For twelve months now, she had been married to a sixty-year-old count from Ravenna. Her husband was a pleasant old man, though rumoured to have murdered his first wife. He seemed fond of Teresa and she did not appear to be repulsed by him. Until she met Byron, it might have been considered a successful aristocratic marriage.
‘Of course,’ continued La Benzona, ‘it was an instant love. No woman could look at Byron without falling for him. Teresa can never have met such an enchanting man. None of us had. But in this case, it was mutual. He looked at her, and saw what he wanted.’
La Benzona continued, ‘Byron was talking, and he included Teresa in the conversation in the subtlest of ways. Small secret smiles and little gestures, you know. I saw it all. He spoke brilliantly that evening, too. Normally, he was quiet; he often sat in the corner glowering, especially if English people turned up. But that night, with Teresa, he took to the stage. He was so eloquent that I seized a pencil and started immediately to write it down. Here is my transcription; I keep it rolled up in the spine of my fan.’
In an instant she had extracted the roll of paper from the ivory stem and handed it to me. I smoothed it out and read what Byron had said, the words he had used to win Teresa Guiccioli.
‘But, ladies and gentlemen, and in particular ladies, you must realise that passion gives a strength above nature, we see it in mad people; true love always shows a refined degree of madness.
‘It must be madness to discard everything but that single person whom you love, to lose all the repose in one’s life in hunting after them, when there is so little likelihood of ever gaining them.’
I rolled up the paper and handed it back to her. I could imagine it all: the inflections of his voice, the inclining of her head, the moment he put his white hand upon her shoulder.
What happened next is now known to everyone in Venice.
As he left the conversazione, Byron had slipped a note into Teresa’s fingers. It was an assignation.
She told her husband that she would take a gondola expedition with her companion-governess, Fanny Silvestrini, to practise her French. As arranged, Teresa’s gondola crossed with Byron’s, and the precious cargo was exchanged. Feverish and no doubt delightful negotiations took place over several days.
Lord Byron, Teresa had observed to anyone who would listen, was not a man to confine himself to sentiment. A few nights later she became his mistress, at one of Byron’s convenient casinos, Santa Maria Zobenigo, where he had always pursued his stray loves away from the wrath of La Fornarina. For ten days, Fanny waited patiently while they tried to exhaust their passion for each other. The lovers often went as far as the Lido, or islands beyond.
Byron did not appear in my studio during this whole period. I went to the Mocenigo and found it deserted. I went to the desk and read the letters there. I found words that made me afraid.
I saw Byron’s letter to Kinnaird, which explained it all, including his fears: ‘She is as fair as the sunrise, and warm as noon … She is the queerest woman I ever met with, for in general they cost one something one way or other, whereas by an odd combination of circumstances, I have proved an expense to her, which is not my custom, but an accident; however, it don’t matter. She is a sort of Italian Caroline Lamb, except that she is much prettier, and not so savage. But she has the same red-hot head, the same noble disdain of public opinion, with the superstructure of all that Italy can add to such natural dispositions. To be sure, they go much further here with Impunity …’
Byron’s letter to Hobhouse frightened me even more. He was serious, it seemed, so serious that he had doubts already: ‘I should not like to be frittered down to a regular cicisbeo. What shall I do? I am in love, and tired of promiscuous concubinage, and have now an opportunity of settling for life.’
Hobhouse tried pleading for me, bless him. A week later I saw his swift response. I saw how worried he was by the levity he affected, ponderously as ever. ‘Don’t you go after that terra firma lady: they are very vixens in those parts especially, and I recollect when I was at Ferrara hearing of two women in the hospital who had stabbed one another in the guts and all por gelosia. Take a fool’s advice for once and content with your Naids – your amphibious fry – you make a very pretty splashing with them in the Lagune and I recommend constancy to the neighbourhood.’
Byron, as always, ignored his earnest friend.
