The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  Palazzo Volpi had been off-limits for so long that even the Venetians were curious to see it again. Knowing this, the Guthries made a shrewd political gesture. With Volpi’s permission, they invited dozens of Venetians to come to the ball as their guests, including a number of people the cantankerous Volpi would never have invited on his own. Just this once, however, Volpi was delighted to let them come. It was his intention to demonstrate that no one could be frozen out of Venice just because certain “clowns” decreed it. If welcoming Venetians into his palace enabled him to rub their noses in that fact, so much the better.

  On the evening of the ball, the windows of Palazzo Volpi were brightly lit for the first time in recent memory. An armada of motor launches pulled up at the water gate, and hundreds of guests in evening gown and black tie alighted, dozens of Venetians among them.

  The significance of the Volpi-Save Venice ball was understood well beyond the walls of Palazzo Volpi. It was, in fact, very clear to Larry Lovett, whose dinner party on his terrace was taking place that very night. It was widely assumed that the sole purpose of Lovett’s party was to upstage Save Venice and deprive it of some of its Venetian guests. It was assumed also that Lovett had stressed “business attire” for his dinner to prevent his guests from going directly from his party to Palazzo Volpi without first going home to change into black tie. His friends conceded that, for Lovett, this dinner party was a rare faux pas; others saw it as a display of infantile spite that proved, once and for all, that Lovett was more concerned with his own prestige and prominence than with preserving Venetian art and architecture.

  None of that mattered to Giovanni Volpi. While Peter Duchin played dance music in his father’s ballroom and Bobby Short crooned his songs upstairs, Volpi stood at the edge of his courtyard garden, apart from it all, as usual.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Save Venice, Venetian Heritage—what’s the difference? When you get right down to it, they’re both really just glorified package tours. I don’t know why Americans can’t come to Venice and just have a good time, instead of coming here and beating their breasts. You know what I mean? It’s this thing of having to come here on a mission. Why must they come to Venice to save it? It’s nice, of course, the money they give. But it doesn’t have anything to do with generosity. It means they want to look important. And, really, it’s just a drop in the ocean. They should come and have a good time. Period. Right? Walk around. See some paintings. Go to some restaurants, like they do in other cities. Americans don’t go to Paris to save Paris, do they? Right? When you see a five-hundred-year-old Venetian building, it may be a bit shabby and possibly even in danger. But you can’t describe it as ‘decaying.’ It has endured five hundred years! The ‘decaying Venice’ is all a big myth. That’s what I mean about Save Venice. Forget it. Venice will save itself. Go save Paris!”

  {13}

  THE MAN WHO LOVED OTHERS

  I FIRST NOTICED THE GRAFFITI—and there were several—as I was walking through the Rialto food market one winter afternoon. A few days later, I came across another one near St. Mark’s, and the next day a third outside the restaurant Osteria di Santa Marina. They were always written neatly in red spray paint and always on temporary wooden walls where they would do no harm. Their melancholy message was always the same: LONELINESS IS NOT BEING ALONE; IT’S LOVING OTHERS TO NO AVAIL (Solitudine non è essere soli, è amare gli altri inutilmente).

  Unlike most graffiti, these had an author. They were signed “Mario Stefani.” Stefani was a well-known character in Venice, a poet of some repute who appeared on a local TV channel, TeleVenezia, five days a week for a brief cultural commentary. He had a smiling, jowly face and a head of untamed hair. The first time I tuned in to his program, it was quite by chance. He was delivering a casual, unscripted monologue that jumped from topic to topic.

  “Venetians used to be great navigators and pirates,” he was saying. “They stole things and brought them back to Venice to make the city more beautiful—carved marble from the East, gold, gems. Now people steal only for themselves. This is very sad.

  “Signor Doge,” Mario Stefani went on, now addressing an imaginary guest, “would you like a glass of water? You would rather have wine! I don’t blame you. A glass of wine costs only a thousand lire [fifty cents] in Venice today. Bottled water costs three times as much.”

  Then he was on to something else.

  “Signor Count,” he said, “would you like to take a walk with me in St. Mark’s? No? You say you are not Moses and you cannot part the waters? Well, it is true that we have floods and high water more and more frequently. After twenty years of arguing about it, nobody can decide whether to build the system of dikes that would stop the flooding. I often hear it said that people who have a financial interest in postponing the decision are the ones who are causing the delay.

  “Signor Doge, you seem hesitant to take a water taxi. Why is that? Because it costs a lot! True. And you have probably noticed that gondolas are expensive, too. And hotels. And restaurants. All the amenities that tourists pay for. Those are the people who have the power in Venice. No, no, no, not the tourists—I mean the taxi drivers, the gondoliers, and the hotel and restaurant owners. They run Venice, as anyone will tell you.”

  Stefani’s TV program was a low-budget, single-camera, black-and-white production that ran at most for about five minutes each time. It always opened with the musical theme from The Pink Panther and with Stefani looking straight into the camera and announcing, “Venetian poisons and proclamations! Idle chatter!” Venice and Venetians were his basic theme.

