The City of Falling Angels

  By 2:00 A.M., even though the fire was still officially out of control, Archimede Seguso could see that an equilibrium had been reached between the flames and the firemen. He appeared in the doorway of his bedroom, the first time he had come away from the window in four hours.

  “We’re out of danger now,” he said. He kissed his wife. “I told you not to worry, Nandina.” Then he embraced his son, his daughter-in-law, and his grandson. With that, and without saying another word, he went to bed.

  AS SIGNOR SEGUSO FELL A SLEEP, a parade of Prussian generals, court jesters, and fairy princesses began stepping out of elevators into the candlelit Rainbow Room in New York. A bishop in full regalia handed a drink to a belly dancer. A hooded executioner chatted with Marie Antoinette. A cluster of people had gathered around the painter Ludovico De Luigi, who had sketched the outlines of the Miracoli Church and was beginning to apply colors to its inlaid-marble façade. The hired entertainers—stilt-walking jugglers, acrobats, fire-eaters, and mimes in commedia dell’arte costumes—strolled among the guests, most of whom had no idea the Fenice was on fire. The only coverage of it on American television so far had been an eleven-second mention, without pictures, on the CBS Evening News.

  Peter Duchin sat at the piano, perched like an exotic bird with black-and-white feathers rising from the brow of his black mask. When he saw Bob Guthrie come to the microphone, he cut off the music with a wave of his hand.

  Guthrie, his large frame wrapped in a red-and-white caftan, welcomed the guests and then told them he hated to be the bearer of bad news. “The Fenice is burning,” he said. “It cannot be saved.” A collective gasp and cries of “No!” resounded throughout the ballroom. Then the room fell silent. Guthrie introduced the guest of honor, Signora Dini, who stepped up to the microphone with tears rolling down her cheeks. In a tremulous voice, she thanked the board of Save Venice, which, she said, had voted late that afternoon to dedicate the evening to raising money to rebuild the Fenice. The silence was broken by scattered applause; the applause swelled to an ovation, and the ovation crested on a burst of cheers and whistles.

  Ludovico De Luigi, his face ashen, took the Miracoli painting off the easel and put a blank canvas in its place. In pencil he quickly sketched the Fenice. He put it in the middle of the Venetian Lagoon, for ironic effect, and engulfed it in flames.

  Several people headed for the elevators to go home and change into traditional evening clothes, saying they were no longer in the mood to be in costume. Signora Dini turned away from the microphone and daubed her eyes with a handkerchief. Bob Guthrie stood nearby, speaking to a cluster of people a few feet from the still-open microphone, which picked up part of his conversation. “We’ll probably raise close to a million dollars for the Fenice tonight,” he said, citing the thousand-dollar price of admission, the auction of Ludovico De Luigi’s painting, and spontaneous donations. In answer to a question about the money, Guthrie could be heard to say, “No, no! Certainly not. We won’t hand the money over to Venice until the restoration starts. Are you kidding? We’re not that stupid. We’ll keep it in escrow till then. Otherwise, there’s no telling whose pocket it might end up in.”

  BY 3:00 A.M., THE FIRE WAS FINALLY DECLARED UNDER control. There had been no secondary fires, despite the flying debris, and no one had been seriously hurt. The Fenice’s thick walls had contained the blaze, preventing the fire from spreading, while incinerating everything inside. Instead of destroying Venice, the Fenice had, in a sense, committed suicide.

  At 4:00 A.M., the helicopter made its last overhead pass. The Fenice’s sad fate was written in the leaky hoses snaking through Campo Santa Maria del Giglio from the Grand Canal to the Fenice.

  Mayor Massimo Cacciari was still standing in Campo San Fantin in front of the Fenice, looking glumly at what was left of the opera house. A perfectly preserved poster, enclosed in a glass case mounted on a wall by the entrance, announced that a Woody Allen jazz concert would reopen the renovated opera house at the end of the month.

  At 5:00 A.M., Archimede Seguso opened his eyes and sat up in bed, refreshed despite having slept only three hours. He went to the window and opened the shutters. The firemen had set up floodlights and trained their hoses on the gutted interior. Billowing smoke rose from the Fenice’s shell.

  Signor Seguso dressed by the light reflected from the Fenice’s floodlit walls. The air was thick with the smell of charred wood, but he could smell the coffee his wife was brewing for him. As always, she was standing by the door waiting for him with a steaming cup, and, as always, he stood there with her and drank it. Then he kissed her on both cheeks, put his gray fedora on his head, and went downstairs. He paused for a moment in front of the house, looking up at the Fenice. The windows were gaping holes framing a view of the dark, predawn sky. A strong wind whipped around the dismal shell. It was a cold wind from the north, a bora. If it had been blowing eight hours earlier, the fire would certainly have spread.

  A young fireman was leaning against the wall, exhausted. He nodded as Signor Seguso approached.

  “We lost it,” the fireman said.

  “You did all you could,” Signor Seguso replied gently. “It was hopeless.”

  The fireman shook his head and looked up at the Fenice. “Every time a piece of that ceiling fell, a piece of my heart fell with it.”

