The aroma of melted chocolate grows stronger and warmer, wafting towards me, potent as incense swung in a censer. It fills my lungs where the sea-water is supposed to be.
Girolamo, I think …
In the roots of my teeth, in the cave of my belly, in the cap of my scalp, I feel the fierce pulse of hot blood. And this is nothing to the eruptions of my heart and the pictures swarming in vivid colour into my mind. I gasp with recognition, like someone who has fallen in love at first sight. There is a kaleidoscope revolving inside me. I think of the butter-soft chestnuts folded into the chocolate cream. I think of Girolamo’s hot little hands, as beautiful as mine. I think of the love in Casanova’s letter, in all his letters. I think of Mary Shelley’s eyes, and of Sofia’s quiet, tender voice. I think of the things I have not yet experienced, warm, sweet novelties for the mouth, hands and eyes.
Suddenly I feel fear, a healthful rumbling in my gut. I am afraid that I shall lose these things because I have made myself blind, and unable to hear.
I think of Mary’s last words to me: 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.
Now I thrash like a fish in a net. I struggle for air. I take great gulps of it. It tastes sweet to me.
Suddenly, I feel anger, a ripeness in my breast and a clenching of my fists. I punch the water and I feel it shrinking from me, as if afraid of my righteous rage.
I think: Where is it written that I must have a lover as odious as Byron? And that I should die of it?
My anger empowers my arms. I swim strong, deliberate strokes. I turn towards the shore. The waves part for me, as if respecting my wishes. I think, The sea is hungry, but it is not me that it hungers for now.
A sudden tug of happiness nudges away my anger. I feel inspired, as if all solutions are possible to me. I find myself laughing in delight. I catch the cynical eye of a seagull floating in the water near me. Know your element, it seems to say to me. My own elements, I think, what are they? Air and oil paint and torta al cioccolato and that delicious smell at the top of Girolamo’s head.
These thoughts carry me to the shore. At Campo San Vio I rise from the water like Botticelli’s Venus. I walk straight to the bakery and beat on the door with my wet hands. The old wood makes a pulpy noise as if I am bruising it. The baker, seeing my mermaid form in the dawn light, crosses himself. He thinks I am a beggar and that I am mad. He gives me a big slice of the hot torta al cioccolato. I devour it on his doorstep like an animal.
I am weak with cravings for the chocolate cake, for the colours of the dawn, for the joys I have known through this wet but still living skin. Girolamo, I think, yes, even he was made with joy.
I draw myself up to my full height and look at San Vio, where Casanova’s gondola used to rock with our love and laughter. I smile. I look at the rising sun gilding the roof of the Accademia galleries. I know that one day my paintings will hang in there. I have more love poems to write to the faces of Venice. And there are Girolamo’s future faces to record!
Girolamo, I think …
But first there are less lovely things to attend to.
I think that addicts have been cured. I think that the poison can be excavated from the blood. Once I thought that it was essential to my happiness to be near Byron. Now I have realised that the necessary thing is never to see him again.
I think we are all redeemable, at a price. Sometimes it is cruel price: exposure. Sometimes it is a dangerous price: revenge. Sometimes it is even more exacting: the truth. In my new omnipotent, omniscient state, I know a way to make Byron leave Venice, leave me and my son in peace, to let us find our happiness. I know two ways in fact. There is one thing I can do immediately.
I ask the baker for a piece of paper. I write on it, address it, and hand it to the baker’s boy with a wet coin from my pocket. I explain what I want, precisely. ‘Run!’ I tell him.
I watch the boy skimming off down the street. I raise my arm to salute him on his way. I feel light and bright as a goddess. I feel certain that I have saved both Byron and my son from danger, and that I have done so just in time.
I walk towards my studio, dripping along the stones. The baker watches me, shaking his head.
