What Casanova Told Me

by Susan Swan

  And now I come to the moment when I must offer thanksgiving for the overflowing generosity of Your Imperial Self. The execution of my duties on Your behalf is reward enough, although I trust that Your Majesty, in Your Superior Wisdom, will allow Miss Adams to reside in my home so that I may enjoy the pleasures of speaking my father’s tongue with my house guest. O Glorious Master, such conversations are precious interludes that help to bring my dear old father back to life.

  This was written by the Poor, the Wretched, the Neediest of God’s Mercy, the scribe Mustafa known as Sari, Son of Mustafa the Scotsman, May he rest in peace and may God forgive our sins and draw a veil over our mistakes! Amen! Completed in Konstantiniye, the capital, in the year 1212 of the Hijrah of the Prophet.

  Luce put down Ender’s translation of the scribe’s letter and gazed with a stricken face at the Golden Horn. It was past noon, and the harbour was jammed with freighters and tourist boats bearing sightseers.

  “It’s so sad,” she whispered.

  “He’s Casanova—he has to keep moving.”

  “But he didn’t, Ender. He went back to a castle in Bohemia and spent his last days there as a librarian for a count who mistreated him.”

  “Well, then, perhaps his pride wouldn’t let him be a burden on someone so young. His bad health in Thrace must have been humiliating for him.”

  “He was protecting Asked For from his old age? Is that what you mean?”

  “Perhaps. I had my suspicions about those letters from Aimée Dubucq de Rivery. I have been reading the copy of the old journal you loaned me and I found some of Aimée’s grammatical constructions awkward. For instance, she sometimes left off the article that French grammar requires. In Italian, you don’t need to use ‘the’ so frequently.”

  “I suppose I made allowances for the French because it was written in the eighteenth century.”

  “Yes, I agree, the errors are subtle. But I was struck by a phrase in Aimée’s last letter to Casanova: ‘You are the man the most important of all the men.’ Obviously, I thought to myself, Aimée has made a grammatical error and forgotten the comma after ‘you are the man.’ Otherwise why would she say such a thing? She was shut away from the world in the harem, and yet the sentence suggested she had other lovers.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would Casanova put in an extra ‘the’? Are you saying that he intended to leave it out?”

  “My hunch is that he knew his tic so he put in an extra ‘the’ to compensate and still ended up writing French like an Italian. There are certain native tendencies we all acquire while learning a language and most of us carry those tendencies to the grave,” Ender said smiling. “Even Casanova.”

  “That’s clever of you. But I feel unsatisfied. I don’t know what happened to her after she stayed in Istanbul.”

  “Perhaps there are more documents. They may turn up yet.”

  He reached over and gently encircled her wrist with his hand. She felt him hesitate as if he expected her to jerk free, and she surprised herself by letting her hand rest in the warmth of his fingers. She heard him take a little breath, and when she looked up, he was watching her with unusual seriousness.

  “Maybe so,” she said doubtfully.

  The following afternoon, Luce awoke from a nap on the beach to feel the heat of several hard little weights on her back. She was lying on the stretch of shore in front of Ender’s uncle’s summer house on the Princes’ Islands. She had started to write in her journal and fallen asleep. She stirred drowsily. There were tiny pulsing sensations of warmth running up and down her spine. She opened her eyes and another soft little weight, radiant with heat, touched the nape of her neck below her swim-damp hair.

  “Don’t move,” a voice whispered. “I haven’t finished.”

  She obeyed, thinking she was in a dream. Then she looked sideways and saw Ender’s face.

  “I’m going to sit up,” she whispered.

  He made a reproachful sound. “You can’t move. You are a sea creature I’ve pinned to the sand.”

  She laughed as the last smooth, hot weight settled on her skin, now tingling from the stones and the electric brush of his fingers.

  “All right. Tell me what I should do.”

