And then, if I was honest, alcohol and I were not mixing well. I did know that I had felt very lonely these past few days since I’d got to Ravenna, especially at the beach. And I knew that I had been going to bars in the evening, allegedly to do as the locals did, to soak up the atmosphere. But I was undoubtedly looking for him. I could completely see why I was drinking and it was not for the pleasure of it. It was loaded with emotional back-story—and it was another version of the old story, whatever that was. I was out looking for him and, in Ravenna, that pretty much meant sitting with a glass of wine. It had great little bars and a lively apertivo culture. The Italians doing it so well again. But I was struggling to make it work for me.
It wasn’t the drink itself. I had a chasmic love void, a devastating loneliness that had risen up to meet me since the strange episodes of Claudio and Norman. Until that was reconciled I could not move forward. He was not in a bar. He was not in a bottle. I knew this. And neither was my salvation. I needed to stop looking.
Lying on the beach there, I made my decision. The search was over. Truly, deeply, I was ready to accept myself as a single woman, I told myself. I had to be. Otherwise I was going to end up in that pit of despair again.
In the evening, I headed out for dinner, cycling the streets, looking for somewhere that appealed. I ventured down a quiet laneway and walked into a trattoria at which I had yet to eat. The signora was in the process of seating me at a table and telling me I had to be out of the tiny establishment at nine to make way for a booking when a man walked in solo. In dreadful Italian he asked for a table and she seated him at one a metre or so from me and told him he had to vacate at half past eight. There was no one else in there. We both studied the Italian-language-only menu and it felt a bit awkward, the two of us being English speakers. The waitress came to me, I asked what a dish on the menu was, found out it was rabbit, she told me the specials and I ordered the meatballs with peas, a salad and a bottle of aqua naturale, per favore.
After she left for the kitchen with my order, he looked over. ‘Did you catch any of that?’ he said.
‘All I caught was rabbit and meatballs.’
He pulled out a big Italian dictionary. ‘I’m trying to learn Italian while I’m here.’ When the waitress came back to the dining room, of course she spoke to him in English. He ordered in Italian.
‘Bravo,’ I said, after she had gone to the kitchen with his order. I went back to my notebook.
‘Where are you from?’ he called over, as more people began arriving at the restaurant. I told him, and went on to what I was doing in Ravenna.
‘And you?’
‘From Nottinghamshire,’ he said.
‘Where Lord Byron’s house is!’
‘Yes, but it’s not really a house, more a pile of stone and a park now,’ he said of Newstead Abbey, the Byron ancestral home.
More people had arrived; we were forced to yell to be heard by each other, and duck this way and that to keep each other in eye line as other diners passed by.
‘Would you like to join me at this table?’ I asked when it was becoming absurd.
‘Yes, thank you.’
His name was Paul. He was unmannered but not awkward, seemingly unselfconscious but easy to blush. Smart and witty. He had a great smile, great teeth. Funny what we notice. He was well read and had recently finished a book about Greek history that gave him a strong perspective on Lord Byron. ‘He was a bit of a plonker, really. The Greeks took him to the cleaners while he walked around in the little uniforms he had made for himself. But if he hadn’t died in Greece, the English never would have got involved and liberation wouldn’t have happened when it did. So in the end, he did achieve his aim.’
Extremely well travelled, another adventurer, he had lived a few years here and there. He worked in the petrochemical business, which is what had recently brought him to Ravenna. We compared notes on places we had been. I mentioned that after Ravenna I was going next to Pisa and how non-Italians I mentioned this to had told me how much they didn’t like the Tuscan town.
‘I think Pisa’s lovely,’ Paul said. ‘A great city.’
I told him of the trattoria I had discovered the day before but couldn’t remember the street and didn’t have the card with me. I offered him mine and suggested he email me if he wanted to and I would furnish him with the details. ‘Or,’ I said, ‘perhaps we can dine there together some time. If you feel like company, SMS me or something.’ He rummaged for his card, but didn’t have one, so wrote his email address and phone number on a piece of paper.
