Casanova in Bolzano (7 page)

“All the same,” replied the friar in his mildest, friendliest manner, “it was writing that saved me, Giacomo. Cast your mind back. We wrote each other such letters, we might have been lovers. Long, ardent letters they were, and Lorenzo the warder, was our go-between. We made our acquaintance through those letters, told each other everything, both past and present. If I were incapable of writing I would never have started a correspondence with you, nor would I ever have escaped. You despise me and look down on me. I know you would happily kill me. You are not being fair. I know as well as you do that writing is very important, a great source of power.”

“Power?” his fellow fugitive repeated, and surveyed the friar haughtily from under suspicious, half-closed eyelids, his head thrown right back. “It’s far greater than that. It is not a matter of ‘sources,’ Balbi, but power itself. Writing is the one and only power. You are right, it is writing that freed you. I really hadn’t thought of that. The scriptures, the sacred writings, are right when they tell us that even fools are not without grace. Writing is the greatest power there is: the written word is greater than king or pope, greater than the doge. We are living proofs of that. It was in writing that we plotted our escape, letters formed the teeth that cut through our chains, letters were the ladder and the rope on which we let ourselves down, it was letters that led us back from hell to earth. Some say,” he continued, “that letters can lead us from earth up to heaven too. But I don’t believe in their power to do that.”

“What then do you believe in?” asked the friar conversationally.

“In fate,” he answered without hesitation, “in the fate we create for ourselves and thenceforth accept. I believe in life, in the multifariousness of things that eventually, miraculously, chime in harmony, in the various fragments that finally combine to make one man, one life. I believe in love and in the wheel of fortune. And I believe in writing, because the power of writing is greater than that of fate or time. The things we do, the things we desire, the things we love, the things we say, all pass away. Women pass, affairs pass. Time’s dust settles over all we have done, over everything that once excited us. But words remain. I tell you, I am a writer,” he declared with delight and satisfaction, as if he had just discovered the fact.

He ran his fingers through his uncombed hair and threw back his head like a great musician about to raise the violin to his chin and assault the strings with his bow. It was a pose he had learned to strike in his youth when he played the instrument in a band in Venice. Agitated, he paced in a somewhat peculiar limping manner across the room, then added quietly, “Sometimes it surprises even me.”

“What surprises you?” asked Balbi like a curious child.

“I am surprised to find that I am a writer,” he replied without thinking. “I cannot help it, Balbi, there is nothing I can do about it, so I beg you to keep the secret to yourself since I don’t like the idea of bragging and complaining in the same breath. I am telling this to you alone, because I have absolutely no respect for you. There are many ways of writing. Some people sit in a room and do nothing but write. They are the happy ones. Their lives are sad because they are lonely, because they gaze at women the way dogs gaze at the moon, and they complain bitterly to the world, singing their woes, telling us how much suffering they undergo on account of the sun, the stars, autumn and death. They are the saddest of men but the happiest of writers because their lives are dedicated to words alone: they breakfast on proper nouns and go to sleep with a well-fleshed adjective in their arms. They smile in a faintly wounded manner when they dream. And when they wake in the morning they raise their eyes to heaven because they are under a permanent spell and live in some cockeyed rapture, believing that by grunting and stuttering their way through all those adjectives and proper nouns they will continue to succeed in articulating that which God himself has succeeded in articulating once and once only. Yes, the happy writers are those who walk about looking sad, and women deal gently with them, taking considerable care of them as they might of their simpleminded nearest and dearest, as if they were the writers’ more fortunate, wiser sisters, obliged to comfort them and prepare them for death. I wouldn’t want to be a writer who does nothing but write,” he declared a little contemptuously. “Then there are writers who run you through with their pens as they would with a sword or dagger, writing in blood, spattering the page with bile, the kind of writers you find in the study with tasseled nightcaps on their heads, berating kings and parasites, traitors and usurers, writers who enter the service of ideas or of human causes as either volunteers or mercenaries. . . . I’ve known some of them. I once spent some time in the company of that scarecrow, Voltaire. Don’t interrupt me, you’ve never even heard of him. He had no teeth left but that did not stop him biting: kings and queens sought to earn his approval, and this toothless wretch with a single quill between his gouty knotted fingers could hold the world to account with it. Do you understand? . . . I do. Writing, for these people, was a means of changing the world, but the writers who exercised power on the basis of their strength and intellect were unhappy, both as men and writers, because they lacked silence and reverence. They could plunge daggers through constitutions and stab a king through the heart with a single sharp word but they were incapable of articulating life’s deepest secret, which is the miraculous sense of being here at all, the delight of knowing that we are not alone but are cared for by the stars, by women and by our demons, not to mention the happy realization of the extraordinary fact that we must die. Those to whom the pen is just a sword or dagger can never articulate such things, however much power they wield on earth. . . . Such people may influence thrones, human institutions, and individual destinies, but they can do little to suspend our sense of time. . . . And then there are writers like myself. They are the rarest kind,” he declared with satisfaction.

