What Casanova Told Me

by Susan Swan

  I came suddenly upon a shipwright caulking a boat amid an evil-smelling cloud of smoke. Down another lane, wretched-looking mattresses stood on end against the houses—as if the Venetian sunshine could do anything for the ugly stains I saw upon them. I noted the absence of religious signs or images. I saw no chapels, no Madonnas, no carved crosses in the squares, no effigies of saints used in the display of religious devotion one finds in other quarters of the city. Nor did the faces of the occupants of this section look Venetian. The men wore black jackets and small caps from which coiled long, straggly curls.

  Turning a corner in a narrow little laneway, I bumped headlong into Francis, who cried out in surprise when he saw me.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I was told an undertaker lives in this part of Venice. And you?”

  “I came in search of a moneylender,” he said sheepishly.

  Francis said we were in the Jewish ghetto, and together we set out to find the establishment on Rio —. I was relieved to have him by my side although he eyed each passerby, from the smallest child to the eldest beggar, as if they were responsible for our sorrows.

  At last we came to the street address on Monsieur Casanova’s note. It was set off by two ruinous bridges at either end of a filthy canal. Dead cats and excrement floated on its surface. I held Father’s hanky over my nose and knocked on the door. From inside, I heard footsteps; the door opened a crack, and I said my name loudly.

  A hand seized my wrist and drew me in, leaving Francis on the doorstep. I found myself in the reception hall of a modest palazzo. My host wore breeches and a simple coat, his long grey curls quelled by a skullcap.

  I considered calling for Francis but the stranger’s hand remained firmly on my arm, preventing me.

  “My name is Isaac Bey, and I will not harm you,” he said. “We have no time to waste. Your father can be buried in our cemetery by sunset, if you are willing.”

  “‘Our’ cemetery?” I asked.

  “The Hebrew cemetery at the Lido. The humble spot has given sanctuary to my ancestors.”

  “Why should I believe you?” I asked. “Perhaps you will take my money and throw Father’s bones into the canal.”

  “I need no payment. It’s a favour for my friend

  Giacomo.” He put a finger to his lips and opened a small stained-glass window in the wall behind us, motioning for me to look. “You see him, in his vestimenti di confidenza? These hard times require many disguises.”

  In the next room, I saw a tall Venetian lady in a grand court wig playing dice with two men in nightcaps and undershirts. I did not know the gentlemen, but I recognized Monsieur Casanova. He wore a petticoat and smock sleeves with pretty trailing ribbons. As my host closed the panel, Monsieur Casanova turned our way and smiled.

  “Handsome, isn’t it?” my host said. “His mother wore the wig on the Vienna stage.”

  “She was an actress?”

  “One of the most beautiful in Europe.”

  Father or Francis would be humiliated to be seen in such a costume, while Monsieur Casanova appears delighted to garb himself in the clothes of my sex. As for me, my size often leads people to mistake me for a man. “What is it you desire, sir?” shopkeepers call out before they notice my skirts. Then they stammer apologies. I should be accustomed to these blunders. But I still feel a great shame when it happens.

  “Miss Adams, let us return to the business at hand.” My host was purposeful now, his voice low and serious. “We will say the funeral Kaddish for your father as if he were one of us. You understand?”

  “I would like to see Father buried,” I said.

  “It is better if you do not know how I am able to arrange this. But I will do this for you as a good Christian woman because the Chevalier tells us you have been kind to him. Look for the red gondola by the San Marco wharf at seven o’clock this evening.” Isaac Bey led me to the door. “All will be taken care of. You need only appear.”

  He nudged me outside, where I found myself face to face again with Francis.

  “Why did you leave me out here, drumming my fists on the door!” Francis cried.

  Before I could shush him, two men in skullcaps leaned out the window above us and screamed in Italian.

  “Shut your mouths, you foreign swine!” Francis yelled.

  Somewhere higher up, another window creaked open, and the next thing I knew, Francis was standing before me, spluttering and shaking like a bedraggled rooster, his homespun suit covered in yellow slop.

