Casanova in Bolzano

  But life proved more resilient, more resilient than even the memory of Francesca, and every day brought something miraculous to a man providing he was healthy and did not go in fear of anything. Who was Francesca, what was she, in the years when gold coins spilled from his fingers at gaming tables, into women’s palms, into the pockets of fashionable tailors, into the fists of layabout acquaintances, into the hands of whoever happened to be about when he needed medicine to cure the terrible pox or to save him from a frightening, secret boredom? “I am a writer,” he thought, “but I don’t like being alone.” He considered this peculiar phenomenon. This might be why life dealt him such a cruel hand in the enforced solitude of the penitentiary; perhaps the sapient and subtle masters of the Inquisition knew about his secret terror; perhaps they suspected that boredom and loneliness were as much a form of torture to him as the Spanish boot, the red-hot pincers, or being broken on the wheel was to others? What was the point of life if one were removed from the busy commerce of the world? However one dreamed or imagined, thought and recalled, or meditated on sensations that life had burned up and reduced to ashes, it was no compensation for the loss of the most humble, most idiotic detail of a life experienced directly! Anything but solitude! he thought and shuddered. Better to be abject and poor, better to be mocked and despised yet able to slink over to the light and crouch there where lamps are burning and music is being played, where people crowd together and enjoy the greasy, foul-smelling yet cheeringly sweet, bestial sense of community that constitutes human life. Life was company for him, nothing more: he was always in company, always carelessly taking his wares to market because the market was where he wanted to be. He loved the racket, the proximity of other bodies, the sheer buccaneering adventure of it. Sometimes the bargaining was rough and crude, at other times sophisticated and sly, but most of the time it was like a game, a competition in which one took on all comers much as one did one’s own destiny. The marketplace was the only place for him, for the writer in him. It was life itself. He scratched his ears and felt a cold thrill run down his spine.

  And that was why his clever, superior torturers had punished him with solitude, a fate worse than death, he thought with disgust. Four hundred and eighty-eight days! And the memories! Each memory just one more condemned soul. And sometimes the image, that shining blue-and-white moment in the Tuscan garden: Francesca! For hers was the only face, the one and only face he had not gazed at with the brazen curiosity he usually directed at women’s faces. Her face persisted more obstinately and with greater force than reality itself, even in his underworld prison where living men groaned and wept. It was a banal enough occasion when their paths first crossed. The cardinal’s kinsman was entertaining him in a coat with ragged elbows, in a room full of clouded mirrors and broken-legged Florentine furniture while the Apennine wind whistled through the cracked windows. As in all houses where not only plaster but discipline itself has begun to crumble, the servant had been confidential, pushy, chatty, and fat. The countess no longer wished to know about anything except occasional excursions to Florence in her threadbare coach, excursions that might take in a mass and a promenade down the corso where she might glimpse the ghost of her much-admired younger self. The count bred doves and, like the pitiful old man he was, regretfully and fearfully awaited the arrival of the messenger from Rome who on the third day of every month would bring him papal gold in a lilac-colored silk purse, this being the modest pension provided for him by the cardinal. The house was dense with dreams, spiders, and bats. Francesca’s first words to him were, “What is it like in Rome? . . .” She stared at the stranger with wide eyes and an expression of terror on her face. For a long time after that she said nothing at all.

