I ignored the question. He waited for a second and then almost whimpered, ‘A kiss as cold as that could hurt a loving heart.’
To this, I replied, ‘Your own organ is safe, in that case. It was a cold reason I kissed for. And, I feel, a cold heart that I investigated.’
Byron drew himself into Childe Harold pose. ‘It has become that way,’ he declaimed, with a tragic sigh. ‘I am cursed. I was born a poet, a nobleman, but the world has had its way with me. My fate has been confounded by the horrors of the love of women. My fortune is persistently evil. Everything is against me. If I had been born a pimp, whores would have been born without clacks. As it was, I was born with too much heart, and I find everywhere women who love me with just fragments of their being. This is what it is to be born a Byron.’
He pronounced his name as if the nectar of an oyster had trickled onto his tongue. He sank back in his chair, his eyes electrical, his colour high. He was waiting for me to capture this moment. But I turned my back on him and started to clean my brushes. When I looked around, he was gone.
My victories over Byron were tiny in the scheme of things. When I examined my painting, I found that I had failed to capture him. The man, yes, I had him – on his terms, of course – if I wanted him, but the portrait eluded me. I wanted him. Now that he was gone, I felt a commotion in my bowels. My hands were dry. The stem of the paintbrush trembled between my fingers. The hairs pricked on the back of my wrists. For all my bravado, I knew that I was falling into the danger of worshipping a graven image. I had not painted anyone so beautiful before. For the allure was not just the perfections of his features but the excitement trapped inside them.
He was back in my studio an hour later, with the smell of porter upon his breath, determined on revenge. I could see that he considered our physical intimacy already begun.
In what I was to learn was his usual way, Byron seduced me with a double-pronged attack of coldness and heat. That afternoon, he turned the mosaic of his character to the light and let it glitter selectively for me. One minute, he was the English milord, commissioning a portrait for his new book from a tradeswoman-artist. Next minute he was an adolescent, breathing hotly in my ear as I bent over him, whispering endearments to my neck, his hands reaching almost shyly for my breasts, saying to me, ‘You’ve painted enough men. Look at this face. This man’s in love. You know the smile. And I know this of you, Cecilia. I’ve been asking about you. For all your frigid kisses, what you don’t know about the love of men could be written on your paint rag, with room left over for all of Pietro Aretino.’
So he had found out about Casanova; he had done a little research of his own. I chose to find this flattering. I laughed at him and pushed him away, but a ghost of my arm reached out of my body to pull him back to me. Then I saw a smile on his lips, a real smile, his first.
And truly, under that smile of Byron’s, my life came to life. I found out that day that Byron had this ability to create a private climate, where the sun shone episodically, and was to be cherished all the more for it. I knew that he was particolare. Not everyone could endure him. Not everyone would want to do so. But he seemed special in a way that included me. His very originality somehow rendered the difference in our ages, cultures and experience all irrelevant. What was more important was that he included me in his consciousness, as a part of himself. When I was there he made me realise that I had been lonely, perhaps for years. I was still lonely. The difference was that I knew it now
At the thought of Byron my celibacy – of the heart and of the skin – suddenly rattled inside me. Since Casanova’s death, nine years before, I had not found anyone to love properly While he still lived I had at least rejoiced in my flesh as he had counselled me to do, while glutting my heart on a continuous diet of loving words from Dux. But after he died I no longer had much enthusiasm for adventure. I felt that my body had been ransacked by careless use. So I kept it more often to myself, and I had little use for recreational intimacies, even with older men. It seemed to me that when I tried them, I was conscious of a shadow falling upon my skin when I returned from wherever the anonymous hands, mouths and members had taken me. It was rarely anywhere far outside myself. It was a shadow of what real lovemaking is, muffled in the grey timbre of a second-best experience. I could never escape the cold feeling it carved upon my skin. So I avoided careless loves – mostly.
Only occasionally I would take on a pupil, turn him into Casanova’s unwitting disciple. Whether I did this simply to satisfy the hunger of my skin or with secret hopes of something more, I don’t know. Perhaps I needed their faces to protect me from my own, or from the loneliness that lurked in waiting for me since Casanova died. Hobhouse, always the expert on obscure tribal matters, had given me cause for thought on this. In Bengal, Hobhouse told me, the woodcutters wear mask portraits attached to the back of their heads. This is because tigers will only, attack from behind. They will follow a woodcutter wearing a mask, but they will not attack him. Many a Bengali woodcutter has been saved by his portrait. In the same way, once or twice I had been saved from the solitude stalking me by making the beast with two backs, with an unsuspecting man. But I had never opened my heart. I had not once fallen in love with one of those sitters, neither one of those tiresomely avid young men or those excitingly cool old counts.
And what else had I to do with my heart? I had withheld it so carefully for all those years, since Casanova. I was forty years old. Since Casanova died, I had never once been foolish. I had always been perfect. My problems were confined to souring in the gallipots and stiffenings of my brushes. I had taken no risks. I had never been in physical danger. I had walked the passerelle during acqua alta, not pushed my skirts through the dark sinews of the water. I had become a famous artist, but I had not left the coddle of the nursery. I did not know how to make a risotto. I had never chased a rabbit across a field, leaving my shoes in the long grass. I had now carried my bathtub of my own canvases all over Europe but I had never tried to create my own new colour. I had not risked a foreign frame.
