Carnevale

  As we boarded the boat, I embraced Mouchar, and held him close to me with Girolamo between us. Mouchar kissed the top of Girolamo’s head.

  ‘Goodbye, little God,’ he said to my son.

  ‘Go, be great again, Cecilia!’ he said. There were no tears in his eyes, or in mine, but in his dark pupils I read a potent blessing.

  I waved to him as the boat slid from the dock into the milky evening sea. I held up Girolamo like a triumphal goblet. For a moment it seemed that I had come to Albania only to acquire him.

  But I had acquired him only to lose him.

  During the past months I had tried to negotiate further with the fathers on San Lazzaro by letter. They informed me that the same restrictions applied to all their novices. They remained adamant that my son must not know his parentage. He was to join the monastery as an anonymous foundling. As a special concession to me, he might keep the name Girolamo, but his cognome would be the same as that of all the other foundlings. Another of their strange conditions was that he must never come to the city. He must be brought directly to them on the island. He should not spend a night under my Venetian roof with me. They would take the child from me at Mestre, before I entered Venice. I was to expect someone, and I was to be as discreet as possible in the transaction, so as not to draw attention to myself or the child. It would be better that way, they wrote.

  How different was this voyage to the one that had brought me to Albania. I could not bear to look upon the alien landscapes now: I was too vulnerable. I am sure that the unrelenting sun continued to rise on the black sea as before, but I did not see it. I had no curiosity to spare. For the entire journey, lying on my berth with the baby breathing quietly beside me, I imagined other scenarios. I imagined arriving at our palazzo at Miracoli with Girolamo. I imagined Sofia taking my baby tenderly to her breast. I imagined a gentlemanly thump on the back from Giovanni. But at this thought reality always intruded. Quite apart from the scandal he would bring, little Girolamo would not be welcome at our palazzo.

  Giovanni and Sofia had never managed to make a son. My baby would pose a threat to Giovanni’s cherished plans for his favourite young brother’s inheritance. But more importantly, it was his paternity that made it impossible for me to keep him. If his father was discovered, and he would be discovered if Girolamo stayed with me – I had already seen how swiftly and vividly gossip about Byron was relayed even to far Tepelene – then there would be no peace for the child. Better anonymity, a life of scholarship and decency at San Lazzaro, than the dark opportunities that would await another abandoned Byron bastard.

  Disembarking at Mestre just before dawn, I stood among my possessions on the quay with Girolamo asleep in my arms. I saw the outlines of huge coils of frayed ropes, like the greasy plaits of giantesses. Living silhouettes of the world and his wife jostled past us. They seemed phantoms to me. Only Girolamo glowed with life in the emerging frail pink light. He was full of my milk, so full that a little dribbled from his tiny soft mouth. When I pulled him gently from my breast he was already asleep. Better that way, I thought. To look into his pale blue eyes just now would be more than I could bear. I leant against the rim of the bath that carried my canvases, in which Girolamo had slept, and looked around me. From which direction would the great pain come? My stomach had already started to ossify. I could not move. But I waited patiently. Every moment was another moment with Girolamo.

  I did not know what to expect of myself. When Byron abandoned me, I had screamed and wept. When Girolamo was taken from me, would I be able to shuffle away, noiselessly, discreetly? I am an Italian. There is drama in my blood. But I had promised the Fathers that I would be as inscrutable as a nun. I held my baby closer, and took long breaths of the perfume of his head. I kissed the soft shells of his sleeping eyes. I licked his nose.

  There was tap on my shoulder. I turned to see a tall, cadaverous and long-bearded Father behind me. He was dressed in the familiar robes of the San Lazzaro monks. How often Casanova and I had seen them all those years ago! I clutched at a memory of a dark habit approaching us through the olive trees as we sat talking on the sweet grass, and kind hands pouring water for us from an earthenware jug. They had welcomed us without comment to their island, the old sinner and the young hoyden as I must have seemed then, all splashed with paint and wild of hair. God knows what they thought we were doing together, but whatever it was, they forgave us. Now they would welcome Girolamo the same way, and absorb him into their kind community.

