What Casanova Told Me (32 page)
Read What Casanova Told Me Online
Authors: Susan Swan
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction, #General, #Historical, #Psychological
Luce was sitting by herself on a public bench near the Hagia Sophia. The dome of the old Byzantine basilica rose like the shell of an overgrown pink turtle above the glistening waterways of Istanbul. The building had been converted into a mosque after Istanbul fell to the Turks in
1453
, and Luce had read in her guidebook how a famous Ottoman architect had solved the problems of its fragile dome by shoring up the sides of the building with buttresses. But it wasn’t the history of Istanbul that occupied her thoughts. She had spent the morning worrying about the fate of Asked For Adams. After breakfast, she found a note from Ender, suggesting they meet at Topkapi Palace at noon.
The translation he had given her had stopped just before Asked For Adams was about to meet Casanova’s lost love, but
Luce suspected him of having held something back. What was he afraid of telling her? She was sure by now that Jacob Casanova had loved her ancestor, and there was no danger that he would choose Aimée. Yet Ender had given her a strange smile when she asked if he was drawing out his translation to prolong the story’s suspense. She didn’t know him well, but what she had seen of his nature made her suspect he might be protecting her.
She saw him coming now, sauntering unchallenged through the gauntlet of loiterers near the taxi stand. She rose to her feet and called his name and he came hurrying up the hill towards her, grinning. Together they went through the Bab-i Hümayun, the Imperial Gate of Topkapi Palace. Inside its grounds, she saw rose gardens and closely cropped lawns shaded by plane and fir trees that grew next to spiky cactus and myrtle bushes. Aside from the delicate peaks of the palace towers, she and Ender could have been in a well-tended monastery somewhere in Switzerland. If Athens with its smoggy golden light was like a large Mediterranean town, Istanbul was a leafy European city on a spectacular sea-river. Except that in the palace’s imperial heart had lain the great harem. The Ottomans adopted the practice of polygamy that they’d adopted from the Arab nomads they had conquered.
Ender touched her arm and pointed out a tall stone arch with a panel of golden Islamic script above the entranceway they were about to pass through.
“The Seraglio,” he said solemnly. They joined the tourists moving through its door like eddying fish in a current, past the high, dark halls with iron grilles and tall wood-panelled cupboards.
They followed a tour group into the Sultan’s apartment and stood by a huge screened window where Luce imagined
Mahmud must have watched his mother Aimée and other harem women bathing in the pool below. According to the guide, the Sultan would select a new partner during a visit to his mother’s apartment. If he liked the girl serving their tea, he would give her the symbolic handkerchief. She was surprised to see that the lavishly tiled bathroom of the Sultan’s mother was adjacent to the bathroom of her son, the Sultan. The harem, she mused, with its numerous women, camouflaged a semi-erotic dependency between mother and son.
“What are you thinking about?” Ender whispered.
“Aimée—I am imagining her living here.”
“Don’t forget, to be a slave in the harem wasn’t equivalent to slavery in the States,” Ender replied. “These women and their servants were treated as dependants, not inferiors.”
“The wives were sequestered. That sounds like the fate of an inferior to me.”
“Yes, perhaps. It was never good to be a woman in earlier times.”
“My mother would have said it was better in Neolithic times.” Luce smiled.
They left the harem’s maze of shadowy tiled rooms and crossed the lawn to inspect the Treasury Pavilion. In the upper gallery, they found a portrait of Selim III, the sultan to whom the scribe had been writing. Selim looked kind, with droopy, sleepy eyes and a narrow nose. Selim’s murderers, Ender told her, were renegade janissaries who didn’t like Selim’s attempts to reform the army with French military practices. Nearby hung the portrait of Mahmud, Aimée’s son. Ender whispered that Mahmud didn’t resemble Selim, perhaps because they had different mothers in the harem. The painting showed a man with large, intelligent eyes and a small, angry mouth partly hidden by a dark beard.
