Carnevale

by Michelle Lovric

  Farewell. I fancy I am with you at San Michele, at the grave of little Fortunato. I stand behind you, my arms around you, my desire for you rising. I smell your hair, you turn to me, and the words from his grave are embossed on your sweet forehead. You smile and move towards me, Cecilia – I would give my life’s blood for one minute of that reality. I remember when we went to see the Carpaccio paintings at the Schiavoni chapel, candlelit and sweet beneath their glazes like blushing jellies. I showed you the faces of the skeletal remains, those young men and women devoured by the dragon. I think of us making the profoundest love inside the frame at the Palazzo Mocenigo. I think of you painting Beckford and of us listening together to his strange tale while you do so.

  If anyone had told me that I would spend thirteen years here in Dux, I would have asked for a knife to drive into my gut. But they have come and gone, those thirteen years, and I still am here. I have extracted some joy from them, after all, because I have relived my life, in the memoirs. The second time around you can savour in your mouth the really good times and you can spit out the bad times, with the knowledge that better times succeeded them. Perhaps this second life was better than the first one, because I can enjoy the laughter a second time, and I no longer feel the pains. In fact, I laugh at them. My steed has become unpunctual, my haemorrhoids bleed, my teeth drop on the plate, like my old friends into their coffins. But still I look at what I have written and the past comes alive.

  I spent all my glory in my living. There is none left for my dying. In this, too, I am like Venice. I am like an old lady selling off her furniture. I am more and more like Venice. Sometimes I think Venice sent me away not because of what I did but because of who I am. I grew old and decrepit: I reminded her of what she once was and the dismal contrast with what she had become latterly. Venice looked at me and said, ‘Exile him! We don’t wish to see ourselves that way’

  What disgrace and depression must fill the city now that she is sold. What a pitiful old courtesan Venice must look: it is the beautiful courtesans who wither most horribly. Now she must watch as her ragged possessions are wheeled away by efficient young men in uniform. Those men won’t understand what her beauty was about. There is no poetry in their souls.

  Ah, if they could but have seen Venice when she was a happy city!

  The old Venetians could not bear the idea of submitting ourselves to one person. A doge was a kind of husband, Venetian style ’ a titular authority to be honoured with picturesque ceremony but comprehensively cuckolded behind his back. For the Venetians, the whole world was their cavalier servente, the lover who gave them all the breathless attention of which the old husband was incapable and to which he turned a blind eye. Now Venice is an old lady whose treasure is no longer between her legs but in her dwindling counting houses and in her past. Our happiness has tottered to the brink and tumbled over into the abyss.

  I bid you farewell.

  Benjamin Franklin said that a man is not completely born until he is dead. I am going to be born.

  Perhaps I shall be reborn as a woman. I would like that.

  I will love you forever and forever after, Cecilia. I worry for you. You seem strong but you are fragile. You feel things too deeply, and not always in order to paint them. Love and pain kill more women than they do men: keep away from the kind of man who will give you dangerous amounts of either. For my sake, Cecilia, think of what I have written here. Love, but do not get broken.

  Your Casanova.

  PS I hear that another ship has gone down in the Bay of Biscay, taking all hands and uncountable art treasures with it, including a painting of Angelica’s. Never trust anything precious to the sea, Cecilia. The sea is hungry for art.

  June 6th, 1798

  Dear Madame Cecilia Cornaro,

  I have found the enclosed letter to you among the effects of my uncle, Giacomo, who sadly passed on to a better world two days ago.

  I know nothing of your relationship with him, but I assume that you would like to know that he died quietly, after a long illness. I was at his side. Despite his great age his heart remained vigorous till the last. It was a cancer of the bladder that carried him away. Nevertheless, he retained his taste for rich foods until the end. His last meal was of crab soup. My wife has told me that his mother, the actress Zanetta, had a craving for crab soup the day before he was born, and it seems that my uncle was born with the same craving, which has lasted from his cradle till his deathbed, no matter how many times it was satisfied.

