Casanova's Women (12 page)

This was the last the three girls would see of Angela's temperamental suitor for eight weeks: anxious to avoid them, he immediately left Venice for Padua, where, to his consternation, he found out that Bettina Gozzi was engaged to be married to an unprepossessing cobbler named Annibale Pigozzo. While he was away from Venice, Angela was plagued with doubts about how she herself had behaved, and the Savorgnan sisters and their aunt missed his visits to their house. When he returned after a few months' absence Signora Orio immediately invited him over, and Marta and Nanetta received him with such obvious pleasure that it dispelled Casanova's sense of shame. As in the past, Nanetta was well-prepared for intrigue, and slipped two letters into his hands. One was from Angela, who promised that if he had the courage to spend the night with her again he would not leave disappointed; she loved him, and wished to know ‘from your own lips, if you would have continued to love me if I had consented to dishonour myself. The second letter was from Nanetta who, in her role as go-between, wanted him to know that Angela was in despair over losing him: ‘If you still love her, I advise you to run the risk of another night. Maybe she can justify her behaviour, and you'll end up happy. So do come.'
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The temptation was too great. After spending an evening at Signora Orio's, Casanova secretly made his way upstairs to the
sisters' bedroom again. But either Angela had failed to turn up that night or she had deliberately not been invited, and Nanetta suggested that Casanova make do with Marta and herself. Almost as if they had been expecting this to happen, they produced Parmesan cheese and bread to add to the wine and meat which their visitor had brought with him, and the three of them picnicked in the bedroom. Slightly tipsy and full of gaiety, they pledged the eternal friendship of siblings, but their innocent embraces soon turned distinctly lustful, and Casanova suddenly realised that the two sisters eclipsed their absent friend Angela in every way.

Guilty at having Casanova to themselves, Nanetta and Marta spent the next hour talking non-stop about Angela. After that, they decided that it was time to go to bed. Casanova sensed that victory was in the offing. Aware that he had to act with great caution if he was not to ruin his chances with both girls, he proceeded slowly and carefully towards his goal. Insisting that he only felt an innocent brotherly love for them, he refused to let them sleep on the sofa in another room as they wanted to, and suggested that all three of them share the same big bed. Next, since he would never be able to sleep if he kept his clothes on, he told them that he was going to undress. If the sisters trusted him – and he would feel insulted if they did not – they must do the same and count on his word of honour that he would not lay a finger on them. Nanetta and Marta conferred with each other for a few minutes and then agreed. Before they could change their minds, Casanova ripped off his clothes, climbed into the middle of their bed, and either fell asleep or pretended to.

By the time he opened his eyes again the candle had been snuffed out, the room was in total darkness and the sisters, dressed only in their loose linen chemises, lay curled up on either side of him, both apparently asleep. His word of honour that he would not molest them, which he had given only minutes earlier, suddenly counted for nothing. He reached out and touched one of them; unknown to him, it was Marta. As she felt his hand slide up her body, she was as overcome with curiosity as he was, and, still pretending to be
asleep, she allowed him to continue his exploration. ‘Little by little I spread her out,' Casanova later wrote of this seminal moment in both their lives. ‘Little by little she unfurled, and little by little by steady, very slow but marvellously natural movements, she assumed the most favourable position for me that she could without betraying herself. I set to work, but to do the thing properly I needed her to join in openly, and nature at last obliged her to do so. I found this first sister beyond suspicion, and not being able to doubt the pain she must have gone through, I was surprised. Duty bound to religiously respect a prejudice to which I owed this pleasure, the sweetness of which I was tasting for the first time in my life, I let the victim alone, and turned on my other side to do the same thing with her sister, who must have been expecting all my gratitude.'
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Nanetta was also a virgin. After feigning sleep for a while, as Marta had done, she turned towards Casanova and embraced him passionately. Within the space of an hour Casanova's virginity, and that of both Savorgnan sisters, were things of the past.

