‘You know Fletcher has grand plans to establish a pasta factory in Knightsbridge, Cecilia?’ he told me. ‘I remember when he was too nice-gutted to dip his tongue in a bowl of macaroni! Look at him now! His impudence has a kind of monstrous elegance to it, doesn’t it? He tells me, by the way, that I myself may never return to London because of my little “fox’s paw” regarding my wife. I see you knitting your brow, Cecilia. A “fox’s paw” is what the French, in their ignorance, call a faux pas.’
I watched him tormenting them and I burned at the injustice. It was thin amusement to watch them struggle, ensnared in his sarcasm. I, with my lingua biforcuta, could at least engage in equal, or almost equal hostilities with him.
I asked myself why I neglected my own good work to spend time with this man, who made my nostrils steam? Why did I want to spend a night, an evening, an hour with this man? Mary Shelley’s words came crowding into my head: addicted not just to wine, or even a lover, but to their mistakes … a dangerous hybrid … a lapse of taste.
Over these thoughts, I superimposed my own.
Perhaps Girolamo knitted me to him.
Perhaps he was my way of taking responsibility: he was the nemesis of the men I had used for the shape of their bodies on my canvas and discarded. But no, I thought, they did not require avenging. They had left my studio happy, rubbing their eyes, sniffing their fingers.
Perhaps, as I had told my cat, I was still waiting for my chance to avenge myself for the treatment I had received in Albania.
But even this was a self-deception. I saw him because I still loved him and because I was flattered that he still came to me and called me to himself. But the rules of our engagement had changed now to be even more in his favour. In Venice he allowed me to align my life with his, but it was all one to him what I did. At times he was available to me; at others not. I gave myself wholly to him, but he picked at me querulously, like a spoilt invalid at a plate of delicacies.
He had taken residence in my imagination like a tapeworm in the gut. I did not know how to expel him. It seemed that this style of tapeworm fed ferociously on neglect. So he grew inside me. Yes, he was malignant as a parasite, but I was addicted to my mistake. I thought of Mary Shelley’s words but I did not have the strength to act on them. My desire for Byron still enfeebled me.
I did the only thing I could: I committed my pain to paper.
None of them, not even Byron, ever saw my private sketches – the ones I made when his. back was turned or when he was engaged with La Fornarina. These were the ones that showed the extra chin, the flesh squeezing out over the rings on his hands, the watering eyes I saw early in the morning when he returned from the casino. But I recorded it all, when Byron wasn’t looking: the dark shadows under his eyes and the early grey hairs behind his ears, the stooped shoulders, and the emptiness.
The Gondolier Speaks Again
Remember me? I was the one who brought that English milord into La Serenissima. She was never quite so serene after that. The town was rocked with oaths. I should know. We gondoliers are the treasure house of the vulgar tongue here. I could teach you a thing or two!
I brought a pestilence here, if you ask me. Venice exiles all her own best men – my grandfather, by the way, served Casanova when he escaped from the Leads – and welcomes in the leavings and refuse from every other land in Europe. Mi Morti! They roost in our palazzi and foul our canals with the English Overcoats they fill with their slimy seed.
I heard that Byron could make a girl love him just by ignoring her. Just by pretending she did not exist. He could turn a sweet fanciulla into a stinking heap of moans.
I want to tell you what Byron did to my brother-in-law’s cousin’s wife. You probably knew her. Wild woman, that Margarita Cogni. She would tear off her blood-rag to strangle a woman who came near her Byron. But he almost killed her by not loving her enough. She was not the only one. That artist, Cecilia Cornaro, the one who does portraits, she was sick for love of him, too. Don’t tell me it takes TWO years to make a portrait of one ugly little English lord.
I wonder if she or Margarita or any of the other bitches ever knew that what he really wanted was his own kind?
We did, we gondoliers. Because we carry people every day to their secret desires. We carry messages; the great and good use us to fare I’ambasciata. We know all the hidden staircases and the niches in walls where love letters are kept. We know the ladies’ maids. We know their mistresses. They think we are anonymous. Welded to the boat, like horse-heads onto black horses. But we are not. We see everything.
