Chapter Two: October 7, 1809
It was a cool morning. It seemed to Byron that he’d been woken by the cold. His left leg was peeking out from under the blanket, his foot was trembling slightly, and he could feel goose bumps on his skin. The day before it had drizzled constantly, but it had been rather warm; the hot breath of summer was still noticeable. But this morning, by contrast, autumn was baring its teeth. Heavy rain had fallen and the loud, even thudding of the drops called to mind a march. Byron was awake, but he did not yet feel like getting up. He didn’t like autumn. He had never liked it. He once read a poem by that madman, Blake… how did it go? “O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stained with the blood of grapes, pass not, but stay beneath my modest roof…”
That’s idiotic, he thought back then, and now it seemed even more preposterous. Accursed autumn, the damned change of the seasons, he thought; this is when the pain in my leg grows. There must be a catch in that phrase “pass not.”
An odd smile passed over Byron’s face. He remembered his first little book, those sixty-six pages to which he had given the title Fugitive Pieces. He loved the title more than anything else about the book, since it referred to loss, evanescence, or flight. He particularly loved that one short poem that still, to this day, gave him at least the intimation of an erection whenever he thought of it. But it was precisely on account of this poem that he had burned all the copies of the book. He didn’t even keep a copy for himself, and he had carefully counted each and every one before the auto-da-fé in order to be certain, and he knew that he had torched all of them, but somehow, nonetheless, he didn’t believe that this book had ceased to exist. He didn’t know his own verses by heart, but he remembered the title, you see and he wasn’t the only one. The thing still existed, therefore, although barely. Indeed, he had felt strange, watching the pyre on which his poems were burning. Present in those flames were also sparks of contentment: the book appeared to have lived up to its title. Its existence in the form of an object was, in fact, fugitive. He was fond of both the thin volumes of his verse that appeared later. Nonetheless, it would not have caused his heart any grief if somebody else had collected them both in turn and incinerated them. The vain bards of yore, who believed that a massive book could ransom their empty lives, would have lived differently if in their youth they had subjected their own books to the treatment he had given Fugitive Pieces. Fire teaches us about proper proportions, he thought.
A second later, he felt a strong stabbing pain in his leg. My damn old bones, he thought; no sooner do they cease growing than they start to break down. A man is like an apple – as soon as his cheeks redden, he drops to the ground.
Then words began to flash through his mind; as when you hear a few beats of a familiar melody – the whole world around you ceases to exist until you remember what the music is. New words are grafted onto the framework of the original ones. A poem. Byron recited it to himself in a whisper:
A drop of rain
licks my eyebrow,
like a suppressed and secret tear.
It tracks across my cheek
as the Rhine the continent.
In a silent insurrection
autumn kills the sun of my summer,
just as the Achaeans did to Ilium
in their wooden horse.
Somewhere I have pen and paper, Byron thought; I have to write that down. And immediately another thought: why should I feel compelled to do that? Let it live in my head; it would be better for oblivion to devour it than flames.
Fortified by this decision, he emerged from under his blanket and sat up on the edge of the bed.
* * *
After breakfast Byron wanted to shave. A razor, as sharp as a sword, was brought to him, along with a jug of warm water and a large, lovely Venetian mirror. He liked to look at the reflection of his own face; he knew he had a handsome one. The curly, jet- black fringe, draped over his pale, high forehead. His skin had a distinctly white tone, like alabaster, and a woman he knew had once compared it to diamonds and moonbeams. He wasn’t the only one who liked the scruffiness on his cheeks and the short hairs in his nose; he realized that the effect of his white skin was even greater when it contrasted with the black of his hair. His sleep-dimmed eyes seemed to show indifference.
Meanwhile, no one knew that his famous agonized look of secret mourning was the product of meticulous training. As a fifteen-year old, he had spent hour upon hour trying out facial expressions in front of a mirror. Women were transported by the way he looked when his eyes, as if irritated by the sun, teared up a little, and his brows tilted upwards towards his smooth forehead. His smile, proud and a touch contemptuous with its vibrating upper lip, was confined to the lower half of his face and did not extend as far as his eyes. A prominent nose, with a bit of the Bourbon about it; his delicate, chiselled lips, deep red, nearly purple; his teeth strong, with the narrow chin – the heart-shaped outline of his own face was thoroughly pleasing to him. He liked the way it gradually and evenly narrowed from his broad brow and protruding cheekbones to his lower jaw. It’ll make a beautiful skull someday, he thought; yet it would be a shame for it to turn to dust somewhere when he could bequeath it to the Royal Theatre.
However, the visible hint of a double chin annoyed him. Since childhood he’d been inclined to corpulence. For him, boxing, swimming, and cricket had always had more of an aesthetic purpose than an athletic one. In the meantime, he had reconciled himself to the barely perceptible accumulation around his mid-section. His clothes concealed that, but a double chin was something much more serious. Ultimately I’m going to have to grow a beard in order to mask it, he thought. His neck was thin, long, and white, with skin even softer than his face, almost swan-like. His shoulders and torso were perfect. His chest held a thick clutch of black hair, stiff as bristles; then came his powerful arms, slender legs, and the disastrously defective foot. He was born with this handicap, and because of it he had limped since he could walk, but that wasn’t the only agony that caused him to suffer: that crazy Bible-thumper, his governess May, who had deflowered him shortly before his 10th birthday, loved to tell him that he had no soul. ‘The soul is located in one’s feet, young master; wise people know as much. But you either have no soul or it is horrifically evil’ – those were her very words. Much later in life, when he read about such beliefs in a book from the Greeks or Romans he wondered where she had picked up such information. She had also told him that he was the devil, that he was Lucifer, Satan, Mephistopheles, the fallen angel; for the devil – as everybody knows – walks with a limp, because of his fall from the heavens. ‘He tumbled to earth and ever since then he’s been lame. Your mad father sold his soul,’ she said, ‘and now you’re paying for his sins’.
Later on, at Cambridge, he had plunged into learning Greek mythology, mostly on account of Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith to the gods. And they had something more in common: they were both fatherless sons. While he had no memory of his own father, the man everyone referred to as ‘Mad Jack’, it was said that Hephaestus was born by means of parthenogenesis, which seemed to him like a heathen variant of an immaculate conception. Hephaestus’s disability had been inherited by the Roman god Vulcan, and even the Scandinavians and Slavs had their own gods that limped. In his view, the devil’s lameness belonged on this list: fire and a lame leg are what the devil inherited from Hephaestus.
Just as he was finishing shaving himself, Byron nicked himself on the cheek. He wiped a drop of blood away with his thumb and stared at the blade: it was as thin and keen as a thread of silk.
* * *
Hasan turned up for lunch in the company of a man with a red beard. This fellow was of medium height and average build, and was dressed inconspicuously. His face, however, was quite striking; with its thick, red beard, gleaming green eyes and regular but yellowed large teeth. It was a face impossible to forget. The two of them sat silently at the table. The Englishman finished the first portion of their meal – a thick, greasy vegetable soup – but the two other men had not even started eating. They began conversing loudly, presumably in Turkish, uttering occasional guttural laughs. Byron put down his spoon and pushed the plate away. He looked at the wall and started drumming his fingers