This latest development mystified everyone who knew Stefani, especially Albert Gardin. Toward the end of June, I was walking by his storefront and saw the top of his head behind a pile of hats. I went into the shop.
“Have you found out anything more about the little girl?” I asked.
“There is no little girl,” he answered.
“What?”
“Mario left everything to a thirty-two-year-old man. That’s all it says in his will. No mention of a baby girl.”
“How did you find that out?” I asked.
Gardin reached into a drawer and took out a single sheet of paper. It was a copy of Mario Stefani’s third will. It was handwritten, as all Italian wills are required to be. The “sole and universal” heir was listed as Nicola Bernardi.
“Who is he?”
“A fruit-and-vegetable dealer,” said Gardin. “He works in his family’s shop in St. Marks. He and his wife have a baby girl. Her name is Anna. Mario wrote a poem about her.”
I remembered then that I had heard Stefani speak twice on his television program about a beautiful baby girl who had helped him come out of a deep depression. Gardin handed me a copy of Stefani’s last book of poetry and opened it to the poem about her. Anna had given him hope, he wrote, and the will to go on living.
“The
Gazzettino
got something else wrong, too,” said Gardin. “They said the notary found the will in a book of poems. But when the notary registered the will, he reported that it was
given
to him by Nicola Bernardi’s lawyer, Cristina Belloni. I’ve got the registration documents, too.”
“What do you make of it?” I asked.
“I am more suspicious than ever. Let me show you something
really
strange. Look at the wording of the will. It’s full of grammatical errors. Mario would never have written anything like this. For example, he switches from the first person to the third, then back to the first: ‘
I,
Mario Stefani, being in full control of
his
mental faculties, leaves all
his
worldly goods and properties and all
my
financial assets . . .’
“If it isn’t an outright forgery, then Mario had to be under tremendous strain at the time he wrote it. It might have been dictated to him. If Mario wrote this will intentionally, then he committed suicide a second time—a literary suicide. I mean, what does this fruit-and-vegetable dealer know or care about poetry? How will he know the difference between a piece of paper with a poem scribbled on it and a piece of paper that can be safely thrown away? Will he be making decisions about literary rights and translations? Will he negotiate with publishers?”
“Speaking of which,” I said, “how does this affect you as Stefani’s publisher? I notice that in his books Editoria Universitaria is identified as the holder of the copyright.”
He shrugged. “Who knows?”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“First I want to have this mystery cleared up. I’m going to petition the public prosecutor to launch an honest, open investigation, and I’ll send copies to the newspapers.”
A week later, Gardin did just that.
The following day, the
Gazzettino
duly reported that Gardin’s petition “puts in doubt the news published here about the suicide of the Venetian poet.” The newspaper quoted Stefani’s will verbatim, including the grammatical mistakes, but omitting Bernardi’s name. It was clear that no baby girl had been mentioned. The paper also cited Gardin’s complaint that in registering the will the notary said it had been given to him by an attorney, not that he had found it between the pages of a book, as the
Gazzettino
had reported. The paper gave no reason for the discrepancies.
Two days after this story appeared in the
Gazzettino,
my telephone rang shortly before noon. It was Gardin. He sounded shaken.
“Something very serious has happened,” he said. “Can you come to the shop? The police have already been here.”
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “You’ll see.”
Fifteen minutes later, I was standing in front of Gardin’s office, which is to say outside his wife’s clothing shop. Scrawled with a blue felt-tip marker on the shop window was the warning DON’T GO BREAKING BALLS OVER MARIO STEFANI’S WILL.
Once I had read and absorbed it, Gardin wiped it off with a rag. “The
Gazzettino
and
La Nuova
were here an hour ago,” he said. “They took pictures. I’ve filed a complaint with the police.”
“Whoever this fruit-and-vegetable dealer is,” I said, “he must be awfully dense not to realize he’d be the obvious suspect.”
“It could be him,” said Gardin. “Or a friend of his, or a member of his family.”
The next day, both newspapers published stories about the threatening scrawl accompanied by photographs of Gardin standing next to the window. “Someone is not happy about my petition to the public prosecutor,” Gardin told
La Nuova,
“but I intend to get to the bottom of this.” He had filed a petition with the police asking for increased nighttime patrols around his wife’s shop. Still neither paper revealed Bernardi’s identity.
That happened three weeks later, at the end of July, when Nicola Bernardi stepped forward publicly and identified himself as Stefani’s heir. Through his lawyer, Cristina Belloni, he said he intended to safeguard Mario Stefani’s legacy by donating all of his manuscripts, books, correspondence, and paintings to the Querini Stampalia Foundation. He had hired specialists to catalog everything in Stefani’s house by the end of summer.
Belloni insisted that there was no mystery behind the will. Her client found out that he was the heir only after Stefani’s death, when he was summoned by the police.
