‘Just like that?’
‘She did not even look back.’
At the filthy boarding house, rats ran all over the attic where he tried to sleep, while three notorious species of insects roamed his body, punctured his flesh and drank at every orifice. He was so distracted by the insects eating him that his terror of the rats was diminished, and his terror of the rats distracted him from the torture of the bites. He had his first experience of what it was to be hungry. That, like his unsatisfied hunger for mother-love, would turn him into a wolf at the table and in the bedroom for the rest of his life.
After six months, his grandmother rescued him. His once pretty curls were so filthy that they had to be cut off entirely.
Finally, Zanetta left Venice for good. Her travels would take her to Verona, Saint Petersburg, and eventually Dresden, where she spent the rest of her life, showing little interest in her eldest son. Before she left she summoned him to Venice one last time.
‘What was she like, your mother?’ I asked him, so many times. He could not answer me coherently. It appeared that all these decades later he was still awe-struck by his mother’s glamour and her beauty. Zanetta apparently was less impressed with her son when she saw him for the last time, complaining that the colour of his wig did not match his eyebrows.
But at supper Casanova found a way to impress his mother. He reeled off a witty Latin epigram of his own composition. I wish I could remember it now, for its cunning obscenity made me laugh aloud when he told it to me. But I cannot.
I do remember, however, his description of the result. I picture the little boy surrounded by his mother’s elegant guests. After a short thunderstruck silence everyone guffawed or tittered. Affection was shown. His mother, for the rest of the evening anyway, appeared to love him. Choice items were handed to him from the table. His mother smiled at him more than once – definitely, directly at him. She even kissed him goodnight, which was also, of course, goodbye. It was the only time he could remember her touching him with kindness. His tutor, Gozzi, was given a gold watch.
But Casanova had been given something much more valuable. He was only eleven, but he had just learnt that with a clever mouth and good timing he could obtain kisses and other delicious things for that mouth. If he was clever, and outrageous, then pleasures, novelties, and late nights were in store for him. I think that there was born in him that moment the ambition to cultivate such skills as would make him attractive to any woman, including the most inaccessible of them, his mother. From that moment, I believe, he became an entertainer, like his mother. He would perform all over Europe, like his mother. She performed on the stage and in the bedroom, he would perform in the drawing room and the bedroom, the laboratory, the nunnery, the bordello and the casino. Most of all, he would perform on the world’s most elaborately beautiful little stage: Venice.
And that eloquent nose of Casanova’s, it had also been receiving an education. Even when they thought him an idiot, that large and sensitive organ was taking things in. Even as it bled, it was learning things, important things, to serve the rest of his body. It took in the smells of the canal, of the fish market, of sex and sweat and the streets around him.
‘Cecilia,’ he said, ‘think how Venice smelt in those days. My senses were always on fire! I was that age, your age, where the blood is in constant agitation. Every new whiff sent me running like a puppy to nose out its source, and taste it.’
He told me how he smelt the darker scents of Venice, too – in Cannaregio, where the living were starving and the dead were rotting on the streets. In Padua, from his attic bedroom in the dreadful boarding house, he had smelt the smoked herrings, uncooked sausages, and raw eggs in the pantry, found them, and devoured them.
As his experience taught him more smells, he developed his own tastes. Soon he would learn to love the smell of a lover’s sweat. He always adored anything on the redolent edge of corruption, its last flare of flavour soaring up his nostrils. He loved cheeses palpitating with little creatures, over-hung game, ragouts of sudorous truffles, garlic-haunted Spanish stews, Neapolitan macaroni, oysters, sticky salted cod from Newfoundland.
Casanova would bring me delicacies like this, when times were good for him, or, when times were bad, I would steal them from our kitchen for him. We always ate as we talked. It was a kind of communion of memory for him. The talk was of food and of love and of the life of the mind, and especially all three enjoyed together. There was one night where the Milky Way seemed to descend and hang just above our heads, in pinpricks of light. Under the luminous cobweb, Casanova and I chewed on pungent little flakes of salt-cod while he told me of his first unrequited passion.
