Carnevale Page 4

  I pushed the book aside and stretched luxuriously. I closed my eyes and let Aretino’s images gyrate across my mind. With my face pressed against the squirrel fur, I felt Casanova lie down behind me and take me in his arms. He caressed me from my forehead to my flanks in long gentle strokes. Then he lifted my hair and fastened his warm mouth to the back of my neck like a mollusc, and sucked gently until I whimpered and revolved in his arms to face him.

  ‘Even without art,’ Casanova said, looking down on me with a smile, ‘we have one additional pleasure. We can pleasure ourselves. A book like Aretino’s can help. Perhaps you already know. Leah told me that all girls do that, though secretly, before they are married.’

  Then Casanova taught me how to love myself, as expertly as he loved me.

  When I was faint and crimson with my own pleasures, he stayed my hand. And he recited folio seventeen of Aretino softly in my ear as he covered me again with his body and moved sweetly over and inside me.

  Afterwards, Casanova warned me against practising my new skill excessively or exclusively. ‘It doesn’t work well, Cecilia, don’t rely on it. It may seem to relieve the pains of the loins for a brief moment. But it offends Nature and she takes her revenge by doubling the irritations of your desires.’

  Night after night, while we rested from our lovemaking, Casanova fed me with more memories, washed me with happy, remembering tears. He loved to stroke my hair, his fingers nosing through the thick curtain to my scalp, which he massaged with firm strokes before gently raking all the way down to my waist, where the curls turned into damp tendrils. One night, while he hypnotised me with these caresses, he told me of Andriana Foscarini, whom he had loved so much and so hopelessly that he had eaten her hair, having first ground it to a powder, which he then worked into a pastille with sugar, flavoured with angelica and vanilla. He had sucked the blood from her finger, when she pricked it with a pin. She asked him to spit the blood into a handkerchief, but he had swallowed it like a cannibal. That was Corfu, 1745, nearly four decades earlier, when he was just twenty years old.

  He told me about his own first complete act of physical love, a double act, with two sisters, Marta and Nanetta, in their attic bedroom at San Samuele. Later that night, as our gondola rocked in a little gasp of wind, soft and sudden as a cat’s sneeze, he told me I reminded him of little Marcolina, a Venetian girl. She was a jewel: intelligent, mischievous, her long hair hanging in adorable ringlets like a mermaid’s. Marcolina was both insatiable and omnivorous. She had promised Casanova never to be jealous of his other mistresses – provided that he let her sleep with them too. With an inexhaustible appetite for her own kind, Marcolina had given him inestimable pleasures, both in the witnessing and the sharing. Marcolina delighted, as he did, in initiating virgins. She raped them in a way that made them eternally grateful for the joy they had received. She tested every woman she met, with the petticoat password, a Florentine kiss, the cheek pinched between the thumb and third finger during osculation. At seventeen, when Casanova met her, she had already initiated more than three hundred girl sweethearts. Of men, the indefatigable Marcolina had not kept count.

  I interrupted his story, ‘So how can I remind you of her? You are my only lover, and I have never loved a woman.’

  ‘I suppose it’s your wit. And your hair. And the fact that you are Venetian. You know, I have not loved so many Venetian women. I was starved of them for years upon end when I was in exile.’

  ‘But did Marcolina want to be an artist, as I do?’

  ‘No, she confined her artistry to the bedroom. There she was a masterpiece. As you are. But you, Cecilia Cornaro, also have masterpieces inside you, waiting to be painted.’

  The next day Casanova brought me a small wooden easel, a palette, a handful of graphite pencils, a stretched canvas and five slim paintbrushes. Like a magician, he flung open a wooden box, which was his final gift. Inside lay twenty-seven fat little bladders of paint pigments already ground and mixed with poppy oil. He lifted one out and pierced it with a fingernail. It yielded with a faint sigh. A droplet of vivid purple bled out. Together we bent over the box to inhale its rich vapour. There was never such a pungent perfume in the world, I tell you, as those first paints I owned.

