The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  Within minutes—as Girolamo Marcello’s video camera whirred and clicked, as Archimede Seguso stared in silence from his bedroom window, as hundreds of Venetians watched from rooftops, and as thousands more all over Italy followed live television coverage of the fire—the roof of the auditorium collapsed with a thunderous boom and a volcanic eruption that shot flaming debris 150 feet into the air. A powerful updraft sent chunks of burning embers, some as big as shoe boxes, arcing over Venice like comets.

  Shortly after eleven, a helicopter appeared above St. Mark’s, swung low over the mouth of Grand Canal, and scooped up a tankful of water. Then it soared aloft again, banked over the Fenice and, to cheers from rooftops, dropped its water. A hissing plume of steam and smoke coiled up from the Fenice, but the fire kept burning undiminished. The helicopter turned and flew back to the Grand Canal to load up again.

  It suddenly occurred to Girolamo Marcello that his wife, Lesa, who was out of town, might hear about the fire before he had a chance to tell her that her family and her house were safe. He came down from the roof to telephone her.

  Countess Marcello worked for Save Venice, the American nonprofit organization devoted to raising money for restoring Venetian art and architecture. Save Venice was headquartered in New York. Lesa Marcello was the director of its Venice office. Over the past thirty years, Save Venice had restored scores of paintings, frescoes, mosaics, statues, ceilings, and building façades. Recently, Save Venice had restored the Fenice’s painted curtain, at a cost of $100,000.

  Save Venice had become a hugely popular charity in America, largely because it was set up to be, in a sense, a participatory charity. Save Venice would organize event-filled, four-day galas in Venice in late summer during which, for three thousand dollars a person, subscribers could attend elegant lunches, dinners, and balls in private villas and palaces not open to the public.

  In winter Save Venice kept the spirit alive by mounting a fund-raising ball in New York. Lesa Marcello had flown to New York earlier in the week to attend the winter ball. This year it was to be a masked ball, based on the theme of Carnival, and it would be held in the Rainbow Room on the sixty-fifth floor of Rockefeller Center. As he picked up the telephone to call his wife, Girolamo Marcello suddenly remembered that the ball was scheduled for this very night.

  THE TOWERS OF MANHATTAN GLITTERED in the late-afternoon sun as Lesa Marcello made her way to the telephone through a confusion of people rushing to finish decorating the Rainbow Room. The interior designer John Saladino was fuming. The unions had allowed him only three hours to install his decorations, so he had been forced to deploy the entire domestic staff of his twenty-three-room house in Connecticut, plus twelve people from his office. He intended to transform the Rainbow Room’s art deco ballroom into his version of the Venetian Lagoon by nightfall.

  “The Rainbow Room is dominated by a cabal of union-clad people,” he said, loud enough to be overheard by some of those very people. “Their role in life is to make everyone around them miserable.” He glared at a foursome of slow-moving electricians. “I’m decorating eighty-eight tables so that each one will represent an island in the lagoon. Over each table we’re suspending a cluster of silver, helium-filled balloons that will reflect candlelight from the table below, creating the effect of a glowing baldacchino.” Mr. Saladino looked around imperiously. “I wonder if anyone within the sound of my voice knows what a baldacchino is?” He was clearly not expecting an answer from any of the people inflating balloons or making centerpieces, or from the technicians loudly testing sound levels on Peter Duchin’s bandstand, or from the two jugglers rehearsing their act, clomping around on stilts, tossing balls in the air and spinning plates on the ends of their fingers.

  “A baldacchino!” said a barrel-chested man standing in front of an easel by the bandstand. He had long white hair, an imperial nose, and a silk scarf hanging loosely around his neck. “A baldacchino is our word for ‘canopy,’” he said. Then he shrugged and went back to setting up his easel.

  This was Ludovico De Luigi, one of the best-known contemporary Venetian artists. He had been brought to New York by Save Venice to help raise money at the ball tonight. In the course of the evening, he would execute a watercolor that would later be auctioned off for the benefit of Save Venice.

