Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [140]
There were times, Lucia complained to her sister, when she felt her only reliable, if unpleasant, company were the rats in her apartment. While Lucia was still in Paris, Paolina had come over to Palazzo Mocenigo to fill in the holes, but evidently the paper fillings had not been enough. Every night, bands of famished rodents scurried across the bedroom floor and scratched the crumbling wooden legs of the bed. “A very large one kept me up all night,”2 Lucia complained to her sister in a typical note.
On the few occasions when Alvise was at home, he could be very impatient with Lucia; but she had reached a point in her life when she was weary of taking the extra step to accommodate her husband’s surliness. They had lived apart for so much of their married life that neither had learnt to live with the other’s moods and rhythms and habits, and they no longer had the energy to try to make things better between them. Tempers flared easily, and the arguing was fairly constant.
The tension between them was deepened by a new revelation: Alvise had an illegitimate daughter living on the mainland. When Lucia and Alvisetto were in Vienna, Alvise had had an affair with Carolina Faldi, wife of Piero Faldi, a family friend. Carolina had given birth to a girl who was christened Luigia in honour of Alvise—Alvise being the Venetian equivalent of Luigi. She was now a boarder at a school for girls in Montagnana (incidentally, the same town near which Colonel Plunkett’s regiment was encamped when he had met Lucia sixteen years earlier). Alvise cared deeply for his daughter. He often went to see her, and he made sure she and her family were well provided for.
One night, the shouting at Palazzo Mocenigo became so loud, the words uttered by husband and wife so awful, that Alvise felt compelled to call in Paolina to try to bring back a minimum of civility to his marriage. Paolina rushed over, and on her way in she was shocked to see the frightened looks on the faces of the staff. Alvise and Lucia seemed shaken. Paolina heard them out separately, and grew even more dismayed when she realised how deeply they could still hurt each other after nearly thirty years of marriage. Lucia had criticised Alvise for his ceaseless womanising, and Alvise had lashed back by attacking her own morality and by bringing up a past they had both worked so hard to bury. They had lost control over themselves, hurling insults to each other in a vortex of mutual recrimination. How could she possibly bring true peace between them, Paolina wondered. “In the beginning, it was not my sister’s intention to offend you,” she wrote the next day to Alvise, “nor do I think you wished to offend her by giving your humiliating reply.” But they had gone too far to resolve matters by simply telling each other they were sorry: an exchange of perfunctory apologies would be meaningless at this stage. There was only one way of putting such awfulness behind them, Paolina concluded: “To erase all memory of what happened.”3 They should try to look into each other’s eyes, she said, as if they had never spoken those words.
The winter of 1814–15 turned out to be especially harsh. The cold brought more hunger and disease and a deadly air hung over the lagoon. Lucia’s old governess, the beloved Madame Dupont, died of pneumonia. And Paolina lost little Marietta to tertian fever—her third daughter to die after Isabella and baby Lucia. “Big” Lucia was heartbroken for her sister. She commissioned a tall marble cross from the funerary sculptors over on the Fondamenta Nuove, the embankment that faced the new cemetery on the island of San Michele, and asked Alvisetto to compose an inscription in Latin verse to honour his ten-year-old cousin. “Please avoid a generic composition,” she pleaded. “Write about her real virtues and qualities. And don’t rush through this: set some time aside to concentrate