Carnevale

by Michelle Lovric

  My father laid a hand on his arm. He said quietly, ‘Be happy, Giovanni. Even daughters can be great.’

  My father did not look at me, but the compliment flowed over the whole room. No one dared to touch me or meet my eyes but I felt, for a moment, transformed from the aberrant spinster aunt to the warm pride of the household. Then the new baby began to mewl and I was forgotten again. I handed my niece to my mother and left quietly. I walked through the winter sunshine to my studio, where a count awaited me. Yes, it was a happy day in Venice, January 22nd, 1788.

  Far away in London, in Byron’s birth-room, everyone was screaming, his mother loudest of all. He told me afterwards that during Lady Catherine’s labour her stays had cut into the fat flesh around her ribs and blood flowed down through the mattress. He told me that twenty she-cats sewn in sacks could not have made so mournful and unpleasant a howling as his mother trying to expel him from her womb. She was in so much pain that she scarcely realised the creature who was apparently trying to kill her had lost the battle and left her body. At first the little scrap of skin looked barely human. His skull was shrivelled like an old corpse.

  Then they realised that he had emerged with a caul over his head, a mark of distinction and good luck – especially effective against death by drowning. Closer inspection revealed he bore an abnormally thin right leg ending in a foot that inclined markedly inwards: a club foot. Byron would swear afterwards that he could remember the shrieks of his mother when they showed her the twisted little limb. It seemed to prove everything she had feared since the best-forgotten moment of his conception.

  Byron was born an Aquarian, then, with a club foot. He was an aristocrat, with no money, the only son of an obsessive mother, a father who was, it would turn out, worse than none at all. He was born both blessed and mutilated – perhaps it could not have been otherwise for him. George Gordon Byron would also remain an only child, something he always found significant. ‘Looks like fatality,’ he would tell me one day. ‘The fiercest animals have the rarest numbers in their litters.’

  That lucky caul was scooped from his infant pate and given to a family friend, who died in a shipwreck twelve years later. It was perhaps because of that caul that Byron was never afraid of the water himself. In fact, he loved it. When he entered it, it dissolved his deformity under its opaque or distorting surface.

  Yes, he loved the water. And it was over the water he came to me, ten years ago now, in 1809. We were both far from home, in as wild a place as we would ever know, a cruel, luxurious place, a place I never hope to see again or hear upon the lips of any human being.

  I speak now, only because I must, of Albania.

  Chapter 2

  Se ocio no smira, cuor no sospira.

  If the eye does not gaze, the heart does not sigh.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  In the summer of 1809 I received a commission that was different from all the others.

  A tiny messenger in a tasselled fez and both arms stiff with bracelets had arrived at our palazzo at Miracoli while we sat at luncheon. Since my father’s death our household had become more luxurious. Sofia and Giovanni liked to use the silver plate that had previously lurked in large chests like pirates’ treasure. French essences and wine sauces were now to be tasted at our table. My mother, Sofia and her daughter were as elegant as possible in their morning dresses. I, invece, looked like a beggar woman, with my clothes oily and multicoloured from an unsleeping night in my studio. But they had learnt to accept me as I was, and even my tradesman’s smell passed uncommented upon these days.

  Our flushed and nervous maid led our exotic visitor into the dining room where we sat together, Sofia, Giovanni, my mother, my surviving niece and I. The dark-skinned messenger — Raw Sienna and Rose Madder, I thought – bowed deeply and lowered his heavy eyelids over his moist chocolate eves — Raw Umber and Brown Madder. I had not painted anyone of his hues before. It was impossible to determine his age, but I suspected it was close to mine. He presented us with a basket of fragrant melons. Then he addressed us, first describing an elaborate spiral in the air with his long, elegant fingers, ushering the exotic perfume of his fragrant hair oil into our noses. He spoke a baroque kind of French, with such a long roll to his r’s that by the end of certain elongated words I felt wrapped around his supple dark-red tongue.

  ‘I, Mouchar, son of Mouchar, have the honour to bring graceful news to the honorable house of Cornaro in Venice. Ali Pasha, Vizier of the Three Tails, Veli of Epirus, Lord of All Albania and Western Greece, commands the pleasure of the artist Cecilia Cornaro’s attendance at his court, for the purpose of rendering upon canvas the likeness of His Majesty himself and of diverse favourites among his children and wives.’

