‘You must take my bike. Take it for your stay.’
Delighted, and figuring he used his car usually and not his bike, I gratefully accepted. I jumped on it, and pedalled home down the Brenta, laughing to myself at the absurdity of my evening.
The next day, I caught a glimpse of Alessandro arriving for work at the Villa Margherita. He was on a decidedly female-looking bike, with a baby seat on the back. Oh no! I’d taken his and now he was using what I assumed was his wife’s. I was mortified. My instinct was to rush downstairs and insist he take his bicycle back. But what I knew of Italian hospitality was that you couldn’t say no to it. To do so would be more offensive than any inconvenience they might have caused themselves by their generosity. Still, mamma mia. Bicycles were lifeblood transportation in the area. It was flat, the roads away from the main highway quiet. While Germans and French people in Lycra came to cycle seriously here, the Venetians were practical cyclists; they got about their business on bikes. They cycled out for coffee, to pick up the children—some bikes had not one, but two kiddy seats; one at the front, another at the back—they cycled to the fishmonger, who set up a stall by the canal in the mornings, they cycled to the bar at night. And now someone, somewhere in the Dal Corso family, did not have a bike on which to do all that.
But I made use of that bicycle. I took bread rolls from breakfast and pedalled till I found the ducks in the canal, the little new spring chicks and their busy, protective parents. And I just rode. Between the dilapidated villas all boarded up and their neatly maintained neighbours. Past clumps of red poppies swaying gently in the breeze along the canal’s banks, through fields of fruit and vegetables, past grottos with shrines to the Madonna, past ancient walls creaking under the weight of fat, pungent roses. Through thickets of pine trees and tall grasses rustling with rodents. Past Palladian architecture and farmhouses, schools, churches, locks, bridges, trattorie and corner stores. I rode and I sang and I thought. Sometimes I stopped and took pictures or read, or wrote, or lunched, or had coffee.
Soon, as I rode along the Brenta Canal, I noticed I was attracting incensed stares from some people. I wondered if any of them knew I had caused one of their own to be without a bike. But I think it more likely they were in some manner taken aback by an entirely foreign-looking woman riding along on a local-looking bicycle, unintimidated by trucks, stares, car doors and buses. Or maybe it was the singing. Either way, I don’t think they were really irate. I think they were somewhat affronted. I was foreign acting local. But I had ridden a bike in Sydney, a place where cyclists are actively hunted, and therefore had seen it all. Secondly, and very newly, I quite liked standing out. Not belonging. Not so long ago it would have frightened me. But then, this being noticed didn’t involve any interaction with people.
Interaction … now that still scared me. No one who knew me then would have believed this, but every time a new friendship had threatened to form in my life to that point I had been terrified. I was so far behind the eight ball when it came to such things.
I didn’t go to kindergarten. Everyone else in my prep grade did, and together. And while that meant I had an extra year at home watching Ben Casey with my mum, it put me on the outside. Everyone had best girlfriends already when I came along. In prep class, I first tried to befriend two girls who had already notched up two years of friendship. At five, this was over thirty per cent of our life span. It didn’t work out, just couldn’t work out, for me getting the best girlfriend I so wanted.
So next, I got a best boyfriend called Curt. He was new to the neighbourhood and had a crew cut and olive skin and he was sweet. At his house there were beehives and a rose garden in which we loved to play. Until one day, a friend of one of my older brothers made fun of our friendship, teasing me that I had a boyfriend. It wasn’t the same after that. I became aware that it wasn’t a regular friendship. So I tried to make regular friends.
I had discovered there was no such thing as Santa—the usual way, seeing parents put presents under the tree. My family wasn’t particularly big on those kinds of myths anyway. I was still in prep when I picked out a girl called Lisa who I thought would be a good friend. As we hung our bags and cardigans on the hooks outside our classroom for the day ahead I decided to cement our friendship by letting her in on the secret, that there was no Santa. I truly believed that she would be delighted to be in the know, and that I was doing her a huge favour, giving her this present of knowledge.
