Casanova's Women (10 page)

Back in Venice, Marcia found Casanova a teacher of poetry and pure Italian, a language which was considered more refined than the local Venetian dialect. As she took him around the city, she introduced him to everyone she met with the proud words,
He's just come from Padua, where he's been studying
. The heads of families shook Casanova's hand solemnly, elderly ladies embraced him, and those who were not old pretended to be so in order to be able to kiss him with propriety, for by now he had grown into a tall, extremely handsome youth. Though his heart was set on becoming a physician – a profession in which ‘charlatanism is more effective than in the work of a lawyer'
¹⁷
as he had observed cynically at Bettina's bedside – Marcia was adamant that he should follow the ecclesiastical career he had been studying for. On 14 February 1740, shortly before his fifteenth birthday, Casanova was formally inducted into the Roman Catholic Church by Giovanni Tosello, the priest at the local parish church of San Samuele; and eleven months later the Patriarch of Venice conferred minor orders on him; these were the first two steps, towards his becoming a fully-fledged priest.

Anxious that his protege the young novice abbot or
abate
should meet the kind of people who could help him, Tosello introduced Casanova to an important and well-connected senator who lived just across the square from the church. Seventy-six-year-old bachelor Alvise Malipiero II was the head of a patrician family whose name had been inscribed in the famous Libro d'Oro, or Golden Book, of Venetian nobility since 1297. Once, like his ancestors, he had been an active member of the Republic's ruling senate, but by now, due to his advanced age and chronic ill-health, he had lost interest in affairs of state and retired from his civic duties. Malipiero remained extremely sociable, however, and despite regular and severe attacks of gout that left him crippled in every limb he still held court every night to the cream of Venetian society in his vast salon on the
piano nobile
of his Byzantine palazzo on the Grand Canal. No one who saw the senator seated behind his long table talking animatedly to his guests would have guessed that he was in such permanent pain that he could scarcely move. His eyes shone with intelligence and good humour and he relished good company, witty conversation, gossip and, above all, fascinating women. Although he had never married, Malipiero often boasted that he had taken twenty mistresses during his lifetime, and claimed that he had only stopped at that number when he had realised the futility of trying to please yet another one.

Soon Casanova became Malipiero's daily companion, and his unlikely confidant. He spent every day talking with him, often alone; and at night he was allowed to attend his receptions, where he was by far the youngest person present. Instructed by the senator never to speak unless directly spoken to, nor to express any opinions of his own (for at his age he was too young to have any), Casanova quickly became the favourite pet of Malipiero's sophisticated female friends, who trusted him so implicitly that they even let him enter their homes unannounced and mingle with their well-protected unmarried daughters. Instead of steering the young priest down a path suitable for one destined to take a vow of chastity, as Tosello had hoped, the senator was inadvertently
leading him into a life of temptation. In Padua Giacomo had mixed in a predominantly male society. In the sexually liberated circles of the Serenissima, beautiful married women and pretty virgins surrounded him day and night.

Of all the young women he met through Malipiero, the greatest temptress of all was Teresa, the daughter of Giuseppe Imer, the actor/manager of the San Samuele theatre and Zanetta Casanova's erstwhile lover. The Imer family lived around the corner from the Casanovas in the Corte del Duca Sforza, a small paved courtyard situated midway between the senator's palazzo and the theatre where Teresa and her older sister Marianna were both destined to begin their singing careers. Like her short, stout father, the youngest Imer was no great beauty. However, she was pretty, curvaceous and remarkably sexually alluring, and her strong nose and thick, arched eyebrows lent her face an amused, coquettish expression which was enhanced by an outspoken manner and a feisty character. Men found Teresa irresistibly attractive. Well aware of this, she already knew how to get what she wanted from them whilst giving little to nothing in return.

