There is something not right with this boy – Giacomo Casanova. Blood runs from his nostrils – a bad sign! We are in Venice, in the stifling dog days of summer, when August opens the torrid wings of a door made of embers. It is 1733, and the boy is eight years old. Now is when he feels his intellect awaken: head against the wall, nostrils draining blood. Drop by drop, in clots, deep red on the floor of the room. It is the first recollection of conscious life – years later, convalescing in the library of the castle of Count Waldstein, in the harsh Bohemian winter, all icicles, chill, and solitude – that the old chevalier, Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt, will retain.
Fortunately, the boy with the nosebleeds has a diligent grandmother. Her name is Marcia, like the wife of Cato the Younger, who saw, in the Purgatory of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the nobile castello where the spirits of the virtuous ladies of pagan eras dwelt. Marcia, the grandmother, has something pagan about her as well. When the day darkens, she washes the boy’s face with cool water, and without anyone’s knowing, sets off with him in a gondola for the island of Murano, dwelling of witches who will find a remedy for the illness that makes him bleed. There is an old woman there seated on a straw pallet, surrounded by black cats.
The grandmother and the witch speak in whispers. A gleaming silver ducat flashes in the hand of the healer, and young Giacomo – stanching the flow of blood from his nose with a handkerchief – is shut up in a box. They take him out, wrap him in a cloth scented with the smoke of mysterious potions; they make him swallow six tablets that resemble sugared almonds, and massage his wrists and the nape of his neck with an odiferous ointment.
That night, when the gondola has returned from Murano and the moon has a wheaten pallor silhouetted against the sky, young Giacomo in his bedroom is roused by the first traces of daylight. A woman emerges from the chimney: in sumptuous clothing, she wears on her head a crown of precious stones that look like fire. With languid majesty, very slowly, she approaches the bedstead; sitting on the cool bedcover, she empties the contents of various phials over the young man’s head. She speaks in a murmur, in words never before heard, and closes the scene of bewitchment with a kiss. The next day, the boy’s grandmother demands complete discretion. The episode must remain secret.
Lucid – the handwriting in the manuscript is exquisite – but inwardly wounded, the aged Casanova, in the prison of the library, presumes the visit from the nocturnal enchanter was a dream or a masquerade. And yet, from that day, no more blood ran from his nose. And now, old Casanova, evoking the birth of conscious life, recollects those verses of Horace that speak of magical terrors and nocturnal spirits and the prodigies we come across in dreams. He remembers the exotic and tranquil Venice of the paintings of Longhi: salon scenes, with figures like wax sculptures, gentleman draped in vermillion cassocks, ladies in ivory lace or flowered gowns. And in the center of this detailed and minimal world, domestic witchcraft leaves a blotch, vivid as blood, bitter as memory.