  “You must tell me if you are involved with anyone.” He lay down next to her on the sand and stared into her eyes. Luce found herself flushing with embarrassment. Out here under the fiendish afternoon sun, with the noise of the surf in her ears, and the small stones a delicately balanced weight on her back, she felt exposed. She held his eyes beneath that single, unbroken eyebrow.

  “No. I prefer my own company.”

  He laughed.

  “And you?” She raised her head and several of the small, hot stones slid onto the sand with dull little plops. “How do I know you aren’t married?”

  He sat up, frowning and sucking on an arm of his sunglasses, and for a moment she thought she had insulted him.

  “I was engaged to someone. It ended last year. I couldn’t please her.” He sighed. “She accused me of being too serious. I tried to change her mind.” Ender rose to his feet, the humour draining from his face. He began to brush the wet sand from his bathing suit. He looked so frustrated and unhappy that Luce rose to her feet too and touched his arm reassuringly.

  “Maybe she didn’t really think that. Maybe she was just afraid of being close.”

  “Ah, Luce. Why must you leave when I am just getting to understand you? Can’t you stay on?”

  “I wish I could. But my job starts again in two days.”

  He took her hand, shaking his head ruefully.

  “You must come back, then, and together we will find out what happened to your ancestor here.”

  “I’ll come back, Ender. I promise.”

  “Luce,” he said, “I would like very much to believe you.”

  They began to walk hand in hand up the shore towards his uncle’s house, their shadows stretching ahead of them on the sand in long spidery patterns.

  PART FIVE

  In Her Own Backyard

  TWO YEARS LATER, TORONTO

  Luce was sitting in her mother’s study, her study now. It overlooked the garden where the grandson of Aaron Adams had once raised sheep and tended a small orchard of pear and apple trees. Only a few fruit trees remained, and plots of phlox and blushing sedum flowered along a meandering stone path. Timothy, Aaron’s grandson, had sold most of the farmland late in his life to build a summer cottage on the St. Lawrence River. But he had left his family the handsome Victorian farmhouse and garden, an island of countryside deep in the heart of the Toronto’s maple-shaded Annex.

  From the large picture window of her mother’s study, she could see Aphrodite asleep on the table she had set for lunch under the pear tree. The goblets made of thin old Canadian glass, the silver cutlery that went back to Timothy’s time, and the festive touch of the bright blue napkins. The “Sexy Fig Salad” (she had found the name in a newspaper recipe) draped with slices of prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella and a sprinkling of shredded basil waited in the kitchen along with dessert, a platter of homemade yogurt and raspberry sauce.

  She had finished her preparations and Lee wasn’t due for another hour at least. She walked over to the pine bookshelf on the north wall of the study. On the top shelf, her mother’s collection of goddess icons sat along with the two-headed figure that Lee had purchased for her in Venice. She ran her fingers lightly along the shelves that held some of her mother’s books, including The Collected Essays of Dr. K.A. Adams—Lee had helped Luce find a publisher for it the year before and written an introduction.

  Had she put all the treasures she wanted Lee to see on the study table? She didn’t want to leave anything out. Lee had been as excited as she was about the news that a scholarly journal, North American Feminist Studies, had agreed to publish her own article on the family documents. A copy-edited draft of “An Archivist Looks at Her Family Papers” sat on her mother’s roll-top desk next to her travel diary about her trip
to Istanbul. She picked up her diary and flipped through it quickly. Its pages were mostly empty. She hadn’t proved to be much of a journal keeper; she knew from her work at the Miller that most journals tend to record only the unhappy moments. She put down her travel diary and picked up the copy-edited draft of her scholarly article. Although she had been through most of it the night before, she hadn’t yet double-checked the preface:

  I would like to acknowledge the help of Lee Pronski who suggested North American Feminist Studies as a possible publisher. In addition, I wish to thank the art historian Ender Mecid, whose knowledge of Ottoman calligraphy was indispensable to my understanding of the old texts.

  The journal containing the “Dubucq-Casanova” letters has been authenticated by Harvard authority Charles Smith. The authenticity of the scribe’s letter was more recently confirmed by the well-known American calligrapher Ahmed Tabaa.

