Carnevale

  Now, too late, I wanted to give and receive affection from her, the way Sofia did. I envied the way they fed each other with kisses and small touches of the hand. I nursed a wild fantasy of presenting Girolamo to my mother and so receiving the same butterfly kisses she had given Sofia at her confinements. I now knew how nourishing that could be.

  I have wasted love, I thought, I did not love my mother properly.

  These were my thoughts as I watched my mother pass from life to death, to the quiet sound of Sofia’s tears.

  When my mother died Sofia and her husband took over our palazzo at Miracoli. They had come to live with us after my father died, but under the fluttering rule of my mother. Now they were officially the householders. We now lived in a state of utmost elegance. Sofia was, of course, attentive to every nuance of each modish ruling: every puffed sleeve, ribband and ruffle was an object of as much anxiety to her as might be the choice of pistols for a soldier at duel. She could barely wait for the cold weather to sport her muffs of sea otter and Muscovy sable. For Sofia, ostrich feathers were positively mundane. She must have egret plumes or nothing. In this alone she was suited to her husband. Giovanni strutted about in a waistcoat of bottle green and claret-coloured silk.

  As I have said, there had been no heir born to them, and now there would not be, for Giovanni had all but abandoned Sofia for his mistresses. He came home for meals, which Sofia superintended with all the skills but little of the anxiety of my mother. At first it seemed inconceivable that life should go on as before, with both my parents dead, but I soon realised that Sofia had been the backbone of the household for some time before my mother died. She fell smoothly into the role she was in fact already playing, pale with grief for the loss of our mother, but never too frail to undertake her duties. She made sure that all the right foods were served on the right days, salmon and eels with cabbage on Christmas Day, duck on the first day of August and so on. The rest of us accepted this as if it were our right.

  I continued to live with them. I stayed in my room on the mezzanino. I gave them most of what I earned, and Giovanni treated me as a gentleman-equal, in a comradely asexual way. I lived with them peaceably enough, and left Sofia to busy herself with the astonishingly complicated domestic details that did not interest me.

  My old maid, with whom Casanova had done business, was long dead. Now I dropped my clothes where I shed them for anonymous backs to stoop over and hands to pick up. There was always a fragrant pile of freshly laundered fisiù for me to tie around my bodice. I sometimes wondered what happened to the little white shawls when I threw them on the floor, stained with paint and oil. Were they thrown away or did the maids hate me, straining their fingers to remove the colours with stiff brushes? Did a laundry woman boil them in a vat as she had once boiled the little Casanova’s blood-soaked handkerchiefs? From knowledge of all these things I was protected. This felt right to me. I had no child to tend to, so let them tend to me, I thought.

  I was not much disturbed. I spent a great deal of time at the studio. I lived ferally, often arriving home too late to dine in famiglia, and foraging in the kitchen for cold pasta, which I ate, standing up, reading letters and books sent by my fond clients. The family became accustomed to my strange ways, and obliged me where they could. If I had allowed it, I think they would have shown me affection, but I remained rigid in my pain and isolation. I had been denied my two great loves, Girolamo and Byron, and I refused to accept what seemed to me to be the lesser joys of domesticated, familial love.

  The only way I could join myself with them was with painting. When I wanted to try a new technique, I would ask Sofia’s daughter or our servants to sit for me. Often I painted our ballerino, the major-domo who regulated the deportment of the whole household. He was a ridiculous little man, an exercise in pomposity. I painted him teaching my niece and the upper servants to kiss hands, to dance, when to smile, how to do so capriciously but with dignity, which is how we do these things in Venice. Sofia, I one day noticed, had beautiful hands, as beautiful as I had once thought my own. Perhaps they were not beautiful before. Perhaps it was the stroking of human flesh, her husband’s, her child’s – for she was as tender as a kitten with everyone around her – that had made them so soft and sweet. I developed the habit of using her hands as studies for those of my noble lady-clients. And so we sat, almost companionably, in the evenings, in the soggiorno, with Sofia sewing and me sketching and my niece singing to us in the firelight. I am here only for the hands, I told myself.

