Me, Myself and Lord Byron

by Julietta Jameson

  I had been watching that kid for an hour. Now he was gone, the square still full of Saturday night people coming and going from restaurants and bars, strolling with ice cream, standing smoking cigarettes and talking, seemed so empty.

  I sat undistracted. I didn’t move, didn’t try to get the attention of passing dogs or children like I usually did. Didn’t pull out the notebook. I just sat. And then I saw me, trying, trying, trying, and there, in the square, finally done trying.

  I saw me and I didn’t flinch. I didn’t look away. I sat and looked at me. I was me, only me. The sound and activity dissipated. I stopped being anything but me.

  And I found my grief.

  It wasn’t grief for Paul being married. My grief was for the wife and mother I would never be. I’d spent twenty years pretending I didn’t care about that, that I was fine. There was this rule, I thought, among single women of a certain age, a rule dictated to us—by whom? Me, really—that it wasn’t okay to lament missing out on those things. That as a career woman with freedom and a mind and independent means, I was some kind of traitor if I looked back and said, well sure, but I might have liked …

  I tried to turn my thoughts of this into thoughts of regret, but they were not that. I tried to use them to invalidate the way my life was now, but they would not let me do that either. There was no using them for anything other than the purity of what they were, an acceptance of the finality of my situation in relation to marriage and motherhood and of the factors that brought me to it. My dad, my mum, my choices.

  I grieved for everything that I had to give that I hadn’t been able to. I had an ocean of love to give. And I grieved for the end of the struggle. The busyness, the effort, the chirpiness, the lipstick, the making myself ready for him, and then, the ever increasing panic that this was all passing me by, and then the alcohol, more busyness, effort, chirpiness, lipstick, and ever more alcohol to try harder, and harder still, and then more busyness, effort, chirpiness, lipstick, alcohol …

  I really wanted this thing, this marriage and motherhood thing. And it was not okay that it didn’t happen. It was not okay in the way it was not okay to have my mum die when I was relatively young. It was as final as death. This denial of being that young mum and wife I always assumed I would be and always thought I would be so good at; it could not be reversed. No amount of beseeching God could change it. It was gone. It was the death of a huge part of me. I saw that now.

  I didn’t before this night.

  Of course I could still get married. But that wasn’t all of it. There it was too, the bigger pain of not having what others had. And of thinking myself substandard because I had not been picked.

  And now I knew why I did what I did, why I drank the way I did.

  I stopped pretending to myself, right there, right then. I stopped running. Completely.

  Three days later, the following Monday, my last full day in Ravenna, I rode my bike past Palazzo Guiccioli, waved at Lord Byron and then took my trusty steed back to Signor Luciano Sambi. I cried when I had to leave it. It had become such a part of me. The signori in the workshop, Sambi included, got a laugh out of the parting scene.

  Around 3 p.m. I checked my phone. There was a message from Paul. It had lobbed four hours earlier. He asked if I was still in Ravenna and did I want to have dinner. Of course I was there. He knew that. I kind of knew I would hear from him on my last day in town. Nice and safe. Married, for sure. But I said yes out of curiosity.

  We arranged to meet in Piazza del Popolo at 8 p.m. When I saw him from a distance, there was a hunched defeat to him that I hadn’t noticed before. We decided to dine at Cappello, a busy wine bar and bistro around the corner from my place, right across the street from the market. We sat outdoors and the conversation burbled along, but I could see his pain. He had the discomfort of duplicity, no question. We basically talked again about everything I had done in Ravenna in contrast to everything he hadn’t due to work. I kept it bright. Didn’t let on.

  Halfway through dinner he got a text message and the mood at the table changed. He began sweating, looked ill, commented on the heat of the evening. It was actually balmy. And then he said by way of explaining the message, ‘I’m always managing crises at work. It never stops.’

  I knew there was a crisis but it had nothing to do with work.

