entered the Gulf of Naples, and Mars in full regalia with all his decorations paced the quarter-deck beside his Venus in a dress of fine white muslin with a long tasseled sash around her waist and a broad-brimmed hat trimmed with ribbons and crowned with ostrich plumes. The Cavaliere, dozing in his cabin, felt the walls shudder as the
Foudroyant
dropped its anchor into thirty fathoms of the turquoise water. What a calm trip, he said, as he joined them. There was the dear geography, the familiar splendors of the cityscape—give or take a few new details. Fires were still burning in the city. Flags of truce were flying from Ovo and Nuovo. Plumed Vesuvius, the Cavaliere noted, was smoking benignly. And there was not a French ship in sight.

The next day the hero received Ruffo in the Great Cabin, as his headquarters in the rear of the ship was called, and through the Cavaliere informed the cardinal that he, he alone, now represented the monarchs in Palermo. Ruffo made his case for the need to halt the bloodshed and restore order. What started as a frigid interview soon turned into a shouting match. The Cavaliere knew Ruffo, he knew his friend, he would explain each to the other. But the room was so hot, he felt staggery—his wife and the hero begged him to retire to his cabin. The Cavaliere's wife was acting as the interpreter when Ruffo explained the treaty he had made with the rebels barricaded in the sea-forts. As the Queen feared, he had accepted a capitulation with terms. The rebels were to be allowed several days to put their affairs in order, and then have passage out of the country into permanent exile. Fourteen transports lay in the harbor, and many of the rebels had gone aboard with their families and possessions. The first ship, already loaded, was to leave for Toulon tomorrow at dawn.

Ruffo stood while the British admiral looked up from his desk and asked the Cavaliere's wife to tell the cardinal that the arrival of the British fleet has completely destroyed the treaty. When the cardinal protested that it had already been signed and solemnly ratified by both sides, the hero replied, agitating the stump of his lost arm, that he would have Ruffo arrested if he persisted in his treachery. Then the hero ordered the transports boarded, the rebels taken off in chains and put in prison to await speedy punishment for their crimes. And summoned Captain Troubridge and issued orders for the deploying of British troops to retake the last French strongholds in Sant'Elmo, Capua, and Gaeta.

We must set an example, the hero said later to the Cavaliere.

Setting an example meant being merciless—the Cavaliere knew that.

The first example was to be Admiral Caracciolo, who in early March had returned to Naples and offered his services to the republic, and when Ruffo's army arrived and the republic fell had gone into hiding on one of his estates in the country. The hero ordered Ruffo to deliver the admiral to him; Ruffo refused. We are awaiting news of Caracciolo, who will be executed as soon as he is captured, the Cavaliere wrote to the Foreign Office.

The Cavaliere hardly recognized as the forty-seven-year-old Neapolitan admiral and prince the old man with the grey face and long beard and peasant clothes worn to disguise himself, who had been abducted the following day by British soldiers, returned to the city, and immediately taken aboard the
Foudroyant
in shackles and brought before its commander.

Caracciolo thought his rank—he belonged to one of the most ancient and public-spirited noble families in the kingdom—as well as his decades of faithful service to the Bourbon monarchs might count in his favor. And his good friends the British minister and his wife would surely intercede for him with the gallant victor of the Battle of the Nile. Never could he have imagined that there would be no trial, that he would have no counsel, that no evidence would be admitted, and that the verdict would be the ignominious sentence of death reserved for common sailors. Caracciolo pleaded for a proper trial (no), implored to be allowed to introduce testimony in his favor (no), begged to be shot (no). And never could the Cavaliere have imagined, as he sat in the Great Cabin writing another dispatch, how quickly it would all go. Sometimes everything goes so quickly. It seemed only minutes since Caracciolo had been pulled into the next room for the travesty of a court-martial ordered by the hero. When the verdict the hero had requested was announced, the Cavaliere took his friend to the long bay window to suggest that it might be well to follow custom and defer the execution for another twenty-four hours. The hero nodded and returned to his desk. Caracciolo was brought before him, head bowed. Sentence to be carried out immediately, said the hero. Already a living corpse, sweat pouring from his armpits, Caracciolo was hurried onto the deck and lowered into a small boat which took him to a Sicilian frigate, where he was pulled on board and hanged. At the British admiral's orders, the Neapolitan admiral's body dangled from the yardarm into the evening. Only when the June sun set around nine o'clock did the hero give the order that iron weights be attached to each foot, the rope be cut, and the body let drop, shroudless, straight down into the sea.

