Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (14 page)

FOURTEEN
What’s It For?

The fundamental fact about modern Trieste, underlying all that happens there, is that it was built
ad hoc
—to be the principal port of a continental empire. Ever since that purpose was lost the city has been trying to find substitute functions for itself, and for most of the years I have known the place it has been more or less stagnant.

A great city that has lost its purpose is like a specialist in retirement. He potters around the house. He tinkers with this hobby or that. He reads a little, watches television for half an hour, does a bit of gardening, determines once more that he really will read
Midnight’s Children
, get to know Beethoven’s late sonatas or try for a last time to get to grips with rock. But he knows that the real energy of his life, the fascination of his calling that has driven him with so much satisfaction for so many years, is never going to be resumed. He no longer reads the technical journals, because they make him feel out-dated. He no longer goes to professional conventions. The world forgetting, by the world forgot! What’s it all been for, he wonders? Sometimes he feels he is cracking up or fading out, and he avoids the newspaper obituaries because . . .

A city seldom thinks about its own demise. The end will almost certainly never happen suddenly, except by war or grand catastrophe, and it will probably never happen at all. Cairo may no longer be the Grand Cairo of the Caliphs, but it is a vital metropolis still. So is the Vienna of the Emperors, or the London of the Raj. But all these are multi-faceted places, with purposes at once economic, political, artistic and perhaps spiritual. The cities most vulnerable to time, like the men in retirement, are the specialist cities, and Trieste is one of those—one can see from a map its God-appointed purpose, for it stands there at the head of the Adriatic like a conduit through which the trade routes of central Europe reach the sea. I used to have one of those pictorial aerial maps of the Alps, painted from a viewpoint somewhere over Bavaria, I would think, and all those high white peaks, all those high valleys, the plains and roads and railways and rivers of half of Europe seem to be looking towards Trieste, at the bottom of the picture. If it were not a port Trieste would have been nothing much, and the sense that it
is
nothing much, now that its great days seem to be gone, is what has made it feel so wistfully unfulfilled. Trieste is not exactly rankled by its disappointments, as a surgeon might be embittered by unfair dismissal from his hospital, but for nearly a century it has been nagged by lost circumstance.

IT IS a place ancient in history, but not in presence. Its true roots lie not in Roman antiquity, as the irredentists and the Fascists loved to argue, but in the commercial enterprise of the Habsburgs and their cosmopolitan agents. Other cities of Christian Europe, not least in Italy, possess a mystic dignity that survives from spiritual certainties of long ago, and helps to make up for civic setbacks. Trieste lacks this reassurance. No inspiring tower or steeple dominates the rooftops of this quin-tessentially secular place, such as ennoble the mercantile impact of an Antwerp or a Riga. Joyce thought the city “nourished on the food of scepticism,” but I think it is dullened by ecu-menicism. The creators of modern Trieste deliberately fostered religious diversity in the port, anxious as they were to attract able immigrants from foreign countries and faiths. There are lots of churches in Trieste, but because it was developed as a multi-national polyglot seaport, Christianity has been more thinned down here than elsewhere, and distributed among many sects and rituals—Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Anglican, Methodist, Armenian Catholic, Waldensian.

Some of these temples are assertive enough: the Roman Catholic church of San Antonio Taumaturgo, St. Antony the Wonder-Worker, which we have seen standing grandly at the head of the Canal Grande, or the big domed Serbian Orthodox church of San Spiridione nearby, or the twin-towered Greek Orthodox church of San Nicolo on the waterfront, or the Jesuit church of Santa Maggiore which majestically surveys from its hillside platform the city centre below.

