With Francesca, I understood, he could be weak, old, frightened. He would sleep in her arms, whimper in his dreams, leave an old man’s spittle on her shoulder, cheap make-up on the thin pillowcase, pomade on her nightdress, a grey hair and a thin laboured emission in her willing mouth. How could I be jealous of this?
With me he could be magic, tragic and potent. But dignified, never! And what cares a convent girl, half-depraved by her erotic awakening, for dignity?
Of course, I fell to daydreaming sometimes. I pushed my knuckles against my eyes to obstruct reality. Into the pulsing darkness comes Casanova. He comes to my bed. It is heaven there.
‘Cecilia, I have something important to tell you.’
His shoulder shudders with a little sob, the pain of his final parting from the estimable Francesca.
‘I give my life to you, Cecilia. I beg you to take it with both hands.’
He cannot say more, for his mouth is contorted with the effort of not weeping. He has stumbled here, his eyes full of tears, and has fallen somewhere along the way. His left garter lolls around his ankle, and the sagging stocking shows a trickling rosary of blood.
I rush to him. I kiss his nose, his eyes, the wound on his knee. I smooth down his rampant hair, tie up the garter. We are both kneeling. He pushes his head into my lap, and wraps his arms around my thighs.
‘I will look after you, Casanova,’ I tell him.
He holds me harder, and whimpers a little.
From his pocket spills a coil of pearls.
‘These are for me?’
They are wedding pearls, such as all Venetian brides wear in their first year of marriage.
Chapter 7
Le done ga do scarsèle:
una per la làgreme, una per le busie.
Women have two pockets:
one for tears and one for lies.
VENETIAN PROVERB
When I went to Casanova the next night I was voracious with new curiosity. And the first thing I wanted to know was this: why did he never marry? And the second one was this: would he ever marry me? In my pocket I carried a pair of little rings made of glass. I turned them on my fingers as we talked, and rubbed them against each other. As I listened, I became rough with them. They clattered like miniature castanets inside my skirt. Finally they fractured between my fingers. I emptied the shards from my pocket and gazed at the coloured dust, like entrails of a disembowelled kaleidoscope.
Casanova blew the fragments from my fingers. ‘What is this, Cecilia?’
I never told him, because that night, when we tipped up the kaleidoscope of his memories, we saw Teresa, and we saw Henriette.
We had taken the gondola to the pleasure gardens of Guidecca and sat in the shadows of a gazebo. The tracery of the ironwork tattooed Casanova’s face with shadows in the moonlight. He looked as if he was wearing a mask. But his voice came, rich and familiar, from the mouth that had only just unfastened itself from mine. I held his hand and listened to the tale, stroking his fingers.
In 1754, when he was twenty-nine years old, Casanova met Bellino, an apparent castrato. The voice was exquisite, but there was something mysterious in the young man’s aura, something alluring. Casanova found himself falling violently in love with the creature, without knowing which sex it really was. As he loved Bellino erotically, Casanova felt that Bellino’s body was telling him that he was, in reality, a woman.
But every attempt to forage for the truth in Bellino’s nether garments was energetically repelled. Casanova started to be tortured by doubts about the gender of the object of his desires, and by the nature of his own lusts. Bellino, meanwhile, hunted and cornered, tried to placate Casanova with his two little sisters.
At this, I raised my eyebrows. Casanova raised his hands in surprise.
‘Of course I accepted, Cecilia. Imagine if you had been in my position. The first was another Cecilia,’ he told me, ‘like you, but younger, and a virgin. And then her sister, Marina, just as sweet. I loved them kindly for the nights I spent with them, and they are still adorable in my memory. But it was Bellino’s virginity that I hungered for, and Bellino’s love. Love is divine condiment that makes that little mouthful delectable. The little girls merely whetted my appetite for the main course, and I was glad to give them a tender education to serve in their future pleasures.’
I wrinkled up my nose, childishly. Casanova merely kissed it and went on with his story.
