The cat turned his back upon me, his tail erect in the air. He presented his posterior, clean and pink as a baby’s ear.
‘I know you don’t believe a word of it,’ I told him. ‘But I am stronger now, really’
It was not true. When Byron came back to me it seemed that I had carried inside me all these years a phial of his essence, a cloudy dangerous perfume like the dread poison of the Doges. When he limped into my studio again, the phial broke open and I was flooded with the old weakness, the old love and the old pain. It was as if he had never been absent.
The cat had lain down and was sleeping. His little paws rippled and his teeth chattered. He dribbled a little. Finally, he relaxed. I knew not to interrupt him when he was dreaming, so I left him there and went home to my bedroom, where I lay in my bath for a long time, soaking the bruises Byron had given me, telling myself lies.
The Cat Speaks of the Pedigree of George Gordon, Lord Byron
A deformed cat like Byron is known to occur in nature, but not often.
He was right when he said that worst animals bear only one progeny at a time. A whole litter like him is inconceivable in our world. We manage things better than that. When she smelt the style of him, a mother cat might well nip him in the neck or despatch him with a cleansing paw.
A cat like Byron would be avoided by the she-cats in their season and so his cripple-seed would silt up in his loins, like his anger. Then it would die out.
Good.
No matter how dramatically or poetically he declaimed his love songs from the roof tiles, none of us would believe a word of it. We would stare at his leg, hard.
We would not encourage him with a surfeit of flattery and notoriety. We would not hold his badness up to admiration and reproach at the same time. We would not leave his few actual virtues unremarked on. Cats like Byron want to appear worse than they actually are.
Cats like Byron pretend to hate the world but they cannot survive without its attention. The whole world is their mirror, and when they look into it they see a better cat than they really are.
In fact, they are nothing more than schoolboys with their pockets stuffed full of firecrackers. They make a big noise, but can they catch a sparrow in their teeth? Can they nurture a family? No.
A cat like Byron might live a while, though. Soft-hearted human females would be tricked into pity by his limp, and take him to their laps.
I am not happy that Byron has come to Venice.
It is not a good thing.
Chapter 2
Chi ga dentro ’l fogo, manda fora el fumo.
If you have fire inside, you send out smoke.
VENETIAN PROVERB
You never see Venice for the first time. She is already floating inside you. She is waiting to pour herself into your heart when it opens.
Byron, the Aquarian, the swimmer, loved our beaver-republic before he ever saw her. She was one of those places he already knew in his mind’s eye, the greenest island of his imagination. How often, in Albania, he had questioned me about our city! Even then I had sometimes found myself thinking that in making love to me he tried to pull Venice into his arms.
But Byron came growling into Venice. Exit London, pursued by unbearable ostracism. Enter Venice, which had been chastened by defeat. She was a city in exile from herself, denatured, chagrined. Her empire had been confiscated, her lottery dismantled. The Doges’ Palace had been looted. The invaders had stripped the Doges’ boat, the Bucentoro, of its gold and turned it into a prison hulk. Byron arrived in a city branded by Napoleon, who had demystified those dark streets that once confounded Beckford. Each dwelling now had its neat lozenge of a number. It was no longer possible to be lost, to lose someone, or to disappear. La Serenissima’s shameless nobility had been shamed. Her arcane laws had been dismantled. Even the mouths of the stone lions in the walls had been stopped up: the secret processes of Venice were now themselves proscribed. Napoleon had paved over our campi dei morti: the dead were now deported to the island of San Cristoforo, and were no longer permitted to lie among us. The city was ruled as efficiently and transparently as possible by an Austrian governor. We were left gasping in the great cull of our happiness.
But Venice was not humbled, not really. If you looked beneath the surface, we were still a happy city. The four bronze horses of San Marco, once shipped off to graze in ignominy in the gardens of the Tuileries in Paris, had just been restored to us. Although our golden rule was vanquished, our warehouses still bulged with silks and stuffs from the corners of our former empire. Our churches were still crammed like magpies’ nests with the jewelled masterpieces of the world. In our cafés we still served the most flagrant scoundrels of the epoch, the most extravagant lovers, the most rapacious cheats, the most monstrous murderers. Sumptuous sinning continued in the casinos. Most of all, our ancient beauty was as impudent as ever. A deep mist or a dark night could still undo all Napoleon’s work, and restore her mystery to Venice.
