A Venetian Affair (6 page)

This was the theory. In reality Andrea was fairly quick to lose his cool when other young men prowled around Giustiniana. He was particularly wary of Momolo Mocenigo, better known as Il Gobbo—the Hunchback—on account of a slight curvature of his spine, but in fact rather good-looking and quite the lady-killer. “He was the handsomest of all the patrician gamesters at the Ridotto,” Casanova wrote in his memoirs.
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When he was not taking bets at his faro table, Il Gobbo hung around the theaters, where he bothered the ladies and tried to make mischief. He especially enjoyed gallivanting with Giustiniana, and her willingness to indulge him annoyed Andrea to no end. Once, after catching her yet again in “a very long conversation” with him, he let her have it: “Everyone knows Il Gobbo for the first-class whoremonger that he is. You should know he once [told me] in front of other people that I should be thankful to him because he chose not to seduce you even though you showed a certain kindness to him. . . . I refused to give in to such abuse, and I dare say my reaction did not make him very happy. . . . But why did you have to go talk to him without your mother? Why speak to him practically in the ear? Why whisper to him that you were going to San Moisè so he could then come and tell me with a tone that so displeased me?”

Another evening, Andrea was at home nursing a fever and a terrible sore throat when he suddenly learned that the “first-class whoremonger” was on his way to meet Giustiniana. He became so upset that he dashed out of the house, ran across town, and burst into the busy gambling rooms of the Ridotto. “I looked for you everywhere, and I finally found you in the same room where [Il Gobbo] had just been,” he wrote to her angrily and with a good deal of self-pity. The incident, he assured Giustiniana, had “redoubled the flames that were already engulfing my throat.”

Still, Il Gobbo was a lesser irritant than Piero Marcello, the handsome
coureur de femmes
who was courting Mariettina Corner but also had eyes for Giustiniana. Andrea considered Piero to be frivolous and vain, the sort of young man who would buy a new coat and then “make a ruckus just to attract attention to it.” Piero’s gondola was often moored at the same dock as the Wynnes’. “How appearances can trick one,” Andrea noted, for he was worried people might wrongly assume that Piero was visiting Giustiniana and her sisters, when in fact Piero simply lived nearby. Indeed, some already referred to them as “Piero Marcello’s girls.” Piero not only flirted with Giustiniana, he also needled Andrea in public, wondering aloud whether he and Giustiniana were secretly still seeing each other. The two nearly came to blows over her, as Andrea reported to Giustiniana with more than a hint of braggadocio in this account of their confrontation:

PIERO:
Are you jealous of me? Oh . . . but I have no designs
on her. True, when women call me it is hard for me to resist. . . .
But I am your friend, I would not betray you. I stay away from
my friends’ women. And if you have the slightest suspicion, I will
never see her again.

ANDREA:
Who do you think you are, the Terror of the World?
Do you really think I’m afraid of losing Giustiniana to you? If
she were crazy, like all your previous lovers were, if she wanted
your money, . . . if she had all the weaknesses, all the silliness, all
the prejudices of the average woman, if she could not tell the true
value of better men, if she were a coquette or worse, then, yes, I
probably wouldn’t trust her. But my dear Piero, who do you think
you’re dealing with?

Andrea concluded, “I told him these things with my usual straightforwardness, so that after affecting surprise he turned the whole thing into a joke.”

Things did not end there. Days later Andrea saw Piero and Giustiniana talking to each other again. He gave her a stern warning: “Now I speak to you as a husband: I absolutely do not want you to show in public that you know Piero Marcello. I was very sorry that Mariettina, noticing that I was trying to see with whom you were laughing, came over and whispered into my ear: ‘She’s laughing with Piero down there.’ ”

Even after such a reprimand Andrea would not admit to being the slightest bit jealous:

I’ve told you a hundred times: I don’t forbid you to see Piero
out of jealousy. . . . But I absolutely do not want you to look at
him in public or even say hello, all the more so because he a fects
an equivocal manner that I simply don’t like and that I find insolent in the extreme. . . . Piero and Momolo are not for you. . . .
Piero frets while Momolo a fects his usual mannerisms, both with
the same end: to make people believe that there has been at least a
little bit of intimacy with all the women they are barely
acquainted with. And for this reason the two of them are a real
nuisance to young lovers.

