The News from Spain (19 page)

He played the mandolin, and made up songs to sing to her. He liked to hold her in his lap and tell her an entirely preposterous version of what he had done that day—assassinations, space travel, stem-cell experiments, icing cakes for a royal wedding. He loved food and stayed skinny. He burped, farted, talked fast, said what he thought, asked for what he wanted, and was the happiest person she’d ever been to bed with. He was right there, not showing off, not acting, just happy. He was someone she might not have fallen in love with if she’d been older than twenty-four—but she was twenty-four, and she was crazy about him.

His movie was finished and got a lot of attention at festivals. Then it was released and it got even more attention. Johnny didn’t seem surprised at any of this, but Elvira was; she had privately thought the successful-director thing was a kind of fantasy, more real than the wedding cakes and assassinations but basically along those same manically buoyant lines. Now he was rich, he was traveling. He didn’t ask her to come
with him and Elvira didn’t ask to go. Her work had become interesting—not the gallery job, which still paid her bills, but the painting. She’d graduated from stones to big pieces of buildings: the corner of a roof, a piece of bas-relief above a doorway, intersecting with the sky or a piece of pavement, and sliced off at unexpected angles by the edge of the canvas. She’d gotten her work into a group show, sold a couple of things.

Then one night she got into the bathtub with a stack of magazines—something Johnny had taught her; he said that reading in the bath was one of life’s supreme pleasures—and in the front section of
¡Hola!
she saw a picture of him with an actress. Wow, she thought, you made the tabloids. That’s penetration.

Bad word, as it turned out. The caption said that Johnny was “linked” to the actress.

And that he was divorcing his wife of six years in order to marry her.

There was a smaller, black-and-white inset photo of Johnny with a different woman, whom the caption identified as the wife—his second wife.

Elvira got out of the bath and went over to the phone, naked. She stood there, dripping, with the phone in her hand and realized she had no idea where Johnny was, and no way to reach him. It was ten o’clock at night. She dialed his office and left her name and number on the switchboard answering machine. It’s an emergency, she said. Please track him down and ask him to call me. She had been seeing Johnny for nearly three years, and this was the first demand she’d ever made. She had been incurious, independent—had noticed him noticing other women, but had never worried or even wondered about whether he did more than look. Work was the big thing in her life, work and then Johnny; she’d assumed that his life was a lot like hers.

He didn’t call. What could he have said? And what could she have said—you asshole, you shithead, you prick? She left more messages at his office, always at night; if she couldn’t talk to Johnny she wanted to talk to a machine, didn’t want to have to deal with a real person who would only mirror back to her how crazy she sounded. You asshole. You shithead. You prick. You bastard. You liar. She went to the gallery; she came home. She smoked. She drank so much that one night she was standing at the kitchen table and the next thing she knew she was lying on her back on the bathroom floor, with blood on her forehead. She considered smashing the mandolin, which he’d left on the floor of her bedroom. She took a piece of paper and wrote on it, “Don’t marry him. He lies,” and wondered how to get it to the actress in Hollywood. She felt sorry for the wife. She studied their faces in
¡Hola!
The actress was pale with red hair, fresh and certainly lovely, but with narrow blue eyes and a determined little mouth. A killer, Johnny. You’ve picked yourself a killer. Good. The wife was softer, older and, Elvira thought, more beautiful. Dark hair, dark eyes. An open face, an open-collar shirt. A man’s shirt? Johnny’s? With the tip of her forefinger she traced the planes of the wife’s face. She got out a pad and some charcoal and made a sketch. She did another in pen and ink. She went in to her studio—she hadn’t been there in weeks, since the night of the bath and the magazine—and spent a couple of nights painting the wife’s face in oil, on a piece of board. Then she did the actress. That long white neck, that slash of lipstick.

A man came into the gallery one day just before it closed.
Johnny
, she thought (wistfully? Vengefully? She wasn’t sure); but then she saw that it was in fact one of Johnny’s friends—someone who worked in the office, a guy Johnny had known
forever, a Johnny wannabe, wearing a Johnny-esque leather jacket and skinny jeans. “You’ve got to stop calling,” he said.