More often, though, Trieste’s holy places are unobtrusive. The Benedictine monastery on the flank of San Giusto has been active since the fourteenth century, but does not look like a monastery at all. The enchanting little twelfth-century church of San Silvestro, where the Waldensians worship, nestles shyly in the shadow of Santa Maggiore. A steepled neo-Gothic church belonging to the Lutheran Evangelicals is almost unnoticeable among the downtown banks and offices. A classically pedimented Anglican church is tucked away in a residential street, and is used mostly as a concert hall. The church of the Evangelical Methodists, although its address is very authoritatively No. i Scala dei Giganti, is in fact all but hidden among the gardens of its now defunct cemetery. The small towered church of the Armenian Mechitarists, which now holds its services in the German language, dreams away the years in a side-street off a side-street, shaded by trees and beloved by cats. Even the hilltop cathedral of San Giusto is a modest enough fane, made of three older churches knocked together, and overshadowed by the neighbouring citadel.

So no Church Triumphant stands proudly at the heart of this seaport, and no holy processions sway through its streets with barefoot penitents and towering holy statues. The only miracle-working image I know of in the city is a Madonna of the Flowers which used to stand in the garden of a trattoria, and which bled real blood when deliberately damaged in a ball game. It became the centre of a cult, housed in the private chapel of one of the thirteen patrician families; and when they demolished the chapel, at the foot of the Old City, the figure was given a small niche in the entrance of the new building that replaced it. There it is still, within the loveless purlieus of a Government office block, safe from the missiles of sacrilegious louts and supplied still with flowers and candles, but hardly reverenced, in my own observation, by today’s passing citizenry. I stood beside it for half an hour one day, and no Triestini crossed themselves when they passed it, or paused for a moment’s silent prayer. Most of them are apparently not the reverent kind. In 1913 a new fishmarket building went up on the central waterfront (it now houses the aquarium). It was imaginatively equipped with a watertower in the picturesque form of a campanile, and the people immediately dubbed it, in their dialect, Santa Maria del Guato—St. Mary of the Gudgeon.

OF COURSE there are places of true numen in Trieste. The parish office at San Dorligo del Valle is one, when the gentle priest tumbles those archives one after the other from their cupboards (although there never was a St. Dorligo—he is merely a corruption of the Slovenian word for a pot-hole). Winckelmann’s Lapidary Garden is another, especially when the music of the cathedral organ sounds through its memorials of two thousand years. In the suburb of San Giovanni there is a little thirteenth-century church, dedicated to the saints Giovanni and Pelagio, standing near a spring in the flank of the Karst: this was the start of a Roman aqueduct which took water down to the city, and like many source-sanctuaries it still possesses an innocently mystic manner. And No. 1 The Giants’ Staircase is a sublime little retreat of tranquillity, through its private gate, among its trees, in the very centre of the city.

There are a pair of municipal saints, too, whose memories add something ethereal to the city style. San Giusto of the cathedral was martyred for his faith in Roman times by being drowned in the bay of Trieste with a lead weight around his neck. In holy legend the weight was metamorphosed into a boulder, this being a city of stones, and the boulder was later stylized as a sort of melon. The other civic saint is San Sergio, a Roman soldier supposed to have been converted to Christianity while on duty here; his image appears in stone beside the cathedral door, subtly converted from a memorial to a Roman lady by the addition of a halo. Sergio was martyred far away in Syria, in the same year that Giusto was thrown into the sea, and at the moment of his execution his three-pronged iron halberd miraculously fell out of the sky into the piazza outside the cathedral of Trieste, to join Giusto’s melon in the city’s ancient iconography. It is now the civic emblem, prominent everywhere, and on a column outside the cathedral it is shown protruding from a round melonian ball.

