Perhaps this had a lot to do with my disconnection from my own history. To look back that far had been too confronting. In the elegant, sparse, stripped-back ruins lay too much room for imagination—and for ghosts. With Renaissance art, which I adored, how I was desired to feel was guided by the lavishly detailed realisations of brilliant minds. There, however, amidst the remains of lives past, lay opportunity for projection and invocation. A canvas prepped only, ready for me.
But I was moved by Caecilia’s tomb. I enjoyed the stirring ghosts. I found myself interested in the stories behind the structures, as I was truly now interested in the foundations of this construct known as me. She meant nothing to me, this Caecilia, the daughter of Quintus Metellus, the conqueror of Crete. But for the first time, I felt the personal in the history. Both my mum and dad had studied Latin and the ancient history that went with it. They both loved it, one of the few things they had in common in the end. I wished they were alive for me to ask about what I was seeing. But then, I didn’t need too much more information than what the little plaques at various points throughout the ruins were giving me. I opened myself to the atmosphere and the more latent information and let it inform and move me.
The walk from the quiet area where Caecilia was entombed to the bus stop where I would catch transport back to the centre was quite something else, however. At the place on Appia Antica where Saint Peter supposedly met Jesus and decided to go back to Rome and face the music, it went from an easy amble to a dreadful feat of endurance along an increasingly narrow roadside as traffic barrelled towards me Le Mans style. At one of the most sacred sites in Christendom, the Romans drove at their aggressive best. For the unsuspecting tourist making their way to the bus stop, it was intense like few other pedestrian experiences.
Gosh, but this was a different Rome from that which I had seen before. The first two occasions I’d visited I’d spent every night drunk and therefore, I was guessing, every day hung-over, or at least at a level of stupefied, dulled, removed absence. The last time I was in Rome I was six months into sobriety and frightened. I was white-knuckle riding the evolving story, begging God to keep me safe. Bargaining with Jesus. Fortunately, the punishing God was a falsehood, as fake as I thought I was. A committee of angels guarded me then, closely. They were taking shifts, keeping vigil over a soul in its dark night. I was in accommodation out of the centre, and although the beauty of the city surrounded me, I didn’t see it in all its bright colours. I was not enjoying life. I was surviving.
But now Rome had become for me the ‘At last, I live’ place of which Henry James wrote. This city had caused far better writers than me to gush. Lord Byron was at his most flowery, flouncy, poncy, lordly when he came to Rome.
Like them, I loved every little detail of it. Even as I arrived in Rome, sitting in my taxi from the train station I’d spied in front of us a woman riding tandem on the back of a motorbike, absolutely giving it to her boyfriend who was trying to drive, berating him in his right ear, her hands going a million gestures a minute, as Romans do. It was so passionate and dangerous and Roman—and I was mesmerised. In Sydney I probably would have gone into a fit of road rage. Here, it was enchanting.
It always takes me a couple of days to get the hang of crossing the road in Rome each time I visit, and when I do, it feels like such an accomplishment. This is in a stark contrast to how Sydney’s disregard for pedestrians usually sends me into an ‘I’m walking here!’ episode of entitlement. In Rome, you just have to succumb to the traffic’s rhythms, develop nerves of steel, but also balletic judgment. You can’t just launch into the traffic with your head held high and eyes forward as I’ve seen some tourists do, frighteningly. Stopping times and distances need to be factored in, slight gaps in the traffic need to be taken advantage of so motorists have time to see you, but so too does your level of confidence because a Roman driver can sniff a chicken like a fox and will certainly play chicken with you if you hesitate.
On my first full day in Rome this time, that trepidation a foreigner feels before venturing into the hurly-burly of traffic delivered a moment. A handsome, well-suited man walked assuredly onto a zebra crossing on the insanely busy Via Tritone as only a Roman can do. I needed to cross the road, too, and decided to use him as a human shield, but he was a way away so I ran to catch up to his wake. He sensed me, or heard my necklaces jingle as I ran up behind him. The two of us made it across the road, and he turned to me and laughed, clearly amused. I said ‘Grazie’, he said ‘Prego’, and the two of us then went in separate directions.
