Carnevale

  Byron-fever increased. His gondola was chased through the narrow canals by hooded black boats from which issued soft gusts of giggles and feminine sighs. Noble ladies were said to have bribed his laundry women for a rag of his linen. Everyone was desperate for a glimpse of Glenarvon/Byron’s fatal beauty. Byron infected the dreams of Venetian women, humble and noble, for he was known to take his pleasure among both extremes of society. Virgins and matrons, nuns and courtesans tossed and turned in their beds, whispering his name; they closed their eyes in the arms of their lovers and pretended to be tending to the poor maimed foot or smoothing down the famous chestnut curls. In their sleep they tore their sheets from their moorings and bathed them in sweat.

  It was all Caro Lamb’s fault. She had described his face just as he loved to have it described: as one of those faces that, once seen, cannot be forgotten. The soul of passion, according to Caro, was stamped upon his every feature. His eyes threw up an ardent gaze. The proud curl of the upper lip expressed haughtiness and bitter contempt, but an air of melancholy shaded and softened every harsher expression.

  ‘Was it possible to behold him unmoved?’ cried Caroline’s long-suffering heroine, Calantha. ‘Oh! was it in woman’s nature to hear him, and not cherish every word he uttered? … What woman upon earth exists who had not wished to please Glenarvon?’ All Venice wanted to see that face for themselves, and hear those words and please Glenarvon/Byron, to make him more pleased than he ever was in his life.

  His conversation was made up of a thousand nothings; yet all his phrases seemed somehow so different from what others had said before. He could speak home to the human heart, for he knew it in all its turnings and windings, and he could rouse and tame the passions of those he wished to dominate. He could appear, without being subservient, to be possessed of a rare gentleness and sweetness, combined with the powers of imagination, vigour of intellect, and brilliance of wit. But it was all a cruel disguise, wrote Caroline. Beware.

  Caroline had written thrillingly, and dreadfully, of his cold, cold heart. Did he ever love anyone? Never, according to Caro. Even in the midst of his most passionate conquest, he despised the victim of his art. Even while he soothed her softly panting breast with loving vows, he was planning his escape from the unbearable thraldom of her charms.

  She should know, thought everyone who read Glenarvon. Fortunate, unfortunate Caroline Lamb, writing from experience! She knew what it was to feel his hand upon her neck, hard.

  I set upon my easel my 1809 Albanian portrait of Byron. I found that it had grown apart from its subject. Those intervening years, when I had continued to work on it, had preserved my vision of him as I knew him first.

  The 1809 Byron was fearless, and still had something to seek. The 1816 Byron was greater and lesser. He was famous now, as famous as Casanova had ever been, but he was less easy in his skin.

  Now I remembered all the questions he had asked about Casanova. Why did it matter so much to him here in Venice when in Albania it had seemed to mean so little? What loss in Byron had made him need to compare himself to my poor Casanova, so vindictively?

  I picked up my copy of Glenarvon and dipped into it again.

  The Cat Speaks

  The thing about Byron and Cecilia is this – she knows his faults but she accepts him back into her life anyway. She shows that she loves him despite the horror that he is. He despises her for that. She despises herself for that.

  But she sits there painting him again as if nothing had happened, as if he had not fathered a living creature on her (for I have worked it out, you see), as if he were not the author of the pain that made all those terrible Madonnas she painted for years after she came back from Albania.

  I let him know what I think. When he comes to the studio I allow him to approach. ‘Come here, you hairy little egotist,’ he says. ‘Animals love me,’ he tells Cecilia. I do not come. I make him come to me. Then I capsize my guts for him just when he bends down to stroke me.

  Cecilia has her lingua biforcuta. I have my culo. I make a fearsome smell, a real warm and vibrant distillation of the contents of my intestines which that day included some ripe fish and the last soft organs of a small mouse.

  Byron recoils, groaning, squeezing his nose.

  That cat has a Sicilian vendetta,’ he tells Cecilia.

  Chapter 3

  Non ghe xe Pasqua senza fogia, né dona senza vogia.