Angela was furious when her girlfriends admitted to her what had happened. Hurling insults at them, she stormed out of Signora Orio's palazzo, swearing she would never set foot in it again. The sisters had no regrets: when Casanova came to dine two days later they passed him a piece of bread-dough impressed with an imprint of the front door key, and instructed him to get a copy cut so that he could visit them whenever he pleased. From then on the novice priest stole secretly up to their bedroom at least twice a week. His sexual confidence grew along with theirs, and whilst they remained faithful to him he became more daring. Although he was aware how much his ‘little wives', as he called them, were risking by sleeping with him, he was not above trying to seduce other women at the same time: once, during a party which was being thrown in the house where he was lodging, he attempted to seduce the hostess while Nanetta, Marta and their aunt were waiting downstairs (his attempt failed miserably when the hostess, a courtesan named Giulietta, boxed him around the ears). And when, after
Easter, the Countess of Montereale invited him back to her country estate in Pasiano, Casanova eagerly rushed there in the expectation of seeing the beautiful Lucia again.

He was to be disappointed. The caretaker and his wife tearfully informed him that their beloved daughter had disappeared. Soon after he had left the previous summer she had been seduced by L'Aigle, one of the Montereales' couriers. Very soon she was pregnant – an unmitigated disaster for any unmarried woman but particularly for an adolescent peasant living in the countryside where there was no access to illegal abortion and where the scrutiny and scathing words of neighbours and friends could not be avoided. When she could no longer hide her pregnancy, Lucia had eloped with her seducer to Trieste. Her parents, whose pride and joy she had once been, were heartbroken, as Casanova guiltily observed. He was overcome with remorse and, until the end of his life, held himself responsible for Lucia's downfall, though perhaps for the wrong reasons: if he had only had fewer scruples about deflowering her, and had left her sexually satisfied, he believed, she might never have been receptive to the courier's advances.

Lucia's life became an unstoppable downhill slide into eventual ruin, for L'Aigle had no intention of marrying her. Instead he forced her into a life of prostitution from which she never escaped. Six months after their child was born he took Lucia to the picturesque island of Zante, a Venetian possession some eight miles south of Cephalonia in the Ionian Sea. Once they were there, L'Aigle enlisted in the navy and fled, leaving Lucia to fend for herself and their child. About nine or ten years later she managed to get to England, where she presumably joined the tens of thousands of poverty-stricken prostitutes who led a gruelling existence on London's streets. Later she moved to Holland, where she added a smattering of Dutch to the Greek, English and French she had picked up on her long and arduous journey from the Friulian countryside.

In the early weeks of 1760, around nineteen years after he had first met her in Pasiano, Casanova came across Lucia by chance in a
low-class dance-hall-cum-whore-house in Amsterdam. This gloomy
musikhaus
could not have been more depressing, even to a hardened libertine such as himself. It was ‘a real cesspit of vice, haunt of the most disgusting debauchery. The very sound of the two or three instruments that made up the orchestra plunged one's soul into sadness. A room stinking of the foul tobacco that was smoked there, and of the stench of garlic from the belches emitted by those who were dancing or seated with bottles or pots of beer on their right side and hideous slatterns on their left, offered up to my eyes and thoughts a desolate reflection of the miseries of life, and the degree of degradation to which brutality could reduce pleasures. The crowd which gave life to the place consisted entirely of sailors and the kind of common people to whom it seemed a paradise which compensated them for all they had suffered on long and tedious journeys.'
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Prostitutes hung around, each more unattractive than the other, and boorish pimps tried to cajole the customers into dancing with them.

This dreary hell-hole was Lucia's place of work. Eighteen years of the ‘accursed trade'
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had not only crushed the
joie de vivre
out of her, it had made her ‘not positively ugly, but something worse: disgusting'.
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Debauchery and, no doubt, repeated attacks of venereal disease had completely obliterated her natural beauty and vivacity, leaving her with no alternative but to make a living by becoming a pimp herself and procuring customers for younger, prettier girls. When Casanova offered her a drink, she accepted it without even bothering to look up at him, never dreaming that the richly-dressed gentleman had been her first love. He found only a trace in her features of the old Lucia, ‘the tender, the pretty, the naive Lucia, who I had loved so much and spared out of delicacy … She was only thirty-two, and I foresaw a terrible future for her.'
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On and off, Casanova remained the lover of both Nanetta and Marta Savorgnan for a number of years. Their relative wealth, their patrician birth and their aunt's trusting nature all insulated them
from the kind of dire misfortune that befell poor Lucia. Signora Orio had so much faith both in her nieces and the young
abate
whom she now regarded as a family friend, that on one occasion she even invited Casanova to stay in the palazzo with them, and allowed him to sleep in a bedroom adjoining theirs. In February 1745, on the night before he quit Venice for a long stay in Corfu, Casanova repeatedly made love to both sisters there. The next morning he left them in floods of tears, convinced that they would never see him again.

