Me, Myself and Lord Byron

by Julietta Jameson

  And so I hatched this great plan to go up to the field next to Villa Diodati and read Canto III of Childe Harold under AVO distance away from where Lord Byron wrote it. I was sure the owners of the villa were about to get a restraining order out on me, I’d been haunting it so since I got to Geneva. But Lord Byron thought of himself as an outsider looking in, so to be in restraining order distance from the house seemed fitting.

  I got up there and discovered a party was going on at the villa. The sun was out and there were catering vans at the service entrance and UN-looking types in suits and sensible heels walking down the driveway.

  There is a steeply declining field next door to the Villa Diodati with perfect views of the lake. The city uses the space for special occasions, for gatherings and views of fireworks and such. But today, there was no one but a group of youths drinking beers and hanging out. And me. I scaled down the knoll to the spot in the middle of the field where there is a stone bench and from where I could see the face of Villa Diodati, the gorgeous façade of her that smiled perfectly into the Geneva sunset.

  I peered up at the balcony. There were the suits, talking calmly over cocktails on that stunning terrace with its view of the lake and the UN building. I lifted my camera to take pictures; the sky was blue and the villa looked heavenly. Then I saw them. Three hawks were patrolling the field and the grounds of the villa, hungry for whatever little critters had made the snake-sized holes in the ground. The sun was brilliant on the water in front of the villa, while black clouds hung over the UN side of the lake. The rain in them produced strips of different intensity through the light. The wind was gentle through the old trees and I could see the parts of the scene that had remained unchanged. The rhythmic beauty forged by Lake Geneva’s unusual topography was no doubt as dramatic and changeable when Lord Byron looked out on it and wrote down the stuff it dredged from the dark corners of his mind and soul. I could feel it doing similarly to me.

  Most of the suits had their coat tails turned to all that.

  I opened up my book of Lord Byron’s writing. This was the first time I had read his poetry since university, some twenty-five years earlier. And quite naturally, reading it aloud seemed the right thing to do. I did think of the youths drinking beer for about a second. But only for a second.

  I was good at reading poetry aloud. It was a skill I’d had ever since my early, steady diet of A.A. Milne. But I didn’t hear myself reading poetry, like I had at high school, or like I had with my mum, trying to impress her with my diction and phrasing, or with Rose, the part-time lesbian and ravishingly Victorian beauty who lived up to her name, and with whom I’d had a half-hearted fling in third-year literature while on the rebound from my first boyfriend, much to the agony of a male tutor or two, and who was probably the last person to ever hear me read poetry out loud.

  Maybe the youths drinking beer were hearing me, but I wasn’t. I heard Lord Byron’s pain. And I heard mine. And then I heard the suits’. And the youths’. And then the world’s.

  Empathy, when it thrusts itself on you like that, is like a microcosm in which you see all the hawks chasing all the critters, and hear all the leaves rustling in all the breezes, and see all the suits turning their backs on all the sunrays. You see time immemorial. And you see how we all feel the same kernel of a thing. We are all trying to do the best we can, at any given moment, with what we have been dealt. The bird, the critter, the youth, the suit. Me. Lord Byron. My mum. My dad. You.

  Lord Byron was many a thing but he was not a man afraid to be alone with his thoughts. And he was not a man afraid to express them. This was where he had me now terrified. In this vortex of seeing his soul’s connection to mine, to the people standing on his old terrace, to the hawks hovering over me, members of whose bloodline had probably done the same over Lord Byron’s curl-festooned head, it struck me that I had to be as honest as he and relentlessly so. Because if I wasn’t going to be, then what was I doing even thinking about following his footsteps? It was time in my life to face all my darkness, all my secrets, all my fears, because it was through so doing that I would find the peace I sought. I saw that clearly, too.

  Clear placid Leman! Thy contrasted lake,

  With the wild world I dwelt in, is a thing

  Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake

  Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring.

  I read those lines, in the third canto of Childe Harold, as the lake, variously known as Leman or Geneva, was painted by thick, amorphous, elephant-grey clouds and a candy-pink setting sun. I felt the truth in them.

