The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  “Have people asked you for loans?”

  “No, but Francesca and I, we’re the ones who can offer now. And as soon as we can, we’re going to renovate Mario’s apartment and move in. We haven’t started yet, though. It’s still the way it was when Mario lived in it, except that the papers and the books have been taken away to be sorted.”

  “Had either you or Francesca seen Mario’s apartment before he died?”

  “We didn’t even know where he lived. I went there for the first time with Cristina and the police. The door was chained shut. We had to be let in by the officer. We found a gift for Anna inside and some money, but the apartment was a mess. Books were everywhere, and stuff was piled up and lying around. It was disturbing.”

  “Have you read any of Mario’s poetry?”

  “I’ve never been a great reader. When I walked to school, I used to pass the saint in the wall in Calle Bembo and put a coin in the box, so I wouldn’t get a failing grade. But I did read the poem about Anna. It was something serious. Then I recorded some of Mario’s stuff on TV.”

  “What do you think about all that speculation over Mario’s suicide and his will and your part in it?”

  “I was really angry. People were saying I forced him to write his will and that I was having an affair with him. That shit really got to me. I wanted to answer back, but everybody told me not to, because then it would only be in the Gazzettino again.”

  “Of course.”

  “And who are those people? They’re supposed to be Mario’s good friends. But they were standing up in public saying terrible things about him—that he was paying for sex and playing dangerous sex games. In the end, what I discovered about Mario was that he was everyone’s friend and at the same time no one’s friend.”

  “What about the threats written with the blue felt-tip marker on Albert Gardin’s window?”

  “Why would I do something crazy like that? One of those things even appeared when I was up in the mountains.”

  At Campo San Giacomo, we waited for Francesca and Anna. Then the four of us went up to Stefani’s apartment. At the top of a steep flight of stone steps, a pair of heavy wooden doors opened on a scene of musty gloom. The apartment had high ceilings, tall windows, heavy oak furniture, and wallpaper that was stained and peeling. Framed pictures, including several pen-and-ink portraits of Stefani, were hung haphazardly on the walls. We walked from room to room.

  “Anna! Look!” said Francesca. “Whose apartment is this? You know who! Uncle Mario!” It crossed my mind that these evocations of Uncle Mario might have been meant as much for my ears as Anna’s. Nicola was a lucky fruit-and-vegetable dealer, that much was certain. But his million-dollar windfall had come at a price: the lingering suspicion that he had earned it through some secret, nefarious dealings that he and his family would forever be at pains to deny.

  In the kitchen, I looked at the narrow stairs leading up to the attic and at the wooden railing where Stefani had tied the rope that had choked him to death. A poster taped to the wall halfway up the stairs showed two young, lighthearted soldiers kissing; it was captioned “Make love, not war.”

  “We haven’t started working on renovating it yet,” said Nicola. “We’d never sell this apartment. It’s Mario’s.”

  We came into the dining room. On a sideboard, I noticed a glass sculpture that appeared at first to be in the shape of a plant, but upon taking a closer look, I saw it was a phallus. Next to it was another phallus-shaped object, this one made of marble. On the floor, there was a box that contained a variety of penises, more in the nature of tawdry jokes than pornography—penis candles with wicks coming out the end, clay penises fashioned into pipe smokers’ pipes, salt-shaker penises, ceramic penises lying in ceramic ashtrays, door-knocker penises.

  “I guess these objects aren’t going to be included in Mario’s permanent archives,” I said to Nicola. His laugh was light, easy, and as far as I could tell, completely genuine.

  A YEAR LATER, THE MARIO STEFANI COLLECTION opened at the Querini Stampalia, a library and museum housed in an exquisite sixteenth-century palace. Stefani’s life’s work had been rescued from the squalid disorder of his house and installed in a place where it would be preserved for future study. The collection included his writings, his paintings, portraits, memorabilia, and his correspondence with such people as Alberto Moravia, Giorgio de Chirico, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and others. Strangely, however, there were no unpublished poems among the papers donated. This only fueled fears among Stefani’s friends that Bernardi might have mistaken Stefani’s jottings for trash and thrown them out before the controversy over the estate became public and forced him to hire experts to cull the material with a professional eye.

  The librarians at the Querini Stampalia, however, were quite content with the acquisition of Stefani’s library of sixty-eight hundred books, most of which were works by lesser-known local poets. The collection was the largest of its kind. As for Stefani’s own poetry, librarian Neda Furlan said that it would be difficult to assess its standing since the poems had not yet been the subject of academic study. “He was very well known locally and nationally, and some of his poetry is truly beautiful,” she said, “but during his lifetime he was never considered exceptional. Perhaps it is too soon to say. The distance of time will be needed for an objective interpretation of his work.”

  Meanwhile Stefani’s heir, after two years, was still working gratis for his parents at the fruit-and-vegetable shop, still rising at four-thirty, and still living in the same one-room apartment as before—but with a wife and two children now. The renovation of Mario’s apartment had not yet begun.

