Casanova's Women (11 page)

By the following summer Casanova was still pestering Angela like a wasp hovering around a sealed honey pot. It was no use. ‘Her meanness in granting me favours irritated me; and my love had already become a torment,' he wrote. ‘With my strong instinct I needed a girl more like Bettina, one who enjoyed appeasing the flame of love without snuffing it out.' He began to lose weight out of sheer sexual frustration. Angela was, he claimed, ‘drying me up. The pathetic, plaintive speeches I made to her over the embroidery frame at which she worked with two sisters, friends of hers, had more effect on them than they did on her heart, which was too enslaved by the maxim that was poisoning me. If I had not only had eyes for her I would have realised that the two sisters were more attractive than she was; but she had made me stubborn.'
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Convinced that he would lose interest if she gave in to him, Angela clung on to her principles in the face of Casanova's emotional blackmail. When she insisted that her self-enforced abstinence was as difficult for her as it was for him, he grew even more annoyed with her, and turned his attentions to a country bumpkin, whose downfall he unwittingly caused.

It was the custom of the patrician classes to leave Venice in the hot summer months when the sewage-polluted canals smelled to high heaven and the mosquitoes were at their most vicious, and to
take refuge in their country villas on the cooler mainland, where they enjoyed an idyllic rural lifestyle. Boating parties, afternoon
trottatas
in carriages around the shady countryside, and balls, picnics and dinners galore were all conducted with the kind of lighthearted informality that would have been unacceptable in town.

One of Malipiero's female friends, the Countess of Montereale, owned a large estate at Pasiano in Friuli, where she spent every summer along with her daughter and a large retinue of guests. In September 1740 she invited Casanova to join her there for a few weeks, and she allotted him a bedroom on the ground floor of the villa, next to that occupied by her caretaker's daughter, who was to wait on him. The girl, Lucia, was fourteen years old, an innocent uneducated country lass with an all-too-trusting and generous nature. Childish almost to the point of being simple-minded, as her parents' only child she was ‘their darling, the consolation of their old age'. She was obedient, devout and healthy, these good people told Casanova; in fact, her only fault was that she was ‘too young' – a subtle warning to their employers' teenage houseguest to respect her honour. They had good reason to warn him off, because physically Lucia was as mature as many seventeen-year-olds. Her skin was fashionably but naturally pale, her eyes were smoulderingly dark, her breasts were ‘two rocks made to shipwreck the most experienced of pilots'
²³
and she wore her long black hair pinned up in an untidy style that was uniquely hers. So unconscious was Lucia of the power of her beauty that she walked about in a state of semi-undress: Casanova's first view of her was when she appeared barefooted in his bedroom early one morning clad only in a skimpy chemise. Far from being embarrassed by the situation, Lucia looked at the young priest as serenely as if he had been an old friend, unaware that her appearance had put him into a state of violent sexual excitement and wiped all thoughts of Angela, Teresa and even Bettina from his mind.

Casanova found it inconceivable that any well-brought-up young girl, ‘virtuous and not at all stupid',
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could behave as freely as Lucia did and still be strait-laced enough to repulse him. He was
certainly not the first man to take an interest in her: the countess's elderly husband had made so many advances towards her that Lucia now ran away whenever she saw him approaching. By contrast with this archetypal lewd old man who was fond of making rude jokes at her expense, the young
abate
was somehow safe, ‘well-behaved, and what's more a priest', as Lucia put it when, determined to find out whether or not she would be open to his advances, Casanova managed to entice her under his bedcovers on the second morning of his stay in Pasiano. Her uninhibited response to him, he concluded, was entirely innocent in nature. ‘Her naivety, her vivacity, her curiosity, her frequent blushes when she guilelessly said things that made me laugh, everything convinced me that she was an angel incarnate who could not fail to fall victim to the first libertine who should take her in hand. I was certain that it would not be me.'
²⁵
It was self-esteem rather than disinterested respect for Lucia that made Casanova determined not even to attempt to lose his own innocence with her; for he did not wish to be shown up in front of his wealthy friends as the kind of man who would betray Lucia's parents' confidence.

