Chapter 8
La dona xe come un indovinélo,
dopo spiegà no ‘l xe più quelo.
A woman is like an oracle:
once explained, she loses her delectation.
VENETIAN PROVERB
From that moment, Byron lost interest in me, and I fell in love with him. ‘I am your slave, make me your king,’ he had whispered in the folds of the sheets. ‘You are my slave, you are my slave,’ he meant. I had known this, but I consented to it.
And so, I suppose, I had consented then to all that followed. For had I ever believed, even for a moment, that his heart was free and disposed to love me? He had seemed to offer it to me, but I always knew he kept it on a string fastened to his skin. By what right, then, did I feel pain to see that, when he rebuttoned himself, he jerked his heart back into his pocket? How pointless was it to grieve when he put it away so that I might never see it again?
‘Cecilia, be careful,’ Hobhouse said, gently. It was not in me, or in Byron. But it was only then that I remembered that Byron had not used an English Overcoat. My golden ball lay dry and smooth in its leather pouch in my trunk. I did not care. My desire for Byron already exceeded my interest in the consequences.
Desire. I know now that it is better to be without its sharpening beak between your legs. The point at which a painfully beautiful love becomes only painful is hard to recognise and by then, of course, it is too late.
I saw it first with Byron when, the next day, we sat together in my studio, discreetly observing in each other the lineaments of the night before. It was a quick transaction. I asked nothing and received nothing, except recognition of my outer shape. Soon Byron was gazing not at me, but at my portrait of him. I ventured my hand on to his thigh – he let it stay there as he would a fish that had not yet commenced to stink. I could not believe it. I left it there a little longer, so that he would have a chance to redeem it, but no, there was no responsive gesture. His hand did not arch up to meet my palm. He did not enclose my hand in his. He did not stroke my fingers.
Then, as we say in Venice, a devil attached itself to each of my hairs. I knew the right thing to do was to remove my hand casually, as if it had only accidentally occupied his thigh, but my delinquent limb lay there upon his knee. I stared at it, my five-fingered enemy flattened like a dehydrating fish on his immaculate linen. My beautiful hand! For the first time, I looked at it and it did not please me. It seemed to me that it no longer glowed with the liquid petal-pink of a conch shell’s private interior. The skin, I thought, had tessellated, like the surface of the Grand Canal in a tight wind. My hand was not tender; it was waxy. It was still a beautiful hand but nothing could make it what it had once been. The light no longer suffused it. It needed to be held to have pleasure, and warmth. I removed my hand and bit my fingers to hide the sad outline of my mouth. But I put it back there on his thigh. I had, after all, consented to be treated like this.
I knew immediately this was to be the pattern of our days together. I was already exhausted by my longing for his touch. My exhaustion stole the strength I needed to stop wanting him. I was hollowed out with bravery. I was excavated with being brave. I was taut for any expression of affection, outside of the bedchamber. I realised that for some time now I had been panting quietly whenever I was with him. My hand stayed on his thigh. Now I hung my head like a dog that has begged and been ignored.
Yes, love is a hostile transaction. He was right, Byron. You win if you don’t say, ‘I love you.’ You win if you make the first move to leave.
I swallowed the tears clenched in my throat, because I could not utter them. But then those Venetian devils started to ruffle my hairs, to pull and tangle. I could not help myself. I did not consent after all! I refused to be condemned to a meagre portion of love: I had been loved properly. The little Venetian fish on his lap curved itself and then pinched hard.
Even as I pinched Byron, I raged at myself: be careful you will lose him. There was an angry exclamation from those full lips. My hand was shaken off his knee. My time with him was already curtailed. A minute later, he turned me on my stomach, lifted my petticoat, and unfurled his arms like wings around me. But the end of his interest in me was looming closer.
Whichever Byron was, dog or prince, the other was always in my mind, tormenting me with doubts about my position in his heart. I hovered over that debatable land between adoration and obsession. My Libran scales tilted violently, one way and another. You see it too, with his poetry. There is this same contrast between Byron’s reverential concept of Man, and his contempt for men themselves, and for women. People reading his poetry are alternately sunk and elevated, as if the hand of an invisible being pulls them up or down, without compassion for their disappointments or their joys. People in love with Byron felt likewise.
