But one person had been able, through coincidences and manipulations of chance, to enter that small, tight circle of nobility, and leave behind him, for a while, the threadbare truth of his origins. That person was, of course, Casanova. It was a tale he loved to tell, especially now that all involved were dead or senile, and he could safely reveal the stage-machinery behind the scenes that took him from the back streets and gave him a new position in the world: that of the cherished pet mystic of three affable, gullible and rich Venetian noblemen.
It took two nights, but he told me the whole story. This time we decided to tear ourselves from the squirrel-fur rug and enjoy the fruits and juices of Venice. We made a tour of the small bars in the dark streets, where men and women greeted Casanova by name and me with complicit smiles. We sat sipping fragolino from little earthenware bowls called mezo boca’éto, half mouthfuls. We went to the pastry shops and ate whipped cream with wafers. We went to a magazén, a strange combination of wine-shop, pawnbroker and bordello, where we took one of the rooms allocated for debauchery. I had started to ask Casanova, ‘Why can we not go to your apartments …?’ but he always closed my mouth with a gentle finger which I sometimes bit.
On our way up the dusty stairs to our room we passed two wretches hugging jars of dark liquid. ‘Borrowers’ wine,’ said Casanova. He explained that those who pawned their goods were obliged to accept a third of their payment in cheap liquor, drinkable only at times of desperation. We ourselves had our own picnic of stolen titbits from my family’s kitchen secreted under my cloak. Upstairs in the dark shuttered bedroom, to the rhythmic music of the mattress next door, we laid out the prosciutto, bread and olives and wine on my scarf. Over these delicacies, talking with his mouth full and repeatedly knocking his wine-goblet flying with his extravagant gestures, Casanova related to me the crucial event in his young life.
It happened when he was twenty-one years old. It was on the night of April 21st 1746, at the wedding of Girolamo Cornaro della Regina and a daughter of the Soranzo family of San Polo. Casanova was fiddling in the orchestra at the Palazzo Soranzo.
‘A cousin of yours, I presume?’ Casanova asked. I nodded. My own family, one of the discreet minor branches of the family, had no doubt been invited for some secondary festivities. The party, a famous one, had gone on for three entire days.
As he left the wedding, in the dead of its last exhausted night, Casanova had passed by the red-robed Venetian nobleman, Matteo Bragadin. At that moment a letter fell from the senator’s pocket and fluttered to the ground.
‘Imagine that dropped letter,’ Casanova told me. ‘Fix your mind upon it. That piece of paper changed my life. To think that I might have walked past and left it! But I did not.’
Politely, Casanova had drawn the nobleman’s attention to the letter. I can imagine the charming gesture with which he bent to pick it up and hand it to the older man, and the modest grace with which he accepted the grateful invitation of Matteo Bragadin to accompany him a way in his gondola, moored just outside the palazzo.
But in the gondola, Bragadin collapsed in sudden convulsions. Faintly, he complained that his arm was numb. His eves were starting to lose their lustre. Casanova helped him home, shooed off the local doctor, and willed Bragadin back to life with a combination of vague medical knowledge and theatrical hocus-pocus. Fortunately, Bragadin survived. He refused to entertain the thought that his recovery had been anything other than a miracle wrought by the fascinating young man who had rescued him.
As witnesses to his miraculous recovery, Bragadin called in his loyal old friends, the nobles Dandolo and Barbaro. I can picture the young Casanova, his beautiful, vigorous body folded into a leather chair in Bragadin’s study, his eyes modestly downcast while the three old men all but danced around him, whispering with childish excitement. When questioned Casanova lifted his large clear eyes to them, one by one, and spoke to them all so convincingly, with such obliquity and with such passion that the noblemen were entranced. He hinted that he possessed a magical mathematical formula with which he might know anything he wanted to. Bragadin explained wisely to Dandolo and Barbaro that Casanova’s secret was to do with the cult of Solomon’s clavicle, known as the cabbala. The others nodded wisely.
