The Volcano Lover (6 page)

And let me tell you, the Cavaliere might continue, about another scramble for food incited by the King which is somewhat less comic. It took place the year after the mock burial I have described to you, when the younger sister of the dead fiancée designated as her replacement, who wept even more copiously than had her older sister upon learning to whom she had been affianced, had been dispatched from Vienna; happily, this archduchess arrived intact, and the days of wedding followed. Now what I must explain, explains the Cavaliere, is that all important court celebrations here include the building of an artificial mountain laden with food.

(A mountain? his auditor would ask.)

Yes, a mountain. A gigantic pyramidal scaffolding of beams and boards erected by teams of carpenters in the middle of the great square in front of the palace, which was then draped and sculpted into a very creditable small park with iron fencing and a pair of allegorical statues guarding the gate.

(May I inquire how high? I am not certain, says the Cavaliere. At least forty feet.)

As soon as the mountain was finished, tribes of purveyors and their assistants began ascending and descending. Bakers on the foothills were stacking huge logs of bread. Farmers were hauling up bins of watermelon and pears and oranges. Poulterers were nailing live chickens, geese, capons, ducks, and pigeons by their wings to wooden fences along the paths that led to the top. And thousands of people arrived to camp in the square while the mountain was heaped with its hierarchies of foods, festooned with garlands of flowers and pennons, and guarded round the clock by a ring of armed soldiers mounted on nervous horses. By the second day of banqueting inside the palace, the crowd had multiplied tenfold, and their knives, daggers, axes, and scissors were in plain view. Around noon a roar went up when the butchers entered the square, dragging the procession of oxen, sheep, goats, calves, and pigs. As they tied the animals by halters to the base of the mountain, a murmuring hush fell on the crowd.

(I see I must fortify myself for what comes next, says his auditor, after the Cavaliere paused for effect.)

Then the King, holding his bride's hand, stepped out on the balcony. Another roar went up, not so different from the one that greeted the procession of animals. As the King acknowledged the cheers and
vivas
of the crowd, the other balconies and the upper windows of the palace quickly filled with the leading members of the court, some of the more important nobles, members of the diplomatic corps most in favor—

(I have heard no one is more in favor with the King than you, interrupts the auditor. Yes, says the Cavaliere, I was there.)

Then the cannon sounded from the top of the fortress of Sant'Elmo, signaling that the assault could begin. The famished crowd gave an answering howl and broke through the ring of soldiers, who rode their rearing horses to the safety of the palace wall. Elbowing, kneeing, punching, shoving one another, the most able-bodied boys and young men pulled ahead and started to scale the mountain, which was soon aswarm with people, some clambering higher, some descending with their booty, others perched at mid-point carving up the fowl and eating it raw or throwing pieces to the outstretched arms of their womenfolk and children below. Meanwhile, others drove their knives into the animals tethered at the base of the mountain. It would be hard to say which of one's sensory organs were being more forcefully assaulted: one's nose, by the smell of blood and the excrement of the terrified animals; one's ears, by the cries of the animals being slaughtered and the screams of people falling or being pushed from some part of the mountain; or one's eyes, by the sight of the poor beasts thrashing about in their agony or of some wretch who, brought to frenzy by all these sensations, to which must be added the applause and shouts of encouragement from the windows and balconies, instead of plunging his knife into the belly of a pig or a goat, had plunged it into his neighbor's neck.

(I trust I am not making you think too ill of the lower orders here, interjects the Cavaliere. They are in most circumstances quite amiable. Indeed, exclaims his auditor—and, musing on human savagery rather than injustice, said no more.)

You would be surprised, the Cavaliere continues, how little time it took to pillage the mountain. It goes even more quickly now. For that was the last year in which the animals were dismembered live. Our young Austrian queen was revolted by the spectacle and entreated the King to put some limits on the barbarity of this custom. The King decreed that the oxen and calves and pigs would be killed first by the butchers and hung already quartered on the fence. And so it is done to this day. As you see, he would conclude, there is progress even here, in this city.