In Padua Casanova had fallen in love with his tutor’s pretty little sister, Bettina, who teased him with troubling caresses but refused to grant the favours her soft fingers had promised him. She was also conducting a clandestine liaison with a young student. The nervous nature of her secret love weakened her, and Bettina fell ill with the smallpox. The little Casanova sat by her bed as she writhed in a terrifying delirium. This is what love can do, he observed to himself. Even as her body festered, he loved Bettina more and wanted to protect her. Casanova drew no conclusions. He just knew he wanted more love, whatever it cost. He now knew that it could be expensive. He consented to the expense.
Bettina had survived, horribly scarred. Casanova left Padua and came back to Venice. He too was indelibly branded by the smell of love and now he took deep breaths of it everywhere. His guardians sent him to be a priest, but after his first sermon the offertory bag was filled with love letters. He was too drunk to finish his second sermon. He pretended to faint, to avoid humiliation. Then he was caught in flagrante with Teresa Imer, the favourite of his seventy-year-old patron, Malipiero, who beat him with a stick until he escaped through a window into the garden. The story made the rounds of Venice. The legend of Casanova, outrageous seducer of women, received its priming coat of varnish. When my father banished Casanova’s name from our table, the escape from the Palazzo Malipiero was probably the first disturbing image of my lover that had rattled across his mind.
The young Casanova was clearly not intended for the Church. Thinking of the sufferings of poor Bettina, he wanted to study medicine and chemistry, but they sent him to be a lawyer. It turned out to be a useful way of meeting pretty women in distress, but no career for Casanova. He tried the army, travelled to Corfu and Constantinople. Again, failure. He returned to Venice.
So at twenty he became a violin player in the orchestra of the San Samuele Theatre. Gozzi had taught him to play and he found the instrument, like his voice, appealing to women. By his new work he was humiliated but not degraded. People might despise him, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that he was not despicable, and he was optimistic, as always. He told me, ‘I was simply waiting for the wheel of Fortune to turn again in my favour, as it surely would.’
Whenever errands took me to the Calle do Spade at Rialto, I would stop outside the tiny bar where Casanova used to come for refreshment after long nights of short, piled-up pleasures. Masked young men would still arrive, creased and stained with the night’s joys, and I could watch and imagine the young Casanova among them, his hot chocolate always drained first, and the cup eagerly held out for more. He never hoarded the liquid in his glass, or money in his pocket, or seed in his body – if he could help it.
Casanova’s portrait of his young self had become so real to me that I could conjure it up in an instant, even now. But my memories of the names and places and the incidents he described have become diffused. These days I see just the broader canvas. My images of the happy city and of Casanova are mixed on the same palette and I no longer remember the details, just the outlines and the colours.
On that palette I see the great times, poor times, in which he and his friends haunted the alleys and the taverns of Venice, masked and mysterious or unmasked and outrageous. Casanova had the run of the city, which was the playground of Europe, a rich city, a golden ci
ty, a power in the world, a city of twenty thousand courtesans, and a powerfully bad odour sweeping up from her canals in the dog days of the summer. Truly, she stank like a city on the verge of ruin. New trade routes were opening to the East and America. As a serious commercial concern, Venice was being passed by. The city turned instinctively, convulsively to the frantic prostitution of her less respectable charms and, by the time Casanova reached his prime, La Serenissima had set herself up for one last decadent decades-long fancy dress party, a masked ball, to which everyone was invited. In Venice, everyone might now invent the role their fantasy desired for them and don the mask of their choice in order to play it to the full.
A mask is the portrait you choose for yourself.
Of course it was Casanova who first taught me what it is to wear a mask: the sense of sudden, dangerous freedom, when your face is hidden from those around you. Everyone should try it, in order to see what lies hidden inside themselves. For the mask, perversely, opens that side of you to the world. You can do anything! You can permit anything. You take more risks. You unmask your genitals to fornicate with masked strangers, but you do not remove the mask from your face. You put unknown foods into your mouth; you walk too close to the edge of the canal. You don’t know how close because you have no peripheral vision, for the mask tells you what to see, just as it tells the others how much they may see of you, and what they should make of you.