  I came and went. Unless I entertained a lover in my studio, I would spend the evenings at home. For when the day dimmed, when the light leached away, that was when I became needy. These were the times I tried not to be out on the streets, when I tried not to be alone. It is the time when humans incline towards the comfort of loving arms. They come in from the cold and want more than the fire’s warmth. These are the dangerous times for someone to be alone. They can hurt a fragile heart. At these times I went back home, and let my family surround me with the clatter of tongues, plates and knitting needles. I would eat with them, sharing the food that Sofia had chosen, knowing my preferences were respected, that breast of duck with marmalade sauce would be served at least once a week, that a fresh torta al cioccolato would always be cooling on a rack in the kitchen and that the best fragolino would always be glowing in the crystal decanter. Sometimes Sofia would come to me where I sat sketching by the fire after supper and place beside me a little bowl of pistachio nuts, which she knew I loved. She had already pulled the pale green nuggets from their shells, with her own soft fingers, because she knew I liked them fresh and moist.

  I was part of the household and yet not part of it. I had the freedom of the piano nobile and all the reception rooms. But my little pink niece was forbidden to descend to the mezzanino. Sofia, no doubt remembering her own experiences with my early attempts at pornography, did not want her to see what she might find in my room.

  In general, I kept away from my brother-in-law. He had already tried to humiliate Sofia by bringing two of his mistresses to my studio for a cheap portrait. I sent him away with a lash of my lingua biforcuta. According to my Libran sense of justice, Sofia did not deserve this. She was a tender wife to Giovanni, and never thought to take on her own cavalier servente. She never criticised me, and bore my outbursts without comment. She always turned instinctively to my portrait of her little dead child when I was cruel to her, as if to remind herself of my goodness to her. For in this portrait I had made a living likeness so the child was never absent from her. I was silenced by this. For me, it had been a piece of work, like any other. That was then, before Girolamo. Now I knew what it meant to her.

  I still went to church with them, and still gave confessions I stole from my sitters. These days it was because my own story was too painful to tell. And I had no need of penance from a priest for those things. I had already been punished for both Byron and Girolamo. My sins were too deep for any number of Our Fathers to erase. But once I tried to see how God might reckon my behaviour with Sofia.

  That day I told the Father Confessor, ‘I am a bad sister.’

  ‘In what way, my child?’

  I was silent. There was too much to say. In no way was I a good sister.

  Sometimes I wondered if Sofia had guessed something of what had happened to me in Albania. She had become so gentle towards me after that. She was not stupid. She could count months. When she undressed me the day I returned, raving and delirious, she must have seen certain marks on my belly and the milk spilling from my breasts. She knew what it was to lose a little child.

  My portrait of my little dead niece was hung above the prayer table in her parlour instead of a Madonna. Sofia never talked to me of it, but I knew she suffered. I watched her. I knew it from her thinning body inside her luxurious clothes, from her pale face, from the droplets on her lashes when she returned from prayers, from the way she coddled her remaining daughter as if she was a jewel whom the very gods envied her and might
at any moment snatch away.

  And I know that Sofia watched me, secretly when she thought I was unaware of it, and openly when she dared.

  But she never asked me, never mentioned Albania. For that tact alone, I blessed her. And these days I watched her over the breakfast table, no longer with disdain but with wonder.

  Meanwhile, in London, wonderful things were afoot.

  Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, A Romaunt, was published and Byron, famously, woke up famous. A thousand copies a day flew out of the bookstores. The gazettes were full of it.

  From what I read in the English newspapers, Byron was now the only topic of conversation among London society. Certainly none of the English visitors in Venice wanted to talk of anyone else. No one saw the poem as anything other than autobiography. The press was convulsed by the tale of a moody young nobleman, sick at heart, of his journey from a stately but dilapidated pile to far Constantinople, of the wildness of the protagonist as he ran through Sin’s long labyrinth, of his splendid isolation, of his grim and tender desperation, of his stiff upper lip. For his English peers, he was the cipher for all that was hot, forbidden, and exotic: all such things they lusted after in the drowsy hush of their cold drawing rooms.

