The Volcano Lover (7 page)

She started by telling him he will have a long life, at which the Cavaliere raised his eyebrows, wrinkled his nose.

A long life here, she murmured. Not what the Cavaliere enjoys imagining, and this was an exercise in imagination. He was still expecting Naples to be succeeded by a better post; say, Madrid. Or Vienna.

Then she told him that a great happiness lay before him.

Let us talk of other matters than my fate, said the Cavaliere, withdrawing his hand from her inspection. Actually, I am not seeking information about myself at all.

Really? Then His Excellency is indeed an unusual man, which I have every reason to believe. What man is not interested in himself?

Oh, said the Cavaliere. I pretend to no disinterestedness. I am as self-loving as the next man.

He guessed her to be about fifty, though one could never be sure with the inhabitants known as “the people” (that is, most people), since they, especially the women, usually looked older than they were. A shrewd, handsome face with amber, no, green eyes, with a strong chin, with greying hair braided and piled on her head; a squarish body whose outline was blurred by the volumes of pink and russet shawls that hung from her shoulders. She sat against an arched wall on a large oak chair. The Cavaliere had been ceremoniously installed in a chair piled with some ruptured cushions intended for his comfort.

Most of those who consult me want to know when they will fall in love, she was saying. Or come into an inheritance. Or die.

The Cavaliere replied that he was extremely fond of his wife, that he knew his prospects of inheritance to be nil. And that only a fool would want to learn the date of his death and poison the time still left to him.

His Excellency seems to think he is old.

I have never felt young, he said irritably. It feels like a new thought. This would-be sibyl had not surprised him yet but he had already surprised himself.

And such feelings keep you younger than your age now, she said with a rather theatrical wave of her arm. About youth and age Efrosina is … an expert! I've told His Excellency that he will live for many years more. Isn't that what everyone wants to hear?

He did not answer.

His Excellency is not curious?

On the contrary, he said sharply, I am exceptionally curious. Curiosity has brought me … here.

He made a gesture that said: this room, this country, this nonsense. I must be patient, he said to himself. I am among savages. Glancing away from the woman, he intercepted the one-eyed gaze of the boy—a servant? her acolyte?—squatting in the corner, who had the same penetrating look as she, more eloquent because halved.

I'm curious to learn how exactly you proceed. Do you read cards or consult the entrails of animals or chew on bitter leaves and fall into a trance—

You are impatient, my lord. A true son of the north.

How interesting, the Cavaliere thought. The woman is no fool. She wants to converse with me, not merely show me her tricks.

Efrosina lowered her head for a moment, sighed, then nodded to the boy, who took something wrapped in a malachite-green cloth from the corner cupboard and set it down on the trestle table between them. Under the cloth, which she removed slowly, was a lidless box of thick milky glass. Staring fixedly at the box, she laid the cloth over her bosom like a bib, muttered some inaudible words, made a few passes in the air, then crossed herself and bowed her head. The performance had started. Ah, said the Cavaliere, encouragingly.

I see too much, she whispered.

The Cavaliere, who always wants to see more, smiled to himself, relishing the contrast.

She lifted her face, eyes gone wide, her mouth twitching.

No, I do not want to see disasters! No!

The Cavaliere nodded in appreciation of the drama of the struggle against knowledge being concocted for his benefit. Sighing, she raised the cube with both hands before her face.

I see … I see water! Her voice had gone hoarse. Yes! And the bottom of a sea strewn with open chests, spilling out their treasure. I see a boat, a colossal boat—

Oh, water, he interrupted. Then earth. Then air, and I suppose we shall get to fire before nightfall.

She set the cube down. Her voice returned to its normal insinuating smoothness. But His Excellency likes water. All Naples enjoys seeing him out in his boat through the long day fishing in our splendid bay.

And I climb the mountain. This is known, too.

Yes, His Excellency is admired for his bravery.

He did not reply.

Perhaps His Excellency is interested in his death after all.

Death, death. He was closing the valves of his attention.

If I cannot reassure you, she was saying, can I frighten you, my lord?

