A Venetian Affair

by Andrea Di Robilant

  Giustiniana balked at Andrea’s bold new plan. She feared confronting her mother, and furthermore she had little faith in the success of the petition. All through the spring and summer of 1757, as Andrea continued his talks with the lawyers, he cajoled and tried to reassure her. “I understand how mortifying it must be for a young girl to reveal her passion to her own mother—and a mother with such a temperament, who has already forbidden that passion,” he told her. “But you are not like other girls, and this is the reason I speak to you the way I do.” She resisted for months, and for a brief moment in the summer of 1757 they seriously contemplated going behind the back of his parents and Mrs. Anna and marrying in secret.11 But in the end Andrea always went back to the idea of giving their best effort to a proper marriage, and Giustiniana’s refusal even to broach the subject with Mrs. Anna started to wear him down. He complained gently at first: “My imagination and my heart grow warmer every day, and I think about you all the time, but alas you are so distant in every way. My precious life, give me the comfort of seeing you do as I say in such an important matter.” Then, in the face of her obduracy, he grew more impatient: “All this time you’ve wanted to do things your own way, but what have we gained?” He could not understand why Giustiniana was so fearful. Did her resistance reflect a woman’s congenital incapacity to plan ahead? he wondered, attempting to apply a philosophical veneer to his exasperation. “For [a woman] never thinks about the future. And not because of any fault of hers but because of her internal organization, which does not allow her to bear for very long the effort needed to work out a complicated scheme.”

  Giustiniana’s letters from that period are missing, so we do not know how she reacted to these misogynistic thoughts. But it is easy to imagine her eyes glazing over as she read Andrea’s pompous reflections on the character of women. Their secret encounters became tense again and were often the scene of more arguments.

  However, Andrea was relentless, and in the fall of 1757, more than six months after he had first suggested the plan, Giustiniana finally mustered the courage to tell her mother that she and Andrea were still in love and wanted to get married with her consent. Andrea was euphoric, and he became even more so when Giustiniana reported to him that Mrs. Anna, after initially stiffening, had been surprisingly receptive to the idea. “How much effort and pain it has cost me to bring you back on the right track!” he exclaimed at his victory.

  Mrs. Anna’s volte-face was not without reason. After all, she had opposed the relationship with Andrea because she was convinced the Memmos would block a marriage contract by any means possible; if this was not the case, the matter would be worth pursuing. Prudently, she decided to wait for the Memmos to make the first move.

  At Ca’ Memmo, Andrea’s optimistic prediction was borne out. Relations between him and his parents had improved, thanks to his deliberate efforts to be accommodating and helpful in the daily running of the house and their estate on the mainland. His diplomatic maneuvering led to an emotional family summit at which Pietro and Lucia Memmo agreed to a preliminary negotiation for the submission of a marriage contract to the authorities. Now it really looked as if Andrea’s gamble might pay off. News trickled out and became grist for Venice’s inexhaustible rumor mill. “Everyone in town speaks of our marriage as a done thing,” he reported happily to Giustiniana.

  The two sides had to agree to the terms of the contract, which usually consisted of lengthy and very detailed documents, filled with financial statements and numerous clauses and conditions. Once the contract was drawn up, it was presented to the primario, a sort of general secretary, of the Avogarìa di Comun for a preliminary review. If the review was successful, the contract was submitted to the three-member panel for final approval.

  Mrs. Anna insisted that Andrea and Giustiniana should not see each other or be in communication during the negotiation. She decided to accompany Giustiniana to Padua, where they were to be the guests of Bernardino Renier, the prominent patrician whose son Alvise was still wooing the lackadaisical Tonnina. The rest of the children stayed in Venice with Toinon. Before leaving, Mrs. Anna hired a lawyer, Signor Faccini, to handle the negotiations with the Memmos while she and her daughter were away. Discreetly, she also turned to Consul Smith for financial advice. A full year had gone by since he had married Betty Murray, and Mrs. Anna felt it was time to renew a precious friendship.