He did not see, as I did, the pattern: how he had rushed to Annabella to save himself from Augusta, and darker secrets; now he rushed to Teresa to save himself from something he could not name.
Chapter 15
Se l’invidia fusse freve, tuto el mondo scotaria.
If jealousy was a fever the world would burn up.
VENETIAN PROVERB
I had watched him every day, in the gondola with Teresa. Sometimes I had followed them in my own gondola, hidden under the felze. I had trailed him to the Lido where he kept his horses. I had spied on them at the opera, where he sat, scandalously, in a box with his mistress and her husband. From his fish-eyes and his fixed gaze upon Teresa, his dreamer’s stumble and the damp sheen on his skin, I had seen the truth and the malaise of his love for her.
His latest portrait was not finished, but Byron, I already understood, would not come back to sit for me again. He was hypnotised by his reflection in La Guiccioli’s eyes and no longer cared for his immortality in the hands of an artist.
After ten days of silence, Byron came whistling into my studio. He greeted me affectionately, by name, like an old friend or a favoured servant. I understood from this use of my name the collapse of all intimacy between us. Until now he had always entered my studio wordlessly, as if it were his own habitation, and he had led me silently to the divan or to the easel. Now he leant towards me, in an unfamiliar confidential manner, and, in the most casual of tones, asked me to paint Teresa Guiccioli’s portrait.
‘She’s an artist, herself, Cecilia. You should see her work. She has something, you know, a great delicacy, a penetration. But of course she cannot paint her own likeness. I told her that I would commission the best artist in Venice to paint her for me.’
In one moment, I saw it. My position in his life had become entirely functional. I said nothing, waiting for the feeling to reach my tongue and allow me to answer.
Meanwhile Byron strolled around the studio, picking up small objects of his and pocketing them. ‘You’re quiet, Cecilia. But think about it. You know how much it would please me. Think how gratifying it would be for me to have a picture of Teresa, painted by you.’
I clicked back my ears, but still I said nothing. Eventually, he left, whistling again. My cat came out of the shadows and nudged my cold hand. A client came, sat for two hours. I worked. Another client came to discuss terms. I agreed to what he offered, dully, and made notes in my sitters’ book. I soaked canvases in my bath. I cleaned my brushes, even those that I had not used. I stupefied myself to continue.
Finally, I walked out to the terrace in front of my studio. The canal steamed like hot milk under the full moon. I stopped where Casanova had stood in 1782, shaped like an exclamation mark of pain. I wished that someone was watching me with love now, as I had watched him.
Until Teresa, my rival had never really been another woman. It had been Byron himself, as we competed to love him the most intensely. I had known that the women, Marianna, Margarita, the muses of the Casino, were irrelevant.
But Teresa, who looked like Augusta, who looked like Byron, had entered a place that I had reserved for myself.
I do not know how I knew it, but I knew that I had lost my place in the world. The truth invaded me that evening. The betrayal, having entered my body, sent its agents – nausea, faintness, trembling, an intense and sour coldness – in all directions. Like a house in an earthquake, I bided my time, waiting for everything that was insecure and fragile to crash and break inside me. Clattering down came my faith in myself, my sexual self-confidence. Falling gently on their wrecks, then came my hazy hopes and dreams,
dislodged like cobwebs, torn and dirty.
I spent the evening with Maurizio, looking across the table at him as if through a pane of mullioned glass. That night he was afraid of me, but he stayed, watching me pace around the studio. He smelt my febrile humour, and I imagined, vindictively, he felt there might be something in it for him. Maurizio still hungered for attention from me, any kind of attention, and still followed me to the corners of every room, till I turned on him, snarling. He loved that, too. For once, it seemed to him that I was really looking at him, really thinking about him. For him, this was as close an approximation of passion as he had known from me. He had never been loved properly, poor Maurizio. He did not know the difference.