  This love matured slowly, for like the best fruit it needed time, a change of seasons, the blessing of sunlight and the scent of rain, a series of dawns in which they would walk through the dewy garden among bushes of flowering may, conversations where a single word might suddenly light up the landscape locked in her tender, cloistered heart, when it would be like looking into the past and seeing ruined castles, vanished festivals where traps with gilded wheels rolled down the paths of neat, properly tended gardens past people in brightly colored clothes with harsh, powerful, and wicked profiles. There was in Francesca something of the past. She was fifteen but it was as if she had stepped out of a different century, as if the Sun King had seen her one morning on the lawn at Versailles playing with a hoop covered in colored paper, and had summoned her to him. There was a kind of radiance in her eyes that suggested women of long ago, women who would risk their lives for love. But it was he that had risked his life, he the suitor, the soldier of misfortune, when his old, terrifyingly rich, and disturbingly aristocratic rival pierced his bare chest just above the heart. Francesca watched the duel from an upstairs window. She stood calmly, her unbound hair hanging in black tendrils over her soft youthful shoulders, wearing the nightgown that the duke of Parma had ordered for her from Lyon a few days earlier, for he had personally taken charge of his future fiancée’s trousseau, stuffing heaps of lace, silk, and linen garments into individual boxes. Calmly she stood in the moonlight in a window on the second story, her arms folded across her chest, watching the two men, the old one and the younger one, who were prepared to shed their blood for her. But why? she might have wondered in that moment. Neither had received any favors, neither was taking anything away from the other, but there they were, leaping about in the silvery light, their bodies bare from the waist up, the moonlight flashing off the blades of their swords, the steel chiming like crystal goblets, and the duke’s wig slightly askew in the heat of the contest so that Francesca was genuinely afraid that this noble encounter might result in His Excellency of Parma losing his artificial mane. Later she saw the younger man fall. She watched carefully to see if the loser would rise. She tightened the silk scarf above her breasts. She waited a little longer. Then she married the duke of Parma.

  “He wants to see me!” muttered Giacomo. “What does he want of me?” He vaguely remembered a rumor he had once heard that His Excellency had inherited some lands near Bolzano and a house in the hills. He felt no anger thinking about the duke. The man had fought well. There was something lordly and absolute about the way he had whisked Francesca away from the house of dreams, spiders, and bats, and Giacomo could not help but admire his aristocratic hauteur, even now, when he could no longer recollect the precise color of Francesca’s eyes. “The seduction was a failure,” he noted and stared into the fire. “The seduction was a failure, but the failure may also have been my greatest triumph. Francesca never became my lover. It might have been stupid and oversensitive of me but I felt only pity for her. She was the first and the last of those for whom I felt such pity. It might have been a great mistake, maybe even an unforgivable mistake, there’s no denying or forgetting that, but there was something exceptional about Francesca. It would have been good to have lived with her, to drink our morning chocolate together in bed, to visit Paris and show her the king and the flea-circus in the market at St. Germain, to warm a bedpan for her when her stomach ached, to buy her skirts, stockings, jewels, and fashionable hats and to grow old with her as the light fades over cities, landscapes, adventures, and life itself. I think I felt that when she stood before me in the garden under the blue sky. That is why I fled from her!” The thought had only just occurred to him, but he took it calmly. He had to face the laws of his own life. “That’s not the kind of thing I do,” he said to himself, but he threw aside the pen, stood up, and felt the restless pounding of his heart.

  Perhaps it pounded only because he was now reminded that the gossip had been right, that Francesca and the duke of Parma were living nearby. For all he knew they might have been his very neighbors or occupying some palazzo in the main square, since it was likely, after all, that in winter they would leave their country house and move into town. And now that he recalled his ridiculous failure and remembered the melancholy lingering sense of triumph that accompani
ed it, he couldn’t help feeling that the morning that Francesca saw him lying wounded on the lawn of the garden of the Tuscan palazzo did not signify the end of the affair, that it hadn’t actually settled anything. You cannot after all settle things with a duel and a little bloodshed. The duke, having wounded him, was courteous, generous, and noble in bearing, and had personally lifted him into the coach. Even half-conscious as he was, he was amazed at the old man’s strength when he picked him up! It was the duke in person who had driven the horses that bore the invalid to Florence, driving carefully, stopping at every crossroads, dabbing with a silk handkerchief at the blood issuing from him, and all this without saying anything, confident in the knowledge that actions spoke louder than words. It was a long ride by night from Pistoia to Florence. The journey was tiring and he was bleeding badly, the stars twinkling distantly above him with a peculiar brightness. He was half sitting, half lying in the back seat and, in his fevered condition, could see the sky in a faint and foggy fashion. All he could see in fact was the sky full of stars against the dark carpet of the firmament, and the slim straight figure of the duke keeping the horses on a short rein. “There,” said the duke once they had arrived at the gates of Florence in the early dawn. “I shall take you to the best surgeon. You will have everything you need. Once you are well you will leave the region. Nor will you ever come back. Should you ever return,” he added, a little more loudly, without moving, the reins still in his hand, “I will either kill you myself or have you killed, make no mistake about it.” He spoke in an easy, friendly, perfectly natural manner. Then they drove into the city. The duke of Parma required no reply.

