The Volcano Lover (32 page)

We shall see much more than this, said the Cavaliere. He pointed to the orchestra of monkeys with drums, flutes, and violins looking out at them from the edge of the villa's roof. Let us continue.

Lackeys were waiting to help them from the carriage, and a podgy man in black livery, the chamberlain, stood at the threshold of the great entrance to greet them.

I never before saw black livery, whispered the hero.

Perhaps he still wears mourning for his master, said the Cavaliere's wife.

The Cavaliere smiled. I should not be surprised, my dear, if you were right.

Outside the entrance door (warped, splintered) a dwarf with the laurel-crowned head of a Roman emperor sat astride a dolphin. The Cavaliere's wife patted the dwarf's head. There is more inside, said the Cavaliere, though the villa is already much despoiled. They followed the chamberlain up a rather filthy staircase and into the first floor above ground level, through halls and anterooms, past more composite creatures and odd couples.

Oh, look!

A double-headed peacock riding an angel on all fours.

Lordy!

A mermaid with a dog's paw coupling with a stag.

And look at this!

The Cavaliere's wife had stopped before two seated, sumptuously garbed figures playing cards, one a lady with a horse's head, the other a gentleman with a griffin's head dressed in a full-bottomed wig and crown.

I should like to have a horse's head for a day, she exclaimed. And see what it would feel like.

Oh, said the hero. I'm sure you would be a most beautiful horse.

I should like to see the faces of our guests when you sat down to play faro with such a head on your shoulders, said the Cavaliere. No doubt you would win every game.

The Cavaliere's wife gave a robust imitation of a horse's neigh, and both men broke into laughter.

The Cavaliere was ready to join in the mockery of the late prince's affectations, to be at one with his wife and their friend. But he wanted to make sure that their amusement was as saturated with knowledge as his own. Wherever he was, the Cavaliere was prone to cast himself in the role of the guide or mentor. At a funeral he would have lectured a fellow mourner on the history of cemetery monuments. What a deft antidote to anxiety or grief one's own erudition can be.

Stimulated by the prince's penchant for horses with limbs or the head of some other creature and humans with horses' heads, the Cavaliere began to recount the stories of Chiron, Pegasus, and other horses in ancient mythology with extra parts. He thought it worth pointing out that these mutants were always semi-divine creatures. Recall Achilles' wise tutor, who was half horse, half human. Or the hippogriff, whose father was a griffin and whose mother was a filly, and in Ariosto is a symbol of love.

Love. The Cavaliere's wife heard the word resound in the sepulchral silence of the villa.
She
had not pronounced it. Nor their friend.

The Cavaliere is not really thinking about love, but the word seems as good a talisman as any against the unsettling violence of feeling expressed in the grotesque inventions with which the prince had populated the villa and its grounds.

Their friend was dodging the thought of love too, and ventured a small contribution of his own to the learned discussion. In Egypt, said the victor of the Battle of the Nile, I was told of an immense statue that is a creature with the head and boson of a woman and the lower limbs of a lion. She must be an awesome sight, crouching in the sand.

Yes, yes, I read about that! She waits for passing travelers and she makes them halt and then she kills them. Except those that can solve a riddle, them she spares.

That's another cruel creature, my dear, said the Cavaliere gently. But I would not be surprised if we were to come across either your Sphinx or the Egyptian one, or something resembling, here in these very rooms, among the prince's stone companions. Shall we look for her?

And we'll think of a riddle to ask her, cried the Cavaliere's wife.

They passed into another drawing room, calling out to one another as they came across more tableaux of the deformed and ill-coupled, the chamberlain trailing behind, a silent reproach to their gaiety and their wish to condescend to what they were seeing.

