Carnevale

by Michelle Lovric

  As I smoothed his wet feathery breast, the cat dribbled onto my hand. I wiped the stickiness back onto his fur, and, as I did so, I found the smallest imaginable packet tucked inside the velvet collar I had presented to him the day he killed his first rat. I pulled it out. The tiny letter was addressed to me: Signorina Cecilia Cornaro.

  I sat up in bed. My candle from the night before still flickered on the table. It was just before dawn and another strange light had invaded the room. With a sick surge in my belly I realised that it was the dull white reflection of the water that had risen even further while I lay sleeping. Now I heard it groping and muttering through the lower regions of the house. I thought of the water cascading into my room on the mezzanino, I thought of it gathering in a dark pool and rising. I thought of it scouring the walls. I thought of my colours bleeding into it, of my painted palazzi and the gondola and the landscapes of Vathek and the Biribissi board, all washed into the same dappled distillation, swirling together with the refuse of the flood. When the waters receded, they would take my old life with them. They would take the Mocenigo, where I had suffered such humiliations, with them. They would take Beckford’s dark fantasies with them.

  Maybe it is for the best, I thought. It is all gone, anyway.

  There was nothing I could do. I turned to the little letter in my hand. The handwriting on the outside of the packet looked familiar.

  Then, at the back of my neck, the hairs started to rise.

  For this was Casanova’s handwriting, which I had loved so well! From Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, San Michele, was written on the back. On the front, under my own name, was the address of the studio at the Palazzo Balbi Valier.

  At first I thought the cat had retrieved one of Casanova’s old love letters from their hiding place in the wall of my studio. For years I had not looked at them. I knew them by heart, and they were beginning to suffer, like over-fondled children, and become transparent and weak. They were becoming impregnated with damp, and with the sadness that dripped from my fingers. They were becoming contaminated with the sorry little griefs of my unwanted lovers, their lost lovers, their lost potency, the rejected kisses they tried to give their wives that morning, their lost glove floating down the Grand Canal, the jewel squandered on an unloving mistress. All these sadnesses had come to my studio to be painted, and they were starting to infect Casanova’s letters. Years ago I had realised that I had to stop touching them and hide them away I had put them in a safe place to recover themselves. I knew that their goodness, like the milky kernel of a nut, would be available to me if I needed it. It gave me pleasure to think of my letters to him and his letters to me interleaved in their soft packet, intimate as the feathers of a bird.

  This letter must be one of them, I thought. I pictured the cat scrabbling at my secret place in the wall to dig them all out. But how could I be angry with him? I looked at the letter again. The paper was discoloured and wrinkled, as if it had been immersed in water. There was no seal, just the stain of one, as if the wax had been washed away. I opened it, hoping to re-live a moment of tenderness with Casanova, to glean some more comfort from those words I had already read a thousand times.

  ‘Tell me, little hero,’ I said to the cat, who arched his back up to meet my cupped hand. ‘Did you think this old letter might save me from the flood? Grazie, signor. It was a noble thought.’

  The cat shook his head. There must have been a flea in his muzzle. I stroked him. Poor cat, why do fleas not drown? Then my hand slid off his back as I realised that I had not read this letter before. It was entirely new to my eyes. It was dated September 21st 1782, the day Casanova had left me; the day I had used my hard tongue against him; the day the cat had sung with his mouth like a cathedral; the last time I had seen Casanova in my life.

  I felt the inebriation of discovery: a curious mingling of joy and anxiety. The paper was rattling in my hands. The cat looked at me with concern, but he nudged my fingers, as if urging me to read what he had brought me. I took a pin from my hair and slid it under the softened folds of the letter. It opened like a flower, and from between its petals there spilled a tiny coil of pearls, wedding pearls.

  The cat put his paw upon them and looked up at me.

  I read.

  My darling Cecilia,

  Your words were hard, my soul, but they were true. When I examined them afterwards I found you had accused me justly of hiding the truth from myself. My exiles, like everything else in my life, are my own fault. If I had loved you better – not more, because that is not possible, but better – I would not have written that dangerous, senseless book. I would still be there with you. You were cruel, but you were right. You have dared, of all the women I have loved, to tell me the truth about myself. I thank you for that.

