Byron had been curiously silent while I talked and pointed. Now we sat among the paintings while he rested his leg.
Byron said suddenly, ‘You have the Carnevale inside you, Cecilia.’
He drew my head to his and kissed me on the lips.
Carnevale. Farewell to meat. Byron had long since bidden farewell to meat in his endless quest to starve himself. But he was not about to say farewell to flesh. The picturesque rituals of the past were gone but Carnevale still provided endless new carnality. Byron found women. It seemed that he was never free of the smell and moisture of them. Later, he told me that his first Carnevale was his best. He ticked off the places where he had spent himself in Venice, the places and the pieces – a woman’s anterior orifice in Campo San Barnaba; her saltiness disappearing in the mouth of a young boy in Campo Santa Margarita half an hour later; then the boy’s saliva sucked inside the great belly of a mooress on the Schiavoni, riding him almost to death with her monstrous weight; and her silt rammed into the posterior of a sailor who resembled sweet Robert Rushton.
‘I might have just outstripped your Casanova this time,’ he told me. He smirked like a schoolboy. ‘But then, I have more choice of where to put my parts.’
Then he looked around him. ‘What’s that stink from hell?’
The cat rippled into the shadows waving a tail that fanned his fumes in Byron’s direction.
Byron loved Carnevale but he didn’t want to lose himself in Venice. His image depended upon being the exotic outsider, no matter how exotic the place. Certainly, after Annabella, he wanted his one thousand and one nights of lovers to be enjoyed and then despatched the next morning. But in Venice there was too much competition. He had been used to being alone in the farther promontories of bad behaviour. And the Venetians were too expert and too energetic in their excesses. He was worn out, self-abused almost to oblivion. He was almost grateful when it ended, with a masked ball at the Fenice, on February 28th.
With the end of Carnevale had come a scourging for Byron, too: a violent attack upon him in the Edinburgh Review. I saw him throw the newspaper across the room, but later he picked it up again. In the eyes of his countrymen he felt damned, and worse, demeaned. The exile in Venice now seemed to be forced upon him, and it lost thereby some of its initial lustre. At twenty-nine, Byron was starting to find his sword outwearing the scabbard. Augusta had not written to him. Marianna’s uses were limited. I kissed his eyes each day. But he was alone. One evening I watched him sitting on my sea-steps, listening to the echo chorus. He put his head in his hands.
It is a particular thing, the echo chorus. The gondoliers perform it only occasionally these days. One boatman stands upon the shore of an island, on the canal-bank or in his gondola, and sings at the top of his voice, pushing the sound as far as he can over the mirroring water. Far away, another gondolier hears it. He knows the words and answers with the next verse. The first singer replies … and so it continues, mouth to mouth. If you are sitting halfway in between, the effect is magical, and more so if the singers are far away. Most tender and haunting of all are the voices of the women of Malamocco and Pellestrina. They too sing the verses of Tasso, and they sit upon the shore when their men are sea-fishing, singing as penetratingly as they can, until, far out at sea, but nearing home, the men start to hear them and begin to reply. In this way, the amorous reunion commences before the lovers are unseparated, and when flesh touches flesh it is already alight.
Chapter 4
Verze riscaldà e mugér ritorna no xe mai bone.
Reheated cabbage and women who come back are never good.
VENETIAN PROVERB
After we consummated the Casanova portraits, Byron and I met, ostensibly for portrait sessions, nearly every day. Sometimes it was at my studio at the Balbi Valier, sometimes at his own apartments in the Segati house in the Frezzaria.
I was his private mirror. In front of me, Byron changed his costumes and his looks almost daily. He favoured, of course, a romantic figura. His extravagant white linen posed problems in the filth of our Venetians streets, slimy with the leavings of the canals and the exhalations of the porous stones. Flakes of pastry whirling through the air, chimney smuts floating in droplets of humidity, small insects were all attracted to Byron’s clothes, it seemed.
‘Like women,’ he would say, ‘sticky’ He slapped at the specks of dirt and smeared them on his linen.