“He looks as if he spent his reign dealing with frustrations,” Luce said.
“Maybe so. Mahmud fought to change the dress code to the fez and the frock coat,” Ender replied. “But he was more successful with introducing Western reforms than Selim.”
Out in the courtyard, they found a quiet bench in the shade, away from the bustle of the palace.
“You’ve finished the scribe’s letter, haven’t you?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was not the right time. I wanted to prepare you. I mean, Luce, I didn’t know how to prepare you—so I waited to see if an idea would come to me.”
“You’re warning me, aren’t you, that I shouldn’t expect a happy ending?”
He said nothing. He took some pages out of his knapsack and handed them over. She began to read with a certain hesitation.
In the private apartment of Nakshidil Sultan, Miss Adams saw plump
bergères
thick with pale satin cushions and giant mirrors in swagged golden frames and pretty satin-wood tables, on whose surfaces rested sweetly scented bowls of potpourri.
Miss Adams lost her tongue as Nakshidil Sultan came into the apartment, a vision of Imperial loveliness in a silk gown embroidered with emeralds and ruby-red carnations. When Nakshidil moved, her wheat-coloured hair glittered with the light of tiny diamonds. Wordlessly, Miss Adams handed her the old gentleman’s letter and then she waited.
Nakshidil Sultan handed the letter back to Miss Adams with a shake of her head.
“There is some mistake,” Nakshidil Sultan said. “It is not addressed to me.”
When Miss Adams read it, she began to sob brokenly. I dutifully submit my translation of the old gentleman’s baroque French.
My darling Asked For
,
By the time you read this, I will be on a coach to Edirne, Finette on my lap and Tante Flora’s wig on my head to keep the autumn chill from my bones. And you will know everything, dear girl. By that, I mean it is you I love—and that I have adored you from the first moment I experienced your kindness on the public barge sailing into Venice.
Do not be sad, my soul. It was not my intention to arouse longings I cannot fulfill. Yet it is our longings that provide us with the text of our lives and lead us to the faiths we need to enact our destinies. And our paradox is this: the true art is not to satisfy our longings but to learn how to cherish them.
Aimée’s letters, which first won me your sympathy, were made up of words I borrowed to please you from the letters of all the women I have loved and who loved me in return. Darling girl, with you I have felt more contented than ever before. I am certain I never will feel as contented again.
In a few hours, the coach will come and I will return to Bohemia and complete the history of my life. Many times, I thought of telling you the truth about Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, and knowing your kind nature, I was certain you would forgive me. But I cannot ask you to join an old crustacean when life and travel calls you. Know that I will never forget you, and that I salute you, Asked For Philosophe.
And so, you and I have come to the end of our journey together. I have spoken to our new friend who will look after you in Constantinople when I am gone. I have given him enough monies to see you safely to America or wherever your heart might direct—these are held in trust by him for your use.
My hope is that you will travel more easily through the world than I, Giacomo Casanova, who fled across Europe and Asia, seeking love and pleasure and resting nowhere for long. Wherever you alight, Asked For, may home await you. And may your adventures inspire a thousand faiths, large and small.
Your loving Jacob
Miss Adams was greatly upset when she returned to our lodgings. I am not certain she heard me when I told her that I had promised the Chevalier de Seingalt that I would take her into my home if troubles befell him. And naturally, I had not had the slightest warning I would be called upon so soon to make good my words.
The poor woman lost her faculty of speech and did not talk to my wife or me for three days. She would turn her head away when Aisha approached her with food, and to my knowledge she did not eat. Instead she left the house and went for walks by the shore of the Bosphorus, not caring whether rain fell or the sun shone. Aisha was finally able to entreat her to join us at the table with bowls of sweet-smelling soup.
That said, Your Majesty, it pleases my wife to have another grown woman about. Our three young sons and two young daughters are now attempting words and discovering language. And Aisha often complains that my work
as your Imperial scribe leaves her with no adult company, and she frequently catches herself babbling in a child’s tongue.
