Carnevale

by Michelle Lovric

  Prim as she was, I suspected Sofia of rifling through my things, so I kept anything really important in my studio. Once, for her edification, I left her my copies of Aretino’s more extreme positions. I knew she had found them when I saw her at dinner that night. She was pale and blotchy and would not meet my father’s eye. I could see her thinking, He has one of those things. It was beyond her comprehension that he might use it with my mother as Aretino recommended. I thought to myself, She will find out soon enough. For Sofia was already betrothed to a respectable client of my father’s. Soon she would be leaving home. After that I thought she would not spy upon me again, and I left everything I wanted in my bedroom. I was wrong, as it turned out.

  I went to church with my family. To please them, I went to confession, where I recited the sins of my sitters, claiming them for my own, for the pleasure of hearing the priest pant and shift erotically inside his confessional. I made these vicarious confessions partly out of curiosity as to what kind of penance my sitters deserved for their sins (for I knew they would not confess such things themselves) and partly to avoid confessing my own. I already knew how I would pay for those.

  I would pay for them by feeling alone. My cruelties to Sofia and my mother would be repaid by a numbing isolation. The cold sensual sins I committed in my studio would be replaced by a sharp longing for the loving embrace of Casanova. Even so, I teased my mother and sister by emerging from these false confessions with my face crumpled and dissolved in liquid mortification. They looked around, terrified that our neighbours would see the guilt on my face and that my precarious position in society – and theirs – would be further compromised.

  Casanova was long gone – it would be eight years before Sofia found my annotated Casanova sketchbooks under the bed in my painted mezzanino room and delivered them to my parents. Before they had a chance to silence her, her ejaculations had been overheard by the maid and two gondoliers. By the afternoon, it was being talked of at Florian. That night, it was mentioned at a grand dinner given at the Doges’ Palace. At the sumptuous table, two of my late lovers were convulsed in their soup.

  At the time, I knew nothing of my exposure. I was at Asolo, painting portraits of the local dignitaries and their ugly wives. When I came back to Venice two days later I found myself famous in a new way. Somehow the news had got out: Cecilia Cornaro had been the last love of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova in Venice.

  Chapter 19

  El baso xe ‘l rufian del buso.

  The kiss is the pimp of the hole.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  Let me tell you how Casanova used to kiss me. It will do you good. It will do me good, too. It’s been too long since I had a kiss like that.

  This is how we would kiss if we stood upon the balcony at the Palazzo Mocenigo, for example, or by the well in Campo San Vio. This was a public kiss, which we did not scruple to share with those less fortunate than ourselves, those who do not know how to kiss. With our mouths fastened together we were anonymous as a statue of a tall man and a small woman.

  We would stand for this kiss, which started with our arms encircling each other. Then our lips would touch and our eyes would close like those of two mechanical dolls. We would then withdraw for a second to look into each other’s eyes. Then he would incline his head one way and I the other so our lips might meet without the interruption of our noses. Then I would put my hand behind his head like a baby’s and draw him to me. He would put one arm around my shoulder and the other around my waist. Then the real kiss would begin.

  This kiss had its own foreplay of lips and tongue-tips. First we sipped at each other like oysters. The kiss had its own gentle penetration and its own accelerating rhythm. All the time our hands moved slowly, pressing each other’s shoulder blades, waists and flanks, as if to contain the richness of the kiss inside our bodies. Such a dangerously beautiful kiss must not be allowed to escape, at all costs.

  This kiss had its own climax and its own other-worldly swoon afterwards, when we sank back into our skins, with my head against his breast, he with his chin resting softly upon my hair. We often wet each other’s throats with tears then. We were more exhausted than if we had sported with steed and treasure, which, to be sure, roused themselves and moistened as we kissed like this.

  But we did not make love after a kiss like this.

  Other kisses were, as we say in Venice, merely the pimps of the lovemaking to come.

  But a kiss such as this one was its own journey and destination.

  It was these kisses that I hungered for alone in my studio, now that he had gone.