  Ludovico De Luigi was a man of supreme self-confidence and dramatic flair. His futuristic, Dalíesque paintings tended toward the metaphysical-surreal. Typically they were spectral landscapes of familiar Venetian buildings in stunning juxtapositions—the domed Santa Maria della Salute Church as an oil rig in the middle of an ocean or St. Mark’s Square as a body of water with a huge Polaris submarine surfacing and plowing ominously toward the basilica. Though verging on kitsch, De Luigi’s works were technically brilliant and always eye-catching.

  In Venice he was known as much for his public antics as for his art. On one occasion, he had been granted permission to display his sculpture of a horse in St. Mark’s Square, and without telling the authorities, he invited a notorious member of the Italian parliament to attend: Ilona Staller, a Radical deputy from Rome, better known to fans of her porn movies as “Cicciolina.” She arrived at St. Mark’s by gondola, topless, and climbed up onto the horse, proclaiming herself a living work of art surmounting an inanimate one. Parliamentary immunity protected Cicciolina from prosecution for obscene acts in public, so De Luigi was charged instead. He told the presiding judge, who happened to be a woman, that he had not expected Cicciolina to take her clothes off.

  “But, knowing Miss Staller’s history, Signor De Luigi,” the judge said, “couldn’t you imagine she would take her clothes off?”

  “Your Honor, I am an artist. I have a lively imagination. I can imagine you taking your clothes off right here in court. But I don’t expect you to do it.”

  “Signor De Luigi,” said the judge, “I, too, have an imagination, and I can imagine sending you to jail for five years for contempt of court.” In the end, she gave him a sentence of five months in jail, which was vacated in a general amnesty a short time later. In any case, tonight in the Rainbow Room, Ludovico De Luigi was going to paint a picture of the Miracoli Church as a tribute to Save Venice’s current, and most ambitious, restoration project. As he went back to mixing colors on his palette, Lesa Marcello picked up the telephone and turned toward the windows and the view of Manhattan.

  Countess Marcello was a dark-haired woman with a quiet manner and an expression of infinite patience. She pressed her free hand against her ear to shut out the noise and heard Girolamo Marcello say that the Fenice had caught fire and was burning out of control. “It’s gone,” he said. “There is nothing anybody can do. But at least we are all safe, and so far the fire has not spread.”

  Lesa sank into a chair by the window, dazed. Tears welled in her eyes as she tried to absorb the news. For generations, her family had played a prominent role in the affairs of Venice. Her grandfather had been mayor between the wars. She gazed blankly out the window. The setting sun cast shimmering red-and-orange reflections on the glass skyscrapers of Wall Street, creating an effect that made it look, to her eyes, as though the city were on fire. She turned away.

  “God, no!” Bea Guthrie gasped when Lesa told her about the Fenice. Mrs. Guthrie was the executive director of Save Venice. She put down the centerpiece she had been working on as a look of panic crossed her face. In an instant, the masked ball had been reduced to a horribly inappropriate frivolity, and it was too late to cancel it. Six hundred costumed merrymakers would be arriving at the Rainbow Room in a matter of hours, dressed as gondoliers, popes, doges, courtesans, Marco Polos, Shylocks, Casanovas, and Tadzios, and there was nothing anybody could do to head them off. The guest of honor, Signora Lamberto Dini, the wife of Italy’s prime minister, would certainly have to bow out, and that would only emphasize the inappropriateness of the ball. Clearly the party would turn into a wake. Something had to be done. But what?