  Only then did Mouchar son of Mouchar draw breath, panting a little. He looked at us with a charming, expectant expression, like a cat presenting a mouse to his beloved mistress. Indeed, I thought. Vizier of the Three Tails. How Very Vathek! Rendering upon canvas. But, of course! A smile was starting to jerk at the corners of my mouth.

  ‘What’s the dwarf saying?’ Giovanni was asking. His French was poor. ‘Does he want to sell us some silverware? We could do something with those bracelets, perhaps. Who’s his capo? I could swear he said it was Ali Pasha, that murdering rapist in Albania. But this little creature’s the servant of some greasy Levantine merchant, isn’t he?’

  Fortunately Giovanni spoke, as usual, in dialect. The beauteous Mouchar continued to appear serene: he did not, apparently, number Venetian among his languages. I had already intuited that our guttural earthy dialect was not Mouchar’s style. ‘No,’ I explained, ‘he’s not a merchant, he’s a diplomat. I am invited to Albania to paint Ali Pasha. In fact, I believe I am commanded.’

  My mother crossed herself. Sofia clapped a hand over her mouth and put her arm around her daughter. Giovanni spluttered, ‘Well, how ridiculous. As if you would go to such a barbarous place, Cecilia … Cecilia? He kills women, you know. Fifteen women! Cecilia, No! You cannot!’

  For he had seen my eager face. The word ‘Albania’ was now capering inside my head. I glimpsed whirling dervishes, turbanned princes, veiled princesses, desert landscapes, camels. I saw the world of young Beckford’s Vathek, in real life. In my mind’s dark eye I discovered dangerous lusts, scintillating secrets, stark palaces leaning over cruel abysses. Ah, my troublesome addiction to novelty, how it surged inside me at the thought of Albania!

  ‘It’s the caterpillars all over again,’ said Sofia softly, without reproach and even with a little sympathy. She explained to Giovanni how, as a child, I had gone down to our courtyard and allowed the insects to bite me, simply because it was something I had not tried before, and because the little green beasts were beautiful. And also, of course, because I had been told that they were bad for me. My mother reached across the table for my arm and traced the tiny white scars with a gentle finger. I twitched my hand away and ran downstairs to start packing.

  Two days later I left Venice, accompanied by the attentive Mouchar and a young Venetian pastry chef who had also been recruited to the Pasha’s court. I travelled with just one small trunk of clothes but also with my bath full of canvas, pigments, oils and brushes. When Mouchar raised his fine dark eyebrows, I told him, ‘All lady painters bring their own baths.’ I could have told him that all lady painters eat their own first-born, so exotic did he think me, a Venetian, a woman, and an artist, with no maid or manservant of her own. My mother had pressed me to take one of the maids, but I had an instinct that I wanted to be alone. I felt a mysterious confidence in Mouchar, who had found his way to me in Venice and seemed unfathomably at ease in the ways of both the East and the West.

  From the port of Mestre, we travelled by boat along the Dalmatian coast. I woke each morning at dawn to see an unrelenting sun rising on a black sea. ‘What am I doing?’ I asked myself, standing on the deck. ‘You are doing what Casanova would have done,’ I answered myself. ‘Are you putting yourself in danger?’ I asked myself. And I answ
ered, ‘I don’t care.’ The spicy smell of the shore excited me. The food on the boat was different to any I had tasted: strange-shaped spiny fish and damp salty biscuits. I passed my days on the deck with Mouchar, who proved a delightful companion.

  We first saw Preveza, the southern port of Albania, at sunset. We had avoided the northern cities; they were, it seemed, at war with our host. Prevesa’s towers and minarets, elongated by a purple sunset, seemed at first to be floating upon the water like Venice herself. Behind them, Mouchar pointed out the Suli mountains, brutal in outline and seeming to be hunched and ruminating darkly. As we pulled into the dock we were met by an ornate party of servants and musicians, who serenaded me and my bath. Suddenly I heard an ululation in the distance and the men, including Mouchar, frightened me by falling to their knees and scraping the ground with their dusty foreheads. After a few minutes they rose to their feet and continued as before. Mouchar explained, ‘Ah, do not perplex yourself, Cecilia. This is how we pray in Albania.’