‘Paint it as if it were still white,’ he bade, flexing a soiled sleeve. ‘Paint me as if I were still pure!’ he laughed. He never tired of sitting. If I ever expressed concern for the length of time he must hold his pose, he would snap, ‘Oh blood and guts, get on with it, woman.’
I never knew what to expect when I heard his dragging step in the courtyard. Sometimes it was a long skirmish on my divan and a quick sketch. Sometimes it was a short, brutal act of love and just time to apply some colour in oils before an abrupt, unaffectionate departure.
‘I’d have fucked you better if I’d been drunk,’ he said once, staggering from the divan. ‘Sorry Cecilia. Don’t take it personally.’
‘It would be a reckless woman who tried to extract a compliment from you,’ I retorted. We still played these dangerous word games. I felt as if he were testing me for vulnerability. Any sign of weakness on my part and he would be gone. For my part, I was determined to act like a man, a worse man even than Byron. It seemed the only way to gain a different kind of treatment to that that he gave other women. Amusing wickednesses tumbled constantly from my tongue, just as they did from his. Some days I thought we were in competition as to who could be the most outrageous and most hurtful. Now, when I painted myself, as I did quite often, to test a new pigment or brush, my double-tipped tongue was always there inside my mouth. If you looked closely you would see two ruby snippets between my lips instead of one. I would also paint in a feinting distraction – the cat on my lap with a paw draped comfortably but distractingly between my legs, or a pomegranate seed of a nipple between a pair of unidentifiable thumbs (unless you were fortunate enough to have known Casanova’s thumbs) attached to a smooth male arm.
Sometimes Byron would come to me with melancholy hanging upon him. He seemed unsure of himself, looking around the studio at my other subjects who gazed down upon us with their lucent, knowing eyes.
‘I feel asexual,’ he told me on one of these bad days. Naked on the divan he nursed himself in the palm of his hand. He complained as if I should pity him and feel guilty of rendering him so lonely in his own skin by my own unattractiveness. Somehow it was my fault, or the fault of all the women.
‘It’s for the inventory of my pieces that I shall be known,’ he said gloomily.
‘Not your poetry? You don’t think of that?’ I am one of those pieces, I thought, I hope that fact is never known.
‘No, and nor will anyone else when I am not rutting the world and his wife. They think they can learn to do that from reading the poems. See how they sell! It’s not my metaphor they pay for. It’s the life I’ve lived. And the face I’ve got,’ he said, gesturing at my portrait.
If you ask me, Byron’s beauty was not yet ruined. Certainly the last seven years had extracted a toll from his features, but he had retained the physical arrogance of his youth. It was a confidence trick, like our Venetian walls of water. Byron thought himself beautiful, and by force of his personality created a collective illusion, among his friends and acquaintances, that he was so. You probably think I write as a woman who loves, and you are right. As long as Byron looked at me, sometimes, with desire in his eyes, I myself was vain enough to believe that he was overspilling with beauty.
Byron still wanted to personify the adventures of 1809, to be Childe Harold, the buccaneer, the homme fatal, the eternal foreigner. Nothing had since happened to him in England to make him want to be depicted as an Englishman. He already knew that so long as he paid for his portraits, or commanded the love of the artist, he had a choice of his immortal image. Of course, each portrait had one other essenti
al gift for him: in it, he was always physically perfect. Portraits did not show his diminutive height, and they could not show his limp.
He knew my trick with sensual symbols. He was desperate that we should find the right one for him. He would bring me a dead eagle, stuffed, or a jewelled sword. ‘This?’ he would ask, ‘Is this me?’ He insisted on no quill pen or book. ‘That would look like Trade,’ he said, wrinkling his nose. In the end I found a symbol for him. He would never have accepted it, so I inserted it secretly into every picture. He was much too busy checking for a fading bloom in the cheek or a crow’s foot beside the eye to notice that I had tucked into his pocket a silk handkerchief exquisitely embroidered with a nodding, coral-footed pigeon. When he finally saw the bird, he reddened with anger at this reference to his gait.