Nine o’clock came and we parted. As I rode back to Paola’s I reflected on how I had checked for a wedding ring before I gave him my card. The check was a reflex, but the invitation was extended without expectation, hooks or even hope. I was no longer looking in that moment. But I knew I would like to see him again.
15
Bagnacavallo
What deep wounds ever closed without a scar?
The heart’s bleed longest, and but heal to wear
That which disfigures it; and they who war
With their own hopes, and have been vanquish’d bear
Silence, but not submission: in his lair
Fix’d Passion holds his breath, until the hour
Which shall atone for years; none need despair:
It came, it cometh, and will come,—the power
To punish or forgive—in one, we shall be slower.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III
While Lord Byron and Teresa were in the throes of intense new obsession, traipsing about the Veneto and Emilia Romagna, Allegra, still in Venice and in her third year on earth, was billeted with a series of caretakers; first, the British Consul General Richard Hoppner and his wife. The Hoppners didn’t much like her, citing bed-wetting, sullenness and developmental slowness as their reasons. They palmed her off onto the family of one of their servants, then to the family of the Danish Consul. Lord Byron eventually sent for her to be brought to him in Bologna.
He then took her, along with his menagerie, to Ravenna, where he leased from the husband of his lover the top floor of the Palazzo Guiccioli, thus putting the child in a curious position. Though she may not have witnessed the sexual secrets, intrigue and power plays, she would have been living in the tense atmosphere the arrangement between Lord Byron and the Guicciolis must have created. Children are little sponges. They may not understand the tension in the air, but they feel it. The adults with whom she resided were not the most stable of human beings. Teresa wavered between spoiling Allegra and resenting her. Claire Clairmont, the child’s mother, was notably absent, Lord Byron refusing to have her in his vicinity.
By the time Allegra was four, Lord Byron and Teresa were embroiled in revolutionary politics. Her father was preoccupied not only with that and the writing of Don Juan, but also with the vitriolic backlash against him in England. He made a decision to send the child away to a convent, San Giovanni Batista, in a small town called Bagnacavallo. A year later, Allegra died there, of what is generally agreed to have been typhus, having never seen her father again.
Do men of great individuality always make bad fathers? Which is not to ask whether all great fathers are men who lack individuality. But I suspect there is a level of selflessness required for excellent parenting that neither Lord Byron nor my father had.
Some people find it impossible to put aside their own stuff to become good parents. I occasionally wonder what kind of a mother I might have made, with my wandering ways and love of the alone. I do love both those things, but I also adore kids, family and, of course, love itself. Maybe being a parent would have made me a better person. Maybe not. It seems a pointless hypothetical.
I thought of Lord Byron’s decision to have poor little Allegra packed off to the nuns after having lived in a palazzo with poets. Like me, she probably believed she was responsible for everything; she surely must have believed she had done something frightfully wrong to be banished like that.
&
nbsp; Riding a bike in Ravenna could be, at times, not unlike driving in Florence. I was going to say driving in Rome but I have never done that. I have driven in Florence, however, and I have the traffic citation to prove it. At least with the cars in Florence there is some small semblance of traffic laws. On busy days, like Tuesdays apparently, Ravenna is one big game of two-wheeled chicken, with obstinate or oblivious pedestrians thrown in to make competition all the more interesting.
In one morning alone I had more almost-prangs with speeding nonnas than anyone should have in a lifetime. Some of those nonnas had not one, but two bambini on board, one in the front handlebars baby seat, another on the seat up the back. There were many delivery vans in town, too. It was dodgem city: people riding the wrong side of the street; pedestrians and other cyclists stopped for a chat in the middle of a tiny cobbled lane, with everyone forced to go around and some refusing to slow or even back down at the threat of a head-on. Everyone was vying for that little strip of smoother, but still bumpy, white cobbles down the middle of the street, which was also where you encountered Hummer-sized prams.
