Casanova's Women (7 page)

The following noon she arrived unannounced at Signora Mida's house, took one look at the hideous hag and demanded to see her grandson. So changed and filthy was Giacomo that for a moment Marcia did not recognise him among the scruffy urchins fighting for food around the kitchen table. However, the moment he saw her he flung himself at her neck and burst into tears. Weeping herself, Marcia sat down and drew the boy on to her lap, where he sobbed out a woeful tale of starvation and abuse. Controlling her fury, she inspected the house. There in the attic were the unwashed sheets Giacomo had complained of, crawling with the vermin which had bitten him.

Marcia took the boy away from Signora Mida's immediately. Back at the inn where she was lodging she watched in astonishment as Giacomo devoured plate after plate of food. In the past few months he had grown taller and skeletally thin, and the curls she had once tended with care were so matted that they were beyond saving and had to be cut off. Yet, undernourished as he was, he glowed with good health. For the first time ever he appeared lively and talkative, as if his brain had at last woken up from its long sleep. Marcia summoned his schoolteacher, Antonio Gozzi, who had suggested that his pupil lodge at his parents' house in future. The handsome twenty-six-year-old priest and teacher immediately impressed Marcia with his good sense, his modest, respectful manners and his literal interpretation of the Bible, which was so similar to her own: in his opinion ‘the Flood had been universal,
before the disaster men had lived for a thousand years, God conversed with them, Noah had taken one hundred years to build the ark, and the earth, suspended in the air, remained fixed at the centre of the universe, which God had created out of nothing.'
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Equally impressive was the fact that Gozzi was plump and cleanly dressed, indicating that in his parents' home her grandson would be well-looked-after and properly fed. When Gozzi told Marcia that he had a younger sister who could help care for Giacomo, and that his father was a cobbler, the same trade as her own dear Girolamo had plied, Marcia agreed to pay the Gozzis double the boarding fees that her daughter had paid Signora Mida, and she immediately handed over a year's money in advance.

Marcia stayed on in Padua for another three days. She fed Giacomo all that he could eat, bathed him, and bought him a wig and new clothes. Only when she was satisfied that she had done everything she could for him did she return to Venice. Her heart was at peace. Her daughter had acted irresponsibly by abandoning Giacomo to an unspeakable monster, but she, his grandmother, was leaving him in trustworthy hands.

 

Unaware of the drama that was taking place nearer to home, Zanetta was still in Verona. Just over sixty miles west of Venice, the ancient city was a lively cultural centre dominated by its ancient Roman arena, a well-preserved oval amphitheatre surrounded by forty-five rows of marble steps capable of seating 25,000 spectators at their ease. For most of the year, this vast edifice was used for jousting, races and bull-baiting. During the summer months, however, a temporary wooden stage was erected in the centre of the arena, simple plank benches were constructed around it, and the best theatre companies in Italy took turns in displaying their talents there. That year it was the turn of the San Samuele actors to perform at this prestigious open-air venue, and the company's highly talented actor/manager, Giuseppe Imer, was delighted to have Zanetta Casanova with him. With her ravishing looks and skilful acting she had become a favourite with his audiences who
flocked to see her play the romantic leads in the innovative musical interludes that he had introduced into his plays.

There was a more personal reason, too, why the stout, charismatic and scrupulously polite Imer was glad that Zanetta had accompanied the players to Verona: he was in love with her. He had known her at least since her marriage, and neither maturity nor motherhood nor her recent sorrows had dimmed her attractions in his eyes. That summer, with his own wife Paolina and his daughters Teresa and Marianna far away in Venice, he was finally free to become her lover. Only months had passed since Zanetta had lost Gaetano, but no matter what her feelings were towards Imer it was almost taken for granted at the time that an actress should favour her impresario with her charms. Zanetta dutifully played the part of mistress, though with little enthusiasm.

