Chapter 11
Se Dio voleva che i veneziani fusse pessi,
el gavarìa dà un aquario, non una cita.
If God had wanted Venetians to be fish,
He would have given us an aquarium and not a city.
VENETIAN PROVERB
I am sure that the Fathers at San Lazzaro did not deliberately put Girolamo in Byron’s way. The Fathers knew Girolamo was special. They had some idea of Byron’s tendencies. They had some suspicions of Girolamo’s provenance, too, I am sure.
I was torn between wanting to tell the Fathers that they must keep him away from Byron and wanting my son and his father to be together. How would I frame the impure words to corrupt the Fathers’ minds, how to explain the pollution I feared, without violating the sanctity of the island?
So I said nothing, and I hoped. I hoped that in Girolamo Byron had met his match. I hoped that he had met a soul he could not corrupt. I had confidence in Girolamo’s strength. It surprised and amazed me. It was greater than my own.
There were only eleven novices on the island, pitting their slender bodies against the Herculean tasks imposed upon them. Byron loved to be among the boys. He would sit in the arbour, looking out at the lagoon, with each arm around one boy. He had already nominated his favourites, though they never offered their names. They were trained not to think of themselves as individuals. They were erasing their sinful humanity in the course of becoming living angels. For Byron, it was Harrow all over again. He even found fleeting resemblances to little Lords Clare and Delawarr among the boys.
He swam with them, walked with them. He did not seem to realise that the eyes of Venice were upon him, that the lagoon is an aquarium for the gossips of the conversazione, the gondoliers and the hairdressers. Everyone has their face pressed against the glass, hoping for transgressions to be performed in front of them.
Girolamo was not shy, but he was unaware of his beauty. One of Byron’s arms always rested on his shoulder.
Girolamo’s personality showed none of his father’s perversity or darkness. He was full of joy and curiosity. Sometimes I wondered if the trajectory of Byron’s seed had simply nudged into life a pro-creative cell of Casanova’s stored somewhere inside me, for truly he was more Casanova’s son than anyone’s. His only fault was greed, and even his greed had a subtle artistry, and he enjoyed delicious things only if he shared them with others.
Each time I saw him I carried his features home with me and smoothed them on to the canvas after each of my visits, hardly releasing my breath, my memory, until I had caught his new likeness. I kept my Girolamos, dozens of them, in my armadio. My portfolio of Casanovas hid and protected them. In my mind now, I always saw my son standing in front of Byron, pigeon-toed like a little crucified Christ.
And I remembered when he was only a thrust of Byron’s thigh, an agonised intake of breath and a slump upon my breast.
Chapter 12
E chi no sa nuar?
Is there anyone who doesn’t know how to swim?
VENETIAN PROVERB
Born in January, straddling the year and indeed the centuries, Byron was an Aquarian. Water was his natural element, and he loved it, even though it had drowned two of the boys he adored in his youth.
Water is beautiful and dangerous. It undulates, as he did. Yes, Byron knew the water, its suck and pull, its slap and tickle, the float and sink of it.
Now Byron lived in a floating palace.
Venice is a swimming and a drowning city. Byron was rarely seen to walk her streets. If he must go forth on foot, he donned such long robes that he seemed to be floating. Only his creamy throat and face appeared above the dark waves of his cloak like a luminous alabaster pebble just before it sinks into a dark pond. He must hide his deformity, at all costs. In Venice he had created a hallucinatory vision of himself: it swam through the unconscious minds of the Venetian women. It was as a sea-creature that we accepted him, as one of our own.
Those of us who fell in love with him found his limp more of a grace than a defect. There was a certain light and gentle undulation when he entered a room, of which strangers hardly felt tempted to enquire the cause. There was something about him, a quiet dark menace flowing from him, that forbade it. When Byron burst on the London scene in 1812, he had one rival for the feverish attention of Society – a newfangled German dance called the Waltz. He could never do it; to try to do so would have drawn attention to his deformity and his ungainly gait.
