What Casanova Told Me (2 page)

“Your mother is knowledgeable,” the clerk said, smiling at Luce.

She’s not my mother, Luce wanted to reply. My mother is dead. She stuffed Lee’s gift into her enormous knapsack and they set off again through the narrow streets.

At the Hotel Flora, the bellhop greeted the women with a sympathetic smile, his eyes resting on Luce in her rain-soaked jacket.

“A bit of weather never hurt anyone.” Lee waved at the terrace where a waiter was setting the tables with bowls of croissants. “Luce, why don’t you change out of your wet things and meet me for breakfast?”

“I’m not hungry,” Luce mumbled.

“What did you say?”

“I think I’ll go to bed.” Luce bowed her head and started up
the stairs after the bellhop, now bent double under the weight of her travel pack.

“I see. Well, sleep all day if you like,” Lee called out after her. “I’ll leave instructions at the desk on where to meet for dinner.”

Luce offered her mother’s lover a barely perceptible nod.

As she stepped through the door, the light in her hotel room seemed to dim. She heard the beating of wings.

“Piccioni!”
The bellhop mimed the gesture of eating and pointed at the dozens of puffy grey birds settling back along the eaves. “They saved Venice in the plagues.”

As the door closed behind him, Luce peeled off her wet sweater. Then she opened her travel pack and removed her raincoat from around the box to see if any moisture had leaked through. The box was made of translucent plastic with the cloudy sheen of a shower curtain. She was impressed by the care Charles Smith had taken with the documents. The box was the latest thing in archival materials, only two and a half inches thick, or “slim size,” the best for hand-carrying documents. As an extra precaution, he had wrapped it in twine in case the tabs came unfastened.

Luce snipped the twine with her nail scissors and nervously stripped away the layering of acid-free tissue, exposing a photocopy of the documents, an old red-ribbed journal, an ornate leatherbound Arabic manuscript and a sheaf of letters.

It’s all dry, she thought. Thank goodness. Casanova’s letters lay next to the old journal, bound with a faded rose-coloured ribbon. She examined the letters first, untying the ribbon with her long skilful fingers. The staff at the Sansovinian would be pleased: not a drop of twenty-first-century moisture marred the paper bearing the Fabriano watermark.

There had been a great deal of disbelief and amusement in Luce’s family after the letters were authenticated by Harvard’s eighteenth-century-manuscript expert, Charles Smith. Holding the letters under the light on the bedside table, she saw that the pages glittered slightly, and she realized sand had been sprinkled across the paper—perhaps to dry the gold ink. Casanova had used a darker ink in his later letters and some of their pages were frail and lacy, as if the ink had eaten through the paper. No doubt this was what Charles Smith had meant when he said Casanova’s letters were in “fairly good condition.” She longed to read the letters, but their fragile condition made her hesitate. What if she tore one by mistake and lessened its value? Better to read the photocopy that Charles Smith had provided, though it didn’t hold the same glamour.

The family documents made up a
fonds d’archives
—the archival term for an assortment of papers generated by one person in a lifetime. Although most people would be satisfied with calling the documents a collection, Luce’s training as an archivist had taught her to use the proper term, and she still enjoyed rolling the words around in her mouth.

The
fonds
appeared to belong to Asked For Adams, who bore a Puritan name of the sort usually bestowed on boys. She was Luce’s great-great-great-great-great aunt to be precise, and so not, strictly speaking, her “ancestor,” but that was how Luce always thought of her. After all, they were both Adamses. According to the Adams family Bible, Asked For Adams had vanished in Venice one spring evening during the eighteenth century and was presumed dead, possibly the victim of Napoleon’s soldiers.

No one knew how Asked For’s papers had come to be in the attic of the old Adams cottage on the south shore of the St. Lawrence. After the death of Luce’s mother two years
before, her aunt Beatrice had found the papers buried under other old documents, mostly letters from forgotten family members. The attic itself was a mess of detritus from generations of Adamses—Japanese temple bronzes, prints, embroidered oriental hangings, Turkey carpets (as they were then called) and military swords. It was assumed the documents had been brought to Canada over a hundred and fifty years before by Aaron Adams, a temperance reformer who lost touch with the Boston branch of his family after he walked north by foot from Albany, New York, looking for a wilderness where the poor weren’t ruined by drink.

As the pigeons fluttered outside her window, she put Casanova’s letters back in the archival box and removed the thick, red-ribbed journal, smiling at its title:
What Casanova Told Me: My Wanderings with Jacob Casanova through the Mediterranean’s Ancient Kingdoms.
The name Asked For Adams appeared on the title page along with a list of places seen, things done—a precursor to the tendency of modern tourists to chalk up destinations like golf scores. The date read
1797
.

It wasn’t just the wonderful title that made her catch her breath. She noticed a small sketch of a woman in Turkish trousers inserted between the back pages of the journal, and on the frontispiece was a hand-drawn map with a tiny black dotted line marking a journey from Venice to Constantinople. Opposite the frontispiece was an inscription by Asked For Adams and a declaration of her ancestor’s travel principles. Flushed with excitement, Luce held the journal so its red-ribbed sides rested evenly on the hotel desk. The documents had arrived only the day before their flight, and she hadn’t had the chance to do more than scan a few pages. She began to read.

Find the ideal in the real? Now what on earth did her ancestor mean by that, Luce wondered. She turned back to the opening page.