  It was a limpid night. The water breathed evenly under us, as if asleep. We set up the easel in the gondola under the light of a silver candelabra. With shaking hands I squeezed more droplets of colour upon the pristine palette and clipped the gallipot of oil to the edge of it; that little click sounded like a resounding kiss to me. I picked up a pencil and let my hand hover over the canvas, delaying my gratification for precious seconds.

  ‘What shall it be, my darling?’ asked Casanova. ‘You see, I am waiting in utter confidence to be surprised by your genius.’

  ‘It will be a portrait, of course,’ I said grandly. ‘It will always be portraits.’

  He seized my left hand and kissed it deferentially, as if I were already a famous artist he scarcely dared approach. ‘Ecco la qua! Cecilia Cornaro! Painter of Faces.’

  ‘But I have everything to learn.’

  ‘It’s inside you already, my darling. You must simply paint as you make love, which you do by instinct. And when you paint your subjects you must always imagine them naked under their clothes. Follow the imagined curves of their bodies with the devotion of a lover. If you become aroused by this, all the better. You will paint your desire into the picture. What portraits they shall be!’

  ‘Nude portraits of lords and ladies, even? No! I don’t believe you!’

  ‘I have not finished … Then, when you have created the naked body, you must clothe it in close-fitting luxury. Be attentive to every enhancing detail. Now you are no longer the lover, you are the tailor, the confidante of all their bodily secrets. You must hide any pendulous flesh. Veil wrinkled necks in cobwebs of lace. Then, when you have finished concealing what must be hidden, then dazzle them with their own greatness! Give them clothes and jewels just a little better than those they can afford. If they wear satin, turn it into silk Gros de Tours with threads of silver. If they wear a golden bracelet, stud it with rubies.’

  ‘Even though there are no rubies?’

  ‘No one will criticise you for little inaccuracies like this.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The portrait painter is the architect of their immortality! He – or she – does not need to be accurate as to the facts of his sitters, but he needs to pay attention to their aspirations.’

  ‘Will they try to tell me what to do?’ I imagined myself painting a doge, mindful of his dignity, or a fussy matron.

  ‘Probably. But only little things. They know very little, and they are frightened of being ugly to the future. So when they ask you to add something to the portrait – an extra plume of hair, a little life to the cheeks – then you must give a little smile that implies that this is indeed the best news you have heard all day, and that you were simply waiting for permission to do so.’

  ‘What if I find them repulsive? What if I don’t like them?’

  ‘Hated skin is your best training ground, as it’s the hardest thing to paint. Paint lots of people you hate. Or dislike. When you have mastered that, you will know that you can paint anyone.’

  Where he had learnt all this wisdom I never knew, unless it was from his brother, Francesco, who was an artist. They were not close, but they kept an eye on each other, if only to monitor that one had not superseded the other in material success. Somehow Casanova knew just when Francesco was prospering enough to hire his own colour-man to grind the paint pigments for him and mix them, drop by drop, with oil. And he knew when times were hard for Francesco, who had then to force the colour-man into hard labour, so that the excess pigments could be sold at a profit to more successful artists.

  Casanova, of course, was my first portrait.

  I remember grasping the brush and dropping the graphite pencil, which rolled away, pursued by the cat. I remember holding my breath until Casanova reminded me of
the necessity to respire. I remember the first tiny slap of paint against the canvas and the moment the shape of his face took on the lines that I loved so well. I remember the mixing of the browns to make his eyes. I remember the moment when I added the scintilla of humanity, the lustre, to the pupils. I remember how many attempts it took to shape his lips. Meanwhile I was learning other, more unusual skills. It was my fate to learn to paint afloat upon the water: the gondola was always in motion when I worked. I soon found a painting rhythm to compensate for the roll of the water, as I had for making love. My paintbrush would dip and meet the rising canvas just at the right moment.

  I remember how often the painting of that portrait was interrupted. I would start purring in my throat, involuntarily, and the signal would be observed. Casanova’s pose would dissolve. The few inches between us became an impossible perspective, and we fell upon each other. Or something about the way I stroked the paint with the brush aroused him, and I would be swept onto the squirrel-fur rug. The painting was accidentally knocked to the floor a hundred times.

