What Casanova Told Me

by Susan Swan

  Then, suddenly, in the distance, I saw a great flash of light and heard several loud cracking booms, one after another. At first, I imagined it was the sound of a storm breaking over the Lido beaches. A nun rushed into the courtyard shrieking, and now an army of them came pounding down the hall outside the library, calling to one another in Italian, their voices frightened and awestruck.

  Father and I hurried with the Abbess down to the main door where a large crowd stood staring at two warships by the harbour entrance. Fortunately, it was some distance away.

  “Our soldiers are attacking a French gunboat.” The Abbess no longer sounded girlish and merry, and the three of us stood in mute apprehension. I could not help thinking that if war comes to the Republic of Venice, there will be no time for weddings in Venetian churches.

  May 3, 1797

  There will be a war and a marriage.

  The incident at the Lido that I witnessed the other day with Father and the Abbess has determined the fate of Venice, just as Father prophesied. Napoleon has been waiting for such an opportunity. Shots from Venetian soldiers at the fortress of St. Andrea near the harbour entrance killed four French sailors and their captain, Jean-Baptiste Laugier. The French captain was killed even though he shouted again and again through his trumpet, “I surrender!” Privately, Father told Francis and me that Venetians do not understand the vengeful determination of General Bonaparte.

  There is little anyone can do. The Senate has apologized for the incident but my parent says this will not appease Napoleon, who needs the money chests of Venice to pay for his Austrian invasion. I am certain Father is right; when we were in Paris, the new martial pride of the French was a wonder.

  Father told me yesterday that my wedding will take place on June 4, Whitsunday, at the Convent of the Capuchins. My distress over his announcement is severe, and my only joy is the comfort I find in Finette, Monsieur Casanova’s fox terrier, who always jumps up to meet me with affection.

  Towards sunset I took her for a walk in the Piazza San Marco. Without realizing what I was doing, I began to climb the Campanile, the dog leading the way. I believe she was hoping, as I was, that Monsieur Casanova would be waiting in the shadows of its bell tower, but not a soul showed his face except for two French soldiers in Phrygian caps lurking by the entrance. As I passed by them with the dog, they made mocking comments about my size, not knowing I understood. I began to feed a flock of pigeons, shouting “Cochon! Cochon!” to the greedy birds scrabbling for my crumbs. The word “pig” was not meant for the birds but the soldiers. And behind me, to my satisfaction, I heard their laughter cease.

  Inquiry of the Day: Why do I admire those who can escape their circumstances?

  Fruitful Thought for the Day: It is because I come from a people who dared the Atlantic for a new life.

  The next morning, Lee Pronski awoke late. It was already ten. She knocked softly on Luce’s door. No answer. Slowly, feeling parental and foolish, Lee opened the door and peered inside. The girl lay asleep on the bed in her bra and panties, her lovely young face half buried beneath a pillow. An old manuscript sat open on the bedside table, no doubt one of the family documents Luce was bringing to the library in Venice.

  Lee softly closed the door, thinking uneasily of appetites that could be stirred by the sight of a young woman in her underwear. She’d always rejected the notion that middle-aged women like herself envied girls like Luce, that envy of the young was part of growing old. No, it was pity she felt looking at Luce’s vulnerable, long-limbed body. Pity and a great weariness. She left Luce a note at the reception desk and set out to find the old waterfront apartment she’d lived in with Luce’s mother on the Riva degli Schiavoni during their last winter together; Kitty Adams had been teaching at the university, and she had tagged along on a research grant.

  Despite the crowds, she made her way there quickly and stood gazing up at the huge, blank windows overlooking the Basin of San Marco. Who was enjoying its splendid view of San Giorgio now? And its huge, light-filled rooms with the breeze from the Adriatic always fresh through its hallway? The stay in Venice had been their last happy time together, despite the exhibitionist who had singled Kitty out at the university. For two weeks, the man had stood buck naked in the window of an apartment across from Kitty’s classroom, as chubby as a Ducal Palace cupid. It was soon apparent he was visible only to Kitty lecturing on her dais; the students couldn’t see him. One morning, when her class was on break, Kitty leaned out her window and lifted up her shirt to reveal her bare breasts. The man retreated into the shadows, wearing, Kitty told her later, a look of immense sorrow. He didn’t reappear. “I have ‘breasted’ a man,” Kitty told Lee. “The way explorers breast a river.”

