Me, Myself and Lord Byron

by Julietta Jameson

  We were at traffic lights together. I felt sad for him. I always did now when I saw drunks who were far-gone because I had seen people at AA who had been where they were—and maybe even somewhere worse—lift into sobriety and back into workable functionality. As we waited for the lights to change, two young Italian men, clean pressed jeans and Lacoste polo shirt types with wavy luscious hair and twenty-something vigour, ran up. One positioned himself next to the man in the green felt hat and the other took a photo. The two turned to the man and elaborately explained that they were taking a picture of the non-existent scenery behind him. The man looked at them silently, his ocean fog hiding any cognisance of the disrespect. But I did not think he was entirely oblivious.

  I felt terrible for him, and quite possibly for me because I identified with him as an outsider. I suspected my motivation for drinking was actually not that it was a beautiful spring night in Milan. It was one of: Respect me, I can drink like you. I’m like you, can’t you see? I am part of this. I belong.

  But I had drunk before I left Sydney. I had decided to quit the fellowship because I knew I had to see if I could stand on my own two feet, trust myself and my relationship with God to not harm myself the way I had been. In AA terms, that put me back to day one. In God’s and mine, well, truthfully then, I didn’t yet know. But it hadn’t felt like a step backwards. There was no such thing. It hadn’t been a slip. It had been a premeditated and planned test.

  In AA terms, that would be a statement of ‘the obsession’. In my terms it was too. About three weeks before I left Sydney for Europe, I could not shake thoughts of drinking. It began with a visit to a clairvoyant. She asked me what the health issue was that kept me from enjoying life. I said alcoholism. She said, ‘You are not a drunk. If you want a little glass of something in a piazza somewhere you can have it.’

  That was hardly a sound basis upon which to build a decision to try to drink in a controlled manner. But for the first time in a long time, I allowed myself to consider the notion that I might not be a drunk, as the clairvoyant so elegantly put it.

  In the early days of my sobriety, I told some people—not a whole lot but some—about what was going on with me. And I would say a good three-quarters of those people responded by telling me they didn’t believe I was an alcoholic. It bugged the hell out of me. What did they know? I was an alcoholic. I was broken. Couldn’t they see? I was defective. Damaged. An unlovable mess. I wilfully gave in to self-pity, then. I wanted them to pity me too. I wanted the world to pity me. I wanted the world to see that I was not fine at all. And I wanted the world to feel bad for me and take the blame for my misery.

  As the months of not drinking went by, through prayer and meditation my connection to my spirit and my God strengthened exponentially. I never fathomed the power of that till it was my only option. And then I found out how truly awesome it was. I was shown that I was perfect as is. I was shown that I was loved.

  I began to feel a bit silly, being so down on myself like that. If God had big love for me and saw me as perfect, who was I to disagree and say I was broken and unlovable? I will always be grateful for my crisis because it showed me the absolutely unconditional love of God, the transformative power of it and its ready availability to anyone who calls on it. I am sure there are plenty of other, less traumatic paths to knowing God, but to experience his vigilance during my dark night of the soul was the most precious gift I had ever received. Needless to say, the self-pity fell away.

  It did, however, leave me in a quandary. So I wanted to embrace life. Okay. How was I going to do that completely with this Sword of Damocles hanging over my head? There was a sense of: yes, you can enjoy life, but within limits. Though able-bodied and in full health, it felt as if I had voluntarily put a handicap on myself. What if, as I now suspected, I wasn’t an alcoholic? What if I was denying myself the immense pleasure of a glass or two of wine as part of a life well lived when I could be enjoying it?

  One thing I knew: I would not go back there. If trouble was brewing I would know what to do and I would know where to go. But if I was incapable, truly, of handling alcohol, I needed to find out. I absolutely could not live with this fear of the unknown.

  I came at it from all angles—every angle except physically desiring a drink, which was bizarre to me. Mentally, I didn’t seem to want one either. I knew this was why AA presented the program as an absolute. Why it instructed its practitioners to accept that they could not drink and not get all crazy with the questions. Follow the program. Submit to it. Accept that you had this thing and that you could do nothing but accept you had this thing because it would bring up obsession otherwise.

