Casanova's Women (18 page)

In modern times there has been much speculation about Casanova's so-called bisexuality. In his memoirs he admits to having the very occasional homosexual encounter (most notably with Ismail Effendi, the ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs in Constantinople, and with Lieutenant Lunin in St Petersburg) but these usually occur in situations where he has been aroused by a woman. A note which was found among his possessions in Dux after his death hints at several other homosexual experiences that he left out of the final draft of his memoirs: it includes the short phrases
‘Mes amours avec Camille (en prison); le Due d'Elboeuf; Pédérastie avec X. à Dunquerque'
. (Camille was a male as well as a female name in eighteenth-century France, and the Due d'Elboeuf was a well-known sodomite.) A libertine by nature, Casanova had no strong moral objection to homosexuality nor, it seems, to having the occasional sexual experience with someone of his own sex, but to have sexual feelings for men did not, he insisted, come naturally to him.

His interest in Bellino did not go unnoticed by the singer's
mother. But was the young cleric heterosexual or homosexual? Did he desire Bellino because he was an effeminate-looking castrato, or did he hope, as many men did, that her son might secretly be a woman? Anxious to make money out of him whatever his sexual leanings, she dispatched Bellino to Casanova's room the following morning to offer him Petronio's services as a manservant during his stay in Ancona. Certain that Bellino was a woman, Casanova was about to make a pass at ‘him' when his younger sisters Cecilia and Marina came running in. ‘I could only be delighted with the appealing tableau in front of me,' he wrote of them. ‘Gaiety, unadorned beauty of three different kinds, sweet familiarity, the verve of the theatre, pretty banter, little Bolognese facial expressions with which I was unfamiliar and which pleased me excessively. The two little girls were real living rosebuds, and worthy of being preferred to Bellino, if I had not got it into my head that she was also a girl.'
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On offer before him, or so he presumed, were an irresistible and vivacious trio: a beautiful youth of indeterminate sex who looked about seventeen years old, and two pubescent children. And when he tipped Petronio for bringing him some coffee the boy thanked him with an open-mouthed kiss, leading Casanova to believe that he, too, could be his for a small price.

If he had money in his pocket a man believed he had the right to buy sexual favours from anyone. And, although he had no idea how he would live in the future, compared to the poverty-stricken theatrical family Casanova was wealthy. Using money as his weapon of power, he set out to discover the true sex of the castrato in the hope that, if Bellino
was
a woman, he could make love to him – or rather, to her. A large tip to the mother elicited the information that Bellino had indeed been certified as a castrato by Ancona's bishop (intimate inspections of castrati by the authorities were commonplace, in order to prevent female singers from slipping through the net and performing illegally). This conclusive-sounding evidence did not satisfy Casanova, who then generously tipped Bellino's sisters to stay away from his room. Left alone with the
castrato, he offered Bellino a gold doubloon to let him examine his genitals. When he rejected this crude offer, Casanova refused to take no for an answer. Exhibiting the bullying streak he usually kept hidden, he attempted to grope the youth, who firmly pushed his hand away.

Bellino's ‘obstinacy' in refusing him what he wanted threw Casanova into the kind of childish sulk he had already exhibited on part of the journey between Naples and Rome with Donna Lucrezia, for he had already spent fifteen or sixteen golden sequins to satisfy his curiosity, and had so far failed to get anything in return. Determined to get his money's worth somehow, he began to fondle little Cecilia and Marina when they returned. ‘With all three of us seated in front of the fire eating chestnuts, I began to distribute kisses,' he wrote. ‘And Bellino, in turn, shows no lack of compliance. I touch and I kiss the budding breasts of Cecilia and Marina, and Bellino, smiling, does not stop my hand from slipping inside his ruffled shirt and grasping hold of a breast which leaves nothing to doubt.'
¹¹

‘Girl, or boy, what does it matter!' laughed Sancho Pico when Casanova told him of his dilemma. As long as the castrato was pretty, who cared what sex he was? Casanova clearly did care. Desperate to know Bellino's real sex, he bribed Cecilia to reveal it, but she claimed that she had never seen her oldest brother naked. The sexually frustrated Casanova then let Cecilia satisfy him in another way – by spending the night in his bed. She was twelve years old, physically undeveloped and, she claimed, a virgin. ‘I did not quibble with her,' Casanova wrote in his memoirs. ‘Love is the divine sauce that makes that particular little morsel delicious. Cecilia was charming, but I had not had time to desire her; so I wasn't able to say to her, you have made me happy; it was she who said it to me; but I wasn't much flattered by it.'
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The child's compliance earned her the generous sum of three doubloons. Not wanting to be outdone, her sister Marina – only eleven years old but, Casanova noted, more physically developed and sexually experienced than Cecilia – earned a similar sum to have full intercourse with him the following night.