  Chapter 20

  Gh’èpi ù zorni che luganega.

  There are more days than there are sausages.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  Casanova did not forget me any more than I forgot him. His love for me was preserved, like the promise in our kiss, like the sun in a jar of honey, like the wild boar’s musk inside the sausage.

  I know this now, but for the entire lamentable duration of that first year without him I thought he must have expunged from his heart all memories of me. I knew that I deserved nothing better. In his moment of weakness and need, I had turned upon him with my egregious lingua biforcuta.

  How do I know that he never stopped loving me?

  There is evidence. I have it in writing. If you look in one place, in a wall, in the Balbi Valier, scratch a little, scrape a little, you will find it, my cache of precious letters.

  Exactly a year after we quarrelled, the first letter arrived. ‘My darling Cecilia, my soul,’ it said. At the endearment, my eyes blurred with tears. ‘I find that I cannot resist writing to you any more than I can resist breathing. I find that my love for you and my fears for you have conquered my desire to leave you in peace.’ The letter was tentative and apprehensive. He continually apologised for writing. He wrote that he could easily understand if I did not wish to hear from him.

  I hugged the letter to my breast. Then I gave it to my cat to sniff. He brandished his tail and vibrated it as if the letter were a she-cat with whom he was newly in love. I felt the same! I was in love with that letter. I carried it everywhere. All day, as I worked in the studio on my painting, I composed and revised my reply inside my head. While I painted with my right hand I fondled Casanova’s letter in my pocket with the left one, running my forefinger down its grooves, tapping its stiff little corners with my thumb. Finally, that evening, I sat down at my desk at Miracoli, looking over the courtyard where I first dropped into his arms, and wrote fifteen chaotic pages without stopping. I wrote him loving thoughts and memories, but most of all longings. I told him how I missed the very hairs of his wrists and the half-moons of his eyelids. I reminded him of how we used to kiss. I told him how I missed his breath on my hair and the fold of his thoughts where I used to enclose myself.

  But I stopped short of begging his forgiveness. I had no need to do so. It seemed that he had accepted what I had said; he had swallowed the toad. To withdraw my words now would have been unkind, for it would deny the pain I had caused him and the reason for our twelve parlous months apart. So I wrote as if that terrible day had never happened. Like Casanova, I pretended that it had not. I acknowledged no cloud between us, no break in our love. I smoothed it over. I did not ask him about his last thoughts, the ones that carried him so far away from me. I did not ask him why he had stayed silent a whole year.

  Within days I had my reply. And so it went on. Casanova wrote to me, from all his exiles, his hiding places, the great and obscure corners of the world where disgrace, misfortune and old age now sent him. Like systematic cuffs to one side of his head and then the other, these hard strokes of fate, in the end, left him dizzy and weak.

  After that first year of silence, the magnificent tumult of his handwriting spilled into my lap every few weeks. And I wrote to him, with the comfort I could offer. ‘Casanova, try to see it this way: you love novelty. Fortune is using this time to demonstrate to you a sample of everything you missed on your previous journ
eys. She offers you the endings to stories left off in the middle. She offers you a chance to muse on what they all meant. You will write one day for everyone, as you write it now for me. How beautifully you write! I could not put this down in painting, this long adventure of yours, yet you have painted it in words.’

  And he wrote back. ‘Don’t philosophise, Cecilia. I write my adventures for you because I want you in my arms. As I write, I see your face and feel your hand covering mine as if to blot the wet ink with its warmth. I write to you in order to be with you. And because, as you know, I fear for you. There are hard things in your path. Don’t forget that, my soul.’

  I came to know those letters as well as I know the streets of Venice. I came to know their turnings and their deviations, the places where the sun shone in them and the sad parts waterlogged with rainy tears. I could never understand why he worried so much about me, why pockets of anxiety opened everywhere I looked. It almost seemed as if he knew something, as if there was something I should already know, something evil and frightening about what lay ahead of me. But every word of warning was wrapped in so much love that in the end I came to see them as part of that love, proper love, which cares more for its object than for itself.

