Yesterday was the second day of Carnival 2018 (Jan. 27-Feb. 13), and the festivities started, as they have for a number of years now, with a monster boat procession in the Grand Canal. The boats and rowers were decorated and trimmed and upholstered and whatever else seemed good across the gamut from minimal (a hat) to the glamorous (let’s all be Mozart for a day!) to the fabulously imaginative, funny, and irreverent. They say that during “Carnevale, ogni scherzo vale” (during Carnival every joke works) and the boat people showed they’ve got plenty of high jinks still in them.
Note: For an overview of Carnival garb, behavior and general atmosphere back in the glory days, I recommend my very own piece on masks for Craftsmanship magazine.
Further note: I promised Lino that I would convey his belief that this festival, amusing and picturesque as it may be, is NOT the real Venetian Carnival. He is extremely firm on that point. Other cities, most particularly Viareggio, are famous for celebrating Carnival with highly elaborate floats (“carri allegorici“). The floats of Viareggio are titanic constructions that can hold their own against any other carnival in the galaxy. But Lino contends that this sort of parade is not the Venetian Carnival and he strongly objects to the introduction of this foreign body into the Venetian culture. I am not going to adjudicate the matter in any way, I have only fulfilled my promise to add his voice into the festive confusion. Confusion there has always been during Carnival, even here, and history attests this. But no carri allegorici.
That said, I’d like to return to the floating (sorry) festivities. I’m a stout defender of Venetian traditions, but I have to admit that I found the whole thing hugely entertaining. That’s all I’m going to say.
The gathering of the boats at the entrance to the Grand Canal. We arrived around 10:45, and we began processing at 11:15. The weather didn’t get the message that it would be hilarious to rain or snow, so we made do with ordinary old sunshine. A good thing, too, because the day after was solid fog.The boat in the foreground bears proudly on its bow the typical sign listing the stops that is displayed on the #1 vaporetto. Cute, but why?Here’s why: The sign says “For today only, the ACTV will provide service by oar.” The crew is wearing the regulation necktie that is part of the ACTV uniform.The battling Casanovas, comparing gondolas and, probably frills. Remember the gondola on the left, it will reappear further on.I’m sure I’m missing something (I’m never wrong if I think that), but here we have a whaling longboat helpfully named “La Baleniere” (“the whale boat,” though the term usually means the entire ship). Instead of being rowed backwards, it’s been fitted out to be rowed the Venetian way, standing up, facing forward. Hazmat suits are always appropriate, so I won’t inquire about those, but the headgear looks like jellyfish brains or something else from the abyss. I’m not even sure what they were made of. Men wearing pink, though, is always entertaining.The boats lined up to check in at the control station at the Customs House Point. The organizers threw bottles of water (never drunk) and packs of sandwiches (never eaten, at least not by me) into the boat. They took no chances that somebody might suddenly feel faint.The star of everything was this enormous plastic mode of a rat, here being carried on a yellow boat to the end of the line where, at the crucial festive moment, he will be broken upon to release a mass of colored balloons. To get the joke you need to know that in the Piazza San Marco, one of the peak moments of Carnival, then and now, is the “flight of the Colombina.” In the very olden days a high-wire artistwould descend a wire stretching from the top of the campanile to the Doge’s Palace (no net. Fun!!). Or sometimes he or she was replaced by a huge model dove (“colomba”) which would burst open and shower the under-standers with clouds of confetti. Seeing that our procession will conclude in the Cannaregio Canal, far, far from the piazza and its glamor and history, the ubiquitous rodent was chosen as the mascot, symbol, patron saint, whatever we want to call him or her, of our lower-brow festa. I wish I could have gotten closer, this is the only picture I managed to make. The backward-looking eyes make me laugh. I wouldn’t have thought a creature this big would bother checking who was behind him.Maybe he was watching for this, a dragon boat from the Canottieri Mestre. The American flag is flying…a yellow-haired effigy is standing…a model of a rocket is pointing…and all the rowers are wearing archery targets on their backs. Um….And astern the flag of some unidentified nation (it is not the official flag of North Korea, I checked). But whatever that bit of fabric may be, I think we can surmise what it symbolizes. And a rocket pointing that way. Hilarious.Wait: THIS is hilarious. The sign the central rowers are holding up translates as: “Mine is longer.” Badaboom.The Addams Family, Uncle Fester rowing astern. The other family members were very white-faced, which was worth a photo but for some reason they kept looking the other way. Are they under witness protection?She spent