On Sunday afternoon, a student friend of Stefani’s, Elena de Maria, waited for him at the Trattoria al Ponte. He had said he would advise her on her thesis, but when he did not show up for their two o’clock meeting, she phoned him and got no answer. She kept trying all afternoon. Finally, around nine o’clock, she called the fire department. While the firemen went up to his apartment, she waited downstairs. Mario had been a family friend for many years, but in all that time he had never invited her up to his apartment—probably, she said, because it was a mess. An ambulance boat came ten minutes later, and the medics went up with a stretcher.
“When they came back down with the stretcher but without Mario,” she said, “I knew he was dead. Then the firemen brought his body down in a sack. They weren’t carrying him, they were dragging him down the stairs.”
Elena de Maria met me at Al Ponte to talk about Mario. “Sunday is the one day of the week Mario would not have been missed so quickly,” she said. “He liked to stay home all day in his underwear. On any other day of the week, friends would begin to worry about him after a few hours if they hadn’t heard from him. The baker would have missed him. The people at Al Ponte would have missed him. Most people would be dead for a week before friends would notice. Mario thought he was alone, but he wasn’t.”
The public prosecutor in charge of Stefani’s case, Antonio Miggiani, said police had found Stefani hanging from the banister of the stairs leading from the kitchen to the attic. He was wearing only a T-shirt. A suicide note was attached to a string tied around his neck. Police did not reveal its contents, but they said Stefani had listed a series of unhappy events that had led him to kill himself, including the recent death of his father. They said they had found no evidence of foul play.
In newspaper editorials and conversations, Venice searched its soul and wondered how it could have overlooked Mario Stefani’s many messages of despair, especially the ones in red spray paint. A gathering at the Ateneo Veneto celebrated his life and poetry. However, the priest in Stefani’s neighborhood provoked a bitter controversy when he refused to allow the use of the Church of San Giacomo dell’Orio for Stefani’s funeral, because he had been a suicide. Ludovico De Luigi and other friends of Stefani’s accused the priest of bias, saying he had invoked an old regulation that was no longer being enforced. They staged a protest demonstration in the
campo.
The impasse was resolved a week later, when the priest at the Church of San Giovanni e Paolo consented to have the funeral there. Hundreds of people attended.
I sat next to De Luigi at the service. He was in a caustic mood. “All this week, Mario’s been in the refrigerator,” he said. “I’m disgusted with the public. They pay more attention to his homosexuality than to his poems and his heart and soul. Nobody can see past the physical aspect, because we live in a materialistic society. Everybody is explaining Mario’s death through his asshole. They don’t understand him. Today everything is tactile. We are back to the apes.” Ludovico shrugged. “Me, I live in terror of the day they understand me, because it will mean I’m just like them. And that will be the end of my life, because all my life I’ve wanted not to be understood.”
Despite police assurances, some of Stefani’s friends doubted that his death could have been a straightforward suicide. Stefani was physically inept, they said. He could not manage the simplest practicalities of daily life. As one friend put it, he would not have known how to hang a painting, much less himself.
Maria Irma Mariotti, a journalist who wrote for the cultural newspaper
Il Sole 24 Ore,
had known Stefani for thirty-five years and was perplexed that he had been found in a state of virtual undress. “Mario was always concerned about his appearance,” she said. “If he had planned this suicide himself, knowing that his body would be seen by any number of strangers, he would have wanted to be found in a more presentable state.”
Shortly after Stefani’s death, his publisher, Editoria Universitaria, released a fifty-page book of his most recent poetry,
A Silent Desperation.
The cover image was a black-and-white photograph of Stefani looking weary, and the mood of the poems inside was equally grim. He spoke of having a smile on his face but a heavy heart. He was tired of living; life was an unbearable weight. Death was waiting for him at the end of a solitary train ride.
I found a copy of an earlier book of his poetry,
Secret Poems.
It had been published three years before his death, and even then his frame of mind could not have been more clear. “I continue to live,” he wrote, “but wish to die.”
It was obvious to me that most of the people who knew Mario had not read his poetry. I sat down and read for an afternoon. At least half of his poems were about life, death, searing memories, and the pain of love and longing.
At this point, I decided to pay a call on Stefani’s publisher. I had assumed, from the sound of its name—Editoria Universitaria—that it was an august academic press, but I could not find it in the phone book. After many queries, I discovered that it was a one-man operation belonging to Albert Gardin, who ran it out of his wife’s antique-clothing and costume shop in a narrow side street, Calle del Scaleter, not far from Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio.
When I looked through the window of the tiny shop, I saw a floor-to-ceiling jumble of antique hats, dresses, coats, capes, scarves, umbrellas, dolls, and bolts of cloth—bunched, piled, strewn, draped, and hanging—but no sign of anything resembling a publishing enterprise. I stepped inside and asked a woman with light brown, shoulder-length hair if she could lead me to Albert Gardin. At that moment, a short, bearded man rose into view from behind a bunker of hats. It was Albert Gardin.
I introduced myself and said I was interested in learning more about Mario Stefani. Signor Gardin said he would be happy to tell me what he knew about his friend’s poetry, which was plenty, and his death, which was not very much. He pointed to a stool, and I sat down.
