Carnevale

  I said nothing. Margarita’s noisy sobs and hiccups and loud imprecations to God could be heard from a distant room. Byron inclined his head towards the sad noise. ‘You know she crosses herself when she hears the prayer-bell, no matter what we are doing. Sometimes, I can tell you, there is some incongruity with the activities of the other parts of her body. She’s a fine rammish animal. I like her energy. I overhear her with the servants: I like the way she boasts about me. She amuses me – she can always get round me by making me laugh with some Venetian pantaloonery or other. And I love her little names for me.’

  Yes, I heard them all the time. Margarita called them out in moments of frenzy from the bedroom or the study. Uvetta mia, my little grape, she called him, and pasta di marzapane. La Fornarina, I thought disdainfully to myself, was after all a baker’s wife, so naturally she took her imagery from the kitchen. I had always pictured Marianna Segati flopping sweetly around him, more liquid than solid. She would keep those inky eyes open on him; he would be afloat inside her. I could not help imagining la Fornarina working Byron’s flesh like pastry, flipping him over, forcing her fingers into all the yielding places. Afterwards she would lie next to him breathing like bread rising. In the time it took to put a knife through a warm loaf, she would be ready again, her face as greasy as a buttered veal-chop and greedy as rising dough to engulf him.

  Chapter 8

  Xe più le done che yarda i òmeni

  che le stele che varda la tera.

  There are more women looking at men than

  there are stars looking at the earth.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  I have said this before. I never had a female friend. I am a woman who prefers to be with men. I am not at my ease with other women. Until Casanova died in 1798 I had in him the only friend I needed. Our letters were my gossip, my safe vent for mischief, my cosiness. When Casanova died, I became harder and colder. After Byron left me in Albania, I suppose that I became softer and kinder, having been battered by pain, but not warmer. The pain made me nicer, I suppose. I was very slightly kinder to Sofia. In fact, I was more amiable with all women. I no longer felt myself above them so I had more compassion for their sorrows. But it was too late in my life then to start trusting women.

  I have said this before, too, I suppose that Mary Shelley is the closest thing to a woman friend that I have ever known.

  The Shelleys – Percy and Mary – came to Venice that summer. I was working on a portrait of Byron when they arrived at the Palazzo Mocenigo one morning. Shelley, pink and blond as an angel, looked the Romantic poet to his every inch. He had Byron’s luminous quality, but in him it had not been dimmed with sulking or bitterness. I itched with an intemperate craving to paint him; I knew I could make the poetry shine out of him. How Byron would hate that idea, I thought. I asked myself if I was attracted to Shelley, but I found that I was not. He did not seem to make a human connection with anyone: it was all spiritual and intellectual for him. Anyway, the image of Byron was imprinted upon my soul. It was his mouth I wanted on mine, not a mouth even somewhat like it.

  Mary, I thought plain, at first glance. She would not make a fine portrait, I thought. Her charm was to be found in the unseen things and not in her pale features. She was dressed simply. I thought that her facial skin was unpleasantly transparent and that it hung shapelessly on her skull. Her figure was unexceptional. Her hands were good.

  ‘Who is she?’ asked Shelley, in his high-pitched, anxious voice, looking at me, distractedly. He had come here to talk about poetry. He feared, as always with Byron, trivial and vulgar pursuits.

  ‘No one. An artist,’ said Byron, carelessly.

  Mary said, soft and sibilant, ‘But an artist is surely someone, Albé. An artist is a kind of god! He or She’ – and she bowed to me — ‘creates life, in a thinking, skilful way.’

  As she spoke I noticed the liveliness of Mary’s pupils under her thick eyelids. Her shining hair was parted in the middle and ringletted at the sides. She had a gesture of bringing her left arm up to her shoulder with the hand curled around, like a little child stretching before bedtime. It is quite affecting, in an unaffected way, I thought.

  Byron sneered, ‘God help us if the artists start to think!’