quite some time adjusting the black crape. We even have Cousin Itt in the form of the long blond wig on a stick.Unlikely as it may seem, everybody manages fine with all those oars.it does get squeezy under the Accademia Bridge, but we are not actually rowing the boat next to us. It only looks like that.And speaking of squeezy, the overloaded vaporettos had to stay where they were, tied up to their boat-stop dock, until the procession had finished. That’s for everybody’s safety, obviously. And to allow all the passengers to crowd to the outboard side to make photographs of the spectacle, which judging by the inclination of the boat wouldn’t meet anybody’s safety standards. Fun!Splashing along toward San Toma’, the boats seem to be organizing themselves by color somehow. Suddenly we’re in the blue section.One caorlina’s crew maintained the roditory (made up — we need this word) theme by dressing as mice and loading the boat with cheese. Another hefty form of parmigiano adorned the stern as well.Now we’re getting closer to the old satirical bone. Here the rowers are each carrying a cardboard rendition of a MOSE floodgate, complete with streamers of algae and the occasional barnacle. Algae also trailling from the boat, as you see. Check my last few posts about the condition of the gates to appreciate the satire here.A quick refresher on what the real gates look like. They do not inspire mirth.And while we’re on the subject of current events, this boat has remnants of jewelry strewn across its bow and the sign says: “Doge’s Palace, here’s what’s left of the Maharaja’s treasure.” Maharaja helpfully rowing nearby. For reference see my post “Lugash on the lagoon.”Every square or triangular or rhomboidal inch was occupied by people, even up onto the roof of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi.Behind us, yet more miles of the flotilla. In the center, the “peata” of the rowing club G.S. Voga Riviera del Brenta, bearing the soundtrack: music, singers, people yelling reckless happy phrases that added to the general atmosphere of revelry.This little group demonstrated yet again that you don’t need an elaborate or expensive costume for carnivaling, but just a little imagination. Everybody in bathrobes and with towels wrapped around their heads; the two seated people are armed with the moveable showerhead and back-scrubbing brush. I think there’s a shower curtain there too. So: Bathrobes. How can you say you don’t have a costume?And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the alligator will lie down with the young penguin ..This caorlina was draped with wafty white fabric and clumps of big cotton balls to create a wintry Alpine scene, complete with rowers in down jackets and somebody on the bow wearing red reindeer antlers. Pay no attention to the blue and white bits in the background — that’s a white caorlina whose bow has been surmounted by a very large seagull head trailing sky-blue fabric. If they had wanted to create a real Venetian scene, they’d have added a few bags of garbage pecked and ripped open with the contents strewn wildly around.A charming couple in fairly authentic mountain-dwellers’ (as opposed to mountaineers’) garb.The gloriously bedecked man astern is Angelo Boscolo, who recently launched his gondola made of 350 fruit crates. However amusing this may be, he spent a year and a half at it, and scrupulously adds that it is 30 cm (11 inches) shorter than the traditional gondola, and that the crates are made from 11 different types of wood (classic gondola uses 8 types, possibly not those used for kiwi containers). On the thwart behind the seats has been carved a very Venetian saying: “Chi sa tace, chi non sa chiede. El mona sa già tutto” (Who knows, remains silent; who doesn’t know, asks. The asshole already knows everything).First prize and a blue ribbon in the “Actually, why the heck not?” category.The Rari Nantes Patavium boat club (in Padua) has an elegant 12-oar gondola, here made even more elegant without six of its rowers but with the addition of two tangoing couples.Of course it’s possible to tango in a space the size of a bathmat. I admire them even more for doing it on a boat, where even the smallest rogue wave could add a few steps they never studied in school.They made it to the end, this extravagantly dressed pair of rowers. It’s true that everyone was rowing against the tide, but somehow seeing them at it made it appear even harder and more thankless. In any case, this is the once- typical boat of Lake Como, and bears the banner of the lakeside town of Bellano. Five centuries ago the craft was simply called “batel,” used for fishing and also passengers; since 1827 it has been called a “Lucia” in honor of the heroine of the novel “I Promessi Sposi” who makes her escape across the lake in such a boat.Our four boats of the Remiera Francescana moored near the top of the Cannaregio Canal, in what appears to have suddenly become the Red Zone (the facing boats belong to the G.S. Voga Riviera del Brenta club).The crowds along the fondamentas were in full cry. Here, a very cool family.Cool, as in wearing your sunglasses over your mask.The view of people ashore was almost as good as the one they got of us. Fun!