And I saw Byron with his boys. He did not take them to the Albrizzi or the Benzona conversazione. And what he did at Arsenale with the sailor boys, well, that is between him and his conscience.
Nor could he take Margarita to the Albrizzi’s or the Benzona’s. She’d have bitten the leg off any of those so-called ladies who hung on his words. She’d have taken off her clothes in the middle of the conversazione and shown them exactly what it was that endeared her to Byron.
She showed all Venice during the Historical Regatta – there they were, the two of them, with her petticoats flung over his shoulder, on the balcony at the Palazzo Mocenigo while the noblemen’s barge sailed past, and the Princess of Madagascar on board, too.
He got rid of her. Perhaps she was too much like him. Byron was the kind, and Margarita was the kind, too, to make Carnevale boil over.
Chapter 10
Chi va col porco impara a sgrugnar.
He who runs with the pigs learns to grunt.
VENETIAN PROVERB
Byron’s solicitor Hanson arrived from London, with a new will to sign. Hanson and his son disembarked from their gondola at the sea-steps of the Palazzo Mocenigo. As they walked into the covered courtyard, the stink of manure must have assaulted them. From upstairs we heard the dogs and birds make a cacophony around them. They must have stumbled, disbelievingly, past the fox and the wolf and Byron’s graveyard of dismantled carriages until they found the dim marble staircase to Byron’s apartments. But of all the beasts, I suspect that it was Byron himself who shocked Hanson the most. I read it in the older man’s reaction as he was ushered into the study where I was at work on my painting, and Byron on his writing. Hanson’s startled face made me look at my lover in a new way.
It was true. Byron’s skin was now bloated and sallow. He looked ten years older than his thirty. He had lately grown very fat again. His shoulders were round and the knuckles of his hands were lost in pink flesh. His eyes looked boiled, lacking in lustre. Even his hair looked dead. The copper lights of it had vanished and now it hung about his pale face like faded silk curtains. That day I realised that he now looked, as he had dreaded all his life to look, like his mother. Hanson did not dare say as much, but the fact that he mentioned Lady Catherine Byron so often, and so unnecessarily, in the course of the conversation, utterly gave him away. I would look later at the miniature of her that Byron kept hidden in the lowest drawer of his desk and understand. The family face had indeed caught up with Byron.
Byron signed all the papers quickly, with Fletcher and myself as the witnesses. They included a new codicil to his will which vouchsafed 5000 pounds to Allegra provided that she did not marry a native of Great Britain. The Hansons left as soon as they could. They were visibly afraid of corruption. They seemed nervous of Byron’s new, dangerous laugh, and the excesses of his conversation. I saw them exchange glances when Byron savaged his nails, already gnawed to the quick, and I saw them take note of the tears of wine on his silk waistcoat. Venice, the Hansons seemed to think, was rotting Byron’s soul. I watched them hurry out of the door, accompanied by an unsteady Byron, and I knew that they would not be back, despite his slurred invitations and aggressive bonhomie.
I followed them down to the courtyard. As the Hansons stepped into their gondola, Byron shouted at Fletcher, ‘Spooney and Young Spooney have left. Now go up and count the silver. And get me a couple of good-natured girls from the nugging-shop – you know w
hat I mean. The kind who when you ask them to sit down will lie down.’
Bleary-eyed, he staggered back into the palazzo.
‘Inglese italianizzato, diavolo incarnato,’ I said quietly to the Hansons, ‘Italianised Englishman, the devil incarnate.’
They looked at me in terror. For them, I was part of the problem, as were the dozens of my portraits of himself that Byron now kept disposed about him. To Hanson and young Hanson, I was nothing more than a lying, corrupting Venetian mirror. Their gondola slid away into the water and they did not look back.