As I enter my courtyard I stand for a moment looking at the Grand Canal between the three graceful arches. I know that Byron is still immersed in that green water, still dipping in and out of it. I know that the baker’s boy is pounding through Campo San Vidal and in a few moments he will arrive, panting, at the rear gates of the Palazzo Mocenigo.
A few minutes later, Byron himself will arrive at the sea-doors of the Mocenigo. He will drag himself from the water and push his way inside. Still dripping from his swim, he will walk past his howling beasts in the courtyard to the staircase. On the very first step he will find a letter in my handwriting, still warm from the baker boy’s humid little hand. He will hear the echoes of the boy’s thudding footsteps fading away.
He will unfold the letter as he walks up the steps. By the time he reaches the landing the packet will be open. He will hold it to the light of that lantern-bearing arm that seems to have punched its way through the wall.
He will see that my letter contains just one line, and he will fall to his knees on the stone steps when he reads it.
My letter says this:
But can she ever be as beautiful as our son, Girolamo?
Chapter 19
La lontananza l’è fiola de la dimenticanza.
Distancing is the child of forgetting.
VENETIAN PROVERB
I take the damp key out of my pocket and unlock my door. The cat greets me loudly and I kneel down to caress him. Over his head, I look around my studio. Inside, from floor to ceiling, I gaze upon my painted faces of Venetians. In the harsh clamour of dawn light they look flushed and slightly surprised, as if put out of breath by a sudden clout upon the back. But nothing can stifle their happiness! I have preserved it here forever in my oils and pastels. The perfervid joy of the happy city lives on here in my studio, in that delicate sfumatura of desire on their skin, those cloudy loves inscribed in the lustre of their eyes, the soft laughter haunting the corners of their mouths.
Among these ghostly faces of the once happy city sits my last beautiful portrait of Byron. Before I left my studio that evening for the swim that had ended differently from the way I had expected, I placed Byron on my easel with a pair of pale candles burning in front of him. Are you still here? I want to say to him, now. I turn away from the painting.
A flickering light calls my attention back to him.
When I opened the door to my studio a quick sigh of wind rushed in ahead of me. Now it teases the flames of the candles so they dance crazily on their wicks. Soon the candles start rocking on their silver sticks; from side to side they go. Unless I close the door, they will topple and fall. The flames would caress Byron’s face on the canvas. But first they would devour his breast. They would eat him from the heart up.
I consider the scene. It would make a fine, fragrant blaze, that painting of Byron. It would give out more warmth than he did in his whole life. The canvas would writhe like driftwood in the fire. I imagine the delicate features withering and dying, as I suspect they never will in real life. Byron has lived too fast, he has already swallowed his story in gulps. He will not live long, I think. The world will he sweeter without him, I think.
However, I close the door, for the moment. The flames gasp quietly and become calm, for the moment. This is not the way I wish to spend my new-born power: no, not in destruction.
I slither from my wet clothes and into dry ones. I do not remove the pearls: I am married to my happiness, now. I am vibrating with vigour like a harp in the wind, and I know exactly what I must do. I take a leather portfolio from the top of the cupboard and spill its contents out on the table. I contemplate my other portraits of Byron, the secret ones, the hideous ones. I fan them out and choose six of them, the on
es that best express the moments that almost killed my happiness.
I begin to work. I have much to do. The pictures must be stretched and mounted. Some of the pastels must be fixed with fine coats of varnish and given time to dry. The boat for England leaves at noon and I must have them ready.
I hum as I work, a Venetian love song. The beauty of the words seems out of place as I run my hands over my grotesque pictures of Byron. I glaze his double chins and his fat wrists. I anoint the wrinkles round his eyes with a preservative oil. I dust his vapid cheeks with desiccating powder to preserve their sick pallor on the long journey.
I wonder, briefly, what Caroline Lamb will make of them. Will it hart her to see her lover like this? Then I think of Glenarvon. Caroline Lamb will know what to do with my pictures.