The only way to make the Lido look beautiful is to add lots of sky. That is, something non-Lido. But it looked like the perfect place to resolve their little evidence problem, even if they did have to travel 167 miles (269 km) to get there.
Let’s admit that “Death in Venice” is — I’m sorry to say — one of the greatest titles ever. It’s better than “Catch-22” or “Atlas Shrugged,” and it’s probably better even than “Of Human Bondage” or “Naked Lunch.”
You can see why. If sadness and Venice appear to be destined for each other, like Victorian lovers, death and Venice seem doomed to be linked forever, thanks to a genius title that connects two of the most emotion-laden words that exist. If the book had been called “Farewell, My Lovely” — which would have been kind of cool, though it would have put Raymond Chandler in a fix — at least Venice could have escaped the “death” search term.
Enough musing. A recent tragedy has shown that there’s nothing romantic about either death or Venice, even when you put them together. And you don’t have to actually die here to benefit from the Venetian element. It’s enough to be discovered to be dead here for the whole affair to seem even worse than it is. Whatever that means.
Here’s what happened. And I warn you that the tragic element, which is real, will play a relatively small part in a story which is made up of idiocy of a magnitude to dwarf even the ten most idiotic things that have ever happened here.
At about 1:40 AM on January 28, a water-taxi driver went home to the Lido and was tying up his boat at its usual place in the canal that flanks via Antonio Loredan. It was dark, obviously, and this street isn’t especially well-lighted. But he saw something floating in the water.
The “something” was the body of a woman, who was clad only in a single necklace.
But the necklace wasn’t the important clue.
It was the fact that a young Indian couple in Milan had reported her missing.
That turned out to be a huge technicolor clue, because they were the ones who killed her. This is the first indication of the level of intelligence at work here (idiocy, as mentioned). If I had murdered someone, I don’t think I’d feel like trotting over to the police to say, “She’s disappeared and I don’t know anything about it” if, in fact, I knew all about it. I’d feel like getting on a plane back to India, which is what exactly what they’d had in mind, but they didn’t do it fast enough.
Her name was Mahtab Ahad Savoji, and she was a 31-year-old Iranian student who had gone to Milan two years ago to study art. She moved into an apartment at #5 via Pericle with Rajeshwar Singh (29), a hotel night porter, and his girlfriend, Gagandeep Kaur (30), a chambermaid.
Life was not tranquil. Contrary to her supposition of sharing the apartment with only Gagandeep, she found herself living with her boyfriend too. The place was so small that Mahtab slept on a cot next to the sofabed where the couple had no second thoughts about getting it on whenever they felt like it. She told her friends that Rajeshwar had begun hitting on her, that Gagandeep wanted to involve her in a menage. Strife escalated.
Fed up, Mahtab packed her bag and told them she was moving out. Then she asked to be reimbursed for her part of the security deposit. As far as I can tell, this is when things went south, possibly aggravated by their feelings of rejection regarding the missed menage. In any case, they killed her.
It was 2:00 PM on January 27. The autopsy revealed that she died of “atypical strangulation,” which has yet to be further elucidated. However, her demise was not caused by a cord, as Gagandeep claimed, nor was it caused by drinking herself to death, as Rajeshwar maintained.
