Carnevale

by Michelle Lovric

  Everyone is dead – Father Balbi who escaped from the Leads with me, my foolish young brother Gaetano. All I hear is of death and loss. I taste bitterness in my mouth when I awake each morning. This is not like me, as you know, Cecilia, but my exile from Venice has exiled me from myself. The remnants of my inner sweetness are curdling in my belly, the more so the further I travel from Venice. I am frightened at this change in myself.

  Do you remember last year I met Count Waldstein of Dux in Bohemia? Even then, he pressed me to his employ – a dignified position as librarian in his vast library. I refused him scornfully. I swore that I would never be a librarian.

  It is always easy to break one’s word to oneself. The moment has finally come for me to accept the offer. My resources are at an end. My exile is confirmed. I shall die in far Bohemia.

  But I shall have something to say, and the world shall hear of it. While I am tending his forty thousand volumes I shall be writing a few of my own. Yes, I think Casanova’s memoirs will be born in Dux. This fact will be Venice’s shame.

  Will I never hold you in my arms again? Or better still, be held by you, in that way you have, behind me, with your knee thrust gently between mine?

  Your Casanova.

  September, 1785

  Cecilia, my soul,

  I have arrived at Dux. I enclose a map. As you see, it’s five miles west of Teplitz, on the main road to Most and Plzn. It is prettyplace in the autumn sunshine, but I swear I shall die here in the first winter. Perhaps by the time you have received this letter, your unhappy Casanova will have ceased to live, for he will have been poisoned by the servants. It’s a dark and murderous state, this Bohemia, and I do not like the way the cook looks at me.

  I bless you, together with the children of my cat. Death inspires me with no fear; I weep only that I die in a foreign land, far from the woman I love, and unable to embrace you for the last time. And with my memoirs still unwritten!

  The next morning

  I must have been exhausted last night. In the light of day, my spirits rise. For the first time in a long while I awoke to find my steed in a triumphant state. I thought of you immediately and enjoyed my familiar fantasy among the sheets. I have survived my first and second meal. My linen has been laundered and almost all returned intact. Perhaps I shall continue to survive here a little longer.

  I realise that for the first time in my life, my material needs are taken care of. I am fed and paid without question. My fee, the cost of Casanova in these skinny days, is a mere 1000 florins a year. It has come to this, and, worst of all, I am even grateful.

  I am rescued from my miserable contemplations by making notes for my memoirs. Visiting my old loves makes me happy, as you thought it would. I find that instead of growing old I am growing up, as you told me I must.

  You were always so wise.

  I hope you know well enough how to take care of yourself.

  ‘Herr Bibliothekar’, Casanova.

  PS They are apparently a race of dwarves here in Bohemia. All the blankets are too small for your tall Casanova. I have ordered two blankets sewn together.

  October, 1786

  Dearest Cecilia,

  I am pleased to hear that your sister has married. The dress sounds like a masterpiece of vulgarity. You are a little cruel, Cecilia. I wish her happiness. How I loved to see the young Venetian women wearing their wedding pearls for the first year of their married lives. The bloom of the pearl and the bloom of the women were always in sympathy, one adding beauty to the other. It was one way of telling, for the connoisseurs amongst us, whether a woman was in need of a little extra attention. In the first year of marriage – rarely! That reminds me of the famous story of Caterina Querini, who burst her necklace of fabulous Oriental pearls while dancing too boisterously at a ball. Instead of gathering the jewels, she simply trampled them with her feet! But that was when Venice was a happy city, of course.

  What kind of man is your brother-in-law? A gentleman, like your father, or a rascal?

  Speaking of scoundrels, I send you my new work, Soliloque d’un penseur. As you see, it’s a skilful polemic against adventurers like that swine Cagliostro. Read it with care, my Cecilia – and be wary of such men. Their hard natures are not contaminated with affection or guilt, which is why they can achieve their ends. But they are adept at persuasions of all kinds, and they are vain, so they may come to your studio to cajole you to immortalise them. Be careful, my darling.

