The Volcano Lover (11 page)

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You project onto the volcano the amount of rage, of complicity with destructiveness, of anxiety about your ability to feel already in your head. Sade took away from his five-month sojourn in Naples, near then-quiescent Vesuvius, the fantasies of evildoing that anything capable of violence inspired in him. Many years later in his
Juliette,
he was to write a volcano scene for this champion evildoer in which she climbs to the summit with two companions, a tiresome man whom she promptly casts into the fiery chasm and a desirable man with whom she then copulates at the brink of the crater.

Sade worried about satiety; he could not conceive of passion without provocation. The Cavaliere did not worry about running out of feeling. For him the volcano was a stimulus for contemplation. Noisy as Vesuvius could be, it offered something like what he experienced with his collections. Islands of silence.

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May 1779. On the slope of Vesuvius, illuminated by the orange glow of molten rock. He stood motionless, his pale grey eyes wide open. The earth trembled under his feet. He could feel the hairs of his eyelashes, his eyebrows move with the uprush of burning air. They could climb no higher.

The danger was not in the ground but in the lethal, unbearable air. Surefooted, pushed down by the billowing smoke and falling rocks at their backs, they moved diagonally, away from the lava stream, keeping upwind to avoid being overcome by smoke. Suddenly the wind shifted, sending scalding jets of sulphur into their faces. The blinding, asphyxiating smoke swirled around them, cutting off their descent.

To the left, a chasm. To the right, the lava stream. Transfixed, he looked for Bartolomeo, who had vanished into the smoke. Where is the boy? There, going the wrong way, shouting and beckoning him to follow. This way!

But blocking the way was the enormous, terrifying spread of grainy orange lava, at least sixty feet wide.

This way, shouted Bartolomeo, pointing to the other side. The Cavaliere's clothes were starting to smoulder. The smoke was tearing his lungs, singeing his eyes. And before them lay a river of fire. I will not cry out, he said to himself. So this is death.

Come! shouted Bartolomeo.

I can't, groaned the Cavaliere, his mind receding as the boy sprinted toward the lava. The stifling smoke, the boy's shouts—he was already deep inside himself. Bartolomeo stepped up lightly on the lava ledge and started across. Christ walking on water could not have amazed his followers more. The boy did not sink into the molten surface. The Cavaliere followed. It was like walking on flesh. As long as one kept moving, the lava's crust would support one's weight. In moments they had crossed the gauntlet and on the far side were once again upwind, coughing off the fumes. Inspecting his scorched boots, the Cavaliere glanced over at Bartolomeo, who was rubbing his good eye with a dirty fist. It was almost like being invulnerable. The Cavaliere with his Cyclops, the King of Cups with his Fool—perhaps not invulnerable but safe. With him, safe.

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August 1779. Saturday, at six o'clock. The great concussion must have rocked the foundations of the Cavaliere's villa at the foot of the mountain, if not worse. But he was at home in town, and from the safety of the observatory room watched the mountain flinging showers of red-hot stones into the air. An hour later a column of liquid fire began to rise and quickly reached an amazing height, twice that of the mountain, a fiery pillar ten thousand feet high, mottled with puffs of black smoke, scored by flashing zigzag lines of lightning. The sun went out. Black clouds descended over Naples. Theatres, closed, churches opened, processions formed, people clustered at candlelit street shrines to Saint Januarius on their knees. In the cathedral the cardinal held aloft the vial of the saint's blood for all to see and began warming it with his hands. This is worth seeing up close, said the Cavaliere—meaning the mountain, not the miracle. He had Bartolomeo sent for, and set out on horseback along the glowing streets, into the country night, down black roads, past fields of blasted leafless trees and carbonized vines, toward the burning mountain.

Suddenly the eruption ceased and, except for the glowing cinder-heaps on Vesuvius and small lava rills on the upper slopes, all was dark.

An hour later, as the full moon was rising, the Cavaliere arrived in a village on a lower slope which lay half silted up under black scoriae and dust, shriveled with heat. The moon rose higher. The dark, dented, scaly village turned pale—lunarized.

