The Volcano Lover (41 page)

She was eager for the evening to be over as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, before she can join her lover, she had something unpleasant to do. She has promised to call on the notorious Neapolitan chief of police, whom she had met that afternoon at the church which had commissioned from her lover a large painting of the Madonna. When she had stopped by earlier her lover had seemed distracted, and she was surprised that he was not there when she returned; instead, she had found this professed admirer of hers, prowling near the scaffolding. So this is the man before whom all Naples trembled! And he was attractive, she could not help noticing that. The police chief, flirting with her in a rather overbearing way, had tried to convince her that her lover was interested in another woman. She had been foolish enough to believe him when he had shown her among her lover's dirty brushes a woman's fan, a fan that did not belong to her.

The diva is a woman who knows how to take care of herself. She knows how to fend off lecherous men. Like the Cavaliere's wife, she is capable of giving herself only for love. She will find out what the police chief wants to tell her. Then she will join her lover, and they will go out to his country villa for the weekend. She has reason now to think that he has probably not been unfaithful to her; but jealousy is one of the few weapons a woman has. After all, she is an actress. Perhaps he will confess that he did find attractive the woman in the church whose face he used as a model for the Madonna's; and she will be cold to him for a few minutes, and then she will forgive him, and they will be happier than ever.

The diva is not a vengeful woman. And she has seen operas and plays extolling clemency. Many dramas about merciful monarchs have been staged in this past decade, the very decade in which hitherto clement autocrats discovered that the iron fist and the gallows had their uses too. The diva thinks there is nothing more beautiful than clemency. Why can't it always be as in the operas of Mozart, like the one about the abduction, which contains the sublime line: Nothing is more hateful than revenge. Or the one about the mercy of the Roman emperor—written for the coronation of the Queen of Naples's brother, the Hapsburg emperor, as King of Bohemia—in which Titus discovers a plot against his life by those dearest to him and, declining to execute the conspirators, declares: It seems that the stars conspire to oblige me in spite of myself to become cruel. No, they shall not have this victory!

True, the opera's Titus, whose day, in
A.D
. 79, began with his announcing that Vesuvius has erupted and directing that the gold allocated by the Senate for a temple in his honor be used to succor the volcano's victims, and ends with his pardoning the friend who sought to murder him, is also history's Titus, scourge of the Jews and destroyer of the Temple. But perhaps we need every model of magnanimity we are offered, including the invented ones. Even the diva knows that, innocent of history though she may be.

Perhaps life is not the way it is in an opera, thinks the diva as she prepares to go upstairs to see the police chief, but it ought to be. Nothing is more hateful than revenge.

*   *   *

We know about evil people. Like Scarpia. Baron Scarpia is truly wicked. He exults in his wickedness and his intelligence. Little pleases him more than practicing his skills of deception. An excellent judge of character, he understands the diva is rash as well as naïve. To the wicked, a person understood is a person manipulated. It was all too easy to convince her that her lover is carrying on with another woman, which has led her to commit an indiscretion that dooms the fugitive Angelotti. Further, there is the sheer love of inflicting pain. When she arrived upstairs, he had her lover brought in and tortured within her hearing—partly because he likes to torture, partly because torture may produce the information he seeks, and partly because he enjoys watching what happens to her face when she hears the screams coming from the next room. Your tears were like lava, burning my senses, he says. After the torture has made her speak, he declares that if she yields to him he will spare her lover's life (the firing squad's bullets will be blanks) and allow them to leave Rome. Of course, he has no intention of doing anything of the kind. To the wicked, a promise made is a promise to be broken.

