Beckford had the classic dark English wit, and at his fingertips all the gorgeous vocabulary of the seraglio, the bagnio, the barrack room, the caravanserai and the crow’s nest. There was no picturesque depravity that could not cause him to pour forth paragraphs of detached but delighted amusement. But about himself, Beckford lacked a sense of humour, a fact that, had he but known it, made him comical. As far as he was concerned, the tragic element of his persona smothered anything light inside.
And so when he first saw his portrait, Beckford sucked in his breath like a schoolboy, in joy. But on his second look, it horrified him, for into it I had slyly inserted a heap of mementoes of Venice and the Cornaro youth. In the background of the picture were unmistakable suggestions of a pink satin corset, a bottle of old wine, dice. I painted the Cornaro crest upon all his buttons. This was one of my special devices – something I would do with a magnifying glass after my sitter had left for the day. It would take a magnifying glass to find it again. But my masterpiece within this portrait of Beckford was a slanted mirror in the background. If you stood by the painting at a certain angle, you would see the mouth of the little Cornaro sucking his thumb, or possibly someone else’s, with an expression of intense delectation. And I had painted, upon a little cartello lying unfolded on the floor, the Venetian proverb that expresses the devilish delights of sodomy.
L’ànema a Dio, el corpo a la tera,
e’l bus del cul al diavolo per tabachiera.
The soul goes to God, the body to the Earth
and the arsehole to the devil, for his snuffbox.
When Beckford found his voice, it was small and reproachful. ‘Cecilia, when I wanted a Venetian portrait, I thought you would paint me the way Tintoretto would, luminous, free from what besets me here,’ he said, pointing at the offending portrait. ‘Casanova told me that you would make me beautiful. He told me that you had magic fingers, that you made images that people could worship.’ Then he looked at the ground, pouting like a schoolgirl. The lingua biforcuta uncurled inside my mouth.
Seeing the signs of danger, Casanova intervened. ‘You don’t need to take the portrait if you do not want it, caro mio.”
‘I don’t want to be that man,’ Beckford whispered.
‘And nor do you have to be,’ soothed Casanova. He put his arm around Beckford and led him away. Over his shoulder he smiled at me reprovingly. I knew what he meant: I should not use portraits to cause pain. People like Beckford carry enough pain inside them without that.
How was I to know that the pain that birthed Vathek would become part of my own history? How was I to know that one day the book would creep into my life in a way that was too painful to bear? But I was not listening properly to the messages of Vathek, in the lines or between the lines. In any case, I was about to confront a more devastating sorrow of my own.
Chapter 16
La lingua no ga osso ma la rompe i ossi.
The tongue doesn’t have bones, but it breaks bones.
VENETIAN PROVERB
Why do we hate endings so much? In my mind, I have an image of Casanova standing behind a slammed door, converting his pre-lacrimal contortion into an ingratiating grin. I could almost sketch on paper the inner process, the strength that grabbed those little muscles around his mouth and eyes and forced them up, not down. No wonder he ate like a wolf. The mere act of withstanding rejection – in other words, of being Casanova – consumed a casino of crab soup and croutons a day. That’s what it took to pull the strings of that million-jointed puppet and to nourish his appetites, erotic, intellectual, alimentary, elementary. There was only food to power all these operations, and of course a supplementary diet of books and love. But even the reading and the lovemaking had to feed upon the food he put in his mouth.
I have an image of Casanova looking down the Grand Canal. I see him standing between the arches of the courtyard, silhouetted against the verdigris of the water. He seems not a man but a strange sorrowful punctuation mark, one that indicates pain. Behind him looms the tall palace of his dead patron, Barbaro. Casanova’s shape is dark against the glow of all those chandeliers under which he used to gush and sparkle. They would not kindle for him again, now. Now he watches the animated silhouettes in the rubicund light of the piano nobile. He watches them from the darkness below. The conversations of the party float across the Canal but the words are unintelligible. An unimaginable distance of years stretches between the good times and now.
