The Volcano Lover (2 page)

One view of catastrophe. This had happened. Who would have expected such a thing. Never, never. No one. It is the worst. And if the worst, then unique. Which means unrepeatable. Let's put it behind us. Let's not be doomsayers.

The other view. Unique for now: what happens once can happen again. You'll see. Just wait. To be sure, you may have to wait a long time.

We come back. We come back.

1

His first leave home was over. The man to be known in polite Naples from now on as II Cavaliere, the Chevalier, was starting the long journey back to his post, to “the kingdom of cinders.” So one of his friends in London called it.

When he had arrived, he was thought to look much older. He was still as lean: a body swollen by macaroni and lemon pastries would have ill suited such a narrow clever face, with the aquiline nose and bushy eyebrows. But he had lost his caste's pallor. The darkening of his white skin since he'd left seven years ago was remarked with something approaching disapproval. Only the poor—that is, most people—were sunburned. Not the grandson of a duke, youngest son of a lord, the childhood companion of the king himself.

Nine months in England had restored his bony face to a pleasing wheyness, bleached the sun creases in his slender music-mastering hands.

The capacious trunks, the new Adam chimney-piece, the three cases of furniture, ten chests of books, eight cases of dishes, medicines, household provisions, two kegs of dark beer, the cello, and Catherine's Shudi harpsichord, refurbished, had left a fortnight ago on a storeship that would reach Naples within two months, while he would board a hired barque that would deposit him and his at Boulogne for an overland journey almost as long—with stops for visits and picture-viewing in Paris, Ferney, Vienna, Venice, Florence, and Rome.

Leaning on his walking stick in the courtyard of the hotel in King Street where his uncle and aunt had lodged these last busy weeks in London, the Cavaliere's nephew, Charles, contributed his sulky presence to the final readying of the two traveling coaches. Everyone is relieved when demanding older relatives who live abroad conclude their visit. But no one likes to be left.

Catherine has already settled with her maid in the large post chaise, fortifying herself for the strenuous journey with a potion of laudanum and chalybeate water. The broader, lower-hung coach behind had been laden with most of the luggage. The Cavaliere's footmen, reluctant to rumple their maroon traveling livery, hung back and fussed with their own compact belongings. It was left to the hotel porters and a lackey in Charles's employ to clamber over the coach, making sure that the dozen or so small trunks, boxes, portmanteaux, the chest of linen and bedding, the ebony escritoire, and finally the cloth satchels with the servants' gear were properly secured with ropes and iron chains to the top and rear. Only the long flat crate containing three paintings that the Cavaliere had bought just last week was strapped to the roof of the first carriage, to ensure the smoothest ride to the barque at Dover. One of the servants was checking on it from below with token thoroughness. The carriage with the Cavaliere's asthmatic wife was not to be jostled.

Meanwhile, another large leather case, almost forgotten, was brought at a run from the hotel and wedged into the load to be borne by the coach, which rocked and sagged a little more. The Cavaliere's favorite relative thought of the storeship, bearing far more cases of his uncle's possessions in its hold, which might already be as far as Cádiz.

Even for that time, when the higher the social station the greater the number and weight of things thought indispensable to the traveler, the Cavaliere traveled in exceptional bulk. But less, to the sum of forty-seven large chests, than when he had arrived. One of the purposes of the Cavaliere's trip, other than to see friends and relations and his beloved nephew, please his homesick wife, renew useful contacts at court, make sure the secretaries of state better appreciated the deftness with which he was representing British interests at that quite different court, attend meetings of the Royal Society and oversee the publication in book form of seven of his letters on volcanic matters, was to bring back most of the treasures he had collected—including seven hundred antique (miscalled Etruscan) vases—and sell them.

He had done the family rounds and had the pleasure of spending a great deal of time with Charles, much of it at Catherine's estate in Wales, which Charles now managed for him. He had impressed more than one minister, or so he thought. He had been received twice by, and once dined alone with, the king, who still called him “foster brother,” and who in January had made him a Knight of the Bath, which this fourth son dared regard as but the first step up a ladder of titles to be won through his own accomplishments. Other Fellows of the Royal Society had congratulated him on his daring feats of close-up observation of the monster in full eruption. He had attended a few picture sales and purchased, judiciously. And the British Museum had bought his Etruscan vases, the whole lot, as well as several minor pictures, the gold necklaces and earrings from Herculaneum and Pompeii, some bronze javelins and helmets, amber and ivory dice, small statues and amulets, for the gratifying sum of eight thousand four hundred pounds (a little more than a year's income from the estate to which Catherine was heiress), although the painting on which he had placed his greatest hopes remained unsold. He was leaving the wanton naked Venus triumphantly holding Cupid's bow over her head, for which he had asked three thousand pounds, in Wales, with Charles.

He was going back lighter as well as whiter.

Furtively passing a bottle among them, the Cavaliere's footmen and cook chatted with the porters in a corner of the courtyard. The aureoled September sun was brightening. A northeast wind had carried a smoke cloud and the smell of coal into Whitehall, overriding the usual rank effluvia of early morning. The clatter of other carriages, carts, barrows, departing diligences could be heard from the street. One of the ponies of the first carriage moved restlessly, and the coachman pulled on the reins of the shaft horse and cracked his whip. Charles looked around for Valerio, his uncle's valet, to restore order among the servants. Frowning, he took out his watch.

A few minutes later the Cavaliere emerged from the hotel, in his train the obsequious proprietor and his wife as well as Valerio, who was carrying the Cavaliere's favorite violin in an ornate leather case. The servants fell silent. Charles stood waiting for a signal, his long face acquiring a more alert expression, which sharpened the resemblance between them. The deferential silence continued as the Cavaliere paused, looking up at the pale sky, sniffing the malodorous air, distractedly plucking a speck from his sleeve. Then he turned, offering a thin-lipped smile to his nephew, who moved quickly to his side, and the two men walked arm in arm toward the carriage.

