A Venetian Affair (9 page)

As Giustiniana diligently prepared the ground for a summer of lovemaking, she did wonder whether “all this information might ever be of any use to us.” Andrea was still constantly on the move, a fleeting presence along the Brenta. When he was not with the consul at Mogliano, he was traveling to Padua on business, visiting the Memmo estate, or rushing back to Venice, where his sister, Marina, who had not been well for some time, had suddenly been taken very ill. Giustiniana might hear that Andrea was in a neighboring village, on his way to see her. Then she would hear nothing more. Every time she started to dream of him stealing into her bedroom in the dead of night or surprising her at the village
bottega,
a letter would reach her announcing a delay or a change of plans. So she waited and wrote to him, and waited and wrote:

I took a long walk in the garden, alone for the most part. I had
your little portrait with me. How often I looked at it! How many
things I said to it! How many prayers and how many protestations I made! Ah, Memmo, if only you knew how excessively I
adore you! I defy any woman to love you as I love you. And we
know each other so deeply and we cannot enjoy our perfect friendship or take advantage of our common interests. God, what madness! Though in these cruel circumstances it is good to know that
you love me in the extreme and that I have no doubts about you:
otherwise what miserable hell my life would be.

A few days later she was still on tenterhooks:

I received your letter just as we got up from the table and I flew
to a small room, locked myself in, and gave myself away to the
pleasure of listening to my Memmo talk to me and profess all his
tenderness for me and tell me about all the things that have kept
him so busy. Oh, if only you had seen me then, how gratified you
would have been. I lay nonchalantly on the couch and held your
letter in one hand and your portrait in the other. I read and reread
[the letter] avidly, and for a moment I abandoned that pleasure
to indulge in the other pleasure of looking at you. I pressed one
and the other against my bosom and was overcome by waves of
tenderness. Little by little I fell asleep. An hour and a half later I
awoke, and now I am with you again and writing to you.

Andrea was finally on his way to see Giustiniana one evening when he was reached by a note from his brother Bernardo, telling him that their sister, Marina, was dying. Distraught, he returned to Venice and wrote to Giustiniana en route to explain his change of plans. She immediately wrote back, sending all her love and sympathy:

Your sister is dying, Memmo? And you have to rush back to
Venice? . . . You do well to go, and I would have advised you to
do the same. . . . But I am hopeful that she will live. . . . Maybe
your mother and your family have written to you so pressingly
only to hasten your return. . . . If your sister recovers, I pray you
will come to see me right away. . . . And if she should pass away,
you will need consolation, and after the time that decency
requires you will come to seek it from your Giustiniana.

In this manner, days and then weeks went by. Eventually, Giustiniana stopped making plans for secret encounters. There were moments during her lonely wait when she even worried about the intensity of her feelings. What was going on in
his
mind, in
his
heart? She had his letters, of course. He was usually very good about writing to her. But his prolonged absence disoriented her. She needed so much to see him—to see him in the flesh and not simply to conjure his image in a world of fantasy. “I tremble, Memmo, at the thought that my excessive love might become a burden on you,” she wrote to him touchingly. “. . . I have no one else but you. . . . Where are you now, my soul? Why can’t I be with you?”

While she longed for Andrea to appear in the country, Giustiniana also forced herself to be graceful with the consul. He called on the Wynnes regularly, coming by for lunch and sometimes staying overnight at Le Scalette, throwing the household into a tizzy because of his surprise arrivals and the late hours he kept. He took Giustiniana out on walks in the garden and spent time with the family, lavishing his attention on everyone. There was no question in anybody’s mind that the old man was completely taken with Giustiniana and that he was courting her with the intention of marriage. Even the younger children had come to assume that the consul had been “tagged” and already “belonged” to their older sister, as Giustiniana put it in her letters to Andrea.