  The next morning Luce was startled to find Lee waiting in a chair outside her bedroom. A large plastic box punched with air holes sat on the floor next to her feet.

  “Are you better today? You didn’t wait for me at the hospital,” Lee said.

  “I had my appointment. I had to leave.”

  “But you didn’t come back to the hotel, Luce. If you and I are going to get along, I have to know your plans. Is that too much to ask?”

  “I’m not used to being accountable to anyone. Not since Mother left.”

  “Louder, Luce. I can’t hear you.”

  “I am used to taking care of myself.”

  Lee cocked her head, as if puzzled. “I’m not angry, Luce. I was only worried.”

  “Oh.” Luce hesitated. “I didn’t mean to make you worry.”

  “Well, that’s a start. But we have another problem.” Lee pointed to the box. “A man called Alberto left this down at the reception desk. He told the clerk you promised to take the cat off his hands.”

  Luce crouched down and peered inside. The sight of the small brown nose pressed against an air hole aroused in her a surge of protective feelings.

  “I don’t think you should get too close to it.” Lee heaved herself out of the chair. “It looks diseased.”

  “Her name is Venus.”

  “Well, someone should look again. The little sacs under its tail say differently.”

  “Where are you going?” Luce asked.

  “To pay our bill. We have to catch the boat. You can tell me what you want to do about it later.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Let’s hope today will go smoothly,” Lee said over her shoulder. “I’m not in the mood for more problems.”

  From the deck of the Ancona ferry, Luce watched the flat, sandbar-strewn coast of eastern Italy dwindle into the Adriatic. By her feet sat the carrying case. She had checked the cat out before breakfast and found Lee was right: Venus was male. In a shop near San Marco, she had bought beautiful Venetian notepaper with swirling, feather-like designs, as well as antibiotic drops for babies, to use on the cat’s infected eye.

  She was sad she had missed seeing Casanova’s birthplace. But Lee had booked them on the morning train to Brindisi and hurried their leave-taking. There had been no time to take the manuscript with the Arabic writing to the Sansovinian, and she had been too embarrassed to admit to Lee that she had forgotten to give it to Signor Goldoni the day before.

  As they were leaving the hotel, the clerk had handed Luce a message from Alberto. She took it out now and reread it.

  Dear Luce: You look very kind so I know you will take

  good care of Venus. Forgive me, Alberto.

  Along with the note, Alberto had sent a slightly overexposed photograph of Luce stroking the cat’s head in his kitchen. A token from Dino, she thought with chagrin. After she refused to leave the cat in Venice, Lee had said they could take it to Greece on the ferry and try their luck with customs. But how would she manage with an animal in Athens?

  “What are you reading?” Lee asked.

  “Alberto’s note.” Luce stuffed it back into her travel pack.

  “Oh, about the cat. Have you thought about what you’re going to do with it in Athens?”

  “Not yet,” Luce said, stroking Venus’s nose through an air hole.

  “It’s a sorry-looking thing, isn’t it?”

  “He has one beautiful blue eye.”

  “Your mother always t
ook in strays,” Lee said.

  “You don’t like cats?”

  “I am not a cat person, Luce. I think people overwhelm pets with emotions they can’t express to their friends. I’m sure most animals would prefer to be left alone. Shall we find the snack bar?”

  Lee began to jostle her way through an obdurate group of backpackers. Luce hesitated and then, with a muffled groan of protest, she picked up her bag and Venus’s carrying case and followed the older woman down the stairs to the ferry’s lounge. She felt the same old watery sadness she often experienced when she left a place. It was as if she had been abandoned by someone. But who was there to abandon her now?

  In the lounge, a smiling lounge singer was struggling through an Elvis Presley hit. Two beats behind, a music box played the same tune. Four Scandinavian girls were singing along, whether in mockery or admiration she couldn’t tell. Lee glowered in his direction and then headed off to the sandwich bar, her grey fedora dipping with the rolling deck.

  Luce sat down and opened the user copy of the old journal. What was it Asked For Adams had said about starting a journey?