I am not easily frightened.

But you have already, more than once, just missed being struck by a fiery missile. You could lean over and lose your balance. You could descend and not be able to climb out.

I am very surefooted.

You know how temperamental the mountain is. Anything can happen from one moment to the next.

I am very adaptable, he said. And to himself: I am observing, I am collecting evidence. He shifted his weight in the cane chair.

I am breathing, he said.

The closeness of the room was making him groggy. He heard her whispering, the boy leaving the room, a large clock ticking, a fly buzzing, a dog barking, church bells, a tambourine, a water seller's cry. A magma of sounds that fell away to reveal a silence, and behind that but more distinct, as if separately wrapped, the clock, the voices, the bells, the dog, the cry, the boy returning, the sound of his own heartbeat, and then silence. The Cavaliere was trying to hear a voice, a very faint, barely audible voice, while this large full-bodied voice droned on about the dangers of the mountain. He is still trying to hear the voice. Determined in his pursuit of experience, the Cavaliere is good at paying attention. You pivot your mind, train it on something fixedly: mental staring. Easy once you know you can do it. It needn't be dark. It's all inside.

Are you awake?

I am always awake, declared the Cavaliere. He had closed his eyes.

Now you are really listening, my lord.

From far inside his head he remembered to wonder why he was sitting here, and then recalled that it would be amusing to relate this exploit to his friends.

Shall we start with the past? Efrosina's voice asked.

What? he said querulously. The question was repeated. He shook his head. Not the past!

Even, she said, if I could raise the spirit of your mother?

Heaven forbid! exclaimed the Cavaliere, opening his eyes to meet her odd, penetrating stare. Since people here always claim to adore their mothers, perhaps they do, so she couldn't know how unwelcome would be even an imaginary visitation of that unaffectionate, august beauty from whom he learned as a small child to expect nothing. Nothing.

I should like to hear about the future, he muttered. He had forgotten to wonder why Efrosina would assume his mother was dead, until he remembered: he was old, so she would now be very old. Not beautiful.

The near future, he added prudently.

He closed his eyes again, without meaning to, then opened them at a farrago of convulsive sounds.

Efrosina had gone pale. She was staring into the cube, groaning and hissing.

I don't like what I see. My lord, why have you asked me to look into the future? No. No. No …

Trembling, sweating profusely, racked by violent coughs and hiccups, she was putting on a show of being extremely uncomfortable. No, surely that was not right, for someone who trembles, who sweats, who coughs and hiccups
is
uncomfortable. But it is still a show.

Let's go on with the game.

Are you seeing something? Something about the volcano?

She cannot fail to come to the point now.

I told the Cavaliere he was not old, she murmured huskily.
I
am old! My God, what a sight I am. Ah. I see, just when I get too old I will be saved. I will become young again. I will live for centuries! Next—she began to laugh—next I will be Emilia. Then Eusapia. Yes, then I will travel to many places, as Eusapia Paladina I will be famous everywhere and even the American professor will be interested in me. Then, where was I—she wiped her eyes with the edge of a shawl—yes, Eleanora. Eleanora is very bad—she laughs. But … then I leave Naples and move to London and I am Ellie and am head of a large—

The volcano! exclaimed the Cavaliere. Having directed Efrosina that the séance was not to be about his personal destiny, he hardly expected her to launch into this incomprehensible rant about herself.

Do you see when it will erupt again?

Efrosina looked at him impudently. My lord, I will see what you want me to look at.

She leaned forward, blew out the candle on the table, and peered into the cube. And now I see it. Oh—she shook her head in ostentatious wonderment—oh, how ugly.

What?

I see a blackened ruin. The cone is gone.

He asked when this would happen.

So changed, she continued. All the woods are gone. There are no more horses. There is a black road. Now I see something quite comical. Droves of people laboring up the mountain, pushing each other. Everyone seems so tall. Tall like you, my lord. But wearing such strange clothes, you can't tell the gentlefolk from the servants, they all look like servants. And near the top … someone in a little cabin selling pieces of lava and boxes of colored rocks, blue and red and yellow, and scarves and plates with pictures of the mountain. Oh, I fear I have gone too far forward.

