What Casanova Told Me

by Susan Swan

  “How do you do make a living?” She realized she had been too taken up with his translation of her document to ask him.

  “I’m an art historian, only this summer I’m working as a copy editor at a publishing house here.” Ender smiled. “The pay is poor but it gives me time to work on my history of art under the Ottomans. And you?”

  “I work at an archives in Toronto.”

  “You? An archivist? How romantic!” His smile deepened. “Of course, I don’t precisely know what an archivist does …”

  “Librarians store books and archivists preserve evidence … old documents and so forth.” She was aware of sounding a little pompous. “I guess I don’t look like who I am.”

  He laughed and they turned to look at the Bosphorus where a fishing boat was vanishing into shimmers of golden light. The sun had set, and above the hilly, wooded shore on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, she noticed a large evening cloud assembling itself into the shape of a man’s head. She picked out a fan-shaped hat and a frock coat. It was the silhouette of a perfect eighteenth-century gentleman.

  “Ender! It’s him, it’s Casanova!” she whispered, pointing. Too late. As he turned to look, the cloud broke into fragments across the evening sky. The way our lives change is mysterious, she thought as she watched the wisps of cloud drifting above the hills on the opposite shore. The process is often slow and gentle, like a symphony shifting into another movement. At first, we are oblivious as it carries us along into the next phase of our lives. Then gradually, we grow aware of how it is sweeping us up into the momentum we started ourselves.

  “Are you far away, Luce?” Ender asked.

  “Not so far.” She smiled. He nodded and picked up his notepad. In his deep, quiet voice, he began to read from his translation.

  After twenty-four hours, we came to the old military road through the mountains that leads to Edirne, finally reaching the beautiful gardens and country houses that surround this city. I am tempted to tell of our adventures along the way, the new mosque and public clock Your Majesty commissioned in the square at D.; the strange sight at R. of Christians and Jews entering the mosque together, proving the habits of village life are sometimes stronger than religious differences; and the nuisance of having to rescue the old gentleman’s dog at the fair in U., where Russian furs are sold in abundance.

  Your Majesty already knows about our problems with the officers of the customs house on the road outside Pera, and how angry I was when they held us up on the pretext of examining our luggage, falsely claiming that I had forgotten to obtain a tezkire in Constantinople when I set out for Belgrade with the young prince. Their impudence was an insult. I was pleased to learn that they were dealt with swiftly. And I accepted with humble gratitude Your Majesty’s gracious suggestion that we should not enter the city in open triumph. Your Majesty is wise to see that public knowledge of Mahmud’s kidnapping could weaken the faith of Your subjects in the Sublime Porte.

  Even so, as Your oarsmen rowed us across the Bosphorus, I was not prepared for the sight of four golden Montgolfier balloons soaring up over our heads and floating off down the Bosphorus like dazzling Imperial suns. We were all overjoyed by the demonstration of Your Majesty’s power. But the old gentleman grew increasingly sad the closer we came to Constantinople, for reasons which will soon become clear.

  As Your Majesty knows, Giacomo Casanova did not accompany us to Topkapi Palace. He was weary from our journey, and indeed, he still seemed unwell. I found him rooms in Stamboul in a konak near the Imperial Gate. There he and Miss Adams rejoiced in the majesty of the Blue Mosque and Santa Sophia whose domes rise out of the earth like the swelling chests of giant war-birds. They were delighted by the peaceful beauty of the Sea of Marmara, its waters lightly wrinkled by the passage of eight-oar caiques and fishing vessels.

  Alas, there had been a fire in the neighbourhood the day before—one of the old wooden places went up like a tinderbox—and the acrid smell of burning still lingered. If I may humbly say, the late summer rain that God the Almighty sent to douse the blaze had, at the same time, muddied the roads up the hill named after Your glorious ancestor, Sultan Ahmet, whose abode is Heaven, may God’s mercy be upon him. The axles of our coach wheels continually ran aground, and each time it floundered in the mud, barking neighbourhood dogs surrounded us, driving the old gentleman’s terrier into a frenzy.

