Welcome to the nineteenth century, Casanova. I write now of a time nine years into it, a perilous time for me. It is three decades since you first took me wet from my bath, since the last time I lay down with you in my arms. You were not old, never think it. Remember that our love is only as old as my first portrait of you, which is, of course, thirteen years younger than I am. I have painted six hundred and thirty-seven portraits in these long limping years without you. I have travelled to fifteen countries. I have painted Goethe again, and Napoleon himself. Your cat has sired and grandsired four hundred and eighty-five times. How many velvet collars have I bought? I simply cannot tell you. And yes, Casanova, they still speak of you in Venice. But your own memoirs, no, they are not yet published.
I too have my memoirs, unwritten but etched upon my skin. I cannot count the pages; they are not finished yet. But now I, too, can recount a catalogue of sensual and commercial disasters; even those are studded with their sweet moments. I know you, and you would not hate me for those adventures of my skin. You would not be jealous; you would rejoice in them. You taught me that ungainly human physical love is a gift from God. We humans could have mated remotely like salmon or spored like plants – instead we have delicious tangles of limbs and liquids. You loved all of them, the out-flung legs, the shapely feet, the soft arms, the sweat, the saliva, the seed, the tears of joy (sweet, not salty, you always said), the female juices. What is a kiss, you asked, but the tangible effect of one’s desire to eat and drink the one you love? You taught me to love Love’s noisy repertoire of display and gratification. The animals have their grunts, the plants their flowers – their ways of expressing sexual exuberance – while we have our music, art, poetry and the laboratory of the kitchen. You, Casanova, gourmandised in everything.
You never made a conquest – you never had victims. Women were your accomplices in pleasure. As you always said, when two people fall in love, both are Love’s dupes; everyone wins a little, everyone loses a little. You loved being duped in this way. You loved women. You didn’t even hate the ones who rejected you, not for long, not even La Charpillon, who deserved your hatred. You craved not just the woman, but her desire for you. Mere consent made you disgusted with yourself. You never took a selfish orgasm. I remember you saying, again and again, as you gently wiped the sweat from my face, looking deeply into my eyes, the visible pleasure I give you makes up four-fifths of mine.
Your love had the shifting boundaries of our lagoon. It was always there, surrounding us, it would never dry up or pull away entirely. It was sometimes drawn to farther shores by the moon and adverse fate, but good luck and dawn light might deliver it back to us at any time. You could smell a needy woman the way other men smell stale beer or warm bread, the way women sniff the heads of their babies. The smell attracted you, the same way the smell of needy love repulses other men, worse men than you.
You took responsibility for the desires you aroused. But when the English Overcoats proved unobtainable or ineffective (the proof of course coming long after you had departed), you were always delighted and fascinated to meet the resultant progeny a few years later, but you were equally happy to allow other men the joy of their supposed paternity. And if you suffered from a love disease, you refrained from spilling your infectious incense inside one of us. That, to you, would be an unpardonable sin.
You used no ugly words for the private parts of our bodies. When you undressed us, you were enraptured to see our treasure, our little pink jewel, our temple of delights, our little such-and-such, our retiring room or our sanctuary. (You hated to hear it described by frigid Andriana Foscarini as ‘the fatal vault’.) The hairs around our sex and under our arms were our ornaments. Your particular part was a little fellow, a masked personage (in his Overcoat), a sliver of lightning, but most often of all, your steed. When you were with us you wanted to spread the columns apart, and then devour love’s chamber. When you entered us it was to perform the gentle sacrifice, or pay respects, but most of all, to give the most ardent proof of affection. Your tumescent steed was the most honest compliment you could give us.
In the case of passionate and prolonged lovemaking, it was always a tender combat or a mutual transport. In the case of virgins, you plucked the fruit or picked the beautiful flower (and it was always better than any other flower you had picked before). And finally you would offer a liqueur, a nectar or – my favourite, always – a Word in the mutual conclusive ecstasy. Sometimes you gave so much that your Word was stained with blood. You made us understand that there was no more tender gift.