It’s now about 2:30 and the two Indians have a dead body they need to get rid of. They strip her, fold her up, and put her in a big rolling suitcase. Then they head to Lecco, a town 31 miles (50 km) away. The plan was to dump her body in beautiful Lake Como, but they decided against it because “there were too many people around.”
An aerial view of Lecco. All that water would be perfect for disposing of a body, but there is that little problem about the thousands of people living there. (Pawel Kierzkowski)
People? The town has 47,760 inhabitants, plus tourists, and it was still daylight, too. Sharp.
So they dragged the big suitcase back to Milan (presumably by train — it’s less than an hour from Lecco), and took a train for Venice.
Why? you ask. Why Venice? The Po River is much closer to Milan than Venice, and I doubt that they were impelled by the well-known romantic connection between the Queen of the Seas and the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.
They went to Venice simply because Rajeshwar had worked in a hotel on the Lido for a brief period, so apparently it came to his mind that all that water would be just the place to leave her remains. Or some sort of reasoning like that. If he had worked in a hotel in Geneva, maybe he’d have lugged the girl’s corpse to Geneva.
They got off the vaporetto at 8:04 PM under a pounding rain; the video surveillance cameras filmed two people pulling a big suitcase. They walked a third of a mile (595 meters) to the first canal to the left, and found a nice dark spot to unburden themselves of their naked former friend.
The pair left the Lido at 9:56 PM (I can’t understand how it took them two hours to accomplish their task, but the video doesn’t lie). But when they got to the station, it was past 11:00 PM, and the last train for Milan was gone. So too was the now-empty suitcase.
Undismayed, they walked over the Calatrava Bridge and asked a taxi driver how much he’d charge to drive them to Milan, because they had to be at work the next day. (First rule of escape: Be as inconspicuous as possible.) (Second rule: Evaluate seriously how important it is to show up on time for work, when you are shortly going to be sought by the police.)
The driver said 650 euros, they said fine, and off they went. The video cameras at Piazzale Roma filmed this also.
At 2:30 AM they were back in Milan. And by now the body had surfaced.
It didn’t take the police all that long to find their way to via Pericle to ask the couple a few questions about their former roommate, thanks to their having reported her missing. At which point they began to just throw remarks every which way, like Eddie Izzard on lying: “I was on the moon. With Steve.”
First, they told the police that they’d gone out for a walk at 10:30 on the day of her disappearance, and when they returned at 6:00 PM, she wasn’t there.
Then they said that they had awakened suddenly at 8:00 AM to find her naked and dead lying on the sofabed next to him; they assumed she had drunk herself to death the night before. (So then they went out for a walk?)
The autopsy hasn’t found any evidence of this yet. On the contrary — the Indians stated that Mahtab had been eating potato chips and chickpeas with her bottomless bottle of whiskey, forgetting that the autopsy would easily reveal what she had really consumed. For the record, it was rice and vegetables, her lunch on the day of her death.
Then Rajeshwar said they hadn’t killed her, they’d only disposed of her body. (Don’t try to make sense of this. “Our friend is inexplicably dead! Gosh, let’s take her clothes off, haul her body to Venice and throw her in the lagoon so nobody thinks we did it.”)
Then Gagandeep said “Rajeshwar killed her with a cord which he threw away.” Then she said, “No, he didn’t kill her, I killed her.”
Then the police found that Rajeshwar had booked a direct flight to India for February 2, and that 5,500 euros were stashed in the sofabed.
Just think; Instead of going all the way back to Milan, they could have gotten on a plane at Marco Polo airport at 6:20 AM and been somewhere in India by 11:40 that night. I’m all for showing up for work, but I think they got their priorities slightly scrambled.
So Rajeshwar and Gagandeep are in jail in Milan, and Mahtab is in the morgue in Venice. Her aunt has come to identify her remains, and when the coroner has clarified all the remaining unclear points in the attempt to establish the definite cause of death, Mahtab will go back to Teheran.
And Rajeshwar and Gagandeep will be going back and forth from their cells to the court for quite a while.
And the good people of the Lido can go back to thinking of how to induce tourists to come to the beach and the golf course. God knows nobody wants the Golden Isle to start being known for a new kind of tourism.
