What Casanova Told Me

by Susan Swan

  She had spent hours watching sturgeons flash their yellow bellies and fishermen chug up the river in aluminium out-boards, their lines trailing through clouds of algae, listening in vain for her mother’s voice above the muffled sound of traffic beyond the trestle bridge.

  Now her mother was dead, and in her place she’d left the Polish Pumpkin, who insulted her intelligence with patronizing speeches about her mother’s worries over her retiring nature. As if shyness was a fault. She’s punishing me for being alive when Kitty is dead, Luce thought. Well, she wouldn’t stoop so low as to take out her own grief on someone else.

  She turned on the bedside light and sat up. She longed for her comfortable room at home. Her mother had told her it was easy to feel sad after a cross-Atlantic flight, that jet lag trails in its wake little tendrils of woe, like the start of a depression. And her mother would know. After all, Kitty had spent the last years of her life visiting hot, happy, faraway places, leaving Luce to look after herself at home.

  She thought of their century-old Victorian house in Toronto. It was their first Christmas with Lee and they were celebrating by the fireplace. Lee sat in an armchair eating Belgian chocolates and watching as Luce opened a present from Kitty, the oracle kit with its handsome tasselled pouch. “I know you don’t usually like this sort of thing. But I thought you might find it fun,” her mother had murmured, smiling over Luce’s shoulder at Lee. Luce had thanked Kitty and then angrily taken the kit upstairs. That evening, her mother had followed Luce to her bedroom.

  “I’ve upset you, haven’t I?”

  Luce had turned away so she wouldn’t see the lines of strain on her mother’s face. You dyke, she had wanted to shout, though such a word had never rolled off her tongue. You think you can appease your guilt about having an affair by giving me presents.

  “I know you think I’ve been a bad mother.” She heard Kitty sigh. “And I’m sorry. But Luce, you’re twenty-one. And I shouldn’t have to feel guilty for loving someone.”

  Her mother had sounded so sad and despairing that she had relented and told her she wasn’t upset.

  Packing for her trip with Lee, she had come across the oracle kit again. Half-jokingly, she had put it in her suitcase, secretly hoping it held a magical connection to her mother.

  Sleep wasn’t going to come now. What was she going to do with herself? She found the stack of essays tucked inside her knapsack and turned to one by the Englishman Arthur Symons who had visited Count Waldstein’s castle in Dux one hundred years after Casanova had died. It was just as she had thought. Symons confirmed that he’d seen the bill for Casanova’s damages to the roof of the Ducal Palace in the Venetian archives. And here, too, was the date of Casanova’s arrest, July 26, 1755. On the night of October 31–November 1, 1756, Casanova escaped from the Piombi—or the Leads—as the prison was called under the lead roof of the Ducal Palace. He was thirty-one at the time and he would live in exile for eighteen years, according to Symons who said that most of Casanova’s 122 love affairs and experiences with historical personages could be verified.

  Luce admired Casanova for keeping to the facts. She relied on facts supported by historical research and distrusted theories. Master narratives usually disappointed those who espoused them, while facts, with their specific, limited nature, were built to last. Her mother’s profession of archaeology had consisted of interpreting worlds from small artifacts, but the nature of her own archival work was more dependable. For instance, the laundry bill of John Macdonald would always stay the laundry bill of Canada’s first prime minister, no matter what anyone said. But the fat Venuses of prehistoric times might be anything—symbols of an ancient deity who represented the great creative power of the universe, as Lee had reminded her that morning in the Venetian shop, or a pornographic icon. Once you moved as far back as prehistory, Luce thought, the past was just a story someone made up. Not that she tried now to understand her mother’s views. After her mother had met Lee in Crete, Luce had given up.

  Her thoughts still on Kitty, she started her iBook and opened her old e-mails, pausing at one whose address said, “katherine.adams@sympatico.ca.” How often had she placed her finger on delete, only to stop herself? It made her feel calmer to keep the e-mails in her system, as if she and her mother were still communicating. It was hard to believe that someone as vital as Kitty could just vanish. But it wasn’t only that: she hated to think of the valuable correspondence that people deleted every day when they sent their mails to the trash. The future will lack the historical records of past generations, she reflected. Nothing online remained. The Internet was like a beach churned up with footprints that waves washed away on a daily basis.

