As everyone knows, in any palace, the piano nobile is the grandest floor by far. It has the highest ceilings, the tallest windows, and the stateliest balconies. It is the floor where, for centuries, the money has been spent on such appurtenances as frescoed ceilings, wall-size paintings, gigantic chandeliers, and wave upon wave of sculpted stucco mounted above the doors, framing the paintings, surging across the ceilings. In some people’s minds, the piano nobile is not merely the most valuable floor of a palace, it is the palace. In other words, if a person owned only that one floor, people tended to speak of the palace as his palace. Daniel Curtis had bought the top three floors of the Barbaro. Even though the two floors below were owned and occupied by other people, there was never any question that the Barbaro belonged to the Curtises, because they owned the piano nobile. In some quarters it was even known as “Palazzo Barbaro-Curtis.”
The preeminence of the Barbaro’s piano nobile over the other floors was especially pronounced, because it was the only floor that extended through both palaces. The other floors were all at different levels, so each was confined within the Gothic part or the baroque part. At ten thousand square feet, the piano nobile was not only much bigger than the other floors, it included the greatest prize of all—the grand ballroom with its monumental paintings and sumptuous swirls of stucco, a room of such elegance and majestic proportions that it was featured in virtually every photo book on Venetian palaces.
Because Patricia was the only one of the three Curtis siblings who lived in the Barbaro, she was also the only one who made regular use of the piano nobile—for receptions, parties, or as an incomparable guest flat. She looked after it with loving care, attending to its needs, while her sister and brother had barely any interest in it. Nevertheless, as joint owners, all three were obliged to make financial contributions to its maintenance.
“When the windows in the rear needed to be replaced,” said Lisa, “we had to follow the guidelines of the superintendent of monuments, and it cost a hundred million lire [fifty thousand dollars]. When chairs need recovering, we can’t use just any cloth. It has to be Fortuny. And the floors must be cleaned and polished properly, according to curatorial standards, because after all the Barbaro is a museum.”
As time went on, with the value of the piano nobile rising year by year to something over $6 million, Lisa and Ralph increasingly viewed it as a burdensome luxury. They wanted to sell, and the issue became emotionally charged. Patricia strongly resisted, and for a time they tried to make the piano nobile pay for its own upkeep by renting it out for private parties at a fee of $10,000 or more. But the parties also eventually became a source of disagreement among the Curtises, and they came to an abrupt halt.
The prospect of handing the piano nobile down to the next generation of Curtises loomed as an even thornier problem and only stiffened Lisa’s resolve to sell. Ralph was divorced and childless, but Patricia had one son and one grandchild, and Lisa had two sons and six grandchildren. Word had it that now, with the alternatives exhausted, Patricia had finally, reluctantly, given in to the two-to-one vote and agreed to put the piano nobile on the market. Prospective buyers were already coming to have a look. It was only a matter of time.
IT OCCURRED TO ME that the sale of the Barbaro might move faster than expected and that my visit might become an unwanted complication. In an idle moment, I looked in the telephone directory for the phone numbers of the other Curtises and found a listing for Ralph. I had intended at some point to seek him out anyway. What would be the harm?
After three rings, a recorded male voice said in American-accented English, “You have reached the Earth liaison station of the Democratic Republic of the Planet Mars.”
I hung up, checked the number, and dialed again. The same voice answered with the same message and went on to declare that “qualified scholars will be admitted to the archives by appointment only. If you leave pertinent information, the librarian will return your call.” I left my name and telephone number and said I was trying to reach Ralph Curtis at Palazzo Barbaro. Two hours later, Ralph Curtis called.
“I thought I’d dialed the wrong number,” I said.
“Well, you know we’re inundated by people doing research on Henry James or John Singer Sargent or Tiepolo,” he said. “It can be such a bore. They ask ridiculous questions. I could care less whether Henry James wore a bow tie or a cravat when he wrote The Aspern Papers.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “So all that business about the Democratic Republic of the Planet Mars is just a ruse to put the academics off the scent.”
“Well, no,” he said. “That happens to be real.”
“Ah . . .” I said, becoming wary.
“How do you feel about peace and nuclear disarmament?” he asked.
“I’m for it,” I said, weighing my words.
“Good,” he said, “because that’s the mission of the Barbaro Project.”
“The Barbaro Project?”
“World peace and nuclear disarmament. We’re in touch with the heads of state of all the terrestrial nuclear powers. Our goal is to get them to surrender their nuclear fire codes to us so we can put them on a spaceship and blast them off to Mars, where they won’t be able to get at them. What do you think of that?”
“It’s a noble cause,” I said. “But you keep saying ‘we.’ Who’s in this with you?”
“Well, it’s basically me. But I’ve talked to a lot of people, like you, who think it’s a good idea.”