She was quite upset, not the response I was expecting at all. I stood confused as she ran into the classroom, crying, to tell the teacher what I had said. The teacher came flying towards me, Lisa in one hand, and with the other, slapped me hard across the back and told me I was a wicked child. Of course there was such a thing as Santa.
Then I befriended the little deaf boy named Anthony. He already made a beeline for me every time the boys had to pick a partner to hold hands with on the walk to the toilet block anyway, so I figured it was friendship readymade. One rainy lunch hour we were being supervised in our room by a couple of grade six girls. Someone got up to sing in front of the class. Like I’d seen the boys do, I encouraged Anthony into giggling about it with me. Not out of any naughtiness. I just thought it was what boys did with their friends, so this would forever cement Anthony and me in mateship. We got caught. The grade six monitors made us get up and sing while instructing the rest of the class to laugh their heartiest at us.
Then the rain must have stopped, because everyone left the room, except for the monitors, Anthony and me. They pushed at us and pulled us and slapped us and called us things. I pleaded with them that I was wearing my best jumper and could they stop pulling it like that. They didn’t for quite a while.
We’ve all got our stories of being bullied or overlooked or missing out on friendship. From the time I started school, my story had been one of recurring botched attempts at intimacy, where everything always went somehow terribly wrong and I was haplessly to blame.
Did this stuff bounce off other kids? Or did we all internalise these messages and lose track of them on the super highway of subconscious chatter, until we took the time and found the courage to tease them up and look at them? I was compiling evidence from very early on that, unfettered and unregulated, I was too much. I wrecked things when I was me. I blew things. I laughed too loud, argued too much, felt too strongly.
When Mum and Dad decided to divorce in 1972, Erin and I became the only kids in the entire school, maybe even the entire neighbourhood, to have separated parents. It was weird to be that. Nothing like Lord Byron being a peer of the realm but poor, and yet it was. We were poor and kids of divorce and yet there was a kind of allure to that. We had parties at our house and kids came and hung out. There was a sense of freedom there at Lavender Street, with Mum out working—very rare then too—and Dad not there. The Jamesons were different. Notoriously cool, my brothers were popular, handsome, charismatic boys known around the neighbourhood, good with the ladies, into music and art, generally, in many ways, their father’s sons. But also their mother’s sons. They had a sense of loyalty, of humour, of delight in others that they got from her. People responded to them. I basked in their reflected glory. But for me, nothing could get around the fact that we were in a middle-class neighbourhood and we were struggling. I felt dirty, damaged and broken. So unlike the other kids, who had dads at home and less freedom, less cool, but more security, more comforts. I would have given anything to be one of them.
Something was happening to me along the Brenta. I had begun to acknowledge all these things about me, and unflinchingly look at them. And unlike Lord Byron, I was thinking about letting go of them. I had not known it could be so simple. That by acknowledging things, exploring stories but not submerging in them again, or attaching to them, you could move through them and forward. It seemed like my time to get that. And intangibly, it seemed like I had much to gain from doing so. I was beginning to like that woman sitting at her lone dinner table amid the German cocktail party. She was b
eginning to frighten me less and impress me more. Damaged, dirty and broken was starting to look like unique, experienced and humanly flawed. That was how I considered Lord Byron. And I was starting to pay myself the same honour.
8
Padua
The world is full of orphans: firstly, those
Who are so in the strict sense of the phrase;
But many a lonely tree the loftier grows
Than others crowded in the Forest’s maze–
The next are such as are not doomed to lose
Their tender parents, in their budding days,
But merely, their parental tenderness,
Which leaves them orphans of the heart no less.
Don Juan, Canto XVII
Marianna Segati was Lord Byron’s first long-term lover in Venice. She managed to maintain his attention for nearly a year and a half. The wife of his first Venetian landlord, she was sexually voracious, dramatic and physically his type, with her thin body and dark eyes. There was also a tremendous sense of danger in being with her under the roof of her husband—Lord Byron and the Segatis shared the same lodging in the Frezzeria area of San Marco, an upstairs–downstairs arrangement of sensual opportunity. Dangerous, yes, but the husband in question, Pietro Segati, knew what was going on, treating it as out of sight, out of mind—such was the Venetian way of the time.