  My uncle has worked prodigiously, it seems, in the last years and there is a great quantity of paper here, close-written in French. I am obliged to clear his offices precipitately, before the arrival of the new librarian, and therefore shall burn what seems to be worthless immediately. The servants here are unkind and unhelpful. My uncle appears to have been on bad terms with nearly all of them.

  His sole legatees are myself and my wife, Marianne, the daughter of the Chevalier’s sister, Maria Magdalena, of Dresden. My uncle has left nothing of material value in this world, so I hope that something of worth is perhaps to be found among the debris here. I fear that I doubt it. It seems that all his life he kept nothing and saved nothing, and spent everything, even what he did not have.

  My son is helping me to make big parcels of paper of what? We scarcely know. I only hope it can be an inheritance some day for my son. Glimpses of certain pages have been disturbing, and I do not wish my wife to see this work.

  Madame,

  I am yours most sincerely,

  Carlo Angiolini

  Chapter 22

  Morir xe l’ultima capèla che se fa.

  Dying is the last stupid thing we do.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  I went there once, long after he died, to paint a portrait of the young heir to Count Waldstein, Casanova’s former employer. The castle had been built in the French style, elegant and harmonious, with a park and a lake. I asked if I could work in Casanova’s bedroom. I wanted to spend some time in the room where Casanova had spent his last thirteen years. I wanted to sit in the brocaded chair he had reserved for me, the one beside his. The room was scrupulously clean, its curtains refreshed, its furniture in the latest style. The brocaded chair was no longer there and nor was there any trace of my lover lingering in the crisp, dustless air.

  He is buried somewhere in the churchyard of Saint Barbara at Dux. The grave is unmarked, but a plaque outside the church wall reads:

  Jakob

  Casanova

  Venedig 1725

  Dux 1798

  How ugly are those k’s and g’s! Where was my sweet Giacomo Girolamo? The liquid syllables inside the delicate web of Italian consonants? I pressed my back against the plaque to get the imprint on my shoulder, as we used to do with Fortunato’s tombstone, those beautiful nights in San Michele. I felt nothing. I was merely empty of happiness, empty of him.

  I told myself that this ugly plaque had nothing to do with Casanova. I knew that the memoirs would be his real tombstone, his monument, his key to immortality.

  Or perhaps it will be the happiness of the women he loved. It is we fortunate ones who will show our gratitude by keeping his memory alive, each as we know best, in paint, on paper or in the stories we tell our children.

  Far away, in Venice, there was another graveyard for me to visit.

  In the winter of 1791, the Venetian lagoon had frozen over.

  I remember the day it first started to snow. The cold slackened its clutch on us for a moment and the flakes started to float like tiny forgiving sighs from the sky. At first it lay upon the pavements and the canals, not dissolving but roaming over the glassy water like petals. But the cold crept up out of the depths of land and sea to seize it. Soon the Grand Canal and lagoon were impacted with dark ice. Then the snow turned angry. First, it fell from the sky in great clumps like pitchforks of hay. Then it snowed more, thrice and threefold more, as if the sky hated us and wanted to bury us forever like the fabled cities enfolded in the sand-dunes of Egypt.
Then it snowed bandages across the windows of the city, binding our eyes so we could see nothing but whiteness. The palazzi were encased in ice that rendered into dead pastels all our vivid terracottas and porphyries. Finally it snowed in a great sheet of white, like a winding-cloth for the corpse of the frozen city. Then it stopped snowing and became still as death.

  We hid our fears with mad revelry. What were we afraid of? I should explain, as no one who is not Venetian can easily understand this side of us. Venice is a walled city, but her walls are made from water. Walls of water are like the Emperor’s new clothes: they exist only in the willing eye of the beholder. They are a confidence trick. With only a transparent, shifting wall to defend us, we Venetians learnt to play other confidence tricks. We fanned out our peacock’s tail with ostentation and luxury. We presented ourselves as invincibly opulent. No one had dared attack us. Now the ice had stolen our walls of water. Our deepest fear was that someone might come marching across the solidified lagoon to claim us. Without our walls of water, we were as vulnerable as new-borns.