Waving Valerio aside, Charles reached up and opened the door for his uncle to mount, stoop, enter, then followed to hand in the Stradivarius. While the Cavaliere settled onto the green velvet-covered seat, he leaned inside to ask, with unfeigned affection and concern, how his aunt was feeling and to say his last words of farewell.

Coachmen and postilions are in place. Valerio and the other servants mounted the larger carriage, which settled noisily a few inches nearer the ground. Charles, farewell. The window is closed against the coal-infested air, so dangerous to the asthmatic, against the shouts of starting and urging. The gates are opened, and things and animals, servants and masters surged into the street.

The Cavaliere removed his amber gloves, strummed his fingers. He was ready to return, he was in fact looking forward to the journey—he thrived on the strenuous—and to the new encounters and acquisitions it would bring. The anxiety of leaving had fallen away the instant he had stepped into the carriage, became the elation of departing. But being a man of considerate feelings, at least toward his wife, of whom he was as fond as he had ever been of anyone, he would not express the rising joy he felt as they passed slowly, sealed, through the erupting clamor of increasingly busy streets. He would wait for Catherine, who had her eyes closed and was breathing shallowly through her half-open mouth.

He coughed—a substitute for a sigh. She opened her eyes. The blue vein pulsing in her temple is not an utterance. In the corner on a low stool, licensed to speak only when spoken to, the maid bent her rosy, humid face into Alleine's
Alarm to the Unconverted,
which her mistress had given her. He reached with one hand for the case at his hip which contained the folded leather-bound traveling atlas, the writing box, the pistol, and a volume of Voltaire he had begun. There is no reason for the Cavaliere to sigh.

How odd, Catherine murmured, to be cold on such a temperate day. I fear—she had a penchant, born of the desire to please, for following a stoical utterance with a self-deprecating one—I fear I have got accustomed to our bestial summers.

You may be too warmly dressed for the journey, observed the Cavaliere in his high, somewhat nasal voice.

I pray I shall not be ill, Catherine said, drawing a camelhair shawl over her legs. I will not be ill if I can help it, she corrected herself, smiling as she daubed at her eyes.

I, too, feel the sadness of parting from our friends, and especially from our dear Charles, replied the Cavaliere gently.

No, said Catherine. I'm not unhappy to return. While I dread the crossing and then the hardships of—she shook her head, interrupting herself—I know that I shall soon breathe more easily. The air.… She closed her eyes for a moment. And, what is more important to me, you are happy to return, she added.

I shall miss my Venus, said the Cavaliere.

The dirt, the stink, the noise are without—like the shadow of the passing carriage darkening the mullioned glass of shop fronts. London appears a spectacle to the Cavaliere, time receding into space. The carriage sways, jostles, creaks, lurches; the vendors and barrow boys and other coachmen cry out, but in a different timbre from the cries he will hear; these are the same familiar streets he might be crossing to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, look in on an auction, or pay a visit to his brother-in-law's, but today he was not crossing to but crossing through—he had entered the kingdom of farewells, finalities, privileged last sightings that are instantly logged as memories; of anticipation. Each street, each rackety turning emits a message: the already, the soon-to-be. He drifted between the desire to look, as if to engrave on his brain, and the inclination to confine his senses to the cool carriage, to consider himself (as he is in truth) already gone.

The Cavaliere liked specimens and might have found a good many in the ceaselessly replenished throngs of beggars, maids, peddlers, apprentices, shoppers, pickpockets, touts, porters, errand boys who stream dangerously near and between moving barriers and wheels. Here, even the wretched scurry. They do not pool, cluster, squat, or dance, entertaining themselves: one of many differences between crowds here and those in the city to which he was returning that could be registered, pondered over—if there were a reason to note it at all. But it was not the Cavaliere's custom to reflect on London's din and shove; one is unlikely to see one's own city as picturesque. When his carriage was halted for a noisy quarter of an hour between fruit barrows and an irate knife grinder's wagon, he did not follow the sightless red-haired man who has ventured into the crossing a few yards ahead, extending his stave before him, heedless of the vehicles starting to bear down on him. This portable scented interior, layered with enough accoutrements of privilege to occupy the senses, says: Don't look. There is nothing outside worth looking at.

If he doesn't know what to do with his hungry eyes, he has that other, always adjacent interior: a book. Catherine has opened a volume on papal cruelties. The maid is with her alarming sermon. Without looking down, the Cavaliere slid his thumb against a sumptuous leather binding, the gold embossing of title and favorite author. The beggar, overtaken by one of the coaches, is knocked back and drops under the wheel of a plodding cooper's cart. The Cavaliere wasn't looking. He was looking away.

Inside the book: Candide, now in South America, has chivalrously, with his double-barreled Spanish gun, come to the accurate rescue of two naked girls whom he sees running gently on the edge of a plain, closely followed by two monkeys who are biting their buttocks. Whereupon the girls fling themselves on the corpses of the monkeys, kiss them tenderly, wet them with their tears, and fill the air with piteous cries, revealing to Candide that the pursuit, an amorous one, had been entirely welcome. Monkeys for lovers? Candide is not just astonished, he is scandalized. But the sage Cacambo, seasoned in the ways of the world, respectfully observes that it might have been better if his dear master had received a proper, cosmopolitan education so that he would not always be surprised by everything. Everything. For the world is wide, with room enough for customs, tastes, principles, observances of every sort, which, once you set them in the society where they have arisen, always make sense. Observe them. Compare them, do, for your own edification. But whatever your own tastes, which you needn't renounce, please, dear master, refrain from identifying them with universal commandments.