Girolamo was now pale but strong. I worried for his immoderate grief at the loss of his friends. One of the Fathers told me, ‘He takes it hard; he seems to take on the pain of the whole community.’ I realised that they were proud of his ability to suffer like that. I did not know what to make of this, but it somehow disquieted me.
Byron feared the fever. He hated the sight of the funeral gondolas in procession and the dark-robed doctors hurrying through the streets. He complained to me that he smelt sickness in every alley. The very walls seemed to be sweltering a poisonous threat; he saw infection in every droplet that coursed down them. He fled. He rented for the summer the Villa Foscarini at La Mira, on the Brenta, some distance out of Venice. He took Marianna there. Hobhouse joined him. They rode horses on the long sands of the Lido. They watched beautiful sunsets. They passed happy months. Byron wrote till the early hours of the morning and came by gondola into Venice to see me on cooler days. While the typhus raged there, he avoided San Lazzaro.
At La Mira, under high clean skies, he enjoyed the effects of the heat; it lessened his appetite. His pallor, by careful management, increased. Hobhouse was at his side, Marianna in his arms. The only clouds on his horizon were those strange letters from Augusta, full of hints of melancholy and mysterious apprehensions, disorder and broken hearts.
‘What does she mean by these runes and imprecations?’ he asked me, flinging down another letter, pacing around my studio. ‘With all these megrims and mysteries I cannot understand whether she has a broken heart or earache. I give up on her.’ I think he was starting to guess at the truth, though he could not quite stomach the thought that Annabella had infiltrated his intimacy with Augusta.
Byron was floating like a bubble upon the water. He was not quite Venetian, but he was not quite anything else either. He was tired of himself, of the old tragic identity, of the constant confessional of his poetry. I think he had cleared his arteries of the poison of the past and he was bored with bleeding from the heart. I watched him changing. Even his posture was different – freer and looser. His face was in flux, too. He no longer looked out from under hunched eyebrows but cast careless glances and mischievous grins.
Byron was working on Beppo. He had been convulsed by a new poem by John Hookham Fere, a light satire imitated from the Italian poets. He seized upon a story recounted, ironically enough, by Marianna’s amiable spouse, about a lady who thinks she has lost her husband at sea, and takes a cavalier servente, or vice-husband, to deputise for him in every important little thing. A delicious dilemma ensues when the husband returns.
Into this story Byron poured all his cruel good humour, his old delight at Venetian amorality. In the process, he freed himself from the fetters of high tragedy that enveloped the living embodiment of Childe Harold. Beppo is an amoral, sensuous and cool romp. He read lines to me while I worked, and they entered my paintings, too. I was bemused to see him in this new state. It was like entertaining a new lover inside a body I already adored.
The moment night with dusky mantle covers
The skies (and the more duskily the better)
The time less liked by husbands than by lovers
Begins, and prudery flings aside her fetter;
And gaiety on restless tiptoe hovers,
Giggling with all the gallants who beset her;
And there are songs and quavers, roaring, humming,
Guitars, and every other sort of strumming.
I strummed the paintbrush and Maurizio. Byron strummed Marianna Segati, me, and the muses of the casino. Marianna was still queen of his household, but he had begun to detach himself from her. He mused on the awful notions of constancy he had witnessed in some Italian women. He had seen some ancient figures of eighty pointed out as morosi of forty, fifty and sixty years’ standing. This did not bear thinking about. For all her tiny size, Marianna was imperious, and she dared to criticise. Perhaps, I thought to myself, she lacked the intelligence not to do so. She was not delighted when Byron started to write poetry again. She did not want to philosophise about love, she just wanted to make it. I heard her shout at him, ‘If you loved me properly you would not make so many fine reflections, which are only good for birsi i scampi’ — cleaning shoes with, a versatile Venetian proverb.