  How like Kitty to tread wittily through unpleasant situations, she thought. Kitty had joked that the exhibitionist was lucky he could satisfy his longings so simply.

  Lee turned her back on the apartment and set off down the boardwalk, her face mournful. Did anyone understand the depth of love she had felt for Kitty? Sometimes she found herself wondering if Kitty herself had understood. If Kitty had known how to handle her moods, perhaps she wouldn’t have driven off without her and died. But that was rubbish. She, Lee, was the guilty party.

  She supposed Luce, too, was still finding things hard. Beatrice, Kitty’s sister, had told her that Luce had been obliged to rent out rooms to students in her mother’s old house to defray costs. The money coming to Luce in the form of a trust wasn’t hers until she turned thirty-five. How old was Luce, anyway? She’d forgotten. Almost twenty-eight? When Lee was the same age she had already secured a tenure track position and was teaching students who stumbled about campus wearing the same glassy, distracted look as Luce.

  Of course, she didn’t really know Luce. Kitty had been protective and secretive about her relationship with her daughter, but Lee knew a deep love had existed between them. Then she and Kitty had left Luce behind when they set out on their travels, going back to Toronto only occasionally when Kitty wanted some time with her daughter. The last occasion she had seen Luce had been at Kitty’s funeral.

  A year after Kitty’s death, an archivist at the Miller Archives and Rare Books had telephoned Lee and explained that she was worried about Luce who had become withdrawn since her mother’s death. The archivist, a friend of Kitty’s, had asked for Lee’s help, and Lee had replied brusquely: “Not my business.” What could she possibly do for a young woman she barely knew? When Kitty died, Lee had taken early retirement and gone to live in Brooklyn. She had no idea what Luce was thinking or feeling.

  And she knew even less about being motherly. Nor was it easy to learn at this stage, she told herself as she left the boardwalk, heading for the Piazza San Marco. She’d considered herself too much of a solo operator to put up with a family—even Kitty’s family. Still, she had decided to try for Kitty’s sake.

  Looking across the square, she spotted Luce reading at a café near the basilica. Luce was what used to be called a strapping girl, Lee thought. And yet despite the boyish crop cut and broad shoulders, nearly everything about Luce was shapely and soft. Yes, she was pleasing to look at and luminous with health, Lee decided grudgingly, from her full-lipped mouth with the striking white teeth to the long, milky white neck lightly ringed with lines like the markings on a statue. But it irritated her to see Luce avidly reading her family documents when, in the same breath, the girl dismissed the truth of her mother’s views. How often had Lee lectured her students not to trust the “I” narrator? And how often had she watched them ignore her cautionary advice? If the text said I, they embraced it unthinkingly. And why was Luce wearing that transparent blouse unbuttoned to the breastbone with nothing underneath? Didn’t she have the sense, in this very male culture, to bring a jacket?

  Luce had just opened the journal when she noticed Lee coming towards her across the square. How frustrating to have company at breakfast when she wanted to read. She was still tired from their flight and she felt slightly achy, as if s
he was coming down with the flu. At least the regatta would relieve her of the burden of making conversation. Hundreds of boats were already jockeying for a starting place in the Basin of San Marco. The hotel clerk had told her the regatta was late this year, postponed because of high winds and unexpected cold weather.

  “Ah, you’re looking at the family documents. Is this one of Casanova’s letters?” Lee pointed at the journal as she sat down.

  “No. It’s my ancestor’s travel journal. I have to deliver it to the Sansovinian at noon, along with the other documents.”

  “May I see it?” Lee picked it up in her plump fingers and peered inside. “The writing’s so quaint.”

