Casanova's Women (14 page)

Despite the ubiquitous beggars and paupers, Naples was much loved by its people.
Vedi Napoli e poi muoril
went the local saying even then: see Naples and then die! Neapolitans, Castelli included, were an earthy lot: robust, tireless and bellicose. They worked hard and played hard, took long siestas in the afternoons, and indulged themselves in the evenings by consuming an inordinate quantity of chocolate. The atmosphere at their assemblies might be formal, even somewhat constrained compared to that in Rome, but ‘the chat in private companies is quite Grecian, that is, very free, and very merry'.
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As in many sophisticated European cities, married women of the merchant and noble classes enjoyed an exceptional degree of liberty, but the freedom of the Neapolitan women shocked even some Parisians. ‘Women of quality go about more less indifferently with anyone,' remarked the French astronomer Jerome de Lalande of Neapolitan women. ‘It is by no means against normal behaviour for women to visit bachelors in their homes.'
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Love was pursued with volcanic recklessness, and ‘Mount Vesuvius, which overlooks the city, is the nearest emblem under which it can be represented in this respect.'
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‘In Italy there are husbands who willingly tolerate the gallants of the wives, and who even become their confidants; but there are others extremely jealous, who bear the strongest ill-will to those singular beings who are the second masters in an ill-regulated family,' Goldoni wrote in his memoirs.
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According to Charles de Brosses, Neapolitan men were the worst offenders, ‘for all the
old Italian jealousy of women seems to have concentrated itself here.'
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Castelli, however, was neither jealous nor possessive of his pretty young wife, whom he trusted implicitly and loved dearly, despite the fact that in ten years of marriage she had failed to provide him with an heir. Instead of resenting Casanova's flirtation with Lucrezia, he openly joked about it. In fact, he seemed almost to encourage it.

On the third day the
vettura
reached the ceremonial wooden gate which marked the end of the Kingdom of Naples and the beginning of the Papal Territories. A Swiss Guard waved them through. From here, the road was cut into the rock and rose precariously above the sea to a height of 120 feet. With every jolting, dangerous turn of the way Lucrezia felt ever more attracted to the young man sitting opposite her, and when the
vettura
finally stopped that night at the whitewashed hilltop village of Terracino an opportunity finally arose for her to signal discreetly that she was interested in him. At the inn they were allotted a room which contained one large bed with two narrow ones on either side of it. While the men turned their backs, the women removed their dresses and, wearing only their linen shifts, climbed into the big bed together. But before she did so, Lucrezia quickly put Castelli's nightcap on the narrow bed on her sister's side, leaving the bed on her side free for Casanova. The significance of the carefully-placed nightcap was certainly not lost on her admirer who ‘was already burning for her'.
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Soon Lucrezia was lying in bed in the darkness, longing for the young man who was lying a mere arm's length away from her. But the gap between them might as well have been a mountain valley, treacherous to cross even after her husband and sister fell asleep. After waiting for what seemed like hours for Casanova to make a move, Lucrezia must have presumed that she had mistaken his intentions for she slipped out of bed, tiptoed around to the other side and climbed in beside the sleeping Castelli. Casanova, who was still awake, fumed with anger. Seeing Lucrezia get into bed with her husband ‘displeased me to a supreme degree, it annoyed me,
and it revolted me so much that, turning on my other side, I fell asleep until dawn; I saw the woman in his bed.'
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Rejected by his mother, displaced by his sisters and brothers, he could never abide competition in the game of love.

Throughout the next day Casanova sulked like a spoiled child in the cramped, stuffy confines of the coach, rarely speaking to Castelli or Angelica and, in marked contrast to his previous behaviour towards her, completely ignoring Lucrezia. When asked if anything was wrong, he complained of having a bad toothache – a malady made to order, as she commented wryly over their dinner. By the time they arrived at their next overnight stop, the medieval village of Sermonetta, his behaviour had become so embarrassing that Lucrezia decided to have the matter out with him. Suggesting they should all take a walk through the cobbled streets, she assertively took Casanova's arm, leaving her husband to take Angelica's, and when they were far enough away from the others Casanova's long silence finally cracked. Without actually saying anything incriminating, both parties laid their cards on the table, and Lucrezia's good sense and delicacy put Casanova's childish petulance to shame. When he impetuously kissed her on the lips, Lucrezia did not resist him.