  But Mary continued, as if she had not heard him. ‘I am not talking about mere likeness, the correct measurement of the eyelid or the faithful rendering of a complexion. I am talking about a tension that is rendered like life itself, a kind of alchemy to recreate the personal essence of the sitter. With colour and life and depth, the artist creates something that can be felt, in other words, life.’

  She came over to the easel, looked at my portrait, and smiled at me, then at Byron. ‘This picture, Albé, is you, to the eyelash. She has created life, your life, and I can read everything I know about you on your face here.’

  Byron hated bluestockings, and Mary’s, he had always told me, were of the deepest indigo. He had no respect for her Frankenstein theories of life forces and reanimation. He did not grace her with an answer. Shelley looked embarrassed. It was not a subject with which his brain currently teemed. Byron did not introduce me. He swept Shelley off to the drawing room and slammed the door like a slap in the face. I understood that he was showing off for Shelley. Mary and I closed our eyes for a second with the shock of the noise. When we opened them we were looking at each other. I was conscious of some kind of transaction, some kind of marching out of souls to greet each other. I did not know how to be this way with women and I felt confused and diffident.

  We have in common famous Romantic poets in our beds, I thought. But how different they were! I could imagine Shelley tender and tearful in ways that Byron would never be. I wondered, and I shall always wonder, what Mary herself was thinking at that moment as we gazed at each other.

  Our ocular negotiations, which I would now call the early stirring of a friendship, were interrupted. The study door was flung open. Suddenly, Byron returned and threw some papers towards us. They thumped on the floor and a cloud of dust made a short-lived halo around them.

  ‘My memoirs,’ he said, over his shoulder.

  ‘Your confessions?’ Mary challenged. ‘Just these few pages?’

  He did not answer her. The door slammed again.

  The reverberations of the door faded to silence. Mary and I looked at each other again. Now I thought my first impression might have been wrong. There was quite definitely something alive in her face. I might, after all, enjoy painting it.

  Mary came to sit with me. She spoke excellent Italian, she was knowledgeable about art, and she knew everything about Byron. We talked like flowers opening together on one branch. The packet of thrown papers lay behind us, temporarily forgotten. Mary had fascinating things to tell me.

  After a very short while it became clear to me that Mary hated Byron. She felt he had cost her the life of her daughter. She told me how Shelley had summoned her urgently to Venice to help him reason with Byron about poor little Allegra. Mary told me that the child’s mother Claire – at the name, she compressed her lips – unbeknownst to Byron, was lurking in wait for him here in Venice. She wanted her baby, but she was also using Allegra as bait to see her former lover. Byron, it seemed, was equally determined not to see Claire or to give up the child. From what I had heard of Claire, she was grotesque, and Mary’s unsaid words confirmed this. But why would Byron not give up Allegra? Mary said, ‘He was afraid that people would say that he had grown tired of her. He already has a reputation here for being capricious, I understand.’ I nodded. ‘Still, everyone must think of the child.’ Reluctantly, Mary had set off across Italy to support her husband and Claire. But the hard journey killed her own ailing little daughter, Clara, who died in Mary’s arms within an hour of their arrival in Venice.

  Mary felt that Shelley had put Byron’s and Claire’s interests above those of herself and their own child. And this, because of Shelley’s insistence that there was a thread of gold running through the vulgar weave of Byron’s mind.
He knew that Byron was no intellectual but he also knew that Byron was chosen from all other men to draw attention to the heat and light he made. Shelley saw Byron throwing it away, wasting its precious luminosity. Shelley wanted to help the poetry come forth, whatever the human expense. It was also possible – I realised from Mary’s sourness – that Shelley, too, had betrayed her with the incorrigible Claire.

  The story raised a storm inside me. Here were other women deprived of their children because of Byron. Here was Shelley, a man as fascinated with him as the women were. I let Mary talk, asking just a question here or there. Why is she telling me this? I wondered at one point. At other times it seemed perfectly clear.

  Fletcher brought us tea. La Fornarina darted in for a quick look and then hurtled into the study where Byron and Shelley were sequestered. Moments later she emerged streaming with tears and rushed away, shaking a large fist at Mary, who flinched.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘When she is violent it is only with her own kind. That amuses Byron. Beating you would not amuse him.’

