A Venetian Affair (34 page)

It was Miss Mendez’s turn to make the half-day trip to Venice. Giustiniana reminded Andrea to take care of her: “Be so generous as to give her all the enlightenment a newcomer to the country will need in order to see all the major points of interest, get some learning, and have fun at the same time. . . . I shall be as grateful to you as if the kindnesses I ask of you were addressed to me.” She tried to press Andrea’s large muffs into the box she had purchased in Verona, but they wouldn’t fit. So she asked Miss Mendez to pack them with her own clothes and give them to him in Venice. “Don’t ask me what the price was,” she wrote to him in an accompanying note. “I had money in Lyon, and I always meant for them to be a gift.”

Each day Giustiniana felt lonelier. She was tired of being stranded in the dank and inhospitable house of the Erizzos. The late autumn cold chilled her bones. The wet weather sapped her spirit. She was saddened to learn about the death of King George II (he had died October 25). The rumors about Frederick of Prussia’s health affected her even more. But it was not the news from abroad that depressed her so much as the ambiguous, hopeless notes she kept receiving from Andrea. He seemed so defensive—always asking forgiveness, always making excuses: M. forbade him to see her . . . M. forbade him to write to her. . . . How was she supposed to react? How was she supposed to feel?

A deep sadness was taking over. Nearly two weeks had gone by since she had arrived in Padua exhausted but also exhilarated at the thought of finally setting eyes on Andrea. The fantasy she had fed during the long trip home dissolved little by little. The remaining ambiguity in Andrea’s letters only hurt her more. She could not bear the confusion anymore. She yearned for some final clarity— even as she dreaded it.

Mon cher frère,

. . . I haven’t written to you. Why I haven’t written to you I
don’t really know, and I hardly know what I should be writing
now. There are times I understand you, and there are times I
don’t. There are times I think you despise me, and there are times
I think you are my friend. Now you treat me as your confidante,
now it looks as if you are in love with me. I know the circumstances you find yourself in, and you know mine. Why all the
intrigue? If your good friend forbids you to write to me, give her
satisfaction. . . . A friend must be sympathetic, and I would be
quite an ungrateful one if I expected you to sacrifice the slightest
pleasure for my sake. I was so struck by this idea yesterday that I
didn’t want to write to you anymore. Believe me: let us speak the
truth. If we meet, I will behave with the grace that my immutable
friendship as well as the memory of my gratitude will inspire. But
you have to live in Venice, and I don’t. You have to cultivate the
Venetian spirit, its genius, its weaknesses, and I don’t—though I
can accept all these attitudes and prejudices in you. So write to
me about the king of England, write to me about the war or other
news. I shall be happy. But don’t write to me about other things,
I beg you. And let us stop deceiving or hurting each other.
Farewell.

During the next several days Giustiniana did her best to contain her anger for fear of making things worse between them. “I read and I keep myself busy trying not to get too bored,” she wrote with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “Nothing much happens here, but I find that if I keep my expectations low time goes by just the same.” On November 17 she received another rambling letter from Andrea. As usual, he was full of tenderness but also vague, evasive, inconclusive. This time she let him have it:

Mon cher frère,

Such a long letter! So many justifications! And such sweet
expressions! But Memmo, shouldn’t I find it offensive that you
should think such a letter necessary? Do you doubt my friendship
to such a degree? Do you really think I would fail you? You force
me to speak! You want me to explain the situation of my heart?
Well, then, I should adore the baron, yet I love him less than he
deserves. But I am his friend and I will remain so for eternity.
You want me to speak about you? All right, I’ll give myself
away. Your words, the letters I received from you during the last
period in London and during the journey back, led me to believe
that your commitment to me only involved your head. So I nourished the sweet illusion that I would find you again, not as my
lover—for that was no longer suitable for either of us—but as my
friend. . . . To do you a favor, I forbade you to come meet me as
you had promised; but still I flattered myself that at least in
Padua the first man I set eyes on would have been Memmo. It
seemed to me I had a thousand things to tell you and a thousand
things to hear from you. I thought about it a lot. I liked the idea.
It often troubled me as well. I arrive; and I do not find you.
Instead I hear a lot of talk about responsibilities, affections, feelings apparently stronger than those I thought you harbored. I
must fight my first impressions. You force me to do so every day. I
humiliate my vanity. I destroy my expectations. I vanquish my
self-esteem. I even sympathize with you when you do not fly here
to see me because love is apparently stronger than our very tender
friendship. I make an e fort and I gain control over myself. But I
remain in a terrible mood, and my courage fails me. This is why I
have been so erratic. This is the reason for my slights, for my nonsensical letters. But I’ll put an end to it, I swear. You have sympathized with me a thousand times, and I sympathize with you
and I forgive you. Perhaps I should even thank you since God
only knows where all that excitement I felt when I arrived in
Padua might have led if it had been encouraged in any way;
whereas you know we must love each other only as friends. I have
done a thousand crazy things. You had to take on a new commitment, for which you asked my advice and my approval. I too have
a commitment, and I would be desperate if I could not keep it.
Venice is not the country for me. I cannot live there with the freedom to which I am now accustomed; and then I cannot see myself
living in a place where people affect superior airs with me or feel
they have to extend their protection to me. I’m not sure yet where
I’ll go, but I have plans and I won’t tell you about them because
there is nothing more ridiculous than plans that are divulged too
soon. A passion between us would be a real curse, and I know it
might be rekindled in me. So again I thank you for having put me
in a position to renounce such a passion forever.