  Bea Guthrie called her husband, Bob Guthrie, who was president of
Save Venice and chief of reconstructive and plastic surgery at New York Downtown Hospital. Dr. Guthrie was in the operating room. She then called Larry Lovett, the chairman of Save Venice. Lovett had been chairman of both the Metropolitan Opera Guild and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. In recent years, he had bought a palace on the Grand Canal and made it his principal residence. He reacted to the news with as much anger as sadness. Whatever the cause had been, he was certain that negligence had been a contributing factor, knowing the way things worked in Venice. Dr. Guthrie heard the news as he was coming out of the operating room. His shock was tempered by a dash of pragmatism. “Well,” he said, “there goes the curtain we just restored for a hundred thousand dollars.”

  Neither Larry Lovett nor Bob Guthrie could suggest any quick fix for the party. It would simply have to go on as planned. For one fleeting moment, they all wondered whether it might be possible to say nothing about the fire, assuming that only a few people would have heard about it before coming to the ball. But that, they decided, might only make matters worse.

  Bea Guthrie returned her attention to her unfinished centerpiece as a smiling, ruddy-faced man with dark, curly hair came walking into the Rainbow Room and waved to her. He was Eligio Paties, a Venetian restaurateur who had also been flown to New York by Save Venice to cook dinner for six hundred people tonight. He was just now pacing off the distance from the stoves on the sixty-fourth floor to the tables here on the sixty-fifth. As he walked, he kept looking at his watch. His main concern was the white truffle and porcini mushroom risotto.

  “The final two minutes of cooking happen after you take the risotto off the fire,” he was saying to the headwaiter walking beside him. “When it comes off the stove, it is absorbing water very quickly, and in exactly two minutes it will be done. It must be served on the plate immediately, or it will turn to mush! We have two minutes to get it from the stoves downstairs to the plates up here. Two minutes. No more!” When Signor Paties reached the far side of the room, he looked at his watch and then looked back at Bea Guthrie, beaming. “One minute and forty-five seconds! Va bene! Good!”

  Later in the afternoon, when the decorations were finished, Bea Guthrie went home to change, depressed, dreading the next several hours. But then the guest of honor, Signora Dini, called with an idea. “I think I know what we can do,” she said, “if it meets with your approval. I will come to the ball tonight. After the guests have arrived and the announcement is made about the fire, I will say, speaking for all Italians, that we are very grateful that this afternoon the board of directors of Save Venice agreed that all the money raised tonight will be dedicated to rebuilding the Fenice.”

  That would put a positive spin on the evening. The Save Venice board could be canvassed quickly, and they would surely agree. Suddenly feeling much better, Mrs. Guthrie went upstairs and laid out her harlequin costume in preparation for the ball.

  SIGNORA SEGUSO NEARLY WEPT FOR JOY when her son, Gino, and her grandson, Antonio, returned home. The moment the electricity had gone off, the flickering light from the fire had invaded the house, its reflection dancing and leaping over the walls and furniture, making it seem as if the house itself had caught fire. The Segusos’ telephone had been ringing constantly, friends wanting to know if they were all right. Some had even come to the door with fire extinguishers. Gino and Antonio were downstairs talking with the firemen, who were urging the Segusos to evacuate, as others in the neighborhood had already done. The officers spoke in lowered voices and with considerably more deference than usual, because they were aware that the old man at the window upstairs was the great Archimede Seguso.

  And Archimede Seguso would not leave the house.

  Nor would any of the Segusos consider leaving while he was still in it. So Gino and Antonio busied themselves moving furniture away from the windows, taking down curtains, rolling up rugs, and moving flower boxes indoors. Antonio went upstairs to the terrace, ripped the awning off its rod, and sprayed water on the roof tiles, which had become so hot that steam rose up from them. Signora Seguso and her daughter-in-law meanwhile put things into suitcases in order to be ready to flee the moment Archimede changed his mind. Gino, noticing his wife’s suitcase in the hall, lifted the lid to see what valuables she had put in it. It was filled with family photographs still in their frames.

  “We can replace everything else,” she said, “but not the memories.” Gino kissed her.

  Suddenly, there was another earth-shaking boom. The roof over the backstage had fallen in.

