Free Casanova in Bolzano by Sándor Marai

judgment on me, on a writer, and a Venetian writer, at that! The bigwigs of Venice took it on themselves to shut me away from life, from sunlight and moonlight; they stole an important part of my time, of my life, a life that is nothing more than a form of service undertaken for the community. . . . Yes, that, in my fashion, is the service I perform! I serve the community! . . . And they dared take sixteen months of life from me! A plague on them!” he declared lightly but firmly. “A pestilence and plague on Venice! Let the Moors come, let the pagan Turks come with their topknots and cut the senators into delicate little pieces, all except Signor Bragadin, of course, who was a father to me when I had no father and who gave me money. I’m glad I remembered him. In fact I must write to him immediately. May shame and desolation be the lot of Venice who threw me, the truest son of Venice, into a rat-infested cell! I will make it the mission of my life to revenge myself on Venice!”
    “Bravo!” cried Balbi enthusiastically, his fat face, yellow and warty as a marrow, beginning to glisten. “You are right, Giacomo, I understand you. I feel the same. I might not be a Venetian when it comes down to it, but I, too, know how to write. Well said: a plague on Venice. I’m with you there, believe me.”
    But he could not finish what he was saying as the stranger suddenly seized him by the neck and set about strangling him.

 
     
    “How Dare You Curse Venice”
     
     
    “H ow dare you curse Venice?” he gasped. “That’s for me to do! Do you understand? . . . I will take care of Venice!” His voice was terrifying. He struck his breast with his left hand and his face was strangely twisted in the heat of the moment, scarcely human, like the half-comic, half-horrific masks worn by Venetians at the wildest peak of the carnival. His right hand was gripping the friar’s shirt collar and lapel while his left hand hung in the air like a bird of prey, blindly seeking the dagger he had just deposited on the mantelpiece. And so they retreated together toward the fireplace, Giacomo dragging the friar, whose face slowly changed from its customary marrow color to a bright puce as the grip tightened. His hand located the dagger on the marble shelf, seized it, and raised it high in the air. “How dare you curse Venice?” he repeated, calmly this time, the point of the dagger raised, his victim pressed against the wall. “No one except me is allowed to curse Venice! No one else has the right! You understand? No one!” He spat the words out, not simply in a figurative sense but quite physically, his lips swollen, the boiling white-hot saliva issuing from his yellow gums and spraying the friar’s face as he spoke: it was as if something in the excited human cauldron within him had suddenly boiled over and the contents of his entire life were bubbling and spitting, and had started to overflow. He was pale, a grayish-yellow, all passion and fury. “I’ll curse her myself!” he reiterated, whispering the words into the ears of the terrified, silent, and by now perfectly blue friar as if they were a seductive promise of pleasures to come. “I alone! Only a Venetian is allowed to do that! What do you know, how could you know?! . . . How would you know, you loafers, vagrants, wastrels, and layabouts? You might as well claim to know the courts of heaven as to know the least thing about Venice! You sit in the taverns in the alleys of the Merceria, sipping sour wine, and think you are in Venice! You stuff your guts with fish, flesh, and fowl, with pâté and long strings of pasta, with
dolce latte
and other smelly cheeses, and think you know Venice! You lurk in cheap bordellos, tickling the fancy of some Cypriot whore on a rotten mattress, and because you can hear the bells of St. Mark’s in the distance you make believe you are part of Venice! You stop by the balcony of the Doge’s Palace, cheering with the crowd,