  Theatrics

  Finally he got down to it and wrote the letter to Signor Bragadin. It was a fine letter, the kind a writer would write, beginning “Father!” and ending “I kiss your feet,” and, over six pages, he related everything in considerable detail: the escape, the journey, Bolzano, the duke of Parma, his plans, and he mentioned Mensch, too, the secretary, money changer, and usurer, to whom money might be sent. He needed more than usual, if possible, or, better still, a letter of credit he could take to Munich and Paris, because his journey would lead him far afield now and it would be a great adventure that would test him to the limit, so it was possible that this letter might be the last opportunity to say goodbye to his friend and father, for who knew when the hearts of the Venetian authorities would soften and forgive their faithless, fugitive son? The question was rhetorical, so he labored to blend bombastic phrases with hard practical content. What could I, the exiled fugitive, offer Venice, that proud, powerful, and ruthless city? he asked, and immediately answered: “I offer my pen, my sword, my blood, and my life.” Then, as if realizing that this did not amount to much, he referred to his understanding of places and human affairs and to his store of ready information on everything and everybody that the Holy Inquisition might wish to know. Being a true Venetian, he knew that the republic had no need either of his pen or of his sword, but that it could always use sharp ears, smooth tongues, and well-trained eyes; that what it required was clever, well-born agents who were capable of observing and betraying Venetians’ secrets.

  He had no desire to return to Venice for the time being. The insults he had borne still glowed fiercely in his heart and gave off a dense smoke that clouded every dear and charming memory that might gently have reminded him of the city. For the time being he was content to hate and to travel. Surely Signor Bragadin, that wise, good, noble, and pure soul, understood that. The senator, who to this very day believed that the half-conscious Venetian fiddle player he had laid gently in his boat in the lagoon one dawn had later saved his life with an extraordinary combination of spells and potions, snatching his rapidly cooling and decaying body from the grasp of doctors and even death; that noble member of the Venetian Council, Signor Bragadin, was perhaps the only friend he had in this world, most certainly the only friend in Venice. It was as impossible to explain this friendship as it was to explain human feelings generally. The truth was that from the very first he had cheated, gulled, and laughed at the noble gentleman. Signor Bragadin was selflessly good to him in a way no one else had been; so good, he suspected, that he would never, in all his insecure rough patchwork of a life, meet his like again. His goodness did not fail or tire: it was silent and patient. Giacomo observed this human phenomenon for a long time, keeping a suspicious, uncomprehending eye on it; there are, after all, certain colors a color-blind man is unable to distinguish. He scrutinized goodness from under lowered lids, his eyes flicking to and fro, wondering when that goodness would exhaust itself and be revealed in its true colors, when it would be time to pay for all the fatherly tenderheartedness with which the old man overwhelmed him, when the doting old gentleman would remove his mask and show his true and terrifying visage. The time could not be delayed for long. But months and years flew by and Signor Bragadin’s patience did not tire. He occasionally admonished him for the gold he squandered, refused the odd wild and impudent demand, warned him of the value of money, preached the joys of honest work, pressed on him the significance of honor in human conduct, but he did all this without any apparent ulterior motive, with a tact and patience born of good breeding, expecting no gratitude, in the knowledge that gratitude is ever the mother of revenge and hatred. For a long time Giacomo failed to understand Signor Bragadin. The old man with his silk waistcoat, aquiline nose, thin gray hair, smooth, ivory-colored brow, and calm and gentle blue eyes, might have stepped out of a Venetian altarpiece: a minor dignitary, a martyr-cum-witness in a toga, a pillar in the earthquake of life. “He must want something!” thought Giacomo impatiently. There were times he loathed this all-comprehending goodness and the almost inhuman patience. “Who could possibly love me without desire or thought of advantage?” he wondered.