One night Casanova and I went out together, masked, and he showed me the places he had roamed thirty years before. It must have been the first time I had worn a mask: I remember no previous occasion. Casanova had chosen Pulcinella, with a hooked nose and white skullcap. For me, he brought La Civetta, the flirt, with its elongated owl eyes and a ruffle of gold lace to hide my nose and lips. But I remember clearly how I felt when he tied the ribbons behind my hair and spun me around to face him. He gazed down on me expectantly. My inner transformation was instantaneous. Once inside my mask, I felt potent and dangerous. I felt I could commit rape, and murder. I felt I could enter the Doges’ Palace and seduce the footman, and the Doge. I lost my own place in society. I was no longer Cecilia Cornaro, daughter of a respectable and prosperous merchant. I could be whoever I wanted.
’Ecco!’ Casanova exclaimed, when I told him all this. ‘You understand, Cecilia.’
With his fellow musicians, the masked Casanova had rampaged around Venice. After a night’s performance they would retire to the tavern, leaving it only to spend the night in a brothel. If they found the bedrooms already in service, they would force the occupants to take to their heels, misbuttoning their pantaloons in panic and perplexity. Then Casanova and his friends would fall like werewolves upon the abandoned whores. They never paid the women, considering the pleasure they had given quite sufficient joy for the miserable creatures.
They passed their idle days thinking up scandalous practical jokes, and the nights in putting them into execution. They would wake midwives and send them to deliver women who were not even with child. They sent priests to deliver the last rites to perfectly healthy noblemen. In each street they passed they relentlessly cut the bell cord of every door. If they found a door unlocked they rushed in and terrified all the sleeping inhabitants, screaming that the street door was open. They would stand and laugh at the array of grimy night-caps and curl-papers that would come stumbling down the stairs.
Finally, one night during Carnevale, they pretended to be officers of the Council of Ten. They kidnapped three unfortunate weavers from a tavern and subjected them to a summary mock trial. The terrified artisans were dumped on the stony shore of the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. The pretty wife of one hostage meanwhile submitted with good grace and evident enjoyment to the amorous attentions of the masked pirates. The happy woman was thereafter safely returned to her door, where she thanked her escorts most sincerely and in good faith for their kindness. Her husband found her fast asleep in bed when he finally made his way home from San Giorgio at daybreak the next morning. No harm done. The wife would say nothing against her captors, who had, she declared, behaved like the gentlemen they evidently were.
‘She did not mind so many men?’ I remember asking. The story had made me feel uneasy. Casanova’s reply has stayed with me, every word.
‘It was a kind of mutual frenzy. We all consented to abandon the normal conventions of love. We all lived outside them that night. She was respectable, but given this chance, she let the animal side of her nature come to greet us. Then, when she went home, she went back to a normal, lawful married life, just a little happier than she was before, and with a joyful memory to sustain her.’
‘I suppose I felt like that after our first night,’ I said, thoughtfully.
There was no such return for Casanova and his friends. They had finally gone too far, not in the pleasuring of the weaver’s wife, but in impersonating the officers of the Council of Ten. The exploit made them outlaws and put a price of five hundred ducati on their heads. Casanova told me that he was gratified at the amount. He had not worried unduly. ‘You see, our leader was a member of the Balbi family, the Balbis of San Vio – the palazzo where your studio is now.’ Not even the Inquisitors would punish a patrician.
However, the Group of Eight disbanded after this event, their nocturnal frolics at an end.
‘We were not so foolhardy as to continue to tempt fate.’
‘That time.’
‘Yes, that time.’
Three or four months later, Casanova discovered that every detail of the truth was known to the Inquisitors, including the identity of each of the perpetrators. His name had been noted, his file had been opened, and he would not have to reach much further into the realm of misbehaviour to reap the full consequences of that night and every other night when, masked or unmasked, he had ruffled the serenity of La Serenissima.
‘One more mistake and I would be in serious trouble.’ Casanova told me.