I have an image of him accepting his fate and reinventing himself for what comes next. I see him ransack his soul for some new reserve of energy and courage, some new mantra – sweet and nourishing – to succour him in his desperation.
With pen and ink, I drew him, from behind, the strangest portrait of Casanova. We Italians say white-and-black, not black-and-white; we are ever the optimists. My picture shows Casanova changing his prospects from black to white.
We have an expression — ingoiare il rospo, to swallow the toad – and, in my image, that is what Casanova is trying to do. He is trying to force down his gagging throat the poisonous fact of the new evil that has come to plague him.
Casanova was leaving me. He had fallen foul of the authorities in Venice. He had been incautious in his pride and in the only extravagances left to him – word and gesture. He had boasted and strutted one too many times in the Piazza San Marco. Perhaps, before he met me, he had consoled the wrong unhappy wife or the wrong daughter of the wrong patrician father, made too many incursions into the dwindling list of noble virgins in the Libro d’oro. One, or several of these crimes had caught up with him. Even though there was one obvious incident to explain why he had to go, the real reason was undoubtedly one of these. Since the death of his protector Bragadin, he had been vulnerable.
The superficial story of his new, last exile was this: when the last theatrical venture failed, Casanova was employed by the Genovese diplomat Carlo Spinola as his secretary. Spinola was rich and eccentric. He lived in a luxurious villa near Padua. He was amused by his new employee and encouraged him in his feats of raconteurship and gastronomy. At first, Casanova divided his time between Venice and Padua, happily occupied in small harmless intrigues on Spinola’s behalf.
But, as usual, his felicity was not of long duration.
Some time before Casanova took up his appointment, Carlo Spinola had made a wager with a certain Carletti. Spinola had lost the wager, which was of some 250 zecchini. However, he chose to overlook the matter; Carletti remained unpaid. He approached Casanova, who agreed to mediate in exchange for certain pecuniary considerations. But the affair ended badly. Instead of paying him for the services rendered, when gently approached at a soirée at the Grimani palazzo, Carletti attacked Casanova both verbally and physically. Casanova, overcome with horror at both the violence and the indignity, backed away, and made to leave. He did not try to defend himself.
‘Bastard!’ Carletti screamed at him. ‘Son of a whoring actress!’ The blows rained down until Carletti had exhausted his vigour and his malice. The host, Casanova’s supposed friend Carlo Grimani, stood by in silence. Splattered with his own blood and tears, Casanova limped from the house and back to Francesca Buschini. I did not see him afterwards for some days. It was Francesca, and not me, whom he needed until he could think of a way to save his face. He did not want to burden me with his weakness and his self-disgust.
But I knew what had happened. The incident was the talk of Venice. I prowled the cafés and the bars in my cloak to hear the news and tried to filter the truth from it. There was no account forthcoming without some kind of commentary. Some saw Casanova’s point, others Carletti’s, but all agreed that Casanova had behaved like a beaten dog. The epithet of coward was a new one for Casanova, but I was grieved to see that it stuck. Men were glad to point a disparaging finger at him. I knew that when he ventured to show himself in public again, the few doors that had remained open to him would now start to slam in his face. The Venetian bourgeois, the nobles and even the gondoliers would ass
ume, as he passed, the closed expressions they wore under their masks, and he would again be a stranger in his own city.
The cat shut up becomes a lion, we say in Venice.
In this internal exile, shut up like a lion, Casanova found a voice with which to address his wrongs. He wrote a vengeful satire Né amori, né donne, ovvero la stalla ripulita (Neither Loves nor Women, or, The Cleaned Stable). Thinly disguised as the central characters were Carletti, depicted as a barking dog, and Grimani, as the illegitimate son. Casanova went further beyond the pale. He depicted himself as Grimani’s illegitimate half-brother, the offspring of a liaison between a whoring actress and Grimani’s father. Casanova had yielded to the temptation to vent his entire spleen. The Carletti affair had been one humiliation too many.