  And then he mentioned that he had flown back to the UK on the weekend just passed. Yep, married. I felt sorry for him then, which was a patronising emotion that I tried not to indulge in. But I couldn’t help it. I saw that I was, to him, an exotic, interesting bird that had flown out of nowhere onto his windowsill. He didn’t want to let it inside, but he did want to look at it awhile. In the end, he hadn’t done anything that wrong, other than play with my heart. And in doing so, he’d revealed to me the core of the story of why I had drunk the way I did.

  I was thankful.

  After a post-prandial passegiata, he suggested another drink. The old nightcap; I used to be a great champion of it. I enjoyed the wine at dinner, I genuinely did. But I had a lemon squash for that nightcap. It was nearing midnight and I had an early train to catch the next morning.

  I left him in Piazza del Popolo and to his life. I didn’t think he wanted to complicate his existence and neither did I.

  I walked out of that square for the final time, down the little side street that led to mine, Via Paolo Costa. Music emanated from the top floor of one of the fifteenth-century palazzi. It was a tenor and a soprano singing transcendently to exquisitely played piano. It took me a minute because my mind went to Elvis and ‘It’s Now or Never’—but they were singing ‘O Sole Mio’.

  I laughed. I leaned against a wall, listening, gazing up to the windows of the top floor of that palazzo, thrown open on that perfect summer evening, with lights blazing down into the otherwise quiet, dark street. Yes, I was still ‘solo’, as I used to think that lyric said. But now I knew it was really about the sun and I was seeing the light now. When the singers finished, the gathering they sang to erupted into bravos.

  ‘Bravissimo!’ I called out, though they wouldn’t have heard. And anyway, I was saying it to me.

  17

  Pisa

  I have looked out

  In the vast desolate night in search of him;

  I watched for what I thought was him coming; for

  With fear rose longing in my heart to know

  What ’twas which shook us all—but nothing came!

  Cain

  Transplanting to Pisa, where Percy and Mary Shelley were now living, Lord Byron also had the company of Teresa’s family, exiled from Ravenna, as well as a band of Englishmen for whom literary aspirations and a liking for how they saw themselves in Byron’s reflected glory were motivation enough to be in the city. Lord Byron now led a life free of the social whirl in which he’d indulged. His daily pursuits—an expat salon of poetry readings and planning for a new magazine, picking oranges from his garden, his sporting activities of riding, shooting and billiards, and gossiping about fellow countrymen and country with those who knew both intimately—were, for a while, halcyon. After some friction over Allegra’s wellbeing and the general attraction–repulsion effect of two brilliant spirits enmeshed, Shelley and Byron reconnected on a simple level of friendship, spending happy, creative times together, as they had back in Geneva.

  It was not long, though, before consequence caught up with Lord Byron. If we do reap as we sow, then Lord Byron’s Tuscan crop had been fertilised with the sense of destiny that had followed him since boyhood. His attraction to Greece, from his classical studies at Harrow and Cambridge, had already been realised as an essential part of his being when he spent idyllic days in Athens on his first lot of travels. ‘Greece has ever been for me, as it must be for all men of any feeling or education, the promised land of valour, of the arts, and of liberty throughout the ages,’ he wrote. Now, only a couple of years more than a decade but lifetimes of experience later, Lord Byron was longing for his own spiritual promised land, hi
s inner place where valour, art and liberty, the things that mattered to him, remained pure and unadulterated; where they were all that was, and the opinions and expectations of others fell away. A series of events would spur him to actively seek that inner realm. And given his stated feelings about Greece, it would be the obvious place to which he would turn, the country’s war the obvious theatre in which to carry out his last quest.

  But he would stay awhile in Pisa before that final chapter. Even then, when Lord Byron was there in the early 1820s, Pisa was a strange little city, almost directly across the top of Italy’s boot from Ravenna and, like Ravenna, almost at the seaside but not quite. It was unbelievably humid in summer, cold and damp in winter and, at the time, sparsely populated between its unusual monuments and curious tower. Lord Byron turned to writing more and more in his large palazzo on the River Arno. There was a sense of urgency to it, all-night sessions fuelled by alcohol. What caused that urgency he never stated. Perhaps it was premonition.