After having been in the Veneto a year, Byron decided to do some sightseeing in the rest of Italy. Marianna begged to come with him. He resisted, writing to his best friend, John Cam Hobhouse, of her as ‘carnal baggage’ that he was loath to carry. He was never faithful to her anyway. And needless to say, he did not take her along.
It’s such an unattractive aspect to Lord Byron, the way he could so suddenly turn on the females in his life, showing callous disrespect. These are the moments in which I am torn about him. There’s that big, luminous soul on display through his work. Then there is the hemmed-in heart, constricted and contorted—and reactive.
By the end of his school days he had grown to despise his over-bearing, accusative and argumentative mother, who blamed his father’s side of the family for all the failings she saw in her only child. He wrote to his half-sister Augusta, ‘I have never been so scurrilously and violently abused by any person, as by that woman.’
It’s so tempting to try to side with Catherine Byron, a single mother in the late 1700s, early 1800s, attempting to bring up a wilful, highly intelligent son. But from her there was a dependence on him for companionship, a wild oscillation between permissiveness and berating, and worst of all, a siding with his abuser. After it came to light that ten-year-old Lord Byron’s nanny, May Gray, had sexually interfered with her charge, had beaten him and most probably had sex with strangers in front of him, Catherine Byron did not dismiss her immediately. She had close ties with May’s family, who insisted that reports of this wrongdoing were fabrications of a spiteful little boy. Catherine did nothing to dispel that.
Later, in the last years of his life, Lord Byron would reflect, ‘My passions were developed very early, so early, very few would believe me, if I were to state the period and the faces which accompanied it. Perhaps this is one of the reasons which caused the anticipated melancholy of my thoughts, having anticipated life.’
What a life to anticipate.
Our early experiences do set up expectations, though, for all of us. Lord Byron was not alone in that. And we spend the rest of our lives playing them out. But if we’re lucky, we reach a point where they no longer serve us, and if we have the courage, we can dismantle them.
Nina was a bespoke travel director who lived not far from Verona. She was an Australian of Sicilian parentage who had lived in Italy for over twenty years. Alessandro had put me in touch with her and I was to become more and more grateful for that. We spoke for the first time when she rang me in my room at the Villa Margherita. I liked her velvety voice. She had an accent that was difficult to pin down in that international way.
‘Have you been to the Amalfi Coast?’ asked Nina.
‘No, I’m not going there till I can go with a partner. It’s too romantic, too coupley. But,’ I added, ‘I said that about Venice too and here I am, again.’
‘Have you ever been married?’
Funny, but I could never say, no, I had never been married—especially to people who were. ‘I was living with somebody for seven years or so, then in another big relationship for a few years,’ I hedged.
Maybe I needed to try just saying it: ‘No, I have never been married.’ If I was to be true to the mission of embracing the what-is-ness of me, rather than the what-isn’t-ness, then I did need to find some way to be comfortable with that.
‘What is the dating scene like in Australia?’ Nina asked.
‘Terrible,’ I said, defaulting then to the ‘all the single men in Australia are gay’ position.
‘I would have thought that in your profession there would have been plenty of opportunities.’
‘I guess I might be what our grandmothers would have called picky.’ That wasn’t true but I said it anyway. The truth was, I didn’t want to say that no one had picked me. Even thinking it felt like a betrayal of the sisterhood.
Most nights I had dinner at a rustic little trattoria up the road from the Villa Margherita. I was feeling more and more inclined to have some wine with my meal. And every time the inclination came up, I felt frightened.