I took advantage of a pause in the conversation to explain my reason for calling. I mentioned my interest in the Barbaro, the Barbaro Circle, and life in the palace during five generations of Curtises. “Would it be possible,” I asked, “to visit Palazzo Barbaro?”
“It might be,” he said. “I’ll send you an application. Tell me your address.”
Three days later, a large envelope arrived with an application for admission to the “R. D. Curtis Library and Research Center.” I filled it out, writing “none” in the space provided for “Affiliations with Alien Spirits and Movements.” The signature box called for a toe print of the big toe on my right foot. Even as I pressed my toe onto an open can of brown Kiwi shoe wax, I figured the chances were about even that I had become the victim of a put-on. But I sent in the application anyway, and in a matter of days, Ralph Curtis was on the phone again, asking if I was free to come to Palazzo Barbaro at three o’clock the next afternoon. I said I was.
“Good,” he said. “We’ll have a ‘liftoff.’” He did not elaborate.
As agreed, I met him at a café in Campo Santo Stefano, immediately behind the Barbaro. He was seated at a table smoking a tapered green cigarette, the kind that usually had dried vegetables rolled into them. He was a man in his mid-fifties, slightly built and deeply tanned. He wore blue-tinted aviator glasses, neatly pressed jeans, and a brown suede jacket over a crew-neck sweater. He snuffed out the cigarette and stood up. “All set?”
A heavy wooden door at the rear of the palace opened onto an enchanting inner courtyard with walls of ancient brick and stucco and windows set at random intervals. To our left, a long, steep marble stairway with a vine-covered iron railing rose in two flights to the piano nobile. At the center of the courtyard, a luxurious rhododendron sprouted from a large marble wellhead made from the capital of an old column. Directly in front of us, a darkened arcade led to the sun-sparkling water of the Grand Canal. An old gondola rested on stilts as if waiting to be launched. Its felze, a small black passenger cabin of the sort not seen for decades in Venice, was still attached. I asked how old it was.
“Over a hundred years,” said Ralph.
Which meant that Robert Browning, John Singer Sargent, and Henry James had probably gone for rides in it.
At the top of the stairs, we entered a tall, dim antechamber. A pair of polished doors stood to our right, and beyond them the formal portego and the storied rooms on the Grand Canal. But those doors remained closed. Ralph took a sharp left, toward a lesser door that l
ed into his own apartment. It was a series of rooms, spacious but spare, at the back of the palace. Every room was painted plain white. The starkness of the place was heightened by its emptiness. What furniture there was amounted to a couple of chairs, a small wooden table, and some shelves. The apartment’s chandeliers and wall fixtures were fitted with small cobalt blue bulbs, the same color as those used to line airport landing strips. The name of each room was neatly stenciled on the walls: FLIGHT CONTROL CENTER, MOON ROOM, MARS ROOM, PEACE ROOM, EXTRATERRESTRIAL SEARCH ROOM.
“Welcome to the Starship Barbaro,” said Ralph, leading me on a brief tour of the apartment, which he referred to as “the O.C. Wing of the Palazzo Barbaro.” O.C. stood for Odile Curtis, the name of his ex-wife.
In one room, three space suits were hung on the wall. A photograph of a stuffed animal, a monkey, was taped to the wall next to one of them, with a caption that read, “Monkeyface, Flight Commander, Starship Barbaro.” In another room, an inflatable, life-size plastic female in a lacy black bikini sat on the floor, propped up against the wall. Ralph walked past each of these items without comment. In the Situation Room, there was a machine labeled “AntiMatter Reactor.” Ralph took a stack of audiotape cassettes from a shelf and went back into the Moon Room.
“Well,” he said, “are you ready for liftoff?”
Ralph sat cross-legged on the floor next to a boom box. He shuffled through the cassettes.
“Let’s see, what ’ll it be. Apollo 11? That’s the first manned moon shot. You know, Neil Armstrong and ‘One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’ Here’s Apollo 12 . . . pretty good. . . . Apollo 13 . . . I guess we’ll skip that one—they had to abort the lunar landing, only orbited the moon and came home. We want a lunar landing as well as a liftoff, don’t we?” He looked over at me.
“Sure,” I said. I had taken a seat on the floor as well.
“Apollo 14,” he went on, “that’s when Alan Shepard hit a couple of golf balls after he landed on the moon. Apollo 15, Shepard was back at the control center in Houston. Let’s do that one.”
Ralph put the cassette into the boom box, pressed the “play” button, and leaned back against the wall. The tape began with the ultracalm voice of Mission Control intoning the familiar mantra, “T minus two minutes and counting. . . .” We sat quietly, listening to the staccato back-and-forth between Houston and the astronauts. Then came the countdown: “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . ignition sequence started . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . zero. . . . Launch coming up. . . . We have liftoff!”
“Damn!” said Ralph.