  “Venetians are creatures of habit,” he said on one broadcast. “You always know you’re early or late by where you see certain people in the street. If you are on time, you see them in such-and-such a campo. If you see them in the street before or after, you know you are late or early.”

  Stefani lamented the passing of institutions and characters.

  “All the cats have disappeared from the streets in Venice. That’s because the old ladies who used to feed them are gone. I miss the old ladies who wore shawls and had delicate gold chains that got caught in the wool. One of my favorite old ladies used to come into the bar and order grappa. She would say, ‘Gimme two grappas. One for me and one for Franca.’ She would pay and drink hers, all the while looking around and saying, ‘Franca? Where’s Franca? She must have gone to buy something. . . . Madonna, I’m tired of waiting. I guess I’ll have to drink hers, too.’ This scene would be repeated daily, and Franca never showed up. The old lady would always drink both grappas. Where is she now? I miss her.”

  Stefani spoke of neighborhoods, especially his own, which was Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio, a lovely square in the Santa Croce area of town, safely removed from the main tourist route.

  “The baker in our campo has printed a poem of mine on his paper bags—out of respect, not just for me but for poetry. So now people come in and ask for two rolls and a poem.”

  Mario Stefani was a booster of his city. He had a generous, welcoming nature. “Anyone who loves Venice is a true Venetian,” he said, “even a tourist, but only if the tourist stays long enough to appreciate the city. If he stays only one day just to say he’s been to Venice, no.”

  Stefani taught literature at a school on the mainland, and his name appeared frequently in the Gazzettino. He wrote literary and art reviews and frequently took part in readings and other cultural events. He was probably best known in Venice for having made the often-quoted observation: “If Venice didn’t have a bridge, Europe would be an island.” That line was the title of one of his books of poetry.

  During Carnival every year, Stefani took part in the erotic-poetry readings in Campo San Maurizio. Twenty percent of his poems, he estimated, were erotic. They were also unrestrainedly homosexual. He made frequent reference in his poems to the muscles, the lips, the beauty, and the gaze of good-looking boys. He spoke of kneeling before them in adoration. He recalled a boy who pressed his groin against him on the bus, and
others who met him late at night in the campo.

  His erotic poetry ranged from playful to graphic, but he took his role as an acknowledged gay man seriously. “Telling the truth is the most anticonformist act I know,” he said. “Hypocrisy is the constitutional basis and foundation of society. I have never led a double life. I have always declared my ‘cross and delight,’ which meant my desire for the male, for strong muscles and an adolescent body, a desire that has given me so much suffering and so much pleasure.”

  Stefani’s honesty earned him the respect and acceptance of Venetians. He had demonstrated his good faith, he said, and had overcome prejudice to the extent that mothers were willing to leave their sons and, more important, their sons’ education in his hands.

  From time to time, I saw Stefani in the street and in the wine bars around the Rialto. He was overweight, about sixty, and walked with a shuffling step. He dressed with a bit of flair—bright red suspenders, red sneakers, an ascot, and loose-fitting trousers—but his clothes were usually rumpled and soiled with food stains. He always carried two plastic bags bulging with books and groceries, one in each hand, making himself look like a vagabond. Every few paces he would call out an affectionate greeting, or stop to talk, or pop his head into a shop to exchange a few words or tell a joke. He liked to kiss women on the cheek, but several times I noticed that they surreptitiously wiped their faces afterward. “He’s a dear, sweet man,” Rose Lauritzen said, “and kind and generous. But I’m always of two minds when I see him headed in my direction, because he always kisses me and he always slobbers when he does.”

  At the wine bars, Stefani came face-to-face with his own image. A local sculptor had made ceramic wine pitchers in the style of toby jugs that bore Stefani’s likeness in the guise of Bacchus, with grapes on his head. The sculptor had produced an edition of one hundred and presented Mayor Cacciari with the “author’s proof ” in a public ceremony. The presentation coincided with the publication of Stefani’s new book of poems, Wine and Eros.

  By the time Stefani’s red spray-painted graffiti began appearing around Venice, it was clear to me that the man had a natural gift for self-promotion. His message—“Loneliness is not being alone; it’s loving others to no avail”—was perceptive and compassionate. It was also one of his better-known lines. Within days, the local press was running photographs of the graffiti accompanied by mood pieces and favorable mentions of Stefani. The publicity had cost him nothing. When asked, Stefani claimed he had not written the graffiti. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “It must have been a fan. I’m flattered, of course, and I’d like to meet whoever it was.”

  A likely story, I thought.

  And then, on Sunday, March 4, 2001, barely a month after the first of the graffiti had appeared, Mario Stefani hanged himself in his kitchen.

  SUDDENLY THE MESSAGE IN HIS GRAFFITI took on a new meaning. It was no longer the wise observation of a sympathetic poet. It had been a cry of pain.

