Carnevale

by Michelle Lovric

  Chapter 8

  La mare sèmena, la morte tol su.

  What the mother sows, death reaps.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  From the first, my customers were surprised to see the profusion of Madonnas in my studio. They soon became accustomed to it. I had become obsessed with copying the great Madonnas of La Serenissima. Giovanni Bellini I copied, and Tiziano, and Veronese. I copied the Greek icons from our churches: Madonnas of Tenderness with their hands cupped around little knees or around the faces of the little babies who swarmed up to their cheeks.

  The Christ child always had Girolamo’s face.

  Other than that, I copied them faithfully, absorbing the Madonnas’ beauty. I did not paint my own face, indeed I felt I did not deserve to be among them. My image with Girolamo’s should not hang anywhere, should it? I had abandoned my baby. Painted Madonnas keep their colourless tears in the well of their pale round eyes. A good painter will make you feel them beneath the surface. And so I tried to keep mine inside me. But it did not always work out like that. Sometimes I erupted in noisy tears while I painted, and stood sobbing in front of my own work.

  When I painted my son, I gave him everything. I gave him kings to visit him, I gave him the soft warm stench of beasts to surround him. I gave him frankincense, gold and myrrh. Then I read somewhere that myrrh was used for embalming. This child of mine was not born to die, I told myself. So when I painted the container of the myrrh it was empty inside. My baby would not die. I painted him ‘argento vivo’– silvery with life.

  The Armenians had no wealth. They had only their minds, but of those they gave exhaustively to my son. They fed his brain with good thoughts and fine words. I saw him becoming wise, alight with knowledge. I knew they saw him as one of the chosen ones. This worried me, in view of the sad history of their faith. Did they think that this baby of mine was born to suffer and die for humanity’s sins?

  Girolamo had been baptised by the monks. I was allowed to watch from behind a curtain as my little son was passed from hand to hand. I saw the gold cup arch over his head, turn and drop the arc of water upon his tiny head. He had never known rain, my baby, in the high skies of Albania. I prayed he never would. I saw a solemn young altar-boy attending with a long white taper. He was absorbed in his ceremony, concentrating on his role. This was my little Girolamo’s fate. I already knew that I would not be allowed to watch his acceptance into the novitiate.

  My desires and aversions developed as Girolamo grew older. At first, I could not bear mothers with babies. Then I could not bear mothers with little stumbling children; then mothers with little boys who walked upright and could argue with their mamas. I never had that luxury with Girolamo. From Girolamo I had the most perfect crystalline courtesy. The manners of San Lazzaro were so decorous as to desex us all. Girolamo bowed to me as he bowed to the Fathers. He respected me. I was an adult, and my art was a special kind of religion in his eyes, I think.

  But there was such grace about him! Such fervour in his politeness! Such a winning modesty! Such a delectable crinkle around the eyes when he smiled! Such a sweet moue of the lips when he returned to gravity! At all these times, and when he bowed to me, he reminded me of Casanova.

  But he was better than me. He was better than both of us. He had been born with an inner grace, a light inside. Byron had the same thing in a physical way; I still envisioned an alabaster lamp when I thought of him. Girolamo’s light was truer because it came from his soul.

  I was less than Girolamo, because I had not learnt to bite my flaying tongue. I still hurt Sofia and Maurizio with irony and worse.

  I was less than Girolamo because I had not conquered my love for Byron. I still wanted him, and I still burned for him. I had not learnt to renounce him. I was still weak, infected by my stubborn useless desire.

  Chapter 9

  El matrimonio nasce da l’amore come Vazéto dal vin.

  Marriage comes from love the way vinegar comes from wine.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  When he finally arrived, Annabella told everyone afterwards, she found her fiancé coarser, somehow sullied since they last met. As well she might, I thought, when I read her account years later. Moreover, she was disturbed by the dark and frequent self-reproachful allusions he muttered in their few stilted conversations. He had not brought an engagement ring or a gift. A prenuptial agreement was signed and its embarrassing details were circulated in gleeful whispers.