Teresa's mother, Paolina, was the kind of grasping thespian whom Marcia Farussi despised; without doubt it was she who instructed Teresa on how to use her feminine wiles. She was determined to find a rich man to finance the girl's singing career and, since one of their neighbours was a rich, elderly bachelor susceptible to pretty women, she did not need to look far. The back of the Imers' terraced house overlooked the large back garden of Malipiero's palazzo and was situated directly opposite his bedroom window. In her eighteenth year Teresa Imer was frequently to be seen pouting at
her
window – far too frequently for her presence there to be a matter of chance. Malipiero's interest was quickly aroused by her provocative appearance, and they struck up a friendship. Along with Casanova, the Imer women became daily visitors to the palace, where Teresa flaunted her charms and flirted shamelessly with the old man, while at the same time managing to keep him at arm's length.

Old and crippled as he was, Malipiero soon grew obsessed with making Teresa his mistress. Although he was delighted to see her when she arrived with her mother, by the time they left he was always in a rage. He allowed only one other person to be present at their meetings: the novice
abate
Casanova who, as he recorded in his memoirs, was amazed by Teresa's flirtatious behaviour: ‘She came to visit him nearly every day, but always accompanied by her mother, an old actress who had retired from the theatre for the good of her soul and who, as one might have expected, had formed a project to unite GOD with the devil. She took her daughter to Mass every day, she demanded that she take confession every Sunday; but in the afternoon she took her up to see the amorous old man, whose anger astonished me when the girl refused to kiss him on the grounds that, having made her devotions in the morning, she could not condescend to offend the same GOD whom she had eaten and might still have in her stomach. What a sight for me then aged fifteen, the only one who the old man allowed to be a silent witness to these scenes! The villainous mother applauded the resistance of her daughter, and dared to lecture the voluptuary, who in his turn dared not refute her maxims which were either too Christian or not at all so, and he had to resist the temptation of hurling anything he could lay his hands on at her. He didn't know what to say to her. His lust turned to anger; and after they left he calmed himself down by having philosophical talks with me.'
¹⁸

It seemed inconceivable to Malipiero that Teresa would not allow him to take even the slightest liberty, never mind relinquish her precious virginity to him – that is, if he had the physical ability to claim it. He was wealthy, noble, generous and well-connected, while she came from the kind of milieu where to offer sex to one's patron was
de rigueur
. And yet, despite being urged on by her mother, the young soprano resisted Malipiero's every advance. Though he attempted to bribe her to become his mistress she insisted that her maidenhead was not for sale at any price; and when, out of desperation, he offered to marry her, she turned him
down, very properly saying that she did not wish to earn the hatred of his relatives, whose name would have been struck from Venice's Golden Book of patrician families if the senator had married a commoner; though sexually liberated, Venetian society was still rigidly divided when it came to class and birth. Frustrated beyond endurance, the senator turned to fifteen-year-old Casanova for some distinctly non-clerical advice on how to seduce Teresa:

 

‘Offer her a huge sum of money, a settlement.'

‘From what she says she wouldn't commit a mortal sin to become queen of the world.'

‘You'll either have to rape her or throw her out and ban her from coming here.'

‘I'm not capable of doing the former, and I can't bring myself to do the latter.'

‘Kill her.'

‘That might happen if I don't die first.'

‘Your Excellency is to be pitied.'

‘Do you ever go to her place?'

‘No, for I could fall in love with her; and if she behaved towards me as I see her do here, I'd become unhappy.'

‘You are right.'
¹⁹

 

Malipiero was eager to nip in the bud any possible relationship between Teresa and Casanova. Since they were thrown together every day, she was an obvious temptation to the youth, and for her part the handsome young novice was a much more enticing prospect than the withered septuagenarian who was forever trying to talk her into bed. They shared a similar family background in the twilight world of the Venetian theatre where their parents' lives had once been all too intimately intertwined; and given their similarly adventurous spirits, their good looks, their amorous natures and the amount of time they spent together, it was almost inevitable that they would eventually be attracted to one another. The opportunity for them to show their feelings for each other was
not to come quite yet, and when it did it had explosive consequences for Casanova. Left alone in the salon with Teresa one afternoon while the senator took a siesta, Casanova began to play a dangerous game with her. ‘Being seated close to one another at a small table,' he wrote, ‘our backs turned towards the door of the bedroom where we supposed our benefactor was asleep, in the innocent gaiety of our natures we were overcome with the desire to explore the differences between our bodies.' They were so carried away that they did not notice the furious Malipiero hobble back into the room with the aid of his walking-stick: ‘We were at the most interesting part of our examination when a violent blow from a cane fell on my neck, followed by another, which would have been followed by more if I hadn't very rapidly escaped from the hail by making for the door.'
²⁰
This was the last Malipiero saw of Casanova, whom he banned from his palazzo from then on; but the senator was so much in Teresa's thrall that he never reproached her about what had happened.

