Casanova's Women (27 page)

Persuading himself that the only way to save Caterina from being exploited by her brother was to marry her, Casanova moved in for the kill. Having assured Signora Capretta that his intentions towards
her daughter were strictly honourable, he spirited the girl away on an afternoon excursion to a private
casino
on the island of Giudecca. One minute Casanova was talking to Caterina about obtaining her father's permission to be wed in ten days' time, and waiting until then to consummate their marriage. The next minute he was piling on emotional pressure designed to make her give in to him straight away. Was Caterina sure that he loved her? Did she believe him capable of failing her? Was she certain that she would never repent of marrying him? If the answer to these questions was yes then they should marry immediately with God as their witness and make themselves happy. A public church ceremony and marriage documents could wait! Carried away by this emotional outburst, Caterina immediately exchanged vows with Casanova. Then, assuring her that they were truly married, her new husband persuaded her to complete their nuptials in bed.

Casanova, who was twice Caterina's age, knew exactly what he was doing. ‘An innocent girl who despite her fourteen years has never loved, or mixed with other girls, knows neither the violence of desires nor what it is that gives birth to them, nor the dangers of being alone with a lover,' he wrote of her. ‘When instinct makes her fall in love with a man, she believes him worthy of all her trust, and she thinks she can only make him love her by showing him that she has no reservations about him.'
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She surrendered her virginity in what he described as a heroic manner, and then submitted to six hours of energetic and passionate sex. The experience took its toll on her. By the time Casanova took Caterina home late that night her eyes were ‘surrounded by such dark circles that she looked as if she had been beaten up. The poor child had sustained a combat which had positively changed her into another being.'
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The amorous combat was resumed several times over the next few days thanks to Pietro, who guessed what had happened and used it to blackmail Casanova into standing surety for his money-making schemes. Since Caterina was convinced that her father would have no choice but to let them marry if she became pregnant, and believed that conception was most likely to occur
if she and Casanova reached orgasm simultaneously, they took every opportunity to work towards this goal.

By the time that Christoforo Capretta returned to Venice a few days later his son Pietro was in prison for debt and, though he did not know it, his previously innocent fourteen-year-old daughter had not only been deflowered by Casanova, she was also pregnant by him (and so, incidentally, was Teresa Imer). Convinced in the heat of the moment that he wanted to legalise his ‘marriage', Casanova persuaded Senator Bragadin to grant him a sufficient income to guarantee Caterina's substantial dowry and then despatched him to see Capretta to plead his cause. Astounded by the senator's proposal that his young daughter be allowed to marry an actress's son with no real position in life, and no money other than the income Bragadin gave him, the merchant summoned Caterina and gently cross-examined her. Terrified of admitting the truth, she swore that she had only met Casanova five or six times, and always in her brother's room where he had asked her if she would consent to marry him. Justly suspicious, Capretta immediately bolted the side door that led from his son's room on to the street. Two days later, while his wife lay sick in bed, he summoned one of his sisters, who was a nun at Santa Maria degli Angeli, and ordered her to take his daughter back to the convent, giving Caterina only fifteen minutes' warning that she was to leave the house.

By mid-June Caterina was enrolled as an
educanda
in the Murano convent, where she was destined to remain until her marriage five years later and where the beautiful nun Marina Maria Morosini – or Mother Maria Contarina, as she was known within the convent walls – took her under her wing. She discouraged Caterina from befriending the other girls, gave her French lessons twice a day and showered her with passionate kisses of which, Caterina told Casanova, he would have had a right to be jealous if the nun had been a man. The abbess had been instructed not to let Caterina correspond with anyone outside the convent, and she was threatened with excommunication if she attempted to do so. Nevertheless, by bribing a lay-nun by the name of Laura, she managed to exchange
letters with the man she now regarded as her husband. With Laura acting as a go-between, Casanova smuggled Caterina some money; and with the unwitting help of her mother, whom he persuaded to believe that he was really a pious man, he managed to send her a miniature portrait of himself concealed in a secret compartment of a ring which bore on its exterior a tiny painting of her namesake, St Catherine.