  “Nicola is taking care of things a little at a time,” Christina Belloni told me. “He paid for the experts who worked on the inventory, and because of what they found, they have been able to reconstruct the figure of Mario as a poet, as a writer, as a critic, and as a homosexual who was one of the first to have the courage to admit it openly—even reconstructing his collection of erotic literature.”

  Sometime after being recognized as Mario Stefani’s legal heir, Nicola Bernardi ordered a gravestone placed on Stefani’s burial niche on the cemetery island of San Michele. Then he asked the catalogers of Stefani’s papers to look for a suitable quotation to use as an epitaph. They found one in the text of a speech Stefani had given, and Nicola had it engraved on the stone: “Even more than as a poet, I would like to be remembered as one who loved others.”

  ALBERT GARDIN’S PROTESTS AND ACCUSATIONS about Mario Stefani’s sad end eventually subsided to a murmur. By 2003 he had become involved in a clamorous public debate over an eight-foot statue of Napoleon that was being given to the city by the French Committee to Safeguard Venice. One side favored accepting the statue on the grounds that Napoleon was part of Venice’s history, for better or for worse. The other side, for which Albert Gardin was a prominent spokesman, was vehemently opposed, calling Napoleon a terrorist, a plunderer, a traitor, a barbarian, and a vandal. The anti-Napoleon side was preparing to haul Napoleon before a posthumous Nuremberg-style ad hoc tribunal.

  I was walking along Calle del Scaleter when it occurred to me to drop in on Gardin and have a chat about the Napoleon controversy. As I approached his wife’s antique-clothing shop, I saw the top of Gardin’s head poking up behind a pile of hats and boxes, as usual. But when I put my hand on the door, I caught sight of something that stopped me cold. The words “Vintage Clothing, Special Sale on Hats and Shawls” had been written on the window to the right of the door—with a blue felt-tip marker.

  {14}

  THE INFERNO REVISITED

  LAURA MIGLIORI STOOD in one of the Fenice’s formal reception rooms and stared at the soot-blackened walls. It was January 2000, four years after the fire, and the Fenice still had no roof. The theater hall was a muddy pit. Signorina Migliori knew that beneath the grime on the walls of this room—the Dante Room—lay the remains of a frescoed panel depicting, of all things, the Inferno. As an art conservator, she had be
en hired to restore what was left of the six frescoes in the room, all scenes from The Divine Comedy.

  “It was not just the flames and the smoke that did all the damage,” she said. “The firemen had to use shallow, low-tide water to put out the fire, so the frescoes were blasted for hours with muddy salt water. Then you have to remember that without a roof there has been nothing to protect the walls from years of rain.”

  “Where do you begin?” I asked. The blackened walls were covered by an oily film.

  “The first thing we’ll have to do,” she said, “even before we wash the mud off, is to secure the fresco. It’s become detached from the wall in places; there’s about a one-centimeter space between parts of the fresco and the wall behind it. So first we’ll cover it with a thin Japanese paper to keep pieces from falling off. Then we’ll inject tiny amounts of plaster through the fresco to fill in the space and bind it to the wall. When that’s done, we’ll remove the paper and take color samples. Then we’ll begin the cleaning process by gently patting it with pads soaked in distilled water mixed with various substances. No one really knows what we’ll find, because for the past twenty-five years the frescoes have been covered by Virgilio Guidi oil paintings that were mounted on top of them. No one has seen them in all that time, and the only photographs we’ve found for reference are old and blurry.”

  Laura Migliori could not begin the restoration immediately. Work on the Fenice had come to a complete stop in February 1998, when the court canceled the contract won by Fiat’s Impregilo eight months after they had started. The contract was then given to the second-place bidder, Holzmann-Romagnoli, but the resumption of work was delayed by the purchase of the privately owned apartments, approval of plans, and tangled contractual negotiations. It was not until sixteen months later that construction finally got started again, and it went badly from the first day.

  Disagreements arose over money, scheduling, and changes in the structural plan mandated by the city. Then, in November 1999, barely five months after work had resumed, Holzmann, the German half of the Holzmann-Romagnoli consortium, announced that it was on the edge of bankruptcy.

  Philipp Holzmann AG was one of the biggest construction companies in Europe, and news of its looming insolvency drove its stock price down 90 percent on the German stock market. Panic hit Venice. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder held emergency meetings with the German parliament and put together a $50 million bailout for Holzmann. This calmed nerves in Venice, but only slightly. The pace of work continued to lag behind schedule. The deadline was extended once, then again. Archaeological discoveries under the Fenice—two ancient wells, an arch, and a pillar—resulted in further delays. Holzmann-Romagnoli demanded more money and an even later deadline, but the Comune refused.

  In May 2000, with work halted once again because of problems installing a new crane, Mayor Cacciari chose not to stand for reelection. Venice elected a new mayor—Paolo Costa, an economist of national stature, who had served as Italy’s minister of public works and as rector of Ca’ Foscari University. White-haired, bespectacled, and deceptively bland in appearance, Mayor Costa boldly took charge of the Fenice morass. He made the unprecedented move of asking to be appointed commissioner in charge of rebuilding, which made him responsible for the success or failure of the project. Costa was putting his job and his reputation on the line, and he discovered soon enough that the odds were not in his favor. Shortly after becoming mayor, he made a surprise inspection tour of the Fenice and found only one person on the job.

