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  After all, the aged Séramis had enjoyed the best orgasm of her life with the most famous young lover of her times, so perhaps nobody was deceived. Madame d’Urfé, I think, got what she had paid for.

  When I suggested as much to Casanova, he grew thoughtful, and then smiled broadly.

  ‘You may well be right, Cecilia. Everyone is for sale. Some people even advertise.’

  The Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser July 5th 1763

  … Lady, with or without a Servant, may he immediately accommodated with a genteel and elegant furnished first Floor with all Conveniencies, to which belong some peculiar Advantages, it is agreeably situated in Pall Mall, with boarding if required, it may he entered on immediately, and will be let on very reasonable Terms, as it is no common Lodging House, and more for the Sake of Company than Profit. Please to enquire at Mrs Redaw’s, Millener, exactly opposite Mr Deard’s Toy Shop in Pall Mall, near the Hay Market, St James’s.

  Chapter 12

  Amar e non venir ama,

  xe come forbirse el culo senza aver cagà.

  To love without being loved

  is like wiping your arse without having shit.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  ‘Did you ever lose heart?’ I asked him a few days later.

  Casanova had come to my studio again and stood slowly spinning my wooden globe with absent-minded hands. The globe slowed to a dragging dawdle. The pink outline of England lingered under his fingers. He looked down, grimaced, and flicked the whole country away. He turned his back on the globe and came to my easel.

  ‘The heart is a fool,’ he told me, with uncharacteristic bitterness. He explained dolefully, ‘Yes, I lost mine, in London. Never go there, Cecilia. It’s a cruel place.’

  It was rarely that Casanova asked for my pity. I moved along my painting bench and made space for him to sit beside me. He put one arm around me, and with the other picked up my brush-hand. He placed it gently against the easel to indicate that I should continue with my work while he told me the sour-tasting story of how London had razed his happiness, and of the dark things he had encountered within himself when he went there.

  It had promised so much, London. The goddess Séramis had made him rich. While Madame d’Urfé took to her curtained bed in Paris, awaiting her supposed confinement, Casanova proceeded to England, full of confidence, sure that he could re-enact there his success with the French lottery.

  He took a house in Pall Mall, engaged a manservant, and awaited conviviality and good times, as he had found everywhere else. But in London Casanova dined, silent in the shock of loneliness, alone. The local delicacies must be sampled, of course, but tender lampreys in Worcester sauce and even the famed green goose gravy savoured of nothing when he could not share them. He looked for old friends, as always. But there was no such sustenance to be found. Even his former lover Teresa Imer, reborn as the London hostess Madame Cornelys, showed him only the most grudging hospitality. He advertised coyly for a lady lodger, which made him a laughing stock. But he amused himself interviewing the applicants. The advertisement brought him the mysterious Portuguese Countess Pauline, who reminded him of Henriette. He suffered acutely when she left, as Henriette had done, to pursue her destiny.

  More pain awaited him.

  His heart, fragile from the loss of Pauline, was a mere plaything for the sharp Swiss whore La Charpillon with whom he fell precipitately in love. He wanted her to adore him. She hated him, made a fool of him, and nearly bankrupted him. He paid for her; he was promised her. A dozen times, she offered herself to him, only to trick him from his joy at the last moment. Then he found her in flagrante with her hairdresser. When she still refused him, he was reduced to violence, and hated himself for it. After he beat her, she pretended to be dying, and made sure that he heard about it.

  In the cold, ugly streets of London, Casanova thought of suicide for the first and only time in his life. He set out for the Thames, his pockets lined with balls of lead. But a chance meeting with the affable Sir Wellbore Agar, a plate of oysters and the sight of three naked prostitutes dancing the hornpipe accompanied by blind musicians all combined to restore his will to live. (He was even moved to notice that, while dancing, the male prostitute maintained his conquering appearance, and he resolved to try this experiment upon his himself when he felt better.)

  Then he found the supposedly dead Charpillon dancing a hectic minuet in the Rotunda at Ranelagh.