Caterina had already paid a high price for falling in love with Casanova. First she had lost her precious virginity, then her freedom. Worse was to come. The Bellini
Barbarigo Madonna and Child
that hung above the altar in the Angeli's church portrayed a glowing vision of motherhood, but Caterina's pregnancy would have no such happy outcome. At the end of July she had a miscarriage. Forced to hide it from all the choir-nuns except Marina, who helped her to keep the affair secret, she lay propped up in bed on pillows, bleeding copiously into a large wad of linen napkins which Casanova purchased from a Jewish merchant in Venice's ghetto, and which Laura smuggled in and out of the convent underneath her own dress. It was possible, even likely, that Caterina would die, and Casanova knew that he would hold himself responsible if she did. Overcome with guilt, he temporarily moved into Laura's rag-strewn house on Murano in order to be closer to Caterina; and when he saw the number of blood-soaked napkins which the lay-nun pulled out from under her skirt when she came home at night he ‘nearly dropped dead. It was sheer butchery.'
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Eventually Caterina recovered from the ‘illness' that had mystified the entire convent. By the end of August, when Casanova attended a profession at the Angeli church in order to try to catch a glimpse of her, she looked older and yet more beautiful than ever. She seemed so pleased to see Casanova, even from a distance, that he decided to visit the church on every feast day from then onwards. But the sordid miscarriage, and her internment, had already dulled his romantic feelings towards Caterina. Celibacy was definitely not on his agenda: he ‘had been born to have a
mistress and to live happily with her'.
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Unwilling to wait four years to marry the girl whose life he had all but ruined within the space of a fortnight (and he was not finished with her yet), Casanova was already on the lookout for a new relationship.

Marina suspected from the start that Caterina had been sent to the convent because she had a lover. Yet it did not occur to her that he was the same man who had attracted her so strongly in church that she had dared to write to him. When Casanova replied to her anonymous letter he assured her that he was free of ties, and she had no reason to doubt his word. Within days he took up the offer of visiting her in the convent in the company of her close friend the Countess Segura. While the two women chatted through the iron grille in the visiting-parlour, a masked Casanova sat nearby observing the beauty who had propositioned him by letter. By the time he left he was madly in love with Marina, and fully resigned to being unfaithful to Caterina, who, he justified, could only be pleased at a liaison designed ‘to keep me alive, and consequently to preserve me for her'.
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The following afternoon he returned to the convent alone as the nun had instructed him to if he wished to see her again. Claiming that he was a relative, he asked for Mother Maria Contarina in the countess's name. Suddenly Marina's courage failed her. After keeping Casanova waiting for an hour, she told her elderly lay-nun to inform him that she was ill the whole day. Instead, the woman told him that she was ‘busy all day'. Marina was devastated, for she guessed that he would take it as an insult. She was right: always sensitive about his humble origins, Casanova could never bear to be slighted by anyone. Furious at having been trifled with by the fickle nun, he returned Marina's letters to her along with a cold but somewhat restrained note pardoning her folly and at the same time warning her never to repeat it with another man.

It took five or six days for the misunderstanding to be cleared up and for the two would-be intriguers at last to meet face to face in the convent visiting-room, alone and with only the iron communication grille separating them. After fifteen speechless minutes,
and with little time left for preliminaries, Casanova explained that he was a man in easy circumstances: his life in Venice consisted of theatre, society and gambling; and the nun should know that he loved spending money on the woman he adored. For her part, Marina admitted to the stranger – whose name she still did not know – that she already had a lover who gave her money, who was absolutely her master, and from whom she kept no secrets, not even this new liaison. They arranged to meet at Marina's
casino
two days later, and she gave Casanova the key to it. Promising him that her lover would not be present when they met, she reassured him that the man would nevertheless be delighted for her.