  I knew all this. It still did not sway me. In fact, it gave me more fuel to follow the path I did. I prayed and meditated on it and one night it became apparent. I had divided my belief in a higher power. I believed in two: God and alcohol. Good and evil, how very Old Testament of me. I without doubt needed to unify my concept of a higher power. I needed to take away the power alcohol had over me as an unknown. If it were to grip me in addiction, then I would know what to do. If it did not, then the hoodoo would be broken.

  If the right opportunity came up, I would have a glass of wine. As these things go, the day after I decided this a friend whom I trust and love rang me and said she was coming down from Brisbane and did I want to have dinner at a favourite restaurant she and I used to frequent before she moved north. I told her what I had decided. She was very cool and unstartled and supportive. And I had it, and it was nice, and it did not make me want a bottle. But it was then I knew I had some exploring to do.

  That small glass of prosecco in Milan did not satiate the curiosity either. Rather, I saw the tiny tip of the tail of why I did what I did the way I did it and I knew I had to follow it till I found the heart.

  6

  Mira Porte

  Don Jose and Donna Inez led

  For some time an unhappy sort of life,

  Wishing each other, not divorced, but dead;

  They lived respectably as man and wife,

  Their conduct was exceedingly well-bred,

  And gave no outward signs of inward strife,

  Until at length, the smother’d fire broke out,

  And put the business past all kind of doubt.

  Don Juan, Canto I

  Cruise ships, out of place like Gulliver in Lilliput or Alice through the looking-glass, sit gargantuan in Venice’s harbour, towering over her perfect proportions, disgorging battalions of day-trippers on greatest hits missions. They join the already burgeoning hordes that crowd Venice’s tiny lanes and bridges. Touts and trinket sellers degrade her icons, clogging her once workaday markets with gaudy junk. Her gondolas, essential transport of days gone by, are now nothing more than a novelty, a ride at the funfair. Most of her shops and restaurants are given over to maximum extraction of profit from stressed and befuddled tourists. In many parts, Venice is more theme park than a city where people live, work, exist.

  Yet she fairly drips with a ghostly, glamorous majesty that is distinctly her own. There is an unyielding dignity to her crumbling palazzi and churches, an effervescent sparkle, a beauty to her waterways, and a sigh-inducing romance to her unchanging form. The enchantment of Venice, even today, is her supernatural transcendence of all the custodians de jour can throw at her. But also it is the fragility of that ability to rise above it all and the fragility of the city itself. You sense that she may finally bow, crumble and sink at any moment and that you may be the last person to see her in all her magnificence.

  She’s a lot like love itself in that: magnificent but fragile.

  In Byron’s time, Venice had its own blight, not the one of mass tourism like today, but a terrible poverty, born of her assets being stripped and degraded by the Napoleonic years and by Austrian rule. She was no longer the proud republic whose influence spread throughout the Mediterranean in powerful waves. Byron loved the sense of her having fallen from grace, of being a sullied version of her once mighty s
elf. It spoke to him of his own state. He had been an English hero. Now, he was tainted and in some instances despised.

  But when he moved to Venice in 1817, it was his kind of town in more than its symbolism. It was a party town, with its yearly Carnivale and its theatres and opera halls continuing to host great works. It attracted certain literary and artistic types. There was still a rich, lively society there. Life was ripe with sensuality and glamour, defiant and orgiastic, like a party before the end of the world.

  Byron too, was living life exactly like that, as if it all might end tomorrow.

  ‘A woman is virtuous … who limits herself to her husband and one lover—those who have two, three or more are a little wild,’ he wrote of Venice’s female population, as he took maximum advantage of that. As soon as he arrived, he found a lover and in so doing cuckolded a husband. She did not have his attention exclusively though. His promiscuity only increased with opportunity. Opportunity, combined with his need to still the storm of regret and sadness that his mind had become, made him insatiable.

  Nature, nurture and situation: how the human spirit navigates through them, in the end, is what counts. Love is the happy ending we all seek. In one way or another, we all want to express our glory and see it reflected back to us so we might truly, tangibly know it. It is the layers of impurity through which we filter that noble mission that causes variations in it, usually for the worse.