  Within a fortnight, I had a copy in my own hands, the gift of a kindly English client with whom I had practised English while I painted her. The little book, smelling in a male leathery way of London, was affectionately inscribed by my client, ‘To Mademoiselle Cornaro, so that you may read English at its very best.’ I tore out that page, so as not to be distracted, and settled down with the book.

  I tried to recognise in this little volume the Byron I knew from our time in Albania. But there were more clues to be found outside Childe Harold than within it. I saw how Byron’s celebrity enveloped the book. The poem and Byron’s person fed upon each other. The poem now defined him – a sad, rebellious romantic with a heart of veined marble. Proud, moody, cynical, implacable in revenge, capable of diabolic eroticism, but incapable of deep or lasting love. In his preface, he insisted that Harold resembled no real personage – Harold is the child of imagination… but I was sure that no one, least of all Byron, wanted to believe this. I realised that he would now have to live up to it. From the moment Childe Harold was published, he could no longer be Byron; he had to become Byronic.

  Mary Shelley would say later, ‘When I wrote Frankenstein, perhaps I had the birth of Lord Byron in the back of my mind. Not his physical birth in 1788, but the moment he birthed himself when Childe Harold was published.’

  The new Byron, 1812 edition: wanted, envied, accepted by the fashionable society, he was their literary lion of the moment. I saw the accounts in the papers, how the street in front of his house was solidly crammed with carriages bearing invitations to more parties than he could attend.

  But underneath, I saw that the London literary community wondered about Byron. I saw the small demurs emerging in the newspapers. I saw the niggling complaints from the conservative press that Byron lacked the technical perfection of the great old Englishmen like Alexander Pope and John Dryden. I saw the feverish sniping by the young writers: they claimed that Byron lacked the deeper spiritual penetration of the new men, of a Wordsworth or a Coleridge. I saw all that, in the midst of the general lionisation, and I took it in.

  But I relied more on the feeling in my gut. By the time I finished the book, I had my own thoughts about it. I know I am a painter, and it ill becomes me to wander into the campo of the writers. I know I am Italian, that English is only my third language. But I do not believe that anyone read that poem with more attention to every nuance than I did. And, excuse me, but I must point this out: sometimes it takes an innocent to see the real cut of the Emperor’s new clothes.

  If you ask me, Childe Harold’s verse was fluent, yes, and spectacularly flamboyant. It had verve. It glittered at the surface like enamel. I could see that Byron was making poetry erotic, desirable and the subject of conversation. No wonder the literary community was aroused: they could all profit from that. Yes, his poetry flowed over the page and its rhythms were delicious. But for all that, I have to say that I was disappointed by it. All those facile verses, all that relentless, bathetic hyperbole! It seemed to me that they were always ringing the changes on the same thing: the monstrous misery and voluptuous self-indulgence of the hero. I hate to say it, and I shall be pilloried for it, but is it not almost monotonous? Is its range not rather tiny? Is there not something missing?

  I felt deep inside me that Byron lacked an emotional dimension to his language. His words said what they said, and no more. There was no magical suggestion, no mystery, no emotional illumination, no half-tones, no overtones, no undertones, all the things I understood to be required by poetry. Sitting in my studio, with the book on my lap, I fondled my cat while I turned the pages. I read slowly. Eventually the cat stretched out an elegant paw and knocked the book to floor. I leant down to pick it up but changed my mind. I left it there and walked over to the window with the cat in my arms.

  ‘You are right, signor, let us not read any more of this. It cannot do us any good.’

  You see, I had understood the problem with Childe Harold. It had strong sinews and scented flesh, that poem, but it was feeble at its core. I stroked the cat’s head and whispered in his ear, ‘I know what’s wrong with it.’

  The cat looked into my face, waiting for the answer.