When I have mounted the last portrait I gather them all together ir careful folds of silk that I bind inside narrow, strong widths of board. I address the parcel. I know where to send it. I have seen the address on his and Hobhouse’s letters to Caroline’s mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne.
I think, I am sorry, Hobhouse. You will feel betrayed. It is a necessary sacrifce.
I look in the mirror and see that my swim has brought a bloom to my skin. I sweep up my hair so that the pearls can be seen against my throat. I meet my eyes in the mirror and smile. I put or my cloak and salute the cat, who brandishes his tail at me. Quickly, I carry the parcel to the docks and I negotiate with a sailor. I give him certain monies and certain looks that will ensure that he will come back to Venice and tell me of the safe delivery of my work.
As I walk back from the docks I hear the voices in the cafés again, the chanting of a Greek chorus. Byron! I hear, the English milord!
Pale as death, you never saw anything like it,’ I hear.
The Mocenigo is abandoned. They say he ran out with just a valise of poems. He has sworn never to return.’
I let the voices fade behind me.
Girolamo, I think …
The winter sun, a frail little petal floating in the sky, begins to lower itself. I go home. There is one more thing to do.
I walk through the streets I love. Everywhere I smell the savoury joys of the Venetians at their tables: sage, butter, rosemary, crab soups, sour parmigiano. I inhale the rich stinks of the seaweed and the soft breath of the stones. I see tall finials unfurling like white buds above the terracotta rooftops. I notice the sinuous black fissures in the white Istrian stone of the paving. I see the flowers blushing on window-sills. I hear the crunch of the waves under the prows of the gondolas. I press coins into the beggars’ curved palms, which bloom up like pale pink tulips as I pass. I hear the gondoliers singing and the children at their nursery rhymes. I look at the striped paline and hear the clicking of the iridescent beasts who devour them at the water-line. I hold my arms open, as if to claim it all. I walk for a long time, until it is almost dark.
I go home.
I go to my campo, and lift my eyes to the delicate cupolas, the airy arches and the pale marble ribs of the church of Miracoli. I pass through the courtyard where once upon a time I fell into the arms of Casanova and I climb the stairs to Sofia’s little parlour, to wait for her. When she has finished the duties of her day, she comes here to sit with my portrait of her dead baby, and to repose a little.
I imagine how I will take her hand and talk to her.
I will tell Sofia everything and I will embrace her.
I think of how we shall go to Giovanni together and how we shall, with our hands uplifted and our eyes fixed upon him, make him see our point of view.
I think of how Sofia and I shall walk together to the Fondamenta Nuova, with our arms linked and our heads close together. One of us will hold the lamp to light our way. We will ask the boatman to take us to San Lazzaro and we will bring Girolamo home.
Postscript Dr Julius Millingen’s Report
I, Dr Julius Millingen, who attended Lord Byron during his final days at Missolonghi, performed an autopsy after the poet died on April 19th 1824, of a malarial infection, at the age of thirty-six years. This is my account of it. There is nothing I have done, in my long life, and what has been, I may say, a distinguished career, about which I have been asked more.
It behoves me first, for the sake of my conscience, to make it clear that Lord Byron would have been horrified at our actions. He believed in the sanctity of the body. At least, he believed fervently in the sanctity of his own. In a premonition of his death, he told me, while I placed the leeches on his forehead, ‘Let my body not be hacked, or be sent to England.’ I promised him, I admit it, that we would leave his carcass entire and that it would rest in Greece, for whose liberation he was, apparently, sacrificing his life. He had no love of his own country, vowing never to return, alive or dead, whole or in pieces, to what he consistently referred to, with loathing, as that ‘tight little island’. He also seemed violently opposed to the idea of returning to his adopted home, Italy, or at least to Venice. ‘Venice, no …!’ he would whisper, from time to time. It was as if there was something there which frightened him.
