The City of Falling Angels (5 page)
Read The City of Falling Angels Online
Authors: John Berendt
Tags: #History, #Social History, #Europe, #Italy
“I’m staying here,” Archimede Seguso said quietly.
IN CONVERSATIONS AT HAIG’S BAR, certain words kept coming up again and again, words that seemed to have nothing to do with the Fenice or with each other: Bari . . . Petruzzelli . . . San Giovanni in Laterano . . . Uffizi . . . Milano . . . Palermo. But there was another word, also frequently overheard, that tied them all together: Mafia.
The mob had recently been engaged in arson and bombings. The most unsettling incident, in view of what was happening tonight at the Fenice, was the 1991 fire that destroyed the Petruzzelli Opera House in Bari. It was subsequently discovered that the Mafia boss in Bari had ordered the fire after bribing the manager to award him lucrative contracts for the reconstruction. More than a few people watching the Fenice fire believed that this was a replay. The Mafia was also suspected in the deadly car-bomb attacks that had destroyed parts of the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and the Gallery of Modern Art in Milan. The bombings had been interpreted as a warning to Pope John Paul II for his frequent anti-Mafia statements and to the Italian government for its aggressive judicial crackdown on the mob. Even now, in Mestre on the mainland shore of the Venetian Lagoon, a Sicilian don was being tried for the car-bomb murder of a tough anti-Mafia judge, his wife, and bodyguards in Palermo. The fire at the Fenice could be a heavy-handed warning to stop the trial.
“The Mafia!” Girolamo Marcello exclaimed, speaking to friends who had joined him on his
altana.
“If they did set the fire, they could have saved themselves the trouble. The Fenice would have burned without any help from them. It’s been chaos over there for months.
altana.
“If they did set the fire, they could have saved themselves the trouble. The Fenice would have burned without any help from them. It’s been chaos over there for months.
“Just after the renovation work started,” Marcello went on, “the superintendent of the Fenice asked me to come and see him. Save Venice had just restored the Fenice’s curtain, and now he wanted me, as a member of the Save Venice board, to ask Save Venice to restore the frescoes of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
in the bar. The superintendent invited me to come and look at the frescoes, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. The place was madness. Everywhere you looked, there were flammable materials. I don’t know how many cans of varnish, turpentine, and solvents there were—open, closed, spilled on the floor—lengths of wooden parquet in stacks, rolls of plastic carpeting piled high, heaps of rubbish everywhere. In the midst of all this, men were working with blowtorches! Can you imagine! Soldering irons! And surveillance? Zero, as usual. Responsibility? Zero. I thought, ‘They’re mad!’ So if the Mafia wanted the Fenice to burn, all they had to do was wait.”
Divine Comedy
in the bar. The superintendent invited me to come and look at the frescoes, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. The place was madness. Everywhere you looked, there were flammable materials. I don’t know how many cans of varnish, turpentine, and solvents there were—open, closed, spilled on the floor—lengths of wooden parquet in stacks, rolls of plastic carpeting piled high, heaps of rubbish everywhere. In the midst of all this, men were working with blowtorches! Can you imagine! Soldering irons! And surveillance? Zero, as usual. Responsibility? Zero. I thought, ‘They’re mad!’ So if the Mafia wanted the Fenice to burn, all they had to do was wait.”
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.
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, glinting 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.
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