The Remedy (21 page)
I even liked the work sometimes. With my lover, I had grown happily accustomed to satisfying meals of manhood, and I gradually took to that side of my work with relish. And it suited me to hunt scalps for my belt. My lover’s rejection cooled its burn with each new lover and his declarations. Even when a man was personally irksome to me, I forced myself on, reminding myself that in his eyes I was an angel of beauty and wonder: After the abuse I had suffered from my lover, I was greedily absorbent of unqualified admiration.
I always arranged three fine chairs facing the bed in whatsoever chamber I performed my ultimate sacrifice. This was to remind me, lest I be swept away by the painted
putti
, the silk drapes or the candlelight, into the false conception that I had entered a romance and not an enforced transaction. Three chairs for three Venetian Inquisitors, for them to witness what sordid-ness they generated in pursuit of the information that kept them potent in the world outside their little city.
And such reports I dispatched, such indiscretions I gathered unto me! How blithely I moved from place to place, too quickly for my deceptions to catch up with me. By the time that Prussian minister was found, his throat slit by a stiletto, I was already in St. Petersburg, tickling the belly of a huge white whale of a general, and learning all about the secret trade in skins that financed his army.
All these things I scribbled down, sealed and sent back to Venice. I was industrious, obedient, and highly successful.
I served sixteen years, a model employee. Had I been imprisoned for my attack on the nun, I might now have been released, my sentence served, my fate my own again.
It irked me, therefore, that the Council still distrusted me so that I was constantly attended by their own spy, Mazziolini, who shadowed me from city to city, and no doubt dispatched his own reports by the same courier as mine. None of the other actor spies had a custodian enforced upon them. I resented the implication bitterly.
If it were not for the unshakeable Mazziolini I might have fancied myself almost content. I might have contrived to picture myself in an exciting enterprise on my own account. I might have imagined myself more free than I would have been had I pursued my Golden Book life in Venice. But over the years Mazziolini’s presence came to resemble, in my mind, the grille of the convent doors. It reminded me that I had no more choices open to me than a nun, not of where I lived, or how, or with whom I passed my time. He also made sure that my disgust in myself was constantly refreshed. He always had some choice barb ready at my employers’ choice of a new lover. And it was unfailingly apt and memorable, despoiling any satisfaction I might feel when my professional romances ran smoothly. Mazziolini despised everyone—Russians, French, Spaniards, almost alike. Above all he hated Englishmen, and when I was embedded with one of them, I felt not just his scorn but, even less bearably, his pity.
I felt increasingly trapped, despite my manifest liberties and luxuries. I soon learned that I might request any item of attire
that I coveted and it would be supplied. Without question, with a speed that seemed almost contemptuous, my employers indulged my every proposed extravagance in food and drink.
But I was poor, despite all my finery and fine accommodations. I was given only discretionary sums of actual cash at the onset of each assignment. In every new city Mazziolini went ahead and set me up in an excellent house, obtained staff from the intelligence office, paid these servants till they gasped, and so bought their rapacious little souls. As an extra precaution, none was permitted to stay with me more than a few months, so that no one might become bonded in affection with me and so conspire in an escape. I was never allowed my own carriage, or any documentation that gave me a separate identity from that which I had assumed when I first stepped on to the stage as Mimosina Dolcezza.
When the letter arrived from Mazziolini, telling me that in three days’ time I must leave for London, at first I bridled at the arrogant tone. He had recently left me in peace for a few days, in the loose stranglehold of my latest Venetian maid, and I had known that this absence meant only one thing: that he was away setting up a new appointment for me. The maid proving a drunkard, I had profited from his absence to steal a few flavor-some freedoms for myself, and it was not pleasant news to hear that I would soon be back under Mazziolini’s taut rein, with none but his faceless face to look at in my leisure hours.
Yet the appointment to London could not have come at a more provident time for me. I had been treading the boards and warming political beds in Paris and Salzburg in one dreary assignment after another for six months, and, even though I had only briefly returned to Venice between missions, I was chafing to be away from the city again, for many reasons of my own,
Then I also laughed out loud to remember that Mazziolini loathed the bread-and-butter English, how, for some reason, they revolted him above all races.
Anglosassone was
his foulest epithet for anything to eat or look at. The fact that Mazziolini would abhor the London assignment served to sweeten its prospect for me.
The play they chose for London was
L’Italiana a Londra
, in which Domenico Cimarosa’s music perfumed a dull text. It seemed perfect fare for a London audience. My English was by now excellent. My looks demonstrably appealed to Englishmen: Politicians and noblemen of that race had been among my proudest trophies, much to Mazziolini’s contempt. Yet I had never actually been to England: My conquests had been made among the peregrinatory tribes of adventurous Englishmen who frequented the courts of Europe, seeking advantages for their countries and preferment for themselves. In view of this, I had often wondered why my employers never sent me to London, the font of all Englishmen, and I had answered myself thus:
They do not want me to seek out my first lover. They fear the consequences; they mistrust my lack of control.
They did not know that I no longer desired his love. I was not even curious to know what lay before him, be it Heaven or Hell. I was well cured of his tortures.
Take red Astringent Wine 1 pint; powder’d Myrrh 2 drams, mix.
It Detergeth, Astringeth, Repelleth, Drieth, Healeth. Is a most excellent Wash for swell’d, fungous, flaccid, bleeding, eroded and putrid Gums; cleanseth and freeth the Mouth from foulness and ill scents; Healeth (even Venereal) Ulcers of the Jaws and Throat. Moreover it may be injected or snuffed up into the Nose, to good Purpose in an Ozena, where putrid Matter lodg’d in the little Caverns of the spongy Bones, sends forth abominably stinking Effluvia.
