I turned away from him. Byron was still ruminating about Mary. ‘I suppose she told you that my memoirs should be burned? I suppose Shelley thinks that now he is married, he doesn’t get anyone else. Of course he has Claire when he wants, but then who doesn’t? Mary won’t open her legs to anyone else, we can be sure. But I am sure that she thinks of me on top of her.’
He strode around my studio, kicking at stacked canvases, too restless to pose. I quietly picked up the canvases. He had not kicked them hard: they might have been pictures of himself. Anyway, canvas is durable, I thought, tougher than human skin. And there was only one canvas that was still wet, and he would not see that. I had hidden it away when I heard his dragging steps upon my threshold.
When he saw that my resolve was impermeable, both to threats and kisses, he left, looking for easier sport. I turned back to my thoughts of Mary.
I took the small wet canvas from its hiding place and resumed work. Within a few hours, it was ready. I sent it, along with the miniature of Clara, to the palazzo where Mary and Shelley were staying.
The Shelleys left Venice very soon. Allegra was briefly restored to her mother. I never saw Mary Shelley again, so I do not know how she received her gift. Of course she wrote to me, and ever after wrote to me. Her letters, great bundles of them, are almost as precious as Casanova’s are to me. But I did not see the moment when she unwrapped my canvas and first held it to the light. I can only imagine her gasp of delight and the soft tears that would have fallen from those fine eyes.
My gift was a little painting in the cinquecento style that she adored. It was a clever pastiche; one would look twice before realising that it was a modern piece. Even then, unless you knew Mary, and Clara, you might not guess the truth. For I had painted them as the Madonna and Child, using the miniature for Clara’s likeness and my vibrant warm memories of Mary for hers.
Chapter 9
El segreto de le fémene no lo sa nissum,
altri che mi e vu, e tuto ’l Comun.
No one knows the women’s secret,
except me, you and the whole city.
VENETIAN PROVERB
Even when Margarita Cogni was installed at the Palazzo Mocenigo, Byron continued to find his low-life women in casinos. He knew that Margarita was rabid enough to disfigure or possibly murder them, so he kept them secret.
When Byron expanded his court from the Countess Albrizzi’s salon to include that of the Countess Benzona, a wider circle of noble women had opened to him. He also foraged in the markets, shops and gutters for useful, usable women. The prostitutes from San Stae to San Marco came to know his dragging step. The retailers of love were required to dispense their favours at keen prices to the English milord. He would be offered the choicest of young flesh at every establishment at a fraction of the normal cost, and sometimes he took the madam as well.
Of course they compared experiences. The diseased, malnourished women of the slums were privileged with information longed for by half the respectable women of England and nearly all the men. It was generally agreed that his lame foot was no impediment in matters of pleasure for the milord, unless you happened to touch it accidentally, or worse still, with tenderness. Then would follow a storm of silence, an agonised ‘vattene’ (‘get away from me’), no tip, and quite possibly a bruise.
Some women cherished the belief that with correct handling the deformed limb could become an organ of pleasure for the milord, but he did not interest himself in this fashion of creativity. When he had limped away, they discussed him with familiarity, the way two women of the same family discuss the bowel movements of their babies. Had he known! When he took them, and felt their little hearts beating like birds under their translucent narrow skins, I am certain that he thought himself powerful. But it was the women who felt themselves strong.
Lover by lover, Byron continued to scandalise and enchant Venice, a city that adores debauchery done in style. An acquaintance who had visited him in Venice carried news of Byron’s escapades back to London. Byron was annoyed to hear what was being said: it was not bad enough.
He raged at me, pacing around my studio. ‘Which “piece” does he mean? ... Is it the Tarruscelli, the Da Mosto, the Spinola, the Lotti, the Rizzato, the Eleanor, the Carlotta, the Giulietta, the Alvisi, the Zambieri, the Eleonora de Bezzi, the Theresina of the Mazzurati, the Glettenheim and her sister, the Luigia and her mother, the Fornarina, the Santa, the Caligara, the Portiera Vedova, the Bolognese figurante, the Tentora and her sister? ... I have had them all and thrice as many to boot since I got here. There were also some courtesans and some cobblers’ wives. Pushing schools and nunneries – what’s the difference in Venice? One thing I will tell you: middling, high or low, they were all of them whores. Even the virgins were whores.’
