The Volcano Lover (46 page)

News has come of the great victory won at Copenhagen, won by your true husband, the father of your precious daughter, your first child as far as your beloved knows, who is mad with grief that he could not be present at his daughter's birth, mad with joy at being a father, he tells you, he writes you once or twice a day; you write him three or four times a day. He writes mostly about the child now, how she must be christened, there is no question of his not acknowledging her paternity, how worried he is about her health. That and his jealousy. He does not seriously believe that you will be unfaithful to him, but he is convinced that every man in London is attracted to you. And the truth is that several are. You may not be presentable at court, and Miss Knight, warned the very evening of the return to London that any further contact with you will tarnish her reputation, has never once called on you. But others do. You are received, you entertain, there have to be parties and musical evenings, if only because your husband, whom you now regard as the father you never had, you were a girl when you married him, but you really are a woman now, your father-husband must show he is still well-off, with no pressing need to sell his collections. There are plans for a party which the Prince of Wales will attend. And a friend of the hero was delighted to be able to inform him that the prince is saying around town that you have hit his fancy. He will be next to you, telling you soft things, wails the hero. He will put his foot near yours! For you have been exchanging crazy hectic letters, you are both being driven mad by the separation. You make him promise that he will never go ashore whenever his ship is in harbor, no matter how long, or allow any woman to come aboard. He keeps his promise. He makes you promise that you will never allow yourself to be seated next to the Prince of Wales at any party (you didn't keep this promise), but when the prince did press a leg against yours under the table, you swiftly pulled your leg away, and with the excuse of preparing your performance left the table. He hasn't made you promise that you won't exhibit yourself.

And at the grand dinner party celebrating the news of the hero's great victory at Copenhagen, after giving a short sedate recital on the harpsichord, you start to dance the tarantella, and then pull toward you Lord *** to dance with you, and when he seems unable to follow you, you seize the hand of Sir ***, and after a few minutes recall that you should have first asked your husband, poor old soul, who gallantly joins you for a few steps, you can feel the trembling of his bandy legs. Then you beckon to Charles, but he refuses. And when you have exhausted the few possible partners in the room, you are still not tired, of course you have been drinking, how else to get through the evening, perhaps you have drunk too much, as you often do, you know that. But you don't want to stop. You go on dancing for a while by yourself. As an exhibition of Neapolitan folklore, which you thought would impress your guests, you have danced the tarantella many times in Palermo, but this is the first time you dance it in cold grey London. It doesn't matter, the tarantella is inside you. You always had a pretext for performing, you were a living statue or a painter's model, reproducing the postures and demeanor of some figure of history or poetry, you impersonated, or Attitudinized, as those who pillory you are now wont to say, you sang, with another's cry or gaiety in your mouth. Now you have no pretext, no mask. There is just the feeling of joy, now, dancing to this music in your head, here, in London, in your own house, with your old husband sitting over there, not looking at you, looking away, while everyone else is looking, staring, you are making a fool of yourself, it doesn't matter, you feel so alive. You know you are not as graceful as you once were, but it is you, it is what you have become, you are starting to put on weight again, your mother and your maids are taking out the seams again, and you call for your black Fatima and your blond Marianne, who are standing with some of the other servants in a far doorway watching the masters' pleasures, to join you in the tarantella. They both come forward shyly, and begin to dance with you, but Marianne has gone all red, and says something you don't hear, and slips away, while Fatima is dancing as ardently as you are. Perhaps it is the wine, perhaps it is Fatima's glossy black skin, perhaps it is your elation over Copenhagen, and you now dance holding Fatima's sweating black hand—faster, your heart thumping, and your engorged, unmilked breasts bumping against your chest. You have no pretext now, you always had a pretext for performing. You are just you. Pure energy, pure defiance, pure foreboding. And you hear the strange cries and screams coming from your mouth, sounds of a most peculiar nature, even you can hear that, and you can see you are creating a scandal, your guests look quite startled. But this is what they wanted. This is what they think of you anyway. You wish you could rip off your clothes and show them your heavy body, the mottling and stretchmarks on your belly, your pale blue-veined huge breasts, the eczema on your elbows and knees. You pull at your clothes, you pull at Fatima's clothes. This is who they think you really are, twirling, screeching, shrieking, all mouth, all breasts, all thighs, vulgar, unrestrained, lewd, lascivious, fleshy, wet. Let them see what they think they see anyway. And you pull Fatima toward you, receiving in her breath, you imagine, all of Africa, and you kiss her on the mouth, tasting the spices, the scents, all the faraway places, you want to be everywhere, but you are only here, with something filling your body, and you dance faster, faster. Something is bursting out of you, almost like when the child was pushing out of your fundament, it is frightening, as that was, you thought you were going to die, a woman always thinks she is going to die when the contractions come faster, and it seems impossible that you can pass this huge thing out of your body. Like that, it is frightening though not painful, not painful as giving birth to life is. No, it is joy, the aliveness of being alive, you have become a figure of scandal, but you are feeling how happy you are, how proud of him you are, and then how big the world is—he is far away and may have to stay away for months, he may be wounded, he may be killed at any time, he will be killed one day, you know that—and how alone you are, and how always alone you are, not so different from this docile Fatima, a stranger in this world like you, a woman, a helot, who must be what others want her to be. And it is so big, the world, and you have lived so much, but everyone blames you, you know it. But there is his glory, his glory, and you sink to your knees, and Fatima follows, and you embrace and kiss once more and then you both rise and Fatima, her eyes closed, is uttering strange ululating cries, and they pour out of your throat too. And the guests are very embarrassed, but for a long time you have been an embarrassment, you always embarrass people now. You've seen it in their eyes, you are anything but unobservant, you just pretend you don't notice. Let them all be embarrassed even further. It feels so good to sing and stamp and twirl. Why do they criticize you and mock you? Why do you embarrass them? They must sometimes feel as you do now. Why are people always trying to stop you? You've tried to be what they wanted you to be.