Lord Byron was mostly delirious in those last days. He believed that he had been cursed by the evil eye. He asked if I would do him the favour of finding an old and ugly witch to exorcise the curse! I regret to say that I did not hear him make any, not even the smallest, mention of the Christian religion. He spoke several times in Italian at the last, something incomprehensible. I believe I heard the word ‘ritratto’. I understand this means ‘portrait’. He said several times, ‘My son, my son,’ and this distressed all those attending him, for it is well known that he had no legitimate male issue.
He continually referred to the fate of his corpse. ‘Let it just be laid in a corner,’ he said at one point, ‘without pomp or nonsense.’ I think, in his delirium, that he believed he could trick us out of an autopsy.
However, I regret to say that Lord Byron was thoroughly ‘hacked’ in the autopsy by five doctors, including myself. What else could we do? The world was clamouring for information.
It is true that two of us burst into tears as we approached his beautiful corpse with our saws. As soon as we had done our grim work, I departed from the bloody scene with my eyes streaming. I left the others to put him back together. I could not look on his dismembered body for a moment longer.
I own that I should have stayed in the room. For when I returned I found that the body had been spliced back together as crudely as a rag doll, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster. Feeling guilty, I supervised the final rites rigorously: the remains were preserved in spirits, sealed in a tin packing case, there being no lead coffins available, and shipped back to England, accompanied by the organs in four separate jars. The lungs were an exception. In response to an earnest request from the Greeks, they were placed in an urn in the church of San Spiridione at Missolonghi, from where they subsequently disappeared.
I know that I promised that the carcass should remain in Greece. But you must understand our position. Greece was at war. We were afraid that if left there his remains might one day become the sport of insulting barbarians. Our greatest poet! I could not permit it. The fate of the lungs alone seems to me to justify my decision.
I understand that when Lord Byron’s body arrived in England, his friend John Cam Hobhouse forced himself to bid farewell to his friend, now laid out in state in London. But the parts had been assembled wrongly and he could not recognise him. It was to my eternal regret that poor Hobhouse had to identify the corpse by lifting the pall to look at his deformed foot. I understand that Lord Byron’s half-sister Augusta also went to view the body, as did immense numbers of members of the public on the two days when it was available for them to file past.
There was talk of it, but permission was refused to bury him in Westminster Abbey. He was put in the family vault in Hucknall Torkard. I read in the papers that Byron’s funeral cortège was followed by dozens of fine carriages. These belonged to great families – the peers of the Realm, Lord Byron’s pe
ers.
But for all their funeral finery, for all the plumed horses and black-garbed footmen, the carriages were empty. The English aristocracy did not wish to offer more than token grief for the death of the man who had scorned and scandalised them. The ghost carriages arrived at the church, barely waited outside, and cantered off.
This I learnt later. My hands were the last to touch Lord Byron when he was still warm, and I shall never forget that feeling. I was undone by it.
In my distressed state I was indiscreet enough to talk to the journalists sent from the local newspapers, foraging for lurid details about the passing of the great poet. I was not myself, I admit it, and I said more than I meant to, but it was no less than the truth.
And so it was that the Greek Telegraph justly reported that Byron’s autopsy revealed a remarkable quantity of brains, at least a quarter more than average, and extremely saturated in blood. But the bones in his head – they were like those of an old man, the sutures of the skull fused together. The texture of the cranium was as hard as ivory. In his body, we saw that the adipose tissue was everywhere predominant, a proof of his congenital predisposition to corpulence. It was noted that the liver was beginning to undergo the alterations usually observed in those who have indulged in the abuse of alcoholic liquors. Its bulk was smaller, its texture harder and its colour much lighter than a healthy liver.
Lord Byron’s heart, I told them – to my eternal regret, for I was forever after hounded for my words – was also very large, far larger than a normal man’s.
But I had to say, in all honesty, that the pale bloated heart displayed on the chopping board lacked the musculature one would expect. It was as flabby as that of someone who had died of old age. In truth, I must admit, though I mislike to do so, that Lord Byron’s heart was but a feeble organ.
Acknowledgements