No, Hobhouse would never talk to me of Nicolo, and perhaps he had reasons of his own for that too. I tried to question him later, and he begged me, ‘Do not ask, please, Cecilia.’
Thinking of Nicolo, the pain swelled up inside me. I could no longer spare Hobhouse.
‘Then tell me this. Did I mean anything to him?’
‘Yes, Cecilia, yes.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because he told me years ago, “Never mention Albania to me again.”’
Hobhouse was more comfortable telling me how Byron had flirted with Teresa Macri, the twelve-year-old daughter of his landlady, who had hopes of selling the girl for a high sum to the English milord.
‘But he scorned the very thought. For it was some time since Byron had needed to pay for his pleasures,’ said Hobhouse, and then blushed on realising what he had implied. He changed the subject hurriedly.
‘Don’t worry. Tell me the truth. Anything else insults me,’ I said, vehemently.
‘Byron was in rut, in Greece,’ Hobhouse admitted. ‘There was no shortage of willing flesh for him. He boasted that he had made love two hundred times since we left England.’ Again, Hobhouse dissolved in blushes. What a war went on in his head when he was with me, poor man: a war between honorable honesty and gentlemanly modesty. I patted his large arm to show him that he had not behaved badly. But my head was filled with unwanted images and involuntary calculations. Of the two hundred acts of love, some were surely women. A dozen, if you could call them acts of love, had been with me.
After ten weeks in Greece, Byron and Hobhouse left on the Pylades for Smyrna. They arrived on March 6th. Travelling past caravans of camels and to the accompaniment of a hundred thousand noisy frogs, they saw Ephesus, and were haunted by the wail of jackals amongst the fallen columns. They witnessed the Albanians in their retinue being sold into slavery. They watched whirling dervishes in a coffee house and the dancing troupes, unfettered by decency, on the streets.
‘This is the real thing,’ Byron told Hobhouse.
Onwards and eastwards went Byron and Hobhouse. Back came the messengers and merchants to tell the inhabitants of the Palace of Tepelene all about it. On the way to Constantinople, they were delayed at the entrance to the Dardanelles, the narrow cleft that separates two continents, Asia and Europe. Byron spent hours diving for turtles. He was eager to imitate Leander, who had swum across the Hellespont to join his lover Hero, in the great tale. He made two attempts, failing the first time. The four miles throbbed to a strong, cold and dangerous current. Then, on May 3rd, he succeeded, swimming – an elegant breast-stroke, we were told – from Europe to Asia, in an hour and a half.
In Constantinople Byron dedicated himself to cultural and erotic explorations. Again he watched the young boys engaged in lustful dances in the wine shops — ‘Disgusting!’ Hobhouse would tell me later – and listened to the whirling dervishes howling in their ecstasy. ‘You never heard such an unearthly caterwaul! And the smells that rose from those filthy skirts!’
Byron rode along the European side of the Bosphorus to the village of Belgrade where his heroine Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had once lived. He circumnavigated the walls of the Sultan’s seraglio, a four-mile journey along triple ivy walls, past Turkish burial grounds tall with strange tombstones and cypresses. He was presented to the young Sultan Mahmoud II. Byron dressed in his red regimental splendour and an elaborate feathered hat for this ceremony as he had for Ali Pasha.
‘He looked such a sight, Cecilia. I never saw him look so well. The travelling had suited him, and he seemed to have acquired a kind of Oriental grace. The sultan afterwards declared that he thought Byron was really a woman inside the fur coat. I never told him that, of course. Please don’t say anything!’ Hobhouse would implore.
‘There is a feminine side to him,’ I said.
‘And never say that either, Cecilia. Better to say that there was something of the Levant or the Orient about him. He would prefer that. It was at this point that he started to say that he could not see not much difference between Englishmen and Turks, save that we have – excuse me, Cecilia – foreskins and they have none, that they have long dresses and we short, and that we talk much and they little. In England, he pointed out, the vices in fashion are whoring and drinking, in Turkey sodomy and smoking, we prefer a girl and a bottle, they a pipe and a pathic.