*   *   *

My dearest wife, the hero writes to the Cavaliere's wife. Parting from you is literally tearing one's own flesh. I am so low I cannot hold up my head.

In February, the hero got three days' leave and saw his daughter in Little Titchfield Street. He wept when he took the infant and held her against his breast. They wept together when he left to go back to sea.

She had always meant to tell him about the other daughter, now nineteen, to whom she had given her own first name. But the right moment had never come, and now it was too late. The other daughter was herself, whereas this child bore the hero's first name, with the feminine
a
ending. So this tiny babe was her only child.

Whenever the Cavaliere was out for the day with Charles, she had the baby brought from Little Titchfield Street. She would go back to bed and sleep beside her. It was kind of him never to allude to the child's existence, she was grateful to him for that. He could have reproached her. No, he will not reproach her. Her mother would knock when the Cavaliere returned. She does not want to impose the child on him, she told herself. The truth was, she did not want to share the child with him, but one day … surely not too far off … he will be … she will no longer be … she will not have to send her child away!

*   *   *

The Cavaliere reproached his wife only about money—the expenses of their entertaining, for instance; a wine bill of four hundred pounds, in particular. But she was as unmercenary as she was extravagant. She volunteered to sell all the presents from the Queen, the diamond necklace given her many years ago by the Cavaliere for her birthday, and the rest of her jewelry. There was a glut of diamonds on the London market (too many penniless French émigré aristocrats selling their jewels); valued in Italy at the equivalent of thirty thousand pounds, they fetched only a twentieth of that. But at least the sum paid for the furnishing of the house in Piccadilly.

Now he had to sell what he had to sell.

The inventory had already been made two and a half years ago, a lifetime ago, before they left Naples. The few paintings which had been uncrated and hung in the house in Piccadilly were repacked; and the fourteen cases of pictures and the other boxes were taken out of the house in Piccadilly and conveyed to the auctioneer.