  Aimée Dubucq de Rivery’s remarkable story was well known even in its time. Many romantic novels have since been written about her and so perhaps it is no surprise that Casanova was attracted to her plight and made her the central figure in his forged letters.

  Readers of the “Dubucq-Casanova” letters should note that they contain a number of Orientalist stereotypes typical of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts by Western travellers in Turkey and the Balkans. I have listed some of the more offensive stereotypes for readers who may be unfamiliar with Ottoman chronicles:

  No primary Ottoman sources offer evidence of Muslim women being stuffed into sacks and stoned, as described in the Adams manuscript. The common Ottoman punishments were strangling and beheading although an example of a woman being stoned to death for adultery has been related by one of the more credible Ottoman historians.

  “Zak,” the name given to the Muslim husband in the Adams manuscript, is not a Turkish name. Some Orientalist fiction published in France during the eighteenth century consistently gives non-existent, pseudo-Oriental names starting with the letter Z to its characters. Apparently this was viewed as exotic. Readers will find a great deal of imaginary and/or incorrect naming in Orientalist literature. The term “Arabic libraries” in one of the Dubucq-Casanova letters is likewise misguided. A large number of Western books were on the shelves in the library of Selim III. Furthermore, there is a Western tendency to use Arabic as an all-purpose adjective to indicate half a dozen languages including Persian and Ottoman Turkish when it correctly refers to only one. Arabic is the language of civic and religious law. The effect is similar to an American using the adjective “Latin” to describe all the books in the European languages in the Library of Congress, although Orientalism, with all its faults, has created an enormous corpus of highly scholarly work on Islamic literatures.

  L.K. Adams lives in Toronto and was recently appointed assistant archivist at Miller Archives and Rare Books. The scribe’s letter was translated by Ender Mecid, Ph.D., the author of A History of Art in the Ottoman Empire. Dr. Mecid is currently a guest lecturer at Marmara University in Istanbul.

  Luce placed her article back on her mother’s desk next to a box belonging to Timothy Adams. In the box lay letters from Asked For Adams and Count Waldstein. My Life with the Ottomans, a small hardcover book that Ender had found in Istanbul sat nearby. He’d sent it on with a great deal of excitement because it contained a reference to her ancestor, Asked For Adams. She opened it to the note that still lay between the pages. “Dear Luce, I hoard my memories of you the way others keep money in the bank,” he had written. She removed the note and gently closed the book again.

  She surveyed her arrangement. She had made a kind of exhibit, she realized, for Lee’s benefit. The archivist doing what she knows best—arranging a fonds d’archives in a satisfying order for the reader.

  She looked up from her daydreaming. The doorbell was tinkling. She ran flying down the long panelled hallway to greet Lee Pronski.

  After they had finished their lunch of fleshy black figs and the 1991 Meursault that Luce had bought for Lee, she led her friend into her mother’s study and picked up the Ottoman memoir from her mother’s desk.

  “This is for you.” She handed Lee the book. “And I want you to read it now.”

  “The afternoon is almost gone and you want me to read something?”

  “Yes. I want to share it with you. Ender sent me a memoir about a woman who was a maid of honour to the princesses in the Ottoman harem. She was the granddaughter of the scribe who knew my ancestor. Are you interested now?”

  “Get on with it, Luce.”

  “The memoir was published abroad. In 1889. It mentions a particular friend of her grandmother’s. And it’s worth noting that the name of her grandmother’s friend was a Miss A.F. Adams. Shall I read you an excerpt?”

  Lee nodded and Luce began to read the page flagged with a bookmark:

  On April 20, 1846, my grandmother, Aisha, buried her American friend, Miss A.F. Adams, in the small Christian cemetery near a favourite picnic spot across from the Sweet Waters of Asia. Miss Adams’ tombstone stands higher than the rest and is crowned with a large stone garland of acanthus leaves. She was like a second mother to us and loved by all my brothers and sisters. Most foreigners are determined to preach and convert but Miss Adams came to discover and revere. For that, she will be greatly missed.