“Absolutely,” Balbi agreed in awe. “And why are they the rarest, my lord and master?”

His deep, rasping voice bore the impress of prison, alcohol, and disease, as well as wayside hovels and the beds of kitchen maids. Now it was a mixture of curiosity and wariness. He sat with his mouth wide open, still twiddling his thumbs, as if he had blundered into a theater where the actors were performing in some language he only imperfectly understood.

“Because what they write is what they have to lose, which is the text of their own lives,” Giacomo’s voice was rising. “Do you understand me, you pot-bellied flat-footed fool, you hero of hovel and brothel, do you understand? I am that rare creature, a writer with a life to write about! You asked me how much I have written? . . . Not much, I admit. A few verses . . . a few essays on the magical arts. . . . But none of these was the real thing. I have been envoy, priest, soldier, fiddler, and doctor of civil and canonical law, thanks be to Bettina, who introduced me to knowledge of the physical world when I was fourteen, and thanks, too, to her older brother, Doctor Gozzi, who was my neighbor in Padua, who knew nothing of what Bettina had taught me but introduced me to the world of the fine arts. But that’s not the point, it’s not the writing, it’s what I have done that matters. It is me, my life, that is the important thing. The point, you fool, is that being is much more difficult than doing. Gozzi denies this. Gozzi says only bad writers want to live and good writers find that writing is enough. But I refute Gozzi because there is only one great struggle in life and that is between powerful, justified assertion on the one hand and powerful, justified denial on the other. However Gozzi may dismiss me as a writer now, my being, my life, is the important thing. I want to live. I cannot write until I know the world. And I am only beginning to know it,” he said, more quietly, almost in awe. “I am forty. I have hardly begun to live. I can’t get enough of life. I have not seen as many dawns as I would wish, there are too many human feelings and sensations that I do not know, I have not yet finished laughing at the arrogance of bureaucrats, dignitaries, and all manner of respectable persons; I have not succeeded as often as I’d like in stuffing the words of fat priests down their throats, I mean those fat priests who count their indulgences in pennies. I have not yet laughed myself sick at human folly; have not rolled into enough ditches in uncontrolled amusement at the world’s vanity, ambition, lust, and greed; have still not woken in the arms of a sufficient number of women to know anything worth knowing about them, to have learned some truth that is more substantial than the sad, vulgar truth of what they hide beneath their skirts, which excites the imagination only of poets and adolescents. . . . I have not lived enough, Balbi,” he repeated stubbornly, with a genuine tremor in his voice. “I don’t want to leave anything out, you see! I am not ambitious for worldly acclaim, I am not ambitious for wealth, for a happy domestic life: there’ll be time enough later for strolling about in slippers, for inspecting my vineyard and for hearing the birds singing, for carrying a volume of
De consolatione philosophiae
by the pagan Boethius under my arm, or indeed one of the books of the sage Horace, who teaches that a just man is always accompanied by two heavenly sisters, Knowledge and Pity. . . . I don’t want to give myself over to pity now. I want to live so that, eventually, I might write. This comes at a great cost. Understand this, my unlucky companion, my fellow in the galleys, understand that I must see everything: I must see the rooms where people sleep, I must hear their whimpers as they enter old age when they can only buy a woman’s favors with gold, I must get to know mothers and younger sisters, lovers and spouses who always have something true and encouraging to say about life. I must at least get to shake their hands. I am the kind of writer who needs to live. Gozzi says only bad writers want to live. But Gozzi is not a man, Gozzi is just a timid indolent bookworm who will never write anything of permanent value.”

“But when will you have time to write, Giacomo? . . .” asked Balbi. “If you spend it all seeing, hearing, and getting to smell everything you’ve talked about you will never find enough time for writing. You are right, I don’t understand such things. I do, however, know something about the chore of writing, and my experience tells me that even writing a letter takes a long time. Real writing, the work that writers do, would need even more leisure, I imagine. Perhaps a whole lifetime of it.”

“I shall write when I have done as much living as I consider necessary,” he replied and stared at the ceiling, his lips moving silently as if counting something. “When I have lived, I shall want to write.”

Somebody was laughing in the yard beneath the window. It was a warm, youthful, broken laugh and the stranger hurried over to the window and leaned over the balcony. He waved and bowed, and grinning widely, put two fingers to his mouth and blew a kiss.

