Casanova's Women (5 page)

The
burchielh
set sail and the glimmering lights of Venice faded into the distance. Once the sailors had fastened the shutters across the large windows, Grimani and Baffo retired to sleep in the back cabin, while Giacomo climbed into a narrow bed in the saloon with his mother. At first he felt awkward, lying so close to her. But, lulled by the rocking of the boat and couched in her unfamiliar scent, he was soon overwhelmed with a feeling of peace and fell fast asleep. In what seemed like no time at all the first rays of the morning sun shone through the trees, across the bed and on to his closed eyelids. He opened them to see his mother standing by the window, while the tops of trees marched past behind her. Puzzled by this odd sight, Giacomo asked her what was happening. Why were the trees walking along beside the boat? He could tell by her expression that, as usual, he had said something stupid, but before she could scold him Baffo and Grimani entered the saloon, and seeing how astonished he looked, they asked him what was wrong. Giacomo repeated his question: why were the trees walking past the boat? ‘It's the boat that's moving, and not the trees,' Zanetta snapped impatiently, and told him to hurry up and get dressed. Instead of doing as he was told, a look of enlightenment crossed Giacomo's face. ‘Then it's possible that the sun does not move either,' he exclaimed, ‘and that it's we who turn from the east to the west!'

One glance at his mother was enough to make Giacomo realise that he had made a fool of himself again. But to his astonishment Signor Baffo gathered him up and kissed him. ‘You are right, my child,' he said. ‘The sun does not move! Take courage, always reason logically, and let others laugh.' Baffo was mad to put such ideas into the boy's head, Zanetta said with an angry smile, but he ignored her, and instead proceeded to explain to Giacomo Galileo's theory that the Earth did indeed move around the sun; and the walking trees he had spotted were the proof of it. The boy's face lit up with the glorious knowledge that, for once, he knew better than his mother did. Zanetta might think him a fool, but his was in fact the superior intellect.

Eight hours after it had left Venice, the
burchiello
docked at Padua, where Grimani led the small party to the home of an apothecary he knew. Everyone shook hands jovially, and a nice woman clasped Giacomo to her breast and smothered him in welcoming kisses. But instead of staying here with her, soon it was time to leave for another house where they said Giacomo was to live from now on. The building they entered was cold and gloomy. The apartment was up two flights of steep, dark miserable stairs. On the second landing a door was opened by a woman so tall, stern and hideous that Giacomo was almost too frightened to look at her. Built like a soldier, Signora Mida had lank greasy hair, sallow skin, a miserable expression and unsmiling eyes which were thrown into dark relief by thick, masculine, bushy eyebrows. Strands of wiry black hair sprouted from her chin, and a stained and shabby dress hung limply from her broad shoulders with the front unbuttoned almost to the waist, revealing two pendulous breasts which hung down her naked chest like long empty sacks separated by a deep furrow.

This frightening gorgon stood aside and let the party into a filthy kitchen. Giacomo clung to his mother's skirt hoping that they would soon leave. He simply could not believe it when Signor Baffo told him that he was a lucky boy because from now on he was always to live in this house. Instead of his mother and
grandmother, Signora Mida was to be in charge of him in future. She would wash him, tend him if he felt poorly, feed him, put him to bed at night and see that he got up in the morning. Why, she was even going to find a schoolteacher for him, and make sure that he studied hard.

Giacomo gave a quick surreptitious glance up at the bearded monster with her deep scowl and dirty clothes. What Signor Baffo had just said could not be true; his mother would never leave him here! He waited for her to assure him that this was so, but Zanetta said nothing, even when he tugged at her skirt. Too shocked to speak, Giacomo watched as his trunk was brought in and opened up and an inventory was made of the contents: breeches, shirts, shoes, stockings, a small crucifix, a set of silver cutlery that his grandmother had given him as a going-away gift.

The monster muttered something about money. With her delicate pale hands Zanetta opened her pretty purse and counted out six gold sequins into Signora Mida's large oily palm. These, she said, were for Giacomo's keep for the next six months. She could never feed a growing boy on that amount, never mind keep him in clean clothes and pay for his schooling, Signora Mida grumbled. Well, she would just have to manage, Giacomo's mother told her, for that was all the money she had.