The human imagination has always been entertained by the fantasy of biological misalliances, and by the reality of bodies that don't look as bodies are supposed to look, which can endure ordeals bodies are not supposed to be able to endure. Painters loved to invent such creatures when they had the pretext. Circuses and fairs display them: freaks, mutants, odd couples, animals doing stunts that violate their nature. The Cavaliere may not have been familiar with Bosch and Bruegel on the subject of hell or the torments of Saint Anthony, but he had seen somewhat less inspired depictions of those anatomical assemblages called demons or monsters. Were it only a question of these freakish beings in every corner, the contents of the prince's lair would not have been so original. Even more astonishing was the profusion of whimsical, threatening—no, freakish—objects.

Lamps in the shape of a human or animal limb.

Tables constructed of shards of tile and made too tall to be of use.

Columns and pyramids, at least forty of them, made of different kinds of china and pottery; one column has a chamber pot for its plinth, a circle of little flowerpots for its capital, and a four-foot-long shaft composed entirely of teapots that diminish gradually in size from plinth to capital.

Chandeliers whose many-tiered components, suspended like drop earrings, were the bottoms, necks, and handles of broken bottles and barometers.

Candelabra, more than three feet high, jerry-built out of pieces of caudle cups, saucers, bowls, jugs, kettles, and tilting ominously. Examining one of the candelabra more closely, the Cavaliere saw to his surprise that among the shards of humble crockery stuck together at random were segments of exceptionally fine porcelain.

Vases, each of which disgorges a mutant creature or a scroll from its belly or base.

The Cavaliere was starting to feel queasy, finally, as the impression of the grotesque was replaced by the impression of an immense sarcasm. He had been prepared for the grotesque. He had not been prepared for the recognition that the prince's temperament was a demented variant of the collector's—though what this fellow collector had amassed were not objects found or purchased but made, according to his designs. To piece together fragments of costly porcelain with chunks of kitchenware—was this not merely a mocking echo of the democracy of objects found in many aristocratic collections, such as the Duchess of Portland's, which displayed exquisite paintings alongside branches of coral and seashells. Like any collector, the prince had surrounded himself with things for people to pay attention to, marvel at when they visited him. They defined him. He was, above all, the proprietor of these objects—which spoke for him, which announced the way he saw the world. They did not say what the Cavaliere, like all great collectors, wished to say with objects: look at all the beauty and interest there is in the world. They said: the world is mad. Ordinary life is ridiculous, if you take some distance from it. Anything can turn into anything else, anything can be dangerous, anything can collapse, give way. An ordinary object can be made from … anything. Any shape can be deformed. Any common purpose served by objects balked.

How many of them there were! As the trio followed the chamberlain through room after room, their ability to respond to what they were seeing began to buckle under the emotional weight, the sheer profusion of assertive objects. Like any obsessed collector, the prince could not get enough of what he coveted. Like a collector, he lived in a crowded space—the objects accumulated, multiplied. And the prince had devised a way to make them multiply further.

They had been brought into the great salon, one of the many rooms whose ceiling, walls, doors, even locks were covered with mirrors.

Where are the monsters, said the Cavaliere's wife. There's no monsters here.

The Cavaliere explained that some of the late prince's more fanciful creations had already been taken away and destroyed by his half brother, the present head of the family, who did not enjoy the villa's continuing notoriety.

Servants were bringing in tea and setting it on a great sideboard with panels made from hundreds of sawn-off pieces of antique gilt frames in different styles of carving. The black-garbed chamberlain had become more animated since they had entered the room.

Ah, if you could have seen the villa in the days when my late master was alive, the chamberlain broke out. The chandeliers ablaze, the room full of His Highness's friends dancing and enjoying themselves.

Did the prince give balls? asked the Cavaliere sharply. I am surprised to hear it. I should have thought a man of his tastes and temperament would have preferred seclusion.

True, Excellency, said the chamberlain. My master preferred the villa to himself. But his wife sometimes longed for company.

His wife, exclaimed the Cavaliere's wife. Did he have a wife?

Did they have children? asked the hero, who could not help wondering if a pregnant woman confined in these surroundings would not give birth to a monster.

My master lacked nothing that makes a man happy, said the chamberlain.

One would hardly suppose that, thought the Cavaliere, who had begun to examine the room.

