The City of Falling Angels

  “Ah, the admirable Sgarbi,” said the man with her. “I wonder if he’s still barred from the Courtauld Institute in London. They caught him walking out the door with two valuable old books not that long ago. It attracted a lot of notice in the press, not only because he was an art critic but because he was also a member of the Italian parliament. He’s in the Chamber of Deputies. Chairman of the Committee on Culture, no less. He was at the Courtauld that day to speak in a symposium about painters of the Ferrara school. When they grabbed him, he claimed he had only wanted to study the books and photocopy them. In his autobiography, he said he’d been set up by another art critic who was jealous.”

  Sgarbi was walking past, one hand running through his mop of brown hair, the other wrapped around the waist of one of his female friends.

  The man sitting next to me, eyes on Sgarbi, continued talking. “Then there was the business about Sgarbi and an old woman in a nursing home. Sgarbi persuaded the woman to sell a valuable painting to an art-dealer friend of his for a mere 8 million lire [$4,000]. Three years later, the painting brought 700 million lire [$350,000] at auction. Then it turned out that the painting had been in storage in a museum in Treviso, which had an option to buy it from the woman. Sgarbi, who was working for the fine-arts superintendency at the time, had an obligation to inform the museum but didn’t. When the sale was discovered, he was investigated for fraud and for private dealing while acting in an official capacity. The charges were dropped, of course.”

  “I suppose the damage to his career had already been done,” I said.

  “Not really. He’s now being talked about as our next minister of culture.”

  In my other ear, I heard the word “rat” again—to be precise, I heard the word pantegana, which is “rat” in the Venetian dialect. “Rats cannot vomit,” Signor Donadon was saying. “They are one of the few species on earth that are physically unable to throw up. So they cannot expel my poison once they’ve eaten it. But it’s safe to use the poison, because if people, cats, or dogs eat even a single gram of it, they vomit immediately, before it can do any harm.”

  The woman who had sworn she would not listen to talk about rats during dinner had swung back around and was now facing Signor Donadon, completely entranced.

  “But if hundreds of thousands of rats die at the same time,” she said, “won’t they decompose and cause the plague?”

  “My poison dehydrates them,” said Signor Donadon, patting her hand in reassurance, “it dries them out, mummifies them. So they don’t rot, and there is no plague.”

  “They bite people, don’t they?” she said, wrinkling her nose. “The idea horrifies me.”

  “If a rat bit you,” said Donadon, “you might not even feel it.”

  “Because I’d be in shock.”

  “No. You wouldn’t feel it because rat saliva contains an anesthetic. One of the government cabinet ministers, Riccardo Misasi, was asleep in bed one night, and he felt his toe itch. The itch got stronger, and when he turned the light on, he discovered his toe had just been gnawed off by a rat!”

  Signor Donadon seemed prepared to go on in this vein for quite a while, but the other guests were stirring.

  “There’s just one thing I wanted to ask you,” I said as I rose to leave the table. “If your poison is as effective as you say it is, why are there any rats left in Venice at all?”

  “Very simple!” he said. “Venice doesn’t use my poison. The city council always awards contracts to the lowest bidder, so I don’t even bother submitting a bid. I’m prepared to make my contribution to humanity, but”—Donadon winked—“humanity must be willing to make a contribution to me.”

  THE SERVING OF COFFEE AND TIRAMISU provided the occasion to change places, mill around, or head down two floors to the entrance hall, where a dance band had begun to make its presence felt. It occurred to me, as I looked at the crowd, that not a single mask remained in place. It was not just that the masks had been removed to facilitate eating. They had been pushed up on top of heads, stuffed into purses, or otherwise made to disappear well before dinner. I noticed also that, except for the odd decorative ribbon or wild tie, almost all the men were wearing traditional formal attire rather than costumes. The women, too, had ventured no further than their accessories in fashioning their costumes: ostrich feathers, outlandish jewelry, a novel hairstyle or some other cosmetic flourish. Anyone arriving at the ball at this hour would hardly have known it was a Carnival ball, let alone a masked or a costume ball.

  “What’s happened to the spirit of Carnival?” I asked Peter Lauritzen as we made our way downstairs.

  “Well, it will never be what it was at the height of decadence in the eighteenth century,” he said. “Carnival was a powerful institution then. When Doge Paolo Renier died during Carnival in 1789, word of his death was suppressed until Carnival was over so as not to spoil the fun.”

  As reinvented in the twentieth century, it seemed, Carnival was a tamer version of its former self. Lacking the context of pervasive decadence, even depravity, Carnival was little more than a comparatively chaste celebration of a long-gone historic phenomenon.

  “Not all Carnival parties are as proper as this one,” said Rose. “I mean, there is a more earthy side to Carnival even now.”

  “And where would that be found?” I asked.

  “The Erotic Poetry Festival is one place. It’s usually held in Campo San Maurizio, where the eighteenth-century poet Giorgio Baffo lived. Baffo’s poetry is usually described as ‘licentious.’ In fact, it’s downright pornographic!”