After dismounting and turning his horse over to Bartolomeo, the Cavaliere was shown the moonlit lanes clogged with gleaming ashes and dingy rocks. The village had been pelted with stones weighing up to a hundred pounds; few of the houses had burned, but every window he saw was broken and some of the roofs had collapsed. Filthy-headed people holding flaming brands walked with him, eager to tell their stories. Yes, they had stayed in their houses, what choice did they have? Those who stirred out with pillows, tables, chairs, or the lids of wine casks on their heads were driven back, wounded by the stones or stifled with heat and dust and sulphur. He heard the horrors. Then he was taken to gaze at a family that had sought refuge prematurely, the day before, and had mysteriously perished. (“No one told them to go to the cellar, Excellency, or to stay there!”) At the low entrance to the cellar, one of the villagers moved ahead with his brand to illuminate an artless tableau. Mother, father, nine children, several cousins, and a pair of grandparents: all sitting upright against the earth wall and staring straight ahead. Their clothes undisturbed. Their faces not contorted—so they could not have died from asphyxiation. Their appearance perfectly normal except for their hair, lifeless-looking hair thickened with white dust, which, since peasants don't wear wigs, gave them the appearance of statues.

It would be interesting to ascertain what killed them, the Cavaliere thought to himself. One sharp concussive strike of the volcano from deep under the earth? The swift suffusion of a lethal volcanic gas? From behind him the boy, his young Bartolomeo, answered his thought firmly. They died of fear, my lord.

6

The Knave of Cups arrived in late October. Of course, who else but he. The Cavaliere felt annoyed with himself for not having divined who it would be.

Indeed a relation, a second cousin of the Cavaliere, William Beckford was then twenty years old, stupendously rich, already the author of a slim ironic book of imaginary biographies, a militant collector and connoisseur, willful, self-pitying, greedy for sights, temptations, treasures. A restless, abbreviated version of the Grand Tour (he had left England only two months earlier) had brought him to its southernmost station with record speed, casting him on the shore of the Cavaliere's hospitality just in time for the hot wind, one of the great winds of southern Europe (mistral, Föhn, sirocco, tramontana) that are used, like the days leading up to menstruation, to explain restlessness, neurasthenia, emotional fragility: a collective PMS that comes on seasonally. The atmosphere was nervous. Whining dogs prowled the filthy steep streets. Women left newborn infants at church doors. Bright-eyed, exhausted, pulsing with dreams of the ever more exotic, William stretched out on a brocaded couch and said, Surely this is not all. Show me more. More. More.

The Cavaliere recognized in his young relation someone like himself, that rare species who would never, not for one moment in the course of a long life, be bored. He showed him his collections, his booty, his self-bestowed inheritance. (He could hardly forget that this boy was, or would soon be, the richest man in England.) The cabinets full of wonders. The paintings in three or four tiers on the walls, most of them seventeenth-century and Italian. My Etruscan vases, said the Cavaliere. Splendid, said William. A sampling of my collection of volcanic rocks. Objects to dream over, said William. And this is my Leonardo, said the Cavaliere. Really, said William. The youth's comments were wonderfully acute, appreciative. A genuine liking on both sides was astir. But the Cavaliere did not need a new (grander, more difficult) nephew. It was Catherine who was needy, Catherine who reached out humbly, passionately to acquire a soul mate and shadow son.

Each felt instantly appreciated by the other. He told her. She told him. They revelled in all the ways they were alike—the handsome, full-hipped young man with curly hair and chewed fingernails, the thin woman of forty-two with her wide, slightly staring eyes. They belong to different generations, have had such different lives. Yet they have so many of the same tastes, the same disappointments. From stories they passed to confidences, each unwrapping a package of grief and yearning. William, being younger and a man, thought it his right to go first.

He spoke of his inner life, filled with (so he tells her now) vague longings. He described his life at home, at Fonthill, moodily pacing in his rooms, reading books that made him weep, full of dissatisfaction with himself and foolish dreams (which he plans never to give up no matter how old he becomes), raging against the stupidity of his mother, his tutors, all those around him.