What could I do? Byron was so addictive. With Byron in my arms I felt an insolent happiness. In the rare moments where we lay together in the bed, the sheen of our lovemaking cooling to droplets on our naked bodies, our hair tangled together, I felt an intimacy I had not felt with anyone since Casanova. I realised how I had longed for a head on the pillow beside me, a head with which I could share thoughts and not just kisses. Byron continually challenged me and made me angry with a good cleansing rage. Then he softened me with a little hand clutching mine like a child’s. He made me think. He made me aware of myself. He was the only person who ever said to me, ‘Cecilia, how would you feel if someone painted your portrait?’
‘Possessed, violated,’ I said, wonderingly.
‘Then be gentle with me,’ he said.
‘But you write poems that are self-portraits.’ I said. ‘Is there not a particular word for that?’
‘Manustupration, you think?’
‘Perhaps you don’t trust anyone else to make an accurate portrait, one that is sufficiently beautiful?’
I stopped myself there. The sentence that hovered unsaid in the damp air between us was this: Because there is no one who loves you with the passion that you feel for yourself.
I could have said it. He would have liked me for it. Byron loved the effrontery of the truth. He was capable of moments of astonishing honesty. He was capable of seeing himself as he was. He could be as savage with himself as he was with others. He was afflicted with a scorn for himself as strong as any he inflicted on others. Sometimes he looked comically thunderous, like a monstrously naughty child who had hurt himself and needed to be kissed better.
He said nothing at all that could be counted as a declaration of love. But he seemed so painfully on the verge of it that I felt sorry for him. He would start, ‘Cecilia, you are …’ and stammer to a standstill, blush, busy himself with a curl or a cuff. Or he would limp from the room with his small ears on fire.
Without him, I waited. I was old enough to know the value, the shame and the pity of those hours I spent waiting for Byron. It was the first time in my life that someone had kept me waiting. And his reasons for leaving me waiting were so diminishing – a horse needing attention, a meeting with a man who sold embroidered felt slippers. All these were more important than being with me. Sometimes it was not the substance of the excuse but the careless way in which it was delivered that corroded my self-confidence. I was not used to this, and I was undextrous in handling it. Instead of fighting, I went down in an instant. If Byron thought less of me than a horse or a slipper, I felt that I must consent to my new place in the world, and the result of this was that I was even more grateful for his attention when it came to me.
Between my legs my desire swung backwards and forwards like a lighted censer.
I remembered something Goethe had told me, a German proverb: ‘Desire enfeebles her slaves.’
Of course, I fell to daydreaming sometimes. I pushed my knuckles against my eyes to obstruct reality.
Into the pulsing darkness comes Byron. He comes to my bed; it is heaven there with him.
He is not limping. He is whole, and perfect.
’Cecilia, I have something
important to tell you.’
His shoulders shudder with a little sob, the pain of his final parting from the vagabond life of his heart. He lays his head down upon the pillow. I cover him with my body in a warm embrace.
I fasten my mouth to the back of his neck like a mollusc and suck gently until he whimpers and turns around to reach for me.
He says, ‘I give my life to you, Cecilia. I beg you to take it with both hands.’
He leans forward to kiss me, but first he licks my lips, tenderly
He has brought me a gift – a peach. To celebrate the marriage of our souls, we eat the peach together, bite by bite, and lick the juice from each other’s chins.
And so I betray you, Casanova.
Byron was never late for a portrait session.
No one had ever caught the sensuality of his lips before. I loved that challenge, and even when kissing I was grasping a paintbrush in my imagination. I sometimes had the curious sensation that he was himself directing his kisses towards that paintbrush, too. He was even more desperate than I that the result of our lovemaking should be an enhancing portrait of him: he wanted my love for him to glaze the image he could show the world. He scratched his name on my palette with a quill, scoring through the dried paint. I tried to see this graffiti as a declaration of love, but I knew it was something different.