  I was on a mission now to peel away my layers. This had taken me by surprise. I had set out to follow Byron as a kind of celebration of the point at which I had arrived. As a reclaiming of all I used to love. But the more I got to know him, the more I saw there was a lot about my psyche that needed to be exposed.

  This nature, nurture, situation thing: I had let all three taint my quest for love. My nature: open, gregarious and sensitive. My nurture: a child of an awful parental relationship. My situation: a lifestyle that afforded indulgence and excitement with little effort, the ease of access to some of life’s decadences making it a splendidly simple antidote to the terrible combination of the other two.

  It was time to unravel that tangle.

  ‘Dear Ms Julietta Jameson,

  Thank you very much for your kind email and compliments for your book. It is a pleasure and honour for me and all Dal Corso family to give hospitality to you in our houses. Even if May is for us best high season it is our pleasure to offer, extraordinarily for you, the five weeks’ stay at …’

  The email was from Alessandro Dal Corso, a hotelier from the town of Mira Porte, about twenty kilometres outside Venice on the mainland. When that email arrived in my inbox five weeks before I left home, I thought I’d never read the English language mangled so delightfully. It was the utter charm of it that had made me decide to stay with the Dal Corsos, even though I thought that would mean I would need to take the bus into Venice daily to get close to Lord Byron’s world. But Alessandro had added:

  ‘If my commitments allow it will be my pleasure to show you to the places of Lord Byron the Great Lover. With my personal boat for show the real Venetian Live stile. Waiting your kind reply I’m at you back and call with high regard, Alessandro Dal Corso.’

  It was an offer that was impossible to resist.

  And so here I was at the Villa Margherita, a sprawling pile on Via Nazionale, the main road between Venice and the university town of Padua. It was a mansion surrounded by manicured gardens and enormous trees. Statues of gods and goddesses lined the drive. An old beagle named Bella sat on the doorstep, wagging her tail at the sign of visitors.

  Alessandro had organised for me to be picked up at Mestre train station and delivered to the villa. His handsome younger brother, Dario, and an effortlessly gorgeous young receptionist, Roberta, greeted me, embarrassingly lugging my hefty bags up two wide, grand flights of stairs to my room, refusing to let me carry anything other than my handbag. ‘You will be comfortable here,’ said Dario, which sounded like a command but one I was willing to obey.

  I unpacked and settled into my room, a tiny single with a small Juliet balcony that looked out to the poplar trees edging the northern boundary of the garden. They were tall, strong and vigorous. They had a poised permanence to them, sentries that had seen them come, seen them go.

  I stood on my balcony gazing out to them and remembered the two enormous poplar trees in our yard at Lavender Street. As I saw more of Europe and its trees in their natural habitat, I could only marvel at the audacity of my parents for planting what exotica they did on our average-sized Australian block. Two poplar trees that ‘strangled the pipes’ with their voracious search for water, my mother would complain, so clearly these were the work of my father; three willow trees, two of which destroyed sections of fence, one of which was to act like a conservatory, providing a hollow and shady outdoor space in which to enjoy afternoon beers; two pines; a passionfruit vine; a clump of bamboo that pushed another section of the fence down; a holly bush; the aforementioned lilac and snowball trees; a crab apple tree; roses, both climbing and not; hibiscus, a liquidambar and, in a token gesture to actual location, various large wattle trees, bottle brush and a couple of massive red gums. I do not assume this recollection is complete. It did not include the flowerbeds, one of which was overrun with nasturtiums, or the chilli plants that were in another garden bed for a while—again, an exotic addition from my father to a suburban Melbourne garden of the 1960s.

  Years after the Jamesons left the property, 10 Lavender Street, Ringwood made the local newspaper front page when one of the pine trees crashed down, straight through the roof and into the bedroom known to us as ‘the boys’ room’, the room that eventually became mine when the last of the boys left home.

