by John Berendt
Gardin filed another complaint against persons unknown, once again asking the police for nighttime surveillance.
I stopped in again at his shop to look at the writing on his window. Gardin and his wife were both inside. He came out into the calle. “My wife is terrified,” he said under his breath. “She wants me to abandon my campaign.”
But he did not. Instead he organized a posthumous sixty-third-birthday party for Stefani the following Sunday in Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio. He sent out invitations entitled “Poets Never Die,” addressed to “My Friends,” and signed “Mario.” The Gazzettino said that the invitation was in dubious taste. “It is right to remember the poet,” the paper declared, “right that his friends (the real ones) gather, but let us not exploit his death. Leave Mario in peace, as he wanted.”
The party took place outdoors in the campo and was attended by about forty people. It began as a tasteful homage to Stefani’s poetry but quickly turned into a platform for denunciations of the police and speculation about what had really happened.
Stefani’s longtime friend, the journalist Maria Irma Mariotti, proposed the most extreme scenario, in line with Gardin’s. “In my opinion, Mario was murdered,” she said in a raspy, smoker’s voice. “I won’t exclude the possibility that he was the victim of an erotic game, one that involved asphyxiation with a bag over his head or a rope around his neck, followed by a staged hanging.”
Mariotti said that she had been with Stefani at an art exhibition a year before he died, when he suddenly broke down in tears, trembling uncontrollably, and told her he was desperately in love with a young man who was threatening never to see him again unless Mario paid him ever-increasing sums of money. “He’s ruining my life,” Stefani had said, “but I can’t turn back.”
“I warned Mario to break off this relationship,” she said. “It sounded dangerous. But he said he had already written the man into his will.
“‘Tear it up,’ I told him.
“‘But if he finds out, I don’t know how he’ll react.’
“When I heard that,” said Mariotti, “I told Mario, ‘If you don’t end this affair in a hurry, you’ll be signing your own death warrant.’ When I left him that evening, not only did I beg him to drop this gold digger, I swore I wouldn’t see him again until he did. Sometime later he called and said, ‘Relax, it’s over,’ but to tell you the truth, I didn’t believe him.”
The Gazzettino published an account of the party, including a summation of Mariotti’s suspicions. Ten days later, Mariotti submitted a detailed, three-page report to the carabinieri, and two days after that a third warning appeared on the window of Gardin’s shop. Once again, it was written with a blue felt-tip marker and in the same handwriting as before: YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE TALKING BULLSHIT ABOUT EROTIC GAMES SAYING MARIO STEFANI WAS MURDERED. HE COMMITTED SUICIDE. UNDERSTAND??? WE’LL BREAK YOUR ASS. LAST WARNING.
For the third time, Albert Gardin filed a complaint against persons unknown and repeated his request for nighttime surveillance.
That was where matters stood when I went to see Aurelio Minazzi, the notary who had purportedly found Mario Stefani’s will in a book of poetry. Minazzi was youthful and likable. He said he had known Stefani thirty-five years, having met him through his father, who had been secretary to the editor of the Gazzettino.
“Did you really find the third will tucked into a book of poetry?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said.
“Then, when you registered it, why did you say Cristina Belloni had given it to you and asked you to file it?”
“That was a legal formality,” he said. “The law requires that someone request that a notary register a will. I could not have done it on my own. I could have taken the will to another notary and asked him to register it. So when I found the will, I called Cristina Belloni and said, ‘Yes, I’ve found it.’ Then she came here with Bernardi. I handed the will to Bernardi. Bernardi gave it to Cristina Belloni, and then she gave it to me and asked me to publish it.”
“Why didn’t you mention in your report that you found it in a book?”
“Because it’s irrelevant. It makes no difference where it was before it was registered. Mario could have put it in a bank vault, or given it to his publisher, or left it in his desk drawer. He didn’t have to leave it with a notary.”
“Then why did the judge immediately point the finger at you and launch an investigation into why you hadn’t turned over the original?”
“Because at the top of his will, Mario had written ‘For the notary Aurelio Minazzi.’ So naturally the judge assumed I had the original.”
“Fair enough,” I said, suddenly remembering that indeed Minazzi’s name had been at the top of the will Albert Gardin had shown me.
“But why would you keep a will in a book of poems?”
“Mario wrote many wills,” Minazzi said with a smile. “He kept changing his mind. It was—I won’t say a mania, but it was his way. He would give me a will, and then he would call and say, ‘I’m not happy with it.’ And then he’d write a new one.
