Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (11 page)

More than all this, the Fascists brought Fascism to Trieste. This is an innately conservative city, where politicians of the Right have generally been successful, and it welcomed Mussolini’s messages. Across the city party symbols appeared, dates according to the Fascist era, buildings in the Fascist style. Within the port administration, once so proudly autonomous, a man from the Ministry of Communications in Rome could veto anything that might “compromise the interests of the State or not correspond to the government’s political directives.” Most of the city’s Austrians had willy-nilly left, but now for the first time its Slavs found themselves second-class citizens. Many Croats and Slovenes preferred to leave too, for the new kingdom of Yugoslavia; those who remained were made to feel decidedly uncomfortable. Slovene schools and newspapers were banned; use of the Slovene language was prohibited “in any public situation.” John Berger tells us (in his novel
G
, 1972), that when an Italian doctor was asked how patients could describe their symptoms to him if they didn’t know Italian, he replied that a cow didn’t have to explain its symptoms to a vet. . . .

This was nationalism—patriotism gone feral. The Trieste newspapers, once trenchantly outspoken, did not oppose the creeping advance of totalitarianism, and when in 1938 Mussolini himself visited the city to open new dock extensions and lay the keel of the battleship
Roma
(42,000 tons), the public celebrations were spectacular and unopposed. Vast panoplies of flags and banners were hoisted across the city, enormously embroidered with the word “DUCE,” or just with the letter “M” in the Napoleonic manner. “DUCE DUCE DUCE DUCE,” simply said the frontpage streamer headline in the now sycophantic
Il Piccolo
. Uniformed functionaries by the thousand, formidable or ridiculous, fat or weedy, paraded here and there in jackboots and tasselled hats, swelling out their chests. The Fountain of the Four Continents was moved to allow a greater welcoming crowd to assemble in the Piazza Unità (which is why it was being moved back again sixty-two years later, when I happened to be passing by that day), and when the time came the biggest audience Trieste had ever known packed the brilliantly illuminated square to hear the dictator speak. He slept only two nights in the city, but sixty years later an entire book was devoted to his visit.

It was mostly bluff and blunder. This city was not economically vital to the Italians, as it had been to the Dual Monarchy—they had several other ports all much nearer their centres of trade and production. Its industries were important enough, especially its shipyards, but for the most part its possession was a matter of nationalist symbolism. “You should have been here in the Fascist times,” said an Italian acquaintance of mine in 1946. “What a city it was then! You should have seen Mussolini in the Piazza!” But Trieste’s Fascist years (Anno I—Anno XXI) did the city little good, and for all their braggadocio never revived its prosperity, or restored it to its place in the world at large.

WORSE was to come, anyway, in the varied causes of nationalism. In the second war, Italy having changed sides again, Trieste and its neighbouring coast was annexed by the Germans. It was called the Kiistenland once more, and governed by a Gauleiter, until in 194$ two armies arrived almost simultaneously and threw the Germans out. From the west came a New Zealand division, with British armour. From the east came Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav partisan forces, advance warning of the huge Communist power-bloc then coming into being. The Yugoslavs arrived first, but the Germans, their last troops by then shut up in the citadel on San Giusto hill, would surrender only to the New Zealanders: when they did, a stand-off ensued between the two victorious forces, who found themselves not allies-in-arms after all, but ideological enemies.

For a few years Trieste once more entered the world’s consciousness, as the Powers argued what to do with it. No longer one of the supreme ports of Europe, it became instead one of those places, like Danzig or Tangier, that have been argued about at international conferences, written about in pamphlets, questioned about in parliamentary debates, less as living cities than as political hypotheses. Winston Churchill, in a famous speech in America, warned the world that an iron curtain had been laid across Europe, dividing democracy and Communism “from Stettin to Trieste.” Abroad the statesmen endlessly parleyed; at home the Triestini of different loyalties, chanting slogans and waving their respective flags, surged about the place rioting.

Finally in 1954 the disconsolate and bewildered seaport was given its solution, and Trieste has been what it has been ever since, a geographical and historical anomaly, Italian by sovereignty but in temperament more or less alone.

MY COUNTRY right or wrong.” How meaningless how it sounds nowadays, how preposterous! It is the slogan of blind nationalism. Patriotism, the love of one’s people or one’s country, seems to me still a noble emotion, but to my mind nationalism has come to mean no more than narrow and offensive chauvinism, based on baloney. Today you can qualify to play for the rugby team of a nation if just one of your grandparents happened to be born there, even if you have never been to the place, even if you speak no word of its language—a qualification almost as absurd as Nazi definitions of Jewishness. One day the very idea of nationality will seem as impossibly primitive as dynastic warfare or the divine right of kings; first the unification of continents, then the global rule of the almighty corporations, like institutions from space, then perhaps space itself and finally plain common-sense will reduce it to a hobby for antiquarians or re-enactment societies.