  It was a night-time portrait. I never saw Casanova during the day in those early times. But when it was finished, my portrait brought to light rather too much of the truth. The eyes were too large, and the mouth looked too hungry. The hands were too big. I was not yet skilful enough to hide the death of his hopes written on the sadness of his skin. I had wanted to paint him as I loved him, immortally, but I had not yet the cunning or the competence to do so. I painted him far too mortal. He flinched when I first allowed him to see it. But he recovered himself in an instant, and from somewhere deep inside the well of his tenderness he even extracted a compliment for me.

  ‘Cecilia, you have painted a noble funerary mask for me. Now it’s ready, whenever I need it.

  ‘In fact,’ he said, peering at it bravely, ‘it’s very glamorous.’

  ‘Don’t flatter me. Glamorous? You look like a ghoul. Forgive me!’

  ‘It is glamorous, because death is glamorous. And death is the reason for all portraits in the end.’

  ‘Why? What do you mean?’

  ‘Portraits are mementoes of people who have passed through this life. When they die, their bodies decompose in the grave but their portraits continue to breathe as beautiful as life on the walls of the houses where they once lived. That portrait is their immortality. That’s why the best portrait painters are rich and famous – people will pay anything to live forever.’

  I pictured people, centuries ahead, gazing at my portrait of Casanova. I saw them lean closer, talk to each other, wave their fingers at it authoritatively, as I had seen people do in front of the masterpieces in our Venetian churches. I already hungered for their attention and their approbation, both for my lover and for my work.

  ‘How can I please them?’ I asked. ‘Should I try to paint sitters whom they will love to gaze at?’

  ‘That is your entire work. To make the audience curious, and regretful that they could never know this vanished soul in the flesh.’

  ‘I should paint people so that the future will want to make love to them?’

  ‘If you can do that, Cecilia, you will conquer the world.’

  ‘But could anyone ever …?’

  ‘It can be done. A portrait can arouse the senses just as Aretino’s engravings do, even without showing the act of love. I remember a church in Madrid where there was a painting of the Virgin suckling the Infant Jesus. Her bare breast was exquisitely beautiful. That church was stuffed with golden candelabra and other pious donations from the aristocracy. At the door there was always a quantity of carriages and even a soldier with a bayonet to forfend quarrels among the coachmen who were constantly arriving and leaving. There was not a nobleman in the town who could pass the chapel without going to pay his respects, as he would say, to the Blessed Virgin. Since I knew men, this devotion did not surprise me. It was obvious that every man in the church was there to worship not the Madonna but the breast.’

  ‘And was it very beautiful, the breast?’

  ‘It was ravishing. I kneeled down in front of it myself once. One felt the breast breathing. The nipple had not inserted itself entirely inside the mouth of the baby, so one saw the darker flesh around it, softly puckered up with tender pleasure, and damp with the exhalations of the little infant. The breast was not large, just enough to rest in your hand, but it was possible to feel your palm tingling at the thought.’

  ‘You went there only once?’

  ‘Just once. For a few weeks later a tragedy occurred. A young abate claimed that the breast had started to debauch his dreams. He had a handkerchief painted over it. After that, the church fell into neglect and poverty.’

  ‘Did the breast act on your own dreams?’

  ‘There were times when I imagined it pressed against my back as I lay in my bed at night. That breast gave me the most voluptuous pleasure I ever knew without a woman in my arms.

  ‘Now, Cecilia, imagine a whole portrait like that! A man or a woman caught in the ecstasy of their desire, a face with love written on the very pores of the skin … Do you think you can paint that, Cecilia?’

