Casanova in Bolzano (8 page)

He stood pale, with circles round his eyes: he looked to be in a kind of trance. Balbi kept feeling his neck and breathed with difficulty after the fright he had suffered. He mumbled through his cracked and gritted teeth.

“I understand, Giacomo. I understand now, the devil take you. I recognize the fact that you are a Venetian. But if you lay your hands on my neck again I’ll bite your nose off.”

“I wasn’t going to hurt you,” replied Giacomo, laughing. “You can run and play now if you want. We shall spend a few days in Bolzano because I have things to do here: first, I must write a letter to Bragadin and wait for his answer, and while we are waiting we should get some new clothes because, without finery, even a Venetian nobleman looks like a beggar. Yes, there are things to do here in Bolzano, but by the end of the week we can be on the road again. I shall take you to Munich, so you may visit the order of which you are, alas, no longer a member. My destiny as a writer calls me further afield. Revenge can wait. The thought of it is deep in my heart, though, and will never fade. You must nurture revenge as you would a captive lion, by feeding it daily with a little raw flesh, the bloody remnants of your remembered insults, so as not to blunt its taste for blood. Because I will return to Venice one day! But in the meantime, no one but me will be allowed to curse her. The fires of revenge will continue burning, but that is a matter between the two of us: between myself and the Inquisition, between myself and the first secretary, myself and the Venetians. If you value your life at all, you’ll not raise a finger against Venice. I will take care of her in due course, don’t you worry. And, mark my words, Balbi, by Venice I do not mean the Venetians. No one knows them better than I who was born among them, who is blood of their blood, the blood of those who humiliated me and cast me out. Who should know them better than the man who introduced the male prostitute to the cardinal? The man who obtained a state loan for the senator responsible for artistic affairs by raiding the state funds reserved for the orphans of the republic? The man who introduced the castrato singer to the gracious head of the supervisory committee? The man who saw the exalted, the high-minded, and the pious, masked and with their collars turned up, sneaking through the notorious doorways of Madame Ricci’s house after sunset? The man who knows that, in Venice, the price of a man’s life is five gold pieces? The man who knows the precise addresses of hired assassins who spend their days hanging about the taverns in the side streets by the fishmarket and who are just as openly eager to place their poisons and daggers at the disposal of the exalted, the high-minded and the pious as the religious-goods vendors are their candles and icons? Who else knows what happened to Lucia, the adopted daughter and secret lover of his grace, the papal delegate? How did she vanish? Who is in a better position to know from whom, and from where, they bought the needle, the thread, and the sacking with which, on Michaelmas night, they stitched up the body of Paolo, the wild son of His Most High Excellency? . . . Who is in a position to reveal what still lies rotting in the cellars of certain Venetian houses and which head belongs to which torso as they both drift down the Grand Canal on the day after the Carnival? These are the people! . . .” he cried and grabbed the table whose great oak top shook as he touched it. “These are the people who judged me! Patricides, murderers of their own sons, usurers, gluttons, parasites, living off orphans’ tears and sucking the blood of widows with their taxes—and these are the people who dared pass judgment on me! Murderers! Thieves! Exploiters! Mark my words, Balbi! One day I shall return to Venice.”

“Yes,” agreed the friar and crossed himself. “But I wouldn’t like to be traveling with you when you do, Giacomo!”

They glared at each other. Then, still staring into each other’s eyes, they started to laugh and were soon shaking with uncontrollable hilarity.

“Send for the barber,” said Giacomo. “And for a cup of chocolate. And ink, a finely-cut pen, and some paper to write on. I must write to Signor Bragadin, who was father to me when I had none. I might be able to squeeze a hundred or so gold pieces out of him. Look sharp, Balbi: don’t forget you are my secretary and manservant. We might have to spend a few more brief days in Bolzano. Go carefully, keep your eyes open, don’t spend all your time sniffing round the skirts of kitchen-maids because, for a plump pigeon like you, there is always a cage like the Leads, ready and waiting. And I won’t pull you out through the bars again. Get a move on. There is a banker in the town, a man called Mensch, a well-known moneylender. Find out his address.”

Using a gesture he had learned from the pope—the extending of the hand for a kiss on its ringed fingers—he dismissed his traveling companion. He went over to the mirror and, with careful, precise movements, began to comb his hair.

