Carnevale

  I had not been so close to Byron for seven years.

  A Gondolier Writes

  It was only later that I found out who that little man was. The one with the limp and that strange white light around his pudgy little mug. He was the wicked English milord who could have had all the women in Venice, and eventually had most of them, by all accounts.

  Stupid bitches. He was just a small fellow, with bad breath and a face like uncooked bread dough. Big lips like a Moor. They tell me – even my sainted mother tells me – that he writes poems to make you burst inside your breast. But how would she know? She’s a washerwoman. What time has she for English poetry? She’s only repeating what they say in the newspapers.

  I, of course, have learnt a few lines now. I can say my piece of Byron for the English tourists and the gold drops nicely into my hand.

  But when I say it – it tastes like old fruit in my mouth, that poetry of his.

  He got his own gondolier soon. That dangerous Tita Falcieri. Too simple for him to limp down to the canal and hail one like an ordinary citizen. Oh no, not him. Ma Morti!

  Remember me. I was the first gondolier to bring him into Venice. What if I had tipped him and that homely friend of his quietly into the lagoon? What if the beak of my gondola had quarrelled with his drowning limbs? How many Venetian women would have remained pure? How many hearts unbroken? How many little bastards unborn?

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Tosa smemorada, tosa inamorada.

  The forgetful girl is the girl who has fallen in love.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  Ah Casanova, here are some more numbers for you, for I know how you love them. Now I write of a time thirty-four years since I first fell into your arms, since I slept a night of my life without your sweat upon my skin and mine upon yours. I have painted eight hundred and three portraits since I last saw you. Your cat has sired and grandsired more than nine hundred times and the silkworms have toiled in their thousands to make the velvet collars I have bought. My memoirs, though neither written nor painted, are now etched more deeply on my skin. My catalogue of sensual and artistic disasters has not been much enriched. And yes, they still speak of you in Venice. But your memoirs, no, they are not yet published.

  You might not recognise me, Casanova. The fashions have changed and I with them, for I must remain pleasing to the eyes of my sitters. I know you would be fascinated with such details. The powder and paint are nearly vanished – now the fine ladies use them discreetly to enhance their complexions rather than to encrust them – not that I ever used them excessively, as you know. Hair powder is seen hardly at all now, but perfume is still the very thing. Sofia wafts about leaving a trail of ‘Royal Tincture of Peach Kernels’. Our dresses have changed. No longer is the lower extreme of the waist nipped in to the narrowness of an orange and a half. Now we are tightened just beneath the breasts, which are thrust upwards and barely covered. Instead there is a great volume of fabric over our bellies, so that we all, maid and matron alike, look to be with child now. I am told that in these draperies we emulate the ancient Greek and Roman Ladies, whose Republican past is of course so much in fashion these days. Sofia, naturally, takes the concept to its outer limitation: she sports laurel leaves and cameos in her hair and sandals à la Sappho, without having the least idea of why, except that it is all the rage.

  The style of this new century is most curious also in the realm of the heart. We have become excessively polite in our speech. It is as if we no longer have bodies. It is years since I heard someone mention their bowels or their womb, the conditions of which we used to share in such vivid and enjoyable ‘organ recitals’. Even intimate garments may not be referred to in polite conversation, or, if it is inevitable, they are described, with a little flush, as ‘unmentionables’. But it has become fashionable to be excessively sentimental. No love letter is considered sincere unless it has been spattered with counterfeit tears, applied with a sponge and rose-water. Even the hoariest of my lady-sitters wants to be depicted as a sweet victim expiring of love, or the mother of tragic sons. The men want to be shown as alabaster lamps lit from within, pale, luminous, with something erotic and something of the grave about them.

  But all this fades to insignificance before the most singular and important fact of my life. I have a little son, Casanova. He is seven years old and as sweet as cream. I have named him Girolamo, for you, Casanova.

  The news is not all good. I had to give my baby away. His father did not love me. I have been hurt, grievously hurt, by this man who prizes love not at all, but finds his frissons in a dark and chilly breed of cynicism. He does not seek lovers; he seeks victims to share the darkness inside him. He is the style of man who puts pins through butterflies, and then writes a sonnet upon the sadness of the act. The women rush to comfort him … And now that man has come to Venice. Yes, Byron is here. I know he will seek me out.

  He will want to compare his seven-years-older physique and face with my 1809 painting of him. He takes it for granted that I will have kept – no, treasured — the one portrait he left me after his robbery. He will also want to compare the sensations of seven years ago, with those of today. After abusing his body in every possible way, I can be sure that Byron is no longer well. He needs to remember, against someone else’s body, how strong he was before.

  Since those days and nights in Tepelene, I have never seen nor heard Byron’s name without a commotion in my belly. For years I have been drinking in, thirstily, all that was said in my presence respecting him. I have become a spy for him. I have scrabbled in desks and eavesdropped on conversations. With cynical motives I have befriended useful people. All this I have done to keep the thread of intelligence about him unrolling.