  There’s no Easter without leaves, and no woman without desires.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  In December Hobhouse departed for Rome, leaving Byron to the frenzy that Caroline had whipped up in Venice. He took apartments in the home of ‘a Merchant of Venice’, il Signor Segati, in the Calle della Piscina, off the Frezzeria, by coincidence, under the sign of II Corno. In Venice this was soon known as II Corno Inglese. For Marianna Segati, the merchant’s wife, was within days on intimate terms with her new lodger.

  ‘I see mischief coming of this,’ Hobhouse told me, shaking his head. He had come to my studio to say goodbye, and to express, in his fumbling, thorough way, his regrets for what had happened in Albania, or at least for what he knew of what had happened in there.

  I waved my hand in a dismissive gesture. It was not the kind of pain for which Hobhouse could apologise so it was best to leave it alone. Instead, I took the opportunity to bring my knowledge of his friend up to date. Of course, I had heard episodes from the mythology already, on the streets and in my studio and via all my multifarious channels of research. Hobhouse helped me distinguish truth from malice.

  From this long conversation with him I distilled all the small facts that had thus far eluded me. I asked Hobhouse all the questions that no one else could answer. I refined what I already knew of Nicolo, Caroline, Augusta and Annabella. Hobhouse fed my obsession with delicacies, tiny details, and with more substantial fare: his long account of Byron’s marriage. His intended brief farewell stretched to a conversation of some five hours’ duration. He seemed to feel he owed me the intelligence I craved. It was as if he was trying to make amends to me for the deprivation of it in Albania. Shamelessly, I exploited the decency in him that made him feel that way.

  ‘Is it better to know?’ Hobhouse asked, as he left. I nodded.

  From now on, until Hobhouse came back to Venice, I would have to rely on what I saw myself in the Segati household and what I heard from Byron or read when I made my private investigations of his desk. I kept no written dossier. Every fact about him was classified and catalogued in the large part of my consciousness which was devoted to him. I thought that what I knew about Byron raised my love for him above that of other women. It was one way, I thought, of loving him properly.

  I was not unduly worried about the new development in Byron’s domestic life, which was fortunate because Byron did not spare my feelings when explaining the situation to me. When he came to my studio, which was nearly every day, he liked to tell me about Marianna while I was painting him.

  I already knew about Marianna Segati. Who didn’t, in Venice? I had even met her a few times at various conversazione. I had not been insensible to her rather obvious attractions. I had heard her sing: her rich voice was of the kind that acted notably on the men in the audience but she did not penetrate the emotion of the words she sang. I knew the style of woman she was. I told myself that Signora Marianna Segati lacked the intelligence to love properly. She was merely, I felt, the animal vessel of love – the low kind of love needed by this new, weakened Byron. Anyway, he was not obsessed with her. He merely enjoyed her, and enjoyed talking about it. An official Venetian lover was an essential accessory to him at this moment, like a gondola, to weld him to his new city. Marianna had one more attraction: she was safely married, with a small daughter.

  As Byron told me – he had not yet realised how we all know each other in this town – Marianna was twenty-one years old, with large, black, beckoning Oriental eyes, the grace of an antelope, and a variety of subsidiary charms. She had a hectic colour – a real Cochineal
– to her soft velutinous complexion. She was fond of the bedchamber, and, I heard on the streets, fond of Byron’s purse. She was generally good-natured, as she would soon have need to be. The naiveté of the Venetian dialect was sweet, Byron told me, in the mouth of such a woman.

  Il Signor Segati proved a very accommodating kind of man, with a discreet blind eye and the tact to occupy himself elsewhere. Within a month, Byron was boasting to me and everyone else that he and Marianna were one of the happiest unlawful couples on the south side of the Alps. A month later, Byron was still entangled with his Adriatic nymph. For a while he was even faithful – apart from the time he spent with me.

  I, for my part, was not jealous of Marianna, any more than I had been of Annabella or Caroline. I looked upon these women as devoid of real significance. Not one of them could stir the core of my relationship with Byron. We merely operated around Marianna, as Casanova and I had done with Francesca Buschini, the way I now did with Maurizio. And it did not occur to Marianna to be jealous of me. She had the glory of strutting the town on Byron’s arm, his public and licensed lover. If she suspected what Byron did in those long private hours in my studio, it did not disturb her as it did not ruffle her vanity. She was not suffering, as yet, from a lack of Byron’s attention.

