William Beckford was young, spoiled and over-excited. He was the only legitimate son of a wealthy political rajah. Everything in the Beckford household was done on the grandest scale. The most rigorous classical education was inflicted on the child in the gilded halls of his opulent home. The little prodigy Mozart was hired to give him music lessons. When his father died, the boy was left with a hundred thousand a year and a million in cash.
There emerged from this rarefied childhood a febrile little personage full of wild affections and dark humours. Whatever was most fearful and putrefyingly excessive, that roused the most delicious giggles in the boy. He became addicted to volatile romances like The Thousand and One Nights and everything exotic and escapist.
By the time he was thirteen, he spoke fluent French, Italian and a most exquisitely satirical English. His sensibilities were finely tuned. He was mad for music. He sang himself, in a high eunuch’s voice and with a eunuch’s effeminate affectation. He had a woman’s plump hips, too, and a long feminine nose, which would one day sharpen to a dowager’s beak. But in those days he was young and with all the supple attraction of youth.
As he blushed and stammered through puberty Beckford found himself imbroglioed in a wayward passion for William, the dainty eleven-year-old son of Lord Courtenay. As if this were not drama enough, or perhaps to prove something to himself, he then commenced a neurotic love affair with his cousin’s wife.
Beckford took the only option then available to wealthy young Englishmen who had got themselves into trouble. He fled for an eleven-month Grand Tour, setting off on June 19th 1780. He determined to spend his millions like a poet, and to plumb the depths of everything gothic, taboo and masochistic that could be found to disgust and delight him in Europe.
He set off via Falmouth and Spain. (Years later, my fate would follow in his footsteps.) Beckford reached La Serenissima in August that year. Venice was already an old acquaintance in his eyes from hours spent in his library with innumerable prints and drawings of her domes and islands. But he knew her even better from his day-dreams of dark murders in her narrow alleys and duels upon her sinuous bridges, not to mention the unspeakable acts he imagined, in some considerable detail, taking place in the gloomy chambers of her rotting palazzi.
He first arrived among us at sunset, under a cloudless sky, with a faint wind breathing on his cheeks. The caress seemed to promise him that Venice would make up for the loss of the pretty little Courtenay. In La Serenissima’s sin and sensuality, he foresaw all kinds of compensations.
The next morning, before five o’clock, Beckford was roused by the din of voices and the splashing of water. Stumbling to the terrace, he beheld the Grand Canal entirely transformed. The water had disappeared. Now it was covered with fruit and vegetables rocking on rafts and barges. There was scarcely the sliver of a wave to be seen between the jostling tear-shaped trays of bright food. Lithe figures leapt deftly from boat to boat. Joining the amphibious contadini coming from their island farms were more mysterious figures, masked and dressed in black. These were tattered remains of those high-born and low-life pleasure-seekers who had spent the night at the table, following the frenzy of the dice. As the vivid darkness faded on their dreams a pale dawn showed the disappointments etched upon their paler faces. These people always had a craving for fruit, a quick restorative intake of sugar before they went home to their daytime beds, to nightmares of ill-fortune, love-disease, and encroaching old age. Like the pantegane, at dawn, depraved and self-abused Venetians were always to be found by the water, where the algae fondled the peeling paint at the ancient feet of the palazzi.
The sun began to paint the day’s colours upon the town. Slabs of stone turned the pale gold of fresh fish frittata; others warmed to the fleshy pink of crab soup. Beckford found his belly scoured by a ravenous emptiness and he was drawn out of his hotel and into a gondola. He tried to purchase his own provision of grapes, little cakes and Schiraz wine. But the low fellow on the fruit barge refused to understand him, no matter how loudly he expressed his desire for just that bunch on which he had set his heart. The impudent fellow waved rotten truffles in the air and spilled droplets of brandy on Beckford’s white cravat. The vendor had already disappointed him by being tall and blond, instead of small and swarthy. His accent, far from quaint, sounded suspiciously like something Beckford had once heard on Lord Courtenay’s pig-farm. All Venice was ruined for him in that moment; her mysteries unwound, her wild glamour ruffianised. It took so few things and such tiny things to cast young Beckford into the sorriest gloom. He was so sensitive to each brutal nuance.