  Reluctantly, she bypassed her mother’s e-mail and opened a new message from Aunt Beatrice.

  Dear Luce,

  I am delighted that Lee agreed to stop in Venice so you can give the family papers to the Sansovinian Library. I told Mr. Smith (of Harvard University) that I was entrusting them to a young family member who works as an archivist and he was very relieved when I said you would be delivering them personally.

  I am sure you remember that your appointment is at noon with Mr. Goldoni on May 14, so please forgive anxious old me for reminding you. Mr. Smith set the whole thing in motion and he says the Sansovinian is extremely grateful to us for allowing them to exhibit our documents in their celebration of Jacob Casanova.

  I know your time away will be memorable, especially since it’s your first trip to the Mediterranean. So let me give you a few words of advice. Hide your passport in a little cloth bag around your neck and be sure to take along a calculator so you won’t be cheated in a foreign currency. Thirdly, never invite theft by leaving a sign on the door—“Occupant out. Please clean.” And lastly, dear, avoid conversations with strange men. They won’t have your best interests at heart. But I realize there’s really no need to say this to someone as sensible as you.

  You won’t let us down, will you, Luce? Mr. Smith seems to think the old papers are worth a great deal of money. So they can rest in the Sansovinian for a while until we decide what to do with them. Venice is where they started out from, after all!

  Love,

  Aunt Bea

  P.S. I am so sorry I can’t join you for the tribute to Kitty, but the restaurant gets very busy this time of year and I just can’t manage it. And I hope you’ll understand when I say this, Luce, but your mother’s New Age thinking was never something I was very comfortable with.

  Luce noted the time of her appointment with Goldoni at the Sansovinian and logged off. She closed her iBook and turned to look for Asked For Adams’ journal. It was right where she’d left it, in its box on the bedside table. She lifted it out, and this time she also took out the Arabic manuscript. She peered at it curiously. Inside its tea-brown leather cover, dense flawless symbols spilled across its margin-free pages. She would look at it more carefully later. She opened the journal to the next entry.

  April 18, 1797

  The day is dank and cool and the lagoon tide has overflowed, wetting the feet of peevish Venetians obliged to cross the Piazza San Marco on raised planking.

  Early this morning, I went to the Florian to meet Monsieur Casanova and give him back his journal. Father had taken Francis and me to dinner yesterday evening after his meeting with Monsieur Pozzo so I had no time to read it. Using hand gestures, I conveyed to the proprietor of the café that I wanted a fried doughnut. I seated myself, and without the slightest hesitation began to read the diary he had loaned me. On the first page, in large, sprawling handwriting, its author began by claiming that he was the cause of all his own misfortunes, as well as his fortunes. I was so taken by his candour that I conveyed his words immediately to my own journal.

  “My vices never burdened anyone but me, and seduction was never characteristic of my behaviour because I never seduced anyone except unconsciously, always being seduced myself first.”

  No American man would make such a boast, I thought, although I myself know not
hing of seduction. On the next page, I found the author’s philosophy of travel under “Casanova’s Advice to Travellers”:

  “The traveller must start his journey with the same fervour he feels when choosing a lover, knowing that a world of possibilities awaits him. And if his choice goes awry, he must quickly select a fresh destination. Just as the best remedy for heartbreak is a new lover, so it is with travel.”

  I grew aware of someone watching me. The journal’s owner stood beside my table in his thin jacket of corn-coloured satin, though the dampness that spring morning was extreme. I noticed a fresh patch on his sleeve and wondered what industrious female hands had worked to make his careworn suit last out another season.

  “I believe you have something of mine.” His voice was deep and lively, and I felt a stir of excitement although he is too old to be a suitor for someone like myself. “May I join you?” he asked. “The rains are inescapable.” He lifted his foot so I could see the mud encrusted on its buckle, and smiled. “Please excuse my shoes, Miss Adams.”