  But when the Imperial Gate loomed in sight, these small nuisances vanished, Your Majesty. We settled the old gentleman in his lodgings, and there he gave Miss Adams a letter to deliver to Nakshidil Sultan.

  But as we turned to go, he surprised me by begging her to stay instead.

  “Dearest,” she replied, “I have resigned myself to our circumstances. Aimée is expecting your help. I set out to help you find her and I cannot intervene now.”

  Giacomo Casanova sank onto a divan, his head in his hands.

  “Dear Jacob,” she said. “You have given me so much. When we met, you taught me what you believed—that love is your first faith. But Aimée is your destination and it is your responsibility to help her. As for me, I have come to realize that my faith is travel. I intend to go around the world twice before I die.”

  “Ah, the pupil has outgrown the master!” He rose, with tears on his cheeks. He held her to him and bade her farewell. I saw that she was fighting back tears. There was no reason that I could see for the old gentleman’s misery since they were about to attain the purpose of their journey together.

  Why do I bother with an account of a personal matter like the old gentleman’s tears, Your Majesty? So that you will understand that while Mahmud’s homecoming was a celebration for you, it was a sad occasion for the Chevalier de Seingalt. And I will return to this matter in a moment.

  Miss Adams was startled when I explained that as a woman she could not go with me to witness Your happy reunion with Mahmud. If I may humbly say, she later thanked me for my descriptions of the Imperial Gate which she said were as good as seeing it with her own eyes—Your Majesty’s dazzling carpets, the wall emblazoned with Your Majesty’s jewels and the lines of turbaned courtiers stretching out in impressive stillness, their eyes averted in deference.

  She listened, wide-eyed, to my description of the viziers in the freshest spring green, the chamberlains aglow in scarlet, the ulema and mullahs, adamantine in purple and the deepest of blues. She was especially pleased when I mentioned the French engineers, distinguished by their bare heads and carmagnoles.

  Naturally, I could not go with Miss Adams into the Seraglio to deliver the letter to Nakshidil Sultan. I had arranged for her to go on her own. When I explained that Nakshidil means “beautiful picture embroidered on the heart,” she smiled sweetly. With the deepest piety, and with no wish to seem disrespectful of the garden of Your Majesty’s happiness, I later encouraged Miss Adams to describe her impressions of Your Imperial Palace and the Seraglio. She exclaimed at everything with a wondering heart—the monumental elegance of Your Majesty’s Tower of Justice and the airy grace of Your Pavilions overlooking the Golden Horn. She was delighted to find gardens as well tended as those in the Garden of Paradise. Then she was escorted into the Seraglio by one of the black eunuchs who had been selected to take her to the apartments of Nakshidil Sultan.

  Luce was sitting by herself on a public bench near the Hagia Sophia. The dome of the old Byzantine basilica rose like the shell of an overgrown pink turtle above the glistening waterways of Istanbul. The building had been converted into a mosque after Istanbul fell to the Turks in 1453, and Luce had read in her guidebook how a famous Ottoman architect had solved the problems of its fragile dome by shoring up the sides of the building with buttresses. But it wasn’t the history of Istanbul that occupied her thoughts. She had spent the morning worrying about the fate of Asked For Adams. After breakfast, she found a note from Ender, suggesting they meet at Topkapi Palace at noon.

  The translation he had given her had stopped just before Asked For Adams was about to meet Casanova’s lost lov
e, but Luce suspected him of having held something back. What was he afraid of telling her? She was sure by now that Jacob Casanova had loved her ancestor, and there was no danger that he would choose Aimée. Yet Ender had given her a strange smile when she asked if he was drawing out his translation to prolong the story’s suspense. She didn’t know him well, but what she had seen of his nature made her suspect he might be protecting her.