As she waited for her lover, Giustiniana watched with mild bewilderment the restrained embraces between her sister Tonnina and her young fiancé, Alvise Renier, who was summering in a villa nearby. “Poor fellow!” she wrote to Andrea. “He takes her in his arms, holds her close to him, and still she remains indolent and moves no more than a statue. Even when she does caress him she is so cold that merely looking at her makes one angry. I don’t understand that kind of love, my soul, because you set me on fire if you so much as touch me.” She was being a little hard on her youngest sister. After all, Tonnina was only thirteen and Alvise little older than that; it was a fairly innocent first love. But of course every time Giustiniana saw them together she longed to be in the arms of her impetuous lover.

Mrs. Anna, unaware of the heavy flow of letters between Le Scalette and Ca’ Memmo, could not have been more pleased at how things were developing. With Andrea out of the way, the consul seemed increasingly comfortable with the idea of marrying Giustiniana. It was not unrealistic to expect a formal proposal by the end of the season. The other summer residents followed with relish the comings and goings at the Wynnes’. The consul’s visits were regularly commented upon at the
bottega
in Dolo, as was Andrea’s conspicuous absence. Were they still seeing each other behind the consul’s back, or had their love affair finally succumbed to family pressures? Giustiniana’s young Venetian friends often put her on the spot when she appeared to fetch her mail. However circumspect she had to be, she could not give up the secret pleasure of letting people know, in her own allusive way, that she still loved Andrea deeply. “Today we were talking about how the English run away from passions whilst the Italians seem to embrace them,” she reported. “I was asked somewhat maliciously what I thought of the matter. I replied that life is quite short and that a well-grounded passion for a sweet and lovable person can give one a thousand pleasures. In such cases, I said, why run away from it? The same person pressed on: ‘What if that passion is strongly opposed or if it is hurtful?’ I answered that once a passion is developed it must always be sustained. . . . Must I really care about what these silly people think? I have too much vanity to disown in public a choice that I have made.”

The consul’s repeated visits—and Andrea’s continued absence— created an air of inevitability about her future marriage that took its toll on Giustiniana. In public, she did her best to put on a brave front. But as soon as she was alone the gloomiest premonitions took hold of her. The hope that when it was all over—when the marriage had taken place—she would be free to give herself completely to the man she loved sustained her through the performance she was putting on day after day. But she could not rid herself of the fear that for all their clever scheming, once the consul married her she would not be able to see Andrea at all. As an English friend summering by the Brenta whispered to her one day, “I know my country well, and I am quite sure the first person Smith will ban from his house will be Memmo.” She wrote to Andrea:

Alas, I know my country too! So what is to be done? Wait until
he dies to be free? And in the meantime? And afterward? He
might live with me for years, while I cannot live without you for a
month. . . . True, any other husband would stop me from seeing you without having the advantages Smith has tooffer,
including his old age. . . . But everything is so uncertain, and it
seems to me that the future can only be worse than the present.
Of course it would be wrong for the two of us to get married. I
wouldn’t want your ruin even if it gave me all the happiness I
would feel living with you. No, my Memmo! I love you in the most
disinterested and sincerest way possible, exactly as you should be
loved. I do not believe we shall ever be entirely happy, but all the
same I will always be yours, I will adore you, and I will depend
on you all my life. . . . So I will do what pleases you, [but remem
ber] that if Smith were to ask for my hand and my Memmo were
not entirely happy about it I would instantly abandon Smith and
everything else with him, for my true good fortune is to belong to
you and you alone.

In August Marina’s health briefly improved and Andrea was finally free to go to the country to see Giustiniana. He was not well—still recovering from a bad fever that had forced him to bed. But he decided to make the trip out to Dolo anyway and take advantage of the Tiepolos’ open invitation. Giustiniana was in a frenzy of excitement. “Come quickly, my heart, now that your sister’s condition allows you to. . . . I would do anything, anything for the pleasure of seeing you.” It was too risky for Andrea to visit her house, so she had arranged to see him in the modest home of the mother of one of the servants, thanks to the intercession of a local priest in whom she had immediately confided. “I went to see it, and I must tell you it’s nothing more than a hovel,” she warned, “but it should suffice us.” Alternatively, they could meet in the caretaker’s apartment, which was reached “by taking a little staircase next to the stables.”