Albert Gardin was not satisfied. Three days later, he held a news conference in the lobby of the Sofitel Hotel and introduced sensational new charges. “The last relationship of Mario Stefani,” he said, “turned into a dangerous erotic game that got out of control and cost him his life.
“I would describe his death as
pasoliniana,
” he went on, referring to the brutal murder in 1975 of the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini for which a hustler was convicted. “Mario paid for sex with the boys he wrote about in his erotic poems. The police should investigate Mario’s bank account, because there was movement in it right before his death, and when he died, the account was empty.”
A reporter pointed out to Gardin, “Many people think you have a personal motive for calling attention to this case even though it seems to be resolved.”
“It is absolutely
not
resolved,” Gardin replied. “Only the lawyer for the heir thinks it is.”
The next morning, a second warning appeared on Gardin’s shop window. This one, like the first, was written with a blue felt-tip marker: HAVEN’T YOU READ THE NEWSPAPERS? THERE’S NO MYSTERY ABOUT STEFANI’S WILL. IF YOU KEEP TALKING, THERE WILL BE TROUBLE FOR YOU.
Gardin filed another complaint against persons unknown, once again asking the police for nighttime surveillance.
I stopped in again at his shop to look at the writing on his window. Gardin and his wife were both inside. He came out into the
calle.
“My wife is terrified,” he said under his breath. “She wants me to abandon my campaign.”
But he did not. Instead he organized a posthumous sixty-third-birthday party for Stefani the following Sunday in Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio. He sent out invitations entitled “Poets Never Die,” addressed to “My Friends,” and signed “Mario.” The
Gazzettino
said that the invitation was in dubious taste. “It is right to remember the poet,” the paper declared, “right that his friends (the real ones) gather, but let us not exploit his death. Leave Mario in peace, as he wanted.”
The party took place outdoors in the
campo
and was attended by about forty people. It began as a tasteful homage to Stefani’s poetry but quickly turned into a platform for denunciations of the police and speculation about what had really happened.
Stefani’s longtime friend, the journalist Maria Irma Mariotti, proposed the most extreme scenario, in line with Gardin’s. “In my opinion, Mario was murdered,” she said in a raspy, smoker’s voice. “I won’t exclude the possibility that he was the victim of an erotic game, one that involved asphyxiation with a bag over his head or a rope around his neck, followed by a staged hanging.”
Mariotti said that she had been with Stefani at an art exhibition a year before he died, when he suddenly broke down in tears, trembling uncontrollably, and told her he was desperately in love with a young man who was threatening never to see him again unless Mario paid him ever-increasing sums of money. “He’s ruining my life,” Stefani had said, “but I can’t turn back.”
“I warned Mario to break off this relationship,” she said. “It sounded dangerous. But he said he had already written the man into his will.
“‘Tear it up,’ I told him.
“‘But if he finds out, I don’t know how he’ll react.’
“When I heard that,” said Mariotti, “I told Mario, ‘If you don’t end this affair in a hurry, you’ll be signing your own death warrant.’ When I left him that evening, not only did I beg him to drop this gold digger, I swore I wouldn’t see him again until he did. Sometime later he called and said, ‘Relax, it’s over,’ but to tell you the truth, I didn’t believe him.”
The
Gazzettino
published an account of the party, including a summation of Mariotti’s suspicions. Ten days later, Mariotti submitted a detailed, three-page report to the carabinieri, and two days after that a third warning appeared on the window of Gardin’s shop. Once again, it was written with a blue felt-tip marker and in the same handwriting as before: YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE TALKING BULLSHIT ABOUT EROTIC GAMES SAYING MARIO STEFANI WAS MURDERED. HE COMMITTED SUICIDE. UNDERSTAND??? WE’LL BREAK YOUR ASS. LAST WARNING.
For the third time, Albert Gardin filed a complaint against persons unknown and repeated his request for nighttime surveillance.
That was where matters stood when I went to see Aurelio Minazzi, the notary who had purportedly found Mario Stefani’s will in a book of poetry. Minazzi was youthful and likable. He said he had known Stefani thirty-five years, having met him through his father, who had been secretary to the editor of the
Gazzettino.
“Did you really find the third will tucked into a book of poetry?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said.
“Then, when you registered it, why did you say Cristina Belloni had given it to you and asked you to file it?”
“That was a legal formality,” he said. “The law requires that someone
request
that a notary register a will. I could not have done it on my own. I could have taken the will to another notary and asked
him
to register it. So when I found the will, I called Cristina Belloni and said, ‘Yes, I’ve found it.’ Then she came here with Bernardi. I handed the will to Bernardi. Bernardi gave it to Cristina Belloni, and then she gave it to me and asked me to publish it.”
“Why didn’t you mention in your report that you found it in a book?”
“Because it’s irrelevant. It makes no difference where it was before it was registered. Mario could have put it in a bank vault, or given it to his publisher, or left it in his desk drawer. He didn’t have to leave it with a notary.”
“Then why did the judge immediately point the finger at you and launch an investigation into why you hadn’t turned over the original?”