And the city still behaved according to her nature – she sent little waves to stroke the stairs, made dark smells in alleyways, breathed her opulent sadness against Byron’s cheek. Nor would the stones of Venice leave his feelings alone. I knew, because I knew Venice and Byron, how she would act on him. He would wake to find himself in love, with all the pain of a new love, with the seductive city outside his window. The palazzi, except the rough-hewn Byzantine ones, would appear feminine to him – delicate virgins or ruined sluts, all of them just out of his grasp. Her drowning colours and her sinuous waters would whisper to him. I knew that Venice would drive him mad with desires.
Byron had brought my descriptions of Venice with him. They were secreted in his memory, somewhere quite apart from the thoughts of me, which he had sweated into oblivion on the skins of other lovers. Now my Venetian pictures in his mind would, I knew, fuse with all five of his senses and take possession of him. That first morning, Venice must have entered Byron through his ears and his nose. I know this because I experienced the same things every morning myself. It is always a festival for the senses merely to wake up, breathe and listen in Venice.
Byron must have woken, of course, to the sound of water snickering around stone and wood and the splat of the green soil of the seagulls who laughed as they flew away. While Byron lay in bed, the orchestra of the street would have tuned itself for the day’s performance, commencing with the cries of the vegetable-sellers and the answering calls of their quarry, the housewives. Everyone would be laughing, at themselves or someone else. Byron must have listened to the robust Venetian dialect, compelling to his sensitive ear. One could distinguish the sellers’ wares merely from the sounds of their voices: the cries of the flower-sellers soft-tongued as petals; the grating rasps of the onion-sellers; the seductive mewing of the women who sold catmeat. There were the dangerous clipped barks of the seller of rat’s bane and the cat-castrator. ‘L-a-t-t-e?’ lapped the milkwomen, swinging their pails on the yoke. The knife-grinder played percussionist, trundling over the cobbles with his barrow, his knives twittering on their leather straps. A lighter beat came from the stuttering of the crutches as the beggars arrived for their day’s importuning. The water-borne barrel-organs competed with the music of the caged canaries, sparrows and turtle-doves.
The morning would be thick with noise and warm air displaced by a thousand vibrant bodies. Any potential for collision would be fully realised, and the laughter and apologies would come floating through the air to Byron’s ears. And how they sang, the Venetians! A song would start on someone’s lips and the refrain would spread, until a whole calle was alight with music and applause.
And the smells! The stinks and the perfumes must have coiled around each other in Byron’s fine nostrils: the scent of crisp new laundry mixed with buttery pastry; the hot, rich stench of the candle-makers’ wares; casks on the quay breathing peppermint and musk, which would have joined with the incense floating from the dark-scented phials of nostrum uncorked and flourished by the quack doctors selling eternal be
auty and erotic vigour. He would have sniffed the grainy sweet-dirt smell of potatoes being shaved of their skins by men rocking on hundred-year-old wooden stools in doorways. The acquaoli must have wafted upwards the intoxicating fumes of chilled water opalescent with liqueurs. Below all this would have hovered the soft salty fragrance that seeps from sun-warmed stones in the morning and the sharp breath of the seaweed lolling on the sea-steps at the low tide.
As he lay in bed, I knew that Byron would have read aloud from his guidebook the euphonious names of the palazzi. He would have heard the beating of wings and watched a pair of pigeons trying to mate on a narrow ledge, snatching the least opportunity – a flurry of feathers and a dizzy recovery. He would have listened to the unexpected gush of lark-song from gardens hidden behind tall walls. Then the beckoning songs of the boatmen would have begun to invade the morning.
I was right. Later Hobhouse would tell me how Byron had leapt from his bed that first morning and come limping to rouse him.