I’ll stop writing now because I don’t feel at all well. . . .
Farewell, and forgive me for not matching all your kind words.
Today I have been sincere with you, and my sincerity cannot but
tell you things which prove my fondest affection and friendship
for you.

Giustiniana felt her strength failing after sending off her letter, and she retired to her room. “I’ve become melancholic, and this malady is affecting my mood and my spirits. I am not the same person anymore, and every pleasure has become dull and burdensome.” The next day she felt worse, and after another difficult night she called for help. “I’m really not well,” she wrote, switching back to French. “My health is very weak, and last night I really thought it was the end. I was forced to call Dr. Berci in at four o’clock in the morning. I’ve decided to put myself in his hands to cure what he calls my ‘attacks of melancholic hysteria.’ ” She asked Andrea not to mention any of this to her mother in Venice. There was no point: “Apart from the fact that my suffering is great and my anxiety even greater, these illnesses are not dangerous.”

Andrea wrote several times a day now—affectionate letters in which he wished her well. But Giustiniana no longer had the energy to write much at all. She asked him to forgive her “for not replying to all your letters.” Andrea thanked her for the muffs. He and Miss Mendez had not taken to each other, he was sorry to report. Giustiniana asked him to make an effort despite what she now realized was a “silly” idea to get them together: “Try to appease her; she can be mean, and it is an advantage to have such people on one’s side. You will tell me you don’t much care. But my vanity is sensitive to compliments paid to you, and so I beg you to do this for me—even if it is but a whim on my part. . . . I’ll stop now. I’m weak and this evening I’ll take a cure. Again, I forbid you to say anything about this to my mother.”

She spent the next few days drifting about the house, awaiting news from Mrs. Anna. Her tone with Andrea became more distant. On November 23: “I haven’t written in two days. I really haven’t had time. . . . A thousand necessary chores have robbed me of all my time. I have not had an hour to myself.” And later: “Mon cher frère, forgive me, I have written little or nothing. I’m not well. I’m melancholic. The saddest curse has fallen upon me, and everything has become unbearable. I have received your letters regularly, and if I were sensitive to anything it would be to your kindness. . . . I’m sorry to hear about the difficulties you’re facing in your love life. But Memmo, if you’re sure of her, does anything else matter?”

The Wynnes had meant to stay no more than ten days in Padua. Three weeks had now gone by, and they were still camping out at Ca’ Erizzo. There was apparently a bureaucratic hitch. Mrs. Anna had found a house, but she was hesitating because it was available for only six months. The city authorities, meanwhile, were waiting for Mrs. Anna to sign the lease before issuing an entry permit for the family, which was needed in addition to the residency permit they had already received when they were still in London. The delay was making Giustiniana irritable: “Why doesn’t my mother take the house? And why haven’t you persuaded her yet? Meanwhile, I’m stuck here; I’m not well, and I’m bored. . . . Since my mother can take the house for only six months, why all the fuss about the entry permits? We’ll be there such a short period of time. . . . Come, Memmo, free us from this hindrance.”

Giustiniana would think about the future later on. Right now she just wanted to rest; she wanted her room and fresh linen and a little peace. “Allow me to come to Venice and trust me, as you should, for I have forsaken all claims.”

Finally, on November 26, word came that Mrs. Anna had secured the house and the entry permits had been granted. It would be another couple of days before their trunks were ready, and there were still a few errands to do before the trip to Venice. But the news cleared the air, and Giustiniana’s spirits lifted for the first time since arriving in Padua. “It seems I am happy today, or at least not as sad as I usually feel. . . . I am much obliged for your sweet words in your last letter. But Memmo, you know we must not believe in them. And poor us if we should still listen to our hearts. I don’t know what mine tells me about you; but even if it spoke out it would gain nothing, for I have sworn to be deaf. For pity’s sake, let us remain friends.

“So I’ll see you at Mira? I feel pleasure in imagining this reunion. . . . I don’t drive the idea away from me. . . .
Basta.
Enough now. . . . Farewell, Memmo.”