  No, I am not against your portrait of Goethe. I am proud that he sought you out at your studio. But he’s an old goat, I hear, with a fondness for young women, so I hope that you did not let him take any unwanted liberties. The man is no doubt a genius, but I am sure that the humourless idolisation of the German nation has rendered him a posing piece of cardboard in the bedchamber. Pray do not try out my theorem, Cecilia. You know I am not usually jealous, but I draw the line here.

  So he calls our Serenissima ‘this beaver-republic’? And what is that ant-hill he comes from himself? After all those years as a civil servant in Weimar, his poetry reeks of the filing cabinet. I am amused to hear that he had a toy gondola when he was a child, and that you painted him with one in his arms. And now, reclining in his own grown-up gondola, I suppose he feels like a lord of the Adriatic!

  He finds Venice crowded, does he? He finds our houses cramped? The Grand Canal is a ‘snake’? I laughed aloud when I read what you told me of his ideas for new sanitary regulations in Venice, and his preliminary plan for a police inspector who is seriously interested in the problem. How typically Teutonic! How utterly impracticable! And he finds our dancers wanton? Our ballet deficient in ideas? The only play he liked was Scuffles and Brawls in Chioggia? (I must admit I always loved that one, too!) He finds us noisy? We Venetians talk all the time?

  Why doesn’t he just go home to silent, boring Weimar?

  But I enjoyed his comment to you that people who decorate their own hats want to see their superiors elegantly dressed as well. This makes sense. And perhaps, yes, the Venetian dancers are a little bit wanton during Carnevale. But nothing like those Parisians. I remember the famous Camargo in Paris. She was already sixty years old when I saw her, and she could truly leap in a lascivious fashion. Nor did she trouble herself to wear drawers, so all her charms were continuously displayed for forty years. And all this is nothing whatsoever compared with the barbarous pastime of ‘Morris dancing’ performed in England!

  Here, the servants continue to craze me with their subtle tortures. The cook deliberately forgets my polenta or serves me soup that scalds my tongue. The stable-man sends a dangerous madman for my carriage. Another servant sets his dog to bark under my window all night. They sound a hunting horn that is out of tune just to fray my nerves. They laugh at me, they laugh at me. The count does not discipline them sufficiently.

  The other evening, I recited some Italian poetry, a full-blooded performance. They giggled like nuns. I showed them my French verses, hoping at least to earn some respect, but they continued to laugh.

  When I dress for a ball in my white plume, my suit of gold-embroidered silk, my vest of black velvet, with rhinestone buckles on my silk stockings, they laugh. They laugh at my Minuet – the steps taught to me by Marcel, the most famous dancing master in Europe, sixty years ago.

  I stay in my room and write most of the time. When the memoirs are published, they will stop laughing downstairs.

  Your adoring Casanova.

  June, 1787

  Dearest Cecilia,

  We were speaking about Goethe and dancing, were we not? (For I feel we still speak to each other, in these letters.)

  If the Count’s servants could only see me dance the fandango, as I danced it in Madrid! I shall never forget the first time I saw it. The couples danced face to face. Without making more than three steps, and armed only with castanets, the couple made a hundred seductive poses, and a thousand lascivious gestures. And their faces! The men’s showed love fully requited in the deepest sense. The wom
en’s showed compliance, ravishment and ecstasy. In the fandango you see love in full, from the first whisper of desire to the last gasp of pleasure. After such a dance it would be impossible for the ballerinas to refuse their partners anything. The fandango produces a certain irritant to all the vital senses that must be satisfied. I wanted to scream when I saw it. The fandango distils desire on the skin the way you do when you paint a portrait. How can I better explain it to you than that? Anyway, I left the ball, found a dancing master, and did nothing else for three days until I could perform the fandango better than any Spaniard in Madrid.