  You might call them love letters, those letters of Casanova. Indeed they were perfumed, crammed and saturated with love. But they were also a rehearsal, for his memoirs. And these letters were part of a chain of love letters that unites so many lovers ... a telling and a retelling of the desires that bite you. You hear a word, you savour a delicious phrase, you think, ‘Aha! Why didn’t I say it like that?’ And the next time you write a love letter, you do. Whether you unconsciously mimic or you wantonly plagiarise, you take the good words which come your way and you send them on.

  Thus I am certain that these love letters from Casanova represent one hundred and thirty-two loves apart from me, and the one hundred and thirty-two loves (or so) of those one hundred and thirty-two loves and all their written caresses. There is, in those letters from Casanova, a special tongue-trick he learnt from C. C., and another phrase he heard first on the soft lips of M. M. There’s a scribbled sigh stolen from Henriette and an affectionate bawdy joke from Marcolina. I never saw the memoirs of course, but I would recognise them if I did, for in them I would also find my own words mixed with the others. Would I protest? No! I should be honoured. I should then be included with the chosen few: I have loved properly

  When I first heard from him again, Casanova was in Paris, city of his former triumphs. He was staying with his brother Francesco, the painter. But out on the streets now there was not a face to greet him. No familiar actress was named on any playbill. The rich had lost everything; the poor were parading their riches in the most vulgar of manners. Even the courtesans were brand new, as the old ones had gone to cut a fine figure in the provinces where their glamour made their wrinkles look alluring. Politics, not pleasure, was all he found. Even the police were not interested in Casanova now.

  Picture him, writing to me in Paris, hunched with cold and rejection over a glass of cheap wine in a café in Avenue d’Italie – what was this place to do with Italy? With Venice? Where was the colour and the life? This pallid street had been sucked by a French vampyre or bleached by a French laundry woman with arms like a bastonada. Casanova reflected, in a frail attempt at optimism, even arms like a wooden club have their pleasant applications.

  ‘But every arm,’ he wrote, ‘let us face it, only makes me long for yours, Cecilia.’

  Picture him at a Parisian shop window. A painting, a very bad painting of Venice, had drawn him to smear the cold glass with his breath. Inside the shop, the bell tinkled emptily in his ears like an old toy, spinning in a deserted nursery. Marble women writhed in contortions to evade the amorous attentions of men and gods. Stuffed monkeys hunched on poles. Casanova spun around like the doll in a music box, the tails of his frock-coat floating in the air. He saw mould-tainted mirrors bewildered with reflections. No one came to serve him. He knew he had been judged unworthy of attention. He was too shabby to fawn over. The painting that had seized his stomach, through his eyes, was of San Vio, where we used to lie in the gondola together.

  ‘Take this letter,’ he wrote, ‘to San Vio. Hold it open in the sun and warm it for me there.’

  Picture him eating foie gras at the table of a rich patron waiting to be amused. The vast expense of the meat melting on his tongue soothed his insecurity: this vulgar French poodle was prepared to pay enormously for the privilege of having Giacomo Casanova, the self-styled Chevalier de Seingalt, at his table. Paying for one’s food, Casanova wrote to me, seemed like paying for love. It was a faux- feast. Alone, he ate like an ogre. In company, his manners were as exquisite as his rapacious hunger would allow. He described to me how he would cherish each oyster, finger each peach, tear the pheasant meat slowly from the breast bone. He craved expensive foods: duck in marmalade sauce, pistachio nuts, crab soup.

  ‘And so,’ he wrote to me, ‘at the tables of the rich, I cringe and grovel and I tell my stories.’