  It was Hobhouse, of course, who would describe the wedding to me and the pathos of Byron’s terror, which he had tried to disguise with an acrid graveyard humour. Byron had wanted Hobhouse and other friends to find their own brides, and share his torture. He fantasised about all his friends being bound together, as if to receive a simultaneous electric shock. ‘I could not oblige,’ said Hobhouse, ignoring my interrogatively arched eyebrows, ‘but I came, with all the support I could give him. He seemed like a man condemned to the cruellest death.’

  Hobhouse, as you know, had an abiding love of plodding detail. His brain was a vast repository with no classification system. When he described the wedding, he omitted no detail, visual or emotional. If I were the kind of artist who did wedding portraits, I could have painted a picture of the supposedly happy couple, from his words alone.

  Byron wore black to his wedding, rejecting the traditional English blue. He refused to be married in a church, so the wedding took place at his new wife’s family home. Byron had to be called away from target practice to say his vows.

  Annabella appeared in a muslin gown trimmed with lace at the hem, a white muslin jacket, and nothing on her head. She was plain as a shepherdess. She looked steadily at Byron as the parson intoned the rites. Her answers fell like peals of small bells. She had achieved her conquest, an innocent conquest. ‘I am sure that is just how she felt,’ said Hobhouse. ‘She meant no harm.’

  Throughout the ceremony, Byron muttered his responses, as if confessing a small and shameful felony. When he vowed to endow his wife with all his worldly goods, he smiled ironically at Hobhouse, and they telepathically added up his total debts. When it was over, Byron gave no sign of pleasure at the deed being done, or of affection for his new wife. He bolted to a corner like a wronged animal, where he stood pale and glowering. No one dared approach him to offer congratulations.

  It was January 2nd 1815, dark and stormy. The guests proceeded silently to the reception chamber, as if to a wake. Hobhouse, for one, felt as if he had buried a friend. Certainly, Byron looked a walking corpse. He was, said Hobhouse, so pale as to be a species of light blue. ‘He looked inhuman.’

  The wedding cake was stale, having been baked a month before, and kept waiting for the reluctant bridegroom.

  ‘Apparently, no one had thought it worthwhile to bake a new one, as there was every chance that he would not appear at all,’ explained Hobhouse. ‘As I remember it, Annabella’s hand shook as she tried to pour the tea, and the rattling of the silver teapot was the only noise for a very long time. No one had anything to say. It was the most silent party you ever saw, even in England.’

  After trying in vain to masticate the cake, the guests left as soon as they could. Byron, sitting in the carriage about to depart on his honeymoon journey, would not let go of Hobhouse’s hand. The wedding, it seemed, had indeed electrified Byron. Hours later, he still appeared spectral, unreal, unlike himself.

  ‘Everything was finished,’ remembered Hobhouse. ‘The horses were snorting and chafing. I believe that Byron’s dangerous quietness had infected them with anxiety. Everyone else looked away in embarrassment. At the last minute, Byron stared at his hands enclosing mine, and said to me, “Look, these small white hands are sold into slavery now.” He would never have left. It was Annabella who signalled to the coachman to pull away. My hands slipped out of his grasp. He looked straight ahead, not at her. I wondered then what lay in store for the poor lady, who seemed at that moment so much in charge of her destiny.’

  The horses started off. Hobhouse be
came a pin-prick in the distance. Annabella sat patiently by the stranger she had married.

  The Cat Speaks

  The yellow silk coverlet in Cecilia’s studio is a diary of my comings and goings, my triumphs over fur and feather at either end of my digestive tract. Look at my work! Blood, mud, small regurgitated skeletons and skulls, pale ornamental paw prints upon the yellow silk.

  By the records I keep here Cecilia may know that I am happy and successful.

  Cecilia is my woman. We are married.

  I could purr and fawn around her to reassure her about this, but I know a better way to keep her love and attention. I treat her coolly and this keeps her passionate, and this keeps us both happy.

  I don’t often look her in the face when she talks to me. Sometimes it is just too much effort to mew so I open my mouth silently to show that it has occurred to me to address her. Cecilia understands. We are married.