*   *   *

How can the Cavaliere communicate to an auditor
how
disgusting the King is. Impossible to describe. He cannot bottle the fetid odors the King emits and waft them under his auditors' noses, or post them to his friends in England whom he regales with his stories, as he does the sulphurs and salts from the volcano he sent back regularly to the Royal Society. He cannot call the servants to bring a bucket of blood and demonstrate, by dipping his own arms in it to the elbows, the spectacle of the King carving up hundreds of animals himself after a day's slaughter he calls hunting. He will not mime the King standing in the harbor marketplace at sunset selling his day's catch of swordfish. (He sells his catch? Yes, and haggles over the price. But it must be added, said the Cavaliere, that he throws his earnings to the suite of layabouts who always follow him.) Though a courtier, the Cavaliere is not an actor. He cannot become the King, even for a moment, to demonstrate or to show. That is not a virile activity. He only relates, and in the relating, the sheer odiousness of it dwindles into a tale, nothing to get wrought up over. In this kingdom of the immoderate, of excess, of overflow, the King is just one item. Since he has only words to tell, then he can explain (the dumbed-down education of the King, the benighted superstitions of the nobles), he can condescend, he can ironize. He can have an opinion (he cannot describe without taking a stand about what he is describing) and that opinion will already have shown itself superior to the facts of the senses, bleached them, muffled their din, deodorized them.

An odor. A taste. A touch. Impossible to describe.

*   *   *

This is a fable the Cavaliere had read in a book by one of those impious French writers he fancied, whose very names made Catherine sigh and grimace. Imagine a park with a beautiful statue of a woman, no, a statue of a beautiful woman, the statue, that is, the woman, clasping a bow and arrows, not naked but
as
naked (the way the marble tunic clings to her breasts and hips), not Venus but Diana (the arrows belong to her). Beautiful herself, with the headband on her ringlets, she is dead to all beauty. Now, runs the fable, let us imagine someone who is able to bring her to life. We are imagining a Pygmalion who is no artist, he did not create her but only found her in the garden, on her pedestal, a little larger than life-size, and decided to perform an experiment on her: a pedagogue, a scientist, then. Someone else made her, then abandoned her. Now she is his. And he is not infatuated with her. But he has a didactic streak and wants to see her bloom to the best of her ability. (Perhaps afterward he will fall in love with her, probably against his better judgment, and want to make love to her; but that is another fable.) So he proceeds slowly, thoughtfully, in the spirit of experiment. Desire does not urge him on, make him want everything at once.

What does he do? How does he bring her to life? Very cautiously. He wants her to become conscious, and, holding the rather simple theory that all knowledge comes from the senses, decides to open her sensorium. Slowly, slowly. He will give her, to begin with, just one of the senses. And which does he pick? Not sight, noblest of the senses, not hearing—well, no need to run through the whole list, short as it is. Let's hasten to relate that he first awards her, perhaps ungenerously, the most primitive sense, that of smell. (Perhaps he does not want to be seen, at least not yet.) And it should be added that, for the experiment to work, we must suppose this divine creature to have some inner existence or responsiveness beneath the impermeable surface; but this is just a hypothesis, albeit a necessary one. Nothing so far can be inferred about this inner aliveness. The goddess, beauty incarnate, does not move.

So now the goddess of the hunt can smell. Her ovoid, slightly protruding marble eyes under her heavy brows do not see, her slightly parted lips and delicate tongue do not taste, her satiny marble skin would not feel your skin or mine, her lovely shell-like ears do not hear, but her chiseled nostrils receive all odors, near and far. She smells the sycamores and poplar trees, resinous, acrid, she can smell the tiny shit of worms, she smells the polish on soldiers' boots, and roasted chestnuts, and bacon burning, she can smell the wisteria and heliotrope and lemon trees, she can smell the rank odor of deer and wild boar fleeing the royal hounds and the three thousand beaters in the King's employ, the effusions of a couple copulating in the nearby bushes, the sweet smell of the freshly cut lawn, the smoke from the chimneys of the palace, from far away the fat King on the privy, she can even smell the rain-lashed erosion of the marble of which she is made, the odor of death (though she knows nothing of death).

There are odors she does not smell, because she is in a garden—or because she is in the past. She is spared city smells, like those of the slops and swill thrown from windows onto the street during the night. And the little cars with two-stroke engines and the bricks of soft brown coal (the smell of Eastern Europe in the second half of our century), the chemical plants and oil refineries outside Newark, cigarette smoke … But why say spared? She would relish these odors, too. Indeed, it comes from a great distance, she smells the future.

