Carnevale

by Michelle Lovric

  San Lazzaro had escaped Napoleon’s dissolution of the monasteries by virtue of the great works of science and scholarship undertaken by the Armenian scholar-priests there. As I have told you, the island had been a leper colony, a lazzaretto, in the thirteenth century, after which it had languished into ruins. But the industrious holy Fathers, once granted this refuge, had ploughed their gratitude into its soil. Now it was beautiful, fertile and immaculate, as the paradises created by exiles usually are, uncontaminated by the old or the disreputable, or by the weight of the past.

  It was always glorious weather inside the Armenian church, with its arched corridor of peacock-blue paint and bright gilt stars, its chequerboard floor in coral-coloured and white marble. The cupolas glittered with mosaics in turquoise, olive green and gold, each glinting chip brought from the glass island of Murano. The frescoes I had repainted for them in 1810 were in a little room, screened off from the rest. My colours were inspired by Carpaccio’s paintings in the Schiavoni Chapel, which Casanova had once shown me by candlelight. When I first heard that he had been there, I imagined Byron, limping through the church, lifting the curtain on my pictures. I knew he would be struck and disturbed by them. I could picture the Father Superior, watching his face change. He would not answer the questions that Byron did not ask. Instead, he would have guided him gently towards the library. I imagined Girolamo tripping past him, laden as usual, with heavy books. In my mind’s eye I saw Byron turn to watch him, curiously: such a beautiful little boy! He might have said as much to the Father who would have smiled in embarrassment and hurried him to the library.

  The library, rich and deep, with a pearly stucco ceiling, reflected a kindly love of even seditious literature. Byron would have seen there the lascivious works of Catullus and Propertius; he could read Horace and even The Letters of Lord Chesterfield in gold-stamped olive green. Lovingly tended by the monks were four thousand manuscripts, many from the dawn of Armenian civilisation, thousands of years before. There was plenty to remind him of his beloved exotic East – he would have sat in winged Oriental chairs and at octagonal tables inlaid with camel bones; he would have peered into cabinets of Egyptian antiquities.

  He came back to me with stories of his discoveries. Byron, like Napoleon before him, was impressed with the Father Superior, a fine old fellow with a beard like a meteor. Byron quickly made friends among the ninety monks who lived there. Within weeks, Byron was helping Father Paschal Archer to compose an English—Armenian grammar. The brutal difficulty of the language was strangely restorative for Byron. He explained to me, ‘My mind needs something craggy to break upon, and this – as the most difficult thing I could discover here for an amusement – I have chosen, to torture me into attention.’

  San Lazzaro quickly became a sacred place for Byron, perhaps the only place in the world he acknowledged as such. Byron could not be cynical about the Armenian monks, no matter how he railed and sneered at everything else. He found that they manifested all the joy and beauty of religion and religious life, with none of the faults. They lived in aesthetic and physical comfort, but in sincere piety. They could teach the world, he declared, that there could be a different, a better kind of life. Indeed, by accepting him, when the rest of the world had cast him as the devil, the Armenian Fathers showed him a kind of faith in which he could almost believe.

  ‘Remember,’ Byron told me, as if this was his personal discovery, ‘that it was in Armenia that God planted the terrestrial paradise, and it was in this Armenia that the waters of the great flood subsided and where the dove found land to rest his legs.’

  I asked him, ‘Do you believe, then, as the Armenians believe? I could almost think your soul saved, when you talk about them.’

  ‘I do not know what to believe or disbelieve. All sense, and senses, are against it ... It’s like walking in the dark over a rabbit warren.’

  ‘It gives comfort to many.’

  ‘Let it, more fools them. Let them pay for their comfort with discomfort. Let them contort themselves to be “good”! I am too indolent to be so unnatural. Anyway, I believe they enjoy the guilt, take baths in it. Damn me it there isn’t a rivalry among the God-botherers to suffer the most for their sins. Everybody may be damned, as they seem fond of it. So let them wallow in their brimstone and scream under the lashing of the devil’s tail on their private parts for all eternity.’

  When he found that I was the author of the glowing colours in the shrouded frescoes at San Lazzaro he shouted with delight. ‘Cecilia, Cecilia, Cecilia! I knew it! I knew there was something about them! How typical that you should have been there before me.’