  The news was received with disbelief across the city. “But he was always smiling,” was the comment most often heard. “He was such a popular man. He had so many friends.”

  Carla Ferrara, a musician, saw it another way. “In Venice loneliness is harder to notice. It’s hidden, because when you leave the house, you have to walk. Everybody walks in Venice, so you see twenty people you know, and you have to say hello. But no matter how many people you greet, you can still feel lonely inside. That’s the problem of a small city. You are surrounded by people talking to you and saying hello. In a big city, you don’t find yourself talking to nearly so many people. The loneliness is more obvious.”

  The disbelief was felt most deeply by Stefani’s neighbors in Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio. “None of us knew he was lonely,” said Paolo Lazzarin, the owner of Trattoria al Ponte on the ground floor of Stefani’s building. “He came in three times a day. We felt he was part of the family. He’d lost a little weight in the last few months, but he told us he was on a diet. We didn’t know he needed help.”

  The women who ran the restaurant La Zucca on the opposite side of the bridge in front of Stefani’s house were also taken by surprise. “We’d see him walking past with his plastic shopping bags,” said Rossana Gasparini. “He’d drop in at least once a day, give us kisses, and say, ‘Have you heard the latest?’ He was looking a little worn out lately, but we never would have imagined . . .”

  The baker, Luciano Favero, said, “He was always surrounded by lots of people, but maybe he had few real friends. He seemed pensive recently.”

  Saturday night, the night before he died, Stefani had gone to Mestre for the opening of an exhibition by the painter Nino Memo, an old friend. “He arrived early,” Memo said, “and he seemed to be in a particularly good mood. He liked the show and even promised me he was going to write a favorable review of it. A lot of his friends were there—writers, painters, and academics—and he talked to everybody. I did notice one thing that was unusual, though: He stayed till the very end. That wasn’t like him; he would usually leave a gathering like that before it was over. Afterward he joined a group of us for dinner, and then we all came back to Venice. Before we parted at Piazzale Roma, he opened his shopping bag and showed us a roast chicken, already prepared. It was for his Sunday dinner. He said he probably wouldn’t leave the house all day. He had a lot of work to do.”

  On Sunday afternoon, a student friend of Stefani’s, Elena de Maria, waited for him at the Trattoria al Ponte. He had said he would advise her on her thesis, but when he did not show up for their two o’clock meeting, she phoned him and got no answer. She kept trying all afternoon. Finally, around nine o’clock, she called the fire department. While the firemen went up to his apartment, she waited downstairs. Mario had been a family friend for many years, but in all that time he had never invited her up to his apartment—probably, she said, because it was a mess. An ambulance boat came ten minutes later, and the medics went up with a stretcher.

  “When they came back down with the stretcher but without Mario,” she said, “I knew he was dead. Then the firemen brought his body down in a sack. They weren’t carrying him, they were dragging him down the stairs.”

  Elena de Maria met me at Al Ponte to talk about Mario. “Sunday is the one day of the week Mario would not have been missed so quickly,” she said. “He liked to stay home all day in his underwear. On any other day of the week, friends would begin to worry about him after a few hours if they hadn’t heard from him. The baker would have missed him. The people at Al Ponte would have missed him. Most people would be dead for a week before friends would notice. Mario thought he was alone, but he wasn’t.”

  The public prosecutor in charge of Stefani’s case, Antonio Miggiani, said police had found Stefani hanging from the banister of the stairs leading from the kitchen to the attic. He was wearing only a T-shirt. A suicide note was attached to a string tied around his neck. Police did not reveal its contents, but they said Stefani had listed a series of unhappy events that had led him to kill himself, including the recent death of his father. They said they had found no evidence of foul play.

  In newspaper editorials and conversations, Venice searched its soul and wondered how it could have overlooked Mario Stefani’s many messages of despair, especially the ones in red spray paint. A gathering at the Ateneo Veneto celebrated his life and poetry. However, the priest in Stefani’s neighborhood provoked a bitter controversy when he refused to allow the use of the Church of San Giacomo dell’Orio for Stefani’s funeral, because he had been a suicide. Ludovico De Luigi and other friends of Stefani’s accused the priest of bias, saying he had invoked an old regulation that was no longer being enforced. They staged a protest demonstration in the campo. The impasse was resolved a week later, when the priest at the Church of San Giovanni e Paolo consented to have the funeral there. Hundreds of people attended.

  I sat next to De Luigi at the service. He was in a caustic mood. “All this week, Mario’s been in the refrigerator,” he said. “I’m disgusted with the
public. They pay more attention to his homosexuality than to his poems and his heart and soul. Nobody can see past the physical aspect, because we live in a materialistic society. Everybody is explaining Mario’s death through his asshole. They don’t understand him. Today everything is tactile. We are back to the apes.” Ludovico shrugged. “Me, I live in terror of the day they understand me, because it will mean I’m just like them. And that will be the end of my life, because all my life I’ve wanted not to be understood.”