  Now I ask of you a very great thing.

  I await you at San Michele, beside the sweet tomb of our little Fortunato. Come with me. Live with me, share my fortunes. Do you know I have never asked this of any woman before? I have offered indefinite and infinite pleasures, moments, experiences. Now I offer you this, such as it is, me, Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, in my entirety.

  I hardly dare to ask you this. You are scarcely more than a child. You have never yet left Venice. I offer you a vagabond future with only our talents and our love to feed us. But I dare to, because I want to, so much.

  There is something between us that neither differences of age nor fortune can displace. I knew it before I took you from your bath. We are the same, we want the same things. In your arms I am myself, the best possible rendering of myself. In my arms, you are loved as much as a woman can be loved.

  You always asked me why: why I chose you, how I found you. Now I feel that I owe you an explanation. In the eyes of the superficial world, it was simple. I saw you eating torta al cioccolato at Florian with your father. The way you ate it, pushing the velvety cream into your mouth like a lover’s fingers, I knew you were ready for me. So I made it my business to find out everything about you and I infiltrated the good will of your maid. But before I came to claim you, I consulted the esoteric forces. I read your future in the cabbala. The numbers confirmed it. They told me that you were the woman of my life.

  There is another thing. To my surprise the numbers strayed into danger as well as joy. They also told me that unless I took you to me you would suffer not just the loss of our perfect love, but something else as well. If we were not together, I saw, then you would meet a darker fate alone.

  I write this not as a threat, but to offer you the intelligence you should have when you make your decision to come to me – or not. If you can believe in the numbers then you must see that you need me as much as I need you. Let me look after you, and protect you from the things I saw in your future.

  Come to me. I love you.

  Casanova.

  I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes. Reading his words, I had felt Casanova’s warm breath on my neck. I felt the hair on his wrists again. I felt the curl of his tongue in my mouth and the nudge of the steed against my thigh. Every part of my body longed to embrace him.

  A waking part of my mind told me that Casanova had been dead now for twenty-one years.

  A thinking part of my mind asked: how many years, how many letters had passed between us in the false shadow of this one undelivered packet?

  I clenched in my hand the piece of paper that could have rescued our lives. Casanova had never needed to know loneliness. I had never needed to know Byron.

  I knew the invitation had died with Casanova.

  But he had invited me to join him. He was still inviting me to join him. But now the invitation was to a safe place, a place beyond pain.

  I turned the letter in my hand. I walked to the window and looked out on the hungry water. It winked back at me, full of treacherous complicity.

  I thought of Girolamo with a melting in my stomach.

  But Casanova had the prior claim to me.

  I would accept, I decided, as I had always meant to.

&nb
sp; I picked up the wedding pearls and fastened them around my neck.

  Chapter 18

  Dio ne vol ferii, ma no morti.

  God wants us hurt but not dead.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  The waters subsided. We cleaned our houses and counted our dead. Venice offered me a palette for my sorrows: after the flood she was grey and pale pink, the colour of her corpses. Something had drowned inside me too, it seemed. Casanova’s letter had released my misery from my day-to-day habit of taut discipline. I cried all the tears I had held inside me. I lay on my bed with my nose in the belly-fur of the cat, fingering the pearls at my throat, exhausted beyond anything I had known. I felt weaker than a newborn. I was in limbo, a state of sorrow in paralysis. But I needed the misery to ferment a little more. Then, I thought, I would go to Casanova. For the moment I was just too tired to take the actions needed.