Their affair was closely observed by a young stage-struck lawyer who would one day become Italy's most revered playwright. Born in Venice six months before Zanetta, although in more prosperous and enlightened circumstances, Carlo Goldoni had been obsessed with the theatre ever since he was a child; in contrast to the Farussis who had forbidden their daughter to have anything to do with it, his father had encouraged his son's interest by building a puppet theatre for him and asking his own friends to write plays for it. After dropping out of medical school, Goldoni had qualified as a lawyer, but his heart had not been in the work, for he lived only to write. Success did not come immediately to him: his first carefully-composed lyrical tragedy,
Amalasunta
, had been derided by a group of actors in Milan; and in despair Goldoni had set fire to the manuscript that he had formerly regarded as his ‘treasure'. Soon afterwards Casali, a leading romantic actor at Venice's San Samuele, had asked Goldoni to write a drama on the subject of the sixth-century Byzantine count, Belisarius. The play was to change both Goldoni's life and the future of Imer's theatre company.

During the summer of 1734, Goldoni was passing through Verona with his new manuscript rolled up in his luggage when he noticed a play-bill for
Harlequin struck mute through fear
, to be
performed by the San Samuele players in the Roman arena. To his astonishment the first actor to come out on stage was Casali, the very man who had commissioned his new play. The actor introduced Goldoni to Imer, who invited the young lawyer to dine with them the following night. Goldoni found the entire theatrical company, including Zanetta Casanova, assembled at Imer's lodgings. ‘The dinner was splendid,' he later wrote, ‘the gaiety of the comedians charming. They made up couplets, and sang drinking songs. They anticipated my every wish, as if they were whores who wanted to seduce me.' After they had eaten, Goldoni nervously read out
Belisario
in front of a rapt audience, and to his relief their applause at the end was genuinely enthusiastic. ‘Imer took me by the hand, and in a magisterial tone said to me:
Bravo,'
he reminisced later in his
Memoirs
. ‘Everyone complimented me; Casali wept with joy.'
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Goldoni ended up spending the remainder of the season with the company. Imer's talent as an impresario inspired the deepest respect in him. ‘He contrived the introduction into comedy of musical interludes which had long been inseparable from grand Opera, and had at last been suppressed to make way for Ballets. Comic opera had had its origins in Naples and Rome, but it was unknown in Lombardy and in the State of Venice, so Imer's project succeeded, and the novelty produced much pleasure, and was highly profitable to the Comedians.' Imer's personal qualities also impressed him: ‘Without having had much of an education, [he] possessed wit and intelligence; he loved Comedy with a passion; he was naturally eloquent, and would have been very well-suited to play the extempore lover, following the Italian fashion, if his height and his face had matched his talent. Short, thick-set, without a neck, with small eyes, and a flat nose, he appeared ridiculous in serious roles, and exaggerated characters were not in fashion.'
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There was one part, Goldoni noted, which Imer played to perfection: that of Zanetta's admirer. ‘I perceived that he had a decided inclination for his friend the widow; I also saw that he was jealous of her.'
¹¹
When Imer commissioned him to create a short
three-act musical interlude for the troupe, Goldoni wrote
La Pupilla
, basing the plot on the couple's relationship. It was a daring move, and one which Imer instantly noticed. However, Goldoni's interlude ‘seemed so well crafted to him, and the attack so honest and delicately put, that he forgave me for the pleasantry. He thanked me, he praised me, and immediately sent off the piece to Venice, to the composer whom he had already commissioned.'
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When the players returned to Venice that September Goldoni accompanied them, and on 24 November, the Feast of St Catherine,
Belisario
was premiered at the San Samuele. Venetian audiences, like those throughout most of Europe, were accustomed to talking, gambling and flirting their way through every performance, but Goldoni's naturalistic characters and dialogue reduced them to an unprecedented silence broken only by applause between the acts and the occasional cry of pleasure. At the close of the play the actors took so many curtain calls that they broke down with laughter and tears of joy. And when the principal actor came back out on stage to announce the next day's play, the audience drowned him out with cries of
Questa, questa, questal – This, this, this!
. – signifying that they wanted to see
Belisario
again. In the end, the play was performed every night for three weeks. On the sixth night, Imer inserted
La Pupilla
into the intermezzo, with Zanetta playing the romantic role which had been written for her. This became even more popular than
Belisario
.