Did Giustiniana and Andrea ever meet at Mira? This is the last fragment of their correspondence to have come down to us, so we are left without an answer. One day, perhaps, other letters will reveal to us what happened that morning. But it is hard to escape the feeling that the little river town ten miles up the road from Padua was indeed where the final act of their love affair took place—whether or not Andrea ever made it to their appointment. Giustiniana’s last letters are filled with so much foreboding that we, the prying readers, understand it is over perhaps even before she does. Yet in the tone of those letters we recognize a new resoluteness as well. It is the clearheaded determination of someone who has weathered a storm and is leaving it behind. Giustiniana was now ready to complete her journey, even as she made it clear that Venice was not her final destination and she was going to live her life beyond its stifling confines. And so we picture her boarding the
burchiello
at Mira with a steady foot and traveling confidently down the gentle waters of the Brenta, past fishing villages and elegant villas, then out into the lagoon, toward the shimmering city across the horizon.

Postscript

At least Andrea and Giustiniana did not live to see the end of their beloved Republic!” my father scribbled wistfully at the end of his notes to the letters. It was a typical thing for him to say: two centuries after Bonaparte’s victorious invasion, the old Venetian in him still ached at the Republic’s ignominious end. As I read those words I was also reminded of how much he had identified with Andrea, not to mention the terrible crush he had developed on Giustiniana and his disappointment at how things had turned out between his two lovers.

In September 2001, nearly five years after my father’s death, I went to Venice with my family to write the book he had wanted to write. We found a small house on the Campiello agli Incurabili, just off the Zattere. It was right on the water and had a small enclosed garden filled with oleanders and laurels and roving wisteria. In daytime the reflections of the sun danced on the walls and created a sense of perpetual movement. At night, when the city was silent, the rhythmic sloshing in the canal signaled the ebb and flow of the tide.

I had never lived in Venice before. To me it had always been the city of my father’s childhood. I saw it as I imagine most people do: as a museum full of tourists, a dead city. But as Venetians well know, it is much more than that. In Venice the past has remained alive in a vivid, disorienting way. It is with you all the time. It blends with the present. And sometimes, walking around the city, my head filled with Andrea and Giustiniana, I found myself slipping back in time so effortlessly that I didn’t know what century I was living in anymore.

I passed by Ca’ Memmo every week on my way to my youngest son’s music class. It stands imposingly to the east of the vaporetto stop of San Marcuola, on the north shore of the Grand Canal. Consul Smith’s
palazzo
is a little further along, on the same side of the Grand Canal, before the bend of the Rialto Bridge. It was recently converted into a luxury condominium for wealthy foreigners, yet the outward appearance of the building is the same as when Andrea and Giustiniana exchanged their first furtive kisses there two and a half centuries ago. Whenever I went by the very grand Palazzo Tiepolo, now Palazzo Papadopoli, I scratched my head trying to figure out which was the window on the mezzanine floor from which Andrea used to woo Giustiniana when the Wynnes lived next door.

The buildings are the same. The streets haven’t changed. Even the names on the doorbells are familiar. Gradually, I came to see how much the love story my father had dug up in the dusty attic of Palazzo Mocenigo had taken him back not just to the city of his childhood, but to a place of the imagination where the great Venetian Republic lived on. And how the unraveling of Andrea and Giustiniana’s long affair had evoked in him—in a way that was still somewhat mysterious to me but that I was beginning to understand—the much vaster demise that was taking place all around them.

On the other hand, I am sure my father took comfort in learning, as he progressed in his research, that his two heroes went on to have full and fascinating lives. Each went his own way: Giustiniana became an accomplished author; Andrea became Venice’s last great statesman. But over the years they remained very close. Their world—the vanishing world of the Venetian Republic— was small enough that they were never very far apart. And when their paths did cross, they always met with that tenderness a first great love can create to last a lifetime.

Would Andrea and Giustiniana have been as distraught by the passing of the Venetian Republic as my father assumed? Probably not. Andrea always knew his life was tied to the fate of the city. But as much as he revered the Venice of the past, one has to wonder whether he would have shed a single tear for the passing of the inglorious Republic he had known in his lifetime. True, he was spared the final demise because his own death came sooner, but he was too intelligent a man not to see that Venice could not continue to survive by small concessions to change. By the time the gangrene began to spread in his own body, he knew the Republic was also doomed. As for Giustiniana, she died at a time when her life was no longer rooted in Venice. She lived mostly on the mainland. Her horizon had widened considerably. She traveled often. She wrote in French. She published her books in London. She was selfsufficient, independent, and worldly. In many ways she had become the woman she had tentatively begun to sketch in her letters to Andrea many years before, when she had so accurately predicted their separate fates: “You have to live in Venice, I don’t.”