  Byron sat in my studio, filling the air with unwanted information: ‘She is insatiable. There never pass twenty-four hours without us giving and receiving from one to three (and occasionally an extra or two) pretty unequivocal proofs of our mutual good contentment.’ And he was, for once, free of physical debility, as he told me ‘thank Heaven above – and woman beneath …’ He had no illusions about Marianna’s intellectual finesse. Conversazione was not the point of this relationship.

  Byron was highly diverted by the moral universal he found in Venice. Despite the fall of the Republic and our public humiliation, married life in La Serenissima was still an affair of merry intrigue. It was normal for a Venetian woman to wait a year after marriage before taking a moroso, also known as a cavalier servente or a cicisbeo. (The mellifluous word ‘cicisbeo’ comes from ’bisbigliare’– to whisper, which is what lovers do.) The cicisbeo might or might not be the physical lover of his mistress, but he would offer her the constant stimulation of unconsecrated love and secrecy. Titillation, of course, is more exciting than fulfilment, which is enervating. And the Venetians were utterly enervated after a century of happy dissipation. In Byron’s case the chastity of the old-time cicisbeo was set aside. He was the new nineteenth-century protagonist, who took his own pleasures rather than serving his lady.

  It was all played out for us at the Fenice one night. Byron and I went together to the opera, Marianna being engaged in a family matter. Byron delighted in a local production with a traditional storyline in which one hundred and fifty ladies of quality poison their husbands. This extraordinary mortality, in the eyes of the world, is at first explained as merely the common effect of matrimony. The wickedness of the ladies is eventually uncovered, in a paroxysm of shrieks, tears, groans and fainting. ‘I never saw anything I enjoyed so much,’ said Byron to me, when the last sturdy corpse was dragged off behind the velvet curtains.

  Not all the melodramas were enacted upon the stage at the Fenice. That night Byron asked me to come to his apartments. He wanted to show me a letter from Hobhouse and some raw white silk that might make a flattering cravat for the next painting. In the entrance hall, Marianna’s young sister-in-law was lying in wait. Ignoring me, she approached Byron, smiling in an unmistakable way. She was stroking the buttons of his waistcoat – Byron looking down upon her in stupefied fascination – when Marianna made a timely arrival. Without a single word, she seized her rival by her blond hair and bestowed some sixteen violent slaps upon her pretty face.

  Screaming ensued from both parties. The vanquished pretender took flight, pursued by Marianna, intent on murder or at least mutilation. With difficulty, Byron and I restrained his lover. She fell into convulsions on a bench with all the apparatus of confusion, dishevelled hair, hat, handkerchief, salts, at which point her ever-understanding husband arrived. Calmly, Signor Segati took his wife back to their apartments, and I went back, with Byron, to his.

  Then Carnevale, universal madness, came to Venice. We donned our masks and threw away our modesty. The gondolas, like sinuous coffins, held white-faced sinners bound for hell by virtue of their excesses. The air fizzled with wanton excitement. All places, all orifices were free to enter. There seemed, Byron grinned to me, to be almost a competition to see how many sins one could commit, so that the Lenten confessions would be worth hearing.

  Carnevale had faded since the fall of the Republic. No longer did we hurl twelve live pigs from the top of the Campanile. Nor did we fire small dogs from the city’s cannons, as we had done previously. But some of the old pleasures remained to us, and they were still extreme and picturesque. Not even Napoleon had been able to stamp out the spirit of mischief in Venice.

  Byron asked me about the old days, about the way Carnevale used to happen.

  ‘Let me show you,’ I said.

  I took him to the Querini palazzo at Santa Maria Formosa. The family was away; a servant, bowing deeply, welcomed us in, and we climbed the stairs to the piano nobile alone. The walls were alive with the Querinis’ peerless collection of paintings by Gabriel Bella and Pietro Longhi. Those two artists had recorded, better than anyone, how we used to live when we were a happy city.

  As we walked through the painted rooms, I told him how in the old days we had Carnevale six months of the year and how we spent the other six months pining for it and looking forward to it. I stopped at different pictures to show him how.