In the eighteenth century, Casanova's behaviour, which today would be regarded as criminal, was not that unusual. The concept of childhood as we know it scarcely existed at the time. In France there were no laws to prevent the rape or sexual abuse of children. In England, the age of female consent, which in 1275 had been fixed at twelve years old under canon law, had in the late sixteenth century been lowered to just ten. Child prostitution was a common fact of life among the desperately poor, for destitute parents regarded their daughters as a potential source of income, one of the few commodities they had to sell. And wealthy men were willing to pay a high price for the privilege of deflowering a young virgin, partly due to the widely-believed myth that it would cure them of venereal disease.

However, even by the standards of the time there was something distinctly unsavoury about the fickle ease with which Casanova switched from pursuing the fifteen-year-old castrato to seducing both his pubescent sisters, and it earned him Bellino's contempt. Contempt turned to disgust a few days later when the castrato accompanied Casanova to Ancona's port. Here they boarded a Turkish vessel, and were left alone in the captain's cabin for a few minutes with a beautiful Greek slave girl. Without exchanging a single word with the slave, Casanova immediately unbuttoned his breeches, pulled her on to his lap and had sex with her. And, to Bellino's amazement, the slave complied ‘like a bitch which only listens to its instinct'.
¹³

As Casanova had perhaps intended, Bellino was deeply shocked by this behaviour, which ran completely contrary to his own romantic nature. Or rather, to
her
romantic nature. For, as Casanova suspected, Bellino was in reality a young woman disguised as a castrato. Her name, he tells us, was Teresa Lanti, and she was born in Bologna around 1730.

Although Casanova rarely, if ever, disguised the names of his thespian lovers, there has always been speculation about Teresa Lanti's identity. She has been named as any number of eighteenth-century sopranos, the most popular being Angiola Calori, a
Milanese singer who achieved fame in London in the late 1750s and early 1760s. There was, however, a real Teresa
Landi
, born in Bologna on 15 May 1731 to parents Luigi Landi and Flavia Gambarini.
¹⁴
Furthermore, a sumptuous portrait of a singer bearing her name hangs today in the theatre museum of the famous La Scala Opera House in Milan, although no one has ever been sure of the painting's real provenance.

Whatever her true identity, Teresa told Casanova that she grew up as the only daughter of a poor widower who worked for the city's Institute of Science, where several men bearing the name Landi are known to have been employed at the time. When she was twelve, her father took in a lodger, a talented castrato in his late twenties who was to end Teresa's lonely childhood and transform her life. In his memoirs Casanova identified him as the celebrated singer Felice Salimbeni, but it is far more likely from the date and place of his death that he was Salimbeni's direct contemporary, the Milanese castrato Giuseppe Appiani.

On the verge of great success in Bologna in 1742, Appiani, as Teresa later told Casanova, took on as his protege a local youngster named Bellino, and sent him to study with a singing teacher in the nearby city of Rimini. At the same time he fell in love with his landlord's eleven-year-old daughter. Entranced by Teresa's beauty and wonderful singing voice, he taught her everything about music that his own singing teacher, Nicola Porpora, had taught him.

His reward, Teresa said, ‘was such as his affection forced him to ask of me; I did not feel humiliated to grant it to him, since I adored him'.
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In short, she became his lover. Castrated men were widely presumed to be impotent and have no sexual desires, but this was not necessarily the case. Many castrati were far from sexless. The great Salimbeni smiled knowingly when people pitied him for having been castrated; the famous Farinelli fell passionately in love with his nephew's young wife; and in 1766
primo uomo
Ferdinando Tenducci caused a scandal by eloping with Miss Dora Maunsell of Limerick, a well-connected young Irishwoman whom he later married in Cork. Tenducci was a star in both England and Ireland:
his voice, immortalised by Lydia Melford in Tobias Smollett's novel
Humphry Clinker
, published in 1771, was said to be ‘neither man's nor woman's; but it is more melodious than either; and it warbled so divinely, that, while I listened, I really thought myself in paradise'. His fame did not stop Dora's outraged family from kidnapping her and having him thrown into prison. Despite this, Mr and Mrs Tenducci stayed together, had two children and later published a full account of their relationship and subsequent persecution.

