Casanova had, in a trawl of his influential friends all over Europe, managed to sign up 339 subscribers to his translation of Homer’s Iliad into Venetian dialect. But he had to abandon the work for lack of funds. His writing was not going to keep him in bread and cheese, let alone oysters and duck in marmalade sauce.
So Casanova, alias Antonio Pratolini, became a secret agent for the Inquisitors. He wrote them at least fifty reports, but it was obvious that he had little appetite for the work. Casanova’s reports were dismally boring. He was constantly renegotiating his stipend with the Inquisitors, who were obviously satisfied neither with Il Signor Pratolini’s attitude nor the diligence of his research. They had every reason.
Sometimes, during our time together, I helped Il Signor Pratolini write his reports for the Tribunal. The Inquisitors never knew how enjoyably Casanova’s tongue filled his cheek when he wrote them.
Or perhaps, on reflection, they did.
‘Let’s see,’ Casanova would say to me, ‘let’s do something theatrical today’ And we would concoct some little delicious thing for the Inquisitors, ‘On the scandalous freedom that takes place in theatres when the lights go out.’
No one knew better than us.
Sometimes, feigning illness, I avoided the family dinner. I retired to my bedroom clutching my belly and plumped up my bed with pillows in a careful approximation of the shape of my body under the coverlet. I borrowed one of Sofia’s discarded dolls whose hair flowed wildly as my own. (Why did Sofia have a doll who looked like me? I wondered.) A few of the doll’s curls spilled out upon the pillow. I worked with deft hands; I had done this before. I slipped out of the house in the black domino Casanova had given me and met him at the doors of the theatre as agreed. Inside our red velvet box we kept one eye on the actors but both mouths and both pairs of hands entirely busy with each other. We never undressed completely, for one never knew when the mischievous actors would alarm the fornicators in the audience by brandishing a huge flaming candelabra aloft. How they knew the right moment I could not understand, unless they kept acute ears to the crescendo of sighs from the boxes.
Unfortunately the Inquisitors had not proved as stupid as Casanova thought. They had soon withdrawn his regular pay of fifteen ducati. Casanova resorted to a cringing letter, but fell into the direst poverty. Then he had tried to set up as a theatrical producer, publicity officer and critic. ‘After all, the theatre is in my blood,’ he told me. He hired a troup of French players and the Sant’ Angelo theatre. Casanova was ahead of his time as usual: double bills, advance advertising and appetising hints and promises of perversions and atrocities, live on stage.
One night Casanova and I walked past the Sant’ Angelo theatre on our way home to Miracoli. Now it was shuttered and dark. ‘Tell me about your plays,’ I asked.
‘Nothing good to tell, I am afraid, my darling.’
Casanova had stood in front of the nut-spitting, groin-scratching audience, inventing distractions to cover the thin substance of the entertainments he had created. More than once he diverted the audience from their discontents with a fountain of bright blood from his reliable nose. He used all he had learnt to hold the crowd, to tease their desire for a performance and keep them in their seats until the end, waiting for that moment of dazzlement which he had so subtly promised them. At the end, he had to make sure that there was enough time for the actors to escape, before the curtain call, which would certainly be a festival of soft vegetables.
‘Sometimes, I too, had to make a timely exit to avoid the spinach and the potatoes,’ he told me. ‘But it was better than London, where the mob would gut the theatre if the performance did not please them.’
He turned back to writing; set up a weekly journal of theatrical critique, which he personally distributed in his old haunts, the theatres and cafés. Only eleven issues were published. Casanova’s career as a theatrical impresario was over. The theatre had not replenished his purse; it had drained it. His needs were still greater than those of the poor man he was. He was greedy for expensive foods. It hurt his soul to dine upon the sea-louse soup of the poor, or on polenta and a slice of watermelon, like the noblemen of San Barnaba who had fallen on hard times.
After we became lovers, I committed daily depredations on the kitchen at home for him. Sofia, astonished, caught me once, with six slender fette of prosciutto and ten quail eggs in my hand, only an hour after an ample dinner. There were a lot of good things to eat in our house that year. My father’s affairs, unlike Casanova’s, were prospering. Unlike his oldest daughter, he had no bad habits, and the family wealth rubbed against itself in our coffers. My father, though, still lived like a monk in a city aflame with ostentatious joy.
