A Venetian Affair (11 page)

Andrea was exasperated by her reaction. Even though he was “afraid to break the agreement” with Mrs. Anna, he sent Giustiniana an angry note: “You have managed to turn my pain into wrath. What must I do for you? Pray tell me, you beast. What kind of love is this that you are never happy with what I do? I adore you and the desire to live with you kills me a little more every day. . . . My one sin is that I do not write to you, but how can I write to you? You know very well all the risks involved.”

The only reasonable thing to do, he insisted, was to fix their attention on the consul and help Mrs. Anna achieve her goal as quickly as possible. It was still the surest path to their happiness. Although Giustiniana never ceased to be skeptical, Andrea’s hope that things would work out to their advantage increased every day. “The time will soon come,” he declared, “when I shall be able to enjoy your happiness and the pleasure of showing the world how much I love you.” Once again he broke the embargo he had solemnly accepted in order to explain to Giustiniana that, in fact, things could not be going any better:

By God, Giustiniana, we are lucky . . . because the only way
to bring this comedy to a happy conclusion is through Smith. . . .
And we are luckier still because he is old, because he is rich, because
he is my friend, because he stands in awe of society, because he
stands in awe of me . . . because he is vain, because he is crazy,
and because he has everything we can possibly need. Must I say
more? Listen, the truth is that our present misfortune—having to
bear with it for so long—is really our greatest fortune, provided it
comes to an end. . . . I ask: if Smith had married you when he
knew my love for you was still too hot . . . would it really have
been possible for me to come to you? Believe me, it takes time to
seduce an old cat and then play him for a sucker. But now I know
that I have prepared everything well, that I have brought him
closer to me, that he loves us all the more and that he trusts us. I
have made a great deal of progress, and I hope at least we shall be
happy.

The old cat wasn’t napping, though. Back in Venice after his
villeggiatura
in Mogliano, it did not take long for Smith to learn about Mrs. Anna’s confrontation with Andrea and, even more infuriating for him, about Giustiniana’s prostration at the thought of not seeing her lover anymore. Andrea and Giustiniana did not make things easier for themselves: they were incapable of observing the ban on their correspondence, and messengers were once again shuttling between them. Soon they began to see each other, sometimes even in Piazza San Marco or Campo Santo Stefano during the evening stroll. It was only a matter of time before someone told Smith, and there was no shortage of people in Venice willing to trade on the misfortune of others.

One such person was the Abbé Testagrossa, a shady character who eked out a living in Venice by means of flattery and gossip. He had found employment as a secretary in the French Embassy but was still in the habit of crying poverty to cadge his lunches and dinners, for which he would sing whatever tune was required. For anyone with a secret, he was a man to be kept at a distance. One evening Andrea and Giustiniana were talking in a secluded corner near Campo Santo Stefano when the Abbé Testagrossa appeared from nowhere and passed by them, smiling. Andrea became so worried that the abbé might create a scandal that he went out of his way to be nice to him, and next time he saw him he even invited him to lunch at Ca’ Memmo. “What could I do?” he sheepishly explained to an even more anxious Giustiniana. “I ran into him on the water near my house, and he said to me, ‘I no longer have a kitchen, and I am forced to go out begging for a meal here and there.’ ” Andrea reassured her that he had “no intention” of being nice to Testagrossa again and would “treat him with so much formality it will be plain to him that this [lunch] does not represent the resumption of a friendship. But you wouldn’t have wanted me to get on the wrong side of this indiscreet chatterer, would you?”

Still, he agreed with Giustiniana that the abbé would probably try to “hurt” them anyway because of “the sheer weirdness of his character.” Given what we know of Testagrossa, it is certainly plausible that he casually told the consul—perhaps over a meal at Palazzo Balbi—that he had seen the two lovers alone near Campo Santo Stefano.

August turned into September, and still the consul made no official proposal. Andrea grew desperate to know what might have been said to Smith. Was it enough to undo all the work he had accomplished over the summer? Somehow the whole enterprise seemed to be more difficult to manage in the city, with its malicious whispers and knowing conversations. Andrea sought the consul’s company to keep a close eye on him. But he could not read him as well as in the past. At times Smith seemed his usual old self. At others, his voice would take on a tone of sarcasm that worried Andrea. Here is a fragment of a conversation he had with Smith, which he transcribed for Giustiniana:

“What is the matter, dear Memmo, that you should sigh so
heavily?”