Oh, those men. I couldn’t get enough of the impossibly handsome Roman males. The catwalk-ready women, too. Such people would have caused me crazy amounts of insecurity back in Sydney. I even adored the plethora of policemen who looked as if they had been sent to the House of Hotness for their uniforms. They were way better dressed than the officers back home. On this score, I knew it wasn’t just a figment of my state of mind in this fantastic city.
I loved, too, how Rome could deliver the unexpected. There’s an eccentricity to the city made all the more whimsical by the grandness of the backdrop. One night, on Via del Corso, I saw a collective of rollerbladers, incongruously outside a very grand church indeed. It was some kind of informal roller derby. There were young guns mixing it up with the forty-somethings, the latter group including one guy with flashing disco light wheels. He was getting busy with the high-speed, front-to-back splits move. I don’t think I ever saw that move for real in the day when rollerblading was big, only in the movies and video clips. It was totally rad.
The thing I loved the most about this Rome visit, though, was that I was, coincidently, a stone’s throw away from where Lord Byron stayed. I could stand on the crowded Spanish Steps and wave an enthusiastic ciao to him on his balcony at number sixty-six Piazza di Spagna and no one batted an eyelid. Except perhaps Lord Byron.
*
Lord Byron’s statue at the Villa Borghese sits on Viale della Pineta and he is broken. His book and foot are snapped off. He wears his beloved cloak, which he wrote about in his letters as if it were an invisibility shield. He and I had the opposite problem. I was seeking to be more visible after years of hiding. He was always lamenting the trappings of fame but, in spite of himself, continued to court infamy.
My hiding wasn’t of the outward kind. No one who knew me would have called me a wallflower. It was much more about hiding the inner me, in particular the one that might not be liked. For many years, whenever I had to confront someone at work I would experience something like severe stage fright. I would get sick to the stomach, almost to the point of vomiting. My heart would palpitate dangerously, or so it felt. I would shake visibly. And when my mouth opened I would tear up. I was desperately afraid of being disliked. To stand up for myself and speak my truth was devastating.
When I drank, I could tell people the cold hard facts as I saw them with an acidic tongue, a razor-sharp wit and a holier-than-thou sense of righteousness. I drunk-dialled, drunk-emailed, drunk-argued, drunk-pontificated.
In the morning I would be like a cartoon character in my exaggeratedly clichéd reaction. I’d be lying there, slowly coming out of slumber, and my mind would drift to the night before. Pieces would at first slowly fall into place then gather pace, like dominoes, till the switch would be flipped, the memory of the outburst would land, and my eyes would snap open, wide and terrified, accompanied by a deep, loud gasp. Let the self-flagellation begin.
Drinking gave me so many excuses, reasons and opportunities to beat myself up. But then, self-abuse had become my stock in trade.
I felt unduly blessed when, at the end of my HSC year, my mother and older sister Bernadette won Lotto. It was 1980 and it was $150 000 between them. For my mother, it meant paying off her War Service Loan, selling the decrepit Lavender Street home and buying a much nicer, warm and sound house in a prettier part of town.
By this time, she had stopped working nights in the pub. She had put herself through secretarial school to brus
h up her skills, cleaning the school’s premises with Erin’s and my help to pay for her time there. And she had got herself a job as the secretary to the principal at the local primary school where she was happy. What an incredible woman she was. While doing all this, she still had Erin and me dependent at home.
After she won Lotto I had a room in that house on Pinewood Avenue and I gained the freedom to go to university. I was told by one of my siblings that I had been afforded opportunities they never had; and it was true, I had. The three oldest had to go out and work as soon as possible. There were three other little kids at home and one income, my dad’s, a good portion of which did not make it home. But I went to Monash in the post-Whitlam years when university education was still essentially free. I worked through high school and I worked while at university. And the timing was not my fault.