“When Mario died, I checked the registers and found a will Mario wrote in 1984, leaving everything to the Association for Cancer Research. I also had a note he sent me later on, saying he wanted to leave everything to the Waldensian Church. But he never actually wrote that will. So when he died, I told the judge that Mario had disavowed the last will he’d made without formally writing another one, as far as I knew. That’s when the judge sent the police back to the house to look for anything else written by Mario, and they found the photocopy of the will leaving everything to Bernardi.
“The judge called me and asked if I had the original. My secretary and I tried to recall Mario’s last visit. Then we remembered he’d come by without an appointment, as usual, and brought a plant, some chocolates, and a book of poems. That’s when we found the two Bernardi wills.”
“How many wills did he write?”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. In fact, after Mario died, another man brought me a copy of a will leaving everything to him. He’s a fireman. Mario had written that will back in 1975, before I was a notary. I had to tell him his will was invalid, that there were others after his.
“Mario had his problems,” said Minazzi. “Perhaps changing wills was his way of solving them.”
CRISTINA BELLONI AGREED TO SEE ME in her office in Campo Santo Stefano. An attractive, fashionably dressed brunette, she came right to the point.
“My client, Nicola Bernardi, received a summons from the public prosecutor for information relating to the suicide of Mario Stefani. The prosecutor told him it would be only an informal chat, but it turned out to be an interrogation. Nicola came here to my office right afterward, upset. He said they told him Mario Stefani had made him his sole heir. He had not the slightest idea about this bequest. But then they told him that the will was a photocopy and therefore not valid. So Nicola was shocked twice, first because there was a will and then because maybe it was worthless.
“I had to move quickly, because I thought someone might have found the original will and destroyed it. It had been reported in the newspapers that a gift-wrapped package had been found on Mario’s kitchen table. It had Nicola’s phone number on it, and it was a birthday present for Nicola’s daughter, Anna. So I immediately went to see the prosecutor and asked him if he had opened the package. He said no. I asked him if by chance he had thought the original copy of the will might be inside it. He said no. I insisted it be opened, and I warned him I would do everything a lawyer could do. I would petition the chief prosecutor to at least give the package to the person it was intended for—Anna. The prosecutor answered me angrily, saying that he had the authority to drag out the investigation another thirty days and would do so if I interfered in any way.
“Now I had to take the offensive. I sent Mario’s notary a certified letter, and rather than saying I knew he didn’t have the will, I played it just the opposite. I wrote, ‘I wonder if you, a friend of
Mario Stefani, could be holding his signed will. Give me confirmation, and if you have it, file it immediately, because I am the lawyer of the person named in the will.’ Twenty-four hours later, the notary called me and said, ‘I found it.’”
“Do you believe he found it in the pages of a book,” I asked, “or that he was hiding it for some reason?”
“That’s not for me to believe one way or the other. I was interested only in protecting my client. The notary said to me, ‘I cannot register it yet, because I must have various certified documents.’ I said, ‘Notary, tomorrow morning you will have them. And then you will, tomorrow morning, file them for me!”
Cristina Belloni’s aggressiveness was startling, and slightly off-putting. She confirmed what Minazzi had told me about the route the will took: Minazzi handed it to Bernardi, Bernardi gave it to Cristina Belloni, and then Cristina Belloni gave it back to Minazzi and asked him to publish it.
“I got a certificate from the notary,” she said, “and, with that in hand, I went to the prosecutor and told him, ‘Now unseal everything immediately.’ He tried to delay a little, and after forty-eight hours I got a court order for him to release Mario’s house from sequestration.”
“How did the story get out that Anna was the heir?” I asked.
“Nicola sells fruit and vegetables—he’s a simple person, socially unsophisticated. He could have been hounded by the press, and he was frightened. So I made an agreement to keep his nomination secret, for a while at least, to permit him to absorb the shock. It takes about twenty days for the registration of a will to become public, and then anybody can see it.”
“Your secrecy plan seems to have made people more suspicious,” I said.
“The media have reported a lot of malicious things about Mario and Nicola, things that were not true. I advised Nicola not to respond; otherwise it would have gotten even worse. So we waited until the inventory of Mario’s work was under way and the gift to the Querini Stampalia was arranged, and then he gave a press conference.”
“What about the speculation that Mario had been blackmailed? That he’d been hounded for money?”
“I found out that Mario was being sued by some woman in Mestre who was demanding restitution for water damage coming from a leak in the apartment he owned above hers. It was a lot of money, and apparently he was very worried about it.”
“The accusations and suspicions have persisted,” I said.
“Yes, from Albert Gardin, who presents himself as Mario’s publisher. I did research on him at the Chamber of Commerce. Gardin has had many careers in his life, but his publishing house doesn’t exist. It has no address. There was a contract in 1991, but after that it closed. I became suspicious of him when he published a collection of Mario’s poetry after he died without making any effort to contact Mario’s heir. He sells books without a bar code, so there is no way of tracking the number of copies sold. He seems eager for publicity.”