  Write down what it is you desire and tear your wish into a

  dozen pieces. Then fling the scraps into a large body of

  water. (Any ocean will do.)

  Luce took a piece of her new Venetian notepaper and scribbled: “I want to meet someone like Casanova.” She reread her sentence. Now what did she mean by that exactly? Was she putting herself at risk of meeting another poseur like Dino Fabbiani? She scratched out the sentence and wrote instead: “I want to meet someone who can show me that love doesn’t mean disappointment.” Folding the notepaper carefully, she put it in her pocket. Then, as the singer moved tunelessly into a rendition of “Blue Suede Shoes,” she brought out the pendulum kit, her mother’s old Christmas present. She examined the small brass pendulum attached to a long velvet ribbon. The fob of the pendulum looked like a miniature top of the kind children spin, she decided.

  She skimmed the booklet with the pendulum kit’s folkloric instructions: avoid red-haired lovers in months with r in the name, and seek blond-haired admirers when the moon is full but dark-haired adventurers when the tide is high and the moon is new. Glancing around the lounge, she checked to see if anyone was watching. No one was. At the far end of the room, Lee stood in a long line of passengers placing orders at the snackbar. A look of hopeful concentration on her face, she delicately lifted up the pendulum and held its string between her thumb and index finger so the fob swung slowly back and forth. When it seemed to her that the pendulum was motionless, she whispered, “Will I know love?” Very, very slightly, the pendulum started to swing in what looked to her like a tiny clockwise circle over Asked For’s clear, rounded letters.

  May 25, 1797

  Father is gone.

  I said goodbye to him in the cellar of the hotel last night. I lit twelve candles and placed them on the floor nearby. He no longer looked like himself but seemed to have shrunk into the packing ice, as if he, too, were melting. I anointed him with lavender to dispel the unpleasant, sweetish odour.

  “Father, forgive me for what I am doing.”

  I meant by that his burial in the Hebrew cemetery. But those words clanged over and over in my head, as if they had another meaning I could faintly grasp.

  We were poled to the Lido in one of the red gondolas the Venetians use to carry the dead. Isaac Bey sat with Francis and me in the felz, and Father lay in the stern in a box of cypress wood. It was alarmingly hot and raining a strange dry rain, like a mist. I was glad the burial had been arranged, because it would be difficult now to keep Father preserved.

  At the Lido, a rabbi met us at the wharf. He stood aside scowling, as if the task of burying Father was being done at great cost to him—and perhaps it was. Francis hired a cart from a nearby merchant and we put Father in it and then sat around him like small animals at the foot of a fallen tree.

  A few families on the streets by the wharf stopped to watch us go by. A man cried, “Il povero,” and the woman beside him crossed herself.

  In no time, we reached the cemetery. I would have missed it because most of its tombstones were crumbling, and their inscriptions hidden by ivy vines. The entire site was made of sand. I asked my companion if the sea was a threat to the graves. Isaac Bey would not answer, and I realized he was praying. At least Father will look east and south at the Adriatic, I whispered to Francis, and he nodded sadly.

  The cart driver produced shovels, and Francis and the men began to dig. It did not take long, as the sand was loose, but soon the evening light started to fade. I watched the watery horizon, praying the sun would go down slowly so we could get this ordeal over and done. The cart driver’s wife offered us olives and a flask of wine that had been much watered. We drank and ate without speaking. The men, whose faces were oily with sweat, took her refreshments silently.

  At last the hole was dug, and Francis and the others slid Father’s coffin into it. It landed with a shocking thump and I let out a cry. Meanwhile, the rabbi had begun to recite a low, wailing dirge. Isaac Bey whispered that this was the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead which his people say as a pledge of renewed commitment to life, and he joined him in the ritual answers.

  I wanted to fall into the hole myself and lie with my parent, so terrible was the rending of our bond. I put my hands on my ears to shut out the hollow thumps as spadefuls of wet sand landed on Father’s coffin.