Did I feel guilty still? It sure sounded like it. On this trip to Rome so many of the paintings that had caught my eye had been of Saint Jerome and Mary Magdalene in penitence. I’d never noticed them before; now it seemed every second one I saw was of them. I really was being prodded to pay attention to these mea culpa tides that had pulled me under time and again.
Sitting there at the base of Lord Byron’s statue, I looked to my left and saw what appeared to be a lovers’ lawn, there were so many young couples a mere piece of fabric or two from copulation. And for some, I was sure the fabric had ceased to be a barrier. On this heavenly spring day, everyone was in couples, and not just on the lawn. They were on tandem cycle contraptions, bathing their feet in fountains, walking hand-in-hand, lying across benches, one asleep in the other’s lap. And who or what did I have? A dead poet and a notebook. I knew I was lucky and I was living a dream. But I did wonder how these cards had fallen. If I had chosen this single life, why had I? And how?
I looked at Lord Byron’s love life and his choices were clear to me: strumpets, married women and older, sassy confidantes. The choices of a man for whom marriage was a disaster, whose mother was domineering and crazy, and whose particular passions probably suited him to the single life anyway. As he so exquisitely put it in the fourth canto of Childe Harold:
The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree
I planted,—they have torn me,—and I bleed.
I should have known what fruit would spring
from such a seed.
Somewhere along the way did I choose this single life? Or was it chosen for me? Was it why I drank the way I drank with seemingly no control over it? And so did I choose that or was it chosen for me? I looked at all the easy intimacy surrounding me and thought back to my last big relationship, with the man who I drove to the bank before I went to Aceh, the man who had not been able to use the L word, who despised me using it and who kept my contact to his timetable of availability and tolerance.
I would have one or two glasses of wine with dinner with him, and pick up a bottle on the way home—or have already bought one and have it at the ready—to fill the cavernous loneliness of it all. And I put up with this for way too long. He was a serial breaker-upper and I was a serial taker-backer. Wine definitely helped to smooth the edges of the idiocy of that. It was the companion he wasn’t.
I watched those lovers some more, on the lawn at the Villa Borghese, being caressed by the warm Italian sunshine, a seductive breeze and each other, and injustice began to consume me. Then I sensed him. My dad. It felt like he came and sat down next to me under that statue of Lord Byron. It was such a strong presence. It felt like an embrace. Part of me melted into it. Then another part rose up.
‘Fuck you,’ I found myself saying out loud. ‘You did this to me. You did this. This is not my fault. I did not choose this. You chose this. You were the worst male role model imaginable. You did this to me. I didn’t do it. You did.’
I got up and turned to face where I had felt him. ‘I need you to say sorry. I need to hear you say it. I need you to own this as your fault. I need to hear you say sorry.’
I cried a terrible release. Fortunately, such displays of emotion are everyday in Italy. No one reacted. Not even my dad. I couldn’t feel him there any more.
As my last touristy thing in Rome before packing and dinner, I visited the Keats–Shelley House. The building, next to the Spanish Steps, was where another poet, poor young John Keats, died of tuberculosis. I’d been there before, on my first trip to Rome. I was glad I left returning till my last day. There was some cool Lord Byron paraphernalia in there. I saw his right-slanting handwriting in some correspondence on display, a mask he wore to some Carnivale or another, and a portrait of him so unlike the other dandified ones I had seen. His hair looked thin and his cheeks sunken, his expression was as if he was over it all, like he had the mother of all hangovers. It was an unusual portrait. His neck looked smooth, pale and long, a stunning feature I had not noticed before. I felt like I knew him better having seen the picture. He said about it: ‘I happen to know this portrait was not a flatterer but dark and stern, eyes as black as the mood in which my mind was scorching …’
Dark and scorching moods could change my face too.