  5

  Milan

  We are the fools of time and terror: Days

  Steal on us and steal from us; yet we live,

  Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.

  Manfred, Act II

  He crossed the Alps from Switzerland to Italy admiring nature, and of course, the feminine wiles of the locals. He was not anonymous—the large, distinct carriage with his crest on the doors saw to that, but so too did his fame. Girls gave him flowers. Teams of women scrambled to row him across lakes. He touched cheeks and delighted in coquetry but there was a terrible darkness, never far away. There always was with him. Throughout this leg of his journey, the end of his marriage still weighed heavily on Lord Byron.

  In his diary of the crossing, intended as a letter to his sister Augusta, he wrote:

  ‘Arrived at Grindenwald, dined, mounted again and rode to the higher glacier. Twilight, but distinct; very fine glacier, like a frozen hurricane. Starlight, beautiful, but a devil of a path. Never mind, got safe in, a little lightning, but the whole of the day as fine in point of weather as the day on which Paradise was made. Passed whole woods of withered pines, all withered, trunks stripped and barkless, branches lifeless, done by a single winter. Their appearance reminded me of me and my family.’

  It was rejection that he could not bear. Throughout his life, his love of loyalty would blind him to the foibles of the dubious characters who pledged allegiance to him. Likewise, his fear of being unloved would blind him to his own part in causing feelings towards him to change.

  The need for acceptance is a strange distortion of the basic requirement for love. It equates approval, inclusion and idolatry as worthy stand-ins for receiving love, and conformity as a fine substitute for being able to give it.

  It was one of the intriguingly human dichotomies of Lord Byron. On one very distinct side, he was authentically outré. On the other, he craved absolution through the acceptance of others.

  Superstars just want to be loved too.

  I asked to settle my bill at the Geneva B&B. The owner smiled tightly and enquired, ‘Did you take a bottle of whiskey from the hall yesterday?’

  ‘What kind of whiskey was it?’ I asked. I’m not sure why. I was so affronted; it was the only response that came forth.

  ‘I don’t know. It was up here.’ We were in the breakfast room. She waved at the cabinets that were, firstly, way too high for me to reach and, secondly, not in the hall. The cupboard she referred to was crammed with spirit bottles; how you’d know something was missing was interesting. Thirdly, I was out all day on the day in question, your honour.

  I told her I did not steal the whiskey. I didn’t even drink, I said. She let it go because I suppose what else could she have done? It was excruciatingly awkward though, because I then had to ask her to call me a taxi and I had to wait for it to arrive. I acted all cheery and nonchalant and as if nothing had transpired, until my cab arrived, thank God, and then I got the hell out of there. It should not have mattered to me. It was so offline, so out there, one of those moments in travel that makes a great dinner party anecdote on returning home. But as my cabbie drove me from the B&B to the train station I was fuming. And as I sat on the Geneva railway platform waiting for my train to Milan, I could not shake the sense of injustice. It was there I startingly put it together.

  This was not about the B&B. This was about the fact that I used to steal as a kid. S
o many suppressed memories had been bubbling to the surface since I had stopped drinking. This was one of those and it had been coming up, in waves of shame and horror, quite regularly. And each time, I had chosen to shut it down. It was confronting then, to stand accused. This time, I could not do the shutdown. It had manifested externally.

  I worked in a milk bar after school from age fourteen. For a while there I stole money. Every so often I paid myself double my wage. The entire extra ten or fifteen dollars went on clothing. Compulsively bought, often ill-fitting garments (it was the 1970s, everything was ill-fitting) that I would wear to the local shopping mall on Friday nights where my girlfriends Roseanne and Sandra and I hung out with boys. Roseanne and Sandra were skinny with great boobs, silky hair and brown skin and the inherent allure of pretty, well-developed fourteen-year-olds. I was developed, but chunky, short, pimpled, with wavy hair, and my teeth bore the yellowing of too much antibiotic as a small child. I make myself sound hideous. I wasn’t. But this was how I saw myself.

  The owner of the shop I was working in caught me slipping a tenner into my trousers. I had got bold. He was standing right next to me. He and his wife let me go not long after.