It was at this point that Casanova had come to his rescue.
‘You were very kind to Beckford,’ I observed, pointing my paintbrush at Casanova. ‘Too kind, if you ask me.’
‘You want grapes, my lord?’ Casanova had asked him, a warm purr from behind Beckford’s left shoulder. ‘Allow me.’
The grapes were paid for with a flourish, and handed to the young man. Beckford, I thought to myself, could have had no idea what those few zecchini cost Casanova in those dark times. He would have seen only Casanova’s enormous, inclusive smile. The smile was surely widening because Casanova had found in Beckford another undoubted novelty.
‘The sweet fruit of liberty,’ announced Beckford. Thrilled to be in receipt of attention, the deflated Beckford became tumescent with good humour.
‘Liberty is sweet indeed,’ said Casanova. ‘Have you heard of the Venetian Leads?’
‘Why, of course. The dreaded Venetian prisons from which no one escapes.’
‘I escaped.’
‘But no one ever escaped from the Leads except …’
Casanova swept a low bow. ‘Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, at your service, my Lord. Soldier, violinist, gambler, poet, priest and servant of women. Venetian.’
‘William Beckford, gentleman, seeker of the miasmic redolence of the past, fugitive from society, writer. Reluctant Englishman, Dreamer in Magic Slumbers.’
There were more smiles and pressings of hands. The two men went to sit on the steps of San Giaccomo in the shade of its wooden portico. They shared the grapes while they exchanged stories. Inside their skins the grape-pulps were already jellied by the warmth of the sun. Casanova and Beckford sat side by side, puncturing the sweet globes inside their mouths and nudging out the tart seeds with their tongues. Those moments, Casanova now told me, were the beginning of the intimacy that would bind them to each other. It was in every way an unlikely friendship.
It was a year and a half before the as-yet-unknownto-me Casanova took me from my bath, but in this meeting with Casanova, the as-yet-unknown-to-me William Beckford had entered my own life. That morning, as Casanova befriended Beckford at Rialto, I was waking up in my parents’ palazzo, where I lived like a little stranger among my family. While Casanova and Beckford shared a handful of fruit, I lay in my bed, thinking about squirrel-fur paintbrushes and how to get my hands on them. Later, as Beckford roamed around Venice, I sat at my desk in the convent, sketching unforgivable caricatures of the nuns on the borders of my Lives of the Saints. As Beckford and Casanova coddled their friendship, I conducted the normal schoolgirl vendettas. I grew further apart from my mother and Sofia. I watched the pink circles round my nipples grow. I noticed some unexpected hairs. That month the maid was obliged to bring me some linen rags and explain their use. I felt no brividi, no shivers of anticipation. I was entirely insensitive to my fate.
So Beckford entered my life. He was about to enter it in person and he would do so again, more profoundly, later still, in his absence. I would be haunted by Beckford, abused by his black humour and the darker reaches of his imagination. I would paint him. I would hear his own story from his own lips while I did so. I would not need to spy on Beckford or distil him from a painstaking research. The loquacious young man would push information into my ears. He would fill them with strange things which he imagined. By those imaginings he would draw something dangerous to me.
If Casanova h
ad known any of these things, he would have protected me, he would have walked right past Beckford. He would have ignored his obvious need. He would not have brought Beckford to my studio. He would have left that dangerous boy alone.
But Casanova did not know anything of this. How could he?
Chapter 15
L’amor non l’è amor, se no’l se desgusta sete volte.
Love is not love if it doesn’t disgust you seven times.
VENETIAN PROVERB
William Beckford spent a month here on that first visit, a welcome guest in every high society conversazione. Tales of his millions had come before him and the Venetian nobles were interested, in their languid way, to see this novelty from England. But Beckford was disappointed in us. In vain, he awaited a passionate quarrel, a thrown glove, a flash of a jewelled stiletto, an aristocratic corpse dragged on velvet curtains, leaving a dark smudge of blood upon the pale terrazzo flooring. The noblemen yawned over their coffee, and seemed barely to move. Beckford took to tourism, looking for something, in the monasteries, palaces and islands, to frighten or disgust him.