  Then his face darkened. ‘I suppose you came here with him.’

  I did not answer.

  Back in Venice, in my studio, Byron continued his language studies, in his preferred way. ‘Sangue di Dio, faccia da maladetti, God’s blood, face of the damned,’ Byron would whisper in my ear as he pulled me to the floor. ‘Sei le mie viscere,’ he would moan, ‘you’re my guts.’ Later, as he grew more excited, ‘I would go for you into the midst of a hundred knives,’ and finally, ‘Mazza ben,’ which means literally, ‘I wish you well even to killing.’ He loved to recite to me the intimate alphabet of physical love, in Venetian, all the picturesque obscenities he could muster, one after another.

  He is more of a little boy than Girolamo, I thought.

  Eventually, with Armenian tamed to almost conversational level, Byron started to write poetry again. He brought his manuscripts to the island. Byron reclined in an olive grove at San Lazzaro, and wrote the fourth canto of Childe Harold, and I painted him as he did so. The Fathers had granted permission for him to continue with his work, and I with mine, in the pleasant sanctuary of their island. In those hours we sat in happy amity. Sometimes, when Byron came to look at my work, he would kiss my ear, a rare gratuitous kiss. He would smile at me and I would begin to believe again in the possibility of happiness.

  Byron, as always, seized any portraits which he considered complete. I kept the unfinished canvases I painted at San Lazzaro in my studio. Together we presented one portrait to the monks, to commemorate the Armenian—English grammar.

  You can still see it on the island of Saint Lazzaro of the Armenians. Byron wears a white shirt, with a jewel at the throat, a brocaded jacket. Look at how I have Italianised him! That pale skin has an olive hue. The blue eyes look brown. The small ears, too, are somehow Italian. Except in his unavoidable resemblance to little Girolamo, there are no secret details in this painting. I owed that courtesy to the Armenian Fathers, who had raised our son to be an angel.

  Venetian Intimate Alphabet

  Male

  bìgolo: spaghetti

  coa: the tail

  bapi: ‘Jamey’

  oselo: the little bird

  mànego: the handle

  creapòpoli: the people-maker

  tubo: the pipe

  ghigno: the sneering one

  spàreso: the asparagus

  pìfero: the flute

  gobo: the hunchback

  tega: the seed pod

  Female

  sfesa: the crack

  mona: the silly thing

  màndola: the almond

  frìtola: the pancake

  gnoca: the pretty one

  buso: the hole

  sportela: the little shopping bag

  meneghela: the Two of Spades

  mustaciona: the moustachioed one

  mónega: the nun, or the warming pan

  mosca: the fly

  pantegana: the water rat

  musina: the money box

  barbatoe: the one with big lips

  Chapter 5

  Quando le fémene se barufa,

  el diavolo se pètena la coa.

  When females fight, the devil combs his tail.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  January 2nd, 1817 was Byron’s second wedding anniversary. He commemorated it with Plen & opt Cs with Marianna, with a whore at Arsenale and with me: one for
each year, and one for luck. ‘Aha! Miss Milbanke!’ he gasped at the last moment. He has not got over it, I thought, her rejection of him. He was already asleep, or unconscious, breathing heavily through his nose. I sat on the edge of the divan in my studio, gazing down upon him. He looked most like Girolamo when he was sleeping, when his tongue was still, when he was not on his guard. I stroked his hair, and his eyes rolled open like a doll’s. He caught my hand and kissed it. I was knitted to him again.

  Another Byron daughter, a half-sister to Annabella’s ‘Little Legitimacy’, had been born in England. This was Byron’s child by Claire Claremont, conceived at the Villa Diodati among the chastened exiles and their febrile ghost stories. When I heard, I thought, What kind of child will this be, the half-sister of my son? A little ghoul? A little devil? A little angel like Girolamo? Byron was curious, as usual, about another Byron coming into the world, though he continued to vilify her mother in the ugliest terms, Venetian, English and now Armenian.

  Shelley had written to him about the Claremont child, he told me.