  No one but a Vampyre could want to make love to my first portrait of Casanova. It was an appalling painting. But it was a start. It was also a statement of love and a declaration of my own desires. That first portrait spawned many successors, each a little better than the one before. I dressed him up. I painted him as saint and sinner, as angel and mortal. Into those portraits I painted my preferences for men like Casanova. I framed and sealed them. I painted into those portraits my love of individuality, of novelty. I painted my Venetian nature: my longing for something that was alive and imperfect, and not divine and perfect. I painted it all into his face. Other women might not recognise Casanova in what I painted. I painted what Casanova was to me and I to him. This changed with each new portrait – and there would be hundreds of them – as we loved each other better, and longer.

  I know now that Casanova was right. Every painter is a lover in this way. For your subject you feel an inexhaustible curiosity about the flare of the nostril or the shadow of an eyebrow. No one but a portrait painter or a lover bestows such compulsive attention upon another human being, and not even a lover can memorise each eyelash, each crease in the webbing of the lips, the tenebrous arch of each nostril the way the artist does. You are looking for something intangible, an essential elixir hidden in the flesh of the face. When you find it you must find a way to lure it to your brush.

  Certain portraits of certain faces, portraits which have captured that voluptuous essence, can make you fall in love, or go wild with desire.

  Now my future was laid out for me.

  For that was the only kind of portrait I wanted to paint.

  The Cat Speaks

  After that, she was always with us at night, and for a long time hers was the only female smell he brought into the gondola.

  The only human smell, that is. Because after that I lived with the stink of paint and pastels in my nostrils for months and then years to come. When they were not mating, she was always drawing something, or painting it. I wrinkled up my moist nose at first, but I learnt to like it, because it meant titbits and caresses for me. Cecilia Cornaro was a good species of female; she loved cats.

  It seemed to me that she was not a bad painter. At first she copied everything, but soon she started to make additions. I noticed that her saints often had Casanova’s face, and her Virgins looked quite a lot like she did. She did not bother much with the Christ-child. Then Casanova put a mirror in the gondola and after that she was forever posing like the Botticelli Venus, or Tiziano’s redhead on the sofa.

  She was always painting faces. I considered this natural. Humans are defective in their sensory perceptions. They are mostly quite insensitive to the mien and manners of the body, the smells, the songs of the blood. Faces are all they give each other, and therefore what they are. I have even heard them describe the act of begetting their hairless offspring as ‘face-making’. />
  My own suave features made an impression on Cecilia, in fact. In this time, she made a copy of Biagio d’Antonio’s Saint Cecilia, and there you will see me, squatting on my haunches while the poor lady is boiled in her bath and everyone weeps. I incline slightly towards my mistress, in three-quarter profile, and this delicate restraint on my part is full of an aching tenderness.

  Have you ever noticed how often, in a painting, a cat lends its ironic subtlety to a scene? By its mere presence, a cat gives a commentary, adds dignity and humanity to the direst of poor hovels, and pathos to the ridiculous deaths of gentle saints. Dogs and lions do merely what dogs and lions do, but a cat – his every gesture is there to be read.

  Chapter 3

  La fortuna l’é na vaca: a chi la mostra el davanti e

  a chi el dadrio.

  Fortune is like a cow: to some she shows her good side;

  to others her backside.

  VENETIAN PROVERB

  In the gondola, I was an apt pupil. But at the convent, I performed without distinction those crowded days. I had no sleep. All day, during lessons, I scribbled on my books. I decorated the borders with increasingly skilful sketches of my lover’s face, breast and other parts. I made passable copies of my favourite positions from Aretino. The nuns, observing these last, were too embarrassed to reprove me or to mention the abomination to my parents. But my Lives of the Saints was confiscated.

  As convents went in those days, ours was of the better class. It was more than a repository for unwanted or unmarriageable patrician daughters. The Abbess, a Dandolo daughter, presided over her echoing chambers of supposed virgins with a resolute hand. Many of the pupils were novices or young nuns but Sofia and I were not destined for the veil: my father’s wealth was more than enough to keep us and to provide us with dowries. So we lived at home and attended the convent six days a week. We sang, we recited, we embroidered on silk, we learnt a little French. More than that it was not thought necessary to educate a Venetian woman of the upper or middle class.