  Costa had been in office six months when a contingent of two dozen Fenice employees boarded a large transport boat and came down the Grand Canal in a noisy protest. It was January 29, 2001, the fifth anniversary of the fire. The demonstrators were singing, chanting, and waving a banner that read COM’ERA, DOV’ERA, IN QUALE ERA? (“As it was, where it was, but when?”—or, literally, “but in which era?,” the Italian era meaning both “it was” and “era,” the same as in English). They tied up in front of the town hall, Ca’ Farsetti, where they were joined by a hundred more demonstrators with whistles, horns, bells, and a cardboard model of the Fenice with special-effects smoke pouring out of it. Opera music blared from loudspeakers. The crowd sang the aria “Di quella pira” from Verdi’s Il Trovatore, in which the tenor sings, “The horrid flames of that pyre consume me. Cowards, put it out, or I will extinguish it with your blood. . . . To arms! To arms!”

  Costa reviewed the status of the Fenice: 60 percent of the allotted time had elapsed, but only 5 percent of the work had been done. The foundations had not even been completed, and Holzmann-Romagnoli was still asking for more time and more money. Costa was convinced that unless he took action, he would still be arguing about money and deadlines in five years. He told Holzmann-Romagnoli he was terminating their contract. They were fired. They had thirty days to remove their equipment, or the city would seize it.

  Costa tried to assure a doubtful public that, as absurd as it might sound, this was the fastest, cleanest way to get the job done. He was speaking now as a former minister of public works. He was saying, Trust me. The whole process would have to start all over again with a new call for competitive bids. The boldest part of Costa’s action was to declare that Venice, not Holzmann-Romagnoli, owned Aldo Rossi’s architectural design and that Venice was going to build it, working with Rossi’s associates in Milan but not with Holzmann-Romagnoli. Costa was confident he would prevail in any court battle.

  Holzmann-Romagnoli writhed and thrashed and refused to leave the work site until Costa sent the police to roust them out. On April 27, 2001, Venice once again had custody of the Fenice, but work had come to a virtual halt. A single company stayed on the job, working on the foundations, while Costa looked for a new contractor.

  Eight construction companies responded to the new solicitation for bids. One letter, however, arrived fifteen minutes after the deadline, and Costa rejected it. He was in no mood to tolerate lateness.

  From the assembled bids, Costa chose the Venetian construction company Sacaim, an outfit well accustomed to operating in the difficult environment of Venice. Sacaim had worked on a great many important Venetian buildings, including Palazzo Grassi and the Malibran Theater. Nor was it a stranger to the Fenice: Sacaim had been the principal contractor for the renovation in progress the night the Fenice burned.

  In early March 2002, after a hiatus of eleven months, Mayor Costa erected a large digital clock outside the Fenice to keep the workers and the public informed of the number of days remaining until Sacaim’s November 30, 2003, deadline. When Sacaim took physical possession of the Fenice on March 11, the clock read 630 days.

  The count was down to 614 when I put on a hard hat and joined Laura Migliori in the Dante Room. It had been two years since she had first taken a look at the blackened walls, but only two weeks since she had been able to begin work. She and her assistants had already removed the overlay of mud and soot from the frescoes. Now, with further treatment, they would erase some of the deeper stains and bring out the colors. In five of the six panels, only fragments of the frescoes remained. However, two-thirds of the Inferno panel had survived. There were three figures in the foreground. A man in a red robe was fully intact, but only the lower halves of the other two were left.

  “I’m pretty sure the one in red is Dante,” said Laura, “and we think one of the others is Virgil. When we do color testing, we hope to find out which. We’ll be looking for traces of green, because he wore a laurel wreath.”

  Much of the work on the Fenice would be completed away from the site and then brought to the theater to be installed. Guerrino Lovato, the owner of the Mondonovo mask shop, had been hired to make the models for all the three-dimensional ornaments for the theater hall. He rented a magazzino across the street from his shop to use as a studio where he would sculpt the clay models for the satyrs, nymphs, sylphs, caryatids, angels, animals, flowers, vines, leaves, lattices, shells, horns, scrolls, suns, moons, masks, swags, and swirls that would adorn the parapet
s of the boxes and the walls and ceiling of the theater. From his originals, sculpted in clay, his assistants would make the negative plaster molds in which ornaments would be cast in papier-mâché and plaster by craftsmen in Mogliano; his assistants would make positive molds to be copied by wood-carvers in Vicenza. To make sure that the ornaments would fit snugly onto the curving contours of the theater, which did not yet exist, Lovato checked his work against a full-size model of half the theater that had been erected in a warehouse in Marghera.

  Laura Migliori and her two assistants would have to restore the Inferno frescoes right where they were, in the midst of workmen putting large structural elements in place, installing air-conditioning ducts and electrical cables, and carrying out such other tasks as painting, plastering, welding, soldering, applying gold leaf, and laying floors of terrazzo and parquet. She would be working, in other words, surrounded by chaos—and happily.