‘Would you have preferred a wingless animal, perhaps?’ I dared. ‘A hyena?’
‘Hyenas hunt in packs.’ The door slammed, and I was left alone.
Byron never asked again to see the pictures of Casanova. That weakness was buried more deeply inside him now. He was making his own place in Venice. But he demanded to see my studies and copies of all the portraits I had made of other famous people. First and foremost, he had wanted to see William Beckford.
‘Let us see how you have rendered Lord Vathek, Prince of the Pederasts,’ he said. ‘You flinch, Cecilia? You know he loved little boys?’
‘It’s an ugly word,’ I said. Since becoming the mother of a son, I had become sensitive to that word; I hated it, in any language.
I showed him my still-unframed portrait of Beckford, removing it from my cupboard and placing it upon the easel as carefully as if it were still wet. I felt a sudden warmth of fondness as I looked at the vanished young man again after all these years. Knowing my tricks, Byron identified the Cornaro crest on the porcelain buttons, and the leering putto in the mirror. He saw the chess-piece palaces and the terracotta camel — ‘Alboufaki!’ – on the desk. But he was disappointed by Beckford himself. Or perhaps he was a little gratified, in these reduced days of his own confidence, to see that Beckford presented no competition. He examined every feature separately.
‘What a long nose! What stupid hair! I thought he would be a great beauty in spite of what you said the last time.’ The word ‘Albania’ would never pass his lips in my company.
I stood defensively in front of my portrait, as if to protect Beckford from Byron’s scorn.
‘He was not a conventionally beautiful man, and that was not important to him. He lived for inner rather than outer sensations. His portrait is not his monument.’
‘You are right, Vathek is. And rammed to the fundament with sensations it is, too. Such a waste it is that he’s become a hermit. We’ll never know if he has another Vathek in him, I suppose. Well, it’s up to the young men to carry on with what he started! Now show me what you are doing with my face here.’
I unveiled the current work: a profile of the poet with his chin resting upon his hand. While we gazed at the glistening portrait together his arm stole around me. He nuzzled my ear and whispered, ‘I love the way you make the light shine out of me.’
While he wanted me, Byron wanted everything I did, everything I thought of. He seemed to offer a thousand loves in exchange for the one I had to offer. But one day I knew it would be otherwise. Already I asked myself, But what am I that I should have your love a second time? Can I hold it? Will it last?
I talked to my heart. I reminded it of our old campaign in 1809, and the stripes we had earned together then. I reasoned with my heart about Byron. I reminded it that there was always something about him that was not good enough. Since when had Byron known or cared how to love properly? I had betrayed everything I believed in when I first gave my love to him and consented to the kind of love he gave me. I had been cruelly punished for it. Yet I found myself re-enacting my old crime in the full knowledge of the probable consequences.
The most scarring knowledge of all was that he was not afraid to lose me. Byron controlled his desires; he was not controlled by them. He liked love, but he could always be sure of getting it elsewhere. Without that fear, there was nothing to civilise him in his treatment of me or any other woman. Knowing this, perversely, just made me more desperate to keep him. As I am certain all his lovers did, I pictured myself dead, and him keening over my pale corpse. I dreamt of his pain and regret, but I knew what his true reaction would be: What good luck I did not invest too much in her.
But I soothed away the worries and ignored the affronts to my own strong sense of what was right in love. I put my heart’s shoulders back, and swelled my heart’s breast out. What kind of peace had my heart known without him? Those grey years alone, what had they been but a period of recuperative numbness? Was I not a professional heart-soldier like Casanova? Well then, I would go to war with Byron, again.
I told my heart such dreadful lies! I told it that it was better to love extraordinarily than never to love. I rang in so many changes on this one simple theme. It was good for my work, I told myself, to understand what lighted up the flesh I painted. I worked on lovers and abandoned lovers every day. Everyone was one or the other: by experiencing these things, I was researching my craft.
I transfigured my memories of Albania. I traduced them.