For what had I been withholding myself? For Casanova? For a dead man? For a memory? For nothing. I would not withhold myself any more. For two decades I had been a conduit for other people’s lives as I saw them written on their faces. I had painted their joy and their pain, as an anonymous scribe. It is sad to be like that, I suddenly thought, I should have something for myself. There was something about Byron that promised me something real, visceral. It might be infernal or it might be sublime. Byron made me feel that, with him, I might experience something that would make my own life worth painting.
Even as I philandered with these ideas, I knew what I was doing. This is how an addict of novelty, who holds everything new in too high a regard, persuades herself to do something dangerous.
By the next morning, our game had advanced. We sparred as old lovers, gave each other small wounds. Within a day, we had scars to make gentle over, or to lacerate anew. Byron had this way of penetrating your consciousness and extracting a return. He was the champion of the sulkers. But hours of sullen silence would end with an exquisite compliment, which answered your exact need of him, to which your insecurities rendered you doubly absorbent.
He said, ‘How have you been able, so suddenly, to charm this warmth into my heart? It was free and empty, and cold as chastity, before I met you.’
He said, ‘Since I have known you, the world is beginning to become bearable, even loveable again.’ At the word ‘love’, my blood ran dappled inside me.
He said, ‘Our conversations cannot possibly date just from yesterday; we have been thinking the same thoughts, in our separate worlds, for years.’ I thought, Pietro Aretino, conversazione, empty heart.
What defence can you make against such an attack on your soul? My self-restraint lay down and expired under his sentences.
It seemed to me another compliment that Byron was intensely curious about Venice. He had read much about it, and wanted to see it, but he was already almost too i
nvolved with it. Venice was in his plans. But it became clear to me that he wanted to see it when his own splendour was fully realised and not before.
‘I think that I have conjured you, Cecilia, out of the air,’ Byron said, laughing. ‘I come to Albania, and I find a beautiful Venetian woman who knows the secrets of Vathek. I am magical, you know!’
And he clicked his fingers three times in the air, like castanets.
In Venice, we say:
Chi varda la luna casca in fosso.
If you look at the moon you fall in the ditch.
That night, while I waited for him – his hand had promised me this visit in the language where masculine accords with feminine – I went out to consult the moon about this new event in my life. I paced the terrace, my bare feet rustling like beetles on the cool stone.
How often we consult the moon. How many decisions we take under her! It is as if we believe that the crystalline light she throws can cut through the dark canals of our thoughts. When we see the moon we instinctively clutch for the hand of our lover. If our lover is absent we say, ‘Look! the moon has my lover’s face! How kindly he looks down on me tonight!’ The Orientals say that the moon has the face of a rabbit upon her. I say, yes, probably, she is as blank and timorous. She gave me no help. The moon and I suffered each other to soliloquise for a few moments, nothing more. But the cool air cleared my head and I was able, possibly for the last time, to think clearly about Byron.
I knew well that he had several interests in me, none of them disinterested. The first was simply that he wanted me to paint him: Childe Harold needed an image to illustrate it. He might never again be so beautiful as he was now, slender, healthy and vigorous from his travels. He wanted his beauty captured. He trusted me to do this; he acknowledged my artistry. My love for him would polish all my gifts.
The second was a sense of needing to prove himself against the most famous lover the world had yet known. A man who had given his name to a life of sexual splendour ... an outlaw, an exile, a writer, a man whom history would not forget. Although he refused to discuss it with me, I was sure that this was a part of his thinking: whatever Casanova had had, Byron wanted some of that, too.
Then there was Beckford and my connection with Vathek. I suspected that even if Byron had not found me personally attractive, he would have wanted me for that.
And I knew that I was worth having on my own account. I still had the audacious sensuality that Casanova had detected when he saw me eat torta al cioccolato. I was amusing, vivid to the ear. My breasts still caused disturbances. The Pasha himself had indicated at dinner, addressing my bosom rather than my face, that I might be made very happy by him.
But as for me, I was vulnerable. We all create the image of our new lover out of our own needs, and not from what exists in front of us.
Crede Biron, said his motto. And I believed him when he told me that we two exotic outcasts should be together. I believed him when he told me that he had not given his heart to anyone for years, and that it lay, throbbing with his need for me, inside the open wound the world had slashed in his breast. All I had to do was plunge my hand inside and take out his heart ... it was mine, if I wanted it. His very need made me want him. I heard again and again his words to me: ‘It is fatal to love me. I never could keep alive even a dog that I liked or that liked me.’ I wanted to be the woman who rescued him from this pain. He released a compassion in me that I did not know I possessed. Taught by Casanova, I was never the kind of woman to torment an aspiring lover who was going to succeed. Casanova always used to say, ‘He who arouses desires is probably destined to satisfy them.’ I consented my part in what would happen, and my culpability in it.