What's hard is choosing. I'll keep this, but I'll let that go. No, I can't give that up.
That's
hard.

But once you decide to let everything go, it isn't so hard. One feels rather reckless, giddy. The important thing is to hold nothing back.

A collection is, ideally, acquired piece by piece—there is more pleasure that way—but that would be the most unpleasant way of selling it. Instead of the death of a thousand cuts, one clean lethal blow. When Mr. Christie informed him of the result of the first two days of sale, entirely devoted to his pictures, he barely glanced at the breakdown. He did not want to dwell on the fact that the Veronese and the Rubens had gone for more than he had expected, the Titian and the Canaletto for less. The important thing is that he had got far more than he had paid for them, nearly six thousand pounds.

Though away at sea, the hero had instructed an agent to bid for two of the fifteen pictures of the Cavaliere's wife. Go to any price. I must have them. And to the Cavaliere's wife: I see you are for
SALE
. How can he, how can he part with pictures of you? When I think that anyone can buy them. How I wish I could buy them all! The one the hero would most like to have acquired was Vigée-Lebrun's salacious Ariadne; but, unfortunately, it had never been in the Cavaliere's collection.

Two more days of sale in early May yielded another three thousand pounds. Then the Cavaliere made his will, the will he always thought he was going to make, and which he had no reason to change now. He felt himself lighter, relieved of a burden.

*   *   *

And what to wear at home, the home you have always wanted, a real home, which means a property in the country, a farm, with a stream running through it. Even when doing the honors of the table, a simple suit of black. And when pacing your property, looking at your livestock, supervising the pruning of trees, a crumpled hat and a striped brown overcoat thrown round your shoulders.

The summer's invasion scare had passed without Napoleon's fleet making its expected appearance in the Channel. The hero had written yet one more letter to the Admiralty. I beg their lordships' permission to go ashore, as I want repose. And he had asked the Cavaliere's wife to look for a house where he can settle when he returns, as he expects, in October. She found a property with a two-story house in unspoiled Surrey countryside only an hour's drive from Westminster Bridge. Against the advice of friends, who thought the century-old brick house and acreage too modest and, at nine thousand pounds, overpriced, the hero borrowed money to purchase it and requested the Cavaliere's wife to ready it for his return. With her mother, she set about fitting up the house. It was to be beautiful, and needed to be plastered, painted, mirrored, furnished (neither a piano nor flags, trophies, pictures, and china celebrating the hero's victories would be lacking). It was to be up-to-date: she installed five water closets and put modern stoves in the kitchens. And it was to be something of a farm, with sheepcotes, pigsties, and hen coops.

I am as much amused with sheap & pigs & hens as ever I was in the court of Naples, she wrote the hero. I hope I do not bore you with these detayls.

My dearest, the hero replied, I would rather read and hear you on the subject of pigs and hens, sheets and towels, saltcellars and ladles, carpenters and upholsterers, than any speech I shall hear in the House of Lords, for there is no subject which you do not enlighten with your wit and eloquence. I agree to African parrots on the veranda. Assure Fatima that I hope to be home in time for her christening. Please remember to instruct Mr. Morley to put some netting round the edges of the stream and on the bridge to prevent any possibility of our child's falling in when she comes to live with us. You will have the kindness to remember that I do not want anything in the house but what is my own, and to tell me everything that you and Mrs. Cadogan are doing. You are speaking of our paradise. I do not know how I can bear our separation much longer. How the Conqueror longs to return and become again the Conquered.

Since his wife and her mother were always at the house in Surrey once the hero returned, the Cavaliere had no choice but to live there too, although he still kept the house in London. They had not forgotten him. It was for him that the stream, which his wife had renamed the Nile, had been stocked with fish. But he had not been allowed to bring his books from the house in London or his French cook. His wife pointed out that he had the library and the servants at the hero's house at his disposal. He could not explain why he needed the French cook. He was weary of giving things up.