These preparations were unnecessary. Andrea arrived by carriage late in the night, exhausted after a long detour to Padua he had made on behalf of the ever-demanding consul. He left his luggage at the Tiepolos’ and immediately went off to surprise Giustiniana by sneaking up to her room from the garden.

The following morning, after lingering in bed in a joyful haze, she scribbled a note and sent it to Andrea care of the Tiepolos: “My darling, lovable Memmo, how grateful I feel! Can a heart be more giving? Anyone can pay a visit to his lover. But the circumstances in which you came to see me last night, and the manner and grace you showed me—nobody, nobody else could have done it! I am so happy and you are wonderful to me. When will I be allowed to show you all my tenderness?”

Giustiniana fretted about Andrea’s health. He had not looked well, and she feared a relapse: “You have lost some weight, and you looked paler than usual. . . . I didn’t want to tell you, my precious, but you left me worried. For the love of me, please take care of yourself. How much you must have suffered riding all night in the stagecoach, and possibly still with a fever. . . . My soul, the pleasure of seeing you is simply too, too costly.” Yet she was so hungry for him after his long absence that she could hardly bear not to see him now that he was so close: “Maybe you will come again this evening. . . . Do not expose yourself to danger, for I would die if I were the cause of any ailment. . . . If you have fully recovered, do come, for I shall be waiting for you with the greatest impatience, but if you are still not well then take care of yourself, my soul. I will come to see you; I will . . . ah, but I cannot. What cruelty!”

Andrea settled in at the Tiepolos’ for the rest of summer. His health fully regained and his sister apparently out of immediate danger, he was anxious to catch up on the time not spent with Giustiniana. They were soon back to their old routine, working their messengers to exhaustion and conniving with trusted allies to set up secret meetings. Giustiniana’s muslins were swishing again as she rushed off on the sly for quick visits to the “hovel”—which she now called “our pleasure house”—or to the caretaker’s, to the Tiepolos’, or even to the village
bottega
if they were feeling especially daring. When they were not together, they sent notes planning their next escapade. Giustiniana was in heaven. There were no worries in her mind, no dark clouds in the sky: “Am I really entirely in your heart? My Memmo, how deeply I feel my happiness! What delightful pleasure I feel in possessing you. There were times, I confess, in which I doubted my own happiness. Now, Memmo, I believe in you completely, and I am the happiest woman in the world. What greater proof of tenderness, of friendship, of true affection can I possibly want from you, my precious one? My heart and soul, you are inimitable. And it will be a miracle if so much pleasure and joy do not drive me entirely mad.”

In the tranquil atmosphere of the Venetian summer, when the days were held together by card games, a little gossip, and an evening
trottata,
the sudden burst of activity between the Tiepolos’ villa and Le Scalette did not go unnoticed. There was much new talk about Andrea and Giustiniana among the summer crowd. Even certain members in the Wynne household grew worried. Aunt Fiorina, always sympathetic to their cause, had been aware of the intense correspondence between the two lovers over the course of the summer but had refrained from making an issue of it. When she learned that Andrea and Giustiniana were actually seeing each other, however, she put her foot down and subjected her niece to “a long rebuke.” The stakes with the consul were too high for them to be playing such a dangerous game, she explained.

Fiorina’s alarm presaged worse things to come. Andrea went back to Venice on family business for a few days. Giustiniana wrote to him several times, but the letters never reached him; her messenger had been intercepted. Someone in the Wynne household— perhaps in the servants’ quarters—had betrayed Giustiniana and handed the letters over to Mrs. Anna. The last lines of a frantic message to Andrea are the only fragment that has survived to give us a sense of the panic and chaos that ensued:
. . . the most violent remedies. It is known that I have written to
Venice, but not to whom! Everyone, my Memmo, is spying on
me. . . . Don’t abandon me now, and don’t take any chances by
writing to me. I won’t lose you, but if something violent were to
happen, I feel capable of anything. If you leave me I shall die,
my soul!