  She saw him coming now, sauntering unchallenged through the gauntlet of loiterers near the taxi stand. She rose to her feet and called his name and he came hurrying up the hill towards her, grinning. Together they went through the Bab-i Hümayun, the Imperial Gate of Topkapi Palace. Inside its grounds, she saw rose gardens and closely cropped lawns shaded by plane and fir trees that grew next to spiky cactus and myrtle bushes. Aside from the delicate peaks of the palace towers, she and Ender could have been in a well-tended monastery somewhere in Switzerland. If Athens with its smoggy golden light was like a large Mediterranean town, Istanbul was a leafy European city on a spectacular sea-river. Except that in the palace’s imperial heart had lain the great harem. The Ottomans adopted the practice of polygamy that they’d adopted from the Arab nomads they had conquered.

  Ender touched her arm and pointed out a tall stone arch with a panel of golden Islamic script above the entranceway they were about to pass through.

  “The Seraglio,” he said solemnly. They joined the tourists moving through its door like eddying fish in a current, past the high, dark halls with iron grilles and tall wood-panelled cupboards.

  They followed a tour group into the Sultan’s apartment and stood by a huge screened window where Luce imagined Mahmud must have watched his mother Aimée and other harem women bathing in the pool below. According to the guide, the Sultan would select a new partner during a visit to his mother’s apartment. If he liked the girl serving their tea, he would give her the symbolic handkerchief. She was surprised to see that the lavishly tiled bathroom of the Sultan’s mother was adjacent to the bathroom of her son, the Sultan. The harem, she mused, with its numerous women, camouflaged a semi-erotic dependency between mother and son.

  “What are you thinking about?” Ender whispered.

  “Aimée—I am imagining her living here.”

  “Don’t forget, to be a slave in the harem wasn’t equivalent to slavery in the States,” Ender replied. “These women and their servants were treated as dependants, not inferiors.”

  “The wives were sequestered. That sounds like the fate of an inferior to me.”

  “Yes, perhaps. It was never good to be a woman in earlier times.”

  “My mother would have said it was better in Neolithic times.” Luce smiled.

  They left the harem’s maze of shadowy tiled rooms and crossed the lawn to inspect the Treasury Pavilion. In the upper gallery, they found a portrait of Selim III, the sultan to whom the scribe had been writing. Selim looked kind, with droopy, sleepy eyes and a narrow nose. Selim’s murderers, Ender told her, were renegade janissaries who didn’t like Selim’s attempts to reform the army with French military practices. Nearby hung the portrait of Mahmud, Aimée’s son. Ender whispered that Mahmud didn’t resemble Selim, perhaps because they had different mothers in the harem. The painting showed a man with large, intelligent eyes and a small, angry mouth partly hidden by a dark beard.

  “He looks as if he spent his reign dealing with frustrations,” Luce said.

  “Maybe so. Mahmud fought to change the dress code to the fez and the frock coat,” Ender replied. “But he was more successful with introducing Western reforms than Selim.”

  Out in the courtyard, they found a quiet bench in the shade, away from the bustle of the palace.

  “You’ve finished the scribe’s letter, haven’t you?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was not the right time. I wanted to prepare you. I mean, Luce, I didn’t know how to prepare you—so I waited to see if an idea would come to me.”

  “You’re warning me, aren’t you, that I shouldn’t expect a happy ending?”

  He said nothing. He took some pages out of his knapsack and handed them over. She began to read with a certain hesitation.

  In the private apartment of Nakshidil Sultan, Miss Adams saw plump bergères thick with pale satin cushions and giant mirrors in swagged golden frames and pretty satin-wood tables, on whose surfaces rested sweetly scented bowls of potpourri.

  Miss Adams lost her tongue as Nakshidil Sultan came into the apartment, a vision of Imperial loveliness in a silk gown embroidered with emeralds and ruby-red carnations. When Nakshidil moved, her wheat-coloured hair glittered with the light of tiny diamonds. Wordlessly, Miss Adams handed her the old gentleman’s letter and then she waited.

  Nakshidil Sultan handed the letter back to Miss Adams with a shake of her head.