  With the publication of a new work, Cain, he caused more outrage among England’s pious, who now accused him of being an evil and cold-blooded atheist. In many respects, it was the final nail in the coffin of his reputation. He had weathered all manner of accusations, but questioning the existence of God was going too far.

  The Tuscan authorities, meanwhile, wanted him and his adopted family, the trouble-making Gambas, out of their province. There were run-ins with police, detainment of members of their staff and altercations in the street.

  Then a terrible succession of events began.

  Back in England, Byron’s mother-in-law died. The date: 28 January 1822. Though he hated the woman, and her death meant more income for him, he suffered nevertheless. In her will she had stipulated that a portrait of her son-in-law be kept away from her grandchild, Ada, till she was twenty-one. The symbolic arrow hit its target, Lord Byron’s heart, squarely.

  He was as good as dead to one daughter. It was only three months later that the other, Allegra, succumbed to fever on 20 April 1822. The depression he was already feeling over Ada made his despair at the death of Allegra exponentially deeper.

  Less than three months later, on 8 July, Percy Shelley was out on the boat known as the Don Juan off the coast near Viareggio when something catastrophic occurred. The boat went missing. A week on, Shelley’s decomposed body washed ashore and was buried in the sand by authorities.

  A month later, Byron and a small group of his expat cronies dug Shelley’s corpse out of the sand and cremated him on the shore. It remains one of the seminal moments in Romantic imagery. But for Byron, living it, the pain was real. This was not, for him, a grand gesture of genre. It was a horrible end to a connection between two soul mates. It’s said that, rather than stand by the funeral pyre with his cloak billowing in the coastal wind, as was portrayed in a famous painting of the scene, Lord Byron didn’t stick around. He swam vigorously out into the deep ocean as the fire blazed and returned when it had died down.

  Within a couple of months of that, Byron would pack for Genoa, from where he would leave Italy for the final time.

  My reading of the spiritual dilemma facing the central character in Lord Byron’s Cain is quite opposite to that of those who pilloried him. One of the things I truly knew in my search for God was that when I was fearfully longing for God’s help I was as far away from knowing him as I could possibly be. When I was feeling desolate it was a sure sign that I had abandoned myself. Nothing ever came in that state.

  I thought Byron’s lines were implicitly pregnant with the knowledge that when one was not seeking and longing fearfully, when we were moving through our dark night in submission, that was when we truly knew God.

  Unquestioning faith might have been religion’s ideal. But it was Christianity’s own Saint John of the Cross who first coined the term ‘the dark night’ to describe the period in which the soul travelled painfully questioning. He did so in the sixteenth century, well before Byron referenced ‘the vast desolate night’. Eighteen hundred years before Byron, Jesus asked why his God had forsaken him.

  I thought Lord Byron showed true spirituality: a preparedness to examine and experience God, in both the negative and the positive, the presence and the absence, and the presence in the absence. And I thought he showed a faith, nothing blind about it, in the notion that in the end, life—and death—had to have meaning.

  It made me sad that he was so vilified, so misunderstood.

  *

  The day before I was to travel on the Florence–Livorno line there had been a terrible train crash. People died. I had taken a train from Ravenna to Bologna, and changed for Florence, from where I was to set out for Pisa. When I got to that bustling, nerve-wracking, grand station, Firenze Santa Maria Novella, all the trains on the Livorno line were cancelled due to a sudden strike over safety issues. Hanging onto my bags for dear life, sweating in the way only thwarted plans can cause, and trying to keep an eye out for thieving gypsies, I studied the board clacking over with departures and arrivals. Seeing there was a train leaving for Lucca any minute, I jumped on it. It was a risk. I didn’t know if a train ran between Lucca and Pisa, but I figured it was worth getting closer—Lucca and Pisa are about thirty kilometres apart. I could be hanging around in Florence for who knew how long. Well, I lumbered onto that train, rather than jumped. My bags and me: the never-ending story.