By the rules of war the hero had no right to abrogate Ruffo's treaty with the rebels, no right to abduct and execute the Bourbon monarchs' senior naval officer or even to receive him on board an English ship as a prisoner; but this was not war. This was the administration of punishment.

I wish we could hang Ruffo, he exclaimed to the Cavaliere. The Cavaliere counseled prudence. But there were plenty of other prisoners, at least twenty thousand of them now languishing in the forts and state prisons, who would have to be vetted to see who needed punishment. After lynching comes judicial murder, which involves a good deal of paperwork. In the Great Cabin the Cavaliere's wife sat at a desk near the admiral's, drawing up lists of prisoners to submit to the Queen for her verdict.

We are restoring happiness to the Kingdom of Naples, and doing good to millions, the hero wrote to Mrs. Cadogan, whom they had left behind in Palermo, of the work initiated from his headquarters in the bay in June 1799. Your daughter is well, but she is very tired with all she has to do.

When the Cavaliere's wife is not busy assisting the hero, and writing the Queen three times a day, she receives the Neapolitan grandees who have come to pay their homage and ask her to transmit their professions of loyalty to the Queen. I am the Queen's deputy, she wrote to Charles. Unfortunately, the Cavaliere could not lay claim to a symmetrical role. He could hardly call himself the King's deputy. The King wrote no letters. Indeed, the King, as the Queen reported to
her
deputy, had gone out to one of their Palermitan country palaces and, though he knows that he must soon make an appearance to receive the allegiance of his subjects, does not want to be bothered with any news from Naples. But what does the King really think, asked the hero earnestly. Laughing, the Cavaliere's wife translated a line from the Queen's morning letter. As far as the King is concerned, the Queen had written, the Neapolitans might just as well be Hottentots.

*   *   *

More examples.

Public executions, which were held in the large market square of the city, began on a Sunday, July 7th, the day before the arrival of the King.

Neither the hero nor his friends witnessed any of the executions. They were not slaughter-minded, merely implacable. And distance distances.

And yet sometimes something comes close that you don't expect. It was two days after the public executions had started, and a day after the King had arrived from Palermo on a Sicilian frigate, wearing a dried heron's leg in his buttonhole as a charm against the evil eye, and had taken up residence on the
Foudroyant.
The King had laboriously climbed the quarter-deck ladder to complain to the Cavaliere about how boring Palermo was in the summer, when a shout from some of the sailors drew him to the railing to see what the commotion was about. A fish. It must be a very large fish. There below him, about thirty feet off the stern, the spume-ringleted head and upright water-flayed torso of his old friend Admiral Caracciolo was weaving and lolling, his beard floating in front of his ghastly rotted face. Had the shouting sailors been Neapolitans, they would have been crossing themselves. The terror-struck King crossed himself, cursed, and fled below. The Cavaliere found him, whimpering and giggling to himself in the dark 'tween deck, surrounded by his apprehensive attendants.

Is he there, is he still there? the King bellowed. Push him under!

It will be done, Majesty.

Now!

Majesty, a boat has been lowered to tow the body to shore for burial in the sand.

Why is he doing this to me? screamed this incurably childish man.

The Cavaliere had his last inspiration of the great courtier he once was.

Though Caracciolo may have been a traitor, he explained to the King, he means you no harm now. But having repented he still cannot rest. So he has come to ask your pardon.

*   *   *

You are a passenger. We are all, often, passengers. The boat, history, is going somewhere. You are not the captain. But you have excellent accommodations.

Of course, down there in the hold are famished immigrants or enslaved Africans or press-ganged tars. You can't help them—you do feel sorry for them—and you can't control the captain, either. Cosseted though you may be, you are actually quite powerless. A gesture on your part might relieve your bad conscience, if you have a bad conscience, but would not materially improve their situation. How would it help them to give up your own spacious cabin, with the room you require for your copious belongings, since, although those below have very few belongings, there are so many of them? The food you are eating would never be enough to feed all of them; indeed, if prepared with them in mind as well, it would no longer be as refined; and of course the view would be spoiled (crowds spoil a view, crowds litter, etc.). So you have no choice but to enjoy the excellent food and the view.