Casanova in Bolzano (10 page)

“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 accompanied 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

F
inally 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.

“I shouldn’t have sold the emerald ring, though,” he reflected as an afterthought. His fatherly friend had chosen the emerald ring for him from among his family treasures, lending it to him for one night only as he was setting out to some glittering occasion, on one of those dangerous but enchanting Venetian Carnival nights, dressed as an Eastern potentate. The emerald ring was a memento, an item favored by the late wife of his generous friend. “It was a mistake to pawn it that night while the banker was dealing. It couldn’t be redeemed later. . . . I even passed the ticket on. Well, people make mistakes,” he thought, generously excusing himself. And when he was offered it for redemption by a man introduced to the noble gentleman after Giacomo himself had been incarcerated in the Leads, he redeemed it! Redeeming such slips of paper might have had an alienating effect on his father and friend, but he never mentioned it. “He paid the price and redeemed it,” he thought, and shrugged his shoulders. He paid up without any song and dance, his one and only Signor Bragadin, he who sent him parcels at Christmas and for New Year’s while he was imprisoned, his old heart full of impotent rage, for it was plain that he could not live without loving somebody, even in his old age, even if the object of love was unworthy of such noble feelings, even if that object had gambled away his most highly prized emerald ring and managed, with passable ingenuity, to forge his signature on documents commonly circulated in commercial transactions. None of this counted for much with him. There were times he almost envied Signor Bragadin this selfless impulse, whose true meaning he could comprehend only through the intellect, not through his emotions. For a while he suspected that the noble gentleman’s love for him was of a perverted kind that he might not be able to admit, even to himself. But the old man’s life was an open book, for never once, in all the time since he was born, had he left his birthplace: he had lived his life in the morass that was Venice, surviving it the way a pure and healthy plant continues to thrive in the fumes of a marsh. All the same, he could not bring himself to believe that a person could love somebody without an ulterior motive or a sensual impulse: the concept simply did not fit into his intellectual framework. For a long time he thought that there must be something wrong with him. There were too many secret ties of affection and attraction, and he had encountered them all in the Venetian docks, where desires of East and West mingled. You could tell what was going on by the way people looked at each other. He hated this other, perverted love: for though he was happy to plumb the depths of depravity himself, those depths always yawned between the opposing shores of men and women; this was how it was, how it had always been, and how it would be in the future. Venice provided a market stall where castrati, Orientals, and other slaves to lust could be bought and sold like meat at a butcher’s shop; and it was precisely here, in Venice, that he, of all people, never once strayed from the beaten path of desire. He trawled the sexual bazaar with a wrinkled nose and a contemptuous smile that spoke of mockery and disgust in equal proportions, observing the sick unfortunates who sought the favors of Eros on shores beyond the world of women. “Ah women,” he reflected with a calm, dark rapture, as if pronouncing the words “Ah, life!”