It was exhilarating.
I had yet to find my gelateria in Ravenna, though. That was not exhilarating. It was very frustrating. The Ravennese gelaterias were okay, but none of them lived up to Ponte Pietra in Verona. Perhaps nothing ever would. But I had found a great café at the base of an ugly orange-brick six-storey apartment block in a back street not far from Paola’s. It was called Fargo and the pastries were organic, the coffee was wicked and the hipsters and nonnas in the know went there. It had taken over a tiny square with cane chairs and cute iron tables. Every morning I was having a crema, a custard-filled cornetto, this particular version being spectacularly well balanced between sweet and creamy (the custard), flaky and chewy (the pastry). I washed it down with two caffè lunghi. How was it that it was perfectly acceptable to me to have custard-filled pastry for breakfast in Europe, but in Australia I’d consider it a travesty of blood sugar level fluctuations, refined flour intolerances and nutrition-negative kilojoules?
Paul told me he had seen, near his apartment, a plaque that commemorated a spot where Byron had slept. Every day I doffed my lid at the Palazzo Guiccioli on Via Cavour—what was, these days, Ravenna’s main shopping street—but I had yet to find this other place. The morning after we shared that meal, as I got off my bike at Fargo, I received a text message from him giving me exact instructions as to the plaque’s whereabouts. I texted back a thank you and a quick note about my day.
I did not hear back.
Each year, Ravenna has a summer arts festival that has featured some of the greatest orchestras in the world, and Bob Dylan. My visit to the town coincided with the festival and so I booked some tickets. I had no idea what to expect of my first event, because most of the available promotional material was in Italian. I knew it was a piano recital and it started at half-past nine in the evening, which seemed so late to me until I turned up and discovered it was outside on the treed lawn of the porticoed courtyard in the centre of the Biblioteca Classense. The Classense is where Lord Byron’s letters to Teresa are held in safekeeping.
As it turned out, the concert was a plink-plonk repertoire of modern composers who refused to believe there are only so many ways to peel an orange. People walked out. Others, like myself, stayed till the end when the best bits occurred, the playing with the elbows, the flat palms and the fists. And then the messing about on the Steinway’s strings, with no regard for the keys, the pianists’ head under the hood like a car mechanic.
I knew there was a place for this stuff, like in horror movies for example. And I got that it was wonderfully well played.
‘Did you enjoy it?’ the elegant Ravennese society signora seated next to me asked.
‘It was interesting,’ I answered, which was the truth.
I did try to beat my prejudice of wanting a little melody and rhythm in my piano recitals. (Call me old-fashioned, but I do.) So I wiggled my shoulders a bit to relax them, took a few deep breaths and closed my eyes to see what might be evoked by that music: the moments of absurdity pushed up against anger and doom, suddenly opening to windows of something like harmony and rhythm but only for a short time and then more melody but not entirely right, big bursts of frenetic sounds followed by sparse melancholy.
All I could think of was my last relationship. Discord, unpredictability, disharmony. The thing that reminded me most of that relationship was the excruciating ache, during the cacophony, for the melodious brackets. And then when they came, that terrible make-do pretence that near enough was good enough.
I woke up ‘lemancholy’ the next day, as Lord Byron called his melancholy. I didn’t think the plink-plonk was to blame. It was my soul, as usual, two steps ahead of me, knowing that I was going to Bagnacavallo, the place where little Allegra Byron died at five years of age.
I decided to take my bike on the train to Bagnacavallo, less than twenty kilometres inland from Ravenna. But it was a bit of a to-do. The train was already in the station, twenty minutes before it was due to depart. I got on an empty carriage in the middle. A guard came and, in Italian, told me I could not have my bike there. ‘Last carriage,’ he said in English. So I hauled my bike off and headed to the end of the train, where I got on the last, also empty carriage. Ten minutes later the guard found me again. ‘No. Not first carriage, last carriage,’ he said in English, waggling his finger. He watched me haul my bike off again, flustered, red-faced, then he walked in front of me all the way up to the engine.