I too heard it all, of course, relayed by my sitters, who sometimes brought a favoured courtesan with them to gaze upon while I painted them. These men believed that the yellow light of lust in their eyes, captured in my painting, would make a more potent picture for the future to admire. ‘What a lover he must have been!’ they wanted their descendants to say.
I had a curious relationship with the puttane, the whores. They dipped and wove around my studio in quick graceless movements, like parrots in vulgar plumage. I usually painted the mistresses themselves in the morning light, when their noble lovers were asleep. In this way I sought to avoid embarrassing encounters on my stairs between wives and mistresses.
I smiled to myself at the cross-grained fidelity of the men: they were faithful to me in that they sent both their wives and mistresses to me. However, the wives and lovers were required to adopt different poses in the studio. The mistresses would be portrayed in movement – dancing, laughing, holding aloft baskets of tempting fruit. The wives were usually painted still as death, as well-tended expensive dolls on which to display the family jewels.
When they were not accompanied by the patrons, the puttane sighed after the English milord. They appealed to me: ‘You know how it is, Madame …’ I would not talk to them about Byron – I hated to think that our liaison was discussed on the streets – but I could not hide my discomposure. And this satisfied them. Shamelessly, they would watch my lips compress to a thin line that would not allow even a whisper to break out, until, at the end of the session, I would say, ‘The portrait is finished.’ Later I would tell their wealthy lovers, ‘Don’t send her again.’
Afterwards, cleaning my brushes, examining my work, I would take my revenge. In some small subtle way, I would spoil the portrait, not the work of art but the image of the woman. I would add a little yellow feather on a lapel, an eggstain on the lace. I pinked their knees (for I painted the puttane in lascivious poses) to indicate the early stages of syphilis. Most people cannot bear to gaze directly at their own portrait at first sight. So I knew that they would not notice my malice till they had grown accustomed to their image, long after their protector had paid for it, and then they would be too embarrassed to ask me to paint out the blemish.
I continued to go to the Mocenigo to work on the permanent portrait of Byron. Sometimes I arrived by gondola, and took my chances with the beasts in the courtyard. Sometimes I walked to his palazzo, for the pleasure of arriving at the narrow entrance down the Calle Mocenigo Ca’ Nova – so narrow that even a small man could touch both sides with barely outstretched hands. From the alley you saw the strange vine-covered first-floor pergola that hung over the garden gate – resembling nothing so much as engravings I had seen of the seraglio in Constantinople. At the gate itself the Mocenigo family crest reared above the fanlight. I walked under the pergola into Byron’s strange kingdom.
Perhaps I imagined it, but it always seemed to me that all was not well in the statue-haunted garden, stretching away from me in both directions, like a vindictive smile. There was a choked well in the centre, and at least one rape taking place in marble in the undergrowth where also nestled startling dwarves of stone where your eye longed for cupids.
I took t
he left path (the right one led to Maurizio’s apartments) and let myself into the dark inner courtyard, sour with the smell of miserable beasts imprisoned at the other end and tortured with their howls. They were diminished in number now, following the elopement of one cat and the decease of two monkeys and a crow by indigestion. But the beasts that remained seemed louder and their stink worse, as if they were abandoned in grief for their lost companions. I spoke kindly to the poor caged cats, and then I mounted the stone steps, with their lanterns on out-thrust arms, and ascended to the piano nobile.
Sometimes Fletcher told me to wait in the dark entrance hall, where I studied the painted ceiling, with its circular central panel and four medallions. Little light fed through the leaded windows. While I waited, I mentally repaired the ravaged faces of the frescoes, adding roses and cream to the pale grey buttocks of the putti and the chipped nipples of the nymphs.