May I humbly suggest, said the chamberlain, that Their Excellencies not sit—

Not sit?

He was pointing. There.

Oh. Indeed, one would have little incentive to do so. Not on chairs with legs of different lengths, ensuring that no one could sit on them.

Nor there, observed the hero, waving his arm at some normally constructed chairs grouped with their backs to one another. Most unfriendly, wouldn't you agree?

Nor there, continued the chamberlain solemnly, indicating three handsome ornate chairs arranged in the proper way, so that those conversing could face one another.

Why not, hooted the Cavaliere's wife, rolling her eyes at her husband in the familiar language of marital complicity.

If her ladyship will touch one of the chairs …

She went toward it.

Carefully, my lady!

She ran her beringed hand over the velvet-cushioned seat, and burst out laughing.

What is it, said the hero.

There's a spike under the cushion!

Perhaps, said the Cavaliere, we will forgo tea and venture out into the park. It is a fine day.

So my master would have wished it, said the chamberlain.

The Cavaliere, displeased with the chamberlain's tone, which since their arrival had seemed to him slightly impertinent, turned with a reproving stare to make the gesture that dismissed him (one of the rare occasions for looking closely at a servant's face), and only then observed that the man had a steely blue eye and a lustrous brown one—rhyming as it were with the hybrid objects the late prince had designed.

The Cavaliere's wife, trained by years of womanly solicitude to read every shift of her husband's attention, instantly saw what the Cavaliere was noticing. As the chamberlain bowed gravely and backed toward a door, she murmured something to the hero, who smiled, waited until the chamberlain had left, and then said he would be happy to have a brown and a blue eye if he could see with both of them. The Cavaliere's wife exclaimed how handsome he would be with eyes of different color.

Shall we go out, said the Cavaliere.

Forgive me if I do not join you both for a while, said the hero, who was looking a little wan. He was tired, he was often tired. It seemed an exertion even to have to put the shield back on his poor eye, to protect it from the roasting effulgence of Sicilian sun.

Please remain with our friend, said the Cavaliere to his wife. I shall enjoy looking by myself.

Before leaving them, however, he could not resist providing one more observation, to make sure that they fully appreciated the originality of the room in which they stood.

Looking up at the irregular panes of smoky mirror on the ceiling, he explained that the prevalence of mirrors is what he regarded as most novel in the prince's conception. I myself had once thought, he said—then paused, recalling with vexation the mirrored wall and lost vistas of his observatory room in Naples.

And note, he continued, stifling the pang, note how skillfully it is done. Taking sheets of mirror and breaking them into a multitude of little mirrors, each a different size, then ingeniously fitting them together, creates effects that are undoubtedly bizarre. Since each of them makes a small angle with the other, the effect is like that of multiplying glass, so that the three of us walking below make three hundred of us walking above. But I find this abundance of effects preferable to the monotony that would result from covering so vast a room with unbroken expanses of glass.

The Cavaliere's wife and the hero were listening attentively, respectfully. They are both genuinely interested in what the Cavaliere had to say. At the same time they see each other—they spy on each other—while the Cavaliere goes on talking. A room with mirrors is a fearful temptation. Even more so a room with a canopy of broken mirrors, as faceted as a fly's eye, in which they see themselves multiplied, superimposed, deformed—but deformities created by mirrors only make them laugh.

And when the Cavaliere went off to look at some other rooms and tour the park, and they realize it is just the two of them now, when father has gone and the children are left alone in the funhouse, they stand there in silence, the fat lady and the short man with one arm, and try to look only at the mirrors, but a gust of happiness that seems to have no borders, bliss without an edge, envelops them, and exhausted by the stress of desire, hilarious with happiness, they turn toward each other and kiss (and kiss and kiss), and their turn, their kiss, was shattered, multiplied in the mirrors above.

*   *   *

In these surroundings, which bespeak reclusiveness, refusal of ordinary sentiments, whose only romance is with objects, two people who have long loved each other have given way to the most ordinary and powerful of passions, from which there is no turning back.