Marianna started to misbehave. She sold the diamonds Byron had given her. He bought them back and gave them to her again. She was not at all embarrassed. I think she was scenting, in her primitive way, the end of Byron’s protection; she was laying her hands upon what she could in the time she had left. Bribing Signor Segati for the loan of his wife was also becoming expensive for Byron. Worse still, Marianna was beginning to display symptoms of jealousy. Well, she had reason for it, for apart from me, the nine muses at the casino, and random couplings on dark canals, Byron had found something else to capture his attention.
It was now the talk of Venice that Byron had made a new conquest. During a ride along the canal, it was reported, Byron had caught sight of a dark beauty. She caught sight of him too, and called out, in dialect.
‘Carissimo, you’re so kind to others – why don’t you give me a hand, too?’
‘You’re too pretty to need help, Signorina,’ laughed Byron.
‘You wouldn’t say that if you could see where I live. And it’s Signora, by the way. Not that I have a husband you’d say was worth the name. He’s never at home. In fact, I’d say there was a spare room to rent.’ She gave a low, throaty laugh, and looked boldly at Byron.
Margarita Cogni was twenty-two years old, illiterate, dramatically beautiful. Her sobriquet in her own family was La Mora, from her colour, which was very dark, dark as Othello, prince of murderous jealousy. When Byron proposed a rendezvous, she stared hard at his pocket. All married women had a lover in Venice, it seemed, whatever their class. It was just a question of the price. Margarita’s husband was a baker. Byron dubbed her ‘La Fornarina’, the baker’s wife. As such, she was not expensive. Marianna, a middle-class matron, had been more so.
It was all over Venice in days. There were a dozen witnesses to the memorable morning when Marianna sought out Margarita and insulted her. Margarita was unperturbed and returned the slight, with interest. The two women stood in the street and entertained all Venice with their exchange. Margarita told Marianna, ‘You are not his wife. You are his whore. I am his whore. What of it?’
Marianna spat, eloquently, but Margarita continued, ‘Your husband is a cuckold. Mine is another.’
Marianna raised her hand to slap her rival, but thought the better of it. Margarita was twice her size, a known brawler, and her voice was louder. Margarita pronounced finally, ‘And for the rest – why should you reproach me? If he prefers what is mine to what is yours – is it my fault?’
It’s all over with La Segati, was the word in the streets from that day forth. She’s priced herself out of a cosy income. The baker’s wife’s the one to watch.
The subject of this and many other discussions returned from La Mira to Venice late in the autumn, and plunged back into a social life lived out in the conversazione of Countess Marina Benzoni. Everything was changing. In January Hobhouse left again for England. On his last night they hired a gondola and two singers, who sat one at the prow and one at the stern of the boat. They embarked from the Piazzetta, and stopped at my studio to entice me to join them. The night was freezing but I wrapped myself in my cloak and slipped into the boat.
We flowed past all Byron’s favourite haunts, while the musicians strummed and sang fragments of lowlife street songs, which were absorbed into the fervent darkness like coins dropping into water. Everyone pulled on a bottle of fragolino, scuffling for it like puppies for a teat. The singing slipped into the bottle. Then there was just the quiet gulp of the water and the cradle-rocking of the benches where the friends were taking leave of each other, and taking stock of what was left. They talked quietly and seriously, side by side upon the narrow bench.
How different they were to look at – Hobhouse so ungainly, Byro
n so graceful – and how different they were to hear. I drifted in and out of their conversations, watching for the moments when I could see Girolamo’s face in Byron’s, the sweet moments when he was at peace.
As we passed San Vio, Byron said, ‘Love? I rather think of it as a hostile transaction.’
‘It can be otherwise.’
‘You think you shall find a better “otherwise” in England?’
‘Neither of us shall find it here.’
‘I shall not be looking.’
When Byron said this, Hobhouse looked at me, to see how I survived the insult. I smiled at him to show him that I took it well, in the spirit that it was meant, in the spirit that I was woman enough to understand when Byron needed his moments of drama and self-pity and that I must not take them personally. Venice makes him even sadder, I thought to myself.