  Eventually I rose from my bed and went to my studio. There is a boredom that insinuates itself into the most tragic of dramas. Now I was even tired of my own pain, of the dull rhythmic torments of my losses beating inside my brain. Girolamo, Byron, Casanova. Wherever my thoughts went, they recoiled in dolorous echoes. As I left the house, I saw how the canals clenched themselves in the cold, drinking in the light and steaming as if Hell itself would soon bubble to their chilly surfaces. The waves were swishing petulantly, like the train of a noblewoman’s balldress. The sick pallor of the clouds and the clamminess of the walls conspired; the whole city seemed victim to a wasting malaise. A rotten smell came up from the water that the storm had disturbed, like the sour gas of a sad old stomach. I walked past the Palazzo Mocenigo. I did not enter, but leant for a moment against the railings, the cold iron branding my forehead.

  As I walked through the calle, the sound of Byron’s name floated out from cafés where the nobles and the borghese huddled, gossiping and sipping their coffee and prosecco. Like a Greek chorus, they intoned Byron’s name in incantatory repetition. Byron, Byron, I heard everywhere, the English milord!

  Crede Biron, I thought. They wouldn’t believe it if they knew the truth about us, about Cecilia Cornaro, Byron, and the existence of our son, Girolamo. Instead, with portentous phrases layered in canonic imitation, the chorus was weaving a new thread into the fantastical chronicles of the English milord. As I paced the misty city, I absorbed the new tidings along with the white vapour heavy with the scent of smouldering damp wood. The words of the chorus seemed intensified by the cold and were carried entire to me across water and stone. Venice was a-whisper and a-mumble with the rumour that Byron was already becoming restless again.

  Byron, I heard, had found a public way to express this agitation. I supposed, as I listened to these new litanies, that he must be feeling the need to make a dramatic gesture to La Serenissima, whom he had ruffled so wildly for the last three years. Or maybe he wished to purify himself in some kind of cold, strenuous cleansing. Perhaps it was his way of saluting the city and those of us whose hearts he had filled with tears. Whatever his motives, the chorus, with its overlapping harmonies and sibilant assents, now made it known to all Venice that Byron had decided to repeat his triumphant swim from the Lido to the Grand Canal, this time alone and in the dangerous swell that had followed the great flood. In two days’ time, when the tide was favourable, he would perform again.

  I knew what was in his mind. Since I had received Casanova’s letter I felt in a heightened state of perception. I could read Byron’s thoughts as if he were lying next to me, muttering in his dreams. Byron’s ideas floated across the water to me and I absorbed them easily. So I knew when and where to be the night he would make his last swim. I would be trailing him in my gondola while Tita poled him in his.

  And so Byron’s plans became my plans. So his intentions nourished my own parallel resolves and his timing became my own. My feelings did not enter into the operation; I remained frozen in the pain of the night of the flood. Like a mechanical doll, I made my small arrangements, in jerky motions. My teeth felt numb. I did not need to eat. I did not wash myself; in any case I bore no odour. I was aware that Sofia watched me with concern, but I ignored her. I was not even angry at the intrusion. The range of my feelings was tiny in those days. Nothing penetrated the waxen cocoon of my introspection. I was like a patient made tranquil before an amputation by a heady mixture of pain and liquor. Not much longer now, I told myself, soothingly, when an occasional weak and fluttering acrid thought rose up inside me like bile in my throat.

  It was necessary, I realised, to preserve this curious state of inanimation. It requires, I understood, an intense stilled energy to exterminate the light of one soul before its time. In order to die, you must be a little dead for some time beforehand.

  Byron chose a night so quiet that the waters moved no more than the surface of a jellyfish stirred by its own slight heart. It was three hours after midnight when he set out for the Lido. Following in my own gondola, I looked at the moonlit stones of Venice in a careful way, not as someone who lived there, but as someone who had lived there. I saw old walls studded with crumbling stone peacocks and griffins. I saw faded paline looming spectrally from the smoky water. I saw little reliefs of Saint George prodding a boneless dragon. A lazy eyelid of a blind blinked at me over a slanting window; its wrinkles seemed old and malevolent. The Gothic windows, with their shutters open, looked like hooded angels flexing their wings. But the palazzi seemed to hold their glass eyes averted from me, reflecting a point just over my shoulder, which did not include me. I saw the gargoyles, sipping the silvery broth of the canals at the water’s edge; suddenly, just as Beckford had done, I saw all the horror woven into the silky pleasures of our lives in Venice.