You liked to talk to us, before, during and afterwards. You loved each caress intensified with an endearment. Without words, you said, there was only a part of the possible pleasure. Like food without its beckoning perfumes, silent coupling was unsatisfying to you. You declined the attentions of England’s proudest courtesan, Kitty Fisher, because you could not share the language of Shakespeare with her! You would spend whole days talking about your love to your lover. Nature, you said, does not afford a wider subject. Merely physical debauches always left you a little sad, a little diminished. But the prospect of a new, true love could always rouse you.
You hated lying to us, as you were sometimes obliged to do, in the fervour of the moment. You admitted to me, ‘In the course of my life I have more than once found myself under the bitter necessity of telling a lie to the woman I loved.’ But you would do so to save our self-respect, and to keep love alive, and happy, just a little longer.
There could be nothing wrong in love, if it was the right love, you said. The right love was always reciprocal, joyful, unburdened with guilt. It was Original Love, without any concomitant sin. You had no respect for the moralisers. According to you, their reasoning was flawed. For does the flower do wrong that spreads its petals to the warm tongue of the sun? Does a wave do wrong that erects its crest in the soft breath of the wind? If so, then love was wrong, you opined. Love is the variegated God of all our natures, you argued. Anyway, we cannot help it, as far as love is concerned. And then we cannot help it, again. With love, there is no such word as satiety, positively no such word. Your desires were bigger than your capacity. All your life you feared that you might not be strong enough to satisfy the desires of those you loved.
Yes, you had your hundred and thirty women, and loved each in her turn, rarely several at a time. But yes, sisters were a speciality. You told me how you loved your way through a family of five, once, in London, saving the youngest and sweetest, Gabrielle, for last. But you wanted only sisters who took pleasure in doubling your felicity and tripling their own. You would let the woman lead, imperceptibly or aggressively, you didn’t mind, so long as she led you to happiness. ‘Seducing is not what I do. Or if I do it, it is unconsciously, something I do after first being seduced myself’ was your own self-definition. I am sure you have stamped it on your memoirs. (How I long to read them, as I have already heard them. But I fear that this new century will find them little to its taste. For times have changed, Casanova, and not for the better.)
You never married: you knew yourself too well. The thought of marriage made you shudder, even when you were crazily, wholly in love. Because of your addiction to novelty, you knew you would make a disappointing husband. So you spared the women you adored by not marrying them. You offered the sacrifice from time to time. You would promise, from your soul, to make Manon, or Esther, or Teresa your wife, but Destiny was always, fortunately, against it. You were plucked from the arms of your lovers, time and time and again. You never rejected us. Separation was always by force of circumstance, beyond our control. You left us intact, our self-esteem untarnished. Or we left you, and felt ourselves enhanced by profundity and tenderness of your regrets. You always, though it broke your heart, encouraged us to accept an offer of respectability, or a lifelong mate. (I understand this now. It has taken so many years to do so.) You taught yourself to regard the lost woman as a treasure who had belonged to you, and who, after making you happy, was going to make another fortunate man so wi
th your full consent. ‘It must be true that Fortune is a lady,’ you said. ‘She is jealous of other women and takes them from me.’
Casanova, you loved your women, but you also liked to dance at their weddings to good men who loved them, not with the feast of passion you had laid out for them but with a quiet, post-prandial domestic love, a serviceable love that would see them through to the happy oblivion of old age. And all their lives those women would nurse a memory of a man who had created such a drama to spend an hour with them, who had, for a short time, been capable of dying not to be with them, who had regarded the touch of their lips as the pinnacle of achievable joy, who had given the act of love such a wild and sweet savour that for once they had known what it was that the poets write of. You left women with sacred memories of you, of themselves with you, and of Love itself. They all wished their children were Casanova’s. And so did I. So I named my son for you … but I run away with myself.