  Such people were extremely rare, much rarer than friends or lovers, and this one inhabited a different world from his own, a place to which, he instinctively felt, he would never gain true access. He could only stand on the threshold and gape at Signor Bragadin’s calm, patient, and upright world from there. “What does he know about me?” he puzzled every so often, at dawn, on his way back to the palazzo across the lagoon, passing the sleepy houses, his gondola swaying through the dreamy leaden water in the heartbreaking silence of first light, disturbed only by the splashing of oars which Venice alone offers by way of greeting to the nocturnal traveler as he emerges into dawn, moving down the Lethean current into the mysterious heart of the city. Signor Bragadin’s household was still asleep and only the old man’s window at his balcony showed the flickering of a night light. He crept up the marble stairs on tiptoe, into his room, the adopted child and prodigal son of this noble residence, opened the window to the Venetian sky, collapsed on the bed, and felt ashamed. He had spent the night at the card table as usual, living on promissory notes and on the credit of his patron, then made the rounds of the dives near the docks in the company of his drunken friends and the giggling, silk-frocked inhabitants of Venetian nightlife, and, now that it was dawn, had arrived here, in this quiet house where this lonely soul kept vigil for him and received him without reproach. . . . “Why?” he asked ever more impatiently of himself. “Why does he tolerate me? Why does he forgive my misdemeanors? Why does he not hand me over to the authorities, knowing, as he does, all there is to be known about me, such terrible things that the merest whiff of them would be enough to set the eyes of the Venetian magistrates rolling and have me sent to the galleys? . . .” Signor Bragadin was the sort of man you don’t read about in books, the sort who made sacrifices without expecting gratitude or reward, and unlikely as it was, he could look kindly and with almost superhuman forbearance on every variety of human passion and weakness. He was one of the powers behind Venice, but one that exercised his power with care, knowing that it was better to govern with intelligence and understanding than with terror.

  He wrote the letter to Signor Bragadin, smiling as he did so. “Maybe it was precisely why he did forgive me,” he
thought and stared into the fluttering candle flame. “Maybe it was precisely because I lack everything that the tablets of the law, both human and divine, demand of me, except the laws of desire.” He read over the lines with close attention, carefully struck out an epithet, and gave a sigh, his breathing shallow and light. The wisdom of Signor Bragadin was so noble, so mature, it was as if he had become a distant accomplice to all that was errant, lustful, and human in him. “He’s like the Pope,” he reflected with satisfaction. “And like Voltaire, and the cardinal. There are a few such people in Italy, in the domain of his Most Christian Majesty. They exist; not many of them, though. . . . For what I know by instinct, through my sense of destiny, in my bones, such people know with their hearts and minds; they know that the law under which I was born is the law of wounds and scars, not the law of virtue. They realize that there is another law, itself a kind of virtue, one loathed by the guardians of morality but understood by the Almighty: the law of the truth to one’s nature, one’s fate, and one’s desire.” The articulation of this perception sent a shiver through him from the ends of his hair down to his toes; he trembled lightly as though feeling a sudden chill. “Perhaps that is why Signor Bragadin has stood by me,” he thought. “He has sat in the council with the others, hearing secret reports, dispensing rewards and punishments, but deep in his soul he has realized that under the letter of the law there is another, unwritten, law, and that one must do justice to that, too.” He felt delightfully moved. He watched the flickering candle flame with shining eyes. “You should send the money to Bolzano, care of Signor Mensch,” he added with true feeling, in clear firm letters.