“I don’t know. I’m not feeling very well. Maybe the sirocco . . .”

“Ah, but it must be something else. These are not sirocco
sighs . . .”

Had he discovered their plot? “And yet the man treats me kindly, in his islander’s sort of way,” Andrea mused.

There was increasing pressure at home as well. The Bentivoglios, a rich family from the mainland, had spoken to Pietro and Lucia Memmo, offering the hand of one of their daughters for Andrea. The Memmos had agreed to initiate a preliminary round of negotiations through the offices of an intermediary. At first Andrea went along with it, hoping the talks would bog down on their own, as was so often the case in these complicated matrimonial deals. He told Giustiniana not to worry, assuring her that in the end nothing would come of it.

Far more worrisome to him was the growing distance of the consul. He stopped talking about marrying Giustiniana, and his bantering tone vanished entirely. And he was cold not just toward Andrea but toward Mrs. Anna as well. The sudden change in his attitude threw her into a state of near panic. One night she took a gondola to Ca’ Memmo and demanded to see Andrea. His servant woke him, and Andrea straggled downstairs: “I get in the gondola, she tells the gondolier to get out of the boat, and then she blurts out, ‘You’re killing me, you’re murdering me. . . . Are you a gentleman or a traitor, Memmo?’ ” Andrea tried to placate her fury and claimed that in spite of his feelings he was not seeing Giustiniana anymore. He agreed to talk directly to Smith and tell him their affair was finished. As a further reassurance, he let her in on the secret marriage negotiations with the Bentivoglios. Neither she nor the consul had anything to worry about, he said.

But that was only a delaying tactic. Discussions with the Bentivoglios were going nowhere, the principal reason being that Andrea was now refusing to cooperate. He realized it was a very advantageous match—as he put it, “it contains all the elements I would not have found separately in other offers.” But he belonged “entirely” to Giustiniana. As long as their situation was not settled one way or another, he was not going to marry anyone else. The Memmos were concerned that other prominent Venetian families might step in and make a deal with the Bentivoglios. Andrea’s dillydallying irked them, and they pressed him for a straight yes or no. When he refused to give his consent, his mother, Lucia, exploded.

For months she had been under the impression that relations had cooled between Andrea and Giustiniana and that the consul was indeed going to marry her son’s lover. Suddenly confronted with Andrea’s recalcitrance, she was seized by a horrifying vision—as Mrs. Anna had been before her. All her son’s talk about the consul marrying Giustiniana was really just a front to cover an unspeakable truth: Andrea and Giustiniana were already secretly married. “So all I heard about Smith was not true!” she yelled at him. “Oh, my God, Andrea, you’ve done it. Tell me the truth: you’ve married Giustiniana. Or you’ve given your word that you will. One of the two, I’m sure.”

His mother’s onslaught hurt Andrea. How could she believe him capable of dishonoring the family name? But it was the spectacle of his old and feeble father “with tears in his eyes” that really broke his heart.

The plan Andrea and Giustiniana had worked on since the spring finally spun out of control. Talks with the Bentivoglios collapsed at the end of September. Andrea’s family put the blame entirely on him, and his life at Ca’ Memmo became intolerable. When Smith learned that Andrea would not be marrying the Bentivoglio girl after all, he felt that all his suspicions about the two young lovers had been indirectly confirmed. In a dramatic and painful confrontation, he accused Andrea of plotting against him behind his back. He dismissed any further talk of marrying Giustiniana and abruptly sent him away.

It was a terrible blow for Andrea. As he expected, Mrs. Anna railed against him for scuttling what had seemed to her a done deal. But he was stunned by the amount of criticism he received from all sides for his embarrassing failure. “I have lost much more than my friendship with Smith,” he wrote self-pityingly to Giustiniana. “Everyone accuses me of being imprudent, disloyal, not enough of a friend to you. If Smith has decided to renounce the project of marrying you—they say—it is on account of my lack of honesty and wisdom.” Giustiniana’s worst fears had come true. She was so crushed, so disoriented by all the mayhem that she did not know what to say to Andrea anymore and withdrew into silence.

Within days Smith proposed to Betty Murray, who had been waiting in the wings all along. “Old Consul Smith, who buried his wife nine months ago, has thrown himself at my sister’s feet but has not yet bent her to his will,”
⁷
the Resident wrote at the beginning of October, savoring the moment with mischievous pride. Her resistance, if ever there was any, did not last long. They were married by the end of the month.

