Carnevale

by Michelle Lovric

  I cannot pretend that I was as cold-blooded as I wanted to be. I never entered a man’s arms without the hope that he would teach me something new of joy. But I rarely left them with that hope fulfilled, and disappointment embittered kisses I exchanged with them. They were shallow kisses, merely an exchange of currency to secure the final transaction. I never took nourishment from those kisses, as you do when you fasten your mouth upon the mouth of the man you really love, by whom you are loved. Unfortunately, in the hectic discomfort of a poor kiss, you always find time to be reminded of the rich joys of a proper one.

  My system of flesh models led to confusion in the studio sometimes. Lost in a brush-stroke, I would forget, and imagine, under my aristocratic sitter’s clothing, the naked body I had already experienced. I would grow desirous, and this led to the real Count Alvise, for example, climbing out of his breeches and onto my divan, just as his unwitting body-double was accustomed to do. I would refuse to accept payment for compromised portraits like these; by doing this I ensured discretion. I couldn’t afford to let it happen too often.

  But I liked the Count Alvises too, and I liked to feel them in my hands. I liked their knowing fingers on my body, and their rich grunts of appreciation. I liked their surprise at the things that didn’t disgust me. I liked to hear the soft plop of a droplet of their sweat falling on my breasts. I liked helping them find their way inside me, and I liked the faint apology when they fell out afterwards. I liked the way their faces presented themselves for portraiture after love-making. More than once I obliged a man – an older one. I gave him the opportunity to help me make him more loved-looking for posterity. I liked the way these noblemen looked at me in the street when we met, as all Venetians meet, days later. What is she? I could see them wondering. Artist, or lover? How should I greet her? With a sinuous movement and a smile, I passed them quickly. I preferred to leave them wondering, in case I needed them again.

  For the sake of my female portraits I undertook a few similar Sapphic adventures. But I did not always have to make love to a woman in order to make her take her clothes off for me. Sometimes I just had to pay her. So I would haunt the slums, looking for physical doubles of my ladies and countesses among the faxoléi. I would lure them back to my studio with a few zecchini. There I would have them sling their great mealy bodies, naked, on the same velvet chair where, a few hours later, their rich and pampered counterpart would delicately alight, completely unaware that the rich fabric still bore the fragrance of the streets. With what horror the noble ladies would have viewed my earlier sketches of their flesh-sister’s breasts, bellies, knees and thighs. These graphite sketches, highlighted in white, were secreted in the cupboard for which only I had the key. Inside, what democratic orgies of skin! The naked bodies of the faxoléti and the Count Alvises all smudged together with the supposed heads oí contessas and dogessas.

  Children could be a problem. Rosalba Carriera, painting the ten-year-old Louis XV, had fallen into despair. In the course of the first sitting alone, the young king’s gun fell over, his parrot died, and his small dog succumbed to a violent fever. Other children, with fewer accoutrements, can torture an artist just as badly. Then there are the mothers. None is ever satisfied with the satin of their child’s painted skin. I was never happy with … but … another time, another time.

  You do not paint too many old ladies in my profession. Few of them crave it. But I painted women of every other shape and configuration. Like another of my idols, Ingres, as an artist I preferred women, for their textures, their accessories and their mysteries. I told tales on them in my pictures. I might let the candlelight fall upon the name of their secret lover on a calling card in a silver platter beside them. I might try my trick with the painted porcelain buttons. On the other hand, I tried to help the ones I liked. They needed help, often.

  Why is God so unkind to us? Why does he cork a sylph with a gorgon’s head? Or bind an exquisite face to a lumpen form? In cases like these, I would help them with every device I could: the old Ingres mirror trick, for example, would distract the viewer from the imperfections that I could not hide. I would position my lady with her back to a mirrored fireplace. The mantelpiece would be bedecked with a vase of delicate wild flowers. Her front view was of a décolletée woman in an elegant salon, but the subtext, the picture behind the picture, showed her naked neck reflected as if in a meadow: sophisticated sensuality and the innocence of spring, both sides at once. The viewer, seduced by the neck, would not ask for more beauty in the face. I always loved to show these tell-tale arches of women’s necks reflected in mirrors behind them. It was those necks, held bravely or slumped in defeat, that told their real stories.

  Sometimes a man brought his new young mistress to my studio to be painted. I could read the faces of the recently violated, the wonderment, the speculation, and the anxiety with which she fondled the beautiful new doll she had received for her pains. So I would deck the confused little girl in the kind of clothes her older sister wore, and dress her hair like a sophisticated princess, but upon the white tablecloth beside her a pewter goblet would be overturned, and a trickle of red wine would signify her recent sacrifice. I already knew it was unlikely that her first experience had been as wondrous as mine.

  I had ways to detract in paint, too, if the situation called for it. If my sitters were haughty, and liked themselves that way, I painted them from below. Then the ‘reader’ of the portrait would know his place, always forced to look up to the arrogant contessa or conte. I painted subtle punishments for the character flaws of my sitters. Their collars did not sit straight on their rigid necks. I would mock a proud old man by looping a gold watch chain twice across his chest. From a distance, two pendulous breasts appeared. I could rely upon the vanity of my sitter to get away with this trick: he would never stand far enough away from his portrait to realise what I had done to him. His friends would never tell him; his family would not dare.