In Trieste more than anywhere the idea of nationality seems alien. The city was given its character by people from a dozen countries long ago, and is still innately solitary. It is by definition a city of the world, and I like to think it instinctively honours the playwright Saunders Lewis’s Welsh criterion of true patriotism:
ysbrid hael ac o gariad at wareiddiad a thraddodiad a phethau gorau dynoliaeth
—“a generous spirit of love for civilization and tradition and the best things of mankind.” Nationalist brags, envies or resentments do not become this city, and seldom surface here now: when a parade bursts out in the Piazza Unita, as it often does, with intoxicating displays of Ital-ianism, feathered hats, formation flying, military bands and warships at the quay, the citizenry responds to a great show with happy and humorous enthusiasm, but never I think with the blind conformity that greeted Mussolini in Anno XVI. A civic publicity brochure I picked up in a.d. 2000 makes no reference to nationality at all—innocent readers would not know what country the city was in, since it is simply characterized as “one of the most interesting areas in Europe.” I was encouraged, too, by a graffito I saw recently on a rubbish disposal bin in the Old City. “FUK NATIONS,” it simply said.

During my original time in Trieste I had a dear friend who was to become central to my conception of the place. Otto was a bit of a mystery. His national origins were indeterminate. He had fought bravely on our side during the war that had just ended, yet he had briefly attended the Potsdam Military Academy, and he had elderly relatives in Vienna who allowed us to spend weekends in a princely apartment there. His English was curiously thickened. He stuttered. His manner was a mixture of the florid, the stiff and the deliberately outrageous. I believe he was in some way connected to the archetypal nineteenth century adventurer Rudolf von Slatin, author of
With Fire and Sword Through the Sudan
, a title he loved resonantly quoting. Perhaps he was partly Jewish.

I used to tell this complex and delightful man that he was just made for inclusion in that inscrutably multi-ethnic memorial on San Giusto hill. In those days I thought of his ironically tolerant outlook as idiosyncratic cosmopolitanism, but now I would characterize it as Triesti city.

ELEVEN
Love and Lust

Italo Svevo, who was born in 1861 and died in 1928, seemed to live a prosaic life in Trieste, first as an insurance clerk, then as an executive in the family paint and varnish factory. If we are to believe his novels, though, behind the bourgeois facade of the city seethed all manner of sexual passion, as it did behind the rectitude of Victorian Britain: in one book the narrator is so addled by his own addictions and jealousies that he is giving himself a course of self-analysis, in another the city itself is interpreted as a tortuous paradigm of an infatuation.

Freud’s ideas indeed found a ready audience among the Trieste intelligentsia, confused as they must have been even then by the ambivalence of the city, its ethnic muddles and historical complexities—as Scipio Slataper wrote at the turn of the twentieth century, “everything in Trieste is double or triple.” I am confused here too, and have never felt more inclined to Freudian introspection than I am when idling the hours away in Trieste, contemplating the varied meanings of love and lust.

TAKE love first. The prime Trieste love story concerns Isabel Burton and her husband Richard, that irrepressible literary pornographer and investigator of sex. Lady Burton was a devout Catholic, and although she was permanently besotted by loving admiration for her husband, and had followed him through many of his desperate adventures, she was understandably uncomfortable with his alternative tastes and interests. After his death in Trieste she determined to obliterate a last trace of them. By then the couple had moved to an apartment in the splendid Palladian villa built by the Englishman George Hepburn 170 years before, and to this day one of the city’s best buildings. Some days after the Consul’s death, nosy passers-by looking through a window might have seen a bright fire burning in a bedroom grate, and Isabel passionately throwing papers into it—as though an enemy were at the gates, and she must destroy the consulate documents. In fact she was putting to the flames the two manuscript volumes of his unfinished final translation of
The Scented Garden
, said to be one of the most sensuously beautiful of all Arabic poems, with a commentary of his own rich in sexual scholarship. Burton himself said the book would be the crown of his life, but Isabel thought she could hardly do less than burn it, for the sake of Richard’s soul and reputation.

She knew very well what she was doing. She knew she would sacrifice many friendships, and infuriate the literary world, and so it proved. Algernon Swinburne, an old friend, was plainly thinking of her when he wrote, in a long poetic elegy for Burton, that

. . . Souls there are that for soul’s afright
Bow down and cower in the sun’s glad sight,
Clothed round with faith that is one with fear,
And dark with doubt of the live world’s light.

Another friend, the writer Ouida, never spoke to her again, and she was plagued by anonymous letters of abuse. But what she did, she did for love. It used to be said that she burnt the manuscript not in a bedroom grate, but in a bonfire in the garden of their house, and this is the version I prefer. The house is still there, although hemmed around by new apartment buildings, and I like to go up there in the evening and imagine the fire still ablaze beneath the trees behind—the crackle of the flames, the curling of the scorched pages one by one, and a trembling Isabel kneeling there, silhouetted against the light and muttering a prayer as she threw them into oblivion. How sad that her bonfire that night, which she saw as a beacon of truest dedication, should have been interpreted ever since as a conflagration of betrayal.