  ‘Can you be so sure?’ Mary had the measure of him. But we did not see Margarita again.

  The men stayed shut up together all day. Enclosed with Mary, I gradually forgot about my own work. After some hours, I gave up the paintbrush and sat with my hands folded on my lap like a schoolgirl. This plain young woman had hypnotised me with her charm and intelligence.

  She set out to answer my every question. She omitted no detail, like a conscientious biographer afraid to sacrifice a fact that posterity might later judge vital. From her I learnt the things about Byron that Hobhouse, in his lumbering kindness, had spared me, and Byron himself had omitted, thinking them deleterious to his legend. Hobhouse thought I was not strong enough to hear it. Mary, knowing women, knew better. And she knew more. She told me of his childhood, and his growing up. Mary’s account made sense of Byron’s. In Albania he had told me the facts as he saw them. Mary told me what others had seen. She spoke intimately of the aspects of his marriage that a man wouldn’t know how to explain to a woman. She had been an industrious distiller of information herself, it seemed. All that he had shared with Shelley, and Shelley with her, after those long, unguarded evenings at the Villa Diodati, when his hurts were fresh and angry, Mary now shared with me.

  She concluded, ‘Byron is not yet an Italian, though he pretends to be. Nor is he as happy as he pretends to be, or as tragic as he pretends to be. He is heartily and deeply discontented with himself. That’s why he behaves so badly.’

  She said nothing I could deny, but nothing I cared to corroborate. I was absorbed in what she had told me about the last seven years of Byron’s life, the ones in which he had not missed me. The stories of Caroline, of Augusta, of Claire, of Annabella were now intertwined with my own, as were the stories of Edelston, Claire and Rushton. I saw my own place in the great scheme of Byron’s life. I saw how it was likely to end. I fell to silence again, looking at the floor.

  Ah,’ Mary said, ‘we have forgotten the famous memoirs.’ We turned to them, raked up the sheets and examined them together in silence. As we read, Mary’s hand strayed out of its sleeve, like a turtle’s head emerging from a shell, to cover mine. I had never been touched like this, in tenderness, by a woman. Sofia would not dare. But I found myself aching to accept Mary’s sweetness. I had need of it. When we reached his account of Albania, she took my hand in hers, and stroked its trembling fingers.

  There was not much in those so-called memoirs of Byron’s. What we read were just notes and scrawls. He had not cared to leave the world too much information. The stories of Greek Love were confirmed, but in no way could that be called titillating. He felt more for his boy-loves than for the women, yes, but still he treated them badly when they bored him.

  Mary and I read pages together in silence, marvelling at how little we had meant to him. At one point she turned to me and said, ‘Cecilia, there is not enough scorn in all the world for him, is there?’

  I shook my head, mutely. Mary, with my hand still in hers, looked into my face.

  ‘But please remember this, Cecilia: just because Byron scorns a creature, that creature is not unworthy. Similarly a creature whom he praises is not necessarily a great one. One should not let his scorn discolour and pervert what is good in this life. We must live apart from his malicious opinions, which have no basis in the truth, only in the weakness in him.’

  I was too distressed to understand her. I took the words into my head and stored them up for later, when I would be calmer. In my case, the memoirs had this to say:

  In Albania, I had my portrait painted by a famous Venetian artist, a woman. I do not remember her name, but I made sure, as you may imagine, that she got a good likeness of me.

  Shelley and Byron finally emerged from their colloquy, and the former reclaimed his wife. At the last moment, Mary leant over to kiss me twice in the Italian style.

  ‘It’s a beautiful portrait,’ she said, pointing at the canvas. ‘I knew immediately that you were his lover,’ she whispered, without a smile, but with infinite gentleness. ‘You have painted the pain into your picture.’

  ‘Let me paint you,’ I offered suddenly. The words had entered my mouth without negotiating with my brain. I realised that for some time now I had been studying her, memorising her features.

  ‘Ah, Cecilia, but I am plain. It’s scarcely worth your talent to render my face. My children were the beautiful ones. Look.’