Casanova did not deny it. Nor did he confirm it. He had already divined that these three old friends beguiled their time with pleasant dabbling in the esoteric arts. He made sure that a charming and mysterious smile greeted their every rhetorical question. Ever after that night Bragadin and his friends would believe in Casanova’s occult powers, and Casanova would allow them to do so. In this way, he became their indispensable oracle. They thought that, having him at their disposal, they would have the mythical Philosophers’ Stone in their grasp: that they would therefore be able to turn the world upside down, and transform base metals into gold.
Of course, to have Casanova at their disposal, the three noblemen must perforce put themselves at his.
So Casanova was plucked out of the Calle della Commedia, out of his shabby class, out of the orchestra pit, and taken to live in the Palazzo Bragadin near Santa Maria dei Miracoli. Indeed, it seemed a miracle to him, for suddenly he had his own apartment, his own new clothes, his own servant, and his own gondola. He would share the luxurious table of his host, and enjoy an allowance of ten zecchini a month. He was not to feel beholden to his patron; he was a free agent. The Wheel of Fortune had indeed turned full circle.
‘After all, I owe you my life,’ Bragadin loved to say, fondly.
Casanova knew full well that this was not true, but he saw no harm in allowing it to be thought.
‘If you wish to be my son, you have only to accept me as your father,’ Bragadin would add, revealing yet again his innocence and good nature.
Casanova, not so innocent, knew that he would never be noble, a nobleman’s son. He would always be the son of an actress and part-time courtesan. But this was the next best thing. The violin was cast aside; the humiliation evaporated. All he had to do was entertain his new father and his friends, and satisfy their avidity for knowledge of the occult. For this purpose, he invented a spirit, Paralis, whom he consulted on all obscure and difficult matters. The capricious Paralis spoke only in runes and double-entendres, and sometimes not at all. Sometimes Casanova and Paralis were occupied eight hours a day entertaining Bragadin, Dandolo and Barbaro. Paralis was a most possessive spirit and saw off all other pretenders to the noblemen’s affections, including at least one potential wife.
It was just before dawn. We roused ourselves on the sordid bed. Some time at an early hour Casanova’s voice had slowed and stilled to heavy slow breathing among the swags of my hair.
We exchanged sour-tasting but sweet morning kisses, at first with affection but soon with passion. The bells, as usual, forced us apart. He walked me home to Miracoli. Before I slipped into the house, we arranged to meet the next night at the church of San Geminiano.
My mother found me unconscious on my bed two hours later and could not rouse me. I slept the entire day and woke to the bitter herbal vapour of a tisane beside my bed and the shadows drawing in outside. I opened my eyes, sniffing. My father was looking down on me.
‘Are you unwell, Cecilia?’ he asked.
I started to smile, but retracted my lips instantly, trying to look wan and delicate. ‘I shall be recovered after a little more rest. I shall not come to dinner tonight.’
’Va bene, Cecilia. That seems prudent. You are indeed a little pale. I shall tell your mother that you should not be disturbed.’
As soon as he had gone, I slipped out of the house. That night Casanova and I walked from the church to his gondola and floated away to San Vio to hear the rest of his story.
In that story my own image of Casanova merges with that which the poets of the pen and the paintbrush have left us in their records of the happy city in her happiest moments, those of Casanova’s years as a rich young man about town.
Now Casanova was allowed his mad, extravagant, lustful youth,
not unlike Bragadin’s own. How life had changed for him! Now his playground was the costly society life of the Piazza San Marco, the meeting place of the intellectuals, the lechers and the women. Again, he went to the dogs, but this time in style. There was no end to his entertainments, scarcely any of them respectable. Under the shadow of the Church of San Geminiano, he muttered some prayers on his way home after nights of every kind of expensive debauchery.