  ‘Did you beat her again?’ I asked.

  As he had wanted me to do, I worked while we talked, painting a damask curtain, the background to my current portrait. Casanova gestured with admiration towards the sheen of my fabric, and replied, ‘You know me, darling, there is little taste for brutality in me. Anyway, I was too weak, too destroyed by her machinations. I took to my bed to recover my health and hide from the humiliation she had thrust on me. Everyone in London was laughing at me, cold English snorts and giggles from behind their hands.

  ‘While I lay in bed, contemplating my pain, I came up with another plan.’

  In the bird market, Casanova purchased a pretty green parrot. In his bedroom, he taught it to deliver just one simple phrase: ‘La Charpillon is a worse whore than her mother’. In less than two weeks the obedient parrot learnt the words so well that it repeated them tirelessly from morning to night. It adorned each performance with an improvisation of its own: after uttering the words, it gave a great burst of derisive laughter.

  ‘La Charpillon is a worse whore than her mother!’ sneered the parrot on Casanova’s bed-post. ‘Caaaaaaaaaaawah! La Charpillon is a worse whore than her mother!’

  It was time to get out of bed and start living again.

  Casanova put the loquacious bird for sale at the stock exchange for fifty guineas. Alerted to the danger, La Charpillon’s latest admirer purchased the bird and silenced it forever on the spot. But the caper, which was the talk of London, exorcised La Charpillon’s malevolent spirit from Casanova’s breast. When he saw her in the street a few months later, he had difficulty in remembering her name.

  However, it was a turning point for him. ‘From the moment I met La Charpillon,’ he told me, ‘that was when I started to die.’

  ‘But you were a young man!’

  ‘I was thirty-eight years old.’

  Certainly, after La Charpillon, nothing was ever the same. The hurts from the past started to join the hurts from the present in a mosaic of pain. Casanova reminded me how, reciting a sad litany of his failures. There was the stone-hearted Angela in Venice, the unheatably cool Marchesa G. in Rome. Andriana Foscarini – she of the dragee made of hair – had ever refused him access to the ‘fatal vault’. Now there were women who took him to their beds only for him to find a hideous pesthouse under their chemises. He already felt, suddenly, that he had grown old. There were times when he found the pleasures of love less intense than he had imagined them before the act. After love, he no longer slept well. That is, when love could be obtained. Women no longer chose him, automatically, from among a field of rivals. For now he was made to feel it was a favour granted even to share a woman with another man. He could no longer expect that sacrifices would be made in order to spend one night with him. He was sometimes obliged to pay for the pleasures that had flowed into his life freely before. His schemes became more elaborate. The women were becoming more expensive to obtain, just when he had less with which to buy them. Worst of all, young men showed no offence when Casanova tried to steal their women from them. They did not see him as a threat.

  ‘I had lost the power to please at first sight, which I had so long possessed in such vast quantities,’ he told me.

  ‘Except me,’ I said, reminding him of our first night, pointing at myself with my brush.

  Casanova gently diverted the dripping brush from my white fisiù. ‘Poor laundry women, Cecilia!’ He would not be consoled. ‘But remember how hard I had to work, how much I had to arrange, in order to obtain you.’

  After London, everything became hard
er for Casanova, not just the women. When we tipped the kaleidoscope to the years after La Charpillon I saw flight from debt in London, fruitless journeys to Riga and Saint Petersburg to curry favour at courts who were indifferent to his talents. I saw duels, banishments, humiliation in Paris and imprisonment in Madrid. I saw assassins on his trail and near escapes. I saw breathless concealments in wardrobes, stolen raptures in sordid attics and short excursions under insanitary petticoats. I saw the continual unlocking of his strongbox to bring out gold to pay for his pleasures and the pleasures of others. I saw him circling Venice, in ever-decreasing circles. He was homesick, tired, and almost penniless.

