He had planned to stay in Venice for a week or two, but he had remained for nearly a year. What bound him was the shimmer of the place, the sense of a world given over to duplication and dissolution: the stone steps going down into the water and joining their own reflection seemed to invite you down into a watery kingdom of forbidden desires, while the water trembling in ripples of light on the stone facades and the arches of ancient bridges turned the solid world into nothing but air and light, an illusion, a wizard’s spell. It was a fragile, trembling world that might vanish at any moment — and perhaps that was the secret of the feverish life that began at night, when women wearing the masks of wolves and birds of prey beckoned from passing gondolas, while torchlight rippled in the black water and dark figures disappeared into doorways. Venetian women were out for pleasure, and Don Juan had bedded so many of them that he sometimes had the sense that Venice was an immense brothel composed of watery corridors and floating bedrooms hung with murky mirrors and paintings of swooning women ravished by centaurs. At other times, leaning back against the cushions of his gondola, gliding under stone balconies along narrow, sinister canals that suddenly opened into broad waterways alive with crowds on bridges, pleasure parties in gondolas, the tremor of jewels in torchlight, laughter and music everywhere, and now and then an ambiguous cry, perhaps of a young girl being thrown down in a doorway or a man being stabbed in a crooked alley, it seemed to Don Juan that he knew exactly where he was: he was on the black, fiery lake he had seen one day in a church fresco, a priestly vision of the damned that he, Don Juan Tenorio, who in a moment would step into the gondola of a woman wearing the mask of a leering satyr, preferred to call A Vision of Paradise.
Here conquest had been easy — perhaps too easy. Although not every Venetian woman was by profession a whore, the kinds of resistance he had encountered were, with a few refreshing exceptions, entirely conventional and perfunctory. A married woman who set out with the intention of giving herself to the notorious Don Juan would lower her eyes, turn her face to one side to avoid a full kiss, and push away the hand resting on her carefully half-bared breasts; sometimes tears of remorse would form in eyes already clouding over with desire. Under such easygoing conditions Don Juan, who liked nothing better than overcoming a fierce resistance, by force if necessary, found himself contriving difficulties that Venetian society failed sufficiently to provide. He would abduct a woman and lead her blindfolded and weeping to a room so dark that she could not see his face; he would frighten willing victims with a show of rage, so that their bodies stiffened and he had to possess them brutally. Sometimes he disguised himself as a gondolier, or a humble glassblower, or a Greek sailor in a red cap. In order to animate the game, he occupied not only a fashionable palazzo on the Grand Canal, but also a modest set of rooms in a mean alley, in always shifting decors intended to support the role he happened to be playing. That sense of playing a part began to exasperate him, and deepened his mood of discontent; even when he reverted to Don Juan, his legend trailed after him like a heavy velvet cloak. One black-eyed beauty had asked him whether it was true that a famous street in Seville was populated entirely by women who had given birth to his bastards. Don Juan, confirming it with a bow, wondered if it might be true.
A recent escapade continued to disturb him. He had passed a brilliantly successful night, making separate assignations with the handsome wife of a spice merchant and her beautiful daughter, and ravishing each of them an hour apart in his private gondola, which had been fitted with a small cabin hung with blood-red curtains. He had then followed a dark, narrow canal that led to an unfamiliar part of the city, where he climbed a flight of watery steps to a maze of high chambers and marble stairways rising to the third-floor bedroom of a silk draper’s wife. She awaited him in her curtained bed with an anxious face and a transparent nightgown. In the candlelight her dark-ringed nipples resembled the open mouths and thrust-out tongues of a pair of gargoyles he had glimpsed that morning as he glided past a church. She protested that the hour was late, that her husband would return at any moment, that she was a respectable woman, the mother of a beautiful little boy; Don Juan disrobed without answering her chatter, and her protests had changed to cries of pleasure when there was a sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs. Don Juan considered remaining on top of the wife and killing the husband when he drew aside the curtain. He changed his mind and began to dress without haste as the footsteps grew closer. He had just fastened his sword belt and placed his great hat on his head when the door handle began to turn. Juan removed his hat and bowed to his inamorata, sweeping his plumes across the stone floor. As the door burst open to reveal the silk merchant wearing the mask of a weeping clown, Don Juan turned to the man and bowed again, a long, slow, insolently calm bow, then sprang to the window. It was a warm night — a good night for a swim. The weeping clown drew his sword, shouted “Thief! Murderer!” and rushed forward as Juan leaped from the window. As he plunged through the night air toward the canal, where his gondolier waited some twenty feet away, Don Juan saw everything very distinctly: he saw an orange peel floating on the moonlit black water, he saw a blue satin slipper on a stone step lapped by ripples, he saw, in a window across the canal, a figure in the mask of a haughty queen fondling the naked breast of a woman in the mask of a grimacing monkey, and at the same time he saw, in his mind, the merchant’s wife with her eyes widening in terror, a vein in the neck of the silk merchant as he came into the glow of the candle, the big sapphire glittering on his finger, and he saw himself, falling as if slowly through the night, holding on to his plumed hat with one hand — and it seemed to him that he had seen these images before, and that he was nothing but a third-rate actor in a provincial troupe traveling from small town to small town with a play called Don Juan Tenorio—and a sorrow came over him as he understood that he had finished with Venice, that he must change his life.
Like many men who prey on women, Don Juan had occasional fantasies of a different life. Sometimes he imagined himself a stern, pale scholar bent over a volume of Aristotle in his library, while the brilliant blue light coming through the tall windows changed to plum blue to dove gray to black. At other times he was a humble monk, hoeing a row of peas in the monastery garden. These idle fancies lasted no longer than the next sight of a pretty girl — or an ugly girl with an interesting walk. Don Juan had no illusions about his nature: he craved pleasure, intense pleasure, and the most extreme of all pleasures was to be found in the bodies of women. If he felt a darkness lying across his life, a dissatisfaction deep in his blood, it was because he had become aware of a slight diminution, a lack of zest. It might be true that the women of Venice were a little too willing to be debauched, but it was also true that the most fastidious women had always proved Venetian in the end. And if they did not, and his blood was up, he asked no permission and never looked back. No, what he needed wasn’t a different life, but a more intense version of this one — a life of sensual pleasure uncorrupted by vague dissatisfactions and elusive ennuis. What he longed for was more desire, a madness of desire, a journey into feeling so intense that he would ride through himself like a conqueror of unknown inner countries. He had perhaps become a little stale. And as he lay in the darkness of his curtained bed, with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes closed, like the stone effigy of a king, Don Juan tried to see the new life that he knew awaited him, if only he could learn to see in his own dark.