  ‘It seems that it’s a great beauty. I shall have it brought here. I shall acknowledge and breed it myself.’

  ‘What is she called?’

  The Shelleys had called the baby Alba, drawn from his own nickname among them, Albé. But Byron decided to give her a Venetian name, Allegra, drawing his blood closer to our city. It had been my suggestion.

  ‘Why not, Cecilia?’ he had said. ‘And you shall paint her when she comes. I should like to see how you paint a child of mine.’

  The advent of the new child and the thought of her arrival clearly discomposed Byron. Outside on the streets the Carnevale swarmed and glittered but he took to his bed, indefinably ill, still musing about Augusta’s strange remoteness. Marianna fussed around him, creating more melodrama about his frail condition than even Byron could withstand. It was not the low and vulgar typhus, I heard him snap at her, but a sharp gentlemanly fever that, with his noble blood, he would survive. While ill, he finished the third act of Manfred, in which, he told me, the hero confronts death.

  Hobhouse would tell me later that when Manfred was published in June 1817, it pointed such an unequivocal a finger at Augusta, as Astarte, the incestuous lover of the hero, that there was no hope but for it to be denounced. Augusta did not respond. Byron thought of a new way to extort her attention. In the ebb of his fever, Byron summoned me to the house in the Frezzaria, where he lay in bed pale and flaccid as a fading lily. Marianna flounced and pouted, but, during a fortnight, I painted two miniatures of him. They showed Byron as blanched and wasted as he wanted to be. These were despatched to Augusta, and he anxiously awaited her comments on his appearance, now but the shadow of her twin self. He was devastated when Augusta, still in Annabella’s thrall, did not give him satisfaction. The bruised look on his face was more than I could bear.

  ‘Why do you want to be so thin?’ I asked.

  ‘I want the women to say, “Poor sweet Lord Byron. How interesting he looked when dying.”’

  Then Carnevale itself died and the town went into mourning for it. The Venetians were buried alive in their black veils and dark clothes. Byron emerged from his bed, restless. Venice had not given him the refuge from himself he thought he would find here. Neither the wildness of Carnevale nor the jaded peace afterwards had given him satisfaction, or even the ease of exhaustion this year. The poetry had started to flow again, in its usual facile way, but not the estro.

  Seeking distraction, he went travelling south. But Venice had taken hold of him. He took the mist and glare of the Canal with him to Rome and saw everything through Venetian eyes, darkly. He wrote to me, short, vivid, discontented letters. After reading them once, I threw them away. I did not like the feel of them bristling in the corners of the studio when I was working. He found Rome swarming with the pestilential English. There he watched, from close quarters, the guillotining of three robbers. He described to me the horrific ceremony – the masked priests, the half-naked executioners, the bandaged criminals, the black Christ and his banner, the soldiers, the slow procession, the fall of the axe and the splash of blood. It turned him hot and thirsty and made him shake so he could hardly see through the opera glass. Though close, he had not wanted to miss a detail.

  As I read the letters, I told myself that Byron’s outer being was becoming more and more Childe Harold. He had become more absorbent of the tragedy around him. The execution of the robbers, he wrote to me, had besmeared a patina of doom upon his own soul. Now, being addicted to portraiture, it did not surprise me to hear that he wanted his transmogrification recorded in a new painting. He called me to Rome, but I would not come. For once, I had something more important than Byron to occupy me.

  Girolamo was ill with typhus, and I could not leave him. The Fathers at San Lazzaro let me tend him while he was delirious. I placed my hands over the pale blue eyes and tried to draw out his pain. I stroked his perfect limbs, and held his small, hot hands, frail and lifeless as dead sparrows.

  So this is what it is to be a mother, I thought. How do women survive the joy and the pain?

  Girolamo doubled himself up like a little clam in the bed. When the Fathers were absent from the room, I quickly lay down on the bed behind him and folded myself around his motionless body, smoothing his skin and his curls, listening to him breathing as I had listened in the cabin on the boat that brought us back from Albania eight years before. Eight years is a long time to wait to hold your child in your arms, I thought to myself. There is something extremely wrong in the world.