  Dancing is life, Cecilia. Alas, we never danced together! You say in your last letter that you do not enjoy it. I say that you simply do not know yet what joy is in your limbs. I say let your breasts dance! What can it matter that they draw the crowd? Resign yourself to their beauty! When you tell me how your breasts are grown in my absence, I become crazy with desire. I rush around the palace. I want to close my hands round anything that reminds me of your breasts. I try apples – too hard – and the pincushions of the maids – too lumpy. Finally I find a pair of peaches sun-warmed on a window ledge. Now I sit with them in my left hand while I write to you.

  I am sorry to hear that your brother-in-law is already betraying Sofia even before she has taken off her wedding pearls. He is wrong to slight her. Be kind to her, Cecilia. Imagine how she suffers.

  Here, it is not just the servants who slight me. The Count does not treat me as he should, and the servants notice this. More than once, I have been asked to eat at a side-table because the number of noble guests has filled the main table. I, Casanova, at a side-table, smiling and bowing from a distance at the jewelled pigs around the opulent feast from which I am excluded, apart from titbits!

  The Count fails to present me to important visitors, and helps himself to the library without notifying me. I look around the revolting pink walls of the Great Hall and I feel sick. I remember reflections on the ceilings of the Palazzo Mocenigo and our airy palazzi dancing in the water, and my whole heart fandangos inside me with longing for Venice.

  I hear someone coming now. I must stop and seal the letter before they see it. They spy on me continually, the servants, hoping to find something that they can use to hurt me.

  Your Casanova.

  PS I see that Beckford’s Vathek has finally appeared in English.

  September, 1787

  Dearest Cecilia,

  Here is the HISTOIRE de ma FUITE DES PRISONS de la Republique de Venise, qu’on appelle les Plombs — my account of my travails in and flight from the Leads. Rehearsed with you, in the gondola at San Vio, and now polished up and dressed in a leather jacket for the delectation of the public at large!

  So you have been painting Angelica’s old clients, the royal family in Naples? Make sure they pay you before you leave, Cecilia!

  One day you shall meet with Angelica Kauffman, I know you shall. I hope you are not disappointed. For my money you are a better painter, Cecilia. And soon you will be more famous. You paint men with the Word inside them, and women desirous and capable of extracting it. Her people are so beautiful as to be without desires for any other human. In other words, they are dead. When the Count receives his guests, I tell everyone, beautiful and ugly – just so long as they are rich – about the famous Venetian portrait painter, Cecilia Cornaro, and how she turns their flesh to petals when she paints it; how she makes portraits that preserve the flush of passion forever. I shall send you clients from all over Europe until you will have more zecchini in your strongbox than I have seen in my whole life.

  I have met again with my old friend, Lorenzo da Ponte. He’s writing librettos for that Austrian kid-genius Mozart. You know, the one who taught young Beckford how to play the pianoforte! Da Ponte has asked me to collaborate on the words for the kid’s new opera Don Giovanni. Who better than me? Perhaps he remembered that I was myself the author of an opera! I wrote it at Aranjuez during my cursed year in Spain. It took me just two weeks and it was rapturously received.

  But back to the little Mozart. Two days before the premiere, and the opera was not yet finished! We met in Prague, on October 27th. Mozart was then forcibly locked in a room to complete the overture in time for the dress rehearsal, which was that very day.

  I gave what help I could, but da Ponte’s Don Giovanni is no Casanova. The Don is a hater of women, who revels in their tears. He’s a professional seducer, who abuses his talents by using them to make women wretched. The very opposite of me! In examining the differences between myself and Don Giovanni, I realise suddenly and for the first time the true meaning of my tragedy with La Charpillon in London. She deliberately set out to make me love her and then treated me so that I suffered the pains of hell. She was Donna Giovanna, incarnate.

  Anyway, the work was done and my advice was treated with respect. I had another thought when I watched the first night of the opera. It was about faces, and this is one for the portrait painter, for you, Cecilia. The singer who played the Don was painted in a fearful pallor, with ridges of infamy and shadows of corruption etched on his face. But La Charpillon, no, she was worse. She did not look like the monster she was. She looked like an angel, which proved tragic for me, and a hundred other men.

