“The first butcher said, ‘If you can do that, I’ll pay any price.’ Flies were depositing their eggs all over his meat. It was a disaster. I picked a number out of the air, and I said, ‘It will cost you thirty thousand lire [fifteen dollars],’ and he said, ‘Do it.’ By the end of the day, I’d picked up orders worth one hundred fifty thousand lire [seventy-five dollars], which was a lot of money in those days.
“I was overjoyed. But I didn’t have a product! Also, I was broke. So I stopped in at a bar in Treviso, where I live—that’s eighteen miles north of Venice—and I talked two friends into going into business with me. I immediately moved into the Carlton Hotel in Treviso, and with the help of the telephone operator and the hotel porter, I led clients to believe that this was the Italian headquarters of the American insecticide company.
“How did we kill flies? We used a phosphorus compound made by Montedison. If you used it today, you would probably go to jail. It’s too toxic. But it worked. Business grew. People heard about us.
“Then I got a call from Count Borletti, the sewing-machine king, and he asked me to rid his stable of flies. One day Borletti said to me, ‘Massimo, what are you going to do in the winter when there are no flies? Killing flies is a seasonal business. But rats are a pest all year. You should consider making rat poison.’
“What a brainstorm! That very night, I started experimenting in my bathroom sink at the hotel. I kneaded ten pounds of pork fat and coumarin with my bare hands, and in the morning I changed everything—my company, its name, and its mission. That was 1970. We were an immediate success, and we’ve only grown since then. I admit that killing rats may not be as noble a profession as curing cancer, but at least I’m making a contribution to humanity, and my grandmother can rest in peace.”
Donadon handed each of us his card. The company’s name was “Braün Mayer Deutschland.”
“I thought you were Italian,” I said.
“I am, but if I had given my company an Italian name, people would think, ‘This product was made in Italy? I don’t trust it.’ Italy has an image of being nothing but Mafia, tailors, and shoemakers. On the other hand, Germany is solid, scientific, and efficient. If anyone could be counted on to kill a rat, a German would be the one. So I chose a name that sounded very German. ‘Mayer’ is the German equivalent of Smith. ‘Braün’ reminds you of Wernher von Braun, the man who designed the rockets that took men to the moon, and that gives you confidence. The umlaut over the
u
shouldn’t be there, but it reinforces the Germanness of the name. And ‘Deutschland’ speaks for itself.”
“Very shrewd,” I said.
“My little company became part of the famous economic boom in northern Italy. Did you know that here in northern Italy we have the highest concentration of businesses in the world? It’s true: There’s one company for every eight inhabitants. They’re mostly small, family-run companies. Like mine, and like Benetton, which is run by my old friend Luciano Benetton. Luciano was born and raised in Treviso, like me, and we both have our world headquarters in Treviso.”
“The Two Titans of Treviso,” I said.
“Well . . .” Signor Donadon blushed. “Luciano has a genius for making money, and he’s very good at holding on to it, too. I’ve known him for more than thirty years, and I love him. But as rich as he is, he’s never so much as bought me lunch! He loves my cooking, though, so he comes to my house often for dinner. I cook for rats and for Luciano Benetton.”
“Have you and Benetton ever worked together?”
“No, but we’ve both used the same photographer for our ads—Oliviero Toscani, the guy who created the ‘United Colors of Benetton’ ad campaign and
Colors
magazine. I got Toscani to shoot an ad for my rat poison. It was based on
The Last Supper.
All the men had rat heads, even Christ. But I got talked out of using it.”
Signor Donadon began eating his dinner, and as he did a commotion erupted at the far end of the hall. A cluster of late arrivals had made a showy entrance involving a flowing white silk scarf and a great deal of glitter. The scarf belonged to a tall, lanky man in a dinner jacket and aviator-style horn-rimmed glasses. He was exchanging greetings with people at various tables. The glitter was his entourage: three beautiful women, one of whom was wearing a sequined body stocking.
“They’re models or actresses, probably,” the woman to my left said, having noticed I was watching. “He’s Vittorio Sgarbi, an art critic and one of Italy’s great seducers, self-proclaimed. He’s already written his autobiography, and he’s only forty-five—sees himself as a modern-day Casanova. He’s very smart and extremely glib. He has a daily commentary slot on television, so he’s a famous national figure.”
“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