As always, Casanova took the chance he had been given, and then took it to excess. Casanova’s first leg-up to loftier social spheres had left him with a lifelong obsession with social climbing. But Venice knew his background too well. He could not charm or marry himself into the Libro d’oro. Among high society, in his mask (or with the mask he made of himself with his mobile features) he was the jester, the entertainer. He was almost an insider, but the young nobles who were amused by him now would never quite forget the poverty of his birth. Casanova never abandoned the friends of his violin-playing years. Among them, in his mask again, Casanova talked rough dialect, seduced the sisters of his friends. He was almost a glamorous insider, but his low-life companions could never forget that he had talents and refined tastes from beyond the back canals. Casanova was an unstable, fascinating brilliant element, a free spirit, rolling from pleasure to pleasure like a drop of mercury. In his mask, with gold in his purse, he tried everything. He was curious, famished for novelty, greedy for new faces and facts, and this curiosity was bound to get him into trouble, picaresque trouble. In those days of spies and censors, it made others, dangerous others, curious about him.
The Inquisitors showed an interest in the wild young man who kept proscribed books, consorted with foreigners, conducted liaisons with the women of men more eminent than himself. The practical jokes had become more extreme and less tasteful. There was the episode with the severed arm which Casanova excavated from a grave and placed in the bed of an acquaintance. The game ended badly, for the victim of this practical joke, Signor Demetrio, discovering the bloodied limb upon the coverlet, had suffered a seizure from which he never recovered.
Venice was becoming too small, too hot for Casanova.
So in 1748, aged twenty-three and just in time to avoid arrest, Casanova began to travel. He took himself to places where his pedigree was more shadowy, where the truth about him could be obscured in a miasma of charm. He also travelled in search of gainful employment or at least profitable entertainment, to taste new things, meet new people, not all of them women. In his time, Casanova would meet writers, priests, diplomats and adventurers. He would meet generals and charlatans. In the course of his travels he would make his extravagant bow to nearly everyone who was anyone from Catherine the Great, Madame de Pompadour, Farinelli il Castrato, several Popes. He made a point of it. Every new face was a treasured novelty for him.
Casanova himself, I am sure, was just as choice a morsel for the jaded palates of those he met. Charisma like his, potent as perfume-essence, was welcome in every yawning drawing room in Europe. To Casanova’s youth and vitality there was an extra sheen: he was a Venetian. He was an unofficial ambassador from the mythical happy city. He had something about him they could not name, but wanted to touch.
Casanova told me, and I shall never forget it, ‘When you say to a Englishman, a Frenchman, a Pole, a German, a Spaniard, “I am a Venetian,” they always acquire a far-away look. This is because what they hear inside their heads is this: “I am tainted with corrupt splendour, I am a cipher for dark secrets, I am a creature apart, I was spawned in decadence and live upon the water. I am as unlike you as I can possibly be, and yet not quite a Turk or a fish.”’
Of course, the Europeans were fascinated, attracted, and, more importantly, would pay for the privilege. Casanova was not the only Venetian abroad in those days. Joining him along the by-ways between Paris, Prague, London, Madrid, Vienna, Moscow, Dresden and Constantinople were Canaletto and Bellotto, Goldoni and Rosalba, the Ricci and the Tiepolos …
‘One day, you will join them on those roads, Cecilia,’ Casanova told me. ‘With your talent, with your bathtub full of stretched canvases, you will see the world, and the world will see you. What a pleasure for the world!’
I laughed. But I was already beginning to think it was possible. I thought of the portrait currently on the easel in my studio. I thought of an easel in a foreign court, a throng of Frenchmen surrounding me, gesticulating with delight at my work.
Casanova leant over and gathered me up in his arms, pulling me on top of him. ‘Do you love me, Cecilia?’
I raised my knees and spread myself over him like a little frog, nibbling his lips. I said, ‘I love you enough to eat you entirely’
‘Don’t say that, Cecilia,’ he told me. ‘I once knew a woman who did.’
