But Casanova was gone. I had not heard his departing footsteps over the screams of the cat, who still sat there singing his desperate aria.
I picked up the cat and held him to my breast, which was humid with Casanova’s tears. I stroked his paws and his ears. I kissed the top of his head. The cat nosed my bodice and pushed his head close to me, finally silent but vibrating with his emotions. He gazed up at me, nudging my chin to make me look at him.
‘I am sorry,’ I told him. I was ashamed to meet his eyes. ‘We will make everything good again.’
A week later a present arrived for me at the studio, a long flat parcel, tied with ribbon. When I tore it open, hundreds of pale pink English Overcoats slithered to the floor like the dried petals of enormous roses. They were followed by a tinkling gold ball. The cat pounced and batted it around the studio while I bundled the Overcoats into the armadio, the tall cabinet where I kept my canvases, finished and unfinished. I snatched the golden ball from the cat and threw it into the bath where my canvases lay soaking. The dark fluid swallowed it with a lascivious gulp. I was furious and ashamed. He still thought I could want a man other than him!
Seeing my anger, the cat opened his mouth again. I rushed to pick him up and hoisted him up to my shoulder, where he scrabbled in my hair until he found my ear. I soothed him with long hard strokes down the length of his back. He laid his muzzle against my earlobe and commenced a voluminous purr.
This time it was my turn to howl.
The Cat Speaks
Casanova generally had the knack of keeping his females affectionate, even after they mated with him.
But even when we give satisfaction, male cats are subject to violence and hatred after making love. We would be happy to stay for a little mutual grooming and a post-coital catnap. But we are hissed and scratched away.
It is a fault in the design of our procreative organ, which is spiny. In penetration, the little spines lie smooth, but as we withdraw they are brushed up the wrong way and tear the tender chamber of the female. It is the pain that makes them hate us when we leave them.
Chapter 17
Fato el buso, pol passar qualunque sorze.
Once the hole is made, any mouse can get in.
VENETIAN PROVERB
I heard that Casanova left for Mestre the same day I flayed him with my rancorous tongue. Apparently he hovered near Venice for some months and even came through on a barge to collect some belongings from Francesca. I suppose he was still hoping for mercy from the Inquisitors. It was not forthcoming. Then, it seems, he took command of his exile and departed for Austria and France. While in Vienna he was able to infiltrate the diplomatic bag of the Venetian Ambassador to insert an anonymous letter to the State Inquisitors. The letter predicted, authoritatively, that on May 25th 1783, an earthquake would seize Venice and drag her to the bottom of the ocean. The letter caused such a panic that many patricians fled the city for their country estates. The rumour had touched the quivering part of the Venetian consciousness that still remembered the horrors of the earthquake that had destroyed Lisbon just thirty years before. Perhaps we also felt guilty, we Venetians. We knew it was our turn to fall. We had stayed up too late, played for too long and too hard. Like naughty children in a fairy tale, a bad end was due to us, whether by commotion of the stars, flood or fire. Our deep Venetian superstitions responded to the threat.
I sat on my steps at the Palazzo Balbi Valier, with my feet lost in the green broth of the water, and watched streams of gondolas laden with treasure lurching up the Grand Canal. By May 20th the value of property in Venice had halved. A week later I watched the boats sneak back in quiet ignominy. I spent a lot of time on those steps. I did not want to be inside my studio, which was still full of air breathed by Casanova, and canvases imprinted with his opinions. I could not believe that he had gone. So I did not let him go; I did not acknowledge his departure, or that it was forever. I merely waited for him.
I myself had received no letters except the parcel of English Overcoats.
I was now left alone in Venice, with only the education he had given me. Gradually I allowed my loss to infiltrate my thoughts, through my body. How many times I wished I was lying in the arms of Casanova, with his nose in my armpit, like a companionable kitten. Now I lay in the arms of no one, and felt a blankness which was without mercy. In agonies of frustration, I assumed the pose of Botticelli’s Venus night after night. But Casanova was right: self-pleasuring only really worked as a supplement to more substantial joys. On its own, it merely preserved my lust.