‘Bastard, you called me,’ Casanova said aloud, addressing the absent Carletti. ‘Bastard I shall be.’ Casanova wrote most of the book in my studio, stabbing at the pages and growling to himself. I heard him muttering and talking to the people who had raised this ire in him. I would go to him and lay my head against his. He would stroke my face with his left hand, but he continued to write with his right hand.
‘I am sorry, my soul,’ he said, looking up at me. ‘You must allow me my say’ He opened his eyes wide in pain.
‘Of course,’ I said, backing away. He continued to murmur and curse as he scribbled, late into the night.
He would not permit me to read the manuscript before it came out. He worked like a maniac, bundling it off to the printer in days. This done, he was calmer. He was more himself, more affectionate, more confident. He needed a lot of love, both to give and to take.
No one took any notice of the anonymous slim volume when it first appeared in the printers’ shop, but somehow its provenance became known. The mysterious twenty-two fleurs-de-lys upon the title page did not fool anyone. To anyone in Society, the noms de plume and the allusions were transparent and that was just what Casanova had intended.
As I had feared, the piece won him no more friends and the indignation of high Venetian society rose up against him. Belatedly, Casanova realised that he had gone too far. Instead of justifying himself, he had damned himself. Days later, he confessed as much to me, but it was too late. Everyone was abandoning him. With his noble friends went those hangers-on who had courted him for his contacts, and with those went his creditors. Effectively, he was about to be starved out of town, in the cruellest and subtlest of ways.
The first act of his life had ended with La Charpillon’s attempt on his soul in 1763. Now, he told me, Venice was closing the second act of his life. She was making him a stranger to herself, even within her walls of water.
‘What will be the third act?’ I asked him.
‘It will be my memoirs, of course. Then, when they are finished, this comedy will be ended. And if it’s hissed this time, I shall not hear it.’
‘It will not be hissed. How could they hiss you?’
He stood there for a long time, looking out of the window, his arms slack at his sides. Eventually I crept up behind him and inserted my fingers between his. He caressed them automatically. Casanova was not capable of withholding tenderness, even when the world had tried to strip him bare.
‘I love you,’ I told him. ‘Don’t forget that.’
These were the last loving words I spoke to Casanova. The situation was graver than we had thought. For that night, unbeknownst to me, Casanova received a summons from Francesco Morosini, in his capacity as Procurator. He was told that he was no longer welcome in Venice. Unless he left, and was quick about it, he would be back in the Leads.
He came to tell me as tenderly as possible. On the chair in my studio he took me on his knees and buried his face between my breasts. He smelled like a frightened animal, sharp and feral, but I held him close to me. I felt the warm moisture of his breath on my skin and stroked his stiff hair. I kissed his eyes. He did not look up. I felt him trembling in my arms. I felt tears on my bodice. He told my breasts that they were the most beautiful he had known. He took my hand, and kissed all my fingers. He told them that they were the fingers that men find at the end of their dreams. Still, he did not look up.
There was something so final in these tributes that I too became frightened.
I held him away from me to try to look into his eyes. He pushed himself against me again, clinging like a child.
‘I must leave Venice, Cecilia,’ he mumbled into my breasts.
I am sure Casanova was not thinking clearly. His despair had deranged him. I should have read it in his face the moment he arrived, in the flaring whites of his eves, and felt it in the sweat of his palms. But I could not. I was lost in my own distress. For the first time, we did not turn to each other. For once, we did not look at each other as we spoke. We were in a state of panic; we could not concentrate. We made mistakes about each other.
Throughout his life, Casanova had always tried to attend to the long-term material needs of lovers after they were separated from him by fate or the implacable demands of opportunity. The lovers were handed on to someone who could look after them well, and love them to distraction. In my case, as if I were just another lover, he offered me to Maurizio Mocenigo, in whose palace we had played at Biribissi and disported ourselves behind the empty frame.