Stolen titbits did not nourish Casanova’s soul. From my studio’s courtyard he could look at the Palazzo Barbaro, scene of some of his most audacious episodes and the ingestion of the most luxurious delicacies. Even now, the chandeliers gushed light. Still the clink of glasses was muffled by the slow tears of the expensive wine inside them. The fragrant noise travelled over the water to my studio, to the exile who had returned from exile, and yet still found himself locked out of his home.
To the current inhabitants of the Palazzo Barbaro the great Casanova was a joke, an old joke gone a little stale. He was a slightly sordid adventurer, an extraordinary anachronism. But Casanova was so hungry for attention and complicated dishes that he would have accepted an invitation even on that basis, and would have gyrated, grimaced, caricatured himself to entertain them. He could have borne their curling lips and their asides, the laughter that they would not bother to hide. He would have borne all of this just for a taste of their supper, or even to eat their leftovers, provided that it was not in the servants’ quarters.
Casanova was still this proud, though. He still would not gamble for a living. He maintained that he had never done so. He gambled as he talked and walked: naturally and with great sprezzo, nonchalant style. To live on his skill at the table, he would have had to cheat. It was a language, in Casanova’s day gambling, a passport into society. To know the game, and how to play the game, how to perform the rituals, was all important. Cheating, ‘correcting fortune’, was part of the game then, too, as fraud was part of fashionable society. The decadent dregs of our high society were permitted to ply their underhand trade, provided the ‘correction’ was carried off with a panache and skill that did not actually insult their dupes.
But Casanova was not, in general, a deceiver at the table or anywhere else. He loved too much the endless novelties fortune offered the gambler; he loved it too much to corrupt it, even in his favour, even when he was desperate. So these days Casanova still gambled, as he had done all his life, in the spirit of extravagance and pleasure. Even if he lost, each card turned face up was, after all, a surprise. Every time he reached his hand into a velvet bag, to pull out a numbered ball, it fed his appetite for something he had not seen before, like the inside of each pistachio nut he slit, or every chemise he had once slipped off a lovely shoulder.
One night I plumped up the pillows on my bed again and we went together to a party at the Palazzo Mocenigo on the volta, the turn of the Grand Canal.
Casanova’s history was littered with Mocenigos. In the 1750s, he had consorted with Alvise II, Venetian ambassador to Paris and the favourite of Madame de Pompadour. Alvise V, the Venetian ambassador to Spain, was the notorious bisexual whose male mistress, Manuzzi, had caused Casanova to be imprisoned. But Casanova always felt affection for Alvise V, born in the same year as himself, who had suffered, as he had, at the hands of the Council of Ten. After Madrid, an excuse had been found to send him to the fortress of Brescia for seven years. Alvise V had recently died, but there was still an endless supply of Mocenigos, Alvises and others. Indeed Alvise V had fathered two daughters. One of them had sent this rare invitation to Casanova.
We arrived at the lion-coloured palazzo by water, nosing through the ten gondolas that the Mocenigo family kept tethered to their blue-striped palin
e. I looked up and counted twelve lion heads carved in white rectangles above the windows of the piano nobile. The Mocenigo consisted of several palazzi threaded together inside and out. Our party was taking place in the apartments of the central palazzo. This part of the Mocenigo was not one of our Venetian Gothic fairy-tale constructions. It was low and, for Venice, plain. Put it on Pall Mall or Oxford Street and you would not look at it a second time. But on the Grand Canal, in its party regalia, with torches ablaze and flowers dripping from the balconies, the Mocenigo was palazzo enough for us that night.
The Mocenigo sea-porter, in a doublet of velvet and gold, directed us with a flourish through the dark entrance hall, strangely decorated with harlequins of mirror and red velvet, to the stairs where the lanterns were held in stone arms that seemed to have thrust themselves through the wall with violence.