  Francis tightened his grip on my elbow. I was grateful for his human touch. He is not all bad, my Francis, only rigid and slow—far too slow in most instances to notice the troubles of others.

  I would not leave after it was done. Francis watched from the laneway as I walked among the forgotten graves, tears spilling down my face. I wanted Father to hear my footsteps, because I believe this is what we can do for our dead: tread over the ground that nourishes them so they will hear us and know life goes on.

  Finally, I pulled myself away from Father and the neglected cemetery and walked with Francis back to the wharf. Isaac and the rabbi were nowhere in sight, but three French soldiers were searching for young couples in the crowd. One of the soldiers came over to Francis and myself, and, in a high, nasal voice, read out an official document ordering us to take part in General Bonaparte’s victory celebration. We have been asked to be one of the young couples representing Domestic Fecundity on the fourth of June. As American revolutionaries, Francis and I are to dress in French colours and wear their red liberty bonnets. Francis bowed and accepted. I hated him at that moment. The soldiers left in a small boat, the wind ruffling their capes. We had to wait several hours before we could find another gondola that would take us back to Venice.

  First Inquiry of the Day: Why should parents die before us? Should they not be like gods, watching over us always?

  I said this to Francis on the gondola ride back to the hotel, and he gave me one of his idiot smiles. “The dead watch over us from Heaven. Every Christian knows that.”

  The wind, stronger now, blew Francis’s red hair over his eyes. As it did so, I stuck out my tongue, but I think he saw me, because he sat like an angry boy, staring stonily into the water which grew black and still while the night clouds massed above our heads.

  A few hours later, I awoke to the sound of someone trying my door. I flung my bed robe about my shoulders and found Francis on the threshold.

  “Asked For, I will teach you how to respect a man,” he said, and stepped unbidden into my room. “My sisters learned from me how to do it and so shall you.”

  Before I could protest, he seized me around the waist and tried to pull me close. Angered, I hurled him up against the door. How dare he do such a thing? As a girl, I had wrestled with my male cousins, so physical sport is not strange to me. After these games, I would fall asleep reciting the names of the boys I had trounced. Meanwhile, Francis came back puffing and cursing and threw me against a wall. Once again, I pushed him away from me, laughing, whether in shock or fear I do not
know. As I stood, shaking with mirth, he threw me down on the bed, whose frame splintered into a dozen pieces, making a boom like thunder.

  Moments later, the landlord’s head in his nightcap appeared at my door and two sbirri entered, waving their clubs. They had come expecting thieves, and when they saw only Francis and me, they snickered and whispered among themselves. The landlord made Francis pay for the broken bed and then he showed me to a new room while a sheepish Francis retired to his quarters. Our landlord seemed to think it a good joke. As he bid me good night, he whispered that he understood that breaking beds was a custom among a frontier people like Americans, but Venetians did not engage in the sport. I did not laugh.

  This morning, I spoke not a word to my betrothed who greeted me gruff and shame-faced. I do not know how I can tolerate Francis without Father to speak to him on my behalf.

  First Inquiry of the Day: How many times should one overlook the erring ways of a husband-to-be?

  Lesson Learned: If to err is human, and to forgive divine, then one must choose one’s husband foolishly so that one can forgive endlessly and approach a state of grace befitting a saint. But I believe this is not wise. Far better to choose carefully in order to forgive less often. This is also the best way to avoid the self-congratulation that accompanies frequent acts of generosity.

  May 28, 1797

  Hot and miserable, with only a few weeks of freedom remaining. I have received a note. At first, I thought it was another message from Monsieur Casanova, but the letter slid under my door had been written by Francis:

  Dear Asked For,

  Please forgive me for what I did. I know that I have not been the man I should be. As Christ is to the church, so a husband should be for his wife. But I have been sorely vexed by our circumstances. The Adams orchards are doing poorly so President Adams devised the pretext of a trade mission to help your ailing father. While you toured Venice, I was obliged to spend many hours out of your company taking useless notes. But that is behind us now. I swear I will not lay a hand on you until we are made one in God’s eyes.