  I clutched Casanova’s letter in my hand and drew the curtain of my felze around me. I watched my gondolier arching his neck to drink from the bottle of fragolino I had given him. After he had drunk a few more mouthfuls, the drugs would start to work.

  At the Lido, Byron slips from his gondola with a subtle splash. He is wearing white silk trousers and nothing else. The water takes his limbs in its soft jaws.

  He swims for two hours and ten minutes, into the dawn.

  In the last ten minutes, when Byron reaches the Basino, I see that the opium in the fragolino has had its effect: my gondolier is swaying. He droops over his pole. By the time we reach the church of Santa Maria della Salute, at the mouth of the Grand Canal, he has slumped down upon his knees. A moment later, he is lying on the prow of the boat, oblivious to everything. All is as I planned it. The current has taken possession of the boat, and we now float down the Canal without the gondolier’s help. I slip out from under the felze and lay a carpet over him. I look around. There is no one on the shore to see me. I think of Casanova in the dismal streets of London, his pockets weighted with lead, on his way to the Thames. I think of La Charpillon, the cold whore who brought him to that. But I have trained myself well; I am still insensate. I feel no inner agitation, only a vague sense of meetness.

  Byron is still swimming, bobbing above the water like a toy horse. He is just a hundred yards ahead of me now. How strange it is to see him from this distance. I think how often I have smoothed the hair now flattened against his head. My hand remembers the soft lustre of his curls but the memory does not connect with any feeling of pain or pleasure.

  I sit on the edge of the gondola and I kick off my shoes. I do not hesitate for an instant as I slip into the Canal and start to swim after him. The water closes round me like an angry fist. In the shock of the cold, I experience a moment of clarity. Memories spill into my head, tickling at my dormant emotions like little fish.

  I remember La Fornarina, who threw herself into the Canal for love of Byron. I know that Byron is a man who lures people to their deaths. I think of Saint Cecilia singing in her boiling bath. I remember myself in the bath sipping fragolino. But here, in the Canal, the water holds me silently in a freezing embrace and I refuse to allow my feelings to be roused. Only a technicality, a matter of minutes, separate me from wh
at I desire.

  I am a Venetian. I can swim. My hands and feet perform the requisite actions without interior commands. It will take an effort for me to desist from this slow, cold dance. But now the water has crept into my clothes and their weight starts to drag me downwards. I am losing sight of him.

  It doesn’t matter. I move my arms and legs as little as possible.

  Nonetheless, there come more clear moments to interrupt me. I am invaded by thoughts.

  Life is too short, I think, and the time in which we love is too short, to make pronouncements about happy and unhappy love. I only know this, that when I was with Byron, it was this way, and when I was with Casanova, it was otherwise. Between them I have known both extremes of felicity I have known Venice, too, as a happy and an unhappy city.

  Perhaps these are my last thoughts, I think.

  My clothes are too heavy now, but I welcome the weight. Underwater, the light is kind. I am as ageless as a fish. I remember an old letter of Casanova’s, the sea is hungry… but I cannot remember what it hungers for.

  I give myself to the water, which seems disposed to accept the gift. It starts to bite inside my nose. Its greasy saltiness has entered my mouth. I let my head loll back so that a wave rolls over it. The spray pricks my eyes. I sink just a little lower into the water. I have started to dron, I think. It does not hurt; it does not hurt as much as Byron has hurt me. The moments when my head is above the waves have become shorter and my eyes have glazed with the brackish wash. Water shuttles down the back of my throat and I swallow it.

  Crede Biron.

  Then, over the water, comes a sudden and intense gust of warmth, fragrant with the hot smell of chocolate. My tongue hears the roasting of the pine nuts, and the air expanding in soft sighs inside a torta al cioccolato.

  I raise my head above the waves, sniffing. I find myself treading water and kneading my hands against the dragging current. My numb teeth begin to chatter like cicadas.