  ‘Outside? And your churches? How are they?’

  ‘Sadly you may not enter, Cecilia, being a foreigner and a woman. But they are different from yours. We have no images of God. We express our piety in the abstract; we do not show God in the paltry likeness of man. It is forbidden.’

  ‘Yet the Pasha wants me to paint his face?’

  ‘The ways of the Pasha are both great and mysterious, and not easily comprehensible, at times, to his humble subjects.’

  I could not ride – few Venetian women acquire this skill. A little kadesh was rigged for me, and another for the bath full of canvases and paint pigments. Soon we were inland, jolting through arid countryside, which made me parched for our canals. The people were the most foreign I had seen or heard. Their harsh dialect had a Northern ring to it. Mouchar told me that the Albanians had five alphabets, and blood was still being shed over which was preeminent. When the Albanians spoke French, it was in the same baroque intonation as his own, and with the fairy-tale glamour of his vocabulary. In the crowds in the marketplaces, the Albanians mingled with Tartars in their high caps, the Turks in their turbans, soldiers, black slaves. The Albanian men strode in skirts to the knee, which reminded me of the Scottish kilts I had seen in engravings. But the exuberant twirl of their moustachios and the lascivious plumpness of their lips and the sensuous droop of their eyelids distinguished them from the thin-lipped, slate-eyed Scots. Over their white kilts, the Albanians wore embroidered tunics, gold-worked cloaks made of goatskin, crimson velvet gold-laced jackets and waistcoats, silver-mounted pistols and daggers. My hand fluttered in a blur over my sketchbook. Everywhere the noises put me in a constant state of expectation, like a child about to hear an exotic tale. The drums and the muezzin chanting in the towers seemed to promise old stories of wild loves and bloody revenges. I thought constantly of Beckford and his Vathek. It was all coming to life. At any moment I expected to encounter the monstrous camel Alboufaki and the wicked queen Carathis astride him, sniffing for corpses.

  We arrived in the great moated city of Jannina on the last day of September, passing through a valley of mosques, goats and orange trees, with eagles, vultures and falcons hovering above us. The city huddled on an outcrop between the Pindus mountains and a stern grey lake. Before the city gates, our little cortege came to an abrupt halt. I observed what appeared to be a piece of dark meat hanging up for sale, opposite a primitive butcher’s shop. As we approached, however, it became clear that what we beheld was a man’s arm and part of his torso strung in bloodied cords from a tree. It was dangling by a broken finger impaled with a nail.

  There was a muttering among the merchants, and the Venetian pastry chef fainted. I looked at the construction of the ribs protruding from the remains and tried to think of it as an exercise in still-life. In this way I contrived not to vomit. Mouchar slipped from his horse to make some enquiries. He came back quickly. The torso, I was told, belonged to a robber, whose other parts were to be found displayed in various quarters of the city. It was an example of the hospitality of the man who was my new employer.

  We loitered six days in Jannina, where Mouchar disappeared briefly into the arms of his family. He explained to me that his mother needed to make sure that he had not been damaged or corrupted in some way by his dangerous visit to the infidel city of Venice.

  I remained with the rest of our party in the kitchens of the airy mansion we had been allocated. I had already been freed from the normal limitations imposed upon my sex because of the strangeness of my profession. Now they let me join them as they crouched around their food, and I sat among their elbows and armpits, thinking how Casanova would have loved this wild garden of sweat. Mouchar, the shadow who had reappeared at my side, explained quietly that in their bathhouses the Albanians were subject to a superstition that meant that they could not pass soap to one another: to do so would be to wash away love. Stimulated by the almost edible sweat, I devoured plates of roasted meat, eggs and odd, angular vegetables. Someone handed me a hookah, and Mouchar taught me how to breathe in the soothing fragrant steam.

  I drank tiny bowls of syrupy coffee. A merchant passed me a long-stemmed pipe. I tried that too. I could see Mouchar thinking, female artists are truly a rare and wonderful breed.

