The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  Then, just as quickly, Donadon’s face perked up again.

  “At last it came to me!” he said. “Plastic is a nonfood. True?”

  “Yes, absolutely,” I said.

  “And I realized: People eat nonfood, too.”

  “We do?”

  “Yes! We eat fast food! Fast food is nonfood! Plastic is the rats’ equivalent of fast food! It means that all is well: Rats are still imitating the eating habits of people, and, like people, they are losing their taste for natural food. They are going for junk food.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” I asked.

  “I’ve already done it!” said Donadon triumphantly. “I’ve put granulated plastic in my Italian rat poison!”

  “Does it work?” I asked.

  “Like a dream,” he said.

  I congratulated Donadon on his new success and started working my way toward the auditorium and the stairway to the third tier. On the stairs, I encountered Bea Guthrie. She had flown over from New York for the opening, accompanied by the new president of Save Venice, Beatrice Rossi-Landi. Save Venice had been a major donor to the Fenice, contributing $300,000 for the ceiling.

  I took my seat and looked out at the five gilt-encrusted tiers of boxes. They were dazzling, but the colors were noticeably brighter and fresher than they had been in the old theater. The gilt, in fact, looked new. I expected, however, that when the lights were dimmed for the concert, it would all tone down a bit. For now anyway, the bright lights made it easier to see the details and look at people.

  There were no movie stars in sight, nor would there be. Pacino, Irons, and Fiennes were fogbound in Luxembourg.

  Downstairs on the orchestra level, Princess Michael of Kent, tall and blond, a coronet twinkling in her hair, stood in the center aisle, chatting with the ballerina Carla Fracci. The princess’s hostess, the Marchesa Barbara Berlingieri, hovered close by her side, turning when the princess turned, pausing when the princess paused. Larry Lovett approached to say hello. Lovett’s new Venetian Heritage had been a great success. He had wisely chosen a somewhat different mandate from that of Save Venice by funding restorations not only in Venice but throughout the old Venetian Republic—in Croatia, Turkey, and elsewhere. Although Venetian Heritage had not contributed to the rebuilding of the Fenice, Lovett had been given two choice seats in the orchestra, on the aisle. That might account, I thought, for the look of displeasure on Bea Guthrie’s face as she climbed higher and higher toward her complimentary seat, all the while coming closer and closer to the Save Venice-sponsored ceiling. Whether her seat assignment had been the result of a consensus within the Fenice hierarchy or the work of a lone antagonist, the insult could not have been more obvious. Larry Lovett was clearly still the favorite among Venetians with power.

  A hush came over the audience as members of the Fenice orchestra took the stage and began tuning up; the chorus filed in behind them. I looked around the hall and recognized a man sitting in a box directly across from me. He was scanning the crowd through a pair of opera glasses, and it occurred to me that he might have been looking for Jane Rylands. Mrs. Rylands had recently taken people by surprise by publishing a book of short stories set in Venice. Some of her fictional characters appeared to be based on real people, or certain aspects of real people, or combinations of real people. The man with the opera glasses had discovered a number of uncomfortable similarities between himself and a character who was the butt of a particularly vicious satire in Jane’s book. Jane insisted that all of her characters were total fabrications. However, at a recent Guggenheim reception, Philip Rylands had engaged the man in conversation, and at one point lightheartedly referred to an innocuous detail of the man’s ancestry, not realizing that this detail had been invented by Jane as part of her character’s thin disguise.

  The man stared icily at Philip.

  “That’s true, isn’t it?” Philip asked, referring to the ancestral detail.

  “Only in your wife’s book!” the man replied.

  Jane Rylands had wisely steered clear of any character or plot-line that would remind anyone of Olga Rudge or the Ezra Pound Foundation. But one of her most belittling caricatures bore a twisted resemblance to a woman who had been among her most vocal critics at the time of the Ezra Pound Foundation imbroglio. This and other unsympathetic portraits created the impression that Jane Rylands had used the stories as a score-settling device.