‘I was stupefied,’ said Hobhouse. ‘It was an unspeakably early hour for him, who never saw the morning light if he could help it.
‘But he had a belly full of fire that morning. He said, “Come, Hobhouse, let us show this deadly city how we live. I have a taste for Plen & opt C, today, Venetian style. Let us go and rock some gondolas. No? Don’t look at me with those fish-eyes. Well, I shall go forth alone.”
‘I said to him, “Why not simply just go out?”
‘He wasn’t to be put off. He laughed at me: “Oh no! Hobhouse, what are you saying? I, Byron, shall go forth.”
‘I had correspondence to attend to, I refused to join him, so he thundered off alone. He pulled on a dark cloak that covered him to the ground and ran down the stairs. I went to my window to watch. After a second, Byron had slipped into the crowd and disappeared. When he came back he was full of stories, happier than I had seen him in years.’
On that first morning, Byron must have continued to hear the Venice I could not describe for him for it is necessary to experience it for one’s self. As he passed through the markets he would have heard the thud of hatchets decapitating a thousand artichokes in a single morning, the struggles of boiling water in kettles. He would have heard the wooden spatulas raking through hot nuts roasting in tin drums. From open doors in the laundrywomen’s houses would have issued the hiss of irons nosing through the ruffles of the ladies’ linen. He must have heard the early violins musing through the windows of the Conservatorio. He would have stopped for a moment, there, looking up at the graceful windows.
In the morning-blooming cafés the waiters would have unfurled their tablecloths with a flourish as he passed, and the fragrance of soap dried in sunshine would have flown up to meet his twitching nose. The waiters would have bowed to him, prouder than dukes in their clean frock-coats. I know that he passed through the Merceria, tapestried with cloth-of-gold, rich damasks and silks which the shops draped from their first floors. He must have breathed in the perfumes and savoury scents from the apothecary shops. He must have dandled a finger in at least one of the shopkeepers’ noisy cages of nightingales. He probably stood at a marble counter and drank a glass of orange juice red as blood. As he crossed bridges he would have trailed his fingers along elaborate railings warmed by the sun.
Byron walked into seduction. Venice is a city that likes to fare la civetta– make owl eyes at you, flirt. And it instils those wiles in its people – you soon learn the art of casting long looks as you pass someone land-bound when you are in a boat. You learn how to make them turn their heads and follow you with voracious eyes. And in Venice, small as she is, you learn to await the reliable joy of meeting that same person soon afterwards in some dark passageway, and remembering. It’s up to you how much you grant of what you promised with your eyes from the water.
And Venice likes to laugh at you while she flirts. She plays tricks on you with her beauty. A delicate arch draws your eye up and then you see a mysterious sleeve of lace among the flowers on a balcony. And is that a stone lion perched among the geraniums? … But look! you have slipped in a puddle and lie sprawling on the sweating stones. Venice is laughing at you again, but so affectionately!
Byron went to the Basilica. He went alone, unwitnessed, that first time.
So I have to imagine him dragging his leg over the sunken floor all inlaid with achats, lazulis, chalcedonies, jaspers and porphyries. I must picture him in my mind’s fervent eye, gazing at the sumptuous encrustations of the walls. I see him lifting his gaze to the roof, a vast inverted and undulating field of variegated gold mosaic, like a crop of corn set on fire by a sunset. I see him running his finger down cool columns of blond alabaster, rumoured to have been brought from King Solomon’s mines.
I am sure he enjoyed its Oriental opulence for itself and for the memories it stirred in him of his own Eastern pleasures seven years before. He would have noted, contemptuously, a small flock of English tourists huddling together with nervous smiles. The English never know how to conduct themselves in our church, because San Marco is barbaric and intensely spiritual all at once. The bodies of stolen saints rest in disturbingly intimate proximity to the visitor. The golden cupolas are strung with dim lamps and swaying red-eyed censers that only intensify the shadows. From behind the columns come whiffs of unknowable perfumes, mixed with potent miasmas from our ancient drains. Perhaps it is this smell that makes some people fall spontaneously to their knees in San Marco’s dark alcoves, smitten with sudden remorse or grief, or perhaps an uncontainable joy.