The Milliner’s Tale
BY GIACOMO GIROLAMO CASANOVA,
CHEVALIER DE SEINGALT, VENETIAN POET
It happened in …
Did I ever tell you?
I had just escaped from Spain.
Three cut-throats had been sent to murder me at the border,
Probably the bravoes of the Duke of Ricla,
Whose wicked Nina … Or it could have been Manuzzi,
The anti-natural mistress of Ambassador Mocenigo,
Whom I offended by my indiscretion …
It was so easy for a man to make enemies in those days!
My gossip cost me the governorship of a colony
And nearly my life.
But I run away with myself. That’s another story. This one is about the milliner.
The mistress of la Pérouse:
A milliner. Pretty, slight, fair,
A look of rumpled linen about her pale face,
One of those blondes whose skin dimples like a ripening strawberry in her moments of joy.
So La Pérouse told us.
Anyway, when he left her,
Instead of the Eucharist, one Sunday,
She swallowed his portrait, and died.
First, she ate his mouth,
Whose lips she’d tried to swallow gently, so many times,
His nose, which she’d often sniffed for the perfumes of other women.
Then his hair, from which she’d combed the lice with
Her own small hands.
Last of all she ate his eyes,
Because they no longer looked at her
The way they did before.
Then, as I said, she died.
She choked on him, in her little shop
Full of hats, stockings and under-drawers of both types,
In one pocket, they found his love letters.
The other one was full of tears.
Chapter 6
El leto xe ‘l paradiso dei poveri.
Bed is the heaven of the poor.
VENETIAN PROVERB
Of course, during all this time when we were together, Casanova was living with another woman, in another part of town, and they sincerely loved each other. Francesca Buschini, a seamstress, kept his small house by the Barberìa delle Tole, near Zannipoli, in the northern edge of Venice.
Casanova rarely spoke to me of Francesca, but he hid nothing from me if I chose to ask him specific questions. But I did not wish to discuss it with him. I had preferred to find out about Francesca in other ways, much as I had distilled information about him before we became lovers: with my own subtle inquiries on the streets, in the convent, at Florian. So now I knew, from diverse sources, that he shared his little house not only with her, but with her brother and her mother. Francesca was devoted to him, and I understood that he needed the soft, gentle refuge of her after the wearying vagrant years that had finally delivered him back to Venice.
For I was beginning to see that Casanova, who seemed so vibrant to me, was living in the dog days of his life. To me, he was the emperor of my happiness, but I could not help noticing the threadbare lapel of his frock-coat and the darning of his breeches. I had only ever seen him wear one pair of shoes, somewhat ignominious ones,
gnarled at the toes. I saw the grey hairs that curled out from under his wig, and when I lay my head upon his breast after lovemaking I heard the slight wheeze above his heart. The days of his youth, which he brought alive for me every night, were almost impossible to reconcile with the poverty of his present. I understood that now that he had fallen upon hard times he needed to be with someone uncritical, unsneering and unaristocratic. His nerves were frayed by years of fawning and he had developed two tics along the lines of his much-practised sycophantic smile, the smile that said, ‘But, of course, how utterly right you are, and what pleasure your insight gives us all …’
With women, I could see, Casanova might sometimes allow himself to share his failure. With women, especially women like Francesca, I realised that he was permitted not to smile at all, to let his features relax and to allow himself even to drop his guard, even to weep, to stand vacantly by a window, clutching the curtain made not from some rich brocade, but from something simple, his, without graft or flattery. He could rest his head on the giving abundance of her breast, and sleep.
Of course he had no money. God knows how he paid for my beautiful paints and the exotic foods he brought me. All his life, apart from those precious few years as Bragadin’s protege, he had suffered from the lack of money, abased himself to obtain a little, and squandered it when he received it. He had never owned enough for long enough to support an honest woman.
Carnevale Page 9