‘You know what an addict he is for new languages. He swallows them whole. I don’t know how he does it. I expected him to be talking fluent Turk in a week. However, in Turkey he noticed that the men take their pleasures silently, apart from the usual horrid grunts and foul eructations.’ Hobhouse wrinkled his nose. ‘So the only words of Turk he mastered were those for “bread”, “water” and “pimp”.’
After Constantinople, Hobhouse and Byron sailed back to Greece, where the two friends parted. Hobhouse was returning to England to face his financial affairs. The parting with Byron could make even the sensible Hobhouse wax sentimental. ‘I admit it, I cried. I even divided a little nosegay of flowers with him. At the time, as he seemed bent on destroying himself with pleasure, it seemed the last thing perhaps I would ever share with him.’
‘Was he not sad to see you go?’ I asked. Perhaps Byron could not manage proper partings. Perhaps it cost him too much pain? Perhaps this was why he had run away from me?
If Hobhouse saw the direction of my thoughts he did not pursue them. He said, ‘No, he was not sad to see the back of me. He was well ready for me to leave. I was holding him back. He wanted to try things he could not “taste” with me around him all the time. In Turkey, he was continually disappearing, and when he came back he did not seem to have the words to tell me where he had been. He did not want an Englishman, even me, as witness. He did not want to have to explain any more.’
This is what Hobhouse would not tell me, but because of what he did tell me, and because of what I know about Byron, I can tell you. After he left me, Byron took a darker turn in his life.
Sometimes, I know certainly, he went a little deeper. Not just the Grand Coital Tourist, but more. Sometimes he renounced the Oriental Bazaar and the donkey ride, and trod in things unintended for tourist feet. Passing doorways that gaped at him darkly, he breathed forbidden perfumes and private decays. His tongue was coated with dust. Nobody asked him where he came from, likened him to Semiramis, offered camels for him. Suddenly it would become quiet among the orange peel, lettuce, mud, offal, sawdust, date stones, children and flies. Slowly, stupidly, he would begin to perceive the quiet sounds of Greeks not performing satires of self-abasement. He had strayed into streets where the people sat without curiosity, wanting nothing from him, not even his story. He heard a drummer’s rhythmic sussuration, curving around the urgent notes of a flute-player. The noise tugged at his groin like a hand.
Byron couldn’t hear music without a lover to fondle. He didn’t like the way it disentangled him. He took steps, with the music still in his ears. He bought a whore for the afternoon, and, as an afterthought, the musicians as well. In moments like this, he could almost love the whore whose tunic he pulled up in the carriage on the way home, while the musicians perched on the baggage-rack behind them, still warbling and whispering to their instruments.
And if that ripe smell was the incense of a love disease, did he care? He drew her onto his lap and unfastened his trousers, cupping the lush soft buttocks almost tenderly. He slid easily inside her. He had to bite her nipple to make her acknowledge his entrance. As she cried out in pain, he finished. Ten minutes later, he took her again, more slowly, more pleasurably, in a place where there was more resistance, where he didn’t have to bite to make her weep.
What I know about Byron from the next period, I heard later from his comical manservant Fletcher, for Byron was now left alone with his paid retinue. Fletcher never learnt much Italian, and very little French, but by the time I called him in as witness, my English had become good enough for spying purposes. Sometimes, as I have said, I tussled with Fletcher
’s language, which had come freshly minted from the back alleys of London, but somehow, when we met again years later, I was able to distil more truth, and more pain for myself, from it.
So it is from Fletcher that I have the eye-witness accounts of Byron’s second sojourn in Greece. It lasted eight months. While I was preparing for my confinement, dragging my swollen body back and forth across the marble floors every long haunted night, Byron was falling for a beautiful Greek youth, Eustathios Georgiori, whose long curls hung down his back, and who sulked and flounced.
‘You should have seen that boy,’ said Fletcher. ‘From behind, he was a perfect woman, but slimmer in the hips. Yooothatteeoss! What a name! What a great big girl! He carried a parasol! Byron put up with what-all from him. Obstropulous is not the word for it! I would have given him a souse across the chops and filliped his snout. What I was puling to do, though, was to whop him a kick where milord was most tender to him.’