  ‘Cecilia Cornaro?’ the Father asked in the knotty accent of his race. His consonants butted against each other. ‘You have something for me?’

  Girolamo stirred in my arms. I put my little finger in his mouth and he sucked on it gently, without opening his eyes, making little burbles of satisfied desire. The Father held out his hands. The expression on his large, sunken face was kind, sympathetic, forgiving. I knew that all the Fathers on San Lazzaro had suffered their own tragedies, refugees to a man, witnesses and victims of violence and horror in the homeland from which they had fled. I knew he understood my pain; he knew its strength if not its style.

  Still, I temporised, like a child who does not want to go to bed. ‘But it’s early …’ The Father gently shook his head. His honey-coloured eyes regarded me as softly and moistly as a dog’s.

  Girolamo did not wake as I handed him over. I too closed my eyes on the sight of his body leaving mine. I wanted no such memory to knife my heart. Afterwards, I stood for a moment, cradling the air, the warmth of his body still tangible in the cavity of my arms. It had been done, as the Fathers insisted, secretly. I had given away my baby and no one would ever know. I waited until the Father had disappeared in the crowd before sitting down on my bath and letting go of my tears, my screams, my oaths and my whispers. I spilled all my pain as if it might flow away once I evacuated it from my body. I had kept my part of the bargain. I had nothing to lose now. People came running. Kind hands were laid on my shoulder. Soothing words were said to me. I did not look up. I screamed louder. I shook, I squealed like a rodent; I took tearing breaths; I roared. I vomited yellow bile on someone’s knee. Milk from my breasts darkened my bodice. ‘Is she a lunatic?’ someone asked. Eventually I lost consciousness, just after someone had said to someone else, ‘My God! That’s Cecilia Cornaro, the artist. Her family’s at Miracoli. She’s been in Albania for over a year, poor soul. What have they done to her, the savages?’

  And that was how I was delivered to my family’s palazzo: delirious, journey-stained, stinking and childless. Sofia took one look at me and sent the servants away. She herself sponged the sweat and tears from my body and put me to bed in my old room on the mezzanino. When I had rested, and was less shocking to the eye, she brought my mother and my young niece to bid me welcome. I took the girl in my arms. This girl was Girolamo’s cousin; she was flesh of my flesh. I saw something alive in her face, something of Girolamo. I held her to me until she gasped. I did not care. I no longer had my own child.

  The Cat Speaks

  It’s a long time since the reader has had word from his obedient servant, the cat.

  Imagine how it has been for me.

  As for Cecilia – she came back, just like that, without a word to explain her absence.

  A year she had left me alone.

  And all those unfinished canvases rotting in her studio. I had guarded them, as if I knew her return was imminent, and that everything must be a posto.

  She looked different. I knew something had happened to her. There was a smell of sour milk about her that told me that she had obviously birthed quite recently, though there was no sign of a single kitten. But it was more than that. Something else had happened to her.

  She painted like a lunatic. She squeezed the water out of those brushes so hard I almost thought to see blood spurt out of them.

  Her paintings were different when she came back. All those canvases I had guarded? She just painted them over with white gesso and started again. For a while, there were no portrai
ts. She painted suicidal lady-saints and weeping Madonnas, and small babies, their toes curling with pleasure as they suckled with their eyes wide open. They tugged at their gentle mothers’ mantles with fat, delicious fingers. When Cecilia returned, her Madonnas grew heavy breasts and knees which could actually support a baby.

  Anyway, I was happy when she came back. I dribbled on her hand and purred against her cheek.

  She was so happy to see me that I thought she would squeeze me to death. I had to remind her, with a little scrape of my claw, that I, too, could be hurt.

  Chapter 3

  Dime che so, ma non me dir chi gero.

  Tell me who I am, but not who I was.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  There was another homecoming. In July 1811, two years after he had left it, Byron returned to the tight little island of his birth. Hobhouse resumed his post as my spy for this period of Byron’s life.

  ‘Was he happy to be home?’ I would ask. ‘To be with his people again?’

