Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [18]
Alvise read Lucia’s Roman chronicles with pleasure. It was a way for him to feel close to her as he travelled from Venice to the Mocenigo estates on the mainland, checking on the late summer harvests. And yet he could not help notice that Lucia still remained slightly aloof. True, she filled her letters with declarations of love and devotion to him, and of loyalty to his family, but beneath the surface of her entertaining anecdotes, she kept a reserve about herself. When he prodded her to open her heart to him she was caught somewhat off guard. She turned to her father, but to no avail. So she told Alvise that if she seemed reticent it was because she feared creating excessive expectations. Why live in a dream world while they were still strangers “and then risk falling all of a sudden from on high?” While Alvise wanted her to be more expansive, she remained cautious about expressing “those feelings which I still can’t quite explain, given that all I know about you comes from a small portrait, from the flattering reports of others, from the very interesting things that you write to me and from the good things you do.” All of this, she said,
has encouraged me to hold you in esteem and to love you and to be grateful to you. It could be that I feel even more, but I don’t know for sure as I have no experience in these matters. I hope, for many good reasons, that I will adore you, for this is the way it should be. But give me time, and if it will happen, and no doubt it will, then my deeds will tell you even better than my words.56
Lucia was startled by her own candour.
I don’t even know how I could have said as much, and I assure you that no one else has tampered with this letter. My father told me: “I don’t want to be involved in this, just speak with your heart.” So I consulted my heart, and this is what came out, and I don’t even know if it’s right or wrong…Enough now, I hope you will soon be at the end of this eternal wait and that I will have the very fine pleasure of seeing you at last to tell you in person how much I wish to be your loving and loyal spouse.57
At Palazzo San Marco signs of the Memmos’ impending departure were everywhere. “People are busy filling trunks, carrying furniture down stairs, beating nails into crates and boxes,” Lucia wrote to Alvise with excitement. “Everything now tells me I will soon be leaving.”58 On 1 October, the new Venetian ambassador finally arrived in the vicinity of Rome, and the Memmos drove out to greet his convoy in a rented carriage drawn by six horses. They moved out of the palazzo and went to stay temporarily at the house of a Venetian friend next to the Ghetto. Memmo introduced his successor to Roman society even as he tried to sell him his furniture and silverware to reduce his debts.
As Lucia was making her last courtesy rounds, she received another jolt from Alvise. How should they meet, he wanted to know. Should they plan it or did she want him to surprise her by turning up unexpectedly somewhere along the way? Lucia did not hesitate: “I choose the latter course, even if it is the most dangerous.”59 Would it be Padua, she wondered dreamily, or perhaps Ferrara? What if Alvise were to journey as far south as Bologna? The waiting game had a new element of suspense.
Memmo had wanted the return journey to Venice to be something of an educational trip for his daughters. He had planned to visit Tuscany extensively, in order to observe from up close the innovative changes introduced by Grand Duke Leopold