Eventually I was summoned to Byron’s study, walking first through the soggiorno, with its pink marble walls veined like the heart of a freshly killed bull. He rarely acknowledged my arrival, so I went straight to my easel. I always sat by the fire that burned between the two windows on the Grand Canal. Byron was ensconced towards the back of the room.
I found it hard to breathe in there. I felt the weight of the stucco’s suffering figures pressed against my shoulders, and Byron’s simmering humours pressed against my breast. If the window was open, from time to time I reeled when an upward breeze puffed the stench of the trapped animals up into my face. Sometimes, when the Canal was quiet, a strain of their sad cries would reach my ears. Perhaps this was why Byron sat so far back in the room: to avoid the mournful reminder of their plight. He seemed oblivious to their manifest miseries.
When I painted him, he reclined on his sofa in a writing attitude. He often actually started to write. But, as Beppo and Don Juan show, he did not lose himself in his verse. He stood some feet away from it and was at once audience, performer and author – miming the words and at the same time watching for the effect.
He read me pieces of the poetry while I painted. The lines gave me ideas. Little phrases of verse, small images, fell into my paintings. I listened to Byron making use of his life, and my life, sometimes. I saw him draw on William Beckford, the Ali Pasha, Hobhouse, for his characters. I flinched as he invested each of us with his scorn. Sometimes I laughed, but I was ashamed of my laughter. Sometimes I had no desire to laugh at all. It was a physical blow to read the lines that defined us, his intimates, secretly and not so secretly, inside the public poetry. Of course he started with himself and he was no less savagely ironical on that count.
I want a hero, he commenced …
Byron needed all his heroism to deal with Margarita. Their battles seemed to be unto the death. The merest perceived slight threw her into a combustion. In her fury there was nothing she dared not say to him. I witnessed bruising scenes that made me pity both of them.
La Fornarina would scream, ‘Is this how you treat your wife?’
Byron clawed the air. ‘Stop it! Don’t ask me about Annabella. Everyone wants to know about her! Why don’t they ask about me? About how I felt? Everyone talks to me the way Caroline writes. I cannot bear it.’ He put his face in his hands.
‘I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in how you are with me,’ said Margarita. ‘It’s good, no, with me? Better than with her?’
For a moment, I thought she was talking about me. Then I realised that Margarita was defying him. She was still talking about Annabella. I held my breath.
Margarita said, ‘Anyway, Missis Byron have own moroso, yes?’
Byron slithered to his feet and said, with a dangerous quietness, ‘Go.’
It was the one thing calculated to break her. Margarita could not survive his coldness any more than I could. She fled, screams erupting like a haemorrhage.
Byron turned to me. His face was raw. Little grey pearls of sweat were distilling above his lips, which were set in a thin, ugly line.
‘No, Cecilia,’ he said, ‘in case you are thinking it. The state of cuckoldry in England is not so flourishing as it is here in Venice. Annabella Milbanke will not replace me in her bed. Damn her and Ada and all the other brats I might have begot out of her.’
Then he clawed the air again, as he had done with Margarita, a gesture of such pain that I felt the ghostly laceration of his nails in my stomach.
‘Do you know how much I hate Miss Milbanke?’ he asked me. ‘I hate her professionally. I hate her the way the grave-digger hates the gases that come from corpses, I hate her the way the fisherman hates the rotten oyster for which he has put his life in danger. When she is dead, I will hate her dust.’
I quickly sketched him as he spoke, and slid the picture into my portfolio before he noticed it. This portrait was different from the ones I let him see. But I thought it was also important to record them, the moments like these.
By autumn, the heroic poet’s health finally collapsed again – the natural and perhaps looked-for result of his recent regime of relentless self-abuse. His stringent diet changed again. Now he ate nothing but scampi, claiming that the expensive little crustaceans performed rare purgative miracles inside him.
Under the cowardly mantle of the doctor’s orders, La Fornarina was told to leave. I was there when Byron called her into the study. He announced, as if talking to a departing tradeswoman, that he had made financial provision for herself and her mother. He spoke in a conversational tone of voice, emphasising the generosity of the settlement. Margarita ran screaming from the room. She had not listened to his words, merely the drab tone of his voice. She left some words in the air for us, words about knives and revenge.