My own family was of the upper merchant class. My father was handsome, hard-working and contented except in that my mother had failed to provide a male heir. One day, I hoped, I would surprise him, and soothe that pain, converting this sense of failure to pride. But not yet. For then I knew that my activities, if discovered, would put him out of countenance in the gravest manner imaginable: it would draw attention, unwelcome attention, to our family. I was biding my time, until I could surprise him wonderfully.
My father traded in fabrics and objets d’art from the eastern edges of the Venetian empire. Downstairs in the magazzino my father’s men unloaded straw baskets of ostrich feathers, moulded caskets of pearls from Ormuz, shimmering rolls of Damascus cloth, Masulipatam muslin from India, and strange wooden cages of Armenian bric-a-brac. In turn, he exported the artistry of Venice to the far-flung cities that were hungry for our graceful luxuries. Sometimes I begged to go with my father on his visits to the Venetian artisans who worked for him. The weavers and pressers of silk unfurled their marvels with shy pride when we arrived and the lace-makers bent blushing over their creations, which were so delicate that they seemed like frosty breath. Under his direction the embroiderers made a simple red silk blossom with flowers of silver and gold thread. My father held up colours to the light for me to see, and he taught me their names. There are fabrics in this world that can only be Venetian, like the watered marezzato silk, mangled in the dyeing to make a pattern as wave-like and lucent as the surface of our lagoon. In Venice we make iridescent satins winking alternate colours as you turn it this way or that, like light on the surface of a canal. We cut deep designs into pliant velvet, alto-basso like the difference between high and low water. These colours and textures were the currency of our family wealth. He knew about beauty, my father, and in Venice this had made him rich.
My father also traded in jewelled and enamelled snuffboxes and with these, even more than with the fabrics, he secured and nourished our prosperity. It seems such a tiny thing now, a snuffbox, such an inconsiderable thing: a little trinket that would fit in the hand. But I talk
of the great age of the snuffbox, which captured our desire for all things exquisite and concentrated in their beauty, things that would hold our flighty, promiscuous attention for a moment, and not demand more. For in those days Venice craved the pretty little things, not the solemnity of grandeur. We were fastidious and nice-gutted: nothing too crude, large or vulgar pleased us. We loved the Lilliputian domestic scenes of Pietro Longhi and Rosalba’s winsome miniatures. The great Goldoni wrote poems about flies, beauty spots and silver spoons. Instead of churches, in those days it was the snuffboxes we decorated with elaborate mosaics. We had snuffboxes for every season: light blue enamel for the summer, tortoiseshell sprinkled with emeralds and topaz for the autumn. There were bone-china snuffboxes, and those worked in solid gold, others in silver inlaid with pearls. In my father’s studios, the artisans fondled their tiny little tools, and every time we went there we found new and more beautiful boxes laid out upon little velvet pillows.
My father did not touch snuff. Not so many people did. That was not the point of the snuffboxes: it was the possession of this little share of the world’s beauty and it was the grace with which the owner might flick his box open, with a flourish of jewelled fingers and manicured hands. Such things my father frowned upon himself. He did not care for ostentation, as I have told you. Our own pretty palazzo at Miracoli was decrepit on the outside. The mist and damp were allowed to gnaw their way through the painted facade, leaving blisters and scabs of paint and render. My father saw no point in trying to hold back Nature’s voracity for the sake of pride. But inside our palazzo all was immaculate, beautiful, quietly luxurious – and private as the interior of an ancient seashell.
We knew our place in Venice, but barely. For in those years, even my father must have been conscious that behind the masks, the edges of society were starting to soften, as everything was, with the general corruption of Venice. There were noblemen managing the theatres! There were courtesans in the libraries! In the casinos threadbare aristocrats on the fall met ambitious parvenus on the rise. Just as Venice had no physical walls around her, she had no walls within her these days. Everyone and everything was for sale. Even entry into the Libro d’oro, the golden book of the nobles, was possible at a certain price. But the high nobility remained a small, tight circle. Amongst the oldest families the birth rate was almost null: the aristocracy was diseased and weakened by its century-long debauch. Moreover, when so many frantic pleasures beckoned, the domestic ones lacked allure.
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