“The police tell us nothing,” he said. “We don’t even know what Mario wrote in his suicide note. My best sources of information have been leaks. A friend in the fire department told me that Mario was found with a noose around his neck and his feet touching the floor. So he didn’t die instantly from a snap of the neck but by a long, slow strangulation. His face had turned black. He used mountain-climbing rope, made of some sort of plastic, and it stretches. I think it’s possible, though, that he died some other way and that his body was strung up afterward to make it look like suicide.”
“You think it was murder?”
“It’s possible. Maybe the autopsy will tell us something.”
“But the police say there is no evidence of foul play,” I said.
“Of course,” he said.
“They say there isn’t any sign of robbery either. Money, paintings, and objects of value were all in their places.”
“They may have found money, paintings, and objects of value, as they say. But how would they know nothing was missing?”
“But weren’t there plenty of signs that Mario Stefani was suicidal?” I asked. “I mean, this new book you just published. It’s almost a road map to suicide.”
“Mario talked to me about death and suicide more than once,” said Gardin. “But I didn’t think he was suicidal, and there are things about his death that don’t seem right to me.”
“What sort?”
“The day before he died, he called to tell me to save the date of March thirtieth. He was planning an event on the Lido. I can’t remember what—a reading involving children or old people. Whatever it was, he was enthusiastic about it. Why would he be making plans if he intended to kill himself?”
“Maybe the final urge came over him suddenly, without warning,” I said. “I understand that can happen, especially to someone struggling with a suicidal impulse.”
Gardin shook his head. “I knew Mario very well. Friendship meant a lot to him. I’m sure he would have come to see me one last time to say good-bye in person. That would have been more like him. Mario was—” Gardin caught himself. He closed his eyes. Then, after a moment, he blinked away tears. “I’m sorry. I’m just not used to saying ‘Mario
was.’
I was starting to say that Mario was a true friend, that’s all. He’d been depressed, but he was not at the point of killing himself.”
“Why was he was depressed?”
Gardin paused and looked down at his hands before answering. “I think he was being blackmailed.”
“Why?”
“Mario always prided himself on buying people drinks and dinner. He’d say, ‘I want to humiliate you with my wealth.’ Then, last summer, he stopped doing that. He would say that he was in financial trouble and could no longer pay, and if he did pay, it was only for his part of the bill. He’d see someone walking by a bar in a hurry and offer him a drink, knowing that the person would not have the time to accept.
“I knew there had to be a reason for his financial problems, and I became concerned. Finally I just asked him if he was being blackmailed. He said, ‘No, no, no!’ But then he thanked me for asking the question and said, ‘Maybe one day I’ll explain everything.’”
“Why would somebody blackmail him? He was very open about his homosexuality.”
“Yes, but he kept that part of his life separate. He paid for sex. The boys were working-class, and some of them had criminal records. Some were drug addicts. They would come up to him in the street and say they needed money to pay the electric bill, and he would say, ‘Come by my house tonight.’ To the boys, it was a matter of sex for money, but Mario would often fall in love, and it made him vulnerable. He’d give them whatever they wanted, and what they always wanted was money. That’s the kind of blackmail I’m thinking of.”
Gardin was concerned about the disposition of Stefani’s estate. “Seventeen artists drew portraits of Mario, including Giorgio de Chirico. Mario told me he wanted all his paintings, his writings, and his collection of thousands of books to go to the Querini Stampalia Foundation museum.”
Gardin was especially worried about the fate of Stefani’s unpublished poetry. “He was always jotting down poems,” said Gardin. “There have to be dozens of them in notebooks, on scraps of paper, finished, unfinished. To the untrained eye, they might not look like anything. They could get thrown away.”
It was assumed at first that Stefani’s heir would be his closest relative, a distant cousin who knew him only slightly. She had made his funeral arrangements and was the sole person allowed by the police to enter his apartment. But soon after his death, two nonprofit organizations came forward, both claiming that Stefani had told them he had named them in his will as beneficiaries—a cancer-research organization in Milan and the Waldensian Church in Venice. The Waldensian Church bequest was the more recent, and therefore it seemed to be the valid heir.
A month later, however, a headline in the
Gazzettino
trumpeted, “The Mystery of the Third Will.” The police had found a third will in Stefani’s apartment, and it bore a later date than the other two. They would not reveal the identity of the beneficiary, except to say that it was someone not named in either of the two previous wills. There was one catch, however: This third will was only a photocopy, so it was not valid by itself. The original would have to be found. The public prosecutor said he would interrogate Stefani’s notary to determine whether the original copy of the will had been suppressed, hidden, or destroyed.
The most surprising revelation in this news story was that Stefani’s estate included not only his house but six rental apartments in Mestre and two
magazzini
in the Rialto. The total worth was more than a million dollars.
The next day, Stefani’s notary found the original of the third will stuck into a book of poems that Stefani had given him several months earlier. He also found a fourth will in the book, dated a month later, which simply reiterated the terms of the third. The identity of the heir was still not divulged.
The story took another unexpected turn six weeks later with the surprising announcement that the heir was a one-year-old girl. Stefani had adored the child as if she were his daughter. According to the
Gazzettino,
Stefani had made the girl’s father his heir because the girl was a minor, and if he had left his estate in her name, the courts would have taken control until she was eighteen. Still the names were not revealed. The girl’s parents were described as working-class people who were amazed and incredulous at the bequest.