The Volcano Lover Read Online Free PDF Page B

virtu and an extravagant collection of precious stones and minerals. He wanted to impress his uncle and he did. The Cavaliere recognized the abstracted, wandering, tensely amiable look of the collector—mineralogy was to be the ruling passion of Charles’s life—and took an immediate liking to him. Dutiful in the pursuit of entertainment, Charles procured the sexual services of a local courtesan named Madame Tschudi (distantly related to the harpsichord-making family), sat through a few evenings at the opera in his uncle’s box, bought ices and watermelon from the vendors on the Toledo, and avowed that he found Naples neither charming nor picturesque but squalid, boring, and dirty. He listened devoutly to his aunt at the harpsichord (Kuhnau, Royer, Couperin). He inspected with envy his uncle’s hoard of paintings, statues, and vases; but rough lumps of tufa with pieces of lava or marine shells embedded in them, the fragments of a volcanic bomb, or the bright yellow and orange salts he was shown only made him think with passion of his crystallized rubies, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds—these could be called beautiful. He washed his hands often. And he resolutely refused to climb the mountain.
    A formidable though benevolent uncle would be too intimidating without some large eccentricity that made one feel a little protective. Declining the Cavaliere’s second invitation to accompany him on a climb, Charles pleaded an intestinal weakness, the lack of a taste for danger. He hoped it would be taken as flattering rather than impertinent if he invoked the obvious classical allusion (many of the Cavaliere’s friends in England made it): Remember, I shouldn’t like to hear that you’ve suffered the fate of the Elder Pliny. And now the Cavaliere, having just acquired a favorite nephew, could return the compliment: Then you shall be the Younger Pliny and report my death to the world.
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    Then as now an ascent had several stages. The road, in our own century turned into a motorway, did not exist then. But there was already a trail on which one came about two-thirds of the way, as far as the natural trough between the central cone and Mount Somma. This valley, now carpeted with black lava from the 1944 eruption, had trees, bramble, and high grasses. There the horses were left to graze while the volcano pilgrims continued up to the crater on foot.
    Having left his horse with a groom, grasping his walking stick, pouch slung over one shoulder, the Cavaliere marched firmly up the slope. The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as in a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants. And that is happening this morning, early morning on this occasion, except for the cold, except for the pain in his ears, from which his broad hat doesn’t protect him. For the work of mindlessness there should not be any pain. He passed through the trees (a century earlier the slopes had been thick with forests and teeming with game), and beyond the tree line, where the wind cut more sharply. The trail darkened, steepened, past tracks of black lava and rises of volcanic boulders. It began to feel like climbing now, his stride slowed, the stretch of muscles became pleasantly perceptible. He didn’t have to stop to catch his breath but he did halt several times to scan the reddish-brown ground, looking for the spiky rocks with seams of color.
    The ground turned grey, loose, quaggy—hindering, by yielding to, every step. The wind pushed against his head. Nearing the top, his ears hurt so much he stuffed them with wax.
    Reaching the boulder-rimmed summit, he paused and rubbed his soft, icy ears. He gazed out and down at the iridescent blue skin of the bay. Then he turned. He never approached the crater without apprehension—partly the fear of danger, partly the fear of disappointment. If the mountain spat fire,