  The dance band on the ground floor was loud enough to drive all but the hardiest dancers from the palace, and we were soon standing on the landing platform waiting for our water taxi.

  While we waited, a gondola approached. It was moving slowly in the direction of St. Mark’s and carried two passengers, both men. One was wearing a billowing, bushy black wig, a black fur jacket, black tights, and a bright red mask with a long nose.

  The other man had a far stranger costume. He wore a shiny red rubber wig or headdress that formed a smooth, rounded cone from the top of his head down to the full width of his shoulders. His arms and torso were wrapped in a sheath of loosely draped pink rubber, and each of his knees was encased in a melon-size pink sphere. The meaning of his costume became abundantly clear as he slowly rose to a standing position. By the time he was fully erect, the pink rubber sheath had been stretched smooth. A white plastic drool hung from his mouth like an elongated pearl.

  A woman standing next to me gasped, then giggled. A man behind me murmured, “Fantastico!”

  Then, as the gondola glided by, the other man stood up, the man in the black fur jacket and the bushy black wig. His gaze swept the landing platform as he stared at each of us through his bright red mask, past his long red nose. Then he flung open his jacket, much in the manner of a flasher, and revealed a brilliant expanse of surprisingly lifelike pink satin labial folds.

  “Now, that’s what I call Carnival,” said Rose.

  {7}

  GLASS WARFARE

  MY FATHER HAS ALWAYS BEEN A MAN OF FEW WORDS,” said Gino Seguso, “and lately he’s being saying fewer words than ever—even to us.”

  It was June. Archimede Seguso was deeply engrossed at his glass factory, making the series of bowls and vases that recalled the night, four months earlier, when he stood at his bedroom window and watched the Fenice burn. Gino had invited me to come to the Seguso glassworks on Murano to have a look at the “La Fenice” collection, which by now had grown to eighty pieces. It had become Archimede Seguso’s obsession.

  The frenzied aftermath of the fire had abated considerably. By the end of February, prosecutor Felice Casson had dropped his trespassing charges against Woody Allen. (Months later Mayor Cacciari would officiate at the wedding of Woody Allen and Soon-Yi in a private civil ceremony at Palazzo Cavalli, the Venice city hall.) The Fenice’s resident orchestra had given its first postfire concert in St. Mark’s Basilica with a program o
f passion, hope, and optimism: Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection symphony. As for rebuilding the Fenice, Mayor Cacciari chose to open the project to competitive bids. This course had the advantage of insulating Cacciari from accusations of favoritism or bribery, but it had drawbacks too: The process of solicitation, submission, and judging would take at least a year.

  Meanwhile the opera company itself had succeeded in finding a temporary home in time to open its season on schedule and avoid having to pay refunds to thousands of ticket holders. The opera’s new venue was a giant circus tent pitched in a parking lot on Tronchetto Island at the foot of the bridge to the mainland. The tent was known as Palafenice, and its six white peaks became a landmark on the edge of the Venetian horizon—a visible reminder that the real Fenice lay in ruins.

  At Archimede Seguso’s glassworks, however, the opera house was still on fire. It flickered and shimmered, swirled and spiraled in the pieces Seguso was making. Gino walked me through the showroom on the way to the factory floor. His manner was warm, good-humored, and correct. In his late fifties, he was stocky, balding except for a fringe of dark hair, and dressed in a business suit. We stood in front of a shelf crowded with La Fenice vases.

  “People picture the flames as being bright orange and yellow,” he said, “because that’s how it looked in newspapers and magazines. They don’t realize how much more than that it really was. There were greens and blues and purples. The colors kept changing all night, depending on what was burning inside the theater. My father was as close to it as anybody, and these are his personal snapshots. They achieve an accuracy that photographs weren’t able to capture.

  “My father has never made anything like these before. You can see what I mean if you look around the room at the other things.”

  The showroom was a museum of glass objects made by Archimede Seguso from the 1930s to the present day, including a glass table and examples of his famous series from the 1950s called Merletti (Lace) in which filaments of colored glass were embedded in bowls and vases. As I walked around the room, I kept my hands jammed into my pockets and my arms pressed against my sides for fear I might elbow one of the larger pieces off its pedestal and send it crashing to the floor.

  Gino told me a story about his father’s tendency to be taciturn, probably to set me at ease in case the maestro did not engage me in conversation. Back in the 1950s, he said, a wealthy Sicilian prince brought Signor Seguso a glass bull that was supposed to have been found in an Etruscan tomb. The prince asked Seguso if he could authenticate it. Signor Seguso set the bull down on a table next to his workbench and proceeded to make an exact copy, correct to the smallest detail, including the surface patina, which he antiqued with the application of powders, minerals, smoke, and sand. When he was finished, the prince could not see any difference between the new bull and the old one. And that was Archimede Seguso’s answer. He had been able to duplicate the bull so precisely that, by doing so, he proved the prince’s bull could have been a fake. Scientific tests would be required to find out for certain, but Signor Seguso could respond only on his level of expertise. His answer therefore was, I don’t know.