  A man might want himself shown as a model of virtue, when I knew him to be a cruel priapus. So I would paint him with the tools of rectitude at his desk. But in a little reflection on the polished wood of his chair, you could read a tiny sketch of the body of a bruised prostitute, lying upon a disordered and bloody bed. A tin-pot philosopher, who bored me to tears during the sitting, would be punished too. I would paint his orrery – the globe of circling discs that show the movements of the planets – with mud and hairline cracks, to mock his fractured, dusty thinking.

  I knew the dreams and fears of my sitters by what they asked for. If a man requested a portrait of his fiancée with a pair of doves on her lap then I knew he doubted her chastity. If a woman posed with a love letter, then I knew she lacked one from her lover.

  Sometimes I painted my subjects’ futures – weddings, illnesses, successes, failures – into my backgrounds, the way a religious artist will sometimes show a sinister crucifix in the dim hinterland behind his Madonna and child.

  I learnt to paint heat and cold so well that you could always tell the season of my portraits. This, too, was a way of revealing more about my sitters than they had consciously intended. My palette was the weather inside them. People who commissioned winter portraits had chosen to be brave. They held themselves against that special cold of Venice – the icy vapour rising from the canals, a pernicious cold that sidles inside your clothes and clutches at your limbs. In winter, you carry frost inside you in Venice; in summer you swell and fester. The winter light – it’s different. In summer it pours itself without discrimination. In winter it gilds capriciously, one window of a palazzo, one stone in a mosaic. My summer pictures showed young women about to be married, already pregnant.

  I continued to follow in Angelica’s footsteps, because that is what people demanded of me.

  As I have told you, portraiture is addictive. Some people commission a new portrait the way they order a new dress, or, if they are rich, sometimes just to celebrate a new dress. Some people like to be painted in mourning, because it shows their tender side
, and an irreproachable opulence, for every extra jet button and dark flounce is but a further tribute to the dead. Like Angelica, like Ingres, I painted Queen Caroline Murat of Naples. In all three of our portraits she is depicted in sumptuous mourning for her sister-in-law, Josephine, wife of her brother Napoleon. Vesuvius smokes gently behind her, in all three portraits.

  Queen Caroline, by the way, never paid any of us, and you can tell from the mean little glint in her eyes that she never intended to. It was a hazard of our business. The more elevated the sitter, the more difficult it was to extract payment. After Queen Caroline, I took to painting merchants for a while. The bourgeoisie always handed me the purse with their left hand as they took the canvas in their right. If they wanted their frames just a little too large, and with just a little too much gold leaf, va bene. I did not have to see it.

  Most of all, I loved to paint my own people, the Venetians, the last Venetians of the Serene Republic, as it would turn out. My portraits would be the last word on their happiness, its final verification. I captured the waning spirit in the light in their eyes. I took the heaviness of their flesh and turned it into a fulsome jewelled light. I was painting the autumnal bloom, the final flare before the rotting begins, and perhaps the rotting had already commenced under the high colour of the cheeks. I did not know that I was painting the fall of a Republic in those vivid faces. I knew that I was painting an apprehension there, a fluttering awareness behind the eyes, a greedy need for the pleasures that would soon be confiscated. No wonder Venice hungered for my portraits as the rest of the world, and one Napoleon Bonaparte, closed in upon us.

  I loved the diaphanous Venetian fabrics smoky over luminous breasts. I adored the shadow of a Rialto goldsmith’s bracelet on a ripe arm. I liked the secret cleavages of elbows. I could make a mouth look soft and blurred as if kissed all the way out of clarity and into confusion, or hard and impermeable to the kiss of the most devoted lover. I loved to illuminate a pure complexion with the same sweet light Giotto had reserved for saints, and darken a corrupt one with the throbbing shadows perfected by Tiziano.

  I painted my way through the Libro d’oro, sat in drawing rooms that my mother and Sofia only dreamt of, portrayed the men and women all Venice was talking about. One day, my clients flattered me, Venice would become too small for me. Casanova’s prophesy would come true. My fame would spread. I would spend the flower of my womanhood on those roads of Italy, with my bathtub full of canvases.

  But I would always come home.

  It may seem unaccountable that I stayed there with those estranged beings, my family, after Casanova left and I became famous. But I am an Italian. I must have my blood around me. And I liked to hear their voices in the background. I liked to hear the house waking up above me. I liked the intimacy of day-to-day life. I liked watching the pimples come and go like migrating birds across Sofia’s face. I liked watching my mother at her embroidery. I liked the salty smell of my father when he came home from the docks. Of course I never told them these things. I assumed they understood them from the fact that I continued to bestow my erratic and barbed presence upon them.