  But alone in the Place des Vosges Casanova gnawed on salade frisées-lardons at a table by a door that would slam after him when he left. He could not these days afford to scorn any kind of food, for he had been hungry. And perhaps he would try that bizarre dish with eggs and beetroot on the menu …

  But he always remembered the better times, those times as a millionaire in Paris, that other Paris, the Paris of his youth, where his table was as famous as his bed. He wrote to me now of those rare fowl he used to keep in a dark room, fed on rice. Their flesh was as white as snow, with an exquisite flavour. To the excellence of French cuisine, he added the genius and nuance of Italy. ‘After all, we have the most sensitive tongues in the world, we Italians. For our tongues there is a universe of difference between a pasta shaped like a ribbon or a tube. What other nation can make this subtle distinction? It’s the same when we kiss …’ He had delighted the palates of his guests – in those days he paid – with his macaroni al sughillo, rice pilau or in cagnoni; the sweet giblets in his ollas podridas were the talk of the town. Only butter from Vambre was served at his table, and his Maraschino came directly from Zadar in Dalmatia. That was in the days when he had set up the national lottery, when Madame d’Urfé was clay in his hands, when interesting women dropped into his arms whenever he opened them, when nothing had been impossible.

  Now he was always hungry, carrying his emptiness from place to place, feeding it with travellers’ impressions he could not share as there was no lover at his side. Alone, Casanova looked up at Place des Vosges palaces lit by chandeliers, under which he used to dazzle. He walked past prodigiously stuffed grocer’s shops, which seemed to beckon him, intimately. Come inside, come inside, there’s an abundance of good things here for you. It was not true. Another door slammed in his face.

  I had the sense that he had risen to the top of the water for the last time, gasping in the cold current, determined to drown with his head held high. Many years later, when I was in Paris, I tried to find the door that slammed against him that night in the Place des Vosges. I walked around the square three times, like an old dog before it settles for death. With each relay, I was more sickened by the cruelty of it. Casanova was there in 1783 with his vibrant misery. I was there decades later with mine. What was this malevolent wrinkle in time that kept me and him alone, outside, when we might have walked together, with me under his arm, under his cloak, with the tiny hairs on our wrists entwined, and the steam of our breath joining in soft spumes against the black night?

  The letters came, one after another. And thus I came to hear about his wanderings in Holland and Austria, his attempts to found a newspaper, to build a canal from Narbonne to Bayonne, his plans for a sailing expedition to Madagascar, his interest in the huge gas balloons of the Montgolfier brothers. I saw him reduced to subtle solicitation and worse, to begging, until finally, for a thousand florins a year, he accepted his last, saddest exile.

  He had been ex
pelled from the rest of the world, and it was time to stop; time to stop, and reflect. And it was time to write, not just to me but to the world, and to the world to come.

  I sat on the steps of the Grand Canal, with Casanova’s letters riffling in my lap. I smelt and smoothed and breathed in the fragrance of those letters. I tried to extract from them the answer to the one question that still haunted me.

  The Cat Speaks

  You see how she loves him. You see the question and the answer implicit in her last words. Why didn’t he ask her to join him? Maybe you have guessed already. You know Casanova. He had already forgiven Cecilia before he left that room she poisoned with her lingua biforcuta. It wasn’t that.

  I suppose you think you are very clever. You have your theory about a letter that was never delivered to her. Well, yes, I suppose some things are obvious. Goldoni and the other playwrights have made incident and coincidence seem special when really they are just a part of everyday life.

  So, yes, there was a letter. And no, it was not delivered, but you should be aware immediately that this was not through any lack of effort or competence on my part, but because she did not want it.

  The day that they quarrelled she left the studio and hid herself away at Miracoli. I could not have delivered the letter in any case. It was not my fault. Not that I feel guilty for losing the letter. Guilt is not known in the world of cats. The letter fell between the gratings of a drain. Well, yes, I admit, I dropped it when I was distracted by a sparrow. That is my nature. I do not apologise for it.

  Cecilia never knew how Casanova waited for her at San Michele, at the grave of little Fortunato, a whole miserable night, with only me for company. I know that by the end of that night Casanova had accepted, with his usual grace, a rejection Cecilia never gave. He accepted his new role – to be a lover from afar – and off he went, alone again, into exile again. He was afraid to ask her a second time; I think he thought Cecilia, with her talent, might end up keeping him, and that was a thought he could not quite bear.