Then, without even asking to inspect the room where he was to sleep from now on, Zanetta bent down and peremptorily kissed the nine-year-old goodbye. Firmly detaching his clenched fingers from her skirt, she warned Giacomo to obey Signora Mida in every way, and then, without so much as a backward glance at him, she walked out of his life.

 

‘Ce fut ainsi qu'on se débarrassa de moi.'2
²
So, on this bitter note, ends the first chapter of the first volume of Casanova's memoirs:
That was how they got rid of me
. He did not see any member of his family again for six months, or his mother for a year. Her abandonment of him in Padua was to prove a defining moment in his relationships with the opposite sex. Never again would Casanova
willingly let a woman he loved walk out on him. In future he would make sure that he was the one to leave first.

What prompted the widowed Zanetta Casanova to banish her eldest child from his home on his ninth birthday? With her new baby, whom she had named Gaetano after the father he would never know, she now had eight mouths to feed, including her mother and herself – a daunting responsibility for any woman. Of her seven dependants, only Giacomo was a real worry to her. As her eldest he should have been of help to her at this terrible time, but instead he was her greatest burden. ‘I was very weak, lacked an appetite, was incapable of concentrating on anything, and appeared to be an imbecile,' was how he later described himself.
³
Instead of living, he merely vegetated. Communication seemed beyond him. Slow to learn to read, Giacomo walked around in a dream world, and although his mouth hung open all the time he rarely spoke. Physically, he was thin, frail and prone to terrible, frequent nosebleeds when blood dripped steadily from his nostrils like water from a faulty pump, leaving him exhausted.

The physicians reckoned that Giacomo lost two pounds' weight of blood through his nose every week, and argued interminably over the cause of it. One maintained that the milky fluid in Giacomo's intestines turned to blood; another that the volume of his blood increased with the amount of air he breathed. Since none of their recommended cures worked, about four months before his father's death his grandmother had secretly spirited Giacomo out of the house during one of his nosebleeds and taken him by gondola to consult an elderly witch on the island of Murano. Sitting on a bed in a small hovel, an old black cat perched on her lap, the witch listened intently as Marcia Farussi told her about Giacomo's illness, then put out a withered hand and accepted a precious silver ducat from her. Shooing the cat off her lap, the witch opened a large chest, picked the boy up and pushed him into it. As she closed the lid on him, trapping him in the pitch-dark, she told him not to be afraid. So insensible to his surroundings was Giacomo that he did not cry out or protest even when the witch
banged on the sides of the chest with a stick; and when she eventually pulled him out he was still meekly holding his red-spattered handkerchief to his nostrils, which had at last stopped dripping. The witch was not yet finished with him. She undressed him, stroked his body, then burned medicinal herbs on the fire, collecting the smoke they produced in a sheet and wrapping him in it. After rubbing a special ointment on his temples and neck, she dressed him again and assured him that he would now get better – but if he told anyone what had happened to him that day he would certainly die. Sweetening this bitter warning with five sugared almonds, she told him to expect a visit from a beautiful woman that evening; his future happiness would depend upon her.

In the middle of that night, Giacomo awoke to see a dazzling beauty appear in the fireplace of his room. Dressed in magnificent clothes and wearing a crown of fiery stones on her head, she sat down beside him on his bed. When Marcia woke him the following morning he tried to tell her what had happened, but she stopped him: hadn't the witch said that his very life depended on his silence? Giacomo shut up. But something profound had happened to him. From that morning on he became more aware of his surroundings. The beautiful woman, and his visit to the witch, became his first precise memories.

His nosebleeds, however, did not stop. And after his father's death it was decided that, with all this loss of blood, something drastic had to be done to stop the boy following his father to an untimely grave. Gaetano's friend Giorgio Baffo consulted Knipps-Macope, a famous physician and professor of medical botany and practical medicine at Padua University, about his condition. The professor diagnosed that the root of the boy's nosebleeds lay in the unusual density of his blood, a condition which was caused by the quality of the air that he breathed. If Giacomo was to survive he must be removed from Venice immediately, for only a complete change of air could save his life.