  I hope you never paint a woman like her. Or her masculine equivalent. Look hard at any handsome man who comes your way and ask what he hides behind that beauty. Protect yourself, my darling Cecilia. I fear that a beautiful human face could one day be the most dangerous thing in the world for you.

  Your Casanova.

  1787

  Dearest Cecilia,

  So you have a baby niece, Cecilia. Does she look like Sofia? Tell me about the christening. What did everyone wear? What delicacies were served? You know how I love to hear about Venice in festa.

  I have sold the amiable Count Waldstein ownership of all my papers. That is, the ones written till this moment. It is good to feel coins in my pocket again.

  I met a woman with a face cratered like the moon tonight. I am happy, for at last I am no longer curious to make love to a woman with a face cratered like the moon, just because I have not experienced such a thing before. I am exhausted. I can no longer perform the pleasures I used to. But this enforced passivity has given me the leisure to savour my memories like old wines, which have only just now aged to perfection and are ready to bring to the table. I am still working on the memoirs, and up to my third draft in some places. What a responsibility it is to create your own literary tombstone! I work thirteen hours a day

  So the celebrated Mrs Thrale has come to Venice and you have painted her? I hope you took the opportunity to improve your English. I know it is a brutish language, which falls on the ears like walnuts on a dry forest floor. But I have the strangest feeling that one day you will have need of it.

  Your Casanova.

  1788

  Dearest Cecilia,

  So you already have another niece! My compliments to your brother-in-law! Come, come, Cecilia, I am sure you have it in you to love the child.

  I have a baby of my own to show. I present my Icosameron, ou Histoire d’Edouard et d’Elisabeth qui passèrent quatre-vingts ans chez les Mégamicres habitans aborigènes du Protcosme dans I’intérieur de notre globe, traduite de l’anglois. It’s a novel about an imaginary journey to the centre of the earth. I had it printed in Prague. One day soon I hope to have sold enough copies to pay for the printing, which was cruelly expensive.

  Do you like the blue-grey marbling of the fore-edge? I wanted to be reminded of the water at San Vio, and of 1782, and of you. That is how it seemed to me when I chose it from samples they fanned out before me at the printer’s.

  I apologise to you for the portrait of me in the frontispiece – what a smug brute I look! What hawk eves, what a ridged forehead! What a jagged nose! The little haberdasher, Merci, who slapped it in Spa, would be proud of her handiwork. If only I could sit once more for a portrait painted by you! With a frontispiece like that, the books would fly o
ut of the bookshop!

  One day you will leave Italy and start painting the rest of the world. When it is safe again. One day you may even come here to Dux. If you only knew how I petition the Count to call you here. But he insists that he has not grown into his face yet, whatever that means.

  Thank you for your description of the opening of the new Venetian opera house. I am amused at the lingua biforcuta in your account of who was there and how they looked in their finery. I hunger for such details and you have given me a perfect sketch of everything I miss.

  Your Casanova.

  1790

  Dearest Cecilia,

  So we are discovered? Sofia found your notebook? You tell me you are proud that the world at last knows the truth about us, but it is I who am proud. It cannot harm you, I hope, that all Venice knows I was – no, I am — your lover. Perhaps it will bring you even more clients, out of curiosity. I hope it does not attract anyone dangerous, unkind or obsessed. Your parents will soon recover from the shock, I am sure. You say our exposure to the gossips changes nothing between us. I feel the same, my darling. Gossip cannot corrupt the alchemy that still flows between us in these letters.

  I open the drawer that holds my treasures. I look at my two peach stones, the oily little rag I stole from your studio, a sprig of your wild hair, your sketched self-portrait from San Lazzaro. I reread your second-last letter and breathe its perfume. How sweet of you to decorate the borders with those colour sketches of our superb cat. What a marvellous beast he is! By the time it reached me the oil had soaked through it and parts of the letter were transparent. But I could still read your words and see those rampant whiskers and those lucent eyes. My faithful messenger! Please steal him a knob of butter from your mother’s kitchen and present it to him with my compliments.