Casanova had never been so directly propositioned before, let alone by a nun, and he was intoxicated as much by the danger of the situation as by Marina's manner and beauty. By the time he left the visiting-room he had all but forgotten Caterina as well as every other woman he had ever professed to love. ‘It was as if I had never been happy in love,' he wrote, ‘and I was about to be so for the first time.' The idea of having illicit sex with the beautiful, sexually-experienced Bride of Christ excited him so much that he could neither eat nor sleep until he next saw her: ‘The affair involved a vestal. I was to taste a forbidden fruit. I was to trespass on the rights of an omnipotent husband, seizing from his divine seraglio the most beautiful of all his sultanas.'
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Any fantasy he had of taking her in her nun's habit would have to wait, for when he turned up at the candle-lit
casino
two days later Marina, who had arrived there earlier, was dressed in elegant secular clothes. Contrary to what she had promised the stranger, her lover was present, but hidden in the secret chamber, from where he watched their every move. By prior arrangement with de Bernis, Marina allowed her new admirer to kiss her and even to uncover her breasts, but she would let him go no further. As a seductive technique, her ‘charming refusals' worked magic on Casanova, particularly since they came in the form of ‘arguments given in words as amorous as they were energetic and reinforced every moment by loving kisses which melted my soul'.
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The couple spent the entire night kissing
passionately, and eventually fell asleep half-clothed on a day-bed in front of the fire.

When he next visited the Murano convent Casanova suspected that he was being followed by a spy, so by mutual agreement he and Marina decided that their second private meeting should take place at his own
casino
in Venice. As with his offer to take Henriette to Parma in his private carriage, there was a drawback to Casanova's plan: although he was still being financed by Bragadin, his income was not sufficient for him to own a
casino
. Eager to impress Marina, he rushed out and rented the most expensive one he could find – an elegant five-roomed apartment a hundred paces from the San Moise theatre, close to the Piazza San Marco. Formerly the property of Robert d'Arcy, the fourth Earl of Holderness and the English ambassador in Venice until 1746, it contained an octagonal room with mirrored walls, floor and ceiling, a salon decorated with painted Chinese tiles depicting erotic scenes, and a boudoir with a bathtub and English-style water-closet – rare novelties in Venice, where plumbing, if it existed at all, was distinctly primitive. Designed to preserve the anonymity of the lovers who met there, the rooms were served by a kitchen hidden behind a revolving dumb-waiter which discreetly blocked off the servants' view of the dining-room. Since he was anxious not to be found wanting in any respect when the nun visited him, Casanova first spent a night there alone and made the servants prepare him a test dinner for two with no expense spared. Always a generous host with a perfectionist's eye for detail, he pronounced the game, truffles, sturgeon and oysters served to him on Meissen dishes faultless, as was the champagne and the fine Burgundy wine. However, he reproached the cook for having forgotten to put out a platter of hardboiled eggs, anchovies, and prepared vinegars for making a salad, and insisted on having bitter oranges to flavour the punch in future as well as all the fresh fruit and ices the man could find. In response, the world-weary cook, who had no doubt seen it all before, rolled his eyes with a contrite air.

Mindful of Marina's safety, it was de Bernis himself, masked and disguised as a gondolier, who conducted her from Murano to
Venice's Campo dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo where she had arranged to meet Casanova behind the famous equestrian statue of the fifteenth-century warrior Bartolomeo Colleoni. The ambassador had disguised her as a masked male masquerader in black satin breeches teamed with a pink velvet coat and matching waistcoat embroidered with gold thread. Marina's hair was arranged in a masculine plait that hung all the way down her back to her knees, her shoe buckles were set with brilliants, her fingers were covered in valuable rings, and the neck of her ruffled shirt was pinned with a heart-shaped diamond brooch. In addition, de Bernis had filled Marina's pockets with all the accessories appropriate for a wealthy young nobleman: opera glasses, scented handkerchiefs, a case of toothpicks, a snuffbox and even a pair of fine English flintlock pistols, presumably so that she could protect herself from Casanova in an emergency. Casanova was overcome by her lover's generosity in presenting Marina to him in this way. Assuring the nun that, although she was not his first love, she would surely be his last, he wined and dined her before making love to her for seven hours, pausing only to engage in the odd fifteen minutes of intimate conversation. Since Marina demonstrated no sexual novelties to him (her experience was limited to one man), Casanova took it upon himself to enlighten her in the mysteries of the female orgasm and, he later hinted, to oral sex: she was ‘astonished to find herself capable of so much pleasure, for I had shown her many things which she had believed were fictions. I did to her what she did not believe she was allowed to ask me to do to her, and I taught her that the slightest embarrassment spoils the greatest of pleasures.'
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