What Casanova Told Me by Susan Swan Read Free Book Online Page A

blunt manner had often been misconstrued by her students. She had grown up in Brooklyn and she struggled with the reserve of Canadians like Luce who didn’t come out and say what they meant. You had to guess with Torontonians, and if you failed to get it right, you were judged silently. Nevertheless, she had enjoyed passing on her knowledge about women’s role in Neolithic cultures, even though many students were bored by the subject now. Young women dismissed her generation of feminists. It wasn’t as if women, like men, had a solid tradition to fall back on. Who read Susan Griffin now or studied Daly or Christ? Only Kitty had seen through her carapace and knew the pride she took in her teaching.
    Smiling wistfully, she removed the small photograph she had tucked inside the pages of her guidebook and stroked it sadly. “Kitty, I’ll do better with your girl next time,” she whispered.
    She put away the photograph. It was time to run through the little chores she had planned for herself that evening.First, from the innards of her overstuffed purse, she extracted a manuscript titled “The Minoan World: A Peace-Loving Matrilineal Society or a Culture Based on Blood Rituals and Human Sacrifice?” Lee’s face softened at the sight of the large, generous
o
’s and
a’s.
Kitty had written her essays out in longhand first; it was a superstition of hers, that thoughts come more easily using a pen than a keyboard. Lee had misplaced the published version, but she had wanted to consult Kitty’s text for her talk on the bogus Minoan sacrifice: she’d need all the ammunition she could muster for her audience in Athens. She set the manuscript aside and took out a postcard of the Piazza San Marco that showed pigeons sprinkled in the air like flashing coins flung by a beneficent Doge. The brightly lit scene did nothing to convey the vortex of perpetual motion in the square, where tourists walked through flying birds. In slow, deliberate strokes, she wrote to her old colleague Martin Wells:
    Dear Marty,
    Arrived this morning with Luce on the early plane. I am fine if a little low. To be expected in the aftermath of the last eighteen months. I trust Luce will be able to look after herself. Today we found a mother-daughter pair in an old bookshop. A Bronze Age copy, Caynkenar type, provenance unknown. Luce pleased by my token. Consoling myself with gourmand fare.
    Lee
    P.S. The chair of our division sent me your course description with a note, urging me to come out of retirement. Thanks for thinking of me, old friend. I haven’t forgotten the good times we had teaching together.
    She stuffed the card into her purse and withdrew a well-worn black-ringed notebook. A syllabus had been Scotch-taped to its inside page:
    Humanities 6491 . 02 : Special Topics: The Journey of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, from a multi-faceted Neolithic deity to one limited primarily to sexual functions. The course will emphasize the cultures of prehistoric Europe and Minoan Crete whose people worshipped an all-powerful goddess of regeneration.
    It wasn’t good to think of work when she felt disoriented by memories of Kitty. Yawning, Lee put away her notebook and went to her window overlooking the moonlit domes of San Marco. She had meant what she said to Luce about Venice. Aside from the occasional pickpocket, there was nothing to fear. The residue of an atavistic loss lingered beneath its legendary suspension of time—perhaps a futile longing for the mainland the Venetians had abandoned over a thousand years before. To escape Attila and his army of Huns, they’d cut their ties with what remained of the Roman Empire and built homes on the swampy islands a few miles from shore. Like me, Lee thought. I, too, have chosen isolation, but the price of isolation is the pain of feeling abandoned and forgotten. Was that why she had asked Luce to come with her to Crete and offered to pay the girl’s fare?
    Her gesture had surprised her