  “You shouldn’t touch it without gloves,” Luce said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I shouldn’t even be looking at it in the open air,” Luce said. She took the journal back and put it in her archival box, resting her hand possessively on its lid.

  “I wouldn’t worry about the journal—it’s Casanova’s letters everyone will be interested in. Too bad. He was a reflection of a patriarchal age.”

  “Casanova’s reputation is unfair. He wrote novels and operas and saw women as his equals.”

  “It sounds like you’ve been taken in by Flem and her defence of Casanova.”

  “You’ve read Lydia Flem?”

  “Only a review of her book in The Times,” Lee said, reaching for the menu. “Interesting idea, that Casanova saw desire as an expression of a mother’s omnipotence. But the man was a predator, who, even from his own account, deliberately misled women. I can tell by your frown that you don’t agree. Here—let me order for you. The menu is in Italian.”

  Ignoring Luce’s frown, Lee placed the order for their costly breakfast: eggs Benedict with Bellinis, the Venetian concoction of champagne and peach juice served in a flute. When the food arrived, they ate in an uncomfortable silence. The only sound was the flapping of their tablecloth in the damp spring wind and the noise of the crowd, some in gaudy medieval costumes, gathering in the bleachers to watch the start of the thirty-kilometre Vogalonga. Out on the Basin of San Marco, thousands of boats with rowers the size of stick figures now swarmed across the milky green waters of the lagoon. Beyond the Basin glistened the domes and church spires of San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore.

  “Luce, are you feeling all right? You’ve hardly touched your breakfast,” Lee asked.

  Luce nodded vaguely. A tourist at a nearby table was photographing a birchbark canoe gliding past a cluster of rowing skiffs. “I was just thinking about—about Casanova. His birthplace is somewhere near here, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe so,” Lee replied. “We could try to find it. After that we can drop off your family papers at the library and visit a museum.”

  “I guess.” Luce rose and followed Lee out of the café. It was warm now and she felt slightly light-headed in the heat. She thought of Dino Fabbiani and wondered if he would be waiting for her in the Piazza San Marco at one o’clock. She wanted to tell him he was mistaken about Casanova faking his escape from the Ducal Palace. If he would listen. There was a good-natured confidence about Dino that suggested he wasn’t used to women disagreeing with his views.

  Ten minutes later, the two women were walking up the narrow lane by the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. Their waiter had said Casanova’s house was near the Salute Cathedral on the Giudecca, but he had been vague about the street address. Following his instructions, they veered first left, then right, and ended up in a jewellery store. A salesgirl said the waiter was wrong—Casanova had been born near the San Samuele Cathedral. Starting over, Lee paid for tickets on the vaporetto to San Samuele and the two women found themselves in a lane where glassblowers sat working at the open windows of their studios. Each glassblower pointed them further down the lane past the stores whose windows were jammed with glass polychrome flowers and carnival masks.

  At the end of the lane, Lee and Luce found a house with a plaque declaring it to be the birthplace of the artist Giorgio Vasari, who had lived two centuries before Casanova.

  “I feel dizzy,” Luce murmured.

  “What did you say?” Turning towards Luce, Lee dropped the guidebook, and without thinking, Luce bent quickly to pick it up—too quickly. She saw the curious little square with its empty water fountain and then, of all things, stars. Such a cliché, she thought afterwards. Moments later, she heard a woman’s voice calling her, and she saw a little oval window in the shape of an eye. Lee’s face appeared in this aperture of light, tiny and frightened and Luce heard Lee’s voice ask if she was all right.

  Luce struggled to her feet as her vision cleared.

  “Sometimes an overnight flight does this,” Lee said.

  She grasped Luce’s arm and guided her through the crowd who turned to stare at the sight they made: the short, fierce middle-aged tourist in a dove-coloured fedora and the tall, bewildered young woman in a pretty chiffon blouse and bright turquoise jeans.

  At a water taxi stand, Lee found a young gondolier who said he was glad to help and called them an ambulance boat.

  “Better now?” As the launch sped along the Grand Canal, Lee rested her hand lightly on the girl’s shoulder.