“Oh, really? Why is that?” Elvira asked. “Did Johnny send you?”

“Let’s go get a beer. I want to talk to you. Really. I think I can put this whole thing into some perspective for you.”

Tired, curious, lonely, and very much wanting the beer, she went with him. They sat at a sidewalk table under an umbrella. Elvira drank, smoked, shivered, listened to him, and at the end of it said, “And this is supposed to make me feel better?”

“My point is, this is just how Johnny is. Always has been. Always will be. He just loves women.”

“Someone who really loved women wouldn’t need to fuck so many of them.”

“Okay, you’re right. Part of it is the chase, the game. But look, he stayed with you two years—”

“Three.”

“All right, even better. Three years. He must have cared about you to stay that long, right?”

“But according to you, he was screwing around behind my back that whole time. What did you tell me?
How
many did he sleep with when you guys were filming in Germany last summer?”

He held up his hand. “Stop shooting the messenger. I’m only the messenger.”

“Well, thanks for the message,” Elvira said, and she got up and left before he could make a pass at her.

“He gave me numbers,” Elvira told Rosina, years later. This was several months into their friendship. They were driving
together in Elvira’s car, out to the country, where she had invited Rosina to come for lunch. “Actual numbers. They kept a list, he and Johnny. This many women in Turkey, this many in Germany. It was
statistical
. But crazy too. The numbers were delusional. A hundred in France, six hundred and forty in Italy. ‘Stop,’ I said. ‘This is too much for me.’ And you know what he said?”

“What?”

“He said, ‘And you haven’t even
heard
the news from Spain yet.’ ”

Rosina laughed; and Elvira did too, driving in that car with a good friend on a summer afternoon almost thirty years after these things had happened.

4

Here is a story: something I have not put into my memoirs. At least, not in this form, not yet. I have written six volumes so far, telling different stories, or changing and improving on the stories I have already told. My goal is entertainment, not veracity.

I had been living in Dresden, engaged in translating the Psalms and sleeping with my landlady and her two daughters. Each had her own attraction. The mother was avid, grateful, adept, and guilty; we played many operatic scenes of renunciation and reconciliation. The daughters were plump and rosy, and of course one was dark and one was fair, one tall and one tiny, one brazen and one aloof and trembling. But it was the triad that I found most alluring, far more than any of the three individually. The meat, the wine, and the sweet: together they make a satisfying dinner.

One night, very late, I came home to find my servant waiting
for me in the street. He warned me not to go inside. The landlady, in one of her fits of penitence, had appealed to her brother for protection; and this brother, a gambler known for his violent temper, was waiting for me in my bedroom, armed, and in a rage all the more fiery because he himself had designs on one of his nieces. I heeded the warning and left that night for Vienna, taking with me only what I had in the pocket of my cloak: a little money and a letter from a Venetian poet and librettist praising my verses.

The letter did its work. The court composer to whom it was addressed welcomed me and recognized my poetic talent immediately, so that my first meeting with the emperor, which I had hoped would be an opportunity to petition him for a position, became instead an occasion to thank him for the one he had just bestowed on me. My life has been a series of inventions and reinventions, losses and reinstatements. This was perhaps one of the most successful, though it would not be the last.

At that time, Vienna was packed with composers, all clamoring for words. The Germans, the Italians, the French, and the English came asking me for stories, songs, dramatis personae. This week’s sensation would be forgotten next week; always there was the desire for more, for something new. My first efforts contained little that was good. When my work was praised and I replied, “It is nothing,” I was speaking not out of modesty but as one who is telling the truth. As for the music, it, too, was mediocre. I listened in vain for beauty, originality, taste, but heard only caution and ambition. And blame—when a new opera failed I was denounced not only by my rivals but by my collaborators. My fellow theater artists—that nest of stinging ants—contended that the music, the scenery, the singing, the costumes, all had excelled. It was my words that were at fault.