And, as I had guessed, I shared his passion for me with his passion for my past. When we made love, I felt as if he was always sniffing my skin to detect the musk of Casanova’s. I was a vessel: just as I interpreted his beauty, so I should also transmit his desire instead of receive it.
I was aware of this, aware of the coldness and impersonality of his love, even at its most hectic moments, and I feared that I would lose him when the portrait was finished. So I spun it out, sketching study after study, each with something not quite satisfactory to his vanity, but with beauty which teased his ego. He was never tired of looking at all these pictures of himself, and refining the exact image of himself which he wanted to survive him. I realised that with my evening sketches I was re-enacting for him The Thousand and One Nights he had loved as child. Maybe he was aware of this process. Perhaps he saw how I prolonged my love-life with him through my creativity, and he perhaps enjoyed the knowledge.
Our words never revolved in those magic configurations of ‘us’ and ‘we’. And we never strayed into the Elysian fields of words with a future; we forswore ‘shall’ or ‘tomorrow’ or ‘always’. Byron was a brilliant strategist when it came to sleeping. Whenever I summoned the courage to say something important to him, not daring to look at his face while I did so, the silence at the end of my words would force me to turn to him. He would be catnapping.
Even then, I knew I had to fight for his attention, forage for anecdotes to amuse him. I faced him after lovemaking, finding, each time, my physical peace shattered by the utter detachment on his face. But whenever he felt me giving up, he refreshed my hope and my despair with a slight caress. He would not quite let go. He would never allow me to finish the question: ‘When …?’ He would say, ‘Cecilia, my darling, do not spoil my dinner. I dine with the Pasha tonight. Don’t be selfish.’
The Pasha was only rarely in the palace now. His political troubles had exploded into violence and he was often absent with his men and commanders. Byron was fretful when the Pasha was away Sitting with him on one of the deep palace window-sills, I once took his hand and kissed it. He looked over my head, out of the window, as if someone had called him.
I asked, ‘Byron, are you restless now?’
‘I wasn’t, but you have put me in mind to be so.’ Then he commenced an inhuman howling. I recognised the noise. It was the same howling I had heard in the hills of Jannina on my way to Tepelene. He, too, must have heard it and been moved by it.
He wants to leave, I thought. He wants to get away from me already.
The more I painted him, the more I loved him. I, of all people, should have known the dangers of worshipping graven images. I should have realised why we are warned against them. In early Christian times, the evil spirits were supposed to be possessed of huge eyes that never closed, and to glide up and down with their feet together, as if propelled upon the wind. This was very like Byron’s undulating slither.
I looked at my Muslim hosts, worshipping their abstract images, and envied them their independence of the human face. Surrounded by their art, their colours, their ceremonies, I absorbed the incense of their faith through all my organs of perception. I was infected with a spiritual unease: I had broken the spiritual law of their country by worshipping Byron and lived in an abstract fear of my punishment. Of course, we all turn the person we love into the person we worship. The artist does this in a simple way, with each successful portrait. But we all do it in more complex ways, for religious faith has lately become subsidiary to personal adorations in this world. Byron had converted me to this new cult with his beautiful face. Now I would pay for my heresy.
We sat together in an open-air marquee where the Albanians performed a primitive tragedy for the entertainment of the foreigners. It was so simple there – the villain wore black, the whore wore red. But what to do with the villain sitting next to me, as indifferent as lead? The players cast their huge shadows on the wall, the projections of their larger-than-life passions. The problem with Byron’s was that they were smaller than life. I had learnt not to put my hand on his knee.
Love hurt increases the value of the loved one by the amount of the hurt: this is as true as Pythagorean theorem. Despite the pain, I wanted no more independent existence than Byron’s shadow had. I loved him more than my own skin. My heart was eaten by love. I ate nothing. I was eating my own flesh to appease my hunger for him. Byron hated fat women like his mother. I was thin already, but I would become a wraith to please him. It turned out that I had miscalculated sadly. Byron also hated thin women! As my cheeks hollowed, he looked upon them critically. He told me that excessively slender women looked like dried butterflies mounted upon pins; he swore he could hear the rustle of their wings. As for older women who tended towards emaciation, he said ominously, they looked like nothing more than ancient spiders tiptoeing around the parlour.