We know about good people—and their reputation for being not very astute. The diva is warmhearted, generous. But to be as easily manipulated as she is, is not without its share of fault. Were the diva just a bit more sceptical—that is, a little less proud of being passionate—perhaps Scarpia could not so promptly have turned her into a decoy; for his brandishing of another woman's fan had sent her rushing out that afternoon to her lover's country villa, where she discovered him not with another woman but with Angelotti, whom he was hiding there, so that she now possessed the knowledge her lover had wanted to keep from her, which she can then divulge when Scarpia confronts her with the unbearable choice of betraying Angelotti or letting her lover die. While her lover would never, never have betrayed Angelotti's whereabouts no matter how excruciating the torture became (or so he believes), the woman who loves him cannot bear his screams. Perhaps she is not more emotional than a man. Scarpia, too, is ruled by his emotions. But the combination of emotions with power creates … power. The combination of emotions with powerlessness creates … powerlessness. Already too late for poor Angelotti, who swallowed poison as Scarpia's men reached down to haul him out of the well. But the diva thought that by agreeing to let Scarpia rape her, she had saved her lover's life. She saw the police chief give the order for a sham execution at dawn; then, when they are alone, he wrote out the passes that will allow them to leave the city. But although the diva seizes a sharp pointed knife from the table just as Scarpia is about to pounce—nothing would seem more powerful than a murder—her courage cannot halt what her credulity has set in motion, her lover will still be mowed down in his fake fake-execution before her eyes, and she must jump from the parapet of the Castel Sant'Angelo, adding to the three other deaths her own.

We know about the very bad and clever, and the very good and gullible.

But what about all the others: those who are neither wicked nor innocent. Just normal important people, going about their important business, wanting to think well of themselves, and committing the most atrocious crimes.

Take the Cavaliere and his wife. Why weren't they moved by the cries of their victims? Of poor Caracciolo, who, like Angelotti, had been found cowering at the bottom of a well. But unlike Angelotti he didn't choose to kill himself immediately. Unlike Angelotti, he didn't think he had the certainty of death before him. Caracciolo thought he had a chance. He was wrong.

*   *   *

You can plead for your life, and it doesn't do any good. The diva pleading with Scarpia to spare her lover. The elderly doctor Cirillo writing a few days after his arrest from his cell, in irons, to the Cavaliere and his wife: I hope you won't take it ill if I take this liberty to trouble you with a few lines, in order to make you recollect that nobody in this world can protect and save a miserable being but you …

You can go with preternatural courage. The young aristocrat Ettore Carafa, sentenced in September to be beheaded, who asked to be placed on the block looking up instead of face down, and kept his eyes open as the ax descended. Or with inspired dispassion and foresight. Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, who, turning to her fellow prisoners as they were waiting to be taken to the cart that would bring them to the gallows, uttered a line from Virgil:
Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit
—Perhaps one day even this will be a joy to recall.

Dignity or wretched groveling, nothing will affect what implacable victors decree, turning themselves into a force of nature. As immovable by pity as the volcano. Mercy is what takes us beyond nature, beyond our natures, which are always stocked with cruel feelings. Mercy, which is not forgiveness, means not doing what nature, and self-interest, tells us we have a right to do. And perhaps we do have the right, as well as the power. How sublime not to, anyway. Nothing is more admirable than mercy.

7

Politics is all very salient and absorbing. Alas, you have to care about politics, even if you don't want to. But there are many other important things to care about. For instance, the choice of what to wear may be of great import. What to wear to flatter obesity—no, to hide pregnancy. A pregnancy best hidden, since everyone will correctly assume that the father is the lover, not the elderly husband. A voluminous gown? A loose dress? And perhaps a shawl arranged over it, several shawls despite the heat, since their wearer is the mistress of the art of draping shawls.

And what to wear to respond to disgrace already made public, to show that you don't acknowledge what people whose opinion you care about are saying behind your back. If you are a hero, you wear your ribands, orders, stars, and medals. All of them. Sometimes you wear the ankle-length sable-trimmed scarlet pelisse presented to you by the Turkish ambassador. Your diamond aigrette with its rotating star, another gift (they call it a chelengk) from the Grand Signior in Constantinople. And the gold sword with hilt and blade set in diamonds which the King has given you, along with a Sicilian dukedom, to express his gratitude for the actions that have brought disgrace on your head. And always, next to your heart, a lace handkerchief belonging to the woman whose influence is reputed to have made you commit the actions that have brought disgrace on your head.