I learned and improved. My royal patron’s faith in me was not misplaced. One of my operas met with tremendous approval, and I found myself in great demand at court and among the ladies. I was flooded with new commissions and amorous proposals, many of which I was forced to turn down but only in order to take full advantage of those I accepted. It was at this time that I lost my teeth, at the hands of a scoundrel posing as a dentist, enamored of a young lady who named me as her lover even though I had never met her. It was also at this time that I met, at a party, the small ethereal composer whose music owes its fame to several ears then in my possession: my own ear, which recognized immediately the quality of his music, and that of the emperor, which I had gained as a result of my recent great success.

The composer and I went to work. I sat up late, writing in my lodgings. The landlady’s daughter—how dull my life, and my story, would have been without landladies and their daughters—was a silent, luscious girl of sixteen who would come to me whenever I rang my bell, bringing coffee, cake, and herself. Ding-ding! I would ring and she would come. I was forever hungry and thirsty. She kept me from my work, but she brought me what I needed to keep working. In the morning, not rested but unfailingly refreshed, I would dress and call on the composer. He and his wife (who, I cannot resist mentioning as an aside, was the daughter of one of his former landladies) would listen with delight to the words I had written, delight matched only by my own when he played for me the music to which he had set my words from the day before.

Those were the happiest days of my life, working at something while knowing how exceptional it was, not yet having finished it but knowing how beautiful it would be when finished.
Friends—musical artists—would drop by of an afternoon to listen to a small air on the piano, or to try out one of our new canzonettas. Bravo! they would cry. They were excited, they urged us to finish; but they were at a remove from us: eager spectators hanging over the fence. The composer and I were playing alone together with our characters and their yearnings and follies, in that delightful enclosure where the noble meets the ridiculous.

The reader will understand, and forgive me, if I embroider. The subsequent success of the work has perhaps colored my memory of its creation. Surely we quarreled? Surely we ventured down alleys that led nowhere? Surely the piece did not play itself out for us with perfect grace and ease as if we were its audience and not its makers? But it did. I vow to you, even allowing for a memory somewhat dimmed by age and sweetened by time, that it did.

And here you will permit me, reader, to digress upon the subject of memory. I have referred to previous volumes of my memoirs, through which perhaps the reader has already been gracious enough to roam, enjoying my earlier and somewhat varied accounts of my travels and accomplishments. I myself have not gone back to peruse them. They were written at a different period of my life—rather, at many different periods, inspired less by my need to remember than by my need for funds, and perhaps, if I am entirely truthful, by my wish for fame, and yet at the same time by a humble desire to share with others the many things I have seen and the many vacillations of my fortunes. Writing, and even more so, revising, has become my way of understanding and fixing my life, as a painter paints many layers and then fixes his colors with a glaze. Life is transitory. Words have the power to correct, conceal, and endure.
Who that has read Casanova’s stories of his adventures can distinguish where his true glory lies: as an adventurer, or as a storyteller?

Yet although I have never reread these earlier volumes, I recall them well: with pride but also, I will confess here, with confusion and some unease. I recall that I have written elsewhere, in one of those earlier volumes, the phrase “Those were the happiest days of my life.” I wrote that about the days I spent working on a different opera, with a different composer. At the time I lived those days, it was true. At the time, years later, when I wrote it, it was true. But now, fifty years after my time writing operas in Vienna, and thirty years after the publication of my first volume of memoir, I find myself considering and reconsidering these events and declamations yet again. Time and judgment collaborate to produce farce, and farce in turn contains much truth; major characters upon the stage may turn out to be lackeys in disguise, while the figures we have overlooked in the midst of much frenetic action unmask and reveal themselves as divinities. The piece I wrote with Martini that gave me such joy and triumphant gratification at the time of its creation and performance has been largely forgotten, while the ones on which Mozart and I worked are held in increasingly reverent esteem. I will not say that I have revised my memory accordingly, because I am not so easily swayed by the fickle judgments of others.
But I have learned that memory is inconstant, which is perhaps its greatest danger and yet also its greatest virtue, the way in which it most truly mirrors our experience upon this earth. I have written within this very hour, of my collaboration with Mozart, “the happiest days of my life.” If my wife were to walk into the room right now and ask me which of my days have been the happiest, I would tell her truthfully: “All the days I have spent with you.”