‘Isn’t this the first carriage?’
He didn’t respond, but watched me lug my bike onto the train again, into another empty carriage, where there was a section full of bike rails. Not on the ground, though. You had to lift your bike and hang the front wheel off some hooks that were way above my head. He motioned to the hooks and watched me struggle for several minutes trying to get my bike, the only bike on the train, onto one of these hooks, which, I discovered, were not only above my head, but several centimetres above my fully extended reach. I got my bike into place. He left me with a self-satisfied nodding of his head. The train departed the station, with my bike and me the sole occupants of that carriage. Five minutes later he was back, checking my ticket, validated, and then my bike ticket, which was not validated. I didn’t realise you had to do both. I’ve never seen a human being more pleased to be in a position of authority. I teared up. With a great, sudden flourish of benevolence, he let me off but could not resist a waggle-fingered warning. I’d made his day.
Bagnacavallo is an absurdly picturesque little town, so authentic as to practically be corny: narrow winding streets built on a medieval corkscrew with peeling walls and quiet piazze of antique appeal and symmetry. I arrived just as that quietness which descends on Italian villages at lunchtime blanketed each and every corner of the place. It did not take long for my bike and me to find the exact location where Allegra had died. It felt desolate. A nice, although unremarkable church fronted a small, rectangular courtyard with a row of egg-shaped topiaries for a fence; a firmly shut door, in that way some doors are more shut than others, leading to the Capuchin cloister. There was a plaque above the door that said more about Allegra’s papa being Lord Byron and the fact that Shelley had visited than her death.
I felt her loneliness. I felt that she had been misjudged. In all the reading I’d done, Allegra had been accused of all sorts of surliness, of having been brattish and greedy, selfish and needy. At one point before Lord Byron left Ravenna for Pisa, crossing the country, leaving her in the east while he went west, which was across a narrow part of the country but may as well have been to the moon, he received a letter from Allegra, begging him to visit—and asking him to bring toys. He focused on the asking for toys. That was the real motivation for her wanting to see him, he said, not to be with her father. So he did not visit.
I was eighteen and in my university days. I had a job to pay for a lot of my expenses. Though my mum had, in my final year at school, w
on that Lotto money, she still had to work. It was not a big sum and after she’d paid all her debts it was a good deal smaller. As I became increasingly miserable in that first year of university, Mum put me into a boarding facility on campus where I had a couple of friends, in the hope that it would make life easier on me. It was an expensive exercise. She was a generous woman who had enormous faith in me.
But she also decided to take my father back to court to hit him up for some help with the university expenses. I think now that it was her final opportunity to have a really good go at him; she could have told me to get on with it, after all. She was, as I said, a generous woman who loved me to bits, especially as I got older and displayed the same interests as her, in literature and language. But some scars are deep.
Those on Mum’s side of the family fence—me, Bernadette, a brother or two—turned up at Melbourne’s family court to demand maintenance from the old man, as we called him.
There he was, the old man—and his lawyer. He had good lawyers because he dealt a lot with the murky side of things in his journalistic work. We had legal aid, but as it turned out, the woman we were given was a highly talented litigator who went on to be head of the Supreme Court or some such. Which is neither here nor there, except that things got ugly in that courtroom.
Witnesses were left to wait in anterooms. There was lots of laughter from us when, in this Melbourne government building of the early eighties, I discovered the partitioning between courtroom and anteroom did not go all the way to the window of the high rise. If you put your ear to the gap, you could hear what was going on.
Our way was to make fun of the big stuff, treat life’s trials as a bit of hilarious sport. Here we were, doing it again and, clever me, I’d found a way to get one up on the old man: listen in when we weren’t supposed to.
Me, Myself and Lord Byron Page 16