‘Since I must leave you, go to him, Cecilia. He has loved you since you painted his portrait. I have talked to him. He will look after you while you paint. You will need to think of nothing but your work. You don’t have to be his lover. He will be your Protector. He will wait for you.’
I pushed him away from me and sprang from his lap. Still, we did not look at each other. I paced up and down the room. Casanova sat on the chair with his head in his hands. His whole body personified abjection from the trailing hem of his shabby satin frock-coat to the sweaty pleating of his brow. The cat came out of the shadows to stand in front of him, with ears and tail erect as if to defend Casanova from my dangerous anger.
When my words finally came out, they were as cruel as I could make them. I tried to project an unbearable image into his mind: ‘So that is the end of us, is it, Casanova? How neatly you have parcelled up my future for me! How kind you are!’
Then I whispered, ‘Will you not be jealous of me in Maurizio Mocenigo’s arms?’
Casanova swallowed and replied so quietly that I could barely hear. ‘More in my mind than in my heart, where it matters.’
Still looking down, Casanova added quietly, ‘I want to know that you are secure in a decent man’s sincere love.’
I think it was his resignation that made me lose control of myself in the grievous manner in which I then did. He had already consigned our happiness to the past, without consulting me. I give this as a reason, not as an excuse for what I said next, or the brutality of its expression.
‘Coward!’ I screamed at him. ‘Why can you not leave me honestly? Because that is what you are doing. You are leaving me. Why can you not admit it? Or have you found another novelty? A pair of sisters? A countess with her own Montgolfier balloon? Why pretend you are giving me a better life without you? I am not one of your passive little Bettinas or Henriettes.’ He flinched at this but I went on, ‘If I want a better life, I can make it one without your help. I am already doing so.’
I added, vindictively, ‘What help could you give me, anyway? And if I want another lover, I shall find him myself. I don’t imagine I shall have much difficulty.’ I gestured at my breasts in reflection in the tall studio mirror,
In the same mirror, for I would not look at him directly, I saw his head sink lower, but he still said nothing. Then the cat clicked back his ears and began to sing. Loudly, he keened, and fulsomely. He filled the room with his yowls and squeals, his low moans and rasping cries. He pulled long agonised notes from the depths of his small body. He looked at me, and at Casanova, and filled his lungs to cry again. I had never heard him make a sound like this, not even when he fought the pantegane in the courtyard or went to war for his sleek lovers on
the rooftops. He strained at his velvet collar till it seemed about to burst.
Over the din of the cat, I shouted. I still had more venom to expend with my lingua biforcuta. I said to Casanova, ‘If you had loved me more, you would have been more afraid of losing me, and you would not have printed that book. But perhaps it’s just an excuse, so you can go off on your adventures again. Go and find whatever woman it is whose scent has got you twitching, But don’t show that long nose around here any more.’
The cat yowled louder. His hindquarters lifted from the ground with the effort of his song. He opened his mouth so wide that we saw the pale pink cathedral of little bones inside, all the way to the back of his dark gasping throat.
Casanova opened his eyes wide in pain, but he said nothing. I knew that he had no script prepared for women hurt by his actions. He had spent his life avoiding the need to say those words.
I said, ‘You have nothing to say. You hang your head like a little boy who has disappointed his parents. You have never grown up and yet you are old. You make mistakes I would scorn to make. You are entirely pathetic, ridiculous! No wonder Venice doesn’t want you any more. You’re like a tired old doll from the nursery. You’re falling apart and you no longer inspire love – you are tolerated only for sentimental reasons. But really you’re now too shabby for us to bother with.’
I turned my back upon them both. The cat was still spending his tiny soul in plaintive cries. I stood a long time like that.
If I had known then that I would never see Casanova again, I would have turned around a second later. I would have pulled him to me and kissed his eyes. I would have licked his nose. I would have torn his poor frock-coat, scrabbling to get inside it and kiss his breast. I would have begged, ‘Let me go with you!’
But I did not know. I stood in silence until I could swallow my tears. Then, still alight with anger, I turned around.
Carnevale Page 16