Finally, at the Doges’ Palace, Beckford found in the ghosts of Venice past a frisson very much to his taste. He observed the walls, covered in grim visages. What kind of tyrant, he wondered, could revel at his opulent balls, conscious of the prisoners consuming their hours in lamentations in the leadlined prisons above his head? What kind of sovereign could dance upon a floor beneath which lay damp and gloomy dungeons, the inhabitants of which were wasting away in the watchful company of rats?
An idea was beginning to take shape in Beckford’s head.
At the Bridge of Sighs he sighed over the prisoners who had been led across it. Kind Casanova had been among them. Yes, he had already heard from his new dear friend of the fleas, the sensory deprivations and the unspeakable enema!
He told Casanova how he had rushed home, shuddering, unable to eat, and was gratified to view his dreadful pallor in the mouldy mirror before retiring to bed. In the morning, he had awoken to find his diary full of detailed drawings depicting fearful landscapes not known on earth. And looming above everything, five sinister roof-lines, surely of palaces, palaces more decadent even than anything he had found in Venice.
With persistence, and with Casanova’s help, Beckford started to find the true darker side of Venice and did not need to invent it any longer. At a church he saw a font filled with bat’s blood masquerading as the vital fluid of our Lord. In the musky quarters of the city where he roamed in search of Turks and Infidels, Beckford was able to spend some of his father’s legacy to experience for himself a few exquisite forms of Oriental cruelty and debauchery.
Then Beckford created a dark drama for himself. He fell in love with a young male member of the most aristocratic branch of my own Cornaro family. I knew of the boy – a distant cousin – he was an experienced seducer. Beckford apparently thought him innocent but shuddered as he recounted to Casanova all kinds of soft delights unconsciously insinuated in the boy’s lithe whispers. He knew that eternal infamy lay in giving way to that alluring tongue. The danger rendered the temptation even greater. Meanwhile, one of the fatal boy’s two sisters fell in love with Beckford. She was married and bought poison to despatch her husband so that she might be together with the young Englishman. He tried to explain that he loved another member of her family. She thought her younger sister the fortunate object of his desire and swallowed the poison herself. It proved unpleasant but not dangerous. However, it was too late: the story was abroad. Venice was convulsed.
That must have been the first occasion I heard Beckford’s name. I am sure that I heard my mother gossiping about it with her lady-friends. At the time, I’m sure I thought of him as nothing more than another foreigner fallen in love with our city and gone mad with it. Of the other matter, the boy matter, I heard hints, but I did not at the time understand them.
Beckford fled in disarray to be comforted by his friends, the Hamiltons, in Naples. But by December he was back among us. Casanova saw in the New Year with him and the dark early days of January. A year would pass before Casanova could find me and we would become lovers. I still remember that my family celebrated New Year, 1781, with a quiet dinner in our elegant dining room. Afterwards, my mother, father, Sofia and I went to watch the fireworks on the Riva degli Schiavoni and walked soberly home. I love to think that somewhere in the crowds we must have passed Casanova and the desperate young Beckford, saying their farewells. Beckford knew now that he must hurry back to England to turn away from the fascinating eyes of the young Cornaro. Casanova and Beckford parted, reluctantly, swearing to renew their brotherhood within the year. Beckford returned to England.
But Venice called him, with her ineluctable charms.
So in May 1782 he set off again for Italy, via Paris. As he drew closer to us, Venice began to invade his soul again. The idea born amid the horrors of the Doges’ Palace began to take material shape. The ideas began to breed words. The words breathed pages. It became a book. It poured out of him, in Paris, in a single sitting that lasted three days and two nights. When he arrived in Padua on June 11th, he had in his trunk not just the travel diaries of the previous year, but a fat little manuscript, close-written in French. It was Vathek.