(Like Byron, I hated to dance, but for different reasons. My breasts attracted too much attention on the dance floor. They responded to the music in their own way. Also, I despised the polite hypocrisy of most modern dances. I particularly hated the Waltz, where a man leads and the woman must trust him, continually taking polite small backwards steps at his direction! I did not dance but I loved to watch. When I watched I preferred the dances that pace out the desires of the blood: the fandango, the furlana, where men and women are equal partners, where the limbs flash and the eyes widen and afterwards everyone is out of breath, their hearts beating and their skin alive with lust.)
Like me, but for different reasons, Byron skulked in corners pretending not to look while the waltzing women swirled around like blousy tulips.
On the land, he must hide. But in the water, Byron was a hero, from the duckpond at Harrow to the Grand Canal. He took his epic swims dressed in silk trousers to hide the withered leg. When he felt the water enclose the damaged limb, he relaxed inside his skin and a different smile would come to his lips.
At Cambridge, he swam in the Cam. At nineteen, he swam three miles down the Thames. After that triumph, every stretch of water must be conquered, and was: the Hellespont, the Tagus, the Piraeus, rivers, seas. Another Byron legend was born upon the spume of the water: he became a kind of male Venus, rising in beauty from the waves.
In Venice, on hot nights, Byron was seen to leave palaces on the Grand Canal, and fling himself fully clothed into the water. He then swam home, holding aloft a torch in his left hand to avoid the oars of passing gondolas.
In the sultry summer of 1818, the Cavalier Angelo Mengaldo, a boastful and vainglorious soldier of the Napoleonic wars, with literary ambitions, formed a niggling relationship with Byron. Their rivalry was bound to culminate in a swimming contest, for both men loved to boast of their aquatic triumphs. Mengaldo had swum the Danube and the Beresina, in the latter case with the added glamour of doing so under enemy fire.
‘I have to do this, Cecilia,’ Byron told me, lolling on the divan in my studio. ‘This is important. It’s Age against Beauty. It’s Military against Poetry.’
‘It is dangerous vanity,’ I muttered under my breath. People could become sick from the strange tiny beasts and stinks that floated on the compromised waves of the lagoon and the canals. Think how many chamber pots, cooking pots, laundry barrels, fish guts and worse were thrown into the forgiving water every day!
The competition took place on June 25th. The swimmers left from the Lido, at precisely the same moment. Byron won easily, leaving Mengaldo to give up before they even reached the Grand Canal. For days, he could talk of nothing else, of how he had beaten the Italian ‘all to bubbles’.
Byron had risen from the water, dimpled like a plucked chicken, and came directly to me. He was not even tired. With the salt of the water still on his body, he had thrown himself upon me and made love to me with pounding thrusts and strokes, as if he was still swimming.
*
I had watched the swimmers pass me from the steps of the Balbi Valier. I wondered what Byron was thinking. Afterwards, he told me.
Mostly, he thought of winning and that it would be another victory against Annabella in some obscure but satisfying way. One by one, as he swam past them now, his eyes discovered all the palazzi in which he had enjoyed his pleasures.
His exhaustion had peeled layers from his thoughts and the memories were crystalline as if suspended in drops of water. In those drops he saw Marianna and Margarita, he saw his favouri
te among the nine muses, he saw the masked lover who had tainted his blood during that first Carnevale. It seemed that naked pink women were suspended in each droplet he shook from his eyes.
He passed a private garden with a decapitated Satyr and for some reason thought of Casanova, and, fleetingly, of me.
He passed a mother and child on a window-sill, feeding upon nuts like pretty little apes. He thought of his daughters, the unknown Ada and the unseen Allegra.
He passed the Contarini degli Scrovegni, the palazzo of the money-chests, and thought of the remittances to come from Murray.
Water invaded his mouth. He remembered how he had taught his dog, Boatswain, to save him from drowning when he pretended to need help in the lake at Newstead. One dank autumn, a thousand years ago it seemed, Boatswain had caught rabies. Byron nursed him himself and sponged the froth from the dying dog’s mouth with his own hand. Boatswain was gentle in his disease, biting no one but himself, and at the memory of him Byron had felt the warmth of tenderness. The cold water had sealed Byron’s warmth inside him. The thought of Boatswain belonged in there.