Byron did not know that the Pasha soon disappeared to conduct his innumerable small wars in the north. He did not know that I stayed in Tepelene till my time came in the heats of July 1810. He knew nothing of the hours of white pain before Girolamo’s birth or of the kind brisk hands and hypnotic incantations of the Albanian midwife, or of the extravagant and unsuitable birth-gifts from Ali Pasha. He did not know how I converted my bath into a luxurious crib for my baby. He knew nothing of Girolamo, of course. He did not know that I decided to name our son for Casanova, taking my old lover’s soft liquid middle name, for comfort, for luck. I wanted the child to belong in some way to Casanova, who had known how to love properly.
The Albanians offered to keep my little Girolamo. His provenance was obvious, and a little wild milord might have flourished in the palace of Ali Pasha. The Albanians also offered a hundred other solutions for the problem of an inconvenient baby, each more barbarous than the next. There need be no trace of the child, I was told. I could pretend nothing had happened: that I had come to Albania, that I had painted, that I had accepted the Pasha’s gold, and returned home; that I had not met Byron, and that I had not lost him.
But when the midwife handed me my son the world had turned upside down. A perfect being smiled at me with Byron’s pale blue eyes. I could not leave him in Albania. I found another solution. I would take him back with me to Venice and give him to the Armenian monks on the island of San Lazzaro. A brief exchange of letters sealed the fate of my child. The Armenians were kind and direct. They would take the child. Their terms: I could see him whenever I wanted; to pay for his keep I would work on their frescoes, save them from the damp, pulverising breath of our lagoon. The monks would care for him, educate him, bring him to manhood as one of their own. Their final and unbreakable condition was this: Girolamo was never to know that I was his mother.
I would give him to the Armenians, but not before I had got to know my little baby. I allowed myself three months in Albania with him before I returned to Venice. I declined the offers of a wet-nurse and fed Girolamo from my own breasts. While Byron ran wild amongst the Oriental boys, I nursed his son, and found all my thoughts absorbed in him.
From the earliest days my little Girolamo was a creature of the most outrageously sophisticated sensuality. I swear he fondled my breasts with tenderness. They were no longer the wrong breasts. They were exactly and utterly the right breasts, and Girolamo smiled up at me over them every hour of the day. I swear he kissed them when he had drunk his full.
But surprisingly soon my baby also reached out for peach juice and hot chocolate, not milk pottages. He loved the nectar of oysters! What a palate he had, how unlike his father’s and how like his namesake Casanova’s! In my room at the palace, one day I saw the baby sniffing and smiling. I realised that he was lying near my box of pungent mussel shells. In those times I used the old method to store gold paint: ground to powder with sugar and stored inside those purple shells. Girolamo wanted the flesh of the shellfish. ‘One day,’ I told him, ‘you will drink crab soup in Venice.’ His exquisite little nostrils dilated and he smiled at me, trusting me to deliver whatever I promised.
‘And I will give you peacock flesh,’ I told him. ‘It never rots.’
For three months I had Girolamo to love, and the pain of Byron’s parting could not penetrate the milky, sleepy little world of joy I inhabited when the baby was in my arms. But one day, I already knew in the small of my back and in the pit of my stomach and in the palms of my hands, one day it would be otherwise.
And as Girolamo lay sleeping, my thoughts sometimes took flight, took me to the East, where I knew Byron journeyed, took me to his mouth, his eyes, his white hands, the nights he had spent with me here in Tepelene and the moment he betrayed me.
While I played with Girolamo, Byron moved into the monastery of the Capuchins. He tired of Eustathios and renewed his passionate friendship with the sweet Nicolo Giraud. He rescued a Turkish girl who was to be drowned in a sack in the sea after being caught in flagrante with a lover during Ramadan. This incident would become part of his poem The Giaour, as would memories of Ali Pasha, whose son, Veli Pasha, came to meet Byron, and became infatuated with him, embracing him in public with more than brotherly warmth.
Of course, Byron swam the Piraeus. Perhaps the polluted water swam into his veins because Byron caught malaria and, maltreated, nearly died of it. ‘It was a near thing,’ Fletcher would tell me. ‘I even started a letter to his ma, to tell her what had happened. But he got better. Thinner, but better. The flesh fell off him.’