“Bellissima!” he cried. “My one and only! Tonight! . . .”

He turned around, his voice somber.

“I have to do everything now for the sake of writing later. I have to experience life and everything life offers. Writing demands serious commitment. . . . I must see everything so I may describe habits and habitations, the places where I was once happy or miserable or simply indifferent. I don’t yet have time for writing. And those people,” he cried with a sudden fury, so angrily that for a moment the whites of his eyes looked enormous, “had the nerve to lock me up in jail! Venice denied me. They denied a man who, even in the galleys, was as true a Venetian as any dignitary painted by Titian! They dared deprive me of my right to be an author, a real author who dedicates each day of his life to gathering material for his work! They dared stand in judgment on me, on a writer, and a Venetian writer, at that! The bigwigs of Venice took it on themselves to shut me away from life, from sunlight and moonlight; they stole an important part of my time, of my life, a life that is nothing more than a form of service undertaken for the community. . . . Yes, that, in my fashion, is the service I perform! I serve the community! . . . And they dared take sixteen months of life from me! A plague on them!” he declared lightly but firmly. “A pestilence and plague on Venice! Let the Moors come, let the pagan Turks come with their topknots and cut the senators into delicate little pieces, all except Signor Bragadin, of course, who was a father to me when I had no father and who gave me money. I’m glad I remembered him. In fact I must write to him immediately. May shame and desolation be the lot of Venice who threw me, the truest son of Venice, into a rat-infested cell! I will make it the mission of my life to revenge myself on Venice!”

“Bravo!” cried Balbi enthusiastically, his fat face, yellow and warty as a marrow, beginning to glisten. “You are right, Giacomo, I understand you. I feel the same. I might not be a Venetian when it comes down to it, but I, too, know how to write. Well said: a plague on Venice. I’m with you there, believe me.”

But he could not finish what he was saying as the stranger suddenly seized him by the neck and set about strangling him.

“How Dare You Curse Venice”