And now I come to my final recommendation, but first I wish to point out that Nakshidil Sultan told Asked For Adams that she did once meet the old gentleman. When she was a girl, she recalled meeting a tall, bewigged gentleman by the name of the Chevalier de Seingalt near Nantes walking his dog in the garden. He tipped his hat and made a friendly remark to her about the swans on the grounds. Nakshidil Sultan also recalled leaving behind a small portrait of herself near P——— in Martinique. It seems the old gentleman claimed the portrait as his own and wrote the love letters under the name Nakshidil Sultan to mislead Miss Adams. It is indeed a curious story, and I do not know as I approach my final summing-up the exact nature of Miss Adams’ relationship with the old gentleman. Clearly, it involved deep affection on both parts.
All that remains is for Your Majesty to accept my recommendation that Miss Adams reside under my supervision where she will be out of reach of scheming courtiers until such time as she is ready to leave. She is a dependable woman who has shown herself courageous and trustworthy with the young prince, and he has repaid her with his respect and friendship. The old gentleman, by contrast, turns out to be a practised dissembler, although Miss Adams defends him and sees good in him still.
She is pleased by the prospect of living with my family in our home. Yesterday she and my wife enjoyed
keyif
in our garden by the Bosphorus, and Miss Adams was pleased to learn that my wife speaks a little English, although Aisha must work harder to perfect her grammar.
And now I come to the moment when I must offer thanksgiving for the overflowing generosity of Your Imperial Self. The execution of my duties on Your behalf is reward enough, although I trust that Your Majesty, in Your Superior Wisdom, will allow Miss Adams to reside in my home so that I may enjoy the pleasures of speaking my father’s tongue with my house guest. O Glorious Master, such conversations are precious interludes that help to bring my dear old father back to life.
This was written by the Poor, the Wretched, the Neediest of God’s Mercy, the scribe Mustafa known as Sari, Son of Mustafa the Scotsman, May he rest in peace and may God forgive our sins and draw a veil over our mistakes! Amen! Completed in Konstantiniye, the capital, in the year 1212 of the Hijrah of the Prophet.
Luce put down Ender’s translation of the scribe’s letter and gazed with a stricken face at the Golden Horn. It was past noon, and the harbour was jammed with freighters and tourist boats bearing sightseers.
“It’s so sad,” she whispered.
“He’s Casanova—he has to keep moving.”
“But he didn’t, Ender. He went back to a castle in Bohemia and spent his last days there as a librarian for a count who mistreated him.”
“Well, then, perhaps his pride wouldn’t let him be a burden on someone so young. His bad health in Thrace must have been humiliating for him.”
“He was protecting Asked For from his old age? Is that what you mean?”
“Perhaps. I had my suspicions about those letters from Aimée Dubucq de Rivery. I have been reading the copy of the old journal you loaned me and I found some of Aimée’s grammatical constructions awkward. For instance, she sometimes left off the article that French grammar requires. In Italian, you don’t need to use ‘the’ so frequently.”
“I suppose I made allowances for the French because it was written in the eighteenth century.”
“Yes, I agree, the errors are subtle. But I was struck by a phrase in Aimée’s last letter to Casanova: ‘You are the man the most important of
all
the men.’ Obviously, I thought to myself, Aimée has made a grammatical error and forgotten the comma after ‘you are the man.’ Otherwise why would she say such a thing? She was shut away from the world in the harem, and yet the sentence suggested she had other lovers.”
“I don’t understand. Why would Casanova put in an extra ‘the’? Are you saying that he intended to leave it out?”
“My hunch is that he knew his tic so he put in an extra ‘the’ to compensate and still ended up writing French like an Italian. There are certain native tendencies we all acquire while learning a language and most of us carry those tendencies to the grave,” Ender said smiling. “Even Casanova.”