She had been worried that Casanova's moodiness that day would make her husband suspicious, but Castelli had even more reason to be so that night. For, instead of being sunk in gloom, their travelling companion was suddenly ‘drunk with happiness'. Again, the lawyer seemed flattered rather than threatened by the young man's crush on his wife. He even made jokes about the walk that had miraculously cured his toothache.

The desolate, marshy plain they crossed the following day failed to dent the lighthearted spirits of Lucrezia and Casanova, who, sitting opposite one another, ‘spoke to each other with our knees more than with our eyes, in this way making sure that our conversation would not be overheard'.
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Nor did the threat of being caught up in a battle between the Spanish and Austrian armies bother them. Velletri, the town where the party stopped to
dine, would on 11 August that year become the scene of a Spanish victory over the Austrians. The two armies were already massing nearby, and a territorial skirmish between them that very evening was about to turn Casanova's first attempt to seduce Lucrezia into pure farce.

It was the travellers' last evening before they reached Rome and, convinced that Lucrezia would now acquiesce to any demands he made on her, Casanova wanted to take as much advantage of the opportunity as he could. The sleeping arrangements at their inn fitted his purposes perfectly: ‘There was one bed in the room where we ate, and another in a small adjoining closet which had no door and which could only be entered by passing through the room where we were. Naturally, the two sisters chose the closet. After they had gone to bed, the lawyer went to bed too, and I last of all; before snuffing out the candle, I put my head into the closet to wish the women goodnight. My purpose was to see on which side the wife was sleeping. I had a plan all prepared.'
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His plan – to creep into the closet the moment the lawyer fell asleep – was foiled by the rudely-fashioned wooden bed he shared with Castelli, for the planks creaked so loudly that the lawyer woke up every time Casanova moved. He had almost given up hope of getting near Lucrezia when suddenly they were all disturbed by a terrible racket. A detachment of Austrian troops had surprised the Spanish soldiers garrisoned in the town:

‘A great noise of people running up and downstairs, coming and going, fills the house. We hear gunshots, the drum, the alarm, there are calls, shouts, knocks on our door, the lawyer asks me what is happening, I answer that I have no idea and beg him to let me go back to sleep. The terrified sisters ask us in the name of God to fetch a light. The lawyer gets up in his shirt to go and look for one, and I get up too. I want to close the door again, and I shut it, but the spring jumps back in a way that I can tell it cannot be opened without a key, which I do not have.'
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One can safely presume that this was no accident and that, grabbing the opportunity, Casanova had sprung the lock on purpose.
Now he groped his way into the sisters' closet, where, on the pretext of giving them courage, he stumbled over to Lucrezia's side of the bed in the pitch-darkness. Emboldened by her lack of resistance he threw himself on top of her, and the bed collapsed, trapping Lucrezia, Casanova and Angelica between the broken planks and the mattress.

When the lawyer came back he was furious to find himself locked out of his own room. Thoroughly annoyed by the sexual fumblings that were taking place beside her, Angelica clambered out of the broken bed and tried to open the door for him. Lucrezia begged Casanova to let go of her, and they too groped their way towards the locked door. While the lawyer went downstairs again to find a key, Casanova, repeating the game he had once played in Signora Orio's palazzo with Angela Tosello and the Savorgnan sisters, groped his way around in the dark with his arms spread out, hoping to catch Lucrezia, and ‘to have time to finish' what he had already begun. Instead, he accidentally caught Angelica who roughly pushed him away. When he eventually found Lucrezia they hurriedly embraced, and by the time her husband came upstairs again, this time jangling a large bunch of keys, Casanova was so excited that he ejaculated over his shirt. Lucrezia pleaded with him to get back into his bed, ‘for if her husband were to see me in the appalling state I was in, he would guess everything'.
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There was a limit to her husband's understanding nature. By the time the lawyer finally opened the door, he found Casanova apparently half-asleep in his bed, and his wife and sister-in-law folded up in their collapsed bed in the closet. Bursting into a peal of heartfelt laughter, he demanded that Casanova come and see what had happened to them.