  I tell you this too. If I have even seen a volume of his upon a table, it has awoken a wasp-barbed sixth sense of danger, a frail fire scuttling under my skin. But that has not stopped me reaching for it. I have glazed the pages of his books with my clammy fingers. I have understood every word. You would be proud of my English. How well I speak it now! Well enough to know his failings as a poet, as I know his failings as a lover. But my tongue clatters dryly in my throat if I try to explain him to you. So I will not try. I am no longer talking to you, Casanova, for now I must tell things that you could not bear to hear.

  *

  Since Albania, I had learnt to be afraid of Scots, of their honeysalted accents and their underwater eyes. I swam against the stream in that; for Scots and Italians have ever been attracted to each other. The Italians are drawn to the wild cruel simplicity of the Scots; theirs is a life pared down to a solitary cloud mirrored in a loch, a ruined cottage, a single blow. The solitariness, the flintiness of the Scots is something we Italians cannot understand. We cannot live outside our families. The Scots simply do not acknowledge the pain of solitude. They will put a single rock as a monument in a far field; the very opposite of our crowded campi. The first Scottish cloth merchant seems to have found his way to Siena in around 1430. The Sienese churches are now crammed with tiny interior scenes from the lives of the saints, each bed sporting its fashionable plaid blanket. Under these blankets, for centuries, Scots and Italians have tried to love each other.

  But it doesn’t work, it will never work, a Scot and an Italian. At least not a Scottish man, with rocks in his heart, and an Italian woman, with soft carboniferous substances smouldering inside.

  There are kisses a Scot can give you that are not worth the saliva they’re etched on. Scots are not naturally good kissers: their lips tend to be thin, and their teeth prominent. They don’t know, or care, to make their lips into eels, starfish, petals. They don’t know how to turn their fingers into lips.

  They know the bones of the act, and sorry little climaxes. Byron didn’t know or care when women cried out under his kisses, whether it was the laceration of their gums under his teeth or their thighs under his elbow that caused it, and that their sobbing afterwards was the sense of loss released by their bruises. There wa
s no shelter under his eyes, even in his embrace, and afterwards your smile would take flight in the chill wind of his choler.

  For he hated to find you there when he returned from wherever his orgasm had taken him. He did not like to lie with his women; no, not even the carnal somnolence between caresses.

  That’s how it was for me and for the other poor donne. I heard it on the streets later about Marianna Segati and Margarita Cogni, about how they suffered. The muses in the casinos, the faxoléti in the gutters, they all cried for Byron because they could not hold him. She who came after me – she could not hold him either. She lost even her claim to be Byron’s last lover. Nobody could possess him: he never loved enough to give up his liberty. Indeed, when the world was running mad after Byron, clamouring to be his lover, that was just when he despised the world the most.

  In November 1816, the night Byron arrived in Venice, I was working in my studio. I had changed during the past seven years. By now I had learnt to live with the pain he had given me. I had reshaped my space in the world. I sometimes woke without thinking of him, though I never lay down without wishing him in my arms. I found that I had been allocated a certain amount of love, the most of it crowded into my fourteenth year. I was not always unhappy. I had my son, albeit at a distance. I had my success to warm me: I saw myself pointed out on the street. I could now pick and choose my commissions. My arrival was anticipated with excitement in every noble house in Venice. I had found many ways to outrun the griefs that stalked me.

  There were still times when I painted to escape the pain of Byron’s abandonment. There were also times when I used the pain to intensify the painting. These times became confused, and I became afraid to stop painting. On canvas, great pain informs great joy. I know that I am not unique in this, being a painter. I think we all like to put our pain on the wall so that we may observe it – and then walk past it.

  But I refused to walk past. I stayed in front of my work, in dialogue with it. It was the only place I could be. Everything else bored or distressed me. I was bored with drawing breath! There seemed little point to an activity that only maintained my unhappiness and did nothing to restore my happiness. It seemed, sometimes, that every moment I did not spend painting was merely time I spent waiting, indifferently, to die. I could not always be in the studio when the pain broke out. Sometimes I slashed a wall with a charcoal outline of my pain as I passed it. We have a saying in Venice: Muro bianco, carta da mati – White walls, the paper of the mad.

  Flake White, Titanium White, Zinc White … for the wretched, white is not beautiful; it is not pure; it is not good. It merely serves to display darkness in better relief.

  A painter is a listener. Within two days of his arrival, in all the soggiorni in all the palazzi, I heard the same tidings of my old lover: Byron is in Venice!

  A painter is an entertainer. Think how even the process of painting conspires to make this possible: many artists hold conversations as they work, with their sitters, with visitors. An artist’s mind has room to roam while she works; she can simultaneously order dinner while stroking Rose Madder onto a child’s cheek, all the while keeping that child still and spellbound making shadow puppets on the wall with her left hand. She can hear the words, ‘Byron is in Venice!’ and continue to flick her brush calmly in the gallipot as if someone had said to her, ‘It’s good weather in Perugia, lately’

  My Albanian portrait of Byron had never been seen, and my connection with him was not known in Venice. Remember, he was just an obscure English nobleman in 1809, before Childe Harold and the subsequent scandals made him conspicuous in the eyes of the world. In this way I had been able to preserve the secrecy of Girolamo’s birth. Byron’s celebrity had changed everything. Had my relations with him been known now, every noble and merchant of Venice would be demanding a portrait, if only for the opportunity to cross-examine me, and the chance to show the portrait, saying casually, ‘Of course, this artist – Cecilia Cornaro, you know – also painted the English milord. She said that there was something about me – the eyes, the strong chin – that reminded her of him.’