It is important, too, how any representation of you is outfitted. For the party the Queen gave in the vast park of the country royal palace to which five thousand were invited, a small Greek temple was erected, inside which were placed life-size wax effigies of the trio garnished with chaplets of laurel. The Queen had requested that the originals of the statues contribute their own clothes. The slender effigy of the Cavaliere's wife wore the purple satin gown of the last opera gala in Naples on which had been embroidered the names of the captains of the Nile; the youthful-looking effigy of the Cavaliere was in full diplomatic dress with the star and red sash of the Order of the Bath; between them stood the hero-effigy with two bright blue agate eyes, his admiral's regalia a field of gleaming medals and stars and
his
Order of the Bath. On the temple roof a musician crouched behind the statue of Fame blowing a trumpet, and when the ceremonies began her trumpet seemed to blow. The Cavaliere received a portrait of the King in a frame encrusted with diamonds; the Cavaliere's wife was presented with the Queen's portrait set in diamonds and crowned by the Queen with the laurel chaplet from her effigy; and the King gave the hero a bejeweled double portrait of Their Majesties and inducted him into the Order of Saint Ferdinand, whose members have the privilege of not removing their hats in the King's presence. The orchestra began to play “Rule, Britannia.” The sky began to thunder: a grand display of fireworks representing the Battle of the Nile which concluded with the spectacular blowing up of the French tricolor. Who could resist such flattery? They gaze at the statues of themselves. Quite lifelike, says the hero, for want of something better to say.

*   *   *

The hero's shameful role as the Bourbon executioner was the talk of Europe, the Europe of privilege. Hang the country's best poet? Most eminent Greek scholar? Leading scientists? Even the most fervent opponents of republicanism and of French ideas were shocked by the butchery of the Neapolitan nobility. Class solidarity easily overrode national enmities.

Then make the hero a villain? But heroes are useful. No, easier to find some influence on the hero that had warped his judgment, that had corrupted him. The good do not become bad, but the strong may become weak. What has made him weak is that he is no longer separate, solitary—what a hero must be. A hero is one who knows how to leave, to break ties. Bad enough when a hero becomes a married man. If married, he cannot be uxorious. If a lover, he must (like Aeneas) disappoint. If a member of a trio, he must … but a hero must not become a member of a trio. A hero must float, must soar. A hero does not cling.

*   *   *

Disgrace, disgrace, disgrace.

Triple disgrace. Three united as one.

The hero, who has in effect gone AWOL, could not be replaced, discarded by his superiors back in London—though this was considered. But those who abetted him, whose pawn he had become, could feel the weight of official displeasure. The Cavaliere's role in the savage retaliation against the Neapolitan patriots had made him, at the very least, controversial. Some said he was a dupe of his wife; others, of the Bourbon government. Of course, no one expected a diplomat to be a paragon, as they did the hero. But he should not be controversial, either. A diplomat who has become an open partisan of the government to which he is posted has fatally impaired his usefulness to the government that dispatched him and whose interests he is supposed to promote. It is only a matter of time before he is replaced.

One morning the Cavaliere received a letter from Charles, who regretted having to inform his uncle that he had learned from that damned Whig newspaper the
Morning Chronicle
that a new envoy to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, young Arthur Paget, had been named. The Cavaliere could no longer conceal from himself the extent of his disfavor. Not only was he dismissed after thirty-seven years in his post instead of being allowed to retire, after being consulted about the choice of his successor; they did not care if he was the last to know. The document from the Foreign Office followed a month later, with a curt subscript informing him that his successor had already left London. Upon hearing the news, the Queen tearfully embraced her dearest confidant, her sister, the ambassador's wife. Oh what will I do without my friends, she cried. It's all the fault of the French.