  We went to watch a Jewish puppet show. The puppets, silhouettes of greased card-paper, rampaged round the tiny stage, rattling their loose limbs. Falsetto voices emerged from behind a dirty curtain, rousing the crowd to roars of laughter with a dialogue that appeared to consist mostly of threats and curses. It was easy to understand the storyline: the young protagonist was possessed of an organ so stupendous that it needed to be supported by a piece of rope hung from his neck. The organ proved wilful and had to be chastised, first by fist and finally with a knife. Indeed, it proved so recalcitrant that it had to be severed and rammed into his own posterior orifice. The behaviour of the lady-puppets was similarly and violently perverse.

  Mouchar asked me, ‘And how are the puppet shows in Venice, Cecilia?’

  I smiled at him. ‘Ah Mouchar, all Venice is just such a puppet show. Only we wear masks when we perform.’

  He nodded wisely. I felt a little guilty.

  At dawn the next day we set off for Tepelene, the Pasha’s seat, seventy-five miles and four days away through rough terrain. The spines of the horses sagged under large leather trunks of provisions and, of course, my bath. Ali Pasha’s gaudily caparisoned guards were with us to protect these valuables from robbers, or perhaps to keep the valuable Venetian artist under guard; it was hard to say. Perhaps the Venetian pastry chef was even more valuable to them. After all, he was a man. There was no question of travelling unescorted through the hills and crevasses, watched by felt but unseen eyes, and where even the tinkle of sheep bells sounded sinister in the thin air. Sometimes I heard an unholy howling in the night. The memory of the dismembered robber still hung before us.

  On October 8th, my birthday, we descended from the passes and saw the towers and minarets of Tepelene piercing the yolk of the setting sun. Tepelene was yet more foreign than Jannina had been, and more exhilarating for it. The marketplace teemed with every exotic race. The air vibrated with kettle drums, and the thrum of the restless hooves of fearsome war-horses. I counted the black slaves and watched boys chanting their prayers in their low throats. A flag on the palace roof told us that the Pasha was in residence.

  With persistence, I had found out more about my host. Mouchar would answer certain questions, and from his silence I divined the answers to the others. From the engraving I had seen in a traveller’s account in Venice, it seemed that Ali Pasha himself was a small, corpulent man of around seventy, with a white beard and a gentle demeanour. Among his subjects, Mouchar told me, the Pasha was known for his profound knowledge of the human heart, and his ability to see through anyone who might try to deceive him.

  ‘No one may behold his noble face without knowing that he knows all,’ breathed Mouchar, fervently.

  For all his spiritual depths, it see
med that Ali Pasha was also a man who would roast an enemy on a gridiron. I had seen the execution yard in Jannina: one of the merchants had told me that men died there with their skin stripped from their faces and hanging over their shoulders like peach peelings. Mouchar told me how Ali had hunted down and executed the ravisher of his sister after forty-two years. ‘Neither time nor place can set bounds on his revenge when he has been traduced. In fact, the longer it is delayed, the more fatal are its effects, for his hatred increases with its duration.’

  I dared not question Mouchar, for the sake of seeing pain in those beautiful eyes, about the fifteen murdered women. Of all the stories about the Pasha, this was the best known in Venice. Among us, he was said to have drugged his daughter-in-law in order to enjoy her body. She committed suicide when she woke to discover the truth, sticky on her thighs. All the witnesses – fifteen women of the harem – were drowned by his black mutes in the palace’s ornamental lake. In another version of this story, it was whispered that the women were executed for having caught the eye of Ali’s son. Yet another hinted that the massacre was ordered simply to defray the expenses of the harem because it had become too large to run economically.

  About the origins of his fierce master I did dare to ask Mouchar and he was most happy to reply at length. Between Mouchar’s loyal obfuscations of certain facts and his colourful effusions, I divined that Ali had been born the son of a humble pasha in Tepelene. His father soon died and he was raised by a fierce, dominating mother. Then he was orphaned at nine years old. Not satisfied with his allocation of glory, he had set himself up as a robber baron. By war and bribery he had increased his domain to Arta and Jannina. He had married his two sons to the daughters of Ibrahim Pasio of Avlonal. Then he had made war against his in-laws, and had taken, by force, all they had.