CHAPTER Four

The winter of 1756–1757 was the coldest in living memory. By late October, autumn’s golden light turned to a chilly gray. The bora blew in from the north. Snow fell early, swirling over the dark, brackish water. Some days the temperature dropped so low that the lagoon was frozen solid. A thick silence enveloped the city, pierced only by the mournful toll of church bells and the isolated cries of gondoliers. Inside the crowded
botteghe
and
malvas
ì
e,
the talk among Venetians was mostly about the war that had broken out in the summer.

Ever since Austria had lost the rich eastern province of Silesia to Prussia in the War of the Austrian Succession of 1740–1748, it had schemed to reclaim it for the vast Habsburg Empire. With that objective in mind, Vienna had worked successfully to bring France, Prussia’s traditional ally, to its side. Russia and the Electorate of Saxony also joined the new coalition. Suddenly surrounded by this powerful array of forces, Frederick the Great of Prussia, the restless “philosopher-king,” struck an alliance with Great Britain and its German appendage, the Hanoverian state. In late August 1756 he staged a surprise attack against Saxony, the weakest link in the enemy camp, and marched all the way to Dresden.

Frederick’s assault was the opening shot of the Seven Years’ War, the last great conflict between the European powers before the French Revolution and one that would redraw the balance of power in favor of Great Britain and Prussia. The Venetian Republic never took part in that drawn-out war fought on three continents. Her neutrality, however, owed more to her growing irrelevance on the European stage than to her once proverbial diplomacy. The city remained at peace but still suffered the indirect consequences of the conflict. Trade plummeted, and the economy entered a period of decline. Venice would feel more and more isolated as the war dragged on, and a numbing fear of the future would creep into the population.

At Ca’ Memmo the atmosphere was particularly gloomy that winter. Andrea’s beloved sister, Marina, after a short reprieve, had died in terrible pain at the end of the summer. His father, Pietro, old and weak, was devastated by the loss of his daughter. Andrea found him “sitting alone by the fire” on a cold day. “He didn’t know whether he wanted to eat or sleep.” All his life Andrea had looked up to his uncle in a way he never had to his father, whom he considered excessively ingenuous and impractical. But he knew the tired old man hunched in the armchair by the fire loved him dearly, and there were times when he felt that his father understood, perhaps better than others, the depth of his feelings for Giustiniana. Andrea did not expect their relationship to change in any fundamental way at this stage in their lives, but now his filial devotion stirred in him more strongly than it had in the past. “His stomach convulsions do not let him sleep all night,” he worried, “not to mention the gout and the fever. Poor old man! If only he were as sensible as he is generous, how much more I would love him.”

Andrea had always been on more intimate terms with his mother, Lucia, but he saw little of her during that winter. The halls of Ca’ Memmo were so cold that she hardly ever left her apartment. It wasn’t just the chill in the air that kept her so withdrawn. The Smith imbroglio had offended her deeply, and for months she continued to brood over Andrea’s embarrassing actions in the frosty confinement of her rooms.

Giustiniana herself remained so distant Andrea feared he would lose her as well. “Our love has not vanished no matter how much it has been threatened,” he reminded her, gently suggesting new approaches to deal with her furious mother. But Giustiniana was still too dejected to give him anything more than passive, perfunctory replies. He felt her slipping away. “Why don’t you defend me?” he complained. “Your mother hates me. . . . She slanders me. . . . Why don’t you show her how wrong she is? . . . Because you don’t love me anymore. . . . Oh God, I am lost. My soul, my sweetest soul, think hard before you ruin me.”

Despite the biting temperatures, Andrea came by the house at Sant’Aponal regularly. He stood shivering under Giustiniana’s window while his gondola sloshed about in the freezing water. Sometimes she did not even come to the window. She left Andrea’s letters unanswered for days and seldom went out, usually only walking the short distance to church with her mother when she did. Andrea’s pleading became increasingly desperate: “Oh God, if you want me to cease tormenting you, let me at least believe that we part as good friends and that you would still consider me worthy of you if circumstances were different.”