  The lagoon had frozen over five times in my memory and on each occasion all Venice ran mad for entertainments wild enough to obliterate our anxieties. We held an extra-mural Carnevale. Anyone with use of their limbs threw themselves onto the ice and competed to glide as if footless or to make the most spectacular falls. People craned over balconies to watch young men wheel decorated carts to a launch point and then send them sailing in a blur of velocity to the limbo land between ice and water far out in the lagoon. Beneath us the ice groaned, full of our old, drowned sins. We peered down at it, looking for corpses and golden plates fabled to have been thrown from windows at the Palazzo Labia during antique Carnevale banquets. But the ice kept its dark heart, and our own, hidden from us.

  That year, a grand tournament of horses was held on the solid green ribbon of the Grand Canal. The whole family had gone together to watch the event. We climbed the fragile wooden dais near the Carità church and found seats among a hundred other Venetians and a handful of dazzled snow-struck tourists. I sat with my nieces on either side of me, my mother and Sofia behind and my father in front of us. The little girls thrust their tiny hands inside their panther-skin muffs; my father’s head looked pale and tender in the clear cold air.

  With fanfares and flourishing of flags the race began. There was a plume of glassy splinters as the hooves rutted the ice. At first the racers galloped in a smooth arrowhead formation. But seconds later a single horse and its rider lost their footing and slid loose from the pack. We saw the pointed head of the horse hurtling towards us and the rider with his mouth open in a silent scream. As the rider and horse collided with it I heard the backbone of the dais snap and then felt myself flying across the ice. I landed on my belly with a rattle of teeth. I lay there face-down, my breasts throbbing, gasping for breath.

  For long moments, there was nothing but the noise of the shattering of bones, thrashing of limbs and the hiss of blood congealing on the ice.

  I sat up and swivelled around, spitting ice and a single wrecked tooth out of my mouth. I could hear Sofia’s screams above the groans of the others. I pulled myself upright and looked quickly at my hands. There was no damage. Sofia was crawling towards the dais. My mother lay stunned and silent beside me. I took her hand and she opened her eyes like a doll. I covered them with my hand for I had just seen what was making Sofia scream.

  When all the bodies were pulled loose of the wreckage, my father’s was piled among the dead, along with the elder of Sofia’s little girls, who still clung around the back of his broken neck and could not be separated from him.

  Two days later, we consigned them to the shallow earth together in the campo dei morti at San Stefano. I mouthed the words to the prayers, thinking of my father. We had never had a conversation. But we had understood each other. We were both merchants of beauty. His love of lucent colour had been reborn in me in a new form. It was not grief that I felt but regret. I could not cry. I thought about my laughing little niece and her pale still face with a ribbon of blood from her mouth when we found her. One hand had been flung over her head as if she was asleep. Only the blood and the strange angle of her throat showed that she had been taken from us. I could not conceive of Sofia’s feelings, but I decided I would paint a portrait of the child for her. I had a number of studies in my room. I was lost in these thoughts and forgot I was at a funeral. I wandered away from the solid little group, planted like black cypresses on the hard earth around the graves.

  While Sofia and her husband wept with their arms around my mother, I stood a little way away, hollowed out by loneliness. I felt like a voyeur. Sofia and her husband had each other in their grief. My mother had them. Who had I?

  I had my work.

  My fame had spread, and finally I started to follow its trail with the turn of the new century. I began to look beyond Venice and even beyond Italy. I began to travel.