While a woman was yours, you were hers, a happy timing leading to happy times for all. Love had always taken you to good places, with rare exceptions. Perhaps, best of all, were the bizarre loves, who took you to strange places on earth, and strange places within yourself. I remember all your stories. I remember Lepi the hunchback and her scarcely credible contortions and her miraculously sited vulva. I remember Roman Margherita with her false eye, which was a different colour from the other, and also larger. You had a matching porcelain eye made for her and were rewarded with the most tender gratitude. I think of the Negro maidservant you pleasured in Trieste, who taught you the falsity of one of your favourite maxims: when the lamp is taken away, all women are alike. There was the flatulent serving girl in Turin who accompanied each delicious thrust with a fragrant trumpet-solo from her posterior orifice. Each woman was for you beloved in her time, remaining beloved in your memory.
You loved one woman at a time, and properly, and then the next one, even better.
If only all love had begun and ended with Casanova! But there was another man, as I told you, who came afterwards. And he declared, ‘I rather look on Love as a hostile transaction.’ And made it so.
Each love was a bitter comedy, with lines that cut the skin, with the kind of sweetness that chokes, the kind of consuming passion that devours the lovers till they become spectral. He used only hard Anglo-Saxon monosyllables for our tenderest parts. From him I learnt, not because I wanted to, the ugly words clack, cunt, piece, salt bitch, and the uglier phrases rut, join giblets, fuck, fuff-fuff and passades. And he could not bear to watch a woman eat. And he could not bear to see an old lover again. We were already stale in his memory the next morning, and stinking the day after. He could smell lust on a woman like urine in an alley. It made him feel the same way: aroused and disgusted at the same time. He preferred as many loves as possible at once, all badly done. He dragged love out of women as if pulling an expiring flower out of the ground.
Love? A transaction? How my Casanova would have raged at this perversion. But then Casanova’s loves were oceanic, curiously nourishing and pure; when ponds are stirred, they produce nothing but a bitter and unhealthy miasma. It has been variously said that this man was a great or a very poor lover. We are not yet at the point in the story where I am prepared to give my own account. But think on this: he was not even able to convey lust in his poetry, just mockeries of lust.
But you would be right in thinking that this pond-dwelling lover was successful with women. He was as successful, in his way, as my Mediterranean Casanova. He had small silken hands: women and money slipped into them, and then out again when he opened his little fist and let them drop. He made pleasure a sin, and sin a pleasure for his women. And when he had finished with them, he gave them a great appetite for suicide.
Women would have their period of success with him. He appealed to their egos with his haughty, tragic froideur: they wanted to warm it up. For a while he let them bathe in the delusion that they had done so, and that they had captivated him with their own particular gift, be it a fine beauty, an expert hand, a long eye, a sexual wit ... In this he was like Casanova, who would always find that one special thing about a woman and make it his own. And, like Casanova, he was able to create, albeit on a temporary basis, an atmosphere of breathless tenderness around himself, an ambience that excluded all others.
How can I explain how he could make you laugh in ways you had never laughed? It was not a gentle laugh. It was more of a gasp, a crackle of air torn from your gut, because he dared so. His humour was as black as a November night, and as biting. How can I explain that you became complicit in his satiric, savage scorn against the rest of the world? How it seemed, sometimes, that all the gall evaporated in the convulsions of the shared, robust laughter? The laughter and the tears that would come later were part of the same insolent intimacy upon which he insisted. How can I convey the way he knew you, and made you ashamed to be yourself? How this shame made you need him all the more; you were enfeebled by it and so you craved the dispensation of his obliterating passion.
But I assure you that in the end it gives more joy to read about George Gordon, Lord Byron than it did to know him at close quarters.
Once, years after I first met him, I ransacked Byron’s desk, when he had gone to his casino. I found an unfinished letter to his mentor, Lady Melbourne. By that time, my English was more than good enough to skim through it. But at first I was mystified by his code. I sat with the letter between my fingers, pronouncing the strange English consonants aloud. Suddenly I understood. Byron’s leading ladies were designated by capital letters. Lady Caroline Lamb was ‘C’, his wife, Annabella, ‘your A’ and his half-sister, Augusta, ‘my A’ or sometimes merely a ‘+’. This code was different from Casanova’s intimate alphabet of initials, of half-discretion and whole passion. In his case, to give them their full names would allow these women a complete entrance into his life, and a full part of it. That was not available. Byron invented a new mechanical system of love – of taking the parts that he needed, but never the whole woman. The result of this hostile transaction was a Frankenstein monster, a love that went bad and murdered happiness.