Thanks partly to Goldoni, Zanetta had become a star within Venice's close-knit theatrical world. And like many of the Republic's star turns, it was not long before she was talent-spotted. The Republic's exuberant actors and singers were among its most important exports, lured as far afield as the courts of Russia, France and Sweden. One such actor was Pietro Mira, a Venetian clown who had become the favourite of Empress Anna Ivanova in St Petersburg. In 1734 the empress commissioned Mira to assemble a company of Italian players to amuse her, and on a trip back to Italy that year, he recruited Zanetta. Accepting an open-ended position in Russia would mean leaving her six children in Marcia's care for
the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, either out of financial necessity or ambition, Zanetta decided to go.

Before she left for Russia, she asked Dr Gozzi to bring Giacomo to Venice for a few days. Incredibly, it was the first time she had seen her eldest son since his ninth birthday, and she could scarcely believe the change in him. He was almost unrecognisable as the sickly imbecile who had seemed destined to die an early death, for in the care of his Paduan schoolteacher he had metamorphosed into a robust, beautiful eleven-year-old with a pin-sharp brain. Among other subjects Gozzi had taught Giacomo Latin, pure Italian, Geography, History, and even how to play the violin. Zanetta watched in amazement as her son impressed her sophisticated dinner guests with his precocious intelligence, reasoning with them in the Italian language rather than in Venetian dialect, and even making risque puns in Latin. When asked by an English poet who was at the table to read the ancient couplet
Discite grammatici cur mascula nomina cunnus/Et cur femineum mentula nomen habet -
Teach us, grammarians, why
vagina
(cunnus) is a masculine noun/And why
penis
(mentula) is feminine – Giacomo answered it with a witty pentameter of his own invention:
Disce quod a domino nomina servus habet -
It is because the slave always takes the name of his master. Zanetta, who was ashamed that she spoke no Latin herself, had to get her friend Signor Baffo to whisper a translation to her.

Giacomo lapped up his mother's admiration along with all the praise that was heaped on him. Suddenly he was the centre of attention in a house where he had previously been ignored or despised by everyone except his grandmother. ‘It was my first literary exploit,' he later admitted, ‘and I can say that it was at this moment that the love of glory which comes from literature was sown in my soul, for the applause sent me soaring to the pinnacle of happiness.' He had won Zanetta's interest at long last, and through sheer brain power. From now on he would make sure that his clever wit and sparkling repartee dominated every important social occasion.

The rapprochement with his beautiful mother had its downside. For four days Giacomo was forced to watch her flirt with his embarrassed school teacher, a simple man who was so overawed by her beauty that he dared not look her in the eye. After that, the two of them were dispatched back to Padua, while Zanetta left for Russia with no idea when she would return. Since the Russian aristocracy spoke French, and did not understand either Italian or the Venetian dialect, this turned out to be sooner than expected, and she came back to Venice the following year, stopping off in Padua en route to visit Giacomo. During her long absence her four-year-old daughter Faustina had died of smallpox but, if Zanetta was grieving for her, her son picked up no sign of it. Their reunion, like their previous one in Venice, was not an intimate occasion but a lively social event witnessed by both Dr Gozzi and his mother's travelling companion and probable lover, the famous Harlequin Carlino Bertinazzi who had been working in St Petersburg with her. After spending just one evening with her son and his teacher, Zanetta continued on her journey.

Beautiful, gregarious, and for ever unattainable, Zanetta came into her son's life, captivated him, and then abandoned him – a pattern of behaviour which he himself would later emulate with many of the women who loved him. Six months after she had turned up in Padua, she summoned him to Venice in order to bid farewell to him yet again. This time she was leaving the Republic for good. Her destination was Dresden, where she had been offered a lifetime engagement in the service of Augustus III, the Elector of Saxony, King of Poland since 1733 and an ally of Anna Ivanova in the war of Polish succession. Though she had been living with her other children since her return from Russia – Francesco was now ten years old, Giovanni seven, Maria five and Gaetano just three – Zanetta had spent less than seven days in total with Giacomo since the night of his ninth birthday. This did not stop him feeling resentful at her departure, particularly when he discovered that she was taking his brother Giovanni to Dresden with her. When they boarded the boat to the mainland Giovanni ‘wept like a desperate
man, which made me think that he was not at all intelligent, for there was nothing tragic about the departure,' Casanova recalled bitterly in his memoir. ‘He was the only one of us who owed all his fortune to our mother, even though he was not her favourite.'
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