London seemed to offer more than I could have hoped for. When I saw that an elegant Englishman of evident means was violently smitten by my stage persona, I was only too happy to let him think that he might take advantage of what passed for my true self.
As for me, he roused a strange and sudden ambition in my soul: a very specific one—to be his wife. As the wife of an English aristocrat, I saw myself beyond the grasp of my Venetian employers, who could never reveal their hand in a public altercation. Relations between Venice and London must be seen to run smoothly. They would sacrifice their hold on me rather than their discretion.
So I chose him, after overhearing that one conversation with my nominal
padrone
Massimo Tosi, liking his face, even liking his name. For who could not enjoy the flavor of those syllables,
Valentine Greatrakes
, upon the tongue and the ear?
I must confess, as well, he was easy on the eye, drew it to him, even. Exceptionally so. That evening I first saw him he was attired as if specifically to please me and my overpetted weakness for fine
clothes. His greatcoat was expensively tailored and buckrammed to an infallible crispness of line. His double-breasted waistcoat was of a coming style, as was his fantail tricorn. He wore a plain linen shirt with an immaculate stock of stiffened cambric fastened at the back. His black solitaire ribbon was tied close with a perfect bow. His breeches were fitted with the latest in silver fixings for catching up his stockings. And I caught my breath when I noticed that his shoes featured what could only be an Artois buckle of Sheffield plate: such a thing I had heard of but not yet seen.
I was determined to be pleased by him. He was my selected destiny. Even so, he took a little getting used to. Accustomed to the ceremony of European courts, I was surprised by the brusque informality of his preliminaries in seduction. But then England was known to be a coarse country, I told myself. I should not have expected to find it overloaded with civilities. And therefore I supposed that his approach via Massimo Tosi, unintroduced, marked the zenith of the polite arts of romance insofar as they were developed in London.
In contrast, my own preparations for him were thorough, both practically and mentally, though all in a spirit of cheerfulness. I reminded myself constantly that I actually
Liked
the look of this man.
I was not lacking in self-confidence. When I made an assault upon a man’s heart, he had need of all his faculties to defend it. I was not often successless. But this was different: My life was riding upon it, not merely the gainful employment of a few heady months.
I reviewed my stratagems. I groomed myself to behave as I must. Better to let him speak, I must say little myself: This was one of the first tricks of seduction I had learned from the old actresses. Yet I would frequently lean so close, listening to him, that he would smell the sweet myrrh on my breath. To make him bold, I would be meek. And for the first evening we would spend together—for that I would contrive such a feast as to blind him to anything but lust.
I put it about the theater that I was in need of the best French chef in London and that expense was no object for one night of his
services. Borne on the wings of rumor, there came to my dressing room two or three cringing dwarfs, ejected from the kitchens of noble houses, their palates and their skills already ruined by servitude to English tastes. I tasted the sample sweetmeats they had brought in grimy covered baskets, and despaired. They could not answer my questions about certain foods, and I dismissed them.
Finally there arrived a trim Frenchman who interrupted me to say, “So you want a man to eat so that he must spend? Why did you not say so?” At the word “spend” he moved his hips slightly so that I was in no doubt that I had found the right man. I handed him all the coins in my purse and he widened his eyes. The fact that this money was supposed to be spent on another lover entirely, a politician in the sights of my employers, struck my mind most pleasurably, as did the fact that I had conducted all this business under the pretext of rehearsal, and so Mazziolini knew nothing of it.
No doubt he watched me leave that first night on the arm of Valentine Greatrakes, but by then it was too late for him to intervene discreetly. For the first time, I had managed to surprise my custodian. I exulted in my success.
That night I fed Valentine Greatrakes anchovies, artichokes and asparagus, ruinous to buy in London, but known to porter heat to the genitals. And the sea course was of Barbel fish, infallible in rescuing men from incipient effemininity, and French eels. Instead of water there was an infusion of the Cubeb pepper berry, alternating with a muscadel cloudy with the powder of bruised acorns. The kidneys were served in cream. To accompany the desserts (spiced plentifully with candied ginger) there was angel water, made of the essence of orange blossom, rose, and myrtle, plus distilled spirit of musk and a dash of ambergris. And finally a glass of brandy with an egg yolk beaten into it.
I rose from my chair two or three times on the pretext of serving him and performed complete circles as if it were the most undesigned thing in the world, so that he might admire me in the round. Then I sat down again, as though restlessly, like a cat afflicted with a seasonal imperative for lovemakmg but lacking an understanding of her own condition.
Meanwhile,
his
hands shook so that he sputtered the sauces over the damask cloth I had hired so expensively After the third such incident I renounced hope of that tablecloth and looked upon it as mine, for I should most certainly be required to pay its full value now.
And then I sang for him. To steady my nerves, and to remind myself what I was about, I selected a cynical little refrain from a Venetian
opera buff a
, but I sang it as if it were the tenderest love song, all the while gazing deeply at him. He drank it up, little guessing what the words meant.
They say beware
of love, of love —
It melts your heart
in waxen pools.
They say beware
of love, of love —
They say love hardens
as it cools
They say beware
of love, of love.
But not with us
of course, of course.
Not with us.
Of course not.
Fool.
He was touchingly nervous, a state of mind that infected me too. Something was afoot, something different. It seemed that instead of the usual bloodless spasm, he too wished to make this coupling finer. It must be done, certainly, or the evening would end unsatisfactorily. But it was not the whole object. It was as if the lovemaking must be got over for the deeper intimacies to begin.
I saw that tears came to his eyes. I asked him in sign language, “But why do you weep? The song is not sad.” And I smiled, encouraging him to feel pleasure in the midst of the bittersweet
pain. I was feeling it myself and thought I must have taken too much wine,