JACOB CASANOVA’S TEN PRIMARY
PRINCIPLES OF TRAVEL:

How whimsical of Casanova, she thought wryly. And his tenth principle, from what little she knew of Italian, suggested that Casanova believed he could change his reality like a suit of clothes. She didn’t like to travel herself and anyway, she couldn’t afford holidays, not on her salary at the Miller Archives and Rare Books. Given the choice, she would rather collapse into a book and let the world come to her. Because no matter what her ancestor said, travel was dangerous. Death lurks in the unknown—the unwanted surprise no traveller is capable of turning to their advantage. Better to burrow in at home and avoid a disaster like the one that had claimed her mother in Greece. If it hadn’t been for the nagging worry that she owed it to her mother
and
herself to see the island where Kitty had died, she would never have let Lee pay her way to the memorial service in Crete. And, of course, she had been intrigued when her aunt asked her to deliver the documents to the Sansovinian Library in Venice. It was the first time Aunt Beatrice had taken Luce’s archival work seriously, and she was flattered to be offered the role of custodian of the family papers.

She carefully placed the journal back in its archival box, along with the photocopies and the Arabic manuscript. Outside the window, rows of terra cotta roofs steamed in the morning sunlight. It was going to be a sunny day, after all. She could see Lee in the courtyard below helping herself to a breakfast roll.

She closed the curtains and began to unpack the knapsack she’d bought at a local camping store. First: the pendulum kit her mother had given her several Christmases before. Then her cache of books. Along with
The Stones of Venice
and her
Rough Guide to Venice
, she had brought with her some essays on
Casanova, a hardback text,
Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women
by Lydia Flem, and a well-thumbed paperback of the first volume of
History of My Life
by Jacob Casanova, describing his Venetian childhood. She’d had to leave the other volumes of his memoirs at home as well as a prized copy of his only novel,
Icosameion
, a surprisingly modern science fiction fantasy about a new human race that lived in the bowels of the earth. Next: the small cloth bag with her mother’s makeup, which still retained the scent of her mother’s perfume. She stacked her books on the windowsill and started in on her new clothes. Not her usual style, but she had wanted something livelier to buoy her spirits. She hung up the three semi-transparent chiffon blouses and three clingy dresses, and neatly repacked her low-cut spandex tops and the pretty white Malibu pants she’d bought for Greece. On Lee’s advice, she’d thrown in a woollen scarf and her favourite jacket with the patchwork of Chinese-coloured silks sewn into its shoulders because Venice was cold in the spring.

Unexpectedly, her fingers closed over the little figure Lee had given her that morning, and she pushed it deeper into her knapsack.

Luce didn’t know how long she’d been asleep. She threw on a pair of beaded jeans and her favourite jacket and then lifted her ancestor’s travel diary out of its box again. Should she take it with her? Reading the user copy provided by Charles Smith wouldn’t feel as personal. Its loose, photocopied pages did not bear the original ink, the impress of a writer’s hand. Even though she knew she shouldn’t, she couldn’t resist. She wrapped the diary up in acid-free tissue from the archival box and placed it inside a small knapsack. At the hotel desk, she picked up the
directions Lee had left for her and walked out into the streets of Venice, carrying her ancestor’s journal.

It was a little late in the day for her sunglasses but she was near-sighted and needed their prescription lenses to see at a distance. In the square beyond, she noticed a celebration. A figure in red robes and lace was swaying into the basilica, carrying a gold cross the length of a body. The scarlet figure was followed by a large throng of men and women and children singing a Latin hymn. She felt slightly awed, as if she was observing a mysterious anthropological rite. Her aunt Beatrice was the last member of the family to believe in a formal Christian doctrine. She had insisted on taking Luce to Anglican services when Luce was small and proudly shown her the family’s ancient copy of
The Optimist’s Good Night.
Held together with Scotch tape, her aunt’s well-handled little book of cheerful axioms listed over
230
selections, including Lord Byron’s recommendation that “to do a man’s best is the way to be blest.”

There was her mother, of course—but her mother’s brand of religion was not what anyone would call Christian. And anyway she suspected that a wilful self-deception lurked inside all religious conviction—a deliberate setting aside of what is true in favour of what the believer needs to be true, like the suspension of disbelief during a film or a play. Still, it’s lonely work to be a postmodern skeptic.

Turning her back on the basilica, she followed Lee’s directions and found herself at the restaurant Da Raffaele. She walked out to the terrace where tables had been set up along the canal, and saw the young photographer from the water taxi drinking a cappuccino. He was dressed in what looked to Luce like a magician’s outfit: an ill-fitting black jacket with flaring lapels and a slight shine to the shoulder seams. His bulky
camera rested on the chair beside him. He stood up, grinning, and she shyly turned away, pretending not to see him. “Miss!” he shouted, and as she turned back, flattered by his persistence, a burst of lights flowered behind his head like miniature strokes of lightning—several simultaneous flashes that illuminated his handsome wolfish face. Then a gondola glided by, crowded with Japanese tourists in the act of lowering their cameras. At the bow stood an accordion player and a middle-aged singer dressed in white sneakers and a homely windbreaker. The singer began his version of
“Arrivederci, Roma”
and the tourists clapped like schoolchildren. At the rear of the craft, the gondolier poled on glumly, a red ribbon dangling from his straw hat.