What did Lucia think of the young priest who asked her into his bed every morning, chatted with her for three hours without so much as holding her hand, and then disappeared off to spend his days entertaining her parents' wealthy employers with his witty repartee? Did she suspect that during their time together he was torturing himself with desire or that, night after night, he resorted to what he called ‘the schoolboys' remedy' and masturbated with her image in his mind? When, at the end of twelve days, Casanova warned Lucia to stay away from him in future for her own good, she made a fatal error very common among women who were new to the game of love: she mistook his lust for love. She was in love with him too, she declared, but instead of making her miserable, as it did him, love made her happy. Could it be that Casanova was not born to love women? Begging him to think of some plan, and touchingly telling him to ‘Trust in Lucia', the caretaker's daughter fell into his arms.

If threatening never to see her again had been a tactic designed to seduce her it could not have been more successful. From now on, Lucia spent the early hours of every morning, the late evening hours, and often all night, in bed with Casanova, and she swore that she would love him for ever. Angela had refused him everything; too generous for her own good, Lucia refused him nothing. Although their sexual relationship stopped short of actual penetration – or so Casanova later insisted – by the time he left Pasiano at the end of the month, her virginity, if it still existed, was a nebulous technicality.

His feelings for Lucia lasted until the moment he returned to Venice and saw Angela again. Intent on obtaining the clearly unobtainable – a trait that would continue throughout Casanova's adult life – he visited the recalcitrant virgin every day at the embroidery school where she was now studying, but she still resisted him. Instructed by her uncle the priest not to spend so much time at the school, Casanova enlisted her fellow-students and close friends, Nanetta and Marta Savorgnan, to help him towards his goal.

The noble-born Savorgnan sisters were in every way delightful girls. Nanetta, the older at sixteen, was clever, quick-thinking, adventurous, literate and well-read. Her sister Marta, who was just one year younger, was quieter and perhaps less intelligent, but she had a gentle, artless nature which made her happy to follow her sister's lead. Both girls, whilst entirely inexperienced, were bursting with sexual curiosity. They simply could not understand why their good friend Angela persisted in repelling her gorgeous admirer, particularly when she had already confessed to them that she liked him; when she stayed overnight with them and shared their large bed, she even made Marta play the part of her ‘dear
abate'
in their kissing games.

The patrician Savorgnans had long-established links to the Farussi family: Tribune Savorgnan had been Zanetta's godfather,
²⁶
and
the actress and her husband had rented their house on the Calle della Commedia from one of his relatives. By the time when Casanova met Nanetta and Marta their mother was dead, and the girls were living in a large but dilapidated palazzo with their aunt, Caterina Orio, a noble lady who had fallen on hard times. Dependent on a small pension from her brother, the secretary of Venice's ruling Council of Ten, Signora Orio coveted one of the grants handed out to needy windows by the charitable Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament (the recipients' names were selected by lot twice a year) but she lacked an influential person to put her name forward for the draw.

When Casanova asked Nanetta and Marta to intervene with Angela on his behalf, the sisters threw themselves into the task with the gusto of professional matchmakers. Compared to their fun-loving, mischievous natures, prim Angela soon seemed rather dull. As Nanetta's first letter to Casanova made clear (she smuggled it to him at the embroidery school), the intrigue was to be delightfully complicated and risky and involve all sorts of subterfuge, and
she
was to organise everything. Since there was nothing in the world that she was not prepared to do for Angela, she wrote, she had devised a plan that would benefit all of them. Casanova's first task was to get into their aunt's good books by recommending to Senator Malipiero that her name be entered into the lottery for a grant from the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, of which he was president.