Byron, after Hobhouse left, abandoned himself to the next Carnevale. Day became night for him. For weeks he never saw the sun. During the height of the revelry, he found himself consumed by a new amore with an unknown masked woman. She clutched the button of her moretta mask between her teeth so that she could not cry out even in her moments of dissolving joy. Byron told me, as if it meant nothing to me, ‘I don’t know exactly whom or what she is except that she is an insatiate of love, and won’t take money …’
He found out who she was when he discovered his symptoms.
The Gondolier Speaks
Can you imagine how it is to sleep like a milord? Never rising before the supper hour?
They said that he would not sleep with his women, even after you know what.
‘Out!’ he’d say, even before he was outside of them, if you know what I mean. Mi Morti!
Didn’t he ever worry that one day the tears might come round to himself?
He knew how to sleep, the milord. He never saw the morning light. I think it was probably deliberate. He didn’t want to see himself in it.
And it was probably that bastard milord looking to himself in another way, as well. He didn’t want to see the women then. Their faces are thinner-skinned in the mornings. You know what I mean. Their tears are closer to their eyes. So he kept his own eyes shut until they had put themselves back together.
After whatever he had done to them in the dead of the night before.
Chapter 6
L’amor fa passar el tempo,
e el temp fa passar l’amor.
Love makes the time pass,
but time makes love pass, too.
VENETIAN PROVERB
Carnevale 1818 left Byron with a love-disease, haemorrhoids and a fever. I saw the letter he wrote to Hobhouse, ‘Elena da Mosta, a Gentil Donna, was clapt, and she has clapt me; to be sure it was gratis, the first gonorrhoea I have not paid for.’
Carnevale ended again. The Venetians once more carried a black coffin round the city to show that the beast that had possessed them had now expired. Byron encoffined himself in a new home.
After he broke with Marianna it was obvious that Byron could no longer inhabit the Segati house in the Frezzeria. In June, he agreed to take one of the four Mocenigo palazzi on the volta, the crook, of the Grand Canal, at an annual rent of 4800 francs.
When I heard this news my heart somersaulted inside me. Yes, it was the same Palazzo Mocenigo where I had comforted Casanova after his night of losses at the table, and where I had memorised the guests’ faces to paint a Biribissi board of noble portraits blossoming from tulips and pineapples. Yes, it was the same Palazzo Mocenigo where Casanova and I had disported so lovingly behind the empty frame. In part of that palazzo still lived the now very elderly Maurizio Mocenigo, whom Casanova had suggested as my protector, with such disastrous results. And in another apartment in the same building lived his son Maurizio, who still loved me like an anemone.
‘So what do you know about the Palazzo Mocenigo?’ Byron asked me. The papers for the lease had just been signed. Fletcher was packing up his books and Marianna’s sobs could be heard in a distant room.
What did I know? At first, I told him what I was prepared to tell him.
I told him that the Mocenigos were one of the ancient and opulent families of Venice. As it grew the Mocenigo family had divided into more than twenty branches, as my own Cornaro family had done. Predominant, in their case, were the Mocenigos of San Stae and the Mocenigos of San Samuele. It was the latter seat that had been my haven with Casanova, and that was now to become Byron’s home.
I told him that Mocenigos were politicians, soldiers, patrons of the arts and sciences. Their portraits had been painted by Giorgione, Tiziano and Tintoretto. The Mocenigo dynasties gave Venice seven doges, Tommaso, Pietro and Alvise winning great battles against the Turks. Alvise had been a man of such noble courage that when he died the Ottomans decked their ships in black and dipped their crescent banners in the sea.
I told him that the house of Mocenigo was also disgraced. The great shame of the house hung over Giovanni Mocenigo, who had, in 1591, invited the saintly philosopher Giordano Bruno to be his guest, hoping to learn from him the secrets of alchemy. When the formula was not forthcoming, Giovanni denounced his guest as a heretic. Bruno was burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome.
Byron was not satisfied with my recitation. He drummed his fingers while I recited my history like a schoolgirl. ‘You have not told me everything, Cecilia. Tell me more. I want the dirty laundry.’