Upstairs, the air in the crowded soggiorno was heavy with an essence of rose the young Madame de Pompadour had sent the Mocenigos from Paris. The perfume, the crushed souls of a million flowers, was still robust all these years later. We all wore masks. The cream of Venetian society was there, with the cream of the courtesans and the great ladies, some of which were one and the same. They were all dressed according to the stringent dictates of the Poupée de France and encrusted with cosmetics. In those days to make love to a noble lady was like breaking open an egg to let the sweetness gush out.
Marina Benzona was there, looking like her Longhi portrait, holding a Sèvres cup of chocolate, wearing a comet of a jewel in the rolling gold of her elaborately dressed hair. Her glittering vitality still disturbed the air. We looked at Rosalba Carriera’s portrait of Lucrezia Basadonna Mocenigo, her beauty bursting out of her jewelled corselet. ‘Poor lady. She was betrayed by a dog of an Englishman,’ Casanova told me.
Faces I had painted swam in and out of the crowd. Maurizio Mocenigo loomed over me, as if he would like to swallow me up. Since I had painted his portrait, he had turned up frequently at the studio with a hungry look on his cavernous face. He was a friend of Casanova’s but he seemed to think that I might be interested in another lover. I laughed in his face, but as politely as possible. I did not want to lose a client, particularly a Mocenigo.
Casanova joined a table of Biribissi. I stood behind him, warming his back with my breasts pressed against it. I looked down upon the toys of the game, particularly the vivid board with its thirty-six painted squares. Swimming before my eyes were delicious images of pears, cherries, eagles, pineapples, peacocks, unicorns, doves, tulips, owls, dogs, bears, angels, lions, harlequins of both sexes in decorous undress. On this board they were painted with a charming naiveté. I imagined how much better I could do it myself.
Casanova was losing horribly, and I was worried. I took his hand and we slipped out of the rose-coloured drawing room and into a strange dark study. We enjoyed each other thoroughly and consolingly behind an enormous empty frame that was leaning up against a wall, louche as a beggar. Pressed against a marble panel, with Casanova’s warm mouth upon mine and my dress in foaming disarray around me, I abandoned all other thoughts but those of pleasure. If someone had come into the room and found us – and perhaps they did, for we were so lost in each other – our love would have seemed a living portrait.
‘One day,’ Casanova declared afterwards, helping me out of the frame and smoothing down my hair, ‘people will sit all day in their own houses watching moving portraits like this and learn about the world.’
I shall always remember that night as one of the sweetest that we knew together. I remember standing with him upon the terrace in the tender quietude that followed our lovemaking behind the frame. Through the curve of a side canal, we saw the moonlight fingering the house of our great Venetian playwright, Goldoni. It reminded Casanova of his mother. His face fell and sad thoughts overcame him, spilling into the memory of his losses at the table. I soothed his hand, distracted him by pointing out Carpaccio’s house near Rialto. I pointed out the noble steed-like towers of the Frari and Saint Barnaba and the obelisks sprouting like horns from roofs along the curve of the canal. I pointed up to the red lids of the curtains like our eyelids after a night together. Still, he hung his head.
Finally I slipped back into the party and plundered the table. I returned to him, still motionless on the terrace, and pushed a large crustacean into his mouth. He turned to me, and took me in his arms.
‘You are a rare and precious person, Cecilia Cornaro. I love you, and I honour you. You will be great, and I will be known for having known you and loved you before anyone else did. That thought comforts me as much as your love.’
As usual, he traded my comfort for a story. He brought the past of the Palazzo Mocenigo to life for me. He told me about the English Lady Arundel who had stoutly confronted the henchmen of the Inquisitors here. She was accused of taking a traitorous Venetian as her lover. He told me of Angelica’s one-time neighbour Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who had occupied one of these palazzi just twenty years before. Amongst the Venetians, she was famous for the malodorous wig that did not cover her greasy black locks hanging loose as seaweed, never combed or curled. Even when receiving guests she wore an old mazine wrap that gaped, revoltingly, open to show a dirty canvas petticoat. Her face was always swelled on one side with the remains of a pustule, covered partly by a rotting plaster and partly by cheap white paint. Nevertheless, Lady Mary had been a great seductress, and was reputed to have made love to the Sultan of Turkey. In Venice, she had waited, mostly in vain, for her Italian lover.