  Perhaps I thought that the exposure of the years would weather my mother’s reserve towards me, and mine towards her. I had no hopes of Sofia: she would soon get married and leave. For my father, I hoped merely not to disappoint him. I had been a strange daughter. He had not asked, at his daily prayers, for his house to be blessed with artistic genius. He had asked for more silk, more customers, more shipments from the east and more Carnevale balls to create the desire for his stuffs. He did not ask for more love in his life. I was sure he did not have a mistress. He was a sober man. I had never worried that I might meet him by accident at a decadent casino or in the wild dark streets at Carnevale, where the bodies juddered like drumsticks in dark corners and a wordy perfume lingered in the air.

  So I did not leave home. Like Venice, I am pragmatic. I admit it, I took what I wanted from my family, and gave very little back. I left the role of dutiful daughter to Sofia. For myself, I took the role of barely tame house animal, something more ungrateful than a cat. My lingua biforcuta stabbed at everyone. I shall not tell you the horrible things I said. I forgive myself only because I lashed out in pain. I was lonely for Casanova. I was lonely for conversazione, intimate conversazione. Without it, my wit festered and turned in upon itself. Gradually, as my success continued, there came a point where no one dared remark upon me.

  But I always came home, nearly always. There were few lovers, as I have explained, with whom I chose to spend the night. At the end of the day, I loved to walk from my studio at the Balbi Valier to my family’s palazzo beside the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. I could not renounce the daily sight of the little doll’s church that juts out of the surrounding sweet terracotta walls at such astonishing angles that it seems to have been placed there by the careful hand of a child. Of all the churches in Venice, Miracoli is my favourite and not merely because I was born in its shadow.

  I loved my room. There was a golden light from the courtyard garden outside, especially after rain. It was a disturbing light, and I could not completely account for it. On the other side was the jade-green canal and the pink and grey marble of Miracoli and the cool shadows they painted on my windows. After Casanova left, I decorated the room with frescoes of the places where I had enjoyed my most exquisite pleasures with him: the grave of Fortunato at San Michele, the long grass on the foreshore at the island of San Lazzaro, the canal at San Vio where we used to moor the gondola, the opulent interior of the boat, with the coverlets banked in lustrous wrinkles after a night of hectic loves. I painted the empty frame in the study at Palazzo Mocenigo, where we had made such gorgeous moving pictures together. I painted a life-size copy of the Biribissi board from that same night at the Mocenigo. Around the window I had painted the fairy tale palaces of Beckford’s Vathek, and yes, Alboufaki the camel. My room was my own world, private from the rest of the world. I could go there and live among my memories and my fantasies.

  I sound unbearably selfish, I know, but in fact everyone was happy. It seemed to the outside world that I had remained respectably at home, despite my eccentric and potentially scandalous profession. Within the family, the shock of my discovery gave way to a quiet acceptance. Soon the little earthquake was absorbed by our palazzo. The walls closed in around my family again. No one knew of my midnight and dawn comings and goings, except the servant who still brought me the bath water. I did not speak to her, but in front of her I was entirely without physical inhibitions. It was she who took my sweaty or bloody clothes away to clean them. It was she who saw the tooth-bruises on my neck, and the abrasions of nails on my back. But I never talked to her.

  My mother came down to my room just once after I had completed the frescoes. She had heard the servants talking about them and wanted to make sure I had done nothing to corrupt the maids, nothing more to put the Cornaro name on the lips of the gossips at Rialto or cause a whisper at the Broglio under the arches of the Doges’ Palace when my father went there to discuss business with the noblemen.

  She knocked quietly and came in only on my bidding. I stared at her, plump and anxious in her fine clothes. Like all adolescents I looked for my future in her drooping face. I imagined painting it. Better to die young, I thought in my arrogance.

  My mother walked just a few steps into the room and stood still in shock as if the Medusa had just caught her eye. She shuddered. Gambling, lust, the corruption of the Orient, everything she feared was there to be seen in vivid, shameful colour on my walls.

  ‘How did I make you?’ she asked. She was not angry, just mystified, and a little afraid.

  I was sorry for her, but I could not make myself take her hand or comfort her. I merely said, ‘I do not know, Mama. Perhaps it’s not your fault.’ We agreed it would be better for my father not to see the pictures.

  ‘To think I named you for the gentlest saint,’ she whispered as she left.

  Poor Mama! My father cert
ainly treated her as if I were her fault.

  He could not meet my eyes any longer; he was afraid of what he might see. He had always been brusque and dominating. In my father’s presence my mother, whose background was nobler but whose fortune had been negligible, was the personification of acquiescence. She had no detectable desires of her own. Or perhaps I just was not looking for them. My father still treated her like a daughter. She took his pronouncements with downcast eyes. Only occasionally her little finger drummed against the fourth one, otherwise her gentleness was impeccable.

  She was always touching Sofia, the way Italian mothers do, like cats; always licking a finger and smoothing down a pale eyebrow, or wiping an invisible crumb from those thin pink lips. The two of them had from the start a kind of milky conspiracy that had always excluded me. (Of course, I did not care.) Sofia developed delicately as my mother hoped. She was given to vapours and nerves and swooned prettily at dramatic noises or bad news, the fashionable pose of the time. She looked like a little Madonna in her zendaléto of supple muslin, which wreathed her head, crossed her shoulders and encircled her waist. If I could be forced into mine, I looked like a madwoman escaped from an asylum.