  The Lucca line had its own set of issues. My train stopped halfway between Florence and its final stop, Viarregio, as there were some safety concerns with a train coming the other way. We saw it eventually, surrounded by firemen having a good look at it. Better safe than sorry, given the terrible event of the day before.

  While Italy could be profoundly inefficient in some aspects, the country’s trains were fabulous, save the occasional strike. But the roll through the Tuscan countryside on this day after disaster was snail pace. Dazzling though, especially after the flat unchanging landscapes I’d been used to for the couple of months prior. All those hills and castles and mountain hamlets, Tuscany sure was blessed in the looks department. I had grown to love that sprawling countryside of the Veneto and Emilia Romagna coast, but my eyes were like saucers trying to take in Tuscany. I’d seen it before but driven it alone, spending most of my time looking at the blacktop on the autostrada. The train, especially a slow-moving one, offered a cinemascope movie view of it.

  Pisa was hot when I arrived mid-afternoon. Well, it was July in northern Italy. I hauled my bags down Corso Italia, the city’s main shopping strip, and arrived at the River Arno that divides Pisa in two. It was essentially not much different along there now to Byron’s time: those squat, colourful buildings, with their uniformly green shutters, unbroken lines of them lining the river’s wide seeming stagnancy, almost perfectly reflected in that stillness. There is a strangeness to the way the Arno looks in Pisa, and it is because of the lack of greenery. Though the Tuscan hills are in the background in some spots, in the centre of Pisa, the riverbank has been built out completely, not a tree in sight. I crossed it at busy Ponte di Mezzo and was stunned to be met by a large statue of Garibaldi that looked for all the world like my dad. It was quite disconcerting, the tight protruding belly, the beard and moustache. There was something in the attitude of this statue—the hand on one hip that tilted out and skyward, one leg forward provocatively, the arrogance, defiance, vanity, the potency—that was pure Bryan Jameson.

  My home for my stay turned out to be one of Pisa’s most photographed buildings outside the Piazza dei Miracoli: the Palazzo Agostini, a fifteenth-century elaborately detailed terracotta ormnament a minute on foot down the road from Dad/Garibaldi, right on the banks of the Arno. I did not have river views. I was to the back of the building, in a spacious studio that was as high as it was square, with soaring ceilings. It had three huge shuttered windows overlooking an ancient alleyway and a building that showed the layers of renovation, from medieval to Renaissance to Byron’s time. There was a pillar in the corner of my combined lounge-dining-bedroom
that was the original deal, nearly 600 years old. I stood with my hand on it for I don’t know how long. It hummed.

  Downstairs was the Caffè dell’Ussero, a legendary hangout of intellectuals, writers, scientists and artists since the 1700s. Apparently not Lord Byron, but it was still excellent to know.

  The owners had organised a bicycle for me and I jumped on to investigate town. The road along the Arno was busy with cars, buses and trucks, and the pedestrian action was thick and chaotic, quite different to the ordered mayhem of Ravenna where I did not have to mix it up with cars much at all. Frazzled, I stopped in a bar along the river. There was a hardness to Pisa that I picked up on immediately, something I had not figured on encountering at all. It was Tuscany, the dreamiest of Italian locations. But there was a sort of pugnacity to Pisa, maybe as a result of being so outshone by the likes of exquisite Florence, Lucca and San Remo. It was not an immediately endearing place.

  The bar was owned by one of the most handsome men I had ever had the pleasure of conversing with. He had jet-black hair, long but not too long, Keanu Reeves kind of bone structure, a nice crinkle at the eye, a well-trimmed beard. Not a dandy, but well put together in a casual, youthful way.

  ‘You are from Australia!’ His English was better than he thought it was. I put him at thirty-five at the oldest. ‘I love Australia. I must go there.’

  ‘You should go!’ I said, munching on one of the delectable sandwiches his bar served. ‘Go to Sydney. All the single men are gay.’ Singing from my same old songbook, still. ‘You’d do great with the ladies. Assuming you’re straight,’ I added. But he would do pretty well with the blokes, too. He’d have a full dance card before he disembarked.