  The room was empty at the time. Still, assumed permanence proving impermanent, the latent, unconsidered danger in something I slept maybe five metres away from for years, listening to it creak in the wind at night … I was long gone when it fell and it wasn’t my drama. But I never thought that tree would come down of its own volition.

  I had walked through life with an endless entourage of unacknowledged, unproven and mostly erroneous assumptions. In that moment when one of them was brought to light by finding out that its exact opposite was actually true, the rest of the myriad beliefs on an indecipherably humming background track were momentarily quietened by the possibility of being potentially wrong too. But only for a second. The mind is a self-preservation mechanism and will quickly go into lockdown at such a breach of protocol. It assumes, therefore it is. Move along, nothing more to see here.

  I thought this must be what people meant when they said something gave them pause for thought. That pine tree gave me pause for thought. Even the Villa Margherita poplar trees wouldn’t be there forever.

  And neither would my assumptions now. I was undoing myself.

  After I finished unpacking I had a coffee downstairs. The hotel was unnervingly quiet. Though Dario had assured me they were busy, mid-afternoon there was only me, Roberta and Bella the beagle amidst the lavishly stuffed sofas and expensive artworks. I wandered the hotel to the strains of Julio Iglesias piped into every corner until I started to feel terribly claustrophobic. I had decided on the Villa Margherita because, apart from Alessandro’s charming email, I could not afford to stay for weeks on end in Venice. Now I was wondering about my decision. I seemed to be so close yet so far away from where Lord Byron had lived, and trapped in what felt in that moment like a ritzy convalescent home, and there wasn’t even a desk in my room and I had to write, and there weren’t even any shops nearby and, and, and … I needed a walk.

  Roberta gave me directions up to the main village, which did little for my sense of isolation. ‘It is about fifteen minutes,’ she said in her musical Italian accent. Bella wagged her tail at me. Well at least no one seemed to be seeing the inner turmoil.

  I walked out the door, crossed the busy Via Nazionale, took a turn-off to the left and found I was following a gently ambling canal with willows drooping into it and wild flowers
dotting its banks. On previous travels, seeing such a perfectly tranquil scene for the first time would usually have me succumb to bliss. Not this day. I was all over the place, too panicked to appreciate the splendour in front of me. One minute my attention was grabbed by a boarded-up old villa for sale and then I was concocting an elaborate fantasy around buying it. The next I was barely breathing, constrained by the return of that feeling of claustrophobia, freaked out at the notion of staying with people I didn’t know for an extended period of time. Then I forgot which direction the traffic was coming from, stepped into an intersection and almost got totalled by a speeding Mercedes. It left me shaken, wondering what I was doing here in the Italian countryside, doubting everything.

  Increasingly unsettled, I rounded a corner, saw a crowd outside a shop and knew the sway of popularity suggested one of my favourite things about Italy: gelato. I am a simple creature. With a big cone in my hand piled high with scoops of banana and strawberry ice cream, all the noise and hubbub of my mind subsided.

  That’s when the whole outing culminated in the Lord Byron moment.

  I was strolling along, placated by my gelato like a toddler with a treat, when not far up the road from the gelateria I came upon a dishevelled old villa turned into apartments, as many of the Mira villas had been. But what made this one remarkable was the sign above the doorway, barely discernible, reading, ‘Lord Byron abito 1817 ’.

  Okay. So maybe the Villa Margherita was a good choice, after all. It turned out Lord Byron had taken summer residence in Mira, along the Brenta Canal, like much of Venetian society, and here I was, a mere stroll, panic attack and ice cream away from where he’d stayed.

  In the sixteenth century the Brenta River was turned into a 36-kilometre-long canal from Padua to the Adriatic Sea, bypassing the Venetian lagoon, becoming a transport channel and source of irrigation for the fertile low-lying land. Venice’s noble families established estates and built villas along it, using the great architects Palladio and Preti. The houses became the summer escapes for the patricians who left their regular residences in Venice. In the summer, the Riviera del Brenta became one long revelry, with parties en palazzi and aboard the barges that drifted from home to home. Famous guests at the goings-on included Galileo, Napoleon, Casanova, Goethe, the playwright Goldoni, and artists Tiepolo and Canaletto.