  Like Casanova I had come to know the feel of flat hard earth and not the sinuous softness of the canals under my feet. I had inhaled the dusty stench rising from ditches instead of the sharp perfume of the sea. I too had laid my head down in anonymous apartments in innumerable inns: The Three Lilies in Berlin, The Crocelle in Naples, The Sign of the Crawfish in Vienna, A la Balance in Geneva, The Cheval Blanc at Montpellier, The Three Dolphins at Aix – all the same places where he had loved and schemed and played fifty years before. Every place recalled a different story he had told me. I lived his memoirs for him, again, as I had done in Venice, but this time without the enclosing warmth of his arms around me.

  Soon the inns were replaced by apartments in noble houses and even at courts. It seemed that everyone in Europe wanted a portrait by the female Venetian painter who made such astonishing likenesses. Everyone was talking about me, and not only because I was a woman who practised a profession in a place and time when the uses of women were strictly confined. I was thought to be a prodigy. People attributed supernatural skills to me because I knew how to paint people who seemed to breathe on the canvas. My portraits did not merely breathe: I painted them with a flush of unmistakable arousal or the pallor of satisfaction upon their skins. I had mastered Leonardo’s technique of sfumato, the melting outlines that give a third dimension to a portrait. I knew to leave something to guess at in the corners of the eyes and the corners of the mouth. I could write the history of a person on their face. I could paint portraits that looked a little different every time you saw them, as if their features were freshly stained with a life still going on underneath the canvas. I liked to blur the edges. I liked to make the respectable women look like exciting whores, or at least to show a flicker of the hussy in them. This is an old artist’s trick, to get people to give your painting a second look, to paint something slightly out of tune. People would always stop short in front of my paintings, and peer at them sharply. I smiled when I saw this. I knew very well what it was that I was doing: it was the subtle perfume of eroticism that I had used to capture their attention. When I saw people actually bend forward to sniff furtively at my work, I knew I had succeeded.

  With the right alchemy of personality, talent and luck the rewards were rich for an artist like me. I could name my price. People were a little afraid of me. Not only was I an alchemist with faces but also of words. News of my lingua biforcuta had spread. I had taken Casanova’s advice about languages: now I could exercise it in French, German, English and Italian. I could demand a retinue, luxurious coaches, stately apartments. I could have acted the prima donna. I rarely did, preferring to take my own bath of materials and to travel alone, and simply. I looked indifferently upon my increasingly luxurious accommodations. But it was gratifying to know that I could ask, within reason, for almost anything I wanted.

  If only this had come to me earlier, I thought. I would have asked to go to Dux.

  The Cat Speaks

  Cecilia, when she is alone, goes to her cupboard and takes out her portraits of Casanova. She sits there with her head on one hand, stro
king his eyes and nose and mouth with her finger. Sometimes I hear the fall and miniature splash of a single tear. Sometimes she moves her lips as if she is talking to him.

  I too mourn my master. He was more like a dog than a cat, himself, but I mourn him.

  He could be so obvious. When he wanted a woman, he was like a dog near a bitch in her season. He could think of nothing else except how to obtain her. His whole brain became a sex organ. And, as we say in Venice, cazzo non vuol pensieri (the prick does not want to think).

  But he understood something that cats understand. The reason for our howls in our time of heat. Desires are nothing but torments. Whether to man or cat, Loves are true pain in the loins. We enjoy our lust because it frees us from those devouring painful desires, and gives us a little peace before we are roused to them again.

  So he shared his last years with two little dogs? Well, I forgive him. They were effeminate little dogs, as near to cats as possible, from what I heard.

  He made some mistakes in his life.

  But he always had a soft hand for me, at all times, and he would share his oysters, his foie gras, and, in leaner times, his hard bread with me, or let me lick the sauce from his macaroni. He was a man a cat could love, Giacomo Casanova. It is not given to us cats to love very often.

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Novantanove a mi, e una per ti.

  Ninety-nine for me, and one for you.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  Ah Casanova, how can I speak to you, from this dim shaft of time? I can kiss you only with my fingers: I trace your lips as I have painted them, stinging fresh from my own mouth. First of all, I give you numbers; you always loved numbers. Here are the important ones.