  It was hard on Andrea and Giustiniana to be separated now that things were looking so hopeful. But it was harder still to have to cease their correspondence at such a critical juncture. Andrea had felt very much in charge, directing the course of events. He needed to remain in touch with Giustiniana, if only to know what decisions were being made on the other side. At the same time he realized that if a compromising letter were found the entire plan would be instantly derailed. A strategist to the core, he concluded that the only solution was to develop a secret cipher. He spent several sleepless nights rearranging dots and lines and circles and triangles to create a coherent alphabet and sent it to Giustiniana so she too could master their secret language. This was the final combination they agreed on:

  At first they used their cipher only to dissimulate the most sensitive information: names, places, details of their plan or their own intimate messages. But eventually they became so fluent they could shift back and forth between the standard alphabet and the secret one with ease. Sometimes they would slip in one or two words in cipher and then carry on in Italian; other times they would cover an entire page with their tiny hieroglyphs, giving a rich and mysterious texture to the letter.

  When she was in Padua, however, Giustiniana was still trying to learn the symbols Andrea had submitted to her, and she did not really have the strength for daily practice. Soon after arriving at the Reniers’ with her mother, she took to her bed complaining of fevers and stomach pains and general weakness. The doctors tormented her with a succession of bleedings that sapped what little energy she had while her mother forced her to follow a punitive diet that consisted mostly of garlic. Andrea was “devastated” by the news of her ill health and weighed in with some medical advice of his own: “More bloodletting will surely do you good, but at least wait until you are not so weak and are feeling a little better.” He also reproached her for not standing up to her mother: “Garlic is very bad for you, and yet you keep eating it.”

  Away from home, bedridden and feverish, Giustiniana struggled to find some peace of mind. Was her mother sincere about wanting to go ahead with the marriage contract? Despite Andrea’s frequent coded messages, she felt isolated from him and lonely. Once more, she was overcome by waves of jealousy and mistrust. Was he seeing his old girlfriends Marietta and Lucrezia in Venice while she was stuck in Padua, half a day’s journey away from her loved one? Even more troubling to her was talk that the Memmos were contemplating yet another marriage offer.

  This time there was none of Andrea’s old defensiveness in his attempt to reassure Giustiniana: “My dearest one, . . . how do you think I spend my days so far away from you? I spend them thinking about our tender passion. And still you think I am lost in thoughts about Mariettas and Lucrezias! One is so precious, the other so flighty. . . . One day I will paint a true picture of their character for you so that you will be able to judge for yourself if there ever was any reason to harbor doubts about me.” As for what she was hearing about another marriage proposal, Andrea explained that a relative of the Memmos had indeed approached his parents with an offer from a wealthy family, the Baglionis, which included a handsome dowry of 12,000 ducats. “But rest assured,” he told Giustiniana, “I paid no attention, and neither did anyone else in my family.”

  Andrea was being truthful. Once his parents had agreed to go ahead with the marriage, they had embraced the idea wholeheartedly and were now working hard to ensure the contract was approved: their prestige, as well as their son’s future, was at stake. Lucia Memmo, who had looked down on the Wynnes ever since Giustiniana had come into their lives, now became one of her most ard
ent supporters. “She’s crazy about your portrait!” Andrea exclaimed, hardly recognizing his mother but delighted at how sentiments were changing all around. Even more important, from a practical point of view, was the change in his father. In an extraordinary gesture of goodwill toward his eldest son, Pietro Memmo had secretly lifted the contraddizione— the power of veto a patrician family had over a marriage contract until it was signed— before the negotiations had even begun in earnest. This move was very generous but also imprudent; Andrea’s uncle would never have approved it had he still been alive. Although Andrea was grateful to his father for removing a major obstacle before the talks had started, the future statesman in him must have winced. Using their code, he told Giustiniana about the new development and asked her to keep the secret. It would be humiliating for the Memmos if the news became public. Worried about a possible leak, Andrea’s mother and brothers went to the Patriarchal Chancery and told the officials in charge of the case to inform anyone who asked that the contraddizione was still in place and to refuse to show the official ledger containing Pietro Memmo’s declaration. Andrea explained to Giustiniana that this was “the only way to protect us as well as my parents, who have already been condemned by all of Venice for not having prevented our union so far.” He was moved by Pietro and Lucia’s flouting of convention for their sake and lost no opportunity in his letters to Giustiniana to remind her how grateful they should be to them.