  Cecilia is important to me. It is against her backdrop that I enact my daily dramas of murder, disappointment, sleep and sex. I share my fleas with her. I sing my special Chicken Song to her when she comes to the studio with a damp parcel from the butcher. I sneer at her only when she behaves incongruously. I am deliberately rude to her only when she leaves me no choice.

  When all is a posto I reward her with passive approval. I love her a little more in the winter when it is cold outside. Sometimes she eats something luscious and then I sniff her mouth as if kissing it. I would love her more if we were not married, but that is my nature.

  I am sorry about the coverlet. It’s simply that when my feet are clean they don’t feel like walking on silk. That, too, is my nature.

  Chapter 10

  Matrimoni e macaroni – se non i xe caldi no i xe boni.

  Marriage and macaroni – if they are not hot, they are not good.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  Annabella’s own account of their honeymoon makes sad reading. For her, the joy closed up the moment it should have blossomed. In the carriage, it seemed that Byron remained eerily silent for several hours, and then burst into an Albanian dirge, howling as if at the malevolent fate which had married him to Annabella Milbanke. It must have been the same savage noise that he had made as we sat together on the window-sill in Tepelene.

  As the light failed and the snow closed in, he vented all his bitterness against his bride and her family.

  ‘You are a fool to have married me,’ were the first words Annabella, apparently, heard from her new husband.

  They arrived in the evening at Halnaby, the house where they were to begin their married life. It seems, from her coy chronicle, that Byron deflowered Annabella, peremptorily, on the sofa before dinner. Yes, I thought, he would not make a ceremony of it. He ate in silence, with his arm around his plate, as if she might steal the very food from his fork. He told her that she could sleep with him if she must, but he preferred his own company. Before he lay down, facing away from her, he placed a dagger and two pistols beside the bed. Annabella climbed in beside him. He did not turn to her. She did not know yet that he hated to sleep with his women. She reported later that when he awoke in the middle of the night, and saw the firelight flickering on the red curtains, he screamed that he was in Hell.

  But it was Annabella who had fallen from grace. Byron tortured his wife with words and with black, frigid silence, and with a clear and insatiable desire for the presence of Augusta. ‘Annabella was not stupid,’ Hobhouse told me. ‘Her suspicions about the true nature of his relationship with Augusta were surely thrust upon her with her own first physical experience. Byron wanted her to know.

  ‘He wanted to punish her as much as possible for taking his liberty. And he wanted to test her.’

  ‘He was testing her love? To see if it came with conditions? Like a naughty child with his mother?’

  ‘You could be right, Cecilia. You Italians know about mother-love, don’t you?’

  And so Byron tested Annabella, it seems from her recitals, to the full extent of her capacity to suffer, and her proud determination to love him.

  The day after the wedding he announced to Annabella, ‘I have done that for which I can never forgive myself.’ She gently urged him to unburden himself, but he replied that she ‘could know nothing of the things to which he alluded – good women could know nothing’. Finally, he mocked her with terrifying tales of insanity on both sides of his family.

  Caroline Lamb, deep in chapter XIX of the second volume of Glenarvon, described what may have happened to Annabella. When I read this page, I felt the warmth of truth rising from it. In Byron’s own copy of the book, I later found he had underlined in red crayon the following passages:

  Glenarvon said there was a horrid secret, which weighed upon his mind. He would start at times, and gaze on vacancy; then turn to Calantha, and ask her what she had heard and seen. His gestures, his menaces were terrific. He would talk to the air; then laugh with convulsive horror; and gazing wildly around, enquire of her, if there were not blood upon the earth, and if ghosts of departed men had not been seen by some.

  Calantha thought that madness had fallen upon his mind, and wept to think that talents such as his were darkened and shrouded over by so heavy a calamity. But when the fierce moment was passed, tears would force their way into his eyes, and placing her hand upon his burning head, he would call her his sole comforter, the only hope that was left him upon earth, his dearest, his only friend …

  ‘But Annabella broke him down in the end,’ said Hobhouse. ‘He had not really been in possession of himself since the wedding.’