All this would take place a year in the future. In the meantime, there were plenty of women other than Teresa to distract the sexually charged novice priest from his prayers and studies, for the famous beauties of Venice, with their penchant for the game of love, were to be found in every corner of the city and, as in the future, women took to him at first sight. ‘So many fine acquaintances with women of the world, as they are called, gave me the desire to please by the way I presented myself and the elegance of my dress,'
²¹
Casanova later admitted. By the tail-end of 1741, he had grown obsessed with his appearance. He swaggered around the city in his clerical garb with his face lightly powdered, and his thin gangly body plastered with jasmine-scented pomade. Even though the top of his head had been shaved by Tosello when he took the tonsure, the famous curls once so lovingly tended by Bettina Gozzi had grown thick and long again, contravening an ancient ecumenical edict often cited by his worried priest that
Clericus qui nutrit comam anathema -
a cleric who grows his hair shall be anathema. Afraid that his self-love was out of control, the ever-anxious Marcia
let Tosello into his bedroom early one morning while Casanova lay sleeping, and allowed him to cut off all his front curls. When her grandson woke up he was furious, particularly when Francesco, his younger brother, laughed at him ('He was jealous of me all his life,' he wrote of Francesco, ‘nevertheless combining envy with fondness, I'm not sure how.') Casanova plotted revenge on Tosello, but calmed down somewhat when Malipiero sent him a fashionable hairdresser who restyled his cropped hair and made him look even more handsome than before.

The proof of this came when, appealing to Casanova's vanity, Malipiero suggested that he should write and deliver the panegyric at the church of San Samuele on 26 December; in the senator's capacity as president of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, a charitable organisation of laymen, the sermon lay in his gift. Casanova had never thought of becoming a preacher before, but suddenly he had full confidence in his own ability to write and deliver a sermon that would astonish everyone. The occasion restored an uneasy peace between the priest and his novice, for Casanova's first sermon was indeed brilliant. The church received fifty gold sequins in offerings from the impressed patrician audience who had been invited to hear it, Marcia wept with joy, and Casanova's considerable ego was further inflated not only by the praise that was heaped upon him but also by the number of love-letters that the female congregants slipped into the offerings bag along with their coins.

He did not bother to reply to any of them, for by now Casanova was in love for a second time. While rehearsing his sermon at Tosello's house he had met a young girl, Angela Cattarina Tosello, who would exercise an irresistible attraction over him for the next year.

Angela Cattarina Tosello was the daughter of the priest's brother, painter Iseppo Tosello. Two months younger than Casanova, she was an honest, beautiful girl who had heard the dramatic story of
his haircut from her uncle's lips, and, when Casanova came to the house, insisted on hearing it again from his. Casanova soon became as obsessed with Angela as Senator Malipiero was with Teresa Imer. In order to have a valid excuse to see her, he announced his intention of becoming a full-time preacher and roped in her uncle to help him. On his frequent visits to the Tosello household, ostensibly to discuss the subject of writing sermons, Casanova wooed Angela with all the charm he could muster. But whilst she was happy to encourage him to love her, and even promised to marry him if he gave up the Church, she proved a perfect dragon of virtue. None of Casanova's emotive arguments had the slightest effect on her. Angela was adamant that she was going to save her virginity, and all her other sexual favours, for her marriage bed.