Deranged with lust, he schemed and planned to unmask Bellino’s secret. Eventually he stole a glimpse at Bellino’s private parts, and was devastated to see that the object of his desires was indeed, apparently, male. But even then he could not give up his obsession. Casanova’s optimism, as ever, eventually found a solution for his dolorous conundrum. He persuaded himself that what he had seen was merely a monstrous clitoris, and he was inflamed anew with curiosity and lust. For what a passionate nature must be endowed with such an expressive part!
Eventually – how could anyone withstand such assiduous attentions? – Bellino revealed himself as Teresa. She turned out to be an impoverished girl who pretended to be a castrato to further her musical career, so that she could support her family. In case of examination, to which castrati were often subjected in those days, she was equipped with a fascinating device. This was what he had glimpsed, and what had desolated him for a time. Now it delighted him.
Casanova described it for me, using his finger and thumb.
‘It was a long soft piece of gut, the size of a thumb, white and with a silky surface … This contraption was attached to the centre of a very delicate, transparent oval-shaped piece of leather, five or six inches long and two inches wide. By applying this skin with some tragacanth gum, Teresa obliterated her female organ from sight.’
He told me how he begged her to put it on. With a gentle finger he found, to his joy, that the soft pendant offered no obstruction to the actual well of her fascinating passage. He was so aroused by the novel device that he made comical but delicious hermaphroditic love to her on the spot.
I could picture his avidity: I knew it well. When he wanted something, he would purse his lips in a little mew, with the most fervent twinkle in the eye.
‘And I did not omit to thank the God who had brought me this new experience. As I thank him for you, Cecilia, now.’ He kissed me.
Teresa set a pattern. Now Casanova knew that there was always something of interest to be found in the pockets of women. Be it lies, love, or tears, Casanova wanted to know He needed to know. It might be something he had not tried before.
His greatest love, Henriette, a mysterious Provencal noblewoman, wore a military uniform until he prised her, and her secret femininity, out of it. They spent three months of ineffable bliss in Parma. He had never been so close to a woman.
‘We went to sleep,’ he told me, ‘only to wake in the morning, see each other naked and then we would fall like tigers upon each other. Eventually, we would rise, more in love than when we went to bed. Anyone who says a woman cannot make a man deliriously happy all hours of the day and night can never have known a Henriette.’
‘Did you never quarrel? Were you never bored with her?’
‘I was welded to her, mind, soul and body Never a folded rose petal came between us.’
But within three months the idyll came to an end. Henriette had no more surprises for him. As she said herself, she had emptied the sack. And then, when they parted, through no fault of either of them, she left him a sorrow that is almost sweeter than pleasure. Henriette wrote him a letter telling him to imagine that they had shared a beautiful dream. She told him not to languish in chastity. She wrote, ‘I wish you to love again, and even to find another Henriette.’
‘Why did you not marry Henriette?’ I asked him.
‘Why, indeed. Sometimes I have been ashamed of loving other women after God had offered me Henriette.’
‘But marriage – no?’
‘Cecilia, it’s sacrament I detest. Marriage is the tomb of love. The word
“marriage” is used only as a respectable mask for the most flattering of ideas – the passion of men and women. I prefer the passion without the mask.’
‘Even when it means that your love will end one day?’
‘Even then. Always. And so I lost Henriette.’
‘But you have me.’
‘It’s true, my darling, but will we always have each other? Will you always want me? You are a curious woman who loves novelties. Remember the caterpillars you told me about. Remember how you love new flavours, all my stories. The more bizarre they are, the better I please you. I am the same kind of man. It’s curiosity that makes men unfaithful. If all women had the same looks and the same minds, a man would have no difficulty in remaining faithful. In fact, he would never even fall in love. He would take the first woman he found and remain happily with her till he died. But we are not like that. We are the slaves of novelty. She uses us to her own ends.’