  She pulled from her pocket a miniature wrapped in silk and wool. It was a glass-mounted pastel of the little dead Clara as a baby, truly the image of her angelic-looking father.

  ‘A sweet child,’ I said, and I felt for Mary deeply. I had never felt such compassion for another human being before. My little Girolamo was not mine to hold any longer, but at least he still lived. I could not quite imagine surviving Mary’s pain. I no longer saw her as plain, but as beautiful, as the image of intelligence and sweetness inscribed on human flesh. In her eyes now I saw diamonds of light, and in the tilt of her head an enviable grace. Yet from that gentle head had come the horrors of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley was truly a fascinating woman, but it was not the fascination that drew me. It was her warmth.

  ‘Let me keep this for a day,’ I asked her, with the miniature still in my hand. ‘I shall make you a copy of it.’

  ‘No, no! I cannot ask it!’ But she was blushing with pleasure at the thought.

  Shelley and Byron had gone out to the terrace to watch the sunset. Mary looked over her shoulder and drew closer to me.

  ‘I have a gift for you, too, Cecilia,’ she said. ‘It is a thought.’

  ‘A thought?’

  ‘A thought that might help you.’ Mary leant over to me. The light of the mullioned windows was tender upon her face. She started to talk, looking at the figures of the two men silhouetted on the terrace. With their nipped-in waists and their curls, they looked like little boys. Then Byron turned and I saw his profile suddenly, cruel as a subtle gargoyle.

  I heard Mary say, ‘People can become addicted not just to wine, or even a lover, but to their mistakes. People can fall in love with an unworthy object, but they cannot admit that they have made a mistake. And so they weld themselves to it with love, knit themselves to it with desire. They start to admire it, their great passion. They step outside it and look at it, and think, “What a masterpiece of love this is, on my side, at least!’”

  I looked at Mary. I could not speak. She went on.

  ‘But what they have made is a Frankenstein monster, a dangerous hybrid given life by their dangerous fantasies. They allow themselves to be savaged by it, rather than admit that they have made a mistake, that they have taken up with something that they should have left alone. They would like to see it as the great tragedy in their life, as something romantic and fated, but in reality it was merely a lapse of taste, and nothing grander than that.’

  I turned away from her then. She rose and stood above me. She reached out to me and was not disco
uraged when I instinctively flinched away from her. For just an instant, she stroked my hair with gentle fingers. I let her. It felt strange but pleasing to be touched like that.

  Then she said, ‘That was important, Cecilia, but what I really want to say to you is this: you do not need to die of your addiction. There are other ways to cure addiction. It’s important to remember that it is the vice that should die and not the poor creature who suffers from it.

  ‘But few can do it alone. We need to turn to another human being, and accept help. Perhaps you are not ready yet, Cecilia. But keep this thought inside you and perhaps you will come to accommodate it in your heart.’

  ‘What were you two talking about all that time?’ Byron asked me, the next day, at my studio, where he had come to avoid Margarita’s wrath. La Fornarina had not been happy to learn that Mary Shelley, homely as she was, had spent a whole day in what she saw as her house. Me, she had accepted as a nearly sexless object, an artist. But Mary, in Margarita’s primitive reasoning, posed a real threat. She was a woman, after all, with a husband, and therefore a vacancy for a lover.

  Byron hated to be disapproved of by the Shelleys as much as he adored it from more respectable folk. But he needed to know. He tried to draw me out. ‘Shelley’s woman has the eyes of a cow. Did you see her face when Margarita came in? She is without the smallest element of attraction. She’s a bracket-faced, stiff-rumped piece if I ever saw one. What does she call that hairstyle – curls à la blowze? She is stuffed to the gills with impacted merde. Why does Shelley pule around her so? What is it with her?’ I winced at these insults.

  ‘What did you think of my memoirs, then?’

  I was silent. I knew how to hurt him.

  He knew how to hurt me too. ‘Not much like Casanova’s? Have I not had as many pieces? Of course, I am a fraction of his age when he came hobbling into your bed.’