Part of the AA program was about getting clear on your drinking ‘story’ and I never could, or rather, I didn’t feel it held a lot for me. This was one of the reasons I had, in the end, left the fellowship. My story began when I had my first big drink on the night of my thirteenth birthday. It ended with me rolling paralytic into a bonfire, but I was fortunately saved from injury by my sister’s boyfriend Toddy. It was awful and dangerous, but not the beginning of something big in itself. The whole narrative was something that didn’t mean anything to me. Booze was always in our house and I came from a big Anglo-Irish Catholic family that drank to celebrate/console/kick back. This also did not give me the ah-ha moment. Journalists were booze hounds. I lived in nightclubs from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s drinking vodka. I was in an intense relationship for seven years and I relied heavily on alcohol to lubricate it. But none of that felt like it had anything to do with it. It all sounded trite to me and I never felt authentic talking about any of that in AA meetings. It didn’t reach the heart of the malady. I thought all those things just made it easier for alcohol to be a ready source of release from pain, whatever the hell it was caused by, and then the alcohol became a problem all of its own because it was habit-forming. It was the subtext, the back-story, that I had yet to connect with and uncover.
The true malady was a dislike of myself. Nope. That wasn’t it. A disconnection from myself. Blah, blah, blah. The denial of God in my life. Not it either. I still didn’t know. That was clear. But I knew I needed to find out why I did what I did. Until I knew, alcohol would still terrify me. Or rather, I would terrify myself. I couldn’t trust myself until I knew why I did what I did the way I did it.
I had to move from the Villa Margherita two nights earlier than planned. I was also not sure they really wanted me to come back after my week in Rome was up as had been our original arrangement before I left home. Under that arrangement, I would come to the Veneto for two weeks, go to Rome for one, come back for another three, because Lord Byron went tripping off south from Venice to return there again and I was emulating that, albeit in a truncated fashion. Alessandro had originally offered to put me up for the whole time, but things had changed. It was fair enough that the Villa Margherita didn’t want me back. They had a big booking suddenly come in and they needed that little single room I was in or else they would lose the entire group. So I’d been asked, in the nicest possible way, would I mind?
It was fair enough, yes, but it brought up sharp feelings of rejection. I said all sorts of prayers to as many guides, angels and saints as I could call in to get over it. And then
I had wine with dinner. I took a sip and something in me said, ‘Hello, old friend.’ I was not sure it was a good idea. Nor was I sure who or what was saying that hello. I thought it might have been my head being dramatic. It had a tendency to do that. So I was not sure it was a bad idea either.
For the two nights I needed to fill between Mira and Rome, I did not choose to go and stay in Venice proper. I chose Padua. I adored that little city not even fifteen kilometres west of where I was and I didn’t think I was ready for Venice yet. I believed that Lord Byron, were he a contemporary figure, would not have loved Venice as much as he did. But he might have loved Padua, a lively, intellectual and still truly Italian town. And, as if to confirm my decision, I got a good last minute deal on the internet for a brilliant little inn called the Hotel Belludi 37.
Padua is the loveliest of cities. Long colonnades and even longer porticos give it a protective, genteel sense. It wraps around you. Its interconnected piazze and leafy river vistas, its elegant gardens and graceful monuments have a dreamlike beauty, brought down to earth rather exuberantly by the throng of students pedalling her streets and enjoying long apertivo times on her sidewalks.
Part of cobbled Via San Francesco is a sweet little arch of a Roman bridge, below which is an outdoor restaurant on a small island, water trickling over pebbles, dense foliage and towering trees either side—the kind of place that would be sheer perfection for a date. As I walked across the bridge very much on my own, gazing at this romantic little spot, I became aware of a man nearby playing piano accordion. It was the melody I always heard as ‘Oh, Solo Mio’. I knew that tune was a piano accordion standard. But still. I mean, really.
‘Does he have to rub it in?’ I said out loud to myself, startling the young couple next to me who had paused to take pictures of each other on the bridge. ‘Solo? Mio?’ I gesticulated exaggeratedly to explain to them my situation, and followed with an apologetic laugh before continuing, ‘Me, alone … I was thinking how nice that restaurant down there would be for a date and …’
Me, Myself and Lord Byron Page 8