Don't, said the Cavaliere.

The future is a hole, Efrosina murmured. When you fall in it, you cannot be sure how far you will go. You asked me to look and I do not control how far I see. But I see … Yes.

What?

Twenty-six.

And she looked up.

Twenty-six eruptions? You see that many?

Years, my lord.

Years?

How many you have. It is a good number. Do not be angry with me, my lord.

She busied herself relighting the candle, as if to avoid looking at him. The Cavaliere flushed with annoyance. Was there more? No. She was taking the cloth from her breast, she covered the cube.

I have disappointed you, I know. But come again. Each time I see something different. Forgive Efrosina that she does not tell you more about the volcano today.

A slow burn of noise outside the door.

People come to me with many fears, she said. I cannot relieve them all.

Someone was knocking. Perhaps it was Valerio.

I promise we will speak about it next time, she was saying. (The fear? The volcano?) She will talk with her son who has climbed the volcano since he was a child and knows its secrets.

The Cavaliere did not understand whom she was talking about. But deciding he had wasted enough time on this evasive display of the clairvoyant's powers, he reached into his purse to put some money on the table. Efrosina stopped him with an imperious gesture, declaring that the honor of His Excellency's visit was payment enough and that it was she who wished to present him with a gift, and directed Tolo or was it Barto—what did she call the one-eyed boy?—to accompany the Cavaliere and his servant home.

*   *   *

The Cavaliere thought of himself as—no, was—an envoy of decorum and reason. (Isn't that what the study of ancient art teaches us?) Besides a most profitable investment and the exercise of his collecting lust, there was a moral in these stones, these shards, these dimmed objects of marble and silver and glass: models of perfection and harmony. The antiquity that was uncouth, alert to the demonic, was largely hidden from these early patrons of antiquity. What he overlooked in antiquity, what he was not prepared to see, he cherished in the volcano: the uncouth holes and hollows, dark grottoes, clefts and precipices and cataracts, pits within pits, rocks under rocks—the rubbish and the violence, the danger, the imperfection.

Few ever see what is not already inside their heads. The Cavaliere's great predecessor of a century earlier in the love of volcanoes, Athanasius Kircher, had watched Etna and Vesuvius in action and had himself lowered by a pulley into their craters. But these bold close-up observations, undertaken at such risk and with so much discomfort (how his eyes must have stung from the fumes, how his torso must have ached from the ropes), did not deter the wily Jesuit from proposing a wholly imagined account of the volcano's insides. The pictures illustrating his
Mundus Subterraneus
show Vesuvius, in cross section, as a hollow shell enclosing another world, furnished with sky, trees, mountains, valleys, caverns, rivers of water as well as of fire.

The Cavaliere wondered if he dared try a descent into the volcano, while it still remained quiet. Of course, he no more envisaged that he would find Kircher's netherworld than he thought the volcano was the mouth of hell or that an eruption, like a famine, was a divine chastisement. He was a rational person, afloat in a sea of superstition. A connoisseur of ruins, like his friend Piranesi in Rome, for what was the mountain if not a great ruin? A ruin which could come alive and cause further ruin.

In the plates he commissioned to illustrate the two folio volumes he had made recently of his “volcanic letters” to the Royal Society, the Cavaliere appears in some of the pictures, on foot or on horseback. In one he is watching his groom bathe in Lake Avernus; in another—a memorable occasion—escorting the royal party to the brink of a chasm into which the lava was coursing. A snowy landscape, in which the mountain looks particularly serene, has no observer, but most pictures that show the odd shapes and mutations produced by volcanic activity have some human figures: a spectacle requires the depiction of a gaze. Erupting is its nature, the nature of a volcano, even if it does so only now and then. That would be the picture … if you choose to have only one.

As Vesuvius neared another eruption, the Cavaliere climbed more often, partly to taste how fearless he had become. Was it the sibyl's prediction of a long life? Sometimes he felt safer making his way up the seething mountain than anywhere else.