Francesca

T
eresa brought in the chocolate and announced that Giuseppe, the pretty, rosy-cheeked, blond, blue-eyed boy, had arrived and was even now waiting for his instructions. Giacomo gave the girl money, had some white stockings brought over from the nearby fashionable haberdasher, then—on credit—ordered two pairs of lace gloves and a pair of clasped shoes as an extra. While the barber lathered him, the various servants proceeded round him on tiptoe, changing the bed, pouring hot water into basins, and ironing his clothes, for he had taken considerable pains to impress upon Teresa the importance of carefully starching the ruffles on the front of his shirt. The barber’s soft hand moved over his face, rubbing the lather in, then, like a conductor, wove and teased each curl of his locks into place.

“Talk to me,” said the guest, his eyes closed, stretching his limbs out in the armchair. “What news in town?”

“Town news?” the pretty barber began in a singing, slightly effeminate voice, lisping a little. “You, sir, are the news. No other news in Bolzano since sunset last night. You alone. May I?” he asked, and with the ends of his scissors he began to snip at the hair sprouting from the guest’s wide nostrils.

“What are they saying?” came the question, along with a sigh of satisfaction. “You are allowed to tell me the worst as well as the best.”

“There is only the best, sir,” the barber answered, snapping his scissors in the air, then taking the heated curling tongs, breathing on them, and turning them about. “This morning, as usual, I was up at the crack of dawn with His Excellency. I’m there every morning. You should know, sir, that His Excellency does us the honor of affording our company his patronage. It is my privilege to shave him and to prepare his peruke for him, since His Excellency—and I tell you this in confidence—is perfectly bald now. My boss, the renowned Barbaruccia—they say there is no one, not even in Florence, who possesses his skill in cutting veins or restoring potency with a special herbal preparation—is both doctor and barber to His Excellency. My job, as I have explained, is to shave him. And Signor Barbaruccia’s wife massages him twice a week, but at other times, too, whenever he feels in need of it.”

“Surely not!” he replied coldly. “His Excellency requires both massage and restoratives? . . .”

“Only since he got married, sir,” answered the barber, and began to curl his thick hair with the hot tongs.

He only half heard the news, stretched out as he was in the exquisite minutes of self-indulgence afforded by the submission of one’s head to the soft fingers of a barber. Giuseppe’s fingers were nimble but he was even nimbler in his talk. His voice was light and gentle, like the sound of a spring, full of lisping, eyeball-rolling scandal; he spoke in the manner peculiar to barbers, who are at once friends, experts, counselors and confidants for whom the town holds no secrets, for they know about aging bodies, about the cooling of the blood, about scalps that are losing their former glories, about the slackening of the muscles, about the delicate creaking of frail bones, about toothless gums and bad breath, about the crow’s-feet gathering on smooth temples, and who listened with attention to everything that the bloodless lips of their customers had to say. “Chatter away!” thought Giacomo and stretched his body again, yielding himself to the effeminate voice, to the fine scent of the burned alcoholic tincture being rubbed into his brow and the rice powder being sprinkled on his wig. He enjoyed this half hour in this distant town, as he did in every distant town, these moments when, after rising, he would welcome the appearance of the barber, the official traitor to the municipality, who snapped his scissors and whispered the secrets of the living and the dead. He encouraged the nimble youth with the odd blink or brief aside—“Really? Completely bald?”—in mock astonishment, as though it were the most important thing in the world, as though he had his own suspicions as to the condition of the gracious gentleman who required feeding and massage now that he was married. “But surely there remain a few stray locks on his nape at least?” he asked confidentially, narrowing his eyes.

“Yes,” Giuseppe brightly replied with the unselfish volubility of one prepared to divulge still darker and more melancholy information. “But how thin those locks are, exceedingly thin. His Excellency is a great patron of ours. My master, Signor Barbaruccia, is among his favorites, as am I. It does us no harm, that sort of thing. We order him roe from Grado for the increasing of his desire, and Signor Barbaruccia’s wife prepares a brew of beetroot, horseradish, and spring onions for him to ward off apoplexy should he then be assailed by particularly carnal thoughts. His Excellency has mentioned you, sir.”

“What did he say?” he asked, his eyes wide with amazement.

“Only that he would like to meet you,” answered the barber in his best obedient-schoolboy manner. “His Excellency, the duke of Parma, would like to meet you. That’s all.”

“I am very much obliged,” he responded carelessly. “I will pay my respects to His excellency, if time allows.”