Given this advice by the revered professor, Zanetta had no alternative but to send her eldest son away from home. Death
had stalked her marriage from the very beginning, and God only knew when it would strike again. Her own parents had been simple working people. Her father Girolamo Farussi was a cobbler from the lagoon island of Burano. His wife Marcia had been a childless widow when she met him; and by the time their only child was born she was thirty-seven years old. Although the couple did not take their marriage vows until little Zuanna Maria, as Zanetta was baptised, was one year old,
⁴
they regarded themselves as respectable people, which was more than could be said of many of their fellow-Venetians.

There was simply nowhere else on earth as extraordinary as the Republic of Venice, nor a people as amoral as its citizens. Built at the point of the globe where the East met the West, and situated in the middle of a lagoon on an archipelago of more than one hundred islands, the exotic city was one of the wonders of the known world, famed for its music and wild social life as much as for its magical beauty. Between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries its rulers had been sinister, fierce and ruthless, qualities that had enabled them to establish a supremacy over their neighbours, to conquer Corfu, Cyprus, Constantinople and Crete, to control the trade routes to Asia Minor and turn the Republic into the most powerful shipping and trading nation in the Mediterranean. At its height the Arsenale, Venice's walled port some two miles in circumference, had employed sixteen thousand men and housed the world's greatest shipping fleet. Fired by single-minded self-interest, Venice's government, which was made up entirely of its ancient patrician families, had crushed its competitors, spied on its residents and tortured its dissident citizens mercilessly.

By 1707, however, the year of Zanetta Farussi's birth, Venice was all but bankrupt, its trading empire had crumbled, the Arsenale lay almost empty of ships and the Council of Ten, the Republic's once-feared ruling body, was reduced to issuing sumptuary laws preventing the importation of French fabrics or the wearing of too many jewels. The most feared power in the Mediterranean was now little more than a tourist attraction – but it was a most glorious
one. Venice's ancient and dilapidated palaces appeared to float on water like the wooden galleons which jostled for space along its famous Grand Canal. Its magnificent basilica, San Marco, threatened to sink into the lagoon under the great weight of the plundered gold it contained, and its centre of government, the massive Doge's Palace, was constructed on such a scale that it dwarfed the human race.

Despite the difficulty of crossing the Alps to reach Venice, foreigners from Northern Europe arrived there in their tens of thousands every autumn, and stayed for months on end. Their purpose was partly to explore the maze of canals and the architectural jewels of the city, but more than anything else they came to enjoy themselves. For despite the seeping damp, the finger-numbing wind that blew off the Adriatic and the occasional flurry of watery snow, wintertime in Venice was one long, wild, hedonistic masquerade ball to which everyone from the most lowly servant to the most exalted patrician was invited. The tiny city boasted more theatres than Paris, its churches and even its orphanages reverberated with the music of professional orchestras, and its Carnival season, when everyone donned masks and cloaks, extended to six months of every year instead of the meagre two weeks celebrated elsewhere. Venice was a party city
par excellence
. It partied all night long week in, week out, and held more public fetes, civic processions and religious festivals than any other city in the world.

Most alluring of all its attractions, perhaps, were the Republic's women, who were not only beautiful but famously flirtatious and as free with their favours as the men who pursued them. Nowhere in Europe was the game of love played with more relish than within Venice's watery borders. With its winding canals, mysterious dark passages and damp musty smells, the city reeked of sex and promised romance, torrid affairs or quick casual encounters – whatever one wanted, given freely in what the English traveller Lady Mary Wortley Montagu called an atmosphere of ‘universal liberty'. Venice was quite simply the sex-tourism capital of Europe,
the place where young male aristocrats on the Grand Tour congregated to scatter their wild oats. Its maze of dead-end alleys, canals, quays and narrow bridges seemed to have been designed specifically with intrigue in mind, as did its anonymous black gondolas with their discreetly curtained cabins just big enough to hold two lovers.