Later that night, after heavy losses, we slunk out of a casino. Casanova held me under his cape, but he was not with me. He had left his heart in the little gold snuffbox he had handed over at the final count. Henriette had given him that snuffbox. The gondolier had been dismissed hours before. We would walk to my home, in the moonlight. We slipped past San Geminiano into the Piazza of San Marco.
It was acqua alta, the Piazza was afloat. The full moon in reflection laughed in the belly of it. Sneers and chuckles of water slapped the steps of the Procuratie.
‘Shall we walk around to Rialto?’ I asked. There was higher ground there.
‘No, my darling,’ said Casanova. ‘We shall not be afraid of the water. We are Venetians. It is our element.’
He scooped me up in his arms and strode into the milky moonlit water. His legs disappeared into the dark, panting liquid up to his knees. He carried me diagonally across the square, held close against his breast. Over his shoulder I watched our slender wake, and then I turned to see the moon above us. The columns of the Piazza were reflected upon the water; we dizzied their reflections as we passed. Casanova warmed my ear with his breath. My left slipper dropped from my foot and was swallowed by the water like a delicacy. With my bare toe I caressed Casanova’s thigh. He reached around with his hand and held my foot, smoothing my toes with delicate strokes. When we reached the Formosa end of the Piazza, we rose out of the water like a confection of Venuses.
At that moment a nun hustled past us, her white pinafore stained with blood. The blank expression on her hard young features frightened me. I told myself that at this hour she must have come from a childbirth or a sickbed. But what was she doing alone?
Casanova watched her until she slipped behind a column. Then she disappeared as if she had never been. For a moment I doubted if she had.
‘Did we …?’ I asked Casanova.
He was lost in his thoughts. Still he did not put me down. He held me tighter.
‘Yes, it was a nun, my soul,’ he said slowly.
‘What are you thinking about?’ I asked him.
In 1753, Casanova returned from his travels to Venice. He was now stuffed with information about the occult, the freemasons, astrology, astronomy, the cabbala. But he had brought with him a lucid cynicism about it all. More importantly, he intended to use this new knowledge not for philosophical pursuits but for pleasure.
Back in Venice, Casanova played the casinos, all one hundred and thirty-two of them, for the delights they offered and the opportunities to dazzle with his systems and keys. In those days the casinos or ridotti were small, unofficial clubs, meeting places for trysting, gambling, dancing and seditious conversation. They were also a place for the classes to mix, and as the Venetian republic gradually dissolved, the first places to melt were these casinos. Casanova, the man of indeterminate class, felt at home in the smoky depths, pungent with opium, of his chosen casino, curious always; even then his eager eye would raise each time the door opened, in a shower of cold air – would it be a new lover, a new protector, a gambler with a new game to teach?
And inside the pockets of women, there were still more surprises to find. Inside the robes of nuns, for example, Casanova found two of the most amorous bodies he ever touched.
C. C. and M. M. he called his nuns, covering their identities with initials that acted like Venetian masks. Their initials were drawn, for Casanova, from an intimate alphabet of semi-anonymous desire, free of convention, free of inhibition. In his stories, Casanova would often rechristen the real women like this, with liberating, concealing initials. He loved, in his time, M. M., C. C., Mlle XVC and Mesdames, it seemed to me, A to Z. Under their initials, as under their masks, women could be whomever they wanted to be.
Casanova was quite gratified to find that his rival with M. M. was no less than the French ambassador. The rotund de Bernis, a future Cardinal, spied on Casanova through a peephole as he performed his best with the nun in the small room at San Moise decorated with encouraging erotic prints. Everyone knew who was watching whom, which heightened everyone’s enjoyment. And best of all was the unforgettable night Casanova spent with both nuns. He told me about it, rejoicing in the geometry and in the violence of their tripartite pleasures. ‘We ravished everything of each other’s until we all three became the same sex.’
‘But were you found out? You and the nuns?’