These random thoughts had taken him almost without effort to the volta of the Grand Canal. Not for the first time, Byron told me, he then found himself wondering what he meant to Venice. As he passed the circus of the Rialto he realised he was just a prize exhibit in this most beautiful of zoos.
‘Surely you are more than that?’ I asked. ‘What about the poetry?’
‘That’s all merde,’ he said. ’Merde that flows.’
Chapter 13
Servo de do paròni, servo dei miei cogioni.
I am a servant of two masters: my two testicles.
VENETIAN PROVERB
At San Lazzaro, Byron crouched over his Armenian—English grammar, but he could not concentrate. The beautiful boy was gently dead-heading the roses in a pot on his desk. I was painting Byron while he worked. Yes, we were alone in the study, we three, unless you count the cicada whose throbbing song invaded the room and our thoughts. In another world we would be a family. The Fathers had left us alone together again. I wondered why. I still wonder.
‘Why do you cut the heads of the flowers?’ Byron asked Girolamo.
‘They are no longer alive, and they are stealing strength from the rest of the plant.’ Girolamo smiled. His affection for Byron was written openly upon his face. Byron was a hero among all the novices, a glamorous figure from a world they would never know.
‘Who are you, little man?’
‘You know me, signor, I am Girolamo, the novice.’ Now the child was troubled. The smile was spent. He knew that Byron wanted something more of him, but he did not understand the need. From the depths of his generous nature, he tried to do so.
‘Where do you come from, Girolamo?’
‘From Our Heavenly Father.’
‘You are so sure?’ With this, my Girolamo’s face flowered into a smile again.
‘Of course. Why are you so sad, my Lord?’
Byron rested his head in his hands, stretched his eyes till he looked as Oriental as Ali Pasha. When had he ever seen anything as beautiful as Girolamo? Probably not since he gazed in his own mirror twenty years previously. When had he wanted something more? Augusta? Nicolo? Could he name his wants? I doubted it. The manifestation of his darker desires could exile him even from Venice. What happens when you defile even the place of exile? Had he become addicted to a need for violation? Or was it simply that Girolamo was so beautiful?
I was almost sorry for Byron. For so many years the erotic impulse had been tied to the love impulse that Byron was no longer able to separate the two. But with Girolamo I saw him struggle to do so. He could not want to ruin Girolamo’s purity: ruined, Girolamo would no longer be the creature of light that drew Byron to him. Byron would not hurt my son, I was sure of it. Something in his blood would keep him from hurting the boy. Girolamo himself would make it so. I had such faith in the infectious goodness of my child.
Suddenly a desperate pigeon stumbled into the window, followed by a shrieking white seagull. We watched a swift and bloody murder. When the pigeon was dead and limp, the seagull moaned its victory, raising its beak to the sky as if to thank God for its grisly meal. Then it seized its prey and swooped out of the window. None of us spoke during the hideous incident. My phantom arms reached out to comfort both Girolamo and Byron, their faces contorted in exactly the same grimace of horror. I wanted to cover their eyes, rock them both against me, take the evil to myself and protect them from it.
Finally, Byron said, bitterly, ‘You see how Venice is torn apart: her sea-self devours her land-self.’
Girolamo looked at his father with infinite tenderness, spreading his hands, just as Casanova would have done, to show that he understood, that he felt Byron’s pain, that he knew the darkness of his soul and that he forgave him for it.
And I looked at Girolamo, hoping that he was not too good for this world.
Chapter 14
Da dona dei altri, a da cavai scampai,
libera nos Domine.
From other men’s women, and from frisky horses,
O Lord, save us!
VENETIAN PROVERB
At the Mocenigo, Byron fumed and paced the terrace, watched with interest by a crowd of sightseers in the gondolas below.
The tourists were eager for some visible act of depravity from the English milord. Sometimes La Fornarina had used to oblige, waving an intimate garment at them in a threatening manner. He missed her, in some ways. Her pugilism had at least entertained him. He was bored without her daily melodramas. He was recovered from the wound of his marriage and tired of the disease and disappointment of promiscuous concubinage with strangers. He could not go every day to San Lazzaro. The Fathers had begun to be cool with him, he told me.