  ‘It did not feel like coming home for Byron. It felt like slinking back to a cave. He was neither fish nor fowl. He could not live forever in exotic lands. Nor could he ever again resume his Englishness, which he had so easily sloughed off in the East. As for “people”, there was only his mother.’

  I said, ‘And his half-sister, Augusta.’

  ‘Ah yes, Augusta.’

  There were more practical reasons to come home. Byron was penniless, worn out and plagued with an itch where no true English gentleman would scratch in polite society. This consideration would no longer restrain him. He considered himself freed from gentlemanly constraints, indeed antipathetical to them. ‘I shall become the sworn enemy of English etiquette,’ he had declared to me in Albania, as if formulating state policy. Now he was to put the theory into action.

  He was annoyed to find that he had lost along the way some of his favourite portraits, the ones I had made for him, the images of love he had stolen from me. Hobhouse had told me that Byron would never use my name after we left Albania, but it seems that he wanted to recreate the image I had made of him. So he had himself painted again in the garb of an Albanian buccaneer. I saw an engraving later. I believe the artist – I think he was called Phillips – executed a competent likeness. But can he have painted Byron as I did? I doubt it.

  Soon afterwards, Hobhouse told me, Byron gave away the Albanian costume to a friend, muttering that it cost him some deranging memories. ‘He told her to use it for a fancy-dress ball and then for whatever she wanted, so long as he never had to see it again.’

  Unlike me, Byron tried to preserve some dignity about his return, a little grace. Unlike me, his deepest problem was money.

  ‘Byron came home with a shawl and attar of roses for his mother, some marbles for me and for himself a phial of Attic hemlock, four Athenian skulls and four Greek tortoises he had found in an ancient sarcophagus,’ Hobhouse told me. ‘But his affairs were so dire that he did not have the money for a journey to Newstead.’

  Byron dallied in London, waiting for funds to be sent by his lawyer and hoping that all his old creditors were dead or jailed. Inconveniently, this was not so. ‘They were closing in around him, politely but relentlessly,’ Hobhouse recalled. ‘The thing they did not know was that even if he had wanted to, he could not pay them. All he had were his outlandish souvenirs, his pistols, and a fat sheaf of poetry.’

  I asked, ‘But the poetry was worth something, surely?’

  ‘Remember, in those days it was the custom that no true aristocrat would stoop to accept payment for his writings.’

  ‘Marvellous creatures, the English,’ I had observed then, thinking of the theft of my work. ‘Among the Venetians the indignity lies in not being paid.’

  Eventually Byron set off for Newstead, but his mother, who had fought off bailiffs and serious illness during his two-year voyage, did not manage to survive his delayed journey from the capital. She died, probably of a cancerous growth in the stomach, or so it seems to me from the cruel symptoms Hobhouse described. Hobhouse thought that her final throes were possibly brought on by fear of seeing her son again. ‘She had heard some of the stories,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘If she had seen his face, it would have confirmed them.’

  ‘Was he devastated to lose her?’ I asked. ‘Did he feel guilty at his treatment of her?’

  ‘He did not show it. Byron had abused her so consistently during her life that he was now unable to demonstrate any grief for her. No one would have believed him,’ Hobhouse explained, as if that answered my question.

  ‘You never saw such a strange funeral. Her coffin bore no affectionate message and merely recorded that she was the mother of George, Lord Byron. He refused to attend his mother’s funeral procession.’ Byron had watched the cortège grimly from the front door and then called for his boxing gloves.

  Byron was now officially an orphan. And it was a time of other, more painful deaths. Byron heard that his beloved, exquisite chorister, John Edelston, had perished of tuberculosis the previous May, but Byron only now received the letter which told him. And his friend Charles Skinner Matthew had drowned in the Cam; his body was found later entwined in reeds. Byron’s own element, water, had killed his great friend. Hobhouse was shaken, too. He told me, ‘It seemed too terrible a coincidence: water had already claimed another of the Harrow boys, for Edward Noel Long had drowned in 1809.’

  Byron’s reaction was hysterical, Hobhouse told me. Greek love, the message came loud and clear, was dangerous for him. ‘He felt himself one of a set of doomed, beautiful young men,’ Hobhouse said. ‘So he cultivated the role of victim.’