  Her funeral was a difficult occasion. The death of Miss Adams from malarial fever was unexpected. She had been planning a journey back to America to see her family and towards that end she had already sent on a few of her possessions. I helped her pack, and placed in the trunk some of her journals, including the letter by my grandfather to his sultan, Selim III, which my grandmother found after his death some years ago and had given to her. It was precious to her, I know. Many of her travel-writing journals had been lost in a spring flood, despite our attempts to save them.

  After my grandfather’s death, Miss Adams’ income had been a boon to our family. For many years, she made a living writing for the British newspapers, using a male pseudonym. We were all overjoyed when her journey across the Black Sea in a Montgolfier balloon was reviewed in an edition of a London literary journal featuring twelve women travel writers. I recall Miss Adams telling my grandmother that she first submitted her article as A. Adams with a note that she was “a student of the East.” She was delighted to discover that the publication welcomed contributions from literary gentlewomen.

  Luce put down the Ottoman memoir. Aphrodite had climbed on to Lee’s lap and she stroked him as she gazed out at the garden whose drowsy September fragrance was drifting in through the study window. Luce recognized the stern expression. It signalled that Lee was absorbed by her thoughts.

  “So your ancestor made herself a new life in Istanbul?”

  “Yes. As a travel writer,” Luce said. “It seems she found a family who loved her, too.”

  Lee picked up her Borsalino that lay discarded beside her chair, and the cat jumped off her lap. She fingered her hat thoughtfully. It was a new fedora, serpent brown with chocolate banding. “I wish we knew how she felt about Casanova.”

  “Oh, but I do know. And I can prove it to you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just wait.” Luce picked up the wooden box belonging to Timothy Adams. She was aware of pausing dramatically to arouse Lee’s curiosity. “I have Asked For’s response to Casanova’s last letter to her. My aunt found several more letters hidden in some of my great-great-great-grandfather’s things. These wooden boxes were given to Canadian senators on their appointment. The boxes were usually filled with paper, pens, nibs, even a porcelain block on which to doodle—”

  “Luce, why did you wait to tell me? Have I told you that you can be really infuriating?”

  “Yes, many times. But listen, please. Asked For tried to write to Casanova, only he died in 1798 before her letter reached him. Timothy Adams put Asked For’s letter to Casanova in this box. My aunt says he must not have known what to do with it. The letter must have just been more embarrassing evi
dence of a relationship outside marriage that wasn’t considered proper in Victorian times. But I’d like to think he thought about Asked For and wondered what he should do.”

  “Get on with it, Luce.”

  “It’s what I’ve been waiting to do.” She opened the box and took out the letter.

  October 19, 1800

  Dear Jacob,

  I have been too angry to write since you left Constantinople three years ago. How I hated you for going to such lengths to fool me. And for your foolish belief that you needed to deceive me in order to arouse my interest. But you must understand that I hated myself too. I began suspecting you had forged the letters from Aimée when we were travelling through Thrace. You muttered things in your feverish state that led me to this conclusion. When you recovered, I waited for you to confide what you had done and I promised myself I would forgive you. When you did not tell me about your forgeries, I punished you by insisting that we journey on to find Aimée. Pride, Father always said, is an Adams failing. Had I not concealed my knowledge, our path might have been different.

  Enough time has gone by for me to have a deeper understanding of our love for each other. And I have made a new life for myself in this extraordinary city. I am sorry now that I did not come out and say what I felt because I no longer believe you meant to hurt me. It is true that I was naive, but perhaps I needed you to deceive me. How else could I throw off the yoke of a domestic future with Francis? I realize now that you wanted me to live without the burden of an older person to nurse. You were wrong. Let me join you in Dux and you will see for yourself how gladly I shoulder such a burden.

  Your Asked For

  “She knew,” Luce said. “She knew he had deceived her. And she wanted to punish him. I think I can understand. I used to think there was something pathetic about people who allow their hearts to be broken.”