But that night, finally, I told him about Byron. I told him the whole story in simple words so that he could understand it. He listened in silence for hours. When it was all out there hanging in the air between us – all the ugly truth, the rancid pain, the lies and the secrets – my studio suddenly felt unsafe, a contaminated place. I did not feel relieved, only more tired than I had ever felt. Then Maurizio put his head in his hands. I saw tears sliding between his thick fingers, heard them dripping on the table. I saw his shoulders tremble. Once he thumped his fist ineffectually upon the table. Then he became quiet. We sat in silence for a long time.
Finally Maurizio said, ‘Cecilia, the way you feel about Byron – that is how I love you.’
‘I am very sorry,’ I said.
I did not reach out to comfort him. It was not in me. I watched him and absorbed his pain like a Vampyre, as if it might cancel out my own. I had no kindness left for him. Our separate pains could not combine to soothe each other. Finally, I grew bored. I told him to go home. He laid his hand upon mine with what seemed to be unselfish tenderness.
‘You should not be alone, Cecilia. At least let me stay here to comfort you.’
‘I shall be safer alone,’ I flinched away. ‘Go. I don’t deserve you.’
I was not safer alone. Later that night it came to me: the fury and the pain. I was kneeling to stroke the cat one minute, and the next I was raging up and down inside the cortile, too agitated to sit down. If I did, my misery would enclose me, so I kept walking away from it, in little feinting steps. He had asked me to paint Teresa.
The ferocity of my bitterness took me by surprise. In a way, it was a relief. Anger about Teresa’s portrait was something into which I could sink my teeth. It was more satisfying than the years of tiny insults and hurts overlaying and somehow obscuring the fundamental pain Byron had given me when he abandoned me in Albania. I strode around the studio shouting at the walls, shaking my fists at the painted putti on the ceiling, running my fingernails along the marble walls so that they made an unbearable noise, like painted canvas being torn.
I calmed myself, eventually.
But I could not swallow the insult, so I allowed it to sit in my throat.
After the rage, came misery.
For comfort, I turned, unwisely, to my latest portrait of Byron. I picked up my brush. I allowed my memory to guide my hand, as if across his real flesh. I permitted myself to succumb once again to my addiction for thinking of him. The memories bled a subtly sweet poison into my heart. I argued to myself that these memories were better than the pain, but I lied. I did not accept the widowhood of my heart.
In the end, I couldn’t work any more. Everything in the studio reminded me of Byron. Everything was the same, but Byron was not there.
I put down my paintbrush and ran through the dark streets back home. I pounded across Campo San Stefano, Campo San Angelo, Campo San Luca, Campo San Bartolomeo. I did not see a living being. My footsteps echoed in the hollow squares as if my pain was in pursuit of me. How strange Venice looked to me that night! The air was still; the water seemed solid in the canals. I thudded through the streets, afraid of the moon, which dipped in and out of clouds. The moon, it seemed to me, was to be looked upon by women who were loved. Women like me must hide from it. Familiar buildings looked dangerous in the excluding moonlight. When I reached Campiello Santa Maria Nova I gratefully let myself into our palazzo. I panted up to the piano nobile, hoping to find Sofia still at her needlework. I would not have any words for her; I merely hoped to find some serenity in her quiet presence. But it was the middle of the night. She had gone to bed.
Passing through the house I seized a large candelabra from the dining table and returned to my bedroom. Sofia had made sure that a small fire still burned there, despite the dark hour. I imagined her in my room, tending to it quietly herself, rather than keeping the servants up late, before gliding up the stairs to her bed. I took a taper to the fire and lit all eight candles, which rose up in tall tumultuous flames, casting red shadows over my painted walls, as if to devour the gondola, the palaces of Vathek and the Mocenigo. Even in the haven of my bedroom, I could not escape from Byron and the images we shared.
He would not be erased from my mind.
I held the candelabra to the mirror and looked at myself. I barely recognised myself in the dark glass. I seemed a foreign creature, bleached of blood, an indecent creature, who loved without being loved.