And all these odors, which we think of as good or bad, putrid or enchanting, flood her, suffuse every marble particle of which she is made. She would tremble with pleasure if she could, but she has not been granted the power of movement, not even of breathing. This is a man teaching, emancipating—deciding what's best for—a woman, and therefore moving circumspectly, not inclined to go all the way, quite comfortable with the idea of creating a limited being—the better to be, to stay, beautiful. (Impossible to imagine the fable with a woman scientist and a beautiful statue of Hippolytus; that is, a statue of the beautiful Hippolytus.) So the deity of the hunt has only the sense of smell, the world inside herself, no space; but time is born, because one smell succeeds, dominates another. And with time, eternity. To have smell, only smell, means she is a being-who-smells and therefore wants to go on smelling (desire wills its perpetuation ad infinitum). But odors do vanish sometimes (indeed, some were gone so quickly!), though some return. And when an odor fades, she feels—is—diminished. She begins to dream, this consciousness-that-smells, of how she could retain the odors, by storing them up inside herself, so she would never lose them. And this is how, later, space emerges, inner space only, as Diana began to wish that she could hold different odors in different parts of her marble body: the dog shit in her left leg, the heliotrope in an elbow, sweetness of the freshly cut grass in her groin. She cherished them, wanted them all. She experiences pain, not the pain (more precisely, displeasure) of a bad odor, for she knows nothing of good or bad, cannot afford to make this luxurious distinction (every odor is good, because any odor is better than no odor, oblivion), but the pain of loss. Every pleasure—and smelling, whatever she smells, is pure pleasure—becomes an experience of anticipated loss. She wants, if only she knew how, to become a collector.

4

Another winter. A month of animal massacres with the King at the foot of the Apennines, Christmas balls, some eminent foreign visitors to entertain, his burgeoning correspondence with learned societies, an excursion with Catherine to Apulia to look at some new excavations, their weekly concerts (but Catherine is ailing). The mountain, draped in snow, fussed and fumed. The Cavaliere's collection of paintings, hitherto distinctly Old Masterish, now included several dozen gouaches and oils by local artists depicting the volcanic scenery and the natives in gaudy costume, frolicking. These are priced very cheaply (by the palm or yard of canvas painted) and hang in the gallery leading to his study. He attended the miracle staged in the cathedral twice a year, on which the city's well-being was believed to depend: the liquefying of a lump of the patron saint's blood. The city's best-known lump of superstition. Looking about for less familiar enactments of the local backwardness, the Cavaliere arranged for an audience with the famous sibyl Efrosina Pumo.

At first it was all atmosphere, the crooked street, the crumbling masonry, the battered door with the undecipherable writing on it, the woman's low dank room with whitewashed walls and soot-stained ceiling, the guttering votive candles, the cauldron on the fire, the straw matting on the tile floor, the black dog rushing to sniff his crotch. Leaving Valerio outside with a clutch of the sibyl's clients waiting for their ration of soothsaying and healing, the Cavaliere was feeling rather, well, Voltairean: in an ethnological mood. On his own. A tourist of other people's superstitions. Feeling superior, enjoying the feeling of being superior, disdainful of all superstitions, magic, zealotry, irrationality, yet not averse to the prospect of being surprised, confounded. Willing to hear a dead voice resound, watch a table prance, have this utter stranger divine the baby name he had called his mother, describe the raspberry mole on his groin … for then it would be after all, if not as vulgarly as is thought here, a miraculous world.

Instead, and one must be content with that, it was a world of wonders. Beauties. Marvels, chief among them the volcano. But no miracles, no.

It is said that some years earlier the woman predicted the month and year of both eruptions, the lesser and the greater, that had recently disturbed the volcano's long slumber. He intends to make her speak of that. But of course he cannot come to the point right away, as he knows from more than a decade among these indolent, sly people. He must listen to many servile expressions of gratitude at the honor of being visited by the most excellent and exalted Cavaliere, the dearest friend and counselor of the young King (may age bring him wisdom!), who had deigned to lower his head to enter her humble abode. He must sip a sweetish brew that she calls tea, served by a lanky boy of around fifteen whose left eye is like a quail egg, and allow his slim hand to lie open in her plushy palm.