Teresa worshipped her father's lodger. Although she later reassured Casanova that ‘men like yourself are, without doubt, to be preferred over those who resemble my first lover' (one can presume that this was a great relief to the great seducer) Appiani was the exception. ‘His beauty, his mind, his manners, his talent and the rare qualities of his heart and soul' made her prefer him to all the whole men she had met up until that time. In addition, he was modest and discreet, rich and generous. Castration had turned him into a ‘monster of adorable qualities'.
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But within a year of arriving in Bologna, he was offered engagements to sing in Ferrara and Venice, and Teresa was heartbroken at the thought of parting from him. When, just before his departure, her father suddenly died of a malignant fever, she was inconsolable. Unable to leave her all alone in Bologna, her lover took her with him as far as Rimini, where he planned to board her with the same music teacher who was currently training his young protégé Bellino.

Tragically, Bellino had just died. Appiani immediately hatched a daring plan that would allow Teresa to continue her musical education and ensure that they would eventually be able to live together without incurring society's disapproval. From now on, she must pretend to be Bellino. In this guise he would take her back to Bologna and board her with the real Bellino's mother, whom he would pay to look after her while she continued her musical training. In future, Teresa would have to sleep and dress alone to prevent her true sex from being discovered, and when her breasts developed people would think nothing of it ‘for having
too much bosom is the usual defect of our sort'. In four years' time her lover would send for her to join him, and from then on they would live together as two castrati and no one would be able to criticise them for it. In short, in exchange for publicly renouncing her sex, Teresa would have a lucrative singing career and the man she depended on

From that moment on, Teresa effectively became Bellino. It was a complicated, risky and often humiliating deception for a girl who was little more than a child. Dressed in the dead boy's clothing, she returned with her lover to Bologna, where the real Bellino's younger siblings – Petronio, Cecilia and Marina – were tricked into thinking that she was their real brother whom they had not seen for some years; only Bellino's bereaved mother knew the truth. Since it was common practice for castrati to have to undergo intimate examinations by priests or theatre owners anxious to avoid prosecution by the Church for unwittingly employing a female singer, Appiani supplied Teresa with a small prosthesis that would give her the appearance of having a penis. It was ‘a kind of cat-gut, long, limp and as thick as one's thumb, pale, and of very soft leather' surrounded by an oval of transparent skin five or six inches long. Teresa quickly learned to attach it to her own genitals with gum tragacanth, a glue made from a shrub.

Once he had settled Teresa with her new family, the castrato left Bologna and Teresa had a premonition that she would never see him again. She was right: thirty-year-old Appiani died soon afterwards in the nearby city of Cesena, of erysipelas, a disfiguring skin disease known as St Anthony's Fire. For the second time in a few months, Teresa was bereaved. Since she had no other means of support she continued to live with Bellino's mother who thought it best to continue the deception in the hope that her new ‘son' might one day make the family's fortune on the stage. In the meantime the woman found a singing engagement for ‘Bellino' in the city of Ancona, where her surviving son, Petronio, was employed as a female dancer.

A precarious, almost farcical existence on the road began. While
Petronio put on a ballet dress and danced in the female chorus of the theatres they worked for, Teresa donned breeches during the daytime and, at night, put on a dress and sang castrato roles. Her reputation soon grew. By the time she was fourteen her alter ego Bellino had engagements in Ancona and Rimini and even in the Holy City itself, and since ‘he' looked so feminine, each time ‘he' performed in a new city Teresa had to glue on her false penis and endure a degrading examination by the priests before she could work. She was risking disgrace, prosecution and a severe punishment by breaking the law against women performers, and her life was made even more unpleasant by the men who constantly molested her in the hope of procuring ‘illicit and dreadful favours' in return for the money she and her family so badly needed. Homosexual men who believed that she was a boy and wished to use her as such made Teresa so angry that she feared she would stab one of them. Heterosexual men who were convinced that she was a woman pestered her with terrifying requests to inspect her mutilated genitals.