How did this happen to me? I asked myself.
I tried to think back to the beginning of everything, to the moment when I had consented to live like this.
At every stage, I identified my mistakes, my misconceptions and my false moves.
It had started in Albania. I had fallen in love not with Byron’s soul, but with his skin. Then I had painted it as if it were capable of loving properly. I had fallen irrevocably in love with the lie I had painted. I had wished the face in my portrait to love me back. As long as he still had that skin, it seemed, I was condemned to love it.
I had fallen in love with a look that Byron gave me, in which I saw something that seemed native to myself. That glimpse of a life he showed me then was embedded in my imagination like a falling star swallowed by the sea. For those few moments of intimacy, I had made a life that was welded to his. I had offered him, however, a servitude for which he had no use.
I reckoned up Byron’s cruelties and his small mean acts. I listed for myself his bad breath, his awkward body, his unloving way of making love. I counted the women – seventeen of whom I knew – he had ruined in Venice. I knew that Byron was a lie that walked around; he seemed to personify romantic love but he was its enemy. Hate was closer to love than the poor fare that he offered hearts hungry for his love. He did not even bestir himself to hate. But, by his very indifference, he roused a tempest of hate and love in others. I knew Byron was the wrong man to love. I had spent too many years loving as wrong a man as I could have found, had I travelled the whole world looking for ways to hurt myself.
I had betrayed things that I believed in to accept his bad style of love, the stale air in his heart. I had lost the right of complaint by my very own forbearance. I had been so passive that I had consented tacitly to acts against the heart. In the hellish light of the candelabra it suddenly seemed to me that I had given up my son because of the narrowness of his father’s soul. Because of Byron, because of Byron’s inability to love me, I had become an unnatural kind of mother.
But it was my own mistake, my love for Byron. I had created it and I had made it monstrous all by myself, with only a little help from him. He was my mistake, the mistake I had coddled and cherished, humoured, succoured, delivered in all his painted beauty to the world.
But because I had made it myself, my love for him would not change now, whatever he did. My love had long ceased to depend upon the way he treated me or the kind of man he was.
For I was addicted to my old mistake, as I had once been addicted to novelty. I still could not let go of it. There is no cure for a love like this; there is no disgust, no pain and no outrage strong enough to strangle it. I did not have it in me to destroy it. I had been made too weak by it to fight against it. Nor could I hurt him: I would be circumvented by my own senseless tenderness for him, and because he was indifferent to me. Worse, he w
as at heart indifferent to love itself.
I knew all these things. But I remained a slave enfeebled by my desire. When I thought of Byron I still felt like fainting. Now that weakness made me long for his hard hand on my back. It was Byron who had authored this enfeebled version of myself. I thought that only he could restore me.
I went to my desk and picked up a pen. I wrote to Byron.
I had been the one woman with the dignity not to crawl after him. Now I joined those legions on their knees. I wrote. I sent the words scrabbling over the paper, looking for cover, longing for a beloved shadow to fall over them as it leant to steal a kiss. No shadow came, and the words scrabbled on in the pitiless light, like the ants that boys burn with magnifying glasses.
I signed the letter and sealed it with a vivid splotch of wax. The droplets looked like solid tears upon the creamy paper.
The Cat Speaks
I never saw her do such a thing before. Put herself on her knees like that! It ill becomes our Cecilia, if you ask me, to behave like another pathetic victim-mistress, whimpering on paper, begging him to return to her, selling herself like a side-show attraction!
‘Will you not be alone on this earth, in some ways that are intrinsic to your soul, if we are not together?’ … ‘Without you, I have gone out like a flaming brand deprived of air. I need you.’ … ‘I need your love to move my fingers properly, to hold my brush.’
Hardly like to win him back, is it? A man like that.
She should not have said that about Teresa Guiccioli, either – doesn’t she realise that when she says ugly things about that woman she is insulting Byron’s own image and likeness?
Carnevale Page 52