I washed myself obsessively, so as not to smell of myself. I felt myself dissolving, turning to a slight feminine miasma, folded and gathered in his possession, like a genie in a lamp. No one else should have me at their disposal. Only then would I feel safe in him. I found myself hating anyone else who came near Byron. I, who had never been jealous, not even of Casanova’s one hundred and thirty loves, envied Hobhouse for the time he had spent alone with Byron! I was even jealous of my own piece of canvas when Byron traced his finger down it.
I still did not worry about the difference in our ages. It remained irrelevant. I remembered what Benjamin Franklin had told Casanova. Older women were better, he had said. ‘They are so grateful,’ he had pointed out. ‘All cats are grey in the dark.’ I knew that what separated me and Byron was not age, or language, but love. It was the difference between what I felt for him and what he felt for me.
My portraits were love letters to him. They grew larger, more colourful. I used all the canvas I had brought with me from Venice. There was no canvas to be had in Albania that was big enough for my love. Even Byron, when he beheld these mirrors, saw in them only half the beauties that I found in him. I no longer painted what I saw. I painted what I loved. At night, now, with closed eyes, I abandoned myself to him whether he came to me or not. I could not tear myself from certain hopes and dreams.
But Byron could tear himself away from me.
Chapter 9
Un baso e ‘na forbia, e ‘l baso scampa via.
A kiss, wipe your mouth, and the kiss is gone.
VENETIAN PROVERB
There was no parting scene, as Byron did not tell me that he was leaving. I was oblivious to the preparations. I pined for him, but I had sufficient impressions of his skin upon my own to feast myself to delirium for hour after hour. I assum
ed that the Pasha had commanded his time that day. Hobhouse had disappeared too, so I could not talk about Byron to him. But I had my paintings of Byron to stroke, caress, and perfect. I had my memories to edit into a bearable sequence. When he did not come to me that night, I assumed the neglect was just a new phase of the hostile transaction Byron made of love. I had no revenge to plan. There was nothing I could do to hurt Byron, or at least nothing I could imagine at that moment.
The next morning I awoke early in that house of gently sleeping women. Among the female quarters of the Palace of Tepelene, it was pink all through. The air lay still in pink marble halls and hung over pale, pink sleeping princesses. Fern-feathers of hair thrummed against soft necks humid with invisible exhalations of their skin. Their moist breath floated from their sleeping lips, nestled under their languid arms and trailed around their warm limbs.
I, too, felt pink and soft that morning. I had woken in the mood to kiss and forgive. After all, what was a night? Then one of my little princesses came to my room and whispered, ‘Do you miss the beautiful English milord, Madame Cecilia?’ I ran in my chemise through the vertiginous corridors to Byron’s rooms. Suddenly my nails were blades, my shoulders were teeth, and my breasts were mica.
In Byron’s room I found a scene of paper carnage. The bright skins of Ali Pasha’s fruits were flung among letters and used linen. I knew that he had gone. I found the hat he had worn for my last portrait on the floor. ‘No!’ I screamed. It was the hat he had worn for me. I could not bear to see it thrown down, just like that. With that loose gesture, he had gone. I lay down among his discarded linen. I took a mouthful of his nightshirt and crushed it in my teeth. It smelt and tasted of me, rich, salty, sweet, abandoned. I wrapped his pillow around my head, breathing the scent of his hair. I tried to choke the emptiness and silence of the room. Inside the pillow, I prayed, Help me, but I heard only my own breathing in the whiteness. I wrenched the pillow from my face and flung it at the door from which he had left me. I looked for the paintings he had insisted on taking to his room ‘to study their defects’. They were gone. But my little notes to him, now running with the sticky blood of a red orange, were still there, among bills from the Tepelene jewellers. A fly settled on my lip, as if drawn to the things going to the bad within me.
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