  “Mine, too,” said Signor Seguso, “but you must not blame yourself.”

  “It will always haunt me that we couldn’t save it.”

  “Look around you,” Signor Seguso said. “You saved Venice.”

  With that the old man turned and set off slowly down Calle Caotorta on his way to Fondamente Nuove, where he would take the vaporetto, or water bus, to his glassworks factory in Murano. When he was younger, the mile-long walk to the vaporetto had taken him twelve minutes. Now it took an hour.

  In Campo Saint ’Angelo, he turned and looked back. A wide, spiraling column of smoke, floodlit from beneath, rose like a lurid specter against the sky.

  At the far side of the campo, he entered the shopping street, Calle de la Mandola, where he encountered a man in a blue workman’s jumper washing the windows of the pastry shop. Window washers were the only people who were at work at that early hour, and they always greeted him as he walked by.

  “Ah, maestro!” said the man in blue. “We were worried about you last night, living so close to the Fenice.”

  “You’re very kind,” said Signor Seguso, bowing slightly and touching the brim of his hat, “but we were never really in any danger, thank goodness. We’ve lost our theater, though. . . .”

  Signor Seguso neither stopped nor slowed his pace. Shortly after six, he arrived at the glassworks and walked into the cavernous furnace room. Six large furnaces clad in ceramic blocks were ranged about the room, set well apart, all of them firing and filling the space with a constant, rumbling roar. He conferred with an assistant about the colors he wanted to prepare for the day. Some would be transparent, some opaque. There would be yellow, orange, red, purple, umber, cobalt, gold leaf, white, and black—more colors than he normally used, but the assistant did not ask why, and the master did not offer to explain.

  When the glass was ready, he stood in front of the open furnace, steel pipe in hand, looking calmly, deeply into the fire. Then, with a smooth, graceful motion, he dipped the end of the pipe into the reservoir of molten glass in the furnace and turned it slowly, over and over, pulling it out when the glowing, pear-shaped lump at the end was just the right size to begin making the vase he had in mind.

  The first vase, of what would eventually be more than a hundred, was unlike anything he had ever made before. Against an opaque background as black as night, he had set swirling ribbons of sinuous diamond shapes in red, green, white, and gold, leaping, overlapping, and spiraling upward around the vase. He never explained what he was doing, but by the second vase, everyone knew. It was a record of the fire in glass—the flames, the sparks, the embers, and the smoke—just as he had seen it from his window, glint
ing through the louvers, reflected in the rippling water at the bottom of the canal, and rising far into the night.

  In the coming days, the municipality of Venice would conduct an inquiry to discover what had happened on the evening of January 29, 1996. But on the morning of the thirtieth, while the Fenice’s embers still smoldered, one preeminent Venetian had already started to compose his own testimony in glass, while at the same time creating a work of terrible beauty.

  {2}

  DUST & ASHES

  I HAD BEEN TO VENICE A DOZEN TIMES OR MORE, having fallen under its spell when I first caught sight of it twenty years before—a city of domes and bell towers, floating hazily in the distance, topped here and there by a marble saint or a gilded angel.

  On this latest trip, as always, I made my approach by water taxi. The boat slowed as we drew near; then it slipped into the shaded closeness of a small canal. Moving at an almost stately pace, we glided past overhanging balconies and weatherworn stone figures set into crumbling brick and stucco. I looked up through open windows and caught glimpses of painted ceilings and glass chandeliers. I heard fleeting bits of music and conversation, but no honking of horns, no squealing of brakes, and no motors other than the muffled churning of our own. People walked over footbridges as we passed underneath, and the backwash from our boat splashed on moss-covered steps leading down into the canal. That twenty-minute boat ride had become a much-anticipated rite of passage, transporting me three miles across the lagoon and five hundred to a thousand years backward in time.

  To me Venice was not merely beautiful; it was beautiful everywhere. On one occasion I set about testing this notion by concocting a game called “photo roulette,” the object of which was to walk around the city taking photographs at unplanned moments—whenever a church bell rang or at every sighting of a dog or cat—to see how often, standing at an arbitrary spot, one would be confronted by a view of exceptional beauty. The answer: almost always.

  But irritatingly often, before taking a picture I had to wait for a straggle of tourists to step out of the frame, even in the outlying quarters where tourists supposedly never went. This is why I decided to come to Venice in midwinter: I would see it without the obscuring overlay of other tourists. For once I would have a clear view of Venice as a functioning city. The people I saw in the street would be people who actually lived there, going about their business purposefully, casting familiar glances at sites that still had the power to stop me in my tracks. But as I came across the lagoon that morning in early February 1996 and caught the first faint whiff of charcoal, I realized I had arrived in Venice at an extraordinary moment.

  A stunning, full-color, aerial photograph of Venice dominated the front page of the morning’s Il Gazzettino. It was a panoramic view of the city taken the day after the fire, with the burned-out Fenice at the center of it, a faint plume of smoke rising from its blackened crater as if from a spent volcano. “Never again! No more pictures like this,” the newspaper promised its readers.