So they chattered on. The barber completed his task and left.

“The duke of Parma!” he muttered, then washed himself, drew on the white stockings that Teresa had left at the side of the bed for him, drank his chocolate, licked his fingers and smoothed his bushy eyebrows before the mirror, trimmed his nails with a sharp blade, pulled on his shirt, and adjusted the hard-ironed pleats with the tips of his fingers while occasionally touching his neck with the index and ring fingers of his right hand, as if testing his collar size or wishing to ascertain that his head was still there. “The duke of Parma!” he grumbled. “So he wishes to see me.” The possibility hadn’t occurred to him when he escaped and hired the trap to drive him to Bolzano. He whistled quietly, lit the candles in front of the mirror because the early afternoon had already filtered into the room with its brownish blue shadows, sat down at the spindle-legged table, arranged paper, ink, and sand for blotting, and with goosequill held high above his head, his upper body slightly reclined, his eyebrows suspiciously raised, he peered attentively and curiously into the mirror. It was a long time since he had seen himself like this, in circumstances so fitting for a writer. It was a long time since he had sat like this, in a room with fine furniture, before a fire, in a freshly starched shirt, in long white pearlescent stockings, with a real quill in his hand, ready for literary production in the hour most apt for solitude and meditation, for complete immersion in the task before him, which, at this precise moment, was neither more nor less than the composition of a begging letter to Signor Bragadin. “What a letter this will be!” he thought with satisfaction, the way a poet might contemplate a sonnet the first few rhymes of which are already jangling in his ears. “The duke of Parma!” he reflected once more, compelled by an association of ideas he could not dismiss. “Can he still be alive? . . .” Pursing his lips, he began to count aloud.

“Four,” he counted, then stared thoughtfully at the ceiling, adding and subtracting. “No, five!” he declared, precise as any tradesman. He gazed into the candle flame, fascinated and round mouthed. “I am a poet about to write a poem,” he thought, quill in hand, leaning back in the armchair, facing the writing desk and the fireplace, his hair lightly combed, his clothes washed and starched. He was enjoying the situation. “Five,” he considered again, this time a little anxiously, and raised the five fingers of his hand, as if showing or proving something to someone, like a child claiming, “It wasn’t me!”

“Five,” he grumbled, and bit hard on his lower lip, wagging his head. Screwing up his eyes, he gazed into the flame, then into the deep shadows of the room, then finally into the far distance, into the past, into life itself. And suddenly he gave a low whistle, as if he had found something he had been looking for. He pronounced the name, “Francesca.”

He raised the quill and with a gesture of amazement wrote the name in the air, as if to say, “The devil take it! But what can I do?” He stretched his legs in the scarlet light of the fire, breathed in the scented warmth, threw away the quill, and watched the flames. “That’s the one,” he thought. “Francesca!” And once again: “The duke of Parma! Bolzano! What a coincidence!” But he knew there was no such thing as coincidence, and that this was no coincidence, either. Suddenly, it was as though a hundred candles had been lit in the room: he saw everything clearly. He heard a voice and was aware of the familiar scent of verbena mingling with the sane, cheerful smell of freshly ironed women’s underwear. Yes, it had been five years, he thought, mildly horrified. For these last five years had swept away everything in their filthy hot torrent, everything including Francesca, nor had he once reached out to save what had vanished in it. Yes, it had been five years: and he wondered whether they recalled the story in Pistoia, in the palazzo from which the aged countess would ride out in a black baldachin-covered coach into Florence at noon when the gilded youth and little lordlings of the city went promenading before the exquisite stores of the Via Tornabuoni? Would they still recall the midnight duel in Pistoia where the bald and elderly aristocrat waited for him, sword in hand, where they fought in the square before the palazzo, in the presence of the silent Francesca and the old count who kept rubbing his hands? They had fought silently, for a long time, their swords glittering in the moonlight, in a genuine fury that transcended the very reason for which they were fighting, so there was no more yearning for revenge or satisfaction but simply a desire to fight, because two mortal men in pursuit of one Francesca was one too many. “The old man fought well!” he acknowledged under his breath. “He didn’t need Signor Barbaruccia’s wife’s aphrodisiacs then: he could vie for Francesca’s affections without such things.” He covered his eyes to see more clearly, unable, not even willing, to shut out the images that now grew clearer and assumed ever more life-size proportions behind his closed eyelids.