  Finally, exhausted by his own performance, Byron started to talk to his wife. After bottles of claret, he must have raved to her of his childhood abuse at the hands of Nurse May and his ungentle mother. As if to compensate, he let Annabella mother him, tenderly, like the women of his poems. ‘She was allowed to tend his little foot,’ said Hobhouse, wonderingly, ‘bathe his head with eaude-cologne, or feel his pulse when his hypochondria persuaded him of some deadly ailment.’ I could hear the jealousy growing in Hobhouse’s voice. I realised, too, that though he tried to be fair, Hobhouse could not make himself actually like Annabella. Maybe he envied her these intimate ministrations she was so briefly allowed.

  Annabella nursed him back to physical health. But she made him strong enough to hurt her. When he was well again, he turned on her. Annabella would suffer for the freedom she had stolen from him. Byron revolted at husbandhood. He revolted at her vision of his redemption. And every cloying ‘dearest’ and every clinging touch at his elbow would be punished. She had only to wait and see.

  When the couple visited Augusta’s home, it seems that Byron subjected Annabella to endless humiliation. Early one night, he dismissed her as the siblings sat cosily together: ‘We don’t want you, my charmer.’ Hours later, when he came to bed, he told her, ‘Now I have her, you will find that I can do without you.’ Night after night, Annabella lay in bed listening to their intimate laughter downstairs. Byron, who had confessed sympathies for Herod, changed his attitude and showed great affection to little Medora, and called her his child. I imagined Annabella leaning over the cradle and looking from the baby to her husband. I saw her suddenly growing white and rigid, taking a step backwards, her eyes ablaze with tears.

  She would have been shocked when he alluded with great authority to the fact that Augusta wore the new-fangled drawers. She would have borne in silence their giggles and knowing smiles. It must have seemed to her that her silent suffering somehow added to their complicit pleasures, which otherwise excluded her. But every night, when he finished with Augusta, he performed his nuptial duties with Annabella, without words and without gentleness.

  In the early hours, Byron would leave both women, to sleep alone. Both Annabella and Augusta must have suffered equally from Byron’s horrendous moods, and drew, in some ways, closer together, to shelter themselves from the fire. And in the middle of this heat, Annabella conceived a child.

  The Byrons moved to London. Numbe
r 13, Piccadilly Terrace, I read in the newspapers. I guessed from the description of its style that it was a house well beyond their means. Ten days later Augusta arrived. Again, Annabella lay upstairs in bed, listening to the intimate laughter late in the night. Annabella, disgusted and terrified, must have begun, at this point, to discard her romantic notions of herself as gentle saviour of her husband’s soul. Nowadays, I imagined, she thought more often of Byron’s dagger by her lonely bedside, and wished to plunge it into her sister-in-law’s heart.

  In Caroline’s Glenarvon, a discarded lover warns the poor Calantha about what she should expect from the man in whom she has placed her faith and entrusted her reputation. When I read this passage, I thought of Annabella, and wondered at which moment she allowed herself to see the truth about her marriage.

  But there will come a time when you will draw his character with darker shades, and taking from it all the romance and mystery of guilt, see him, as I do, a cold malignant heart, which the light of genius, self-love and passion, have warmed at intervals; but which, in all the detail of every-day life, sinks into hypocrisy and baseness. Crimes have been perpetrated in the heat of passion, even by noble minds; but Glenarvon is little, contemptible and mean. He unites the malice and petty vices of a woman, to the perfidy and villainy of a man. You do not know him as I do.

  Byron, it seemed, was violently allergic to his marriage. In London, his behaviour, if possible, worsened. The debts mounted, and it looked as if the bailiffs and the midwife would be calling on Annabella at the same time. Byron was scarcely at home. He had taken up with an actress, Susan Boyce. He was open in his infidelity and announced to Annabella that he intended to continue with Susan and anyone else who took his fancy. He seemed not to be married at all. The days when she bathed his forehead and tended his feet were long forgotten. She must have almost missed the days when he had hated her with violence. Now the neglect was comprehensive.