The excitement of the situation, the humour of it, the exhilarating danger and the sheer wonder of being desired overwhelmed Lucrezia like a narcotic. This was the first time in her life that she had ever experienced such strong sexual feelings for a man, and during the next few weeks she would risk her marriage and her reputation in order to satisfy them. The good sense, loyalty and propriety that she had previously shown now deserted her. The
following morning, in the sweet grip of what Casanova termed the ‘divine monster' of love, she watched as he behaved with shameful familiarity towards her husband when they stopped for omelettes at the famous Tor di Mezza Via inn on the outskirts of Rome, hugging and kissing him, calling him ‘papa' and even predicting the birth of a son to him and his wife.

When the
vetturino
dropped Casanova off near Rome's famous Piazza di Spagna the bittersweet pain of love must have struck Lucrezia. Her admirer had promised to call on her, but Rome was an easy place to lose a person in. The Aurelian walls, built in the third century AD , still marked the twenty-kilometre perimeter of a city which in ancient times had been home to more than two million people. Now the same area housed less than a tenth of that number, and consequently even the centre of the city had a sprawling, rural feel to it. History rubbed shoulders with modernity, the urban with the rural, the religious with the secular, and the exalted with the everyday. Though wealthy foreigners travelled across Europe to wonder at the remains of Rome's ancient circuses, markets, aqueducts and temples, the locals regarded them as no more than conveniently placed stone-quarries. ‘One comes upon traces both of magnificence and of devastation which stagger the imagination,' wrote Goethe. ‘What the barbarians left, the builders of modern Rome have destroyed.'
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Sheep grazed in the Coliseum, which was overgrown with brambles and ivy, the Forum was used as a cattle market, vines were trained up abandoned marble columns, fragments of temples could be found cemented into the walls of new houses, and artisans built their workshops underneath half-buried arches. The ancient Romans had been famous for their road-building skills, but now the city's roads were unsurfaced, unswept and unlit. The long straight avenues with their plashing fountains gave way to twisting alleyways which led in turn to open spaces where exuberant baroque churches and luxurious palazzi built by generations of extravagant popes stood cheek by jowl with lowly shacks and tumble-down cowsheds. The result was a charming, unplanned hotchpotch of a city that was both relaxing and uplifting to live in.

‘Imagine a population a third of which is composed of priests, who do absolutely nothing; the peasants work little, there is no agriculture, no commerce, no manufactures,' wrote Charles de Brosses of Rome's laid-back atmosphere. The city was so pleasant because of ‘the extreme freedom prevailing in it, and the civility of its inhabitants, who, if not cordial, are full of good breeding, and are more obliging and accessible in Rome than in any other part of Italy.'
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Romans were the most friendly and delightful of all Italians, and if the city itself was not as colourful as Naples, its floating population certainly made up for it. The fashionable cafes overflowed with tourists, local noblemen, pilgrims on their way to the Vatican, English lords discussing their private audiences with the Pope (as essential an ingredient of any Grand Tour of Europe as being carried over the Alps or taking a ride in one of Venice's gondolas), effeminate castrati employed to sing in the churches, and richly-dressed clerics on the make.

Casanova now unashamedly became one of the latter. His whole life had been leading up to this one moment. Everything was in his favour: ‘Rome was the one city where a man, starting out from nothing, had often risen very high; and it was not surprising that I believed I had all the requisite qualities; my currency was an unbridled self-esteem, which inexperience forbade me to doubt.' He had every chance of succeeding, for he was ‘well turned out, provided with enough money, with a fair amount of jewellery, with enough experience, with good letters of recommendation, perfectly free, and at an age when a man can count on good fortune, if he has a little bit of courage, and a face which disposes those whom he approaches in his favour'. To forge a career in the Vatican, a man needed political skill rather than faith, to be ‘flexible, insinuating, a great dissembler, inscrutable, conniving, often base, insincere, always seeming to know less than he does, having only one tone of voice, patient, in control of his features, as cold as ice when another in his place would burn; and if he is unfortunate enough not to have religion in his heart, he must have it in his mind, suffering in silence, if he is an honest man, the mortification of knowing that he is a hypocrite'.
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