  As for the now-defunct Ezra Pound Foundation, one of its would-be assets, the Hidden Nest cottage of Ezra Pound and Olga Rudge, was currently providing a substantial rental income for their daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz. Pound memorabilia had been increasing in value. In 1999, Mary de Rachewiltz had offered for sale, through Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in New York, 139 of her parents’ books, which had been stored for years in Brunnenburg Castle. They included signed first editions of the Cantos and books by other authors, many with marginal notations by Pound and Rudge. Horowitz’s asking price came to a total of over $1 million, prompting people to wonder what the 208 boxes of Olga Rudge’s papers, sold to the Ezra Pound Foundation for $7,000 in 1987, and later to Yale for an undisclosed sum, might now be worth on the open market.

  Riccardo Muti strode onto the stage, his glossy black hair falling into his eyes. He bowed, raised his baton, and led the orchestra in the Italian national anthem. The audience, rising to its feet, turned toward the royal box at the rear of the hall and saluted the presidential couple with a sustained ovation. Standing at the Ciampis’ side in the royal box were the patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Angelo Scola, Mayor and Maura Costa, and former prime minister Lamberto Dini, whose wife, Donatella, had broken the news of the fire at the Save Venice Ball in New York eight years earlier.

  My gaze drifted up to the lion of St. Mark’s, mounted atop the royal box like a burnished diadem in exactly the spot once occupied by the insignias of France and Austria. It reminded me of what Count Ranieri da Mosto had said about the royal box: “It’s not Napoleon’s royal box any longer, nor is it Austria’s. It’s ours.”

  The gift to the city of an eight-foot statue of Napoleon had sparked an intensely emotional debate over whether to accept it. The statue had been commissioned in 1811 by Venetian merchants who were grateful to Napoleon for turning the city into a free port. It had stood in St. Mark’s for two years until Venice fell to the Austrians in 1814. After that, it was lost for two hundred years and had only recently surfaced at Sotheby’s in New York, where the French Committee to Safeguard Venice had bought it for $350,000 in order to make what they had assumed would be a welcome gift for Venice.

  The moderates, including Mayor Costa and the director of civic museums, Giandomenico Romanelli, argued that Napoleon and the statue were simply part of Venice’s history and therefore worthy of being displayed. The anti-Bonapartists, whose ranks included Count Girolamo Marcello, Count da Mosto, and most of the center right, countered that on those grounds one could argue that the bronze bust of Mussolini in storage at the Correr Museum should be displayed as well.

  The debate rang with endless recitations of Napoleon’s thefts, desecrations, and other outrages against Venice. Virtually everyone took one side or the other. Peter and Rose Lauritzen were vocal anti-Bonapartists. I dropped in on a lecture Peter was giving to a group of English students in the Accademia. The first words I heard him say were, “Napoleon saw to the suppression of forty parishes in Venice and the destruction—razed to the ground!—of one hundred and seventy-six religious buildings and more than eighty palaces, all of which were decorated with paintings and other works of art. In addition, Napoleon’s agents saw to the listing for confiscation of twelve thousand paintings, a great many of which were sent to Paris to enrich the collections of something called the Musée Napoleon. I trust if any of you have been to Paris you have been to the Musée Napoleon. Today it’s rather better known as the Louvre, and of course it is the single greatest monument to organized theft in the history of art!”

  A poll conducted by the Gazzettino sh
owed the public to be 12 to 1 against accepting the statue. Nevertheless, Mayor Costa did accept it, and in the dead of night it was smuggled into the Correr Museum, where it was installed in a niche behind a protective shield of Plexiglas. Months later the anti-Bonapartists brought Napoleon before an ad hoc Nuremberg-style tribunal and found him guilty as charged.