  I never felt guilty while I was stealing. I felt they owed it to me. After all, the woman would pull me into the residence behind the milk bar and bitterly expound her theory that her husband was having sex with the other young girl who worked in the shop. She tried to get me to act as a spy, to report back anything I heard from him or the other girl that might confirm her suspicions. They sold the milk bar and bought another store in the inner city, to which I would travel on Friday nights and Saturdays for my shifts. After work on Fridays, the man would close the shop, turn down the lights, put a record on, and we would lie on the beanbags down the back of the shop where he would ply me with booze before giving me a lift home. Nothing seriously untoward happened. But I felt trapped into drinking with him.

  In my teens I was all about being the good kid. What plagued me was not the actual stealing, but the getting caught. It was the look on the man’s face as he saw me that haunted me. I gave him and his wife, both of whom I despised yet with whose strange power games I played along, an opportunity to think less of me.

  Trains tend to follow rivers when they cut through mountains. The trip from Geneva to Milan afforded valley vistas of some of the world’s most dramatic mountains. It was spring so I was seeing vibrant new green against the clearest of skies. There were great stony slashes where avalanches had occurred. There were voluptuously blooming orchards and old villages of the Swiss chocolate-box variety. The mountains were still snow-capped. Terraced farming cut determinedly up impossible slopes. Clouds sat puffy atop peaks, like white afros.

  I was sharing the experience with a PR team preparing for the launch of a Dolce & Gabbana fragrance. We were in one of those old-fashioned carriages divided into eight-seater compartments linked by a long narrow walkway, and at Geneva, when I bustled into my little compartment with my big bags, the two young men of the team grabbed my luggage from me and hoisted it up into the racks above our seats. ‘I think I broke my wrist,’ the fresh-faced blond one said as he recovered from the unexpected weight. I blushed and blurted out excuses about needing to carry books. His dark, swoon-worthy South American co-worker laughed, stretched out in his seat and pulled down his sunglasses. It was early.

  When the snack trolley came by and I discovered I had no euro in my wallet, their boss, one of those edgy, unfussy Italian women who can make jeans, a T-shirt and no make-up as glam as Oscar night, piped up, ‘Oh, but you must have coffee! I must get it for you.’ I sipped my beverage gratefully and felt like I was in Italy before I even got there. They pulled out folders and laptops and began to talk loudly and rapid-fire. ‘Kate Moss—’ I heard then lots of Italian I could not comprehend. ‘Naomi.’ ‘Claudia.’ It only got better as the journey went along. Benvenuti a Milano.

  As we came out of the Simplon Tunnel on the Italian side of the Alps, I left our compartment to stand in the walkway, where the windows now looked directly onto Lake Maggiore. A sparkling sapphire in upper Lombardy’s tiara of lakes, Maggiore marked my first ever glimpse of this kind of Italian geography. It was idyllic; the kind of scenery that’s hard to take in, it is so picture perfect. Shuttered villas hanging over sparkling blue water. Tiny, tiered islands with boats gliding by or buzzing about. My stomach flipped with a sense of longing, and of connection. I wasn’t sure if it was merely because I was now in Italy and adored it so, or if this was a place I must one day return to. The South American PR guy joined me at the window. ‘I came here for a vacation with my girlfriend,’ he said. ‘After standing here, looking out at it, just like you, I had this feeling and I knew I had to return here.’

  ‘I had that feeling not thirty seconds ago,’ I said, wondering immediately if that was unbelievable to him. But he shrugged, nodded, extended his hands in a gesture of ‘but of course’. Intuition has credence in Italy. It surprises no one.

  ‘It’s calling you,’ he said. ‘You must come here one day.’

  His words resonated with me. I was looking for signs that I was on the right track to all I desired. This seemed to be one.