“Do you think Nicola or any of his friends wrote those messages with the blue felt-tip marker on Gardin’s window?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Who would have done it, then?”
“Maybe Gardin did it himself.”
EVEN BEFORE NICOLA BERNARDI WAS IDENTIFIED by the press as Mario Stefani’s heir, his name and whereabouts circulated among Stefani’s friends, and a steady stream of curious people filed by his family’s shop to get a glimpse of him. Some took photographs, pretending to be tourists; some went into the shop and bought a kilo of tomatoes. They compared notes. Bernardi was tall and plain-looking. He had a lean build; close-cropped, thinning hair; and a long, equine face.
“He has small eyes,” one of Stefani’s friends, a woman, reported, “and they move very quickly, like a lizard’s. His smile, in my opinion, is too eager. It’s forced, like the sudden smile you see on beggar children in Morocco, Mexico, and India, when they want money. The mouth opens unexpectedly. Children of the rich have more restrained smiles. They laugh less often—only when it comes naturally.”
A Korean journalist, also a woman, recalled that in the past, on several occasions, Stefani had insisted that she accompany him to Bernardi’s fruit-and-vegetable shop. “He was irresistibly drawn to the place.” she said, “but he was afraid to go there alone. When we arrived at the shop, Mario would pretend we just happened to be in the neighborhood. I was surprised by the reception he received. It was not at all friendly, and it made me uncomfortable. They barely spoke to him. There was no communication, not even a laugh or a smile. The young man, Nicola, went about his business and pretended not to know him. If anything, he seemed annoyed by Mario’s presence.”
Nicola Bernardi lived with his wife and daughter in a one-room, ground-floor apartment near the Frari. It was a tight space, four hundred square feet at most; the front door opened directly into the living room. I paid them a visit a year after Mario Stefani’s death, having gotten in touch through Cristina Belloni. I took a seat on the couch opposite Nicola, who was wearing jeans and jogging shoes. Francesca had auburn hair, a luminous complexion, and calm, cool eyes. She was helping Anna into a pink jumper. Anna was blond and now two years old.
“We got to know Mario,” said Nicola, “because he used to come to our shop all the time to buy fruit and vegetables and visit my parents, my brother, and me. His bank was nearby. He was such a good customer we offered him a discount, but he never took it. He’d say, ‘Mamma mia, what a job you have! You all get up so early. So I don’t want a discount.’”
This recollection of warmth and friendliness among the fruits and vegetables did not square with the Korean journalist’s account of indifference verging on hostility. But whose version was the accurate one? Francesca, too, like Nicola, remembered Mario as a virtual member of the family.
“Mario came to the hospital when I had Anna,” she said. “He was at the christening, too. We had invited him to Anna’s first birthday party, and he said he’d try to come, but he killed himself before that.”
“Did he ever come here?”
“He’d call and say he was close by,” said Nicola, “and that he had a gift for Anna or a set of pots and pans for us. If we weren’t home, he’d leave presents on the windowsill and close the shutters. He was like that. We’d come home and find the stuff. In fact, we finally had to put a stop to it. I said, ‘Mario, you can’t keep giving us gifts. We don’t need anything.’”
It had been agreed that I would meet the Bernardis at their house and from there walk over to Mario’s apartment. Francesca put Anna into a stroller and handed her a teddy bear.
“Anna,” she said, “who gave you this teddy bear? Remember? Uncle . . . Uncle . . . Uncle who? Uncle Mario! You remember Uncle Mario.” Anna did not respond.
On the way to Stefani’s house, Anna got out of the stroller and walked over each of the four bridges. Nicola and I went on ahead.
“It’s been a year now,” I said. “How has your life changed since you became an heir?”
“We don’t have money problems anymore,” said Nicola. “If an electricity bill comes, we don’t worry about it. And if I want to keep the air-conditioning on all summer, now I can. But the work is just the same. I still get up at four-thirty and take the boat to buy fruits and vegetables and bring them to the shop. The only difference is that I don’t take any money from my parents for it now.”
“You work without pay?”
“Nobody is making me do it. I really don’t have to work at all, but I feel I have a moral obligation to my parents and my brother. It’s right that we continue to work together.”
Bernardi spoke with casual ease and without any apparent guile. He had a relaxed charm and flashed a disarming smile every so often, which was remarkable, I thought, under the circumstances. He had been accused, after all, of having had a secret relationship with Mario and of somehow having been involved in his death. And here we were, walking toward the supposed scene of the crime. Nicola had every right to be uneasy, whether the accusations were true or
wholly made up. But he appeared to be completely untroubled.