In the final months of our relationship, right before I went to Aceh, that man who could not use the L word invited me to a picnic with his friends at a quaint harbour-side reserve. He suggested we leave the friends on the picnic blanket and go for a walk along the rocks, just the two of us. When we were out of sight of them, he took the opportunity to tell me that the holiday to Bali we were planning together was not going to happen as we had discussed for months on end. He was going to take it by himself. No explanation, that was the way it was.
He performed such rug-pulling tricks many times on me but this one was a particular shock because things were going well for once between us. He’d taken me on a picnic with his best friends! All was well with the world! We were a real couple!
We returned to that blanket and his friends with me in a markedly different mood. I was not of a mind, nor of the ability, to pretend at that point. I was in a full-blown, black sulk.
He was as happy as a lark.
Later, back at his place, I had calmed down. ‘See?’ he said. ‘You look so beautiful now that you’re happy. You looked so ugly all afternoon.’
I took this to heart. Again, being myself, expressing my truth had turned into me wrecking something, in this instance, my attractiveness.
Did I date men like this because, in the absence of my long-dead father, I wanted to hear some other man apologise to me? And when they didn’t was this why I drank? Close, but no cigar. There was more to this picture. It was multi-faceted, a lot like that picture of the poet.
I found a postcard of it in the museum’s souvenir stash and bought it. In it, I saw Lord Byron’s melancholy for real, his beauty, his charisma and the darker side of him. That picture deepened my regard for him.
And in it I saw that I was all of my faces, not only my happy ones. And that someone apologising to me for slights real or imagined was not going to change that. It was up to me to love and respect all those faces. If I didn’t, no one else was going to.
Later that day, I lunched with a work contact, a debonair Roman man who flirted expertly with me and told me I was ‘almost perfect’ when, at the end of the meal, I did not put sugar in my espresso. ‘But perfect, it is too hard. Almost perfect is much better,’ he added.
Okay, Dad, I got the message. For today, at least.
Oh Rome, city of my soul.
10
Venice
So we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
So We’ll Go No More A Roving
‘The mumming closed with a masked ball at the Fenice, where I went, as also to most of the ridottos, etc., etc.; and, though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find “the sword wearing out the scabbard”, though I have but just turned the corner of twenty-nine.’ So wrote Lord Byron of his exhau
sted state to his publisher back in England, John Murray, having just completed his odyssey through the Venice Carnivale of 1817.
Up all night and all day for the duration of the ‘mumming’ as he called it, using an old English word for ritualistic entertainment, he’d been a fixture at the gambling houses, the balls and the parties. There’d been dramas with ladies and their husbands, with ladies and other ladies, with men whom he had cause to ‘punch in the guts’, with servants and gondoliers, confidantes, cohorts and confrontations. And he pulled up with the mother of all comedowns.
Lord Byron had moved from the Frezzeria, taken up residence in the Palazzo Mocenigo by now, and by his own admission was living in a ‘Sea Sodom’, extravagantly, promiscuously and growing corpulent from excess. He had pets of all kinds, monkeys, peacocks and dogs, all living indoors and terrorising visitors on the stairs. He claimed to have slept with over 200 women. Who knows how many men? His friend Percy Shelley was horrified when he laid eyes on him, Mary Shelley dismayed.
He was not unconscious of it himself. He wrote to Murray:
‘If I live ten years longer, you will see, however, that it is not over with me—I don’t mean in literature, for that is nothing; and it may seem odd enough to say, I do not think it my vocation. But you will see that I shall do something or other—the times and fortune permitting—that, “like the cosmogony, or creation of the world, will puzzle the philosophers of all ages”. But I doubt whether my constitution will hold out. I have, at intervals, exorcised it most devilishly.’
The statement was a poignant harbinger of what was to come.
Excess is never for its own sake. It is a symptom, not a cause. It fills us up to push things down. The problem is, you have to keep topping up. Otherwise all that stuff that’s been pushed down, buried and obliterated is going to come bubbling to the surface. Better out than in, though, because if we keep pushing it down it’s eventually going to, at best, eat its own way out, at worst, consume us.
Me, Myself and Lord Byron Page 10