The original halberd still exists, too, at least for the faithful. It used to be on the top of the cathedral tower, but was knocked down by lightning in 1421, and is now kept in the cathedral treasury. There it stands modestly in a niche in the reredos, surrounded by reliquaries and saintly images, and illuminated by the glitter of treasures below. Scholars say it is not in fact at all like a halberd of Roman times, being more probably a medieval Saracen weapon, and the only miraculous property it seems to possess is its imperviousness to rust. Be that as it may, once a year on the saint’s feast day it is carried in procession through the cathedral, attended by vestmented priests and choirs. I happened upon this ceremony purely by chance one day, when I was helping to make a television film at San Giusto, and just for a moment, as the procession of priests and choristers passed shimmering through the dark building, incense-burners swinging, golden-clad canons of solemn movement, lovely chanting echoes from the high rafters, and on a silken cushion the refulgent halberd itself, fallen from the empyrean so many centuries before—just for once I felt in Trieste some of the transcendental mystery that gives more spiritual cities their resilience. It was only a transient epiphany, though, and next time I went to the cathedral the halberd was back in its niche again, and not shining at all.

There is one more remembrancer of Trieste which I have not seen, but which sounds genuinely holy. In the deep waters of Trieste bay, not far off Miramare, on the bottom of the sea stands a life-size figure of San Giusto—San Giusto del Mare. He is standing, I am told, four-square on the sea floor, bound, and holding not the melon of his tradition, but the original lead weight of his martyrdom. All around him fishes swim, and occasional pious skin-divers.

Post-Christian faiths have mostly passed Trieste by. In eastern Europe one bright light that shone among the dark delusions of the Stalinist years was the flame of true belief. Colours might be dimmed in Prague or Belgrade, shops might be bare, the totalitarian pall lay like a drab cloak over everyone’s lives, but still there were people who honestly believed that the system was just, and the gleam in the eye of the believer had its own beauty. Trieste has never been ideologically inspired in this way. The imperial idea was at best a commercial convenience for this city. Irredentism was no more than nationalism. Fascism, popular though it was, seems to have been more a fashion than a conviction. The nearest I sense to public spirituality today is the enthusiasm of the young New Age enthusiasts of the place, whose consciousness-raising meetings, organic cookery demonstrations, natural healing demonstrations, yoga classes, aromatherapy sessions and Ritual Trance Dances do add a touch of the other-worldly to the civic ambiance.

No, from the start Trieste’s true inspiration, which brought it fame, glory and satisfaction, was money, accumulated by hard work. Its one ideology was materialism, with the conservative principles that go with it. What was the worst moral failing? asked an “ethical drama” performed before His Excellency the Governor in 1786, and the answer was not Dishonesty, Lechery or Treacherous Inclinations, but Idleness. Trieste was the Philadelphia of Europe, wrote a Frenchman in 1807, whose pioneers worked steadily and with iron will “in the shade of the caduceus of Mercury and the trident of Neptune.” Mercury and Neptune were to remain its presiding divinities ever afterwards, together with semi-sacred patrons like Progress, Commerce, Industry and Abundance. Wherever you look to this day emblems of wealth and diligence ornament rooftops or add a sober grandeur to streets. Security, Labour and Navigation stand guard in the old Lloyd Triestino offices. In the lobby of the headquarters of Riunione Adriatica di Securta, one of the founding insurance companies of Trieste, two ravenous lions and a lioness are held in restraint by a helmeted hero whom I take to be Security, or perhaps Accountancy. What is the message of that Fountain of the Four Continents, which stands like a mound of stones in the Piazza Unita? Why, it tells us that the wealth of the world pours through Trieste to fill or buy those barrels and packing-cases at the top, and at its corners characters representing all four continents raise their products in tribute to the profitable civic genius.

In its great days Trieste must have seemed a marvellous mechanism. “A colossal emporium and a prodigious trading centre,” Jules Verne called it in 1874, and the empire did everything it could to channel trade Via Trieste. Four railway lines conveyed the goods of the four continents in and out of Europe. One went by Ljubljana to Graz and Vienna; one via Udine to Salzburg, and thence to Munich; one via Gorizia to Prague; one southward to Pola. The central station in those days was decorated with lavishly elevated frescoes of Success, and although the southern station has long been disused, it is still proud enough as a railway museum, a treasure-house of old photographs, timetables, telegraph machines, model trains, signalling maps, uniforms and half a dozen old locomotives, for ever rusting with their carriages on the tracks outside.