  “Think nothing of it, monsieur,” I said. They were the same shoes he had worn as “Aunt Flora” on the public boat, an old square-toed pair with clogs fastened to their soles so that the wearer’s feet could rest evenly on the cobbles.

  “Did you read it?” he asked, pointing at the journal.

  “Sir, I read only the opening page with your comparison of travel to lovemaking.”

  “Do you think my comparison is a mistake, Puritan girl?”

  I knew he used the word Puritan to tease me. “Please do not address me so. I am no more a Puritan than yourself.” He widened his eyes, but I resolved not to falter. “I was raised on the writings of the Roman stoics. Cicero was my uncle’s favourite and Seneca is the philosopher whose ethics I learned from my aunt. Perhaps you know him?”

  He shrugged. “I find Seneca’s philosophy too severe, Miss Adams. Why should I maintain a contrived indifference to pain, or for that matter—pleasure?”

  “The virtuous man should be indifferent to both and so learn to master suffering.” I had a copy of Seneca’s De Beneficiis in my travelling satchel. I pulled it out and placed it on the table. “This is my Bible, monsieur.”

  “You do not pray in your Congregational church, Miss Adams?”

  “I prefer rational inquiry to religious speculation.”

  “Ah, so I am conversing with a philosophe?”

  “How else can we know the truth if we do not question what we see? But I am exceedingly interested in your views on travel, monsieur. I was taught that the Grand Tourist travels to get an education.”

  “Then you have read too many guides, Miss Adams. Travel is a faith, like love. And a faith involves pleasure as well as the challenge of pain or hardship. So for the utmost success, a traveller must follow the same methods as love—selection, satisfaction, seduction and separation.”

  When he saw my doubtful look, he added, “My travel principles are empirically sound—worthy, I hope, of a great philosophe like Voltaire.”

  “Please tell me one, monsieur.”

  “What you desire is always waiting for you, but you must tell the Fates what you are searching for. First, you should write down your wish on a scrap of paper and then throw it to the winds. It will scatter best if you tear it into a dozen pieces, Miss Adams.”

  “How strange. And another?”

  “We must not follow the dictate of our will but go only where pleasure leads. And we should grant ourselves the comfort of graceful entrances and exits. Although I am not as skilful with my exits as I would like …”

  “Only your entrances, monsieur.” I laughed, thinking of him in his strange wig on the public barge.

  “Ah, so you make fun of me, Miss Adams! And I so dearly enjoy talking to you!” He was smiling broadly now, and for the first time I felt the youthfulness of his spirit.

  “I, too, enjoy our conversations,” I said. “And I am eager to hear about the woman in the locket.”

  “I did promise, did I not?” He glanced at his watch, where the dainty miniature hung from his fob. But this time, he quickly tucked it away.

  “That will have to wait. Forgive me, Miss Adams. I must go to an appointment. May I reclaim my journal?” He took it, and without another word he bowed, and melted into the crowd.

  I sat for a while, watching the spot where he had vanished, my soul disturbed by longings.

  April 25, 1797

  We are soon to be at war. General Bonaparte is in Austria while his army remains in northern Italy. But the situation has become critical. I saw this with my own eyes. I was standing with Father on the shore of the Giudecca near the Convent of the Capuchins. On Easter Monday there was an uprising against the French army in Verona and yesterday we witnessed a foolish gun battle—Venetian soldiers firing on French sailors from a fortress by the harbour. Father says the Venetians have brought war upon us sooner than he would like. Who knows now what will happen to Father’s trade mission? He had hoped the army would bypass Venice in its hurry to crush the Austrians.

  Poor Father. He was feeling poorly, and he became seasick on the gondola taking us to the Convent. Afterwards, I held his head on my lap and massaged his scalp while the gondolier studied us with cunning eyes. Francis had gone to Murano to talk to the glass merchants, and I think the gondolier assumed Father was my aged husband. I stared coldly back and continued massaging my poor father’s scalp.