‘This is a palazzo that attracts the English,’ said Casanova. ‘I don’t know why. The Mocenigo does not seem to make them happy.’
We returned to the depleted gaming tables, and joined the addicts at their play.
Picture, as I do now, Casanova playing Biribissi, his face rapt, his whole body seeming to pivot upon the turn of the card, like the fall of a leaf. Picture, as I do, cards falling like a Bohemian autumn, turning, in my daydreams, to the papery touches of Madame d’Urfé. In those dreams, now turning to nightmares, Casanova was often on the edge of the game, chosen last to play, qualifying by his charm and fame rather than his purse. Or he was found wanting even in this, and was not invited at all. He was condemned to that dead realm of unwantables, the men with their brave stretching grins.
In seven churches in France there are frescoes of a danse macabre — a bishop, un mort, a nobleman, une morte, a woman, un mort in comical dance upon the walls. The dead smile grotesquely and contort their bodies. Those who have fortune and a place in society stand serene and dignified. Gambling is just like that, every night. Ring round the table in the casino — un mort, un signore, un mort …
I watched the tides of loss and victory that flowed across the Mocenigo party. It’s a cruel thing, a party. You are always winning and losing something and not just at the table. You can lose the gold, a lover flits out of your eyesight and returns flushed, you play, you throw the dice, reach into the velvet bag. At stake is your fortune, your reputation …
That was the night I myself learnt to play Biribissi, and then went home and painted the whole board from memory, but each beast, each flower had the face of one of the noble guests. I had it delivered, rolled up the next day. What a stir it caused at the Palazzo Mocenigo! – I believe they always used it after that. And yet more noble clients came tripping into my studio on their impractical slippers.
Years later I would see that Biribissi board again but I would not be able to bring myself to touch it.
The Cat Speaks
So Cecilia’s star is rising in the world but Casanova’s is falling and falling and falling.
The Poupée de France, that vixenish arbiter of female fashion, has a toy cat, you know, and its collar changes to match its mistress’s finery. It even wears tiny mouse-skin mittens! (This despite the well-known saying gatta guantata non piglia sorci, a cat in gloves grabs no mice.)
Some people come to look at the doll, but I think most of them really want to see the cat. You see
, it has a dazzling triangular smile. It knows something.
The cat knows the doll is as old as the shrivelled Madame d’Urfé, and that under her velvet and silk lurks a very shabby pair of under-drawers. And inside those drawers, the cat knows, there’s a pesthouse. The woodworm are nibbling at the private parts of the Poupée de France. They are quiet and industrious, those woodworm, unlike the party-loving Venetians.
By 1797, the toy cat calculates, the Poupée, like the Serene Republic of Venice, and all who gamble in her, will fall to dust.
Chapter 14
Chi ghe n’à ghe ne sémena.
One who spends money like semen.
VENETIAN PROVERB
‘Beckford is back!’ Casanova burst into my studio like a laugh opening a face. He came to stand behind me, with his arms around me, admiring my new portrait of Maurizio Mocenigo.
‘Beck Ford?’ I asked, swivelling my head to kiss him. I tasted excitement on his lips. ‘Ah! Yes, Beckford. The Englishman.’
‘Yes, The only one I ever warmed to. And he has a book with him!’
‘Well, imagine that,’ I said, turning from Casanova with a smile. I picked up my brush again. I was feathering the wings of a putto, the final touch to an allegorical background. The nobleman was coming to collect the painting himself the next day, one more excuse to present himself at my studio.
‘Come now, Cecilia! Don’t be so satirical. It’s a book Beckford has written. I have persuaded him that the one thing he must do at this moment is come to you for a portrait. The face of the newauthor must be immortalised! Will you paint him, Cecilia? Will you make him beautiful, my angel? Will you do that trick of yours with the skin? And the eyes?’
‘Let me meet him first. From all that I have heard about him, he may be absolutely impossible to paint. Remind me …’
Casanova refreshed my memory. While I finished the putto, he recounted once more his story of that highly original young man, William Beckford.