A Carnival story
Feb. 24th, 2009 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pallas_athena
Io ch'armato sin hor d'un duro gelo
degli assalti d'amor potei difendermi
ne l'infocato suo pungente telo
puote l'alma passar o'l petto offendermi
Hor che il tutto si cangia al novo cielo
a due begli occhi ancor non dovea a rendermi
si si disarma il solito rigore
arda dunque d'amor
arda il mio core.
I who am armoured now in hard ice
From the assaults of Love will be able to defend myself.
Not even his fiery, stabbing arrow
Can pass into my soul or wound my breast.
Now that all things are changed under a new sky
To two beautiful eyes I must not again surrender.
If this same rigour should disarm itself
It burns then with love
It burns, my heart.
Seen through the eyes of a mask, all men are lords, all women beauties.
Men know this. It is why they come in flocks to Venice in the winter. I think it is also why our city’s law allows the wearing of masks in public from October until the beginning of Lent. Certainly we do not go masked for anonymity: in a city this small, no one is anonymous. We who once oversaw a trading empire that stretched from Asia to the Adriatic now have nothing to do but gossip. The cut of your clothes, the rhythm of your step, the way you hold a fan or climb out of a gondola will give you away, mask or no. Masks are useless for disguise. I think we Venetians simply could not bear to look at each other’s bare faces all year round.
Women of my city used to wear the moretta, the round black full-face mask with eyes but no mouth. It did not tie on round one’s head-- quite unthinkable, with the coiffures worn then. Instead, a button with a long shank was sewn on where the no-mouth was, and you held it in your teeth as you went about your business. Men wrote little poems praising it for keeping women quiet. Nowadays that style is worn only by whores, who say it makes them feel safe.
These days, the fashion for ladies is a simpler mask, covering only the eyes. I wear a plain black velvet one during daylight hours. For evening occasions I have an assortment decorated with plumes to match each of my gowns. My husband’s brother Antonio, who often steps out with me, likes to affect the Plague Doctor’s mask, with its green glass eyes and long beak. He is an odd exception, though-- most men past thirty leave the fantastical commedia masks to the students and apprentices, and wear the simple and practical bautta, which covers the face and slopes out over the top lip. You can eat wearing the bautta, but you cannot kiss. Not comfortably, at least.
When I was sixteen, I fell terribly in love. He was thirty-three and perfect. I was not yet married then, and I walked always under the eye of my mother who watched me as a cook watches a chicken. I was somewhat in vogue as a beauty, and other girls of my age would watch me as hens watch the cat. It was Girolamo who I first saw watching me as a man watches a woman.
Of course I was his. We outwitted my mother, my aunts, my duenna and all the eyes of Venice to steal moments, words, kisses. We kissed in corners at the Casino, in gardens, in churches, in black gondolas in the darkness of narrow stinking canals. That was when I learned how best to kiss someone wearing a bautta: he must sit, and you must lean back across him and let him hold you so that you may raise your head and reach his lips beneath the shelf of his mask. He must be quite still while you do this-- if he tries to bend his head down to you, it won’t work. You must trust him to hold you, and he must trust you to kiss him. You may get a stiff neck eventually, but if you’re in love you won’t mind.
We were found out in the most idiotic of ways. Exchanging letters is always a risk, of course; you’re much better off agreeing a set of signals in person and relying on those. But I was an accomplished student of music in those days, and I could not resist sending him a canzonetta he had inspired me to write. I was proud of it, you see, and I knew I could never sing it where anyone might hear. It had a little refrain that went Mio Girolamo, io l’amo, io l’amo! It rang sweetly round and round in my head as I went about my daily tasks in the long, slow hours until our next rendezvous. Before the month was out, it rang out round and round the streets of Venice too, for Girolamo had left it on the desk in his study where a servant found it, who showed it to Girolamo’s wife, who sent it back to my mother-- after having it copied and delivered to every gondolier in town. All that spring my mother confined me to the house, but it seemed my little song was the hit of Carnival. Certainly, I never heard the splash of an oar without an echoing falsetto chorus of O mio Girolamo! Io t’amo, io t’amo! aimed up at my window. When I was allowed to appear in public again, my teeth clenched as if under the moretta, it got no better. The gondoliers of our city write the most creative filthy verses anywhere in the world. Let no one dispute this, for it is so.
After that, my mother quite sensibly abandoned her hopes of marrying me to an aristocrat. My two younger sisters, luckily, did better in that regard once their turn came. When my own marriage was arranged to an elderly doctor from the University at Padua, I obeyed faultlessly. He is a good man. His essays and treatises are eagerly sought after by students of medicine, who listened to his lectures with upturned faces until last winter, when he became unwell.
His brother Antonio and I brought him back here to my city, to the house my family left me, since they had no sons and my sisters now live in far grander places. When we crossed the Piazza for the first time, I paused a moment to look up at the horses of Constantinople who paw the air from the roof of San Marco, and felt the years in Padua blow away like morning haze. I cannot describe to you what it was like to come home at last, and to remove from their cedar box the masks whose touch on my face is like an old friend’s.
Antonio and I look after my husband and see that he wants for nothing. His room is always warm and dry, with a window where he can see the sky from his bed. The light is good for reading. We have had all his books brought from Padua, and he is never without one or two close at hand.
Girolamo is a great man now in the running of this once-great city. I see him from time to time at the Casino, or in the street, or at an assembly. Once, at a ball we were both attending, the band actually struck up with that damn song. I froze in place. This is how it was:
This is absolutely the last moment I should glance in Girolamo’s direction, but I can’t resist; I never could. I meet his gaze, which he must have been practicing for months, to get so perfectly blank. He eyes me through his mask and says nothing. I take Antonio’s arm and step away, trying to keep from smiling-- I know the impossible man is laughing under the Plague Doctor’s beak. I can feel his laugh through the velvet of his coat, in his ribcage, against my arm. I’d never have thought it, but Antonio is practically a Venetian these days. Masks quite suit him.
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no subject
on 2009-02-24 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-02-24 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-02-25 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-02-26 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-02-24 01:14 pm (UTC)Oh, how delicious that feels in my mouth!
no subject
on 2009-02-24 09:53 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-02-24 11:08 pm (UTC)Vita de la mia vita,
Tu mi somigli pallidetta oliva
O rosa scolorita;
Nè di beltà sei priva,
Ma in ogni aspetto tu mi sei gradita,
O lusinghiera o schiva;
E se mi segui o fuggi
Soavemente mi consumi e struggi.
Torquato Tasso (1544-1595)
I defy anyone to say "tu mi somigli pallidetta oliva" (honoring the doppi, of course) and not instantly turn into Marcello Mastroianni.
no subject
on 2009-02-24 11:22 pm (UTC)Also, I took your challenge and am now Marcello Mastroianni. Not sure what to do about this.
no subject
on 2009-02-24 07:11 pm (UTC)I was just yesterday daydreaming about the moretta-- it becomes a perfect metaphor in your story here.
When will you write your novel? I am dying to read it.
And when are we going to Venice? soon, soon, soon.
I am so grateful to know you, my brilliant friend.
no subject
on 2009-02-24 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-02-24 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-02-24 10:22 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-02-24 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-02-24 10:26 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-02-25 08:55 pm (UTC)I feel quite honoured to be singing the setting, now...
no subject
on 2009-02-26 01:27 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-02-26 03:25 pm (UTC)