My dissatisfaction was written on my face when I woke up in the morning. Passing boys and men would stop and look at me in the street, mutely offering to help. My mother was jealous. Sofia was jealous. The admiring looks and comments that had formerly been reserved for their more cultivated beauty were now directed at me. Both my mother and Sofia had the look of that pasty-faced Giustizia painting by Bonifacio de’ Pitati, hair as fine and as limp as wet silk. They were both upholstered with thick pale skin, and both had impossibly small feet. Sofia loved to dress up like a great lady. Her hats spouted little stuffed birds and dead butterflies. She was starting to wear her hair piled up in a pouf à sentiment, with a lock of my mother’s own hair inside it and sometimes a little portrait of her in a locket too. Her hair was now powdered and little puffs of sparkling white dust clouded her face when the wind blew. In spite of such allurements, the men looked at me.
Sofia complained, ‘You make me feel invisible when I walk with you.’
My mother blamed my breasts. So did I. There had been a mistake. In the last few months I had grown the wrong ones. I had the temperament of a woman with small, independent breasts, the kind that require no thought, that do not draw attention to themselves and adhere to the ribs almost imperceptibly. Instead, I grew soft, white Madonna-like breasts, gentle, undulating as I walked. My breasts drew admiration out of men, and smiles out of babies. Like those of the Madonna in Madrid, my breasts were unmistakably carnal, to everyone else and to me. Every time I slipped a chemise over my head, and the fabric caressed them, I suffered agonies of frustrated desire.
One day a group of young men surrounded me, with their sticky bodies and their pointless commentary on my breasts, ‘Stupendi!’ ‘Perfetti!’ ‘Complimenti!’ ‘Fidanzata?’ I walked through them, scornfully, my eyes fixed on a point just beyond their heads. They parted to allow my passage. I myself held my hands in high regard: my hands had something to give this world. So I ignored the boys, which inflamed them, for there was something about my breasts that promised them more. From behind me, the boys made dog noises like the hounds of the Isle of Bones in the lagoon. They promised to fuck me to death. I would die smiling, they told me. In Venice, I reflected, our concepts and expressions of love and death are always very much mixed.
‘Le mani a casa vostra,’ I spat at them when they reached out to touch me. ‘Keep your hands to yourself!’
But in the end, it was too much for me, the incessant call of sex in my blood. Other people had recognised it before I did. I had denied it too long. Three months after Casanova left, I opened the armadio and took out those English Overcoats. I would do as Casanova had told me, and enjoy the pleasures of beasts. But it would not be with the boys who called after me in the street.
I had no use for unskilled hands upon my body, or selfish firm flesh. For the rest of my life, with the exception of one, I preferred older men with cool hands, whose faces dissolved slowly in orgasm, whose foreheads were pleated with experience, whose lips were webbed with tiny folds, who bore a certain deep groove from nose to mouth, behind whose ears was a little vulnerable area of slacker flesh, sensitive as a petal, that was where I liked to rest my lips during the night. I preferred to hold these delicate men, rather than to be held myself ... so I would always arrange myself behind them and hold them. At the last minute I would gently slide one knee between theirs and enfold their slackening limbs in my thighs. If they loved me their hand would reach out for mine at this point. If the
y had merely wanted me, and might want me again later, they would shuffle their hindquarters into my groin before relaxing into the contemplative sleep of the quite-soon-dead.
Of course, after Casanova had gone, I tried them all – all kinds of men, some young, some old, some mutilated, some perfectly constructed. Sometimes the cat would be there, watching. When a corteggiatore of mine left, the cat would shrug his tail into the very punctuation mark of irony.
The tail would say to me, ‘A fine fellow you have chosen there!’ Meaning exactly the opposite. We must hope that the cat found his own low loves more satisfying than I found mine.
Venice is a bad place to be with the wrong man, even if he is doing all the right things. So many times, for so many years since, I have sat in a gondola, gliding past painted palazzi, with the wrong man nibbling my shoulder or stroking my fingers. Years later I found the right man who would do all the wrong things, and he was worse.