LUST is a different matter. I don’t believe Burton was a particularly lustful man, his interest in the wide reaches of sex being mostly anthropological, or artistic. But down the hill from his house that night, lustful appetites were undoubtedly being indulged. As a great cosmopolitan seaport, Trieste in his time had a lively red-light quarter. Proust’s Narrator, who had imagined it as deliriously melancholy, changed his mind when he heard that his Albertine was enjoying Sapphic sex there, and called it an accursed city that ought to go up in flames. The centre of low life was the area around the Piazza Cavana, at the back of the Piazza Unita at the foot of the Old City. Today it is a good place for secondhand bookshops, antiques and food stores, and only a few leprous alleys resist the scours of progress. A century ago, by all accounts, its mesh of little streets was stinking, crumbling, mouldy and permanently puddled. In those days ships docked a few blocks away, and this was where the seamen caroused, the soldiers came down from their barracks and the brothels flourished. The
lamparetti
knew it well. Saba often picked his way through its roistering crowds on his way home in the evening, feeling that the more squalid his route, the purer his thoughts.

Prostitution was legal in Italy until 1958, some of the brothels being State-owned. It thrives in Trieste still, but there is no red-light district now; business is dispersed more discreetly across the city, arranged by mobile telephones and concluded in private houses. It was to one of the old-style places of pleasure, though, that at his own request I once escorted a fellow-officer. He was no older than I was, had never been to such a place before, and was nervous. I dropped him at the doorstep of the brothel—could it have been the famous Oriental House?—and remember still how pale he stood there in the street-light, looking back at me almost desperately as I drove my jeep away into the night.

I have often wondered how he got on. A shy, well-scrubbed young man, born to the English countryside, how easily did he adapt to the ornate opulence of the place, somewhat akin as I imagine it to the decor of Baron Revoltella’s mansion? His chief passion was steeple-chasing. Was he not repelled by the stuffy smells inside, of scent, cheap powder and cigarettes? Was his need really so urgent that he could disregard it all, and plunge himself, eyes closed and thinking of Becher’s Brook, into such sleazy sublimation?

James Joyce is said to have been an assiduous drunken frequenter of the Trieste whore-houses, allegedly preferring
La Chiave d’Oro
, the Golden Key, or the poky
Il Metro Cubo
, the Cubic Metre. Drunken he certainly was, often having to be taken home by his brother Stanislaus, and very unlikely to be chaste. It was in Trieste that he wrote
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, a searing record of repentance after lustful sin, and he must have known what he was talking about. How strange it is nevertheless, that the man who wrote “Watching the Needle-Boats at San Sabba” in the daytime could stagger sozzled from pub to prostitute at night! Joyce adored his children and loved his wife after his fashion, yet apparently he still felt the need to wander, night after night, down the Via del Soli-tario to the House of the Golden Key.

I am of the opinion that lust is one of the more banal impulses, essentially functional and familiar not just to the birds and the diligent bees, but to any old lop-eared tomcat. In Trieste I ponder the mystery of its power over the most fastidious of point-to-point riders, or the very greatest of geniuses.

LOVE generally supersedes lust as we grow older, and nowadays a more amorphous kind of eroticism seizes me in this city. It is a sensuality of homesickness. I have always been homesick on my travels, missing my own people, my animals, my books, my house, my country, but somehow in Trieste it becomes homesickness of a wider range. It gives me a yearning pleasure when I telephone Wales before I go to sleep, and hear the beloved voices of home wishing me goodnight; yet it is a yearning that goes beyond them, to make me long for some even greater loving whole. There is something libidinous to this feeling, like the lusting of nuns for their God. Is it a latent religious instinct, or just the fathomless expectancy of Trieste, which always makes me look for something grander yet to come? Perhaps everyone feels it, in this city of hiatus. Perhaps my anxious subaltern, waiting on the doorstep, felt that he too was moving towards some more universal fulfilment, and Joyce knew that his whore’s bed was a bed of Heaven after all, even if he had to be carried insensible home from it.

Certainly I sometimes think that transient love, the sort that is embodied in a one-night passion, or even a passing glance, is no less real than the lifelong sort. Even imagined love is true! It all comes from, and goes back to, the same illimitable reservoir that lies somewhere beyond my bedside telephone. Of course this foggy fancy suits my idea of Trieste. This is a place of transience, where power and prosperity come and go, and even the stateliest palaces of State or commerce seem insubstantial when you are in the mood. It makes me more than usually vulnerable to momentary consolations. The sight of a ship hull-down on the horizon—a sudden vision of the Dolomite snow-peaks—a cheerful gesture from a traffic-cop—a scrawny white cat looking up at me proudly as she chases her kitten to safety off the street—all such trifling incidents, in Trieste, sentimentally comfort me.

Long ago I was going out through the door of the Albergo Savoia Excelsior when a man simultaneously entered. We bumped into one another, our bags and luggage got mixed up, and we both apologized. He was a theatrical-looking character, with a camel coat slung over his shoulders—perhaps one of the opera singers from the Teatro Verdi, who habitually stay in the hotel. When we had disentangled ourselves he stood there for a moment motionless.

“Where are you from?” he said.

“Wales.”

“Wales! How
wonderful!
”

Oh you splendid liar, I thought to myself, you’ve never heard of the place. There was a pause. I laughed, and so did he. He shook my hand in both of his, we lingered for a moment and parted. When I think of Trieste, love and lust, I often think of him.