Byron did not stay long, he told me afterwards. On closer inspection, the Basilica must have troubled him. It had been built from a love he could not conceive. The enormity of the work must have stupefied him. He must have thought uncomfortably of the facility with which he threw together his verses, his own great monument, himself. San Marco, invece, showed the sweat, hopes and prayers – but most of all the love – of a thousand artists, giving everything of themselves, holding back nothing, and content to work in eternal anonymity.
It would have been then that he would have started to find the Oriental-looking Madonnas disturbing. The concept of worshipping a mother and child must have filled him with disgust. He could not have helped thinking of the puffy pink maternity of Annabella, and the smell of fresh milk-vomit on Ada, from those few weeks he had known his daughter. ‘Miss Milbanke did not give birth. She calved,’ he told me afterwards. In the left transept, I imagine that the far-away eyes of the Virgin must have made him think of Annabella’s staring at him, wet with tears forced out by the shock of their final encounter in the bedroom.
He dragged his leg up the Campanile in Piazza San Marco, almost to the top, where an angel turned with the wind. From there, he saw the prospect down the Adriatic as far as Istria, and our miraculous city, floating in the sea the shape of a mandolin laced with bridges. Afterwards, he told me later, he sat at a café in San Marco, and let the bells of the great Campanile enter him, until they sounded in his gut. He sat so long that the pigeons surrounded him as if he were one of their own. Perhaps he felt at home with their nodding walk on feet like branches of coral. It was not unlike his own undulating step. A nun walked past, tearing into shreds a small piece of paper. Lines of voluptuous excess crossed her face.
‘I love your town, Cecilia,’ he told me, after describing his first day in all its minutiae. He had held forth as if I myself had never seen Venice.
‘I shall find what I want here,’ he told me.
Byron loved Venice, and soon Venice began to love him back. In him Venice had, as usual, obtained the crème de la crème. Venice has a great taste for allegory, and she inclines towards the East. When Byron came to Venice, it was as if Vathek himself had arrived. La Serenissima was perturbed, though as delightfully as possible. An English milord, suspected of crimes against God and the flesh, a mysterious deformed person, delicate and depraved, who secreted himself in the heart of Venice — Che delizia!
But there were few confirmed sightings to grat
ify the curiosity whipped up by the rumours. Byron’s sightseeing had been accomplished discreetly, before the news of his arrival was quite out. Once his presence had become known, Byron cultivated his celebrity with rarity, knowing that to make one’s self too available is to allow one’s charm to evaporate. He knew that his short stature, his limp, his as yet imperfect grasp of Italian would undermine the enormity of his unknown persona. So, as the rumours of his presence spread, he hid himself, allowing carefully groomed incidents to become public. He sat in his parlour, waiting to be mythologised.
Those days the defiant remnants of the Venetian intelligentsia congregated in the salon of Countess Albrizzi. Byron, of course, was introduced, making a rare excursion abroad in the dark of the evening. At the Albrizzi conversazione he listened to the Venetian nobles reading aloud their refined little poems in languid voices. The men stood in one part of the room. At the other, the ladies sat in a semi-circle. This was the most elegant entertainment offered by Venice. He took his place amongst our aristocrats as a matter of course. His literary legend would have gained him entry, even without his personal notoriety. Murray had published the third canto of Childe Harold just weeks before Byron arrived here, closely followed by The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems. Seven thousand of each were sold in one evening at a dinner for booksellers. Byron triumphed again, and spume of the adulation in London floated to Venice within days.
Byron’s stock only increased when a Venetian newspaper published a review of Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon, along with a breathless description of the attempted suicide of the noble authoress in the sad throes of her hopeless passion for the English milord. Byron made an attempt to appear livid – describing the drama to the Albrizzi guests as ‘the scratching attempt at canicide of that two-handed whore’. Still, he kept the Venetian newspaper, along with another, labelling him a supporter of the hated Bonaparte. ‘As curiosities,’ he told me.
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