  A fire captain came up the stairs and told the Segusos, almost apologetically, that his men would have to run a hose through their living room to a window facing the Fenice, just in case the fire breached the wall across the canal. But first the firemen cleared a path for the hose. With care verging on reverence, they moved Archimede Seguso’s works of art in glass—the abstract, modernist pieces he had made in the 1920s and 1930s when most other Venetian glassmakers were still turning out flowery, eighteenth-century designs. When they laid down the fire hose, it was flanked by an honor guard of glass objects touched by Seguso’s genius—bowls and vases embedded with fine threads of colored glass resembling lace, or with undulating ribbons of color, or with tiny bubbles suspended in rows and spirals. There were remarkable solid sculptures of people and animals made from single masses of molten glass, a seemingly impossible feat that he alone had mastered.

  Gino came to his father’s bedroom door accompanied by the fire captain. The captain, rather than presuming to address the old man directly, turned to Gino and said, “We are very concerned for the maestro’s safety.”

  Signor Seguso continued to stare out the window in silence.

  “Papa,” said Gino in a gently pleading voice, “the fire is getting closer. I think we should leave.”

  Gino’s father kept his eye on the Fenice, watching as bursts of green, purple, umber, and blue flames punctuated the fire. He could see the flames through the slits in the louvered shutters at the back of the Fenice, and he saw their reflections on the rippling puddles at the bottom of the canal. He saw great, long tongues of fire licking out through windows and geysers of glowing ash soaring through holes in the roof. The winter air outside the bedroom window had turned blazing hot. The Fenice had become a furnace.

  “I’m staying here,” Archimede Seguso said quietly.

  IN CONVERSATIONS AT HAIG’S BAR, certain words kept coming up again and again, words that seemed to have nothing to do with the Fenice or with each other: Bari . . . Petruzzelli . . . San Giovanni in Laterano . . . Uffizi . . . Milano . . . Palermo. But there was another word, also frequently overheard, that tied them all together: Mafia.

  The mob had recently been engaged in arson and bombings. The most unsettling incident, in view of what was happening tonight at the Fenice, was the 1991 fire that destroyed the Petruzzelli Opera House in Bari. It was subsequently discovered that the Mafia boss in Bari had ordered the fire after bribing the manager to award him lucrative contracts for the reconstruction. More than a few people watching the Fenice fire believed that this was a replay. The Mafia was also suspected in the deadly car-bomb attacks that had destroyed parts of the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and the Gallery of Modern Art in Milan. The bombings had been interpreted as a warning to Pope John Paul II for his frequent anti-Mafia statements and to the Italian government for its aggressive judicial crackdown on the mob. Even now, in Mestre on the mainland shore of the Venetian Lagoon, a Sicilian don was being tried for the car-bomb murder of a tough anti-Mafia judge, his wife, and bodyguards in Palermo. The fire at the Fenice could be a heavy-handed warning to stop the trial.

  “The Mafia!” Girolamo Marcello exclaimed, speaking to friends who had joined him on his altana. “If they did set the fire, they could have saved themselves the trouble. The Fenice would have burned without any help from them. It’s been chaos over there for months.

  “Just after the renovation work started,” Marcell
o went on, “the superintendent of the Fenice asked me to come and see him. Save Venice had just restored the Fenice’s curtain, and now he wanted me, as a member of the Save Venice board, to ask Save Venice to restore the frescoes of Dante’s Divine Comedy in the bar. The superintendent invited me to come and look at the frescoes, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. The place was madness. Everywhere you looked, there were flammable materials. I don’t know how many cans of varnish, turpentine, and solvents there were—open, closed, spilled on the floor—lengths of wooden parquet in stacks, rolls of plastic carpeting piled high, heaps of rubbish everywhere. In the midst of all this, men were working with blowtorches! Can you imagine! Soldering irons! And surveillance? Zero, as usual. Responsibility? Zero. I thought, ‘They’re mad!’ So if the Mafia wanted the Fenice to burn, all they had to do was wait.”