News of the nuns and other adventures seeped into the gossip parlours of Venice, and into more official ears. Casanova was living dangerously. He was larger than life, he made a noise, he attracted attention. In Venice the walls had not only ears but mouths. Around the city, stone lions’ mouths in walls opened in grimaces of disgust to receive denunciations of Casanova. These letters were carried to the Inquisitors. Files opened years before were now fattened with incriminating reports and testimonials.
Casanova was becoming careless, thinking himself beloved by Fate. He was so in love with his own life that he could not look outside it and see the danger.
Finally, Casanova’s outrageous luck ran out. He had received warnings in profusion, but he had refused to hear them. He had been too busy being Casanova. One night, his patron Bragadin embraced him sadly. ‘I am going to lose you to the Inquisition, my son.’ Casanova returned the embrace with true affection. How kind this man had been to him! Still he felt himself inviolable.
But the next morning, July 25th 1755, Casanova was arrested, denounced by a dozen secret spies for atheism, licentious living and freemasonry.
In his apartment the Inquisitors’ henchmen found Ariosto, Horace, Le Portier des Chartreux, a magic spell-book, and Aretino’s book of thirty-five useful sexual positions. Worse, they found all the ephemera of the freemasons, including The Key of Solomon, The Zecorben, the key work of the cabbala, and a Picatrix, a manual for creating perfumes and spells to conjure up demons of all classes.
For his arrest Casanova dressed in silk and lace, as if on his way to a wedding. The actor’s son was still acting as a nobleman. No one itemised the charge against him, and he saw no reason to cut a brutta figura and creep around like one humiliated. Anyway, he would soon be out, he was certain. Bragadin, he thought, would see to things, as always.
But as he crossed the Bridge of Sighs and was ushered into his cell, Casanova suddenly realised that he was now not merely in trouble; he was in danger. There was no limit to the power of the Inquisitors. In those days wrong-doers would simply disappear off the streets. They would be found maimed and strangled, hanging by one leg somewhere conspicuous, days or years later, a rare and stark lesson in consequences to the inhabitants of the too-happy city.
Casanova found himself making water every quarter of an hour, the first time such a thing had happened to him. He filled two large chamber pots with dark urine.
‘My body was telling me the crisis I was in,’ Casanova told me. ‘I had refused to accept it in my soul. But suddenly it was all clear. I was destroyed. And I had brought it all upon myself entirely. I had such a bitter taste in my mouth as I have never experienced before or since,’ he told me, kissi
ng me for comfort against the remembered shock and pain.
As he withdrew his mouth from mine and looked down on me, a pantegana, a huge water-rat, scuttled across San Vio. He was the biggest I had ever seen. The cat growled, but even he did not attempt to follow the monster.
‘A worthy ambassador from my old enemies,’ said Casanova, pointing at the rat. ‘They nearly got me that time.’
The Song of the Pantegane in the Prisons of the Doges’ Palace, Venice
The culls come in all aflourish in their lace
They’re bacon-fed and pasta-gutted
Silk waistcoats stretched over tripes and trullibubs
Stale drunk, tears of the bottle on their frock-coats
Pink and breathless from the pushing shop or
Trouser-ripe from lying in state with their regular harlots.
They think they’ll soon be out.
Ha!
It’s not long before they’re
Dancing like death’s head on a mopstick
Herring-gutted, weasel-faced,
Scratching at their scrubbados
And clutching at their eelish paunches,
Screaming that their great guts are ready to eat their little ones.
Some girls plead their bellies
But all the morts stop bleeding here.
Their fur drops off: they rub their nude pimply pelts.
Soon they stop talking, or mumble like a mouse in a cheese.
By then they all whiff the same, or more so.
So in the end we only know the fresh ones from the stale ones
And the dead ones from the dying.
You think we’d woffle ‘em? Sniv that!
A wolf in the stomach would not persuade us!
We’d rather sail to the spice-islands in a privy-pot!
They are too dirty – we’d not stick our snaggs in ‘em.
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