“H
ow dare you curse Venice?” he gasped. “That’s for me to do! Do you understand? . . . I will take care of Venice!” His voice was terrifying. He struck his breast with his left hand and his face was strangely twisted in the heat of the moment, scarcely human, like the half-comic, half-horrific masks worn by Venetians at the wildest peak of the carnival. His right hand was gripping the friar’s shirt collar and lapel while his left hand hung in the air like a bird of prey, blindly seeking the dagger he had just deposited on the mantelpiece. And so they retreated together toward the fireplace, Giacomo dragging the friar, whose face slowly changed from its customary marrow color to a bright puce as the grip tightened. His hand located the dagger on the marble shelf, seized it, and raised it high in the air. “How dare you curse Venice?” he repeated, calmly this time, the point of the dagger raised, his victim pressed against the wall. “No one except me is allowed to curse Venice! No one else has the right! You understand? No one!” He spat the words out, not simply in a figurative sense but quite physically, his lips swollen, the boiling white-hot saliva issuing from his yellow gums and spraying the friar’s face as he spoke: it was as if something in the excited human cauldron within him had suddenly boiled over and the contents of his entire life were bubbling and spitting, and had started to overflow. He was pale, a grayish-yellow, all passion and fury. “I’ll curse her myself!” he reiterated, whispering the words into the ears of the terrified, silent, and by now perfectly blue friar as if they were a seductive promise of pleasures to come. “I alone! Only a Venetian is allowed to do that! What do you know, how could you know?! . . . How would you know, you loafers, vagrants, wastrels, and layabouts? You might as well claim to know the courts of heaven as to know the least thing about Venice! You sit in the taverns in the alleys of the Merceria, sipping sour wine, and think you are in Venice! You stuff your guts with fish, flesh, and fowl, with pâté and long strings of pasta, with
dolce latte
and other smelly cheeses, and think you know Venice! You lurk in cheap bordellos, tickling the fancy of some Cypriot whore on a rotten mattress, and because you can hear the bells of St. Mark’s in the distance you make believe you are part of Venice! You stop by the balcony of the Doge’s Palace, cheering with the crowd, anticipating a handout, or looking around with an eye to a bargain, and you imagine yourselves to be Venetians! Leave Venice alone, do you hear! You are not to lay a finger on her! What can you possibly know of her, what can you see of her, what can you hear of her? Do not dare to speak of Venice, you have nothing to say about her. Worms will be feeding on your fat belly, which is the legacy of Venetian bakeries and Venetian pots and pans, before you are ready to say anything on the subject! You will keep your mouth shut about Venice as the Jews of the Diaspora do about their God. You will keep silent if you value your life and if you ever hope to see Venice again! How could you know Venice? . . . You have seen only the paving stones, the iron feet of the casseroles, the heels of Venetian women, the thighs of Venetian servants and the indifferent sea that carried you to Venice along with all the rest: with the French and their verses, their diseases, and their fine manners; with the Germans, who wander through our squares and gaze at our statues with such anxious looks on their faces, as if it were not life that were the important thing but some lecture they sooner or later had to give; with the English, who prefer warm water to red wine and are capable of staring through their glasses for hours at one or other altarpiece, not noticing that the model for the painting is the marriageable daughter of a nearby innkeeper and that she is praying right next to them on the steps of the altar, recalling her sins, sins that are the talk of all Venice but which Venice has long since forgiven. Because Venice is not the doge or the
messer grande,
not the round bellied canons, nor the senators who, given a bag of gold, are anybody’s. Venice is not only the bell ringer in the Piazza San Marco, the doves on the white stones, the wells built by Venetian masons, by the ancestors of my mother and father, and stamped with their genius; Venice is not just the rain glinting in narrow streets or the moonlight falling on the little footbridge, nor is it just the bawds, drovers, gamblers, and fallen women whose numbers the procurators register in their musty offices: Venice is not simply what you see. Who knows Venice? . . . You have to be born there to know her. You have to taste her damp, sour, stale smell in your mother’s milk, smell the noble scent of decay which is like the breath of the dying or the memory of happy times without fear of either life or death, when the spell of the moment, the dizziness of reality, the enchanted consciousness of living here and now in Venice, filled each fiber of your body and every nook and cranny of your intellect. I bless my fate and I go down on my knees in gratitude to the destiny that decreed I should be born in Venice. I thank heaven that my first earthly breath was of the rotten wisdom that lingers in the scent of the lagoon! I was born a Venetian and that means everything is mine, that everything that makes life worth living has been given to me as a gift: the sense of freedom, the sea, art, manners . . . and, having been born there, I know that to live is to struggle, and that to struggle is to be a true, noble Venetian! Venice is happiness!” he cried, letting go of the friar’s purple neck and spreading his arms, staring about him with a pale face and a glazed expression like a priest announcing the miraculous news that the light of heaven was to be found here among us mortals. “It is a source of pride and delight to me that Venice exists, that over and above reality, which is flat and dull, there floats something whose stones are suspended between the sky and the water, that is supported not only on columns but on the souls of my forefathers. It delights me that the streets and squares where the nations of the world remove their shoes and go about on bare feet, their faces purple with devotion, were simply places where I played as a child, where I took the part of policeman or criminal, of Turk or Moor, in games with the children of street sweepers and patricians! Venice is a city of miracles where everyone, even the street waif larking among pigeon droppings by the campanile, can aspire to be an aristocrat. Mark my words, Balbi: every Venetian is indeed an aristocrat, and you should address me with due reverence! The milk that a Venetian sucks with the first hungry movement of his lips from his mother’s breast tastes of the sea and the lagoon: it tastes and smells of Venice, that is to say it is a touch salty, lukewarm and terrifyingly familiar. Wherever I go and smell the sea it is always Venice that comes to mind, Venice and my mother. Things were always best in Venice. I was three years old when I learned to walk on water like the Savior. We were filthy and ragged, and everything belonged to us. The marble palaces, the gateways with their stone arches that looked like fine lace, and the harbor, where, from morning to night, they were loading and unloading cargoes, ferrying gold and ivory and silver and amber and pearls and rose oil and cloth and silk and velvet and canvas, everything that could be bought in the bazaars of Constantinople or was manufactured by the studios of Crete, by the fashion houses of France or by English armament factories: everything was disgorged here, in the harbor in Venice, and everything was ours and, because I was a Venetian, it was mine too. Even when I was a child at play I was aware that I was a Venetian. And when I grew up, stood on the Rialto, and watched the world’s nations bringing their wares and throwing them at Venice’s feet, I saw that the gold, frankincense, and myrrh they were bringing was in adoration of Venice. His Merciful Highness, the first secretary, that bureaucratic bloodhound of the Inquisition, accused me of the false use of a noble surname! But who in the world is more properly entitled to be aware of his nobility than I, who am Venetian born? . . . Show me the pope, the emperor, the king, or the princeling who is better fitted to bestow nobility on a man than the Queen of all the World, my birthplace, Venice? . . . My mother and father were both Venetians, I and my siblings were all born there: could there be a more genuine
grandezza
or nobility than ours? . . . Are you beginning to understand? You will not curse Venice!”