  I said I would not be offended if the maestro chose to go on working rather than talk with me. But when we opened the door to the furnace room, we were bombarded by such a roar from the ovens that conversation would have been impossible anyway.

  The old man, wearing dark slacks and a white shirt, was seated at his workbench in front of a blazing furnace. He was turning a steel rod at the end of which was a large cylindrical vase, its blue and white colors alternating in a supple, harlequin pattern. As he turned the rod, he shaped the mouth of the vase with a pair of tongs. Then he handed the rod to an assistant, who inserted it back into the furnace to heat the vase and soften it a bit. Gino walked over to his father and spoke into his ear. Archimede turned and looked in my direction. He smiled and indicated with his head that I should come over to him. I did, and said hello. He nodded in response. The assistant pulled the vase out of the fire and rested the rod on the edge of the workbench, still turning it. Archimede looked up at me again and pointed at the vase with his tongs. “Dawn,” he said. “It’s dawn.” Then he went back to work, turning the rod and shaping the vase.

  Those were the three words Archimede Seguso spoke to me. They were enough to let me know that the vase he was making represented the Fenice as he had seen it when he rose at five o’clock the morning after the fire: white smoke rising against a medium-blue sky just before sunrise.

  We watched him work for another ten minutes and then went to Gino’s office for coffee. Gino’s son, Antonio, appeared at the doorway briefly. He was in his late twenties, thin and shy. He resembled his grandfather more than his father and had the deferential manner of a dutiful son and grandson. Antonio worked at the factory, Gino said, gaining experience in each of the departments. He would eventually take over the management of the business from his father. His grandfather had given him a few lessons in glassblowing.

  “I’ve been wondering,” I said to Gino. “’Earlier generations of Segusos were glassblowers, but that required starting at such an early age that there was no time for a formal education. Neither you nor your son is a master glassblower. What happens after Archimede?”

  “There will always be master glassblowers,” said Gino, “whether or not they are Segusos. But one needs artists as well. There are masters and there are artists. An artist has an idea. A master translates that idea into glass. Very few master glassblowers are also artists. My father is a rare exception. When he dies, our glassblowers will continue to produce his classic designs, and new artists will come up with fresh ideas that the glassblowers will then execute.”

  “So you and your son will carry on the family business,” I said.

  “Well, yes.” said Gino. Then he hesitated, fidgeting with objects on his desk for a moment. “But it’s more complicated than that. I am not an only child. I have a brother, Giampaolo. He’s four years younger. For thirty years, he worked here with my father and me, and we worked very closely. Our family was as strong as steel: my father, my mother, my brother, me—and God. Giampaolo and I were alter egos for each other. But there began to be disagreements. Then, three years ago, he left. He hasn’t been in touch with us since.”

  “You don’t speak?”

  “Only through lawyers.”

  “What about the night of the Fenice fire? Did you hear anything from him then?”

  “No. He didn’t call and didn’t come. And yet that night my son-in-law came thirty miles in his boat with a load of industrial fire extinguishers, then carried them from Campo Sant’ Angelo to our house. But from my brother we heard nothing.”

  “What were the disagreements about?”

  “Giampaolo wanted to modernize, to change things. But more important, in my opinion, was the fact we each had four grown children. I have three daughters and one son; he has three sons and a daughter. All eight were about to start their adult lives. If they wanted to work in the company, I thought each of them should earn the right, based on merit. I didn’t want the company to become a refuge for spoiled children. I insisted that we set up strict guidelines, but my brother didn’t want any rules. He had faith that the children would behave properly.

  “That was the first difficulty. The second was his relationship with our father. My brother often said that he and I were castrated by him, because of his strong personality. Giampaolo felt overshadowed. I never did.”

  “Was there anything your brother wanted to do in the company that he was not allowed to do?”

  “He was given whatever job he wanted. He worked in production, in sales, and in our stores.”

  “Did he want to design glass?”

  “He did some of that, too. And he could have done more if he wanted.”

  “Then why did he leave?”

  “Giampaolo said he wanted to lead his own life. Anyway, three years ago he announced abruptly that he was leaving, and he asked to be compensated for his
share of the family business. My father had given us each thirty percent of the company.

  “My father was indignant. He said, ‘I gave you a gift of part ownership of the business, and now you want me to buy you out?’ Instead he gave my brother some money to help him get started. Giampaolo had said he wanted to write books on the history of glassmaking. But he had a surprise for us: He started a rival company, right here in Murano. He named it Seguso Viro. He took some of our key people with him, too—a designer, our warehouse manager, and our production manager. He even tried to get the man who assembles chandeliers. He hired some of our former employees, too. Then he opened stores close to ours—one in St. Mark’s, one in the Frezzeria, another in Milan.”