‘Damn them to hell, then, and their grammar with them. I will find myself another diversion,’ he said.
I rather hoped he would, even if it took him away from me. These days I could not be sure that Byron’s temper would not erupt in the face of Girolamo’s unshakeable serenity. My son had never heard a hard or evil word. I wanted it to stay that way.
Byron’s satiety with Venice had slid into a dangerous lassitude from which, I knew, only a dramatic act of effrontery could rescue him. His ennui was so painful to him that I was sorry for him. He yawned hugely; he continually stretched. He seemed unable to contain himself within his own skin. I would see him shudder, after lovemaking, the way the cat shook his back legs at an unsatisfactory plateful of food, before stalking off.
Then something happened that swept his boredom off the table.
In April 1819, Byron met Teresa Guiccioli.
It happened, as most noteworthy things did in those days, at La Benzona’s conversazione.
Marina Benzoni was a loquacious ageing beauty with full confidence in her charms, even at sixty. The nobleman Giuseppe Rangone had been her cavalier servente for thirty years, and finally married her just before his seventieth birthday. Byron told me how he had asked Rangone after La Benzona one morning. The cavalier, who had just come from her bed, replied that his mistress was rugiadosa, ‘dewy’.
Not far from the Mocenigo, Marina Benzoni kept a luxurious house. She was famous for the pieces of hot polenta she used to carry between her breasts on cold days. One of her nicknames was El Fumeto – the Steaming Lady. Another was La Biondina in Gondola, after the famous song composed in her honour. She had been known in her time as the sweetest and loosest woman in Venice. I remembered her from the parties at the Mocenigo and other palazzi when Casanova was still with me in Venice. I could never forget her dancing round the ‘liberty tree’ in San Marco at the fall of the Republic. She acknowledged with a nod that she too remembered those times, and my witnessing of them. Byron adored her wit, and called her the Venetian Lady Melbourne. There could be no higher compliment from him.
It was the dewy Benzona herself who told me what happened that night, as I was at that time in the middle of a portrait of he
r. She was one of the few old ladies in Venice who still loved to be painted. You could still see the outlines Longhi had painted in her old, proud face. Like Longhi, to capture her, I was mixing Lead White, Naples Yellow and Rose Madder. I cooled passages of her complexion that had become too foxy using tones of French Ultramarine. Where her aged skin had become extremely thin, under her eyes and around her nose, I dotted in Purple Lake.
I still remember how that long, high-arched and bird-like nose quivered at the memory of the night Byron met Teresa Guiccioli.
It should not have happened as it did. Teresa was pregnant, tired and she had come only reluctantly to La Benzona’s conversazione that evening. Nor was Byron, in his bearish mood, particularly interested in being introduced to a clever young bride from Ravenna.
‘Leave me,’ he had told La Benzona, gracelessly, when she proposed to introduce him to Teresa. ‘I do not want to make any new acquaintances with women; if they are ugly because they are ugly – and if they are beautiful, because they are beautiful.’
‘But I prevailed,’ smiled the hostess, recalling that night. ‘I always do.
‘He loved to shock me, the naughty boy! He said, “Very well then. How desperate is she? How willing is she to perform acts of unspeakable degradation with me?’”
La Benzona giggled at the memory.
But then, from across the room, Byron had seen a petite but voluptuous version of himself – chestnut curls, full lips, large luminous eyes, a fully realised femininity beyond her years.
‘I presented Byron to Teresa,’ said La Benzona, ‘simply as “Peer of England and its greatest poet”. The extraordinary thing was, when I saw them together, they seemed immediately to be just like brother and sister.’ She winked at me.
I knew what La Benzona meant about Teresa. I had myself met her when she was in Venice a year before, on her honeymoon. She had seemed to me a woman who was over-ripe without ever having matured. Titian-haired, with a beautiful mouth, and rather short legs, Teresa was convent-educated, spoke French as well as Italian, quoted the Latin historians and could even paint small flower studies – all charmingly. We had all looked at one of her pictures, in a locket on her breast, and she had no reason to be embarrassed by it.