Despite the misunderstandings and squabbles that ensued, Andrea and Giustiniana’s relationship deepened through the spring and summer of 1755 to the point that very little else seemed to matter to them anymore. All their energies were devoted to making time for themselves and finding places to meet. They had become experts at escaping the restrictions imposed on them and moved stealthily from alcove to alcove. Their love affair consumed their life, and it gradually transformed them.

Giustiniana had been known as a lively and gregarious young woman. The affectionate nickname
inglesina di Sant’Aponal
conjured up a refreshing image of youth and grace. Soon after returning to Venice, Giustiniana, being the eldest, had begun to share with her mother the duties of a good hostess while Bettina, Tonnina, Richard, and William were still under the care of Toinon. This role had come naturally to her. She had felt at ease in their drawing room or over at the consul’s, delighting everyone with her charm. But by 1755 she was tired of all that, tired of performing onstage. She hardly recognized herself. “Coquetry was all I really cared for once,” she told Andrea in a moment of introspection. “Now I can barely manage to be polite. Everything bores me. Everything annoys me. People say I have become stupid, silly; that I am hopeless at entertaining guests. I realize they’re right, but I don’t much care.” She spent her days writing letters to Andrea, worrying about whom he was seeing, planning their next meeting—where, at what time, and, always, what to do with the keys. When she did go out with her mother—to lunch at the consul’s, or to church, the theater, the Ridotto—the people she chose to talk to, what she said, how she said it: everything she did, in one way or another, related to Andrea.

The affair had become all-consuming for Andrea as well. “My love, you govern my every action,” he confessed to her. “I do not think, I do not feel, I do not see anything but my Giustiniana. Everything else is meaningless to me. . . . I simply cannot hide my love for you from others anymore.” He still made the usual rounds—a family errand, a trip to the printer Pasquali on behalf of the consul, a lunch at Ca’ Tiepolo, and in the evening a visit to the theater. But his life outside the secret world he shared with Giustiniana no longer seemed very stimulating or even much fun. After the death of his uncle Andrea the year before, Ca’ Memmo had received fewer visitors and had ceased to be the scintillating intellectual haven of years past. At this time, too, Andrea’s mother, obsessed about Casanova’s influence on her three boys, finally had her way and convinced the inquisitors to have him arrested.
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The heated, late-night conversations at the crowded
malvas
ì
e
on the latest book from Paris or the new play by Goldoni had lost their most entertaining participant.

Andrea’s personal project for establishing a French theater in Venice was going nowhere, and Giustiniana worried that she might be the main cause of his lack of progress: “Are you not working on it because of me? Dear Memmo, please don’t give up. If only you knew how much I care about your affairs when your honor is at stake. Especially this project, which, given its scale, the detailed manner in which you planned it, and the excellence with which you carried out every phase, was meant to establish your reputation. And to think that my feelings for you—true as they are—might have caused you so much damage. I am mortified.” Andrea admitted that he had made little progress and “all the people involved” in the project were furious with him. “They say I have been taking them for a ride all along. The talk of the town is that the theater project has fallen through because of my excessive passion for you. By God, I couldn’t care less. I only wish to tell you that I love you, my heart.” Sweetly, he added that he would now start working on it again “because it will feel I will be doing something for you. [After I received your letter] I dashed off to the lawyers to get them started again. They weren’t in the office, but I shall find them soon enough.” In the end, despite fitful efforts, the project never got off the ground.