  Antica Locanda dei Mercanti, my Milanese hotel, was in an old palazzo right in the centre of town. The airy white foyer was full of azaleas in bloom and the receptionist had the slightly detached bemusement for which Milan is famous. I was led to my room, a small, wooden-floored space dominated by a pale green and white colour scheme, with wooden ducks lining the bed head. It had a fashionable quaintness to it that made me squeal in delight. Alarmed, the eastern European porter who had shown me up to my room scurried away as quickly as she could. The room had billowy white curtains and shutters and when I threw them open onto the warm Milanese afternoon and leaned out across the window boxes, the workmen doing a renovation across the laneway all reacted as if I was Sophia Loren herself. ‘Ciao bella!’ ‘Mamma mia!’ ‘Sei bellissima!’ Ah, Italia. My Fellini moment.

  I went out walking, heading straight for Milan’s famous cathedral. I’d changed from sandals into a pair of Rockports that were, I congratulated myself upon purchase back home, an excellent compromise between trainer and ballet flat. They had a Mary Jane look, but with a sport shoe sole. They were made of white nylon mesh mostly. On my way to the Duomo I walked into a shoe store in them, not a particularly posh one. The sales girl looked down at my feet with such a violent tilt of the head and shocked expression you would think I had killed two cats, split them down the middle, shoved my feet into their gizzards and sauntered into the shop so shod.

  I suddenly had the desire to buy a whole new wardrobe. Sensibly, I did not act upon it.

  I was in Milan briefly, mainly to go to the opera at La Scala but also, of course, because Lord Byron had passed through there. I’d seen pictures of La Scala, but they got nowhere near the real interior of that marvellous theatre. It was bordello-like with red silk walls and fringing, gold fixtures and bacchanalian masks and statues. Somehow it was also contained and elegant by way of the symmetry and order in its arched and tiered design. I sat with an Italian couple who did not speak a word of English, and I of course, no Italian. But language barriers do not perturb Italians. They chatted to me anyway, stopping with benevolently puzzled expressions as I attempted to answer them. I worked out that their son was a doctor in London, that they would love to go to Australia, and that they were massive fans of Rossini. At night’s end, so was I.

  Lord Byron went to La Scala. There, he met Stendhal, who was an admirer, and not yet famous. ‘I was filled with timidity and tenderness,’ Stendhal wrote of the night. ‘Had I dared, I would have wept and kissed Lord Byron’s hand … I attempted to speak, and uttered only commonplaces that did nothing to break the silence reigning over the company that evening. Finally Lord Byron asked me—as the only one there who spoke English—what roads he should take walking back to his inn; it was at the other end of the city, near the fortress. I thought that he was w
rong to try walking: at that end of Milan, at midnight, all the shops are closed; he would be wandering along solitary, poorly lit streets, and without knowing a word of the language. So out of solicitude I was foolish enough to advise him to hire a coach. Instantly, an expression of haughtiness appeared on his face; he gave to understand, with all politeness, that he had asked me for the route, and not for advice on how to travel it. He then left the box, and I understood why he had imposed such silence upon it.’

  It’s widely hypothesised that Lord Byron thought Stendhal’s suggestion of a coach was motivated by pity for his lame foot. The city and its society had fallen for Lord Byron with all the gusto of pop fans in Tokyo. But the prism of his brokenness distorted it into despisal. They’re funny things, our prisms. (It’s interesting how close that word sounds to prison.)

  I was at Pescheria da Claudio, a fishmonger turned local apertivo favourite. It is a wonderful old shop with three big steel and glass counters selling everything fishy from mussels to lobster. In the evening, it sells plates of sashimi and prawns and oysters and for the price of the meal you get a glass of bubbly prosecco. Along one wall there were benches set with knives and forks and paper placemats where well-dressed Milanese sipped and supped before taking off into the night. I carried my sashimi and glass to one of these and when I settled the man next to me raised his glass. ‘Salute,’ he said. I raised my glass back and drank some of it. It went straight to my head.

  As I left that restaurant, my head woozy from that half glass of prosecco, a man wandered by, leather-skinned and ruddy-faced. By the looks of him, he was living rough. He wore a shabby, dirty version of the green felt hat you’d expect to see with lederhosen and an embroidered white puffy shirt. He was carrying a longneck of German beer and his blue eyes were clouded over like the ocean on a drizzly, dark winter afternoon.