Like the original Venetians, fleeing persecution at the hands of the barbarians, Byron had come to Venice when the world turned hostile against him. He had chosen a floating refuge with walls of water and a secret language as soft and treacherous as the curve of a wave. Never mind the Fall of the Republic, Byron rejoiced in the fact that the whole city of Venice had twice been excommunicated by the Pope.
Venice laid on a noble kind of exile. One of the things Byron liked most about exile was that in Europe his title received greater deference than it did at home. In England, he was just a minor aristocrat hanging on to the coat-tails of high society. His claims were slight, his ancestry compromised with scandal. As a result he carried his aristocracy like a raised fist in front of him. He had felt the cold contempt of his superiors: as a result his own slender silver spoon had left a nasty taste in his mouth. But on the Continent, as in the East, he could reinvent himself as a prince. What is more, in his own eyes he was still a beautiful prince distinguished by his small ears and exquisite hands.
Byron was reading Voltaire and revelling in his cool, satiric spirit. He was still writing his comedy of Don Juan, applying his new ideas. His letters had always been cruelly funny. Now he presented that side of himself to the public. Childe Harold had grown up into a cynical adolescent, lashing out at every constraint that offended him and at others merely to shock.
‘What do you think of this?’ he asked as he read me pieces of Don Juan. Byron was writing about shipwreck, lingering death, the devouring of a pet dog, and finally cannibalism, with humour. The blackest core of the comedy, in which the cannibals go mad, was based on the true tale of the wreck of the Medusa, which went down off the coast of Senegal in 1816.
I shall always think that Don Juan was a faster’s fantasy, which explains some of its excesses. Since the Hansons had left, and perhaps with the memory of their faces in his mind, Byron was dieting again, trying to scrape loose the tallow that had gathered on his bones. He would exist upon dry biscuits and soda water for days on end. Finally, driven by the buzzing in his ears and the thunder in his belly, he would stride into the kitchen and scrape into one bowl a disgusting mess of fish, rice, old vegetables. He deluged it all with vinegar, bolting it down in gagging swallows. ‘I have no palate,’ he told me, when I remonstrated. ‘It all tastes the same to me. But the vinegar – that I can hear on my tongue, at least.’ He measured his waist and his wrists every morning. The tiniest increase brought forth the glass jar of Epsom salts. This was followed by his usual basin of pitchy green tea, unmilked and unsweetened.
By now, Byron had only one English friend left in Venice, the English Consul, Richard Hoppner, who had rescued Allegra. In April 1818, Byron’s exile was further confirmed: news of Lady Melbourne’s death arrived. I was with him when the letter came.
‘I have always dreaded this,’ he told me. ‘She was my mentor, my muse, the companion of my spirit. Now I am alone in the world.’ What about me? I clamoured silently.
With Lady Melbourne dead, there was one less attachment to England. For years now, Byron had been referring to England, in letters to friends, as your island. Byron nursed a sore reason to stay away from his birthplace. Annabella was still there, manufacturing poison against him.
One day he came rampaging triumphantly into my studio waving a piece of paper. He dropped it in my lap. Newstead Abbey had been sold for 94,500 pounds. This was an unimaginable sum of lire.
‘You sold your home?’ I asked. ‘Are you not sad today?’
‘I am happy, because I am free now.’
‘To me, you look sad. And I know about your face.’
Byron sat in the window of the Mocenigo and watched women in slow gondolas passing back and forwards with copies of Childe Harold ostentatiously open upon their laps. Very occasionally he would summon one inside. At night, he sat brooding on his terrace with the candles extinguished. He was beginning to understand what was happening to Augusta. In hours like these, he could not stop thinking of the virtuous monster Annabella lurking in London, poisoning Augusta’s mind against him.
Don Juan gave Byron a chance to take revenge on Annabella for all he had suffered. He depicted Annabella, Princess of Parallelograms, as Donna Inez, perfect past all parallel. But in Byron’s newly created world, where values were turned upside down, such perfection was insipid and pretentious. Byron ridiculed Annabella’s superficial grasp of the classics and modern languages. Crueller still, he mocked her face. He wrote that she ‘look’d a lecture’, with each eye a sermon and her brow a homily. ‘A walking calculation,’ he taunted her. ‘Morality’s prim personification.’