  When it seemed certain that he would die I blamed myself with all the colours of hatred. I had left him to grow up as an anonymous little slave for the aged scholars of this island. Perhaps they had worked him too hard; I did not even know. I had left him in an ascetic environment where there were few comforts to protect him from infections. As the doctor shuffled in and out, I sat hunched and stiff beside the bed, waiting for him to leave so that I might take Girolamo in my arms again. Late at night, the Fathers would come to me with a candle, and tell me that a boatman was waiting to take me back to Miracoli. I sat in the boat, without seeing the lagoon. When I came home I rushed to my room to record Girolamo’s changing features. While he lay unconscious they were changing subtly. He seemed to be growing up at an accelerated rate, as if snatching at years he might not ever have upon this earth.

  One morning, I arrived and confronted closed faces.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘No, he is recovered, so you may not tend to him any longer.’

  I packed my heart back into my breast and returned to Venice. I would not go to Rome, however, in case Girolamo needed me again.

  Without me, Byron decided to risk a three-dimensional portrait. The Danish sculptor Thorwaldson, for whom he posed at the recommendation of Countess Albrizzi, was ordered to capture the translation from Byron to Childe Harold.

  Thorwaldson proved rather indiscreet, and news about the sittings leaked out to Rome agog for information about the wicked Lord Byron. One of my English clients told me about it, in authoritative detail.

  It was said that when he sat down to pose, Byron had frozen his features into a tortured expression.

  Thorwaldson told him, laconically, ‘You need not put on that look, my Lord.’

  ‘That is my expression,’ Byron said.

  ‘Indeed?’ replied the sculptor, and portrayed Byron as he himself saw him: a little sulky.

  I did not hear of this incident from Byron himself, and dared not ask, but it had the ring of truth. He gave himself away when he wrote to tell me that he was horribly disappointed in the bust.

  ‘It does not look like me at all,’ he complained. ‘My expression is far more melancholic.’

  The new attempt to immortalise himself was a failure. Byron was disconsolate, feeling himself in exile, even from Venice. He was bored. He missed Marianna. He summoned her and then returned with her to Venice. And came back to me.

  I continued to paint B
yron, as I always had, as I was ordered or persuaded to do. The current portrait was of the compleat Romantic poet, expiring tragically young, of excesses that I could suggest but not name with the nuances of my brush. Suicide seemed but a dagger-thrust away, in the pictures he wanted painted of himself now. Let the world and Miss Milbanke see what they had done to him!

  ‘Paint me,’ he said, ‘so that they can see that I have been more ravished than anybody since the Trojan War. Paint me vanquished and at peace.’

  Then he astonished me. He whispered under his breath, with the catch of tears in his throat,

  ‘Con culto d’amore

  spargono fiori e pregano pace …’

  In the name of love,

  Scatter flowers and beg for peace …

  He had been to San Michele, to the grave of little Fortunato. Did he know? How could he know? Was he still thinking of Casanova? I dared not ask. He had all but stopped talking about my old lover. I believed that was because he could not stomach the softness on my face when Casanova’s name was mentioned. I was moved by the misery and curiosity that might have prompted Byron to go to our island.

  I asked him, gently, ‘Do you ever contemplate suicide, Byron?’ Not stirring an eyelash to disturb his tragic pose, Byron mocked my tenderness.

  He said, ‘I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection of the pleasure it would have given to that bitch my mother-in-law.’

  He leapt from his chair and fastened his lips to mine.

  Then it was summer. How quiet Venice is without nature! Never the lowing of a cow or the clopping of a horse. In the stillness of summer, there is just the tolling of the bells to punctuate the groaning of the sick and old in the heavy air and the tugging of boats against their moorings. This fitful silence is rent by the cruel laughter of the seagulls along the Schiavoni as the fishing boats come in. There is a dangerous quiet in the narrow alleyways. Typhus spreads silently, from campo to campo, and island to island. Two novices had died on San Lazzaro. When I think of that summer my memories are of the funeral gondolas lurching like sobs in the silent heat of afternoons, and the keening of women under black veils. I remember how the clear green of the Grand Canal seemed to clot and thicken into some kind of pestilential abscess. I remember heavy, wan clouds bearing down upon us, and the stickiness of my own skin.