The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag

Author:Susan Sontag [Sontag, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780224029124
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2016-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

5

Another storm.

After leaving Naples in October, plodding nervily across the Mediterranean, past the ships of warring nations, through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the ocean, up the Iberian, then the French coast, clinging to the western ledge of Europe, the storeship Colossus, carrying two thousand rare antique vases in its entrails, had struck out for England and near the end of its two-month-long journey, off the Scilly Isles, ran into a merciless, protean storm, shuddered, rocked, took on water, fractured, foundered, and was wrecked. There was time to save all members of the crew. Time even to dump into a lifeboat one crate from the hold believed by the sailors to contain treasure—not one of the crates bearing the Cavaliere’s seal. The roiling waters rose over real treasure, the second and greater collection of vases that the Cavaliere had assembled.

Water. Fire. Earth. Air. Four modes of disaster. Possessions lost to fire disappear. They change into … air. Possessions lost to fire’s enemy, water, are not consumed, though they may break (if porous, like paper, bloat and rot). They still exist, possibly intact, but sunk, sequestered, out of reach. They are still there, decaying imperceptibly, encrusted by sea creatures, shifting aimlessly under the tides, buoyed up and sucked back in their little space—an unhappier fate than lying under the earth, for they are much farther down, much more inaccessible. What the ground covers is not so hard to bring up, and may have been uncannily preserved by earth-burial. Look at the cities doomed, then buried, by Vesuvius. But to be covered by water …

Having survived his storm, the Cavaliere still doesn’t know his vases were already lost to water several weeks before the flight from Naples. The Vanguard has made it safely to the Palermo harbor. And the relief at surviving the humiliating, storm-tossed passage dulled his anguish at the precipitous departure, which had allowed him to take only a select number of cherished objects in addition to his pictures. He tried not to think of all that he had left behind in his magnificently furnished houses, which now lie unguarded, awaiting their plunderers. He thought of his horses and seven handsome carriages, and Catherine’s spinet, harpsichord, and piano.

But surely he need not conclude that he would never see his abandoned possessions again. Never entertain guests at his Vesuvian villa. Never set out on horseback at dawn from the lodge in Caserta to the cries of beaters and hounds. Never watch beauty bathing from the rocks at Posillipo. Never again stand at the window of his observatory room, admiring the sweep of the bay and his dear mountain. No. No. Yes? No. The Cavaliere was as ill-prepared as any connoisseur of disaster for the real thing.

* * *

Temporarily then, for a short time only, they were to live in Palermo: the south of south.

Every culture has its southerners—people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing, brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more

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