  “I’m sorry to be a burden,” Luce whispered.

  “Oh, balls!” Lee said, and removed her hand from Luce’s shoulder. They sat in silence while the ambulance boat roared down a canal whose edges were lined with peculiar blue-tipped barge poles; in the distance lay the ghostly island of San Michele, with the famous cemetery created by Napoleon. Their launch swerved under a small bridge and came to a stop inside the hospital buildings, next to a door marked with a red cross. They disembarked and found themselves in the emergency room where a doctor in baby blue clogs confirmed that the disorientation caused by jet lag sometimes led to dizziness and fainting.

  “The rule of thumb for jet lag is one day for every time zone you cross.”

  He gave Luce a Valium and told Lee to go off and watch the regatta.

  “Thanks, but I’m staying with her,” Lee said.

  “No, please! I’m fine.” Luce stared imploringly at the doctor.

  “She needs rest,” the doctor said.

  “All right, Luce. I’ll come back for you later—we’ll make plans for dinner then.”

  Closing her eyes, Luce waited for Lee’s footsteps to die away in the hall. When she was sure Lee and the doctor were gone, she brought out the old journal and settled down to read on the hospital cot.

  May 4, 1797

  I look for evidence of Jacob Casanova.

  I took Finette with me when I accompanied Father to the Ducal Palace today. Father met with General Junot, Napoleons aide-de-camp last night, and the General asked him to make a report on the prisoners in Venetian gaols to assure our government of the good intentions of the French. It was a lucky coincidence because I was eager to see the gaol where the man Jacob Casanova was imprisoned. My parent knows nothing of my tête-à-tête in the Campanile with the old Venetian. Nor had I ever told him who had given me the dog. I had said I found Finette in the street, and Father was too preoccupied to bother with a stray.

  The old justice building hides beneath its frilly Gothic façade three prisons: the Wells, a horrible sewer beneath the edifice of Istrian marble, where prisoners float in sea water; the Fours, which Father refused to describe to me; and the Leads, built directly under the lead roof of the Ducal Palace. Because the lead heats up in the summer sun, the cells are deadly during the warmer months.

  We entered the Palace of the Doge by an old door called the Porta della Carta, ornamented with slender pillars, statues and the inevitable winged lion of San Marco. Father puffed and sighed as we made our way through a series of rooms—too beautiful to be properly described—rooms such as the Sala dell’Anticollegio, the waiting room of the ambassadors, and the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, the banquet hall where the Doge gives state dinners. The walls of the banquet hall were hung with portraits by Tintoretto and Bassano. Father noticed only t
he rills of stinking water on the stairs. He looks poorly. There are dark rings under his eyes and from time to time I glimpse an empty look in his eyes.

  The news of war has upset my parent who hoped the sea air in Venice would do him good. Instead, he claims his constitution is bothered by the filth of its stopped-up gutters and the slops the Venetians empty onto the roofs of their neighbours’ houses. And he misses the Boston newsrooms where men gather to talk politics.

  “Venice is the Grave of Virtue,” Father said as we made our way into the Great Council Hall, his eyes alert for human offal.

  “Oh, Father!” I cried, hoping to distract him. “Look at Tintoretto’s portrait of Heaven! Is it not beautiful?”

  As we stopped by the painting, the Doge’s minion, Marino Faliero, introduced himself. He told us he was a descendant of the first Doge who had built the Ducal Palace.

  Monsieur Faliero led us first to the cells in the east overlooking the canal, the Rio di Palazzo, and the famous Bridge of Sighs where for centuries prisoners have taken their last look at Venice before descending into the watery quarters of the Wells. The little arched bridge was picturesque but I was interested in the Leads, where Finette’s owner had been kept prisoner, and was relieved when Monsieur Faliero took us there directly afterwards, Father wheezing beside me. As we peered into these empty rooms, I tried to caution myself about accepting the old Venetian’s tale. You see, I possess a gullible nature and am only too eager to believe whatever marvellous things I am told—simply because they are marvellous.