  ‘The Compagnie della Calza– see their striped stockings here – were the masters of ceremony. They organised balls and readings of erotic poetry. There’s the mattacino flinging eggs filled with sweet water – but sometimes with something rather nasty instead. These boys are hunting bulls through tiny alleys, with no escape. This picture shows one of our mock regattas at Rialto. Instead of boats, we ran about with decorated wheelbarrows.

  ‘You see here how noblemen dressed as country bumpkins. Maids dressed as great ladies and were treated as such. Then there were all the characters of the Commedia dell’Arte: That’s Arlecchino in his chequerboard costume with the hare’s foot flopping on his cap. That’s Doctor Graziano in the black robe, and here’s Pulcinella playing the bagpipes. Here are some satyrs, dervishes, Indians in their feathers and wooden muffs, a few Roman emperors.

  ‘As you can see, you could be whomever you wanted. In their masks, everyone took on the personality of the mask, aggressively so, so there was no possibility of walking the streets unmolested. These maskers are dressed as lawyers. They’re buttonholing passers-by to inform them of disastrous law-suits against their families. Of course, it was always a complete fiction.

  ‘Even people who looked ordinary were not so. You see those two apparently respectable gentlemen walking together, deep in serious conversation? Look behind them … See they are carrying fishing rods baited with sugar almonds. Those small boys following behind them would nibble at the sweetmeats like fish.’

  I drew him to a painting of the Riva degli Schiavoni.

  ‘This was the side-show of the Carnevale. This was where you came if you wanted to watch mountebanks, ballad singers, rope-dancers, jugglers, snake-charmers and conjurers. Once the Irish giant, Magrat, came here. He was seven foot tall and forty’ stones in weight. That’s a fortune-teller whispering his predictions down a long silver trumpet. Those are the quack doctors with their noxious nostrums.

  ‘And those are the animal enclosures. We had a rhinoceros there once. Every kind of dancing dog and bear. Imagine how noisy it was! The crowds swayed from stall to stall, chattering above the noise of the entertainers. Then you would hear the roll of the drum that announced that the tooth-puller was about to make an extraction. At that, everyone stopped, and clutched their own jaws, unconsciously’

  I showed him a pic
ture of the Piazza San Marco at the height of the revelry.

  ‘Now this is the forza d’Ercole, a human pyramid of twenty-six men with a tiny child on top. That flying figure is the saltamartino. On Maundy Thursday he slid face-down a rope from the top of the Campanile. You must imagine the intake of five thousand breaths as he leapt off the tower.

  ‘People even changed sexes. It was common for men to dress in full female costume, not neglecting the airiest of underwear. Or they would hire a dressmaker to graft luxurious female clothes into male ones.’

  I gestured to a pair of figures, ‘See – male and female silks and satins are torn apart and thrust in amongst each other. Flame-coloured satin peeks out of lilac floss silk. Sulphur-yellow short-nap velvet is rent to reveal blue and white satin. The ladies’ dresses are torn at the bosom, and slashed to reveal half a leg. There are holes everywhere you want to look! The men’s batiste shirts and cuffs are shredded, their hair unravelled. They both wear naturalistic masks expressing ardent desperation. Under their masks, you can be sure that they are starting to feel the emotions painted upon them. They bear begging-bowls and they have clearly rehearsed themselves in how to hold their heads in the convincing abjection of poverty’

  I told him how the Venetians made love during Carnevale, how everywhere you looked were huge lunging shadows projected upon the wall: lovers and strangers in the grip of the fever that had seized us all. ‘Nine months after Carnevale, it was always the busy season for our midwives,’ I told him.

  I told him how, at the end of the Carnevale, the Calabresi with their lighted caps would carry the coffin of the old feast to San Marco, followed by wheelbarrows of limp bodies wearing the hideous death mask of a face covered with syphilitic sores, baring their rosy knees to show the world the symptoms of the disease that killed them. Even Lent would be interrupted by the segaveccia: a decrepit dummy of an old woman, symbolising famine and deprivation, would be put on trial on a stage. She stood accused of killing the Carnevale and was condemned to be sawn in two. As the saws sliced through her torso, sweets and fruit fell from her belly and the crowd would fight for them.