  I told him, ‘It’s the heart of his poetry that is impotent.’

  Chapter 4

  Chi ga in boca l’amaro

  no pol spuar dolce.

  He who has a bitter taste in his mouth

  cannot spit sweetly.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  I saw babies and children everywhere. It was an affliction to me. I pulsed with pain every time I saw a little child pull a nodding wooden duck on a string across a campo. It galled my ears to hear the mothers of little children calling dammi la tua manina, ‘give me your little hand’, to their fallen, squalling children, and it hurt my eyes to see those mothers tenderly excavate the grit of the street from those tiny fingernails. I saw children raising their arms to the sun like flowers in the park. From the windows of humble houses I heard little voices mourning a lost caramella as if the world had ended. I ached and hungered for Girolamo. Such craving for his arms around me muttered in my belly! I saw baby linen hanging on lines fed out from shabby shutters. I thought, Blessed house, a baby lives there.

  Girolamo’s precocious, joyful greed haunted me. When I passed the pastry shops I wanted to rush in and buy armfuls of sweetness for him. I wanted to give him all the good things, the Venetian delicacies: ‘Kisses in a Gondola’, the little white meringues cemented in pairs with chocolate; the sour sweet fish dishes like sarde in saor. At the fish market I found myself wondering how I might make crab soup for him, even though I had never cooked anything in my life. I saw mother birds returning to their nests with worms. I turned my head away from them, sick with sorrow. They had young to feed. Why them, and not me?

  Venice had fallen in 1797. Like Venice, I had my period of confusion. The Austrian soldiers had taken possession in 1798 but Napoleon had claimed us back again in 1805. Then he gave us back to the Habsburgs. Our heads were spinning. The reminders of our indignity were everywhere around me: the tidy buildings left by Napoleon, the new system of street numbers and the many new Austrian street names, the waltz tunes played a little louder in the cafés than our own Venetian folk-song. For the first time I felt our subjection personally. We had been a happy city, and now we were not. I had been a happy woman, and now I was not.

  When I returned to Venice in 1810, after the hell I had known in Albania, Venice was no longer home because it no longer knew me, the creature I had become. I had a bitter taste in my mouth. The lingua biforcuta hung limp inside it. Sofia was no longer so frightened of me. There was nothing to fear. I was pathetic to know. After I gave away Girolamo and came home, I collapsed into myself. It was days before I left my room. I was dizzy an
d spent. I told them I was well again but I was unconvincing. Sofia insisted on accompanying me when I took my first passeggiata to San Marco. How different my world looked now that I had been humbled and hurt! It was only when it was too late that I understood how my family’s little palazzo at Miracoli, Casanova’s love and Venice herself had sheltered me.

  I thought I would feel calmer when I came home but it was not like that. Coming home, I found, had merely confirmed my loss. I had left Venice confident and curious. I had returned home damaged and closed up inside myself. I looked at Salute and remembered how, in Casanova’s arms, I had enjoyed the beauty of her white domes against an eggshell dawn sky. There was a such a distance between that time and now, between my state of happiness then and my present broken state.

  When I went to my studio, I sat staring at my old work. I did not believe in it any longer. I did not believe I had painted anything real. In my ignorant arrogance I had thought I knew how to paint Venetians. I thought I had captured their joys and their sorrows in the sfumatura of their skin. Now I realised that I had known nothing about it. The Venetians had deceived me: I had painted only what they wanted me to see. Even without their masks the Venetians are always masked. We wear a veil of self-absorption on our faces, as when we dance the furlana. The pageant is always being performed. We are outside ourselves, watching ourselves. See that far-off look we have – it excludes outsiders. It is Venetians turning into puppets in their great puppet theatre. The play is not for the benefit of the audience. It is the play we create of ourselves, in that beautiful theatre, that floating theatre. Now I knew that I had not really known my sitters because I had never understood how brave they were. I guessed at how many of them must carry inside them a pain as great as mine, for how few of them were ever loved properly?