At sunset, on June 13th 1782, Beckford returned to Venice, just in time to see his favourite haunts illuminated in the dying light. He beheld a troubled sky, shot with vivid red, the lagoon tinted like an open wound and the islands glowing embers.
It was in the red light of that sunset that Casanova burst into my studio to tell me that Beckford had come back. It was in the full sun of the next morning that he brought Beckford to my studio.
‘I’m delighted to meet you,’ I said, trying not to sound ironical. ‘I have heard so much about you.’ I ran my eyes over the soft complexion, grey eyes, long nose. Flake White, Naples Yellow and Rose Madder, I thought. Viridian Green for the shadows under the chin.
‘Likewise, Mademoiselle Cecilia. I understand that you are the alchemist of human faces and the poet of human skin. I believe that your paintbrush discovers souls and the secrets of men’s desires. I see for myself now that all these virtues come in a form so viciously lovely as to break men’s hearts at first sight. I understand that I must be a little careful of your tongue. Ah yes, though, I see it now as you smile at me – it, too, is beautiful.’
He bowed. ‘Have I omitted anything, Casanova?’ His voice was pitched high, but I thought this an affectation. He seemed a man in other ways.
‘Only that I love her more than my own eyes,’ said Casanova, who was standing at my side and now kissed the top of my head.
‘But of course,’ said Beckford, with a smile, ‘that is entirely understandable.’ I warmed to him, habituated as I was to the nervous flattery of those about to be painted. I liked the flourish of his French, and the dark nuance of his humour.
He became entirely serious when he discussed how we were to style his immortality. We had different ideas, but I knew better than to argue in words. I would argue with my paintbrush, later, silently and invincibly. He had brought his thick little manuscript with him. He wanted to be painted beside its frantic pages. In the time it took me to paint his face, Beckford read me the entire story of Vathek. I heard the book before anyone ever saw it.
Vathek would not be published in English until 1786, anonymously, and then not again until 1809, a year that would become important to me. The English public would be convulsed by the young, extreme Oriental potentate, Vathek, with a liquorish taste after good dishes and young damsels, whose eye could kill with a single glance. They would shudder at Vathek’s mother, the wicked Queen Carathis, whose own liquorish taste was for dead bodies strangled, with amiable smiles, by her team of mute and murderous one-eyed Negresses. They would marvel at her gigantic camel, Alboufaki, who could infallibly scent dead flesh in distant graveyards. Their mouths would water for the apricots from the Isle of Kirmith and their eyes for the lustre of the enamel of Franguista
n. They would strain to admire Vathek’s awful tower and the five sumptuous palaces he had invented, one for each of his raveningly self-indulgent senses. They would sigh at a voluptuous vision of Vathek’s great love, Nouronihar, whose venality and carnality matched those of her prince, and whose lust for the glittering Carbuncle of Giamschid and the other treasures of the pre-adamite sultans probably exceeded even his own. Vathek’s diabolical levity and joyous licentiousness would not find another imitator until … but these musings do not serve at this moment.
Yes, I should have guessed that Vathek would seduce the English public, dying to have the strings of its strait-lacing cut and its chemise ripped asunder. But I could have no idea of its effect upon one young Scottish aristocrat, George Gordon, heir to Newstead Abbey … Now my tale runs away with me yet again.
Certainly, Vathek kept me amused while I worked, and it helped me paint a more accurate portrait of the author. It provided me with a literal and metaphorical background for my painting. For amidst all the horror was a delicious humour, which somehow intensified the abomination. There was more to Beckford, I thought, than met the eye.
Even then I thought that.
I painted Beckford in his favourite green coat with porcelain buttons and his buff-coloured striped waistcoat, which caught the grey of his eyes. To please him, I inserted into his portrait chess pieces in the shape of the five palaces, and a large terracotta model of the camel, Alboufaki. Casanova, looking over my shoulder, laughed in delight. He too had listened to the tale of Vathek, and had made suggestions, mostly in the realms of gastronomy and sensuality.
I knew too much about Beckford, and I forgot to hide it in my work. And I was mistaken in my reading of him. I thought a man with such black humour would be able to laugh at himself.