I learnt then things that Casanova could never have taught me, things about pain, things about failure. I learnt that we stand for a long time in front of a door that has been slammed in our face. It takes a long time before we see that the walls of our lives are punctured with millions of doors. Sometimes, blinded with tears, we lurch into the nearest one. Is it a surprise that it sometimes turns out to be a bad choice?
After Casanova left, I found painful memories everywhere I looked. We had been able to stride about the back streets, me secreted under his arm … now, in his absence, I saw too many older men with their diminutive teenage mistresses under their arms. What a gesture! What an exclusive, inclusive gesture: excluding everyone else and almost swallowing the lover. I knew it so well, the exchange of looks as the arm of one is raised and the shoulder of the other is lowered, those quick pivotings of the bodies in to amity, the quick reassuring squeeze and then the infinitesimal nestlings. And then the kiss. Now I must talk of other things.
Double lives are lived twice as fast and twice as dangerously as others. Of course, in the end, mine was discovered. I grew careless. One day I accepted a commission delivered on parchment without checking the seal of the signature with sufficient care. A week later a friend of my father’s duly marched into my studio with his corpulent wife, a friend of my mother’s.
After three days locked in my room, I began to detect a new note in the family meeting upstairs in the piano nobile. I heard my uncles clapping my father on the shoulder. I heard the twittering of my mother’s sisters. I heard the name of Angelica Kauffman mentioned more than once. Rosalba Carriera was cited several times. I heard the names of my satisfied clients from the high echelons of the Libro d’oro. The house was no longer disgraced. My parents had decided that they could be proud of me. So when I came out of my room. it was on my own terms. I could keep the studio at the Palazzo Balbi Valier, and my clients. Suddenly I was an adult, a business woman, a woman in charge of her own destiny.
The Cat Speaks
What did Cecilia mean, ‘his own low loves’? She’s hardly in a position to criticise, and it gets worse.
For myself, well, I admit it, I have my Persian harem but I also like a little rough. I like a thin little tabby from the ghetto sometimes, or the old spinster white from San Polo. Or the red cat from San Giobbe who’s got a bit of a past. And the novelty is perpetual! Every cat’s face is different, and then, when you look closely, you see that each feature has its own personality. Sometimes each eye has a different expression. And then there are the smells!
Alas poor humans who cannot smell the poetry that rises off a female cat in season! Poor humans who must be in the same room as one even to know that something good and juicy disturbs the air. We cats carry information in our blood and we know a ready female three roofs and two alleys away.
Among the male cats, there are four states of desire:
Andàr sui copi, to go out on the tiles
To have an urgent need to make love, in the manner of the Venetian cats who, when in heat, go meet each other on the rooftops where they MIAOW noisily.
Restàr imatonìo, to remain stone-like, impassive
To be out of season and uninterested in physical matters.
Mandar in squero, to need to go to the gondola-workshop
To be in need of serious help, generally after fighting over females, or, in humans, after Carnevale.
El ze tuto un caìn de folpi, to be nothing more than a basin of octopus
An expression used for an old cat who believes he has the kind of sexual capacity on which, in his case, the sun has already set.
Chapter 18
La colpa l’è na bela putela, ma nissun la vol.
Guilt is a gorgeous girl but nobody wants her.
VENETIAN PROVERB
Now that I was free to practise my profession, my ambitions became more greedy. To be a better painter, I needed to know more. The more I wanted to know, the further I placed myself out upon a moral limb.
An artist, for example, needs to know what lies beneath the outer garb of the sitter; not just the skin, but the muscles and the bones. Otherwise your portraits are of well-stuffed dolls. If I was to progress I needed to draw the human figure from life. And this was a problem for female artists. Angelica herself, the first female Royal Academician, had been mocked for her inability to portray the musculature of masculinity. A poet suggested in a satiric verse that if she were to marry such a man as she painted that she would find her own wedding night a somewhat lacklustre occasion.
It was not her fault! Johann Zoffany’s 1772 painting of the members of London’s Royal Academy shows the two female members, not in the flesh with all their serious, self-conscious colleagues, but in portraits hung upon the wall. Angelica, you see there, and her rival, Mary Moser. In Zoffany’s painting, Angelica and Mary hang, pale and dull, behind the beautiful nude male model who is being examined by the male Academicians. The women are not permitted to see the frontal parts of the model, or to join in the discussion. They are silent, works of art themselves rather than participators.