So I told him about the dark times when noble Venetians cultivated the habit of murdering their debtors. Domenigo Mocenigo stabbed the brother of one of his, and his name was erased from the Libro d’oro. I told him about the notorious beauty Marina Mocenigo. I told him about Lucrezia Basadonna, a Mocenigo wife, who had been betrayed by her English lover. Rosalba Carriera painted her with the Mocenigo pearls heavy upon her neck. I told him about Giustiniana Gussoni, the eighteen-year-old bride of a Mocenigo, who eloped in a gondola with the Count de Tassis.
‘That’s more like it,’ said Byron. ‘Any more scandal?’
‘English scandal?’
‘Any kind of scandal will serve, so long as it’s filthy.’
So I told him about the eccentric Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had lived there before I was born, the great friend of Antonio Mocenigo — ‘Yes! I’ve read her letters! What a lively old piece!’ – and I told him about another scandalous Englishwoman, Lady Arundel, who had been implicated in the alleged treason of her supposed Venetian lover, Antonio Foscarini.
‘So it’s seen some passion in its time, that palazzo!’ Byron exclaimed.
‘And such parties!’ I said. I told them how Pietro Mocenigo once spent, in one night alone, 40,000 ducati on wine, food and showers of gold. I told him about the rose essence sent by Madame de Pompadour and how it wafted over noble heads gathered around the gaming table at sumptuous parties in the last days of the Republic.
I still did not tell him about my magical night behind the empty frame with Casanova.
In acquiring the Palazzo Mocenigo, Byron acquired a palatial way of life. He now lived like a Venetian aristocrat, with his own gondola moored to his own blue and white paline, and his own gondolier, Tita Falcieri, a huge man with extravagant black moustachios. When not poling the gondola, Tita acted as both butler and pimp.
The first time I returned to the Palazzo Mocenigo I was almost afraid to approach it. I came by gondola along the Canal. It was a day when a strata of clear water seemed to hang above the green mud like a banner of silk. I stood sniffing the air on the sea-steps. The water was brighter than the sky that day. The right and proper tonal hierarchy of the world was reversed. It felt uneasy. Everything loomed out of its own mist, the way a sfumato outline gives every head a halo in certain paintings. The whole world is pulsing with the disturbances of souls in paintings like that and on days like this one. It has to be found, a language for this. I find it in my paint.
I asked myself how I would paint the Mocenigo now. The fall of the Republic, it seemed, had dragged the Mocenigo down with it. The pa
lazzo looked frailer, less prosperous than before. Its lion-coloured pigment still clung to the exterior, but it was dirty and faded, licked and clawed by the mist and the sea. The twelve lion heads still loomed above the windows of the piano nobile but they seemed diminished, shabbier. Gone were the sea-porter in his velvet doublet and the ten gondolas that used to be tethered there. Now, if I were painting it, I would add more Lead White to the Burnt Terra di Sienna than I would have done thirty years before. I would thereby make it look less substantial and more dangerous. I would add grey to the blue of the paline, as time had done. With Lamp Black on a dry brush I would eat away the feet of the sea-doors, as the tiny insects had done since I was last there.
I opened what was left of the sea-doors. There was a lurch and a splintering inside the heavy wood. I walked inside, feeling the damp air in my lungs, running my eyes over its unchecked depredations on the red velvet and mirrors I had last seen so many years before. I climbed the stairs. Yes, the lanterns on the out-thrust arms still lit the stone corridors. But now mummified flies swayed in thick cobwebs in high corners. Trails of moisture bled down the walls.
At the door to Byron’s apartments I stopped for a moment. I closed my eyes and travelled back in my memories. They were still so rich, so vivid! I indulged in a sudden fantasy that I might open the door and find inside that party of 1782 still in flow. I wanted to see the men gay as butterflies and powdered as pastry. I wanted to see the courtesans and the great ladies, the luxuriant plates piled high with delicacies, to hear the clink of the counters on the gaming tables, to see the men leaning over their lovers with the silk embroidery of their frock-coats lambent in the candlelight. I wanted to hear the confection of elegant voices, the high-bred buzz of gossip and flirtation. Most of all I wanted to see Casanova, opening his arms to me.
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