  The Casanova of the recounted stories was getting older, feebler, less reliably potent. I was beginning to be able to reconcile the Casanova of his tales with the Casanova in my arms. This Casanova had started to feel his mortality and he had started to be afraid of time. By continuous travelling, he had tried to stop time. By wearing a mask, he had still tried to stop time, for no one could watch him withering behind it. With the love of a young women like myself Casanova tried to stop time. I began to understand something – why his greatest loves were seldom older than Juliet – and I began to understand something else – why he had never chosen one woman, for alongside her, however much he loved her, he would start to grow measurably old.

  I pictured Casanova living out his exile alone under high foreign skies, feeling vulnerable.

  And so hopeless. He craved closeness, and was beginning to wonder if he would ever be close to anyone again. He knew he had love in him. He had known intimacy, and he knew how to love, properly. But his life now, in comparison to those past joys, was merely a candle flame against a dirty window, just a smear of warmth against a pocked mirror. He had made no impression upon the world; his only legacy was etched upon the transient skins and hearts of the women who had once loved him. There was a bad alchemy at work inside Casanova now, a corrosive inner acidity that was consuming his self-confidence and good humour. In his younger days, he never bore a grudge. But by now, too many evils had rained down upon him. On occasion, spleen bubbled from his fat lips, his pantaloons were sagging, over-loaded with loans, for which he hated to grovel.

  I pictured Casanova, in increasingly shabby carriages, rapping his head against the glass to the rhythm of the horses, looking at the veins thickening on the backs of his hands, the bruises healing or emerging, the mosquito bites on the scars of old loves. Insults rotted in his memory, with no sweet new experiences to soften their blows now. Casanova knew, as he knew every hair on Madame d’Urfé’s pendulous chins, the jaunt and jut of every road from Pisa to Paris. But nowhere, along the way, could he find what he was looking for.

  Casanova, too many times now, knew what it was to clutch his last zecchino so tightly that when he paid it over for food he still had its impression etched upon his hand. He read his brand mark: MARC. FOSCARINUS DUX VENEZIA chased its tail around the circumference, while inside there was the square cross with floriated points. Venetian zecchini, Ottoman piastre, French louis, English guineas, Milanese philipi, Portuguese reis, Spanish maravedís had tumbled from his hands at pleasure houses and gaming tables, very few had made their way back to him.

  Casanova started, shamefully, to profit from his own myth. The rich and curious would pay in coin to hear his stories. He would even tell them for nothing, so hungry was he, these days, for attention. Casanova knew the value of speaking French with his charmingly muscular Italian accent. He could plume the feathers of his words with extravagant gestures – imaginary flowers and jewels blossomed on empty fingers from which every ring had been pawned. When he spoke well, he was led to the trough to feed on rich foods. Behind his back, he heard the well-bred sniggers. And in his ears he always heard the metronome tick, the hourglass in his purse trickling away to emptiness. Then the smile of the knowing servant not lasting long enough to sugar-coat the last Oui, Monsieur, as he made his hasty exit from a noble house with his winnings in his shoes.

  In the kaleidoscope Casanova was always wearing his Arlecchino costume, performing. He performed so well that everyone was fooled. No one sensed the slow bleeding of his tragedy. He did not want their pity, anyway. Pity carries sadness on its soft back. Casanova could not bear to inflict sadness, or to endure it. The one art he had continuously practised, against all odds, was that of happiness, given and received. He had made a cult of it. He was the last son of the happy city, and happy he would like to be.

  He wanted to come back to Venice, where he could practise happiness as he did in the old days. He had had enough of being an outlaw in Europe, condemned, pilloried, ridiculed, cold-shouldered and even imprisoned, merely for being Casanova.

  He scrabbled at the door, which seemed to be half-open.

  ‘Let me in!’ begged Casanova.

  ‘Perhaps,’ teased the Council of Ten.

  And so Casanova waited in Trieste, longing for happiness, believing in it.

  He swam against the tide with his display of relentless optimism. The very essence of Casanova was about to fall out of fashion. In 1774, as Casanova waited for a word of clemency from Venice, Goethe published his melancholy masterpiece, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Its pensive young hero commits suicide as a result of a noble and hopeless love. The book was a sensation. Napoleon Bonaparte himself read it seven times. It was banned by the Vatican. But it was already too late: the book had done its work. Suicides blossomed all over Europe that year. Happiness had fallen out of fashion. Something darker was falling into place.