I clenched my fists, my stomach and my womb and drew in the first breath of the new battle. I unloved my emotionally celibate state. I unsheathed my tongue, and I dipped it in Jragolino. I heard inside me a stomach-growl of sadness, a metallic pincing in the womb, a bad bell in my ears.
When Byron was in my studio the cat often erected his tail and shook it as if spraying his stink. It seemed a threatening gesture. Byron preferred dogs, but he would bend to stroke my cat. The cat looked at him cynically, but allowed himself to be pleasured.
‘Bravo gatto! That is how to handle him,’ I told myself, listening to his even purring.
But Byron himself was already listening to something else.
Learning a foreign language is like making a erotic conquest. The more foreign and exotic, the more intractable the challenge, the greater is the thrill of penetration. The greater the intimacy, the deeper is the gratification.
Byron inhaled language with the kisses he took. By the time we were reunited in Venice, Byron, he told me, had come to know eleven languages and approximately five hundred women. Who can guess at the number of boys? And does it count if you do not actually talk to them?
The seeds of Byron’s linguistic success were planted early. He had told me the story when we were still in Albania. At seven, Byron had exposed his appalling doctor, Lavender, who had encased his little foot in an agonising wooden trap that was supposed to straighten it. Lavender, in reality little more than a part-time truss-maker, posed as a great linguist. Little Byron did not believe a word of it. One day, the boy had scribbled out random letters of the alphabet, as if in sentences, on a scrap of paper. He laid the sheet in front of Lavender, and asked, mildly, ‘What language, sir, is this?’
The foolish Lavender, who should have been more attentive to the uncharacteristic gentleness, had replied unwarily, ‘Italian, of course.’
After the doctor was shamed and sent away, Byron was left with a free, naked leg and a lasting fondness for the Italian language that had liberated it. By the time he arrived in Venice, Byron already spoke Italian with a picturesque fluency rather than accuracy – learnt from the Divine Comedy, but more, he boasted, from the young Nicolo Giraud, the young man with whom he had been besotted in Athens. Of course, he had also taken the opportunity, for a few days in 1809, to learn a little Venetian from me. Once Hobhouse had filled in the missing pieces, I calculated that Byron went directly from my bed to Nicolo’s with only anonymous whores along the way. So he probably made use of my Venetian endearments within a few weeks.
Now Byron enjoyed Marianna Segati’s Venetian dialect, though it took him a little time to get his lithe tongue around our strange elongated vowels. He described the Venetian style of Italian as
something like the Somersetshire version of English. Marianna taught Byron how to swear in both Venetian and Italian. His ear was excellent; he could mimic both sound and cadence, and so, forever after, when he said such things, even to me, it was in her accent.
Byron loved Italian. He tried to goad me, ‘Why did your Casanova always write in French? Did he have no feeling for his own language? When I hear he used French I think he lacked all sensual feelings in his mouth. Italian is the finest language, even though it’s just bastard Latin at heart. It still melts like kisses on the tongue. It should be written upon satin, not on paper.’
But, as ever, Byron was not faithful to his latest passion. Italian and Venetian conquered, he felt restless, in need of a challenge, perhaps an activity to mask the fact that he was not really writing. Marianna was demanding. Living in the same home as his mistress was not something he had tried to do before. He needed a place where she could not follow him with her caresses, her tears and her eager fingers.
So he took another language-mistress, too.
Every day, Byron went to the Armenian convent on the Island of San Lazzaro, the island where, with Casanova’s encouragement, I had learnt to paint landscapes, the island where, though Byron had no idea of his existence, our son Girolamo was now a seven-year-old novice, living in peace, safety and ignorance. I saw him often, always monitored by the Fathers. Few women came to San Lazzaro, so Girolamo was growing up under the impression that all of them must be as tender as I was. For me, seeing Girolamo had these days become a mixed pleasure, as his father’s features fastened ever more distinctly onto his face. I was still caught short with fierce impulses to embrace him, but knew that should I weaken, even once, I would be denied further access to him.
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