And yes, I had my less sentimental motives. Byron was a man whose contempt froze everything around him. I rose to the challenge of making his warmth shine upon me. I wanted to be included in his party of one against the rest of the world. And yes, maybe in me, there was an answering egotism: I had been loved by Casanova; now I wanted to be loved by this beautiful man who seemed to me to embody the cut, style and strange sexual omnivorous nature of this selfish new century.
And yes, Byron had beautiful hands and delectably small ears. He had eyes that melted my hands in my pockets. Yes, for those things alone I wanted him, the way I once wanted torta al cioccolato, the way Casanova had once wanted me.
I lay in my bath and thought all these things as my hands swam through the water. After a while I lay motionless like a little reptile preserved in a bottle. When I finally rose from the bath all its perfumed oils seemed to have leached into my skin. I secreted musk and lavender from my every pore. I fluttered a linen chemise over my head and lay on my bed. I blew out the candle.
But that evening, in anticipation of our tryst, Byron’s foreplay was one-sided. He went to a Turkish bath, where the washing was performed by beautiful young men. He was frightened away by a fierce and unprepossessing old masseur, so he came to me dirty, with regrets for the slim fingers of boys upon his lips. It was part of his play for power. For how could I compete? He was already discounting what we were to do together, before we had touched one another. His flesh was already alight when he walked into my room, but I was to know at once that it did not burn exclusively for me.
He came to me, with the sweat of the day and the semen of the last days upon him. He did not knock. He opened the unlocked door to my apartment where I lay sleepless in the dark.
He carried his own candle. He held it under his chin so the full lips swelled to Nubian proportions.
‘It is very kind of you to bring me a candle, my Lord,’ I said, from inside the curtains of my bed.
‘Yes, very kind,’ he said, and blew it out. I heard him lay his pistols on the table.
‘I reek to hell,’ he said in the dark.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. The smell did not matter – it had spiked my nostrils as he walked in – but the insult had already stained this first night indelibly.
Now he leant against the carved bedpost. He was in no hurry. I understood this parry. I was to know from it that his passion for me was not insuperable. In the foamy moonlight, I saw the white swivel of his eye. I was also to realise that he did not wish to see my face. I felt them, suddenly, the small grooves and sags that he did not want to see. My hand swam, involuntarily, to my chin so I could stretch the skin back. I snouted my shameful too-large feet away under the sheet.
I was disheartened. I had been loved properly. I suddenly realised why people prefer to make love naked only with those who really love them. Only with love can the flaws of the body be forgiven. I was about to be judged on the coolest of criteria. I knew that it was wrong to invite this sophisticated coldness into my life. If I could not have love then I should find something closer to the animals, and enthusiastic like they are. I told myself to send Byron away and send a servant for one of the merchants from my journey. That would be safer than this.
I did neither of those things.
Meanwhile Byron mouthed the prepared text, ‘I am your slave tonight, Cecilia. Make me your king.’ I said nothing, hoping he would fill the space with words specially for me. I wanted him to leave the words in the room when he left, for me to cling to. I longed to inspire them. I did not. Somewhere in the dark corridors outside, a door slammed. It was the last noise I heard. Then the tongue of his dagger parted the whispering silk hangings of my bed.
‘And so, Cecilia, I come in quest of the Carbuncle of the Giamschid. I think I spy it there all rosy on the sheets. I should perhaps have brought the balm of Mecca to lubricate it. But I did not.’
He was showing me his empty hands and laughing when he entered my bed.
He unbuttoned but he did not undress. He did not look at me. I felt more lonely than I had ever done in my life, in the moment when Byron became my lover.
He humiliated me. He made me lift my own chemise to bunch in a soft ‘u’ an exclamation above my genitals. He made me do it out of my own desire for him. He made me do it by no
t doing it himself.
His tongue was hard. I smelt English vinegar. He was small, but it was almost another reason to love him. He so needed not to be small, and he so needed me not to know that he was. He did not let me touch him before he entered me, distracted me with lunging bites and pinches, and in the moments afterwards, he let my own desire and imagination magnify him inside me. He said nothing, so I said nothing. It did not last long, the first time, but neither did the pause before he pulled me on top of him again. It took all night for him to exhaust himself, because he gave so little each time. He snatched at my chemise, my hair, but never my skin. I hungered and scrabbled for him in the bed, but he was not mine, not for a second.
We did not sleep; we were never at peace. But at the last minute, before he left, he laid a finger gentle as milk across my eyes, as if erasing what I had seen of his naked needs in the darkness. I pulled the finger down to my mouth. I sucked, looking up at him. I met a faceful of pain. He tore my lip with his fingernail in his panic to pull his finger from my mouth. He stumbled as he took the heavy pistols from the table and did not look behind him.
Why did I fall in love with Byron? I told you, already. Because he emptied me. It felt like fainting.
‘Your love is not like love,’ I told him, as he walked away. My mouth tasted of blood.
‘What is it like?’
I said, ‘It is like death.’
This pleased him. He stopped for a moment. With his back to me, I saw him measure the words in his ears. I knew I would see them some day upon the page. Then he asked me, as he opened the door, ‘Did I not give you pleasure?’
But what little he gave, he took back later.
Carnevale Page 31