The roar of the rockets burst through the speakers with a massive violence that seemed likely to rupture them. Even so, Ralph turned up the volume. Throbbing sound waves pounded my eardrums and sent vibrations humming in the walls and floors. As the noise of the rockets began to fade, Ralph lifted his gaze from the boom box. My ears popped at the sudden drop in air pressure.
“How often do you do this?” I asked.
“Oh, I’ve had liftoffs at three in the morning. Telephones start ringing. The neighbors call. Occasionally my sister Pat freaks out.”
“Is that why you do it?”
“No, I do it because it gives me hope. I imagine it’s the Starship Barbaro soaring out of the atmosphere and taking the nuclear fire codes to Mars. I wrote a letter to Bill Clinton offering to be the first person to go to Mars with the fire codes and not come back. It took a lot of courage to do that, you know, because people might have thought I was crazy.”
“Did Clinton write back?” I asked.
“Not yet. I sent Boris Yeltsin an artwork entitled The Twelve Apostles from Planet Mars. But I haven’t had a response from him yet either. It can be discouraging at times. That’s when I come here for a liftoff.”
On the tape, Apollo 15 was drawing farther away from Earth. We sat in the blue-white glow of Ralph Curtis’s Moon Room, listening to the conversations between Houston and the spacecraft interspersed with tiny beeps. Apollo 15 would shortly be going into its Earth-orbit phase. Ralph pressed the “fast-forward” button. “Bear with me for a few minutes,” he said. “We’ll go right to the lunar landing.” When he resumed play, the voice of Mission Control was saying, “They’re at five thousand feet now.”
Fast forward.
“. . . twelve hundred . . .”
Fast forward.
“. . . eighty . . . forty . . . twenty . . . fifteen . . . ten . . . six . . . three . . . contact!”
“Damn!” said Ralph.
He sat quietly for a while, basking in whatever pleasure he was able to take from the replay of this trip to the moon. Then he gathered up the tapes, and while he was putting them away, I walked around the apartment again. The rooms were more barren than I had realized at first. There were no clothes in sight, no kitchen utensils, no towels or toiletries.
“But where are your belongings?” I asked. “Where do you sleep?”
“Oh, I don’t live here,” he said. “I have no home, no fixed address. I prefer it that way.”
“You’re joking.”
“Nope. I stay with friends. I leave my clothes in suitcases in various apartments.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a key ring jangling with keys. “I’ve got keys to the apartments of ten friends. These are my ‘house keys.’”
Ralph Curtis’s rooms could have made a very comfortable apartment. I ventured to say that it baffled me why anyone who could live in a palace on the Grand Canal would choose instead to live out of a suitcase in other people’s apartments.
“I don’t like possessions,” he said. “I don’t want to own anything.”
“But you’re an owner of Palazzo Barbaro.”
“I prefer to think of myself as the Barbaro’s ‘spiritual custodian. ’”
“In what way?” I asked.
“For four hundred years, the Barbaro family lived here. They were scholars, philosophers, diplomats, you name it—seekers of wisdom and harmony. That’s the heritage of this palace, and it has to be protected.”
“Protected from what?”
“Well, anything inappropriate, offensive, debasing. For a while, we rented out the piano nobile for private parties, hoping it would be a harmless way to help pay expenses. We signed a contract with Jim Sherwood, who owns the ‘21’ Club in New York and the Cipriani Hotel here, to do the catering. He went to great expense. He bought a lot of equipment and even installed a standard industrial kitchen, but it all got to be too much. He created a menu with really objectionable phony names like ‘Tournedos Barbaro,’ and he commissioned sets of glasses and dishes that had the Barbaro insignia, which is a red circle on a white background.
“I said to him, ‘Jim, do you know where that insignia comes from?’ He didn’t know. I said, ‘It’s from a battle during the Crusades when a Barbaro commander sliced an arm off a Saracen infidel and swabbed a bloody circle with it on a white cloth to make a battle flag.’ I said, ‘This is scandalous!’ He’d spent eighty thousand dollars on the glassware and the dishes, and I made him throw them out. I told him, ‘You’re lucky I didn’t break them all!’ And then finally I made him tear out the kitchen. Now the kitchen is being put to better use. It’s the Peace Room.”
“And the piano nobile is up for sale,” I said.
“I’d rather not sell it. I’d prefer to donate the piano nobile to the National Gallery of Art as a symbolic gesture. I wrote them about it, but they said it would cost too much money to maintain.”
“But it is being sold, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Probably,” he said. “Pat isn’t happy about it. She wrote a letter to my sister Lisa and me, accusing us of wanting to smembrare the family’s artistic and cultural patrimony, which means, literally, to ‘dismember’ it. She wrote the letter in Italian. She’s very Italian at heart, which at times irritates me a little. Her dedication to the house is almost a sickness.