  I knew I should feel outraged that Byron could invade my city, take possession of my refuge, and not even show me the respect of warning me. I knew I should make it my object to avoid him, to leave Venice if necessary, until he did. I knew I should think on the seven years’ silence and remember his usage of me. Whether I consented to it or not, it was ill-usage, and it should not be excused. But what I felt was much simpler: excitement, and fear. With every hour, the excitement clotted in my belly, and I began to anticipate the moment when he would come to me.

  It took Byron just two days to find me.

  I had been that morning to my old tree-lined boudoir of San Michele. It was where I always went to be closer to Casanova. I felt the need of his protection that day. I could not sleep, with the thought of Byron besieging the fragile peace of my mind. I left Miracoli so early that the sparrows were still nodding in their sparrow-sized niches in the walls. There was a gentle sleepy chittering as I walked past and then they sighed and resumed their early-morning dreams.

  At the island I had paced backwards and forwards among the graves, imagining how Byron would commence his new assault upon my happiness. Would it be with indifference or with passion?

  I thought of Casanova. Povero. I hoped that his dematerialised spirit had made the journey from that cold graveyard at Dux home to Venice. I had left a rose, of course, upon the grave of little Fortunato, and carried home with me the impression of him on my palm.

  Con culto d’amore

  spargono fiori e pregano pace …

  In the name of love,

  Scatter flowers and beg for peace …

  I must have stayed some hours. In my absence it had been a strange day in Venice. When I returned from San Michele I found the city convulsed by a new phenomenon. There was everywhere a deafening din of unseen birds. Meanwhile tiny black feathers floated in the thick golden air. They did not seem to settle to the ground, but remained suspended in the ether, not so much floating as flying of their own will. When people talked the little fronds became tangled in their teeth. I snatched a fistful of feathers from the air and took them to my studio. In a French manual of art symbols I found the answer: these were baby blackbird feathers, tokens of the dark nature of sin. The bird’s alluring voice embodied the beckoning temptations of the flesh. Saint Benedict had recognised the bird as a little devil who tried to distract him from his devotions.

  Byron is here, I thought. I tested myself for pain with the memory of his face. Yes, the pain was still there, rich and strident. So I turned my back on the thought of him, as I had taught myself to do, and continued with the portrait in hand.

  Hours later, in the dark of the night, I was still working in my studio in the Palazzo Balbi Valier. I did not hear him enter. He was so slight, that in the long shadows of the room, I did not see him until he was standing with his hand on the back of my chair. His touch vibrated even through the senseless wood into my heart. The air suddenly curdled around me. Then he took my neck in his hand, hard.

  ‘Show me your Casanova,’ he said.

  You know the rest. You know how he pincered my neck, made me open my portfolio, threw my Casanovas on the floor, and me after them, how I inhaled the vinegar of his breath, and how he reentered my body and my life.

  ‘Now you can finish that portrait of me, Cecilia,’ Byron said as he left the studio.

  After Byron had gone, I picked up the stained and soiled Casanovas. I did not put on my clothes. I stood naked and looked at myself in my sitters’ tall mirror. I gazed at myself, and my paintings of Casanova, which I held tenderly in my arms as if to comfort them for the violence they had just sustained.

  ‘Why did you not spare me this?’ I asked an oil sketch of Casanova’s face, unreasonably. ‘Why did you not protect me from him?’

  But I was being less than honest. I was alive with sensation. I was truly animate for the first time in seven years. It h
ad hardly been an apology, a settling of accounts or a loving reunion, that violent rut on the floor of my studio. But I was filled with something like happiness, for I could not help feeling, with a corrupt kind of triumph, that Byron had returned a little of what he had stolen. He had not been able to come to Venice without coming back to me. It was an involuntary gift, this proof of continuing desire for me. It had been delivered gracelessly and without the intention of giving pleasure. But it was a gift.

  The cat came out of the shadows and nudged my ankle interrogatively. If a cat can look displeased, he looked displeased. What he had just seen was not the kind of lovemaking he knew or could approve of.

  ‘You are right,’ I told him. ‘That was not pretty.’

  At the word ‘pretty’, the cat rolled on his back and showed me his beautiful belly of blond and grey stripes stippled with white, chocolate browns and terracottas.

  ‘But I know what I am doing,’ I told him, smoothing his stomach. ‘I will not just lie down and die for him. I will not let him ruin me again.’

  The cat stretched until he was the longest cat he could be. He looked as if he were staked out upon the ground.

  ‘No, you are wrong,’ I told him. ‘I am not going to allow myself to be hurt again. I am a Libran. The sign of the scales. I simply need more time with him in order to hurt him as badly as he hurt me in Albania. I need to make him feel pain as I felt it. My sense of balance requires it.’

  The cat turned his back upon me, his tail erect in the air. He presented his posterior, clean and pink as a baby’s ear.