‘Last Sunday Angela told her that you enjoy this gentleman's affection,' Nanetta wrote, ‘and that the best means of gaining his support would be by committing you to ask him for it. She foolishly told her that you're in love with me, that you only go to the embroidery school so that you can speak to me, and that consequently I would be able to engage your interest on her behalf. My aunt answered that since you were a priest there was nothing to fear, and that I could write and invite you to her house; but I refused. The lawyer Rosa, who's my aunt's soul-mate, said that I was in the right, and that it wasn't proper for me to write to you;
but that she herself must ask you to come and see her on an important matter. He said that if it was true that you liked me you wouldn't fail to turn up, and he persuaded her to write you the note that you'll find when you get home. If you want to find Angela at our house, don't come until the day after tomorrow, Sunday. If you can obtain the favour that my aunt desires from Signor Malipiero you'll become the pet of our house. Forgive me if I treat you badly when you come, for I told them that I didn't like you. You'd do well to flirt with my aunt, even though she's sixty years old. Signor Rosa will not be jealous, and you'll endear yourself to everyone here. I'll arrange things so that you can speak to Angela alone. I'll do everything to convince you of my friendship. Farewell.'
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Nanetta's plan ran like the mechanism of a well-oiled clock. Casanova visited the palazzo, and Signora Orio handed him her application for the Blessed Sacrament's grant. Since he had less influence over Malipiero than Teresa Imer did, Casanova decided to enlist her help. Tracking Teresa down at her parents' home, he found her in her bedroom with another of her admirers, a local doctor named Leonardo Doro. Though they were both fully dressed, the situation was compromising enough for Teresa and Doro to be flustered, particularly since the jealous senator had made the young soprano promise never to receive the doctor alone. All this was very much to Casanova's advantage. Once Doro had hurriedly left, he told Teresa what he wanted from her and, at the same time, delicately assured her of his discretion. In return, she promised that she would present Signora Orio's case to the senator.

Two days later, Teresa handed Signora Orio's application back to Casanova, endorsed by Malipiero. Casanova duly returned it to Signora Orio on the next feast day, when Angela was due to stay overnight with her girlfriends. The moment Casanova arrived at her aunt's house, Nanetta slipped him another note and told him to read it before he left. Since an urgent need to relieve himself was the only excuse he could think of to be alone, he took it to the water closet. ‘My aunt will beg you to stay for supper, but you'll
decline,' the breathless note instructed him. ‘You'll leave when we sit down to eat, and Marta will light you as far as the street door, which she'll open; but you won't go out. She'll shut it and come back up. Everyone will believe that you have left the house. You'll go back up the staircase in the dark, and then up two other flights to the third floor. The steps are good. You'll wait for all three of us there. We'll come up after Signor Rosa has left, and after we've put our aunt to bed. It will rest with Angela to grant you the private interview that you desire, even all night long, and I hope it makes you very happy.'
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After pretending to leave the house later that evening, Casanova crept upstairs and waited excitedly for the girls to join him. At last all three of them appeared carrying a single candle. Nanetta and Marta sat quietly in a corner, while Casanova sat close to Angela, anticipating the pleasures that he presumed lay ahead of him during the next few hours. But while he talked endlessly to her of his love, she repulsed his roving hands ‘with the most disagreeable gentleness'. He grew impatient. When the candle burned out, plunging the room into total darkness, he reached out to grab Angela, only to find that she had slipped away. Though he spent the next hour doing his best to coax her back, she only giggled at him through the darkness. After a while Casanova's disembodied voice began to sound aggressive – anger was often his reaction whenever his powers of persuasion failed to work on a woman – and he declared that he would play Blind Man's Buff until he found her. As he stumbled around the pitch-black room, his groping hands stretched out in front of him, Marta and Nanetta threw themselves into his path with joyful relish, but Angela remained out of harm's way.

It was all good, childish fun until an hour before dawn when Casanova's mood suddenly changed. Desperate to get somewhere with Angela before he had to leave, he ignored the sisters and unleashed the full fury of his frustration on Angela. First he pleaded with her. Then he nagged her. Then he begged her to give in, prayed and even wept. When none of these ploys produced the
result he wanted – Angela's willing body in his arms – Casanova resorted to a stream of verbal abuse: ‘I showered on her all the insults that scorned love suggests to a furious mind. I hurled fanatical curses at her; I swore to her that all my love had changed into hate, and ended by warning her to keep away from me, for I would certainly kill her the moment I saw her.'
²⁹
The three girls were terrified. As the dawn light gradually seeped through the shuttered windows, bleaching the darkness into a dismal grey light, they dissolved into tears – as did Casanova, who suddenly realised how shamefully he had behaved. As soon as they heard Signora Orio go off to Mass, Nanetta rose to her feet and told him to leave immediately.