It is hard to say when Byron stopped being Byron and became Byronic. But I would learn from him that the cultivation of his own image, his romance with his own face in the mirror and on the page, was from an early age the central relationship in his life. Byron, rejecting the fat, unromantic mother he had been allotted, became his own, and nourished himself tenderly. By the time he grew to the age when we start to reach out for others, there was no room for a soulmate in that passionate and complex love story between Byron and himself. Of course, there was room for supplementary loves, and, oh yes, certainly, for a portrait painter …
Let me introduce you to the Byronic hero, recently delivered of Lord Byron. He is thin, pale, and wears black. Lacking ordinary parents, he is the orphaned son of the Gothic genre. His birthmarks are emotional cruelty, taboo-breaking and obsession. He terrorises women, engulfing them alternately in devouring fire and obliterating coldness. This is because there festers inside him great imprisoned love that no one has ever unlocked. The thought of being the object of that love is irresistible to women; it makes them shiver. The Byronic hero nurses a dread secret. But he cannot communicate with others and neither can they unravel what is knotted in his soul. Inarticulate in conversation, it is only when he soliloquises about himself that he is endlessly eloquent. He wallows in voluptuous but vaguely defined misery. He dies young: therefore his tragic emanation is all the more concentrated, and infectious. Like Casanova, Byron became a label, a metaphor. Casanova embodied, I now know, everything di speciale to the 1700s, and Byron, I hazard a guess, will mean something in this cold bright new century. If I am right, I pity the women to come. Our good times are past.
Yes, Byron was the new thing, the spirit of his age, the ornament and star of it, the crème de la crème. As with Casanova, I would sample all that was advertised, and I would be treated accordingly.
Perhaps he could n
ot help it? I have sometimes tried to see it that way. The people who really knew him, Mary Shelley and Hobhouse, for example, told me that they could always distinguish something fatal and beautiful in his soul, down there amongst the bunkum, bathos and melodrama. His lovers would ever say the same. We were bound to do so. With every love-affair, the penetration was so deep, his grasp of your soul so thorough, that it became like incest. Incest and violation, they cross each other. Incest, the other side of self-love, the ultimate violation, was perhaps born into Byron.
He was born on January 22nd, 1788, the same day that my sister Sofia delivered her second daughter. Sofia’s confinement was uneventful; the baby was perfect, except that she was a girl. After the midwife had left, we gathered in Sofia’s room, to worship, as we Italian Catholics have always worshipped, the act of motherhood. Sofia was a little torn and pale, my brother-in-law somewhat aggrieved at the arrival of another female but trying to put a good face to it. He had already fathered two male bastards; he knew it was in him, the seed that sows sons. I watched him look at Sofia over the head of the new little girl. Yes, he would probably summon up the desire to beget the necessary heir upon my sister, I thought.
I held their first daughter wide-eyed in my arms while my mother dabbed the sweat from Sofia’s face and kissed her a hundred times, little butterfly kisses, which Sofia seemed to absorb into her damp skin like a health-giving draught. She and my mother shared an air of potency, for once taking precedence over every other living thing in the house. Sofia grew more radiant every moment as she held her breast to the new baby. A wet-nurse hovered modestly at the back of the room. Sofia did not seem to want her. My father, awkward with tenderness, approached the bed and handed Sofia a jewel case of pink velvet. I saw a pale blue duplicate poking out of his robe; he had been prepared for both possibilities. My mother opened the case for Sofia, who, it seemed, could not bear to take her hands from her new baby. A golden bracelet slid onto the linen birthing coverlet and tangled in its silver threads. My brother-in-law lowered his disappointed face and stooped to pick it up. If it had been a son, there would have been diamonds.
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