  The mood was now upbeat. Pietro’s decision was bound to speed up the process. Andrea told Giustiniana not to worry: “The contract will be approved, and once it is, all the rest will fall into place.” He ran into Signor Faccini, Mrs. Anna’s lawyer, who assured him that their side of the contract would soon be completed and taken over to the designated primario, Signor Bonzio, a man apparently well disposed toward the two lovers. Andrea was also getting inside information from a well-placed source: Signor Bonzio’s secret lover, Donada. “There will be important news in a few days,” he informed Giustiniana. “And then who will dare keep me separated from my spouse?” He added a short note in cipher: “Tuesday or Wednesday you will return to Venice by order of the inquisitors.”

  Giustiniana’s brief exile in Padua thus came to an end. The lovers were still not allowed to see each other, but it was impossible for them to remain apart now that they were both in Venice. The sense that negotiations were moving swiftly to a conclusion increased their desire to be together at whatever cost, and their physical love blossomed again as another frigid winter set in. “I am writing to you from home,” Andrea told Giustiniana before he left the house for Rosa’s. “But when you receive this envelope I shall already be where you know. . . . Run, for I am there already, waiting for you with open arms.” Now Giustiniana gave herself to her lover more freely than ever before. Andrea was overwhelmed. He confessed to being “ingiustinianatissimo”—completely enthralled by her.

  They made love in Rosa’s dank little room, swaddled beneath layers of woolen clothes to keep out the cold. These encounters were necessarily hurried—there was always the fear of being found out, and, anyway, it was too icy to linger among the hardened sheets. They left their alcove still filled with desire for each other, and their lovemaking continued in their compulsive letters and notes—protected by the shield of their secret language:

  When I left you, I came home and went straight to bed. As soon as I was under the covers my little nightingale felt an urge to fly back to you. I wanted to keep him here. I wanted him to stay quiet until the morning. But as much as I tried to distract him with fantasies about the nice legs of Cattina Barbarigo, the soft little tummy of Countess Romilii, and the pretty cheeks of Cattina Loredan, he would have none of it. He wanted satisfaction. Would you believe he even convinced me you had ordered him not to let me sleep if I did not satisfy his every desire? Thankful at last, and generous toward me, he wished to produce on this piece of paper the evidence of his satisfaction so that I in turn could prove to you, at the first opportunity, my blind obedience to all your wishes.

  Such playful but rather extreme displays of affection were not always to Giustiniana’s taste. Yet he developed a habit of sending small samples of his semen to her as a tangible sign of his love. He would spread them on a piece of paper, which he then folded into what he referred to as his special “involtini”—borrowing a common Italian culinary term. At first, Giustiniana reacted with disgust to those sticky little envelopes that had traveled across town in the hands of their messenger. But she grew accustomed to them, even indifferent, and eventually Andrea gave up sending them while lamenting the fact that he had never received similar tokens of her love. “They would have caused such transport,” he sighed.

  There were changes at Rosa’s. The two lovers were saddened to learn that “their” room was now being let out to other clandestine couples. The traffic around the house also made it more likely that they would be recognized. It was imperative that they both keep their mask on whenever they visited. But even that precaution was not always enough. For Andrea certainly had his mask on when he stepped out of Rosa’s house alone one day (they were always careful to leave separately), wearing a bright red cloak over many layers of warm clothes and the typical Venetian three-cornered felt hat. It should have been very difficult for anyone to know who he was, especially since his face was entirely hidden. Yet when he suddenly found himself face to face with Giacomo Zandiri, a friend of Mrs. Anna’s, he had the sinking feeling he had been found out by just the wrong person.

  Zandiri, like Mrs. Anna, had emigrated as a child from one of the Greek islands. His brother worked as a butler for the Bragadins, a well-known Venetian family. Giacomo, on the other hand, had no fixed employment. He had managed to weasel his way into Mrs. Anna’s home by being on hand to help out with the daily chores necessary to running a large household. A nosy fellow by nature, he also kept an eye on Giustiniana’s comings and goings, and on several occasions he had provided Mrs. Anna with secret intelligence about her oldest daughter. “Stay away from him,” Andrea had warned her many times, “and never forget how much he has hurt you in the past.”