  At the height of the controversy, the leaders of the antistatue coalition sent two menacing letters to Jerome Zieseniss, the head of the French committee, advising him to get out of town. Zieseniss expressed his outrage, and city officials hastened to condemn the letter writers. Though tempers had since cooled, the gift of the statue was still widely resented as an insult to Venice. In spite of all that, however, Zieseniss had been given two excellent seats at the Fenice’s reopening. He was sitting in the orchestra beside the chairman of the World Monuments Fund, Marilyn Perry.

  The concert opened with Beethoven’s “Consecration of the House,” which was, of course, an apt choice. It put me in mind of the comment Robert Browning made in 1890 to his son, Pen, upon learning that Pen and his rich American wife had bought the enormous Palazzo Rezzonico on the Grand Canal. “Don’t be a little man in a big house,” Browning warned. Henry James, visiting the Curtises at Palazzo Barbaro a bit farther down the Grand Canal, wrote to his sister about the news, “[Palazzo Rezzonico] is altogether royal and imperial—but ‘Pen’ isn’t kingly and the train de vie remains to be seen. Gondoliers ushering in friends from pensions won’t fill it out.” Three years later, James wrote to Ariana Curtis, “Poor, grotesque little Pen—and poor sacrificed little Mrs. Pen. There seems but one way to be sane in this queer world, but there are many ways of being mad! and a palazzo-madness is almost as alarming—or as convulsive—as an earthquake—which indeed it essentially resembles.” Pen Browning had not filled out Palazzo Rezzonico in any memorable way. In fact, it was Robert Browning himself, ironically, who stole the honors from his son by dying in the house and being remembered by a plaque attached to the façade.

  The Curtises had “filled out” Palazzo Barbaro admirably for over a century. And, now that the Barbaro had passed into the hands of Ivano Beggio, the proprietor of the motorcycle maker Aprilia, Venice was watching to see how well the Beggios would fill it out. Beggio had wasted no time seeing to the cleaning of the Barbaro’s double façade. He removed important paintings from the piano nobile for cleaning and restoration.

  But then . . . nothing. Months, then years, went by. The windows of the piano nobile remained boarded up. The Beggios were rarely seen in Venice. Specialists hired to work on the restoration were utterly perplexed. Speculation abounded that the Beggios had hoped that their ownership of Palazzo Barbaro would lead to their acceptance in Venetian society and that they had been disappointed when it did not.

  Then the truth emerged. Ivano Beggio was broke! The phenomenally successful Aprilia motorcycle company was facing bankruptcy. Palazzo Barbaro was once again for sale—but not for the $6 million Beggio had paid the Curtises for it. The new asking price was said to be $14 million. No offers had yet been made, and, tragically, none would be forthcoming from the young, idealistic Daniel Curtis—the only Curtis in five generations to have any Venetian blood in his veins. Daniel had died suddenly from an aneurysm at the age of forty-seven. For a full week after his death, loving notices had appeared in the Gazzettino. One in particular captured the spirit of all the others: DANIEL. “A friend forever, a great Venetian.”

  The Fenice’s house lights did not dim when the music started, because the evening was being televised, which meant that the baroque hall would be as bright as a TV studio all night. The theater’s subtleties would be lost, at least for now. I closed my eyes and listened to the music. After Beethoven came Igor Stravinsky (buried in Venice), Antonio Caldara (born in Venice), and Richard Wagner (died in Venice). I concentrated on the sound. Were the acoustics a success? The experts had said they were. But, of course, for people sitting in boxes, especially toward the rear of the boxes, the sound quality would never be as good as it was for people sitting out in the open.

  The most distinctive sounds in Venice, however, were not really the ones inside the Fenice. Jürgen Reinhold, the Fenice’s master acoustics engineer, had put his finger on it when he expressed surprise at having discovered that the ambient nocturnal sound level in Venice was a very low thirty-two decibels. Forty-five decibels was typical of most other cities. The absence of automobile traffic, of course, accounted for the difference. “All this Venetian quietness has me bewitched,” Reinhold had said. “When I came back to my house in Munich, the noise was unbearable. But it was only the usual traffic sounds.”