Andrea kept up with his mentor Carlo Lodoli, the Franciscan monk who continued to hold sway among the more open-minded members of the Venetian nobility. Now that he was no longer Lodoli’s student, Andrea saw him less often, but he was anxious that Giustiniana should also benefit from the mind that had influenced him so profoundly. He encouraged his old teacher to visit her as much as possible and draw her into his circle of followers. Giustiniana always welcomed these visits, starved as she was of new books and new ideas in the restricted intellectual environment her mother fostered at home. Most of all she delighted in the chance to spend time with a person who knew the man she loved so well. When Lodoli came to visit, it was as if he brought Andrea with him—at least in spirit. “He just left,” Giustiniana reported to her lover. “He kept me company for a long time, and we spoke very freely. I appreciated our conversation today immensely—more than usual. He is the most useful man to society. . . . But beyond that, he talked a lot about you and he praised you for the virtues men should want to be praised for—the goodness of your soul and the truthfulness of your spirit.”

For several years Consul Smith’s library had been a second home for Andrea. He continued to visit the consul regularly during his secret affair with Giustiniana, helping him catalogue his art and book collections. Nearly two years had gone by since the two lovers first met in that house. As Andrea worked, he luxuriated in tender memories of those earlier days, when they had been falling in love among the beautiful pictures and the rare books. “Everything there [reminds] me of you. . . . Oh God, Giustiniana, my idol, do you remember our happiness there?”

In reality, Andrea stopped at the consul’s more out of a sense of duty and gratitude than for pleasure. The old man could be demanding. “When he starts talking after his evening tea, he never stops,” Andrea reported with a sense of fatigue. “He generally asks me to stay on even while he has himself undressed.” These man-to-man ramblings often touched on the Wynnes, and on several occasions Andrea could not help but notice with amusement the vaguely lustful tone Smith had begun to use when he talked about Giustiniana.

Inevitably, as Andrea and Giustiniana’s lives became more entwined and inextricable, so the hopelessness of their situation gradually sank in, bringing with it more tension and crises. Andrea filled his letters with declarations of love and devotion, but he never offered much to look forward to—there was no long-term plan that, however vague, might allow Giustiniana to dream about a future together. Instead, he made offhand remarks about how much simpler it would be if she were married to someone else or, better still, if she were a young widow “so that we wouldn’t have to take all these precautions and I could show the world how much I adore you.”

Giustiniana was having a harder time than Andrea. Her letters, always more impulsive and emotional than his, grew wilder as she swung between bliss and despair. Venice could seem such a hostile place—a watery labyrinth of mirrors and shadows and whispers. She could not get a grip on Andrea’s life or, as a consequence, on her own. The more time passed, the more she felt she was losing her way. Again and again she was overcome by waves of jealousy that brought her to breaking point.

Caterina (Cattina) Barbarigo was a great beauty and a notorious
femme fatale.
She held court in a
casino
that was much in vogue among progressive patricians and viewed with suspicion by the inquisitors. Though older than Andrea—she was married and the mother of two beautiful daughters—she liked surrounding herself with promising young men. He, in turn, was delighted to be drawn into her circle of friends—even at the cost of hurting Giustiniana’s feelings. “All day you’ve been at Cattina Barbarigo’s, haven’t you?” she asked accusingly. “Enough, I shan’t complain about it. But why have I not seen you? Why have I not received a line from you? Now that I think of it, it is perhaps better not to have received a note from you because you probably would have written late at night, in haste, and maybe only out of a sense of duty. Tomorrow, perhaps, you will write to me with greater ease.” But there was no letter on the following day, or the next, or the one after that. On the fourth day of silence her anxiety turned into rage:

You should be ashamed of yourself, Memmo. Could one possibly behave worse toward a lover one claims to be desperately in
love with? I write to you on Saturday, and you don’t answer
because you are at Barbarigo’s house. Sunday I never see you even
though I spend the entire day at my window. And no letter—even
though you know very well that on Mondays I go out and you
should want to find out what the plan is in order to see me. Or perhaps you did write to me but your friend could not deliver? Do you
suppose I will believe that you could not find another way of getting a letter to me, considering I had been two days without any
news about you? . . . My mother has been ill for many days, and
we could have been seeing each other with fewer precautions. But
no—Memmo is having fun elsewhere. He does not even think
about Giustiniana except when a compelling urge forces him to.
What must I think? I hear from all sides about your new games
and your oh-so-beloved old friendships.