  There had been an outpouring of sympathy for Venice. The opera singer Luciano Pavarotti had announced he would give a concert to help raise funds to rebuild the Fenice. Plácido Domingo, not to be outdone, said he would also give a concert, but his concert would be in St. Mark’s Basilica. Pavarotti shot back that he, too, would sing in St. Mark’s, and that he would sing there alone. Woody Allen, whose jazz band was to have reopened the newly renovated Fenice with a concert at the end of the month, quipped to a reporter that the fire must have been set by “a lover of good music,” adding, “If they didn’t want me to play, all they had to do was say so.”

  The destruction of the Fenice was an especially brutal loss for Venice. It had been one of the few cultural attractions that had not been ceded to outsiders. Venetians always outnumbered tourists at the Fenice, so all Venetians felt a special affection for it, even those who had never set foot inside the place. The city’s prostitutes took up a collection and presented Mayor Cacciari with a check for $1,500.

  The Gazzettino reported on a series of revelations about the fire that had come out in the last two days. Even for people not normally susceptible to suggestions of conspiracy, there were a number of suspicious coincidences.

  It was discovered, for example, that someone had unplugged both the smoke alarm and the heat sensor two days before the fire. This had supposedly been done because fumes and heat from the renovation work had been setting off the alarms repeatedly, annoying the workers.

  The Fenice’s sprinkler system had been dismantled before a newly installed system could be activated.

  The lone guard of the Fenice had not made an appearance at the fire until 9:20 P.M., at least twenty minutes after the first alarm had been called in. He claimed he had been wandering around inside the building, trying to find the source of the smoke.

  It had also come to light that a small fire had broken out two weeks earlier, caused by a blowtorch, possibly on purpose, but the incident had been hushed up.

  Conspiracy or no, there was ample evidence of negligence, starting with the empty canal. Mayor Cacciari had initiated a commendable and long-overdue plan to dredge and clean the city’s smaller canals. However, a year before the fire, the city’s prefect, or chief administrator, had sent the mayor a letter warning that no canal should be drained until the city had first secured an alternate source of water in case of fire. His letter had gone unanswered. Six months later, the prefect sent a second letter. The answer to that one was the fire itself.

  The dry canal was only part of the story of malfeasance and negligence. People who had been involved in the renovation of the Fenice described the work site as chaotic. Security doors had been left unlocked or even wide open; people came and went as they pleased, authorized or not; copies of the keys to the front door had been handed out haphazardly, and several were unaccounted for.

  There was also the curious tale of the Fenice’s café. Officials had ordered the café shut down during renovation, but the café manager, Signora Annamaria Rosato, had begged her bosses to let her keep it open as a canteen for the workers. They had relented, telling her, “Just be careful.” So Signora Rosato set up her electric coffeemaker and her electric hot plate for making pasta. She moved this makeshift kitchen from room to room, staying out of the way of the renovation work as best she could. But since the fire had started in the Apollonian rooms, very close to the site of her operations of the moment, Signora Rosato and her coffeemaker became a media sensation. The police called her in for questioning as a suspect. They cleared her, but not before her unexpected notoriety had made her so resentful that she began suggesting names of other people she thought might be worth looking into as suspects—the workers who had used her stove on the afternoon of the fire, for example, and the conservators who had left powerful heat lamps aimed at wet patches of stucco overnight in order to dry them. All the people she fingered were brought in for questioning and later released.

  The prosecutors, despite having interviewed dozens of witnesses, admitted to the Gazzettino that at this point they did not know how the fire had started. Prosecutor Felice Casson appointed a panel of four experts to investigate the fire and told them to begin work immediately.

  One thing was already painfully clear, however: Neither of the two major evils confronting Venice could be blamed for the fire—not the rising sea level, which threatened to inundate the city at some unspecified time in the future, nor the overabundance of tourists, which was choking the life out of the city. There had been no high water and hardly any tourists in Venice on the night the Fenice burned. This time Venice had only itself to blame.

  According to the Gazzettino, there was to be a town meeting to discuss the Fenice later in the day. It would be held at the Ateneo Veneto, a monumental sixteenth-century palace on the opposite side of Campo San Fantin from the Fenice. The Ateneo Veneto had originally been the home of a black-hooded fraternal order dedicated to escorting condemned prisoners to the gallows and providing them with a decent burial. For t
he last two hundred years, however, it had served as the Academy of Letters and Sciences, the cultural Parnassus of Venice. Lectures and convocations of the highest literary and artistic significance were held in the ornate Great Hall on the ground floor. For an event merely to be scheduled at the Ateneo Veneto meant that the cultural elite of Venice considered it important.

  I went to Campo San Fantin half an hour before the meeting and found a somber gathering of Venetians filing past the Fenice in silent mourning. Two carabinieri, or policemen, stood guard in front, smartly dressed in dark blue suits with rakish red stripes along the trouser seams. They were smoking cigarettes. At first glance, the Fenice looked just as it always had—the formal portico, the Corinthian columns, the ornamental iron gates, the windows and balustrades—all completely intact. But of course this was just the façade, and façade was all there was. The Fenice had become a mask of itself. Behind the mask, the interior had been reduced to a pile of rubble.