  I, too, had been bewitched by the peacefulness of Venice, and by much more about Venice besides. What had at first been largely an attraction to the city’s beauty evolved into a more generalized enchantment as time went on. From the very start I had kept Count Marcello’s cautionary words in mind: “Everyone in Venice is acting. . . . Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say.”

  I knew that in Venice I had been told truths, half-truths, and outright lies, and I was never entirely sure which was which. But time often clarified matters. Only a few days before the Fenice reopened, for example, I had come upon a revealing piece of information while I was walking along the arcade of the Doge’s Palace. I noticed a plaque with the name “Loredan” inscribed on it. I thought immediately of Count Alvise Loredan, the man I had met at the Carnival ball, who had held up three fingers as he told me, more than once, that there had been three doges in his family.

  That much was quite true.

  Count Loredan also told me that a fifteenth-century Loredan had defeated the Turks and thereby prevented them from crossing the Adriatic and wiping out Christianity. There was, in fact, a well-known Pietro Loredan who had defeated the Turks in the fifteenth century. But the man commemorated on the plaque at St. Mark’s was a seventeenth-century Loredan named Girolamo, a coward who had been exiled from Venice in disgrace for having abandoned the fortress of Tenedos to the Turks, “to the great detriment of Christianity and [his] country.”

  Alvise Loredan had been under no obligation to wash his family’s dirty linen in front of me. His deception was harmless enough, and I accepted it as part of the act, part of the perpetual myth and mystery of Venice.

  When the concert was over, I came out into Campo San Fantin, where I noticed a man with two scarves draped around his neck—one white silk, one red wool—standing at the center of a burst of flashbulbs. It was Vittorio Sgarbi, the art critic who had made himself persona non grata at the Courtauld Institute in London by walking out with two rare books in his satchel. Sgarbi was posing for photographers with one arm slung around Signora Ciampi and the other clasped around the waist of a woman wearing a cap of pearls. Sgarbi had not been made Italy’s minister of culture, as it had been rumored he might be; he had been named undersecretary of state for culture, a lesser but still prominent position—and a surprising one, under the circumstances.

  At the edge of the campo, a dozen silk-stockinged men in black capes and tricornered hats were waiting to escort the eleven hundred members of the audience to boats headed for the Arsenal and a great celebratory banquet. Teams of party planners had been working on the decorations for weeks. The Gazzettino had scheduled an early printing of the next day’s newspaper—December 15, 2003—so that as guests took their seats at the banquet, they would be greeted by a glorious, full-color photograph of the Fenice splashed across the paper’s front page. World events had intervened during the day, however, and as a consequence, tonight’s guests would sit down instead to a page-one photograph of a grubby and bewildered Saddam Hussein, who had been captured in Iraq only hours earlier. But no matter.

  Having dinner with a thousand people did not appeal to me especially, and anyway I had other plans. I left Campo San Fantin and walked along Calle della Fenice toward the rear of the theater, then over a small bridge to the house on Calle Caotorta, where I paid
a visit to Signora Seguso, now the widow of the maestro Archimede Seguso, the “Wizard of Fire.”

  We stood at the window where Signora Seguso had seen smoke rising from the Fenice eight years earlier, and from which Archimede Seguso had watched the fire all night. Signora Seguso said she did not care to look out the window at the Fenice anymore, because in spite of all the talk about “com’era, dov’era,” the Fenice was definitely not “as it was” before the fire—not from her window, at any rate. The Fenice’s north wing, thirty feet across the canal, had been rebuilt several feet taller than it used to be, and an array of metal ducts, pipes, and fences had been mounted on top, making the view look more like the industrial landscape of Marghera than the lovely vista of terra-cotta rooftops that she and her husband had enjoyed before.