‘Perhaps he was a little sad?’ I asked. Perhaps he thought of me, and missed me?
‘Oh no, he was happy as a French chicken! He liked himself skinny as what-have-you. He wanted to stay that way. After that he became the very devil to feed.’
Of course. I understood that Byron would have been pleased to have become emaciated with the illness. On his recovery he observed a strict regimen to preserve his ethereal beauty. ‘The only thing he would eat was rice, great boiled nasty lumps of it – unchristian, I told him it was. And no more wine. He sucked all day on a bottle of vinegar and water.’
I could imagine that in Athens, where every young man was supposed to look like a Greek god, it must have been hard work for Byron to be the most beautiful of all.
Fletcher told me, ‘He didn’t eat enough proper food to feed an eel, and it went to his head. His guts must have been wondering if his throat had been cut. It was a big drama looking after his body. We all knew our parts. We were there to listen. He would talk forever about a single fallen hair or a hole in his tooth. He was forever writing to his friends to send him that bilious red toothpaste he liked.’ Fletcher spat.
The other side of this coin, it seemed, was an intense self-consciousness. ‘When he walked in public,’ Fletcher recounted, ‘and he heard footsteps approaching, he would stop dead and stand motionless, in case some stranger happened to see him limping. It was as if the stranger’s opinion of him mattered more than the opinions of the people who really knew him.’
This, too, made sense to me.
On April 21st, Byron and Fletcher boarded the Hydra to leave Athens. But the boat remained becalmed for three days – the unwilling wind reflecting his own feelings about leaving the place where he had been happy. His mood was bitter. ‘He was writing nasty stuff, about Lord Elgin and the marbles, about Scotland, about everything really. I kept out of his way,’ said Fletcher. ‘When he’s gut-foundered like that, I’m better off out of it.’ I realised that Byron must have been gnawing at his own roots as the return to Britain, where his affairs languished in dire disorder, loomed ever closer. Fulminate as he did, the Hydra still bore in her hold the last large consignment of the Elgin Marbles on their journey to the British Museum in London.
‘Then we set sail and he got sick as a dog,’ said Fletcher. ‘Malaria, piles and, pardon me, Madam, a little gentlemanly disorder in the lower regions. He took to his berth and kept on scribbling.’ As the Hydra finally pulled out of Piraeus harbour, Byron made notes on his m
iserable state of mind, ‘Four or Five Reasons in Favour of a Change.’ They stretched to seven.
Many years later I found them in his desk. They had never stopped being true. Even now, thinking on them, I see the misery inside Byron, and my tenderness wells out of a soft part of me. Even now, when I read them, I cannot really hate him.
Reasons in Favour of a Change, by George Gordon, Lord Byron
1st At twenty-three the best of life is over and its bitters double.
2ndly I have seen mankind in various countries and find them equally despicable, if anything the Balance is rather in favour of the Turks.
3rdly I am sick at heart…
4thly A man who is lame of one leg is in a state of bodily inferiority, which increases with years and must render his old age more peevish & intolerable. Besides, in another existence I expect to have two if not four legs by way of compensation.
5th I grow selfish & misanthropical…
6th My affairs at home and abroad are gloomy enough.
7th I have outlived all my appetites and most of my vanities, aye even the vanity of authorship.
Chapter 2
Tuti i gode a veder i mati in piazza, purché no i sia de la so razza.
Everyone enjoys seeing a lunatic in the piazza because he’s not of the same breed.
VENETIAN PROVERB
I too knew what it was to make a weary homecoming. While Byron abandoned himself to his second Athenian idyll, in the late October of 1810, Girolamo and I made our way back to Venice, first with horse-carts through the mountain passes, then in a carriage on the kinder roads and finally, blessedly, over water. Mouchar accompanied me all the way to the boat, taking care of every practicality. I was happy to have his soothing presence, and for the graceful scent of his hair oil, which blocked the uglier stenches of our travels. But I barely talked to him. I had eyes and ears only for Girolamo, who had lived three months in this world now, never more than seconds from my side. All this while Girolamo was learning different ways to laugh at me: slow, bubbling chuckles, short staccato cries, silent laughs with his eyes crinkled up like cowry shells.
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