‘This love, which was my first,' he wrote of his relationship with them, ‘taught me almost nothing of the ways of the world, for it was perfectly happy, never disrupted by any discord, nor tarnished by the slightest self-interest.'
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Did they both experience it in the same way? On 2 March 1745, a few days before her father's death, Nanetta married a forty-one-year-old count whom Casanova referred to in his memoirs by the initial R (it has been suggested by one Casanova scholar that the initial stood for Rambaldi). She went to live with him in Guastalla, a city on the River Po in Emiglia-Romagna. Around the same time, her younger sister Marta was confined in one of Venice's convents, in all probability that of Santa Maria degli Angeli on the island of Murano. Being forced to become a nun was a common fate of the unmarried daughters of Venice's noble families, not least because the dowry required to become a bride of Christ was far less than that required to secure a good husband. It was also a convenient way for the nobility to dispose of troublesome daughters. Could Marta possibly have been pregnant with Casanova's child at the time she was banished there? We can only speculate.

In her future life as a nun, Marta wanted nothing more to do with Casanova. She even wrote to him from the convent, where she took the religious name of Mother Maria Concetta, and beseeched him in the name of Jesus Christ and the Holy Virgin never again to appear before her eyes. She had, she said, forgiven him for the crime he had committed in seducing her, since the consequence of that crime was to ensure that she would save her soul by spending
her entire life repenting it. Her tone was unmistakably ironic and bitter, and her last word to Casanova was that she never ceased praying to God for his conversion.

One feast day in the year 1754, Mother Maria Concetta noticed a man standing at the grating of the convent's visiting-room, deep in conversation with a fourteen-year-old girl who had recently been sent to Santa Maria degli Angeli as a boarder. Though nine or ten years had passed since she had last seen her lover, she recognised him immediately. Afterwards she discreetly took the girl aside and warned her to beware of Casanova, for he was a dangerous man. Her advice came too late: Casanova had already made the girl pregnant, and she had suffered a miscarriage that had almost killed her.

By now Mother Maria Concetta was mortally ill with consumption which she had contracted in the cold, damp environment of the Murano convent. She died the following year, at the age of twenty-seven.

 

Bettina Gozzi, the young woman who first awoke Casanova's lust, eventually married her fiance, cobbler Annibale Pigozzo. She would have done better to have remained a spinster, for he treated her scandalously and frittered away all her dowry. Poverty-stricken and brutalised by his harsh treatment, she eventually fled back to the safe haven of her family with her two daughters. When Antonio was appointed parish priest of the nearby village of Cantarana in 1750, Bettina went with him to keep house for him. Years later the two siblings moved on to the village of Val San Giorgio, where Antonio had been appointed as the archpriest.

By this time, Bettina was fifty-seven years old and had been ill for at least three years. Over the next months she grew progressively worse. By the summer of 1777 she lay mortally sick within the cool walls of their stone house, while the cicadas serenaded her outside in the baking heat. Was she conscious that the boy whose hair she had once so lovingly tended, whose thighs she had so daringly caressed and who had inadvertently brought so much trouble on
her, now came to visit her? Showing commendable loyalty to the family who had brought him up, Casanova arrived at Val San Giorgio on 28 June 1777, no doubt summoned by his old teacher. At the age of fifty-two, he was by then more sanguine and less hotheaded when it came to love, and still two years away from beginning his most solid, down-to-earth relationship. By contrast, the woman who had inspired his career as a great seducer was a spent force.