Have you read a book called
The Sorrows of Young Werther?
I think every line resplendent with genius.

This was a test that Catherine had to pass.

Yes, she said. I love it, too.

It happened quickly, as it so often happens. There is So-and-so, an acquaintance you meet from time to time at parties or at concerts and never think of. Then one day a door flies open and you tumble into a pit of infinity. Amazed as well as grateful, you ask: Can this deep soul be the person I thought merely … a mere…? Yes.

I want to be alone with you. And I, my dear, with you.

From his study in the villa near Portici, the Cavaliere saw them lingering side by side on the terrace without speaking. From the terrace he saw them strolling slowly in the arbor surrounded by myrtle and vines. From the corridor he saw them at the piano together. Or Catherine played and William lounged on a settee beside a little tripod table and leafed through the Cavaliere's books. The Cavaliere was glad Catherine should have someone of her own, someone who preferred her to the Cavaliere himself.

They did not simply play together, as Catherine and the Cavaliere did. They improvised together, vying with each other to produce the most expressive sound, the most heart-rending decrescendo.

Catherine confessed that she composed, in secret. She had never played her “little movements” for anyone. William begged her to play them for him. The first was a minuet, with a darting gleeful melody. The others—his appreciation of the minuet gave her courage—had a freer form, a graver cast: slow, questioning, with long plaintive chords.

William avowed that he had always wanted to compose but knew he lacked the creative fire. She told him he was too young to know that.

No—he shook his head—I am good only for dreaming, but—he looked up—this is not flattery. You are a great musician, Catherine. I have never heard anyone feel music as you do.

When I played for Mozart, she said, I trembled as I sat down. His father noticed, I saw him noticing.

I tremble at everything, said William.

Each feels understood (at last!) by the other. William considered that it was the fate of a man like himself to be misunderstood by everyone. Now there was this angelic woman who understood him perfectly. Catherine may have thought, wrongly, that she was escaping male egotism.

He brought her flattering presents. A very cosmopolitan relation. He had found a wise, cultivated, stylish, encouraging older woman: every young man needs an authority. And she, at an age when she thought that no longer possible, has a new man in her life: every woman needs, or thinks she needs, an escort.

Catherine had taken a visceral dislike to the whole court from the beginning—this grande bourgeoise was more fastidious than the arrantly patrician Cavaliere. Her husband accommodated this by thinking of Catherine as reclusive, and respecting her the more for it. Catherine prefers the life of a hermit, was the Cavaliere's fond exaggeration in a letter to Charles, while he had often to be away with the King. Their union was designed to confirm their being different, in the way that most couples—two siblings, a wife and husband, a boss and secretary—divide up roles. You be retiring, I'll be gregarious; you be talkative, I'll be laconic; you be fleshy, I'll be thin; you read poetry, I'll tinker with my motorcycle. With William, Catherine was experiencing the rarer form of coupledom in which two people, different as they can be, claim to be as alike as possible.

She wants to do what pleases him and he wants to do what pleases her. They are moved by, admire the same music and poetry; are repelled by the same things (killing animals, vulgar conversation, the intrigues of aristocratic salons and an antic court).

The Cavaliere, whose life is unavoidably much taken up with killing animals, vulgar conversation, the intrigues of salons and the court, was glad that Catherine had someone to talk to, someone to be sensitive with. And it would have had to be a man—oddly, Catherine did not seem to enjoy much the company of her own sex—but one a good deal younger than she, so she could mother him; and, ideally, a lover of other men, so as to spare the Cavaliere concern there might be improper advances.

Without jealousy, no, with approval, the Cavaliere observed that Catherine looked almost youthful in the company of this stripling, and happier.

The two of them had been sitting on the terrace with a view of Naples and the gulf. Now it was six and they had gone indoors, to a room with windows facing Vesuvius. Catherine's favorite maid brought tea. Light softened, paled. The candles were lit. The bustle of servants and the screech of cicadas were sounds they would not hear. If the mountain made noise, they ignored it.

After a long silence, Catherine went to the piano. William listened with moistening eyes.

Please sing, she said. You have a beautiful voice.