Winter seemed to drag on endlessly, but in early spring Venice gradually regained her scintillating colors. The narrow streets again bustled with activity. The canals filled with boats of every size. After months of hibernation, the chattering crowds returned to the Listone for their daily stroll. Giustiniana was not immune to the changes around her. She responded a little more warmly to Andrea’s letters. Warily, she agreed to see him again in secret. Andrea was grateful and extremely solicitous. He fretted over her health and her diet and was full of practical attentions as well. “I must look for some reed matting so that room of Rosa’s will be less uncomfortable,” he wrote in a touching display of domesticity. “My heart, how much I love you. I’m so full of you and so happy you will be mine forever.”

On the surface, things gradually went back to the way they had been before. Of course, Alvisetto was no longer on the scene, but a replacement had been found: Martino, the bellboy at the Regina d’Inghilterra, the fashionable inn in the Frezzeria where Andrea sometimes stopped for a quick bite at lunchtime, now handled most of their secret correspondence.

Yet their relationship was not as it once had been. At the time of the conspiracy against Consul Smith, Giustiniana had given herself to Andrea with abandon because, in the end, she had allowed herself to believe in the success of their preposterous scheme. Now, as they met like thieves in Rosa’s unadorned little room, what prospect did their love have? “You will be mine forever,” Andrea kept assuring her. But how was this to be? Again Giustiniana had nothing to look forward to: only uncertainty and more pain seemed to lie ahead. She gave in to Andrea’s entreaties, spurred by her own physical desire to be in his arms, yet she remained emotionally aloof. Moreover, on the practical side she felt her mother was right: her marriage prospects
had
been seriously damaged. So there were a number of reasons why she was wary of following her lover along another tortuous path of deception. She preferred to live her passion day by day, avoiding her own thoughts about the future.

Andrea, however, had changed. It had been a painful winter for him, and the possibility of losing Giustiniana in the aftermath of the Smith debacle had made him even more aware of the depth of his feelings for her. As their clandestine relationship entered its fourth year with no hope of finding a practical arrangement that would allow them to be lovers in a less secretive manner, he began to contemplate what until now had been unthinkable. He loved her deeply. He wanted to be with her, to have children with her. If marriage was the only way they could be together, perhaps the time had come to take that bold step while trying to minimize the negative consequences as much as possible.

Without telling Giustiniana, Andrea had approached Clemente Sibiliato, a prominent lawyer, and the Abbé Jacopo Facciolati, a legal scholar and close friend of the family, to discuss the idea of submitting a marriage contract to the Avogarìa di Comun, the powerful three-member panel that had jurisdiction over such matters. The conversations were less discouraging than Andrea had feared, and he had come away with new hope. In the past, he had not even considered this possibility on the assumption that such a contract would never have been approved and the effort would only have discredited the two families. The same line of reasoning had led Mrs. Anna to banish Andrea in the first place. But circumstances had changed rather dramatically in the meantime, and with no serious alternative in sight, marriage did not seem such an unreasonable solution anymore. In many ways, it had become the only possible one.

Andrea grew increasingly convinced that the Venetian authorities would accept the petition, provided the two families preempted the veto of the Avogarìa di Comun by agreeing to endorse the marriage contract before it was presented. After all, he reasoned, the role of the Avogarìa was to protect Venetian customs and institutions and therefore, by extension, the interests of the ruling oligarchy. Where would the three
avogadori
find the legal authority to reject a marriage contract endorsed by one of the founding families of the Republic? All he had to do was persuade the two families. The rest would take care of itself.

Andrea figured he could bring his father over to his side. To convince his uncle—the old Procurator Andrea Memmo, hero of Constantinople and stern guardian of Venetian tradition—would have been an entirely different proposition, but the gentle Pietro Memmo, ailing and deeply loving, would not disappoint him, and his mother, despite their frosty relations, would follow in the end. The great obstacle, Andrea realized immediately, was Mrs. Anna. Giustiniana would have to work hard on her mother to bring her to agree, after all that had happened, to negotiate a marriage contract with the Memmos.

Despite his growing optimism, Andrea never lost sight of the fact that such a course of action was very risky for everyone involved. If in the end the Avogarìa rejected the contract, the Memmos’ reputation would be tarnished for years to come. As for Giustiniana, her prospects of finding a husband would be so badly damaged that the Wynnes would probably have to leave the city. But a lucid assessment of the situation, combined with a good dose of wishful thinking, brought Andrea to rely on the ultimate wisdom of the
avogadori
. “I am sure,” he told Giustiniana when he finally suggested to her this new course of action, “that if your mother gives in even only an inch, the path ahead will clear.”

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.