  After his chance encounter with Zandiri, Andrea dashed off a note to Giustiniana in cipher: “Giacomo found me at Rosa’s doorstep just as I was leaving. I am convinced he recognized me because he acted surprised and stopped to look at me for a while. I pretended not to know him and hid from him as best I could. But I feel it is nearly impossible that he won’t tell your mother, even on the strength of a mere suspicion.”

  What to do? Andrea needed a convincing alibi in case Zandiri mentioned having seen him coming out of Rosa’s. Giustiniana, meanwhile, should deny very firmly that she had been with him there and suggest that the man Zandiri had seen at the door might have been Lucatello Loredan, a friend of Andrea who also met his lover at Rosa’s and “who wears a hat similar to mine and white stockings and has thin legs like I do.” Andrea then remembered an important detail: upon leaving Rosa’s he’d realized he had left his manizza, the fur hand warmer Venetians wore in winter, in their room, but he hadn’t gone back to fetch it “because I didn’t want [Rosa] to know we had been together for so long.” Since the man Zandiri saw on Rosa’s doorstep was obviously not wearing a manizza, Giustiniana should convince her sister Bettina to say she had seen Andrea pass in his gondola on the Grand Canal wearing his red coat and his manizza. “What I fear the most are the stupid answers Rosa and her servants might give if they are asked. So tomorrow morning you must make sure [they] deny I was ever there.”

  The following morning Andrea waited in vain for a letter to reach him at Ca’ Memmo. Then he checked at the various botteghe he and Giustiniana used as mailboxes. Nothing. Finally, in the evening, his gondolier brought him the news: no one had dared deliver Giustiniana’s letters to Andrea because of the “the terrible uproar” that had taken place at the Wynnes’ after Mrs. Anna had discovered that the two had seen each other. So he’d been right about the wretched Zandiri, and none of his efforts to cover his tracks
had made the slightest difference.

  They stopped seeing each other at Rosa’s. It was too risky. Meanwhile, the negotiations had stalled. The times called for maximum prudence. Yet Andrea continued to write, mostly in cipher now, to keep Giustiniana abreast of developments.

  Even before the Zandiri incident, Mrs. Anna had made a series of demands that were clearly at odds with the goodwill displayed by the Memmo family. Andrea was especially incensed by her insistence on the inclusion of a clause stating that if the contract were not approved, all correspondence between Andrea and Giustiniana would have to cease by order of the court. Mrs. Anna was trying to protect her daughter’s chances of marrying someone else, and Faccini told the Memmos she insisted on having her way on that point. Andrea protested vehemently: “What a foolish request! If I agreed to it, my family would immediately think: Ah, then Andrea is not so attached to Giustiniana after all.”

  It was not so much the specific clause that worried Andrea. He felt that Mrs. Anna’s attitude was self-defeating: by negotiating as if the contract would never be approved, she would inevitably undermine the whole effort. He sent Giustiniana a message explaining that the Memmos would not respond to Mrs. Anna’s requests until she had made clear the names of all her counsels. “Then I will reason with them. . . . Don’t worry, my beloved wife. . . . I have thought of everything.” Andrea had in fact lost all confidence in Faccini, who kept him out of the loop and came to Ca’ Memmo “his belly sticking out, asking to speak to my mother alone without having talked things over with me first.” Not only was he hurt, he thought his exclusion unwise: he, more than anyone else, could help finesse the agreement since he knew what both families wanted.

  The difficulties raised by Mrs. Anna made the Memmo camp nervous because they had already put their reputation on the line. “My mother is now desperately worried that the news that she has lifted the contraddizione will become public too soon,” Andrea complained, twisting the facts a little. His father, of course, had lifted it—he was the titular head of the Memmo clan and was the only person entitled to do so. To tell Giustiniana that his mother had done it was technically incorrect but rather revealing about who was really in charge of the negotiation. Lucia Memmo, however, was no longer as optimistic as she had been. She feared her family would be dragged into quicksand. Why was Mrs. Anna not pressing for the contract to go forward? Andrea’s mother feared “very much” that she was stalling simply because she was afraid it would not be approved—which Mrs. Anna had in fact already said to several people outside the negotiating circle.