Murray was afraid to publish Don Juan. As delicately as possible, he explained that Byron, in his exile, might have distanced himself just a little too far from the mores of the English. Byron, who had been idolised for the waywardness of the earlier poems, disagreed. He swore that England was clamouring for a fresh, robust humour. This might be so, the publisher conceded, but the English would not stomach the indecency and irreverence of Don Juan. He asked Byron to remove some of the indelicacies. He would receive a dusty reply. ‘You shall not make Canticles of my Cantos … I will have none of your damned cutting and slashing,’ declared Byron in a letter he read aloud to me as he scratched it across the page. Finally, he threw down the pen.
‘Cecilia, he’s pathetic. He wants to cut the bollocks off my Donny Jonny because he has none of his own.’
‘Perhaps he looks also at the poetry?’ I asked, mildly.
‘But the poetry is the thing! It may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? – and tooled in a post-chaise?— in a hackney coach? – in a gondola? – against a wall? – in a court carriage? – in a vis-à-vis? – on a table? – and under it?’
‘That is true,’ I said. ‘But is it necessary to offend them so? Could you not extract the passion, the estro, and sublimate it, cleverly and subtly, into something that would make them think on themselves, rather than something that makes them afraid?’
‘Damn them, they need me, Cecilia, to blow the dust off their privates. At least to give them something new to read while they finger their equipment, or to think about when they go about the grim exercise of begetting heirs on their ugly wives.’
‘The poem will need to be published – publishable – before they can do that. I have some portraits at the studio that I shall never sell because of the offence that they give. I painted them in anger. I was foolish because my work is thereby lost.’
‘If people cannot bear the sight of genius, they don’t deserve it. Anyway, I hate the thought of them reading and reciting, no, vomiting up my poetry’
Then my lingua biforcuta darted out of my mouth. I regretted it an instant later. ‘Sometimes I wonder if what you think of as genius may just be bile.’ Having uttered these words, I looked at Byron fearfully.
But today Byron chose to laugh with me. ‘Ha, ha, Cecilia. We are both of us rather bilious these days. But it’s our anger that the world needs. The hypocrites and moralists are winning. Cant is so much stronger than cunt these days that I fear my experience in all the vital monosyllables must be lost to despairing posterity. Shame. The women would love it. And the more scandal they talk of it, the more women would buy it.’
‘You do not really believe that.’
‘Perhaps not. The only thing I know is
that reading or not reading it would never keep down a single petticoat. That last, by the way, was a good phrase. I shall use it. Though never on English soil.’
‘Do you not want to go back, ever?’ I asked him.
‘You know, I have already passed more than half of my time out of it.’
Like Casanova, I thought, no, not like Casanova at all.
I asked him, ‘With no regrets?’
‘None, except that I ever returned to it at all and sold myself to the accursed bitch I married.’
‘Do you not wish to be buried there, with your family?’
‘You Venetians, always thinking of death! I hope that whoever may survive me shall see me put in the foreigners’ burying-ground on the Lido. I trust they won’t think of chopping and pickling me, for the edification of the doctors and the told-you-sos – looking for my heart, I suppose – and bring me home to Clod or Blunderbuss Hall. I would not even feed their English worms, if I could help it. Let me enrich the soil of Italy, where I have also spread my seed.’
I thought of Girolamo, and quietly agreed with him.
Exile is more attractive when it can be achieved in style. For the first time in his life, Byron was now wealthy as an Oriental potentate, rich as Vathek. There were the proceeds of the sale of Newstead at his disposal, as well as the remittances from Murray for the books. In lire, he was a millionaire.
‘I have imbibed a great love of this stuff, money,’ he told me one day. We had been looking at the English papers, reading the habitual dire conglomeration of idolatry and abuse about him. ‘With every word they write about me, the worse the better, I get richer.’
It was at this moment that Byron started to pine for something that was not for sale.
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