  ‘You are cynical about him!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘No, he was not pretending, just dramatising. He empathised excessively with the extinction of those young flames. He took them all into himself. He spent hours moping at Newstead, staring at those four Greek skulls. He reshaped himself as a man who attracted untold sorrows to himself and carried a superhuman burden of pain. And he drew up an extraordinary will in which he insisted that he should have no funeral and be buried with his dog, Boatswain, in the family vault at Newstead.’

  Back at Newstead, he was chewing tobacco to stave off hunger and retain his slender figure. He was bored. Rural entertainments, after the excitement of the East, offered little. Hobhouse had watched him with concern. ‘He took to exploding soda water bottles with his pistols, and jumping into the lake, and rowing over it, and shooting wildfowl he had no intention of eating.’

  Byron resumed correspondence with his half-sister Augusta, now unhappily married, and started to think of marriage himself. Hobhouse explained, ‘He saw no other way out of his debts. The thought of wedlock made him shudder. He told me that when he imagined himself married, there ranged across his imagination vague but distasteful scenes of domesticity, the smell of milk, the prospect of the same ageing face across the table, endlessly.’

  Needs must, however. Like his father before him, Byron set off heiress-hunting.

  ‘I always remember how he described his quest for a bride,’ Hobhouse told me. ‘It was hardly a romantic quest! He said that he was “pledged to find some wealthy dowdy to ennoble the dirty puddle of mercantile blood”. Those were his exact words. I pitied his bride already’

  There were no wealthy dowdies in the vicinity of Newstead. Byron became bored with conjugating the verb ennuyer at Newstead and moved back down to London.

  Like Byron, I returned home and became motherless.

  A sweating fever swept through Venice in 1810, just after I arrived back from Albania. It carried away my mother, already weakened by lung disorder, in a week.

  I faced Sofia over my mother’s deathbed. Humbly she handed the priest a salver with lemon and an ampulla of holy oil. I watched her praying, blowing her nose delicately into a silk handkerchief, tenderly spooning a fragrant julap of honey and water onto my mother’s dry lips. I found myself thinking, suddenly, that when my time came to die she would do the same for me, as gracefu
lly and sweetly.

  Returning from San Lazzaro that day, I had run up the stairs to my mother’s sick room. I could see, in an instant, that her condition was graver, even without the presence of the mumbling priest. I looked at the outline of Sofia’s cheek, inclined towards my mother, and her hands, both grasping one of my mother’s wasted claws. I retreated to the doorway, where I stood, stricken, excluded. Sofia turned to me and reached a hand out, her face suffused with hope and slick with tears, but I stumbled away muttering excuses. I simply could not feel I deserved the dispensation of Sofia’s tenderness, and I did not know how to accept it.

  I had buried what was left of my capacity to love in Girolamo, and it was rationed to minutes at a time when I went to San Lazzaro to work on the frescoes. The Fathers would let me look at Girolamo in the sunny nursery, where he lay with three other baby boys, clearly well-fed and well-loved. They kicked their little legs in unison. I thought Girolamo’s by far the shapeliest. I was not permitted even a quick caress, but I could look.

  Girolamo and the sadness of him had made me sensitive to my family. I felt the need to re-attach myself to the roots of the tree which bore me. It seemed that from Girolamo I had learnt to be a daughter as well as a mother. But I had lost my opportunity; my timing could not have been worse. It was too late. My mother would die before I could have one of the many conversations I planned. I realised, hunching my shoulders in misery, that I would be an orphan before I could learn to touch her again, the way she had touched me as a child, in the days before I made myself remote from her.

  Before I had Girolamo, my mother had already ceased to be, years before, the flesh that bore me. She had become simply flesh, simply an education in chromatic intensity and texture. It was not that I did not love her; it was that I had not thought that love precious or worthy of remark. I invested myself elsewhere. I was entirely occupied in my passion for painting and my pursuit of novelty. I knew her love for me hung around my life like the air I breathed. I did not question it. But we were shy with one another, overly courteous, as if to compensate for the absence of the more normal, sweeter ties which bound her to Sofia.