  “There is some mistake,” Nakshidil Sultan said. “It is not addressed to me.”

  When Miss Adams read it, she began to sob brokenly. I dutifully submit my translation of the old gentleman’s baroque French.

  My darling Asked For,

  By the time you read this, I will be on a coach to Edirne, Finette on my lap and Tante Flora’s wig on my head to keep the autumn chill from my bones. And you will know everything, dear girl. By that, I mean it is you I love—and that I have adored you from the first moment I experienced your kindness on the public barge sailing into Venice.

  Do not be sad, my soul. It was not my intention to arouse longings I cannot fulfill. Yet it is our longings that provide us with the text of our lives and lead us to the faiths we need to enact our destinies. And our paradox is this: the true art is not to satisfy our longings but to learn how to cherish them.

  Aimée’s letters, which first won me your sympathy, were made up of words I borrowed to please you from the letters of all the women I have loved and who loved me in return. Darling girl, with you I have felt more contented than ever before. I am certain I never will feel as contented again.

  In a few hours, the coach will come and I will return to Bohemia and complete the history of my life. Many times, I thought of telling you the truth about Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, and knowing your kind nature, I was certain you would forgive me. But I cannot ask you to join an old crustacean when life and travel calls you. Know that I will never forget you, and that I salute you, Asked For Philosophe.

  And so, you and I have come to the end of our journey together. I have spoken to our new friend who will look after you in Constantinople when I am gone. I have given him enough monies to see you safely to America or wherever your heart might direct—these are held in trust by him for your use.

  My hope is that you will travel more easily through the world than I, Giacomo Casanova, who fled across Europe and Asia, seeking love and pleasure and resting nowhere for long. Wherever you alight, Asked For, may home await you. And may your adventures inspire a thousand faiths, large and small.

  Your loving Jacob

  Miss Adams was greatly upset when she returned to our lodgings. I am not certain she heard me when I told her that I had promised the Chevalier de Seingalt that I would take her into my home if troubles befell him. And naturally, I had not had the slightest warning I would be called upon so soon to make good my words.

  The poor woman lost her faculty of speech and did not talk to my wife or me for three days. She would turn her head away when Aisha approached her with food, and to my knowledge she did not eat. Instead she left the house and went for walks by the shore of the Bosphorus, not caring whether rain fell or the sun shone. Aisha was finally able to entreat her to join us at the table with bowls of sweet-smelling soup.

  That said, Your Majesty, it pleases my wife to have another grown woman about. Our three young sons and two young daughters are now attempting words and discovering language. And Aisha often complains that my work as your Imperial scribe leaves her with no adult company, and she frequently catches herself babbling in a child’s tongue. />
  And now I come to my final recommendation, but first I wish to point out that Nakshidil Sultan told Asked For Adams that she did once meet the old gentleman. When she was a girl, she recalled meeting a tall, bewigged gentleman by the name of the Chevalier de Seingalt near Nantes walking his dog in the garden. He tipped his hat and made a friendly remark to her about the swans on the grounds. Nakshidil Sultan also recalled leaving behind a small portrait of herself near P——— in Martinique. It seems the old gentleman claimed the portrait as his own and wrote the love letters under the name Nakshidil Sultan to mislead Miss Adams. It is indeed a curious story, and I do not know as I approach my final summing-up the exact nature of Miss Adams’ relationship with the old gentleman. Clearly, it involved deep affection on both parts.

  All that remains is for Your Majesty to accept my recommendation that Miss Adams reside under my supervision where she will be out of reach of scheming courtiers until such time as she is ready to leave. She is a dependable woman who has shown herself courageous and trustworthy with the young prince, and he has repaid her with his respect and friendship. The old gentleman, by contrast, turns out to be a practised dissembler, although Miss Adams defends him and sees good in him still.

  She is pleased by the prospect of living with my family in our home. Yesterday she and my wife enjoyed keyif in our garden by the Bosphorus, and Miss Adams was pleased to learn that my wife speaks a little English, although Aisha must work harder to perfect her grammar.