The next day, at the dinner hour, she was back. She smashed a glass door on the staircase and ran babbling like a madwoman up to Byron’s apartments. She burst into the study where we were working. She stood there silently, her arms folded in front of her. Byron looked up at her with exasperation. ‘I was entirely serious, Margarita. You no longer have a position here. I shall not change my mind.’
Margarita pulled a knife from her apron. The glint of it whisked the air as she rushed at Byron. I stood helpless as she pulled him out of his chair and into her arms. She fastened her lips upon his and he screamed, a high-pitched animal noise. She started backwards and I could see Byron gazing at a slight wound to his thumb. He put it to his mouth and turned his back on her. I was astounded at his temerity, but he seemed to know that Margarita could not really hurt him, or perhaps he did not care if she did.
‘Look at me!’ she shrieked. He refused to respond. I saw her turn the blade in her hand and ram it into her own breast, as Caroline Lamb had done. When I could bear to look again I saw that her gesture had been as futile as her predecessor’s. For all her bellowing she had done little more than sever the lace from her bodice. By now the entire staff had come running to us, but when they saw Margarita with the knife in her hand and the vicious light in her eye, they would not enter the room. They stood in the doorway, crossing themselves.
Byron ordered Tita to see her out, but Margarita was too agile for the frightened gondolier. She leapt through the door and launched herself from the balcony with a great flapping of linen, cawing like a seagull. We heard a splash.
‘She’s thrown herself in the Canal,’ said Byron. ‘Good God! I imagine that she will float in all that get-up. Go and fish her out, Tita. Fletcher doesn’t know the right end of a woman from the wrong one.’
A few minutes later Margarita was carried limp and dripping up the stairs. By this time Byron was sitting at the dinner table, gorging upon scampi. He continued to eat while directing Tita and Fletcher on the techniques of resuscitation. ‘Female suicides,’ he observed, ripping shells from pink flesh, ‘are seldom conclusive.’
He added, ‘In my experience.’
I watched all this sadly from behind my easel. It seemed only a crude puppet-play of what had happened to me in Albania, and could happen to me again at any minute. I
did not feel much more dignified than Margarita. I did not love Byron any less than she did, either, or hate him any less. When she had hurtled towards him, with the knife alive in her hand, I had half-wished her well, I realised now, and perhaps that was why I had done nothing to help him in the moment of apparent danger.
While La Fornarina reigned, Byron never touched me at the Mocenigo. We both feared death at her ungovernable hands. But after she left, I would stay, and wake in the night, not with him, for of course he hated to sleep or eat with us, but in a smaller room with two windows on the Canal. I would glide to my painting, naked, with a candle and work on it with the ardour he would not allow me to show him. He never woke early, but sometimes he came home in the middle of the night from a rout at a casino, and he would find me working there. He would discard all his clothes apart from the silk trousers that hid the withered leg, and walk straight to the painting as if he wished to walk right into this beautiful version of himself. He would take me on the floor, while he looked into the eyes of his portrait.
‘Do you think she has made me handsome enough?’ Byron would ask Fletcher, pointing at my work. ‘Do you think she has caught my best features?’ he demanded, thrusting his groin into the air.
Fletcher would be in difficulties. He would stammer something equivocal, carefully staring over my left shoulder. Byron always laughed. ‘It’s not a trap, you nigit. If it were a difficult question I would not expect you to understand it.’
Tita the gondolier would be summoned. A few minutes later I would smell his sweat and perfumed hair oil behind me, as he crossed his arms and pronounced gravely on the painting with all the weight of a Venetian born into a city of art he never looked at but absorbed as he did the winter mist that rotted all our bones. (We Venetians click and snap as we bend our joints – just listen to us, like castanets. The city exacts this physical tax and we pay more each year of our lives.) Byron would then satirise them both, cruelly, in English and Italian, so that each suffered for himself and snickered at the humiliation of the other.
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