Remember that in this world the word ‘artist’ automatically denotes a male, unless ‘female’ is additionally specified. Every woman artist is accustomed to be celebrated as an exceptional member of her species; she is a curiosity. Our paintings are worth less than those of our male counterparts. I would often have sitters referred to me who could not afford what they really wanted: an Ingres or a Jacques-Louis David. There is only one thing we women artists can look forward to in the dim future: after our deaths we generally have fewer inferior paintings attributed to us than our male colleagues do. More often, unfortunately, our best work is attributed to the master who originally taught us. Sometimes, I have wondered if this will happen to Antonio and me, but I doubt it now, in view of what has happened since. I doubt it.
Female artists have always needed to be careful not to be identified with artists’ models, who are, in men’s minds, looseness and depravity incarnate. Surely it is lubricious, people have always thought, for a woman to stare at a man for hours, or herself in a mirror? Up until my time, and Angelica’s, if we painted ourselves, it had to be as models of virtue. You see, the more unlike men we are – the less virile, the less analytical, the less aggressive – the more prized we are. We women should, some male critics have claimed, paint only babies and flowers, as graceful and fresh and harmless as our lovely selves. We women artists have always been accused of taking an immoderate pleasure in colour, of applying it like cosmetic paints to skin. But as well as artifice, we women are also supposed to be dangerously close to nature, perilously instinctive. As Casanova used to say with tender admiration, we bear an untamed uterus inside us, a voracious organ with no connection to our brains, and it frightens respectable men!
But it was still a good time to be a portrait painter, and even a woman, if you knew how to take your place, with style. The Parisian Académie Royale had just given portraiture its place in the hierarchy of true arts. We came second only to history paintings. Genre, still-life and landsca
pe were numbered below us. And the new fluidity of our society also helped us. The rising bourgeoisie hired painters to give a patina of aristocratic heritage to their walls. By painting their portraits, we legitimised them. Their painted faces on the wall were the equal of any nobleman’s. Some of these new sitters even asked for portraits in clothes of an earlier age. In this way, we helped them elongate their pedigree.
Now that I was free to do as I wished, I still wanted to paint portraits, but I wanted to get closer to the skin. I was still ambitious to equal and supersede Angelica. In the matter of painting desire, and desirability, I longed to claim the laurels. Casanova had been right, I realised: if I could do that I could conquer the world. But there were practical difficulties.
The female nude, I had mastered early. To learn my own body, I had always had access to mirrors and stolen candles. I knew how I looked in the heat of my passions. But how was I, without marrying, to obtain access to the male nude? I did not want to marry. After Casanova, marriage seemed somehow irrelevant, and possibly intrusive. So I set myself the task of learning male anatomy in a pleasurable way. Or mostly pleasurable. Or, to be honest, mostly tolerably pleasurable. And sometimes, only my appetite for novelty or information kept me from disgust.
These days, despite my personal preference for delicate older men, I chose my physical types to match my commissions. If my sitter – Count Alvise, say – was stocky and greying, then so was my current lover. They seemed to come in shoals, the kinds of men I painted. Sometimes I was condemned to a diet of lovers with stagnant eyes, sheltered by patient sparse lashes. Other times it was skinless young men with ugly, disproportionate organs and disappointing stamina. It happens like that.
I found my men in the fish market, where the smells made all Venetians come alive inside their clothes. There would be an exchange of subtle glances and they would follow me back to the studio. Or I found them in San Marco, surrounding the blue and white striped awning of the Public Lottery tent under the Campanile, or drawing the sun into their loins as they lounged on the stairs of the Procuratie. Or I would hear heavy breathing behind me and deliberately stop in my tracks to provoke a collision and the subsequent pleasantries. There seemed to be an endless supply of such men, waiting for women such as me to look them in the eyes, confident that we would come. Whatever the current phenomenon, I would sketch him afterwards, when he lay exhausted. Or coax him into the same pose that my sitter had requested. Most would do anything I asked, if his wife was not waiting for him.
Carnevale Page 17