  I do not hold this marriage plan against Father. I understand that he is doing what is best for me before he dies, and that he does not want me to make my way in the world without a husband, whereas I would be content to live alone in a city like Paris, far from the world of the Gooch farm with its views of the great Atlantic and the humpbacked islands near Boston. Aunt Abigail brought me up to know Greek and Latin, and I could make a modest living teaching the Classics to French schoolchildren. Father dismisses these plans and jokes that it is better for me to wed a dullard who will be too slow witted to mind my bookworm habits than choose a learned man who will assume a wife should obey her husband. There is little point trying to tell Father I am not reassured by this advice.

  So I was thinking, as I massaged his head, that I forgive Father for wanting me to do and be things I do not wish to do and be. And perhaps it was the tenderness in my face that the gondolier misinterpreted. As for my betrothed, I feel only boredom. Each night, he comes to dinner and grumbles on about the lace industry in Burano, or the glass furnaces in Murano—both are sadly in decline, he claims. And despite his own lack of cleanliness, Francis has taken up Father’s practice of searching for bodily wastes in the streets as proof of Venetian sloth and depravity. Father had thought we might be married in Venice if his trade mission prospered. But yesterday Francis announced he will not be married in a Papist soap bubble—he means the Basilica of San Marco—because he found human excrement in the vestry.

  My parent and I made our way up from the landing to the little Convent of the Capuchins near San Redentore. The Abbess was waiting for us at the door, dressed in a white robe that left the tops of her round shoulders as naked as those of the French actresses we saw one night in Paris. Perhaps Father, too, was thinking of those daring thespians because I caught him gazing admiringly at the curve of her neck as she let us into an elegant hall.

  Aside from a tall grilled wall rising up like the bars of a cage at the end of the room we could have been in a count’s banqueting hall in Paris. On one side of the barrier, dozens of young novices in pretty white dresses smiled and dipped like goldfish in a water bowl. On the other, young male visitors stood gossiping with them through the holes in the grille, designed for that purpose.

  The Abbess, who spoke a pretty French, explained that young girls enter her convent to receive an education because Venetian schools are very poor, and Venetian girls among the most untutored in Europe. Most of the novices, she told us, will marry the young men visiting them there that afternoon.

  Although I envied the novices their small b
odies and flirtatious ways that so easily elicited the suitors’ attention, they appeared trapped in their pretty cage, and their suitors were a weedy, pale-faced lot, less imposing even than Francis who, like Father, at least looks ruddy from farm work. Our arrival disrupted the flirting, and a few of the suitors turned to listen as Father described the simple wedding ceremony he has planned for Francis and myself. He told the Abbess he wanted a minister of our own denomination and that the ceremony should be done before war is declared.

  “You think there will be a war in Venice?” the Abbess said, smiling at the notion.

  Father brought out a little box of powders he’d bought at a local apothecary shop. He took some up his nostrils.

  “I pray I am wrong, Mother,” he said. “But I believe Napoleon will avenge the Verona uprising against his army. He is encouraged by the weakness of Venice. Already, your Senate has given in to his request to punish Venetians who resist the French.” The Abbess sat very still, as if she didn’t believe a word Father said, and then she broke into a tinkly, sly laugh.

  “You Americans are a deadly serious race,” she said. “A month from now when your daughter is married, you and I will laugh at your foreboding.”

  Our discussion over, the Abbess took us down a long hall and into another grilled room and then another until we found ourselves in a library. She produced a journal and quill-pen and proceeded to make notes about the cost of posting the banns while Father waited fretfully, twirling the curls on his bob wig between his fingers. I guessed that he was brooding about the fate of his mission.

  I resolved not to worry about politics that afternoon and wandered over to enjoy the view from the library window. It overlooked a pretty hedged courtyard, and I was startled to see Monsieur Casanova sunning himself there in his body corset; nearby, a young nun stood washing clothes in a water trough. On a hedge behind him a long white garment was heaped like a snowdrift. Other pieces of clothing hung off little bushes and shrubs. Although I cannot help feeling the old Countess and Monsieur Casanova are two beings, I saw below me only one: a handsome old gentleman sitting amid the beanpoles in his white undergarments while the laundress cleaned his clothes.