  Casanova was a man out of time. Still, he refused to be downhearted, let alone suicidal.

  While he waited for his pardon, Casanova called in his favours, as he had done everywhere else. These too were fewer in supply. His patron Bragadin had died already, leaving Casanova nothing but a Bill of Exchange for 1000 ecus. Like his protégé, he had lived to the full and spent everything he had. Signor Barbaro was dead too, and Dandolo was ailing.

  But there were still women who had reason to be grateful to Casanova. He revisited ex-mistresses, and renewed affectionate and sometimes erotic ties. A pattern emerged, in which the grateful husbands of his former lovers repaid him the money he had used years before to arrange their nuptials. And if the first-born child, now grown up, looked something of a sinner – with what joy Casanova recognised his own happy handiwork!

  He was still in Trieste, waiting for an answer from the Council of Ten, when he was given some opportunities to do small services for the Venetian state. He strained to perform, and was rewarded, first with acknowledgement and even with payment.

  Finally he received a safe conduct pass dated September 3rd 1774. When the longed-for document was delivered to him, he read it, he reread it, he kissed it many times, then he fell into a concentrated kind of silence. After that, he burst into tears.

  Casanova could come home, at last. But it was a home-coming of mitigated joy, and no honour. When Casanova came back to Venice it was with a new name and in a new capacity. He was called Antonio Pratolini, and he was a spy.

  The Cat Speaks

  When we dislike one of our kind, or if he becomes old, or damaged, we kill him. Humans are more cruel.

  They allow their outcast to crouch at the edge of their magic circle, looking in. They let him smell their fish roasting, they even let a few drops of hot oil splash on his tattered coat.

  They talk about him as if he is not there.

  And that is the worst thing that they can do to him.

  Much worse than death.

  This was what Casanova knew about women: give them assiduous attention and they will be yours. Give them the kind of attention they have never dreamt of, they will fulfil your dreams.

  But without attention, women, cats and Casanovas wither and fade away.

  Chapter 13

  A l’ostaria bever, o magnar, o zogar,

  or bestemiar or Jar la spia.

  At the tavern, either drink, eat,

  play, swear – or spy.

&
nbsp; VENETIAN PROVERB

  Casanova arrived in Venice just nine days after he received his pardon. He had travelled with undignified haste, propelled by his rapacious hopes. He was given a room at the Dandolo palazzo, and let himself be seen in his out-dated finery on the Rialto, the Merceria and of course in the Piazza San Marco. It was 1774 and the Inquisitors had just closed down his old playground of the ridotto. The necessary activities of gambling, flirting and drinking had now spread like impetigo to private establishments. Here Casanova tested his welcome, arriving with a flourish of not-quite snowy lace, sometimes finding wine and renewed friendship thrust into his hands, other times slinking outside in a convulsion of shame when no one recognised him, or worse, pretended not to do so.

  ‘Here was Casanova, returned at last, the world conquered,’ he told me wryly. ‘I was barely fifty. I planned to spend what I had now decided would be the sweet flower of my maturity in the arms of La Serenissima.’

  He was still, after all, the friend of the Mocenigos, the Memmos and the Grimanis. He was still welcome at the opulent casinos of Pietro Zaguri and Lorenzo Morosini. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to see him – and who did not want to hear from his own lips of his tales of European adventures, his travels, and not least, the famous flight from the Leads? Of his bloody duel in Poland with the Branicki? Of the French lottery that made him a millionaire? Of how he had spent his millions on hundreds, at least, of women. It was rumoured that even the Inquisitors asked him to dine, and Casanova did nothing to dispel these stories.

  He presented a brave face, but in reality Casanova skimmed the edges of desperation. He could not live on just his monthly pension of six zecchini willed by Barbaro, and a similar stipend from the failing Dandolo.