Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (15 page)

Complex manipulations of railway route and tariff kept the port competitive. The great threat to Trieste was the rise of the continental North Sea ports, Hamburg, Bremen, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, which were almost as close as Trieste itself to the markets of the European interior. Sometimes the German railways stole a march by reducing rates on traffic to Hamburg, but one great advantage Trieste offered was an arrangement for combined tariffs—land transport, port dues and shipping costs all in one fee. If an exporter shipped via Trieste he could pay a single fare for his goods to go from Munich to Shanghai, say, and have done with it. Trieste became Europe’s chief point of contact with the Orient, especially after the cutting of the Suez Canal: even the British, when they wanted to reach their Indian empire in a hurry, sent their mail and couriers across the continent by rail to Trieste, to pick up a Lloyd Adriatico packet to the east.

Naturally the docks themselves were always the point of Trieste. Everything looked towards the wharfs and quays, as the mountains themselves looked down there in that fanciful Alpine map of mine. It was above all a place of ships and sailors, and Maria Theresa herself had instituted a nautical school, to be run by Jesuits—its successor still exists, opposite the Civic Library. The Austrian East India Company had its base here, in the days when all European States were competing for markets in the east, and built ships in its own Trieste yards, not far from today’s railway station.

If you drive through the industrial quarters beside Muggia bay, with docks and warehouses all around you, and elevated highways threading over and under one another, you may notice an apparent castle tower protruding diffidently out of the chaos—more like a cardboard tower than a real one, with a pair of lions prominently prancing beside it. This is the tower of the Lloyd Austriaco Arsenal, for generations the headquarters of shipbuilding in Trieste. Great ships were built in this city for a century or more, and names that were famous all over the world were born to a splash of champagne on Trieste slipways. Here the
Viribus Unitis
was built, and two other powerful dreadnoughts which represented Austro-Hungary’s will to be a major naval power, but which, as it turned out, were the last Austrian battleships. It was at the Cantiere San Marco here that Mussolini laid the keel of the battleship
Roma
, one of the only class of battleships ordered by the Fascist regime, and as it happened the last ever to be built for the Italian Navy, too.

Most memorably of all, at Trieste between the wars was built one of the loveliest of all passenger liners, the
Conte di Savoia
(48,500 tons), which with her sister ship
Rex
for a few years of the 1930s made Italy stylishly supreme on the Atlantic shipping routes. I grew up with these great ships. I pored over their pictures in shipping magazines, thrilled to their graceful lines, and marvelled to imagine their elegant shapes, streaming smoke from their two funnels, swelling foam from their prows, as they made at twenty-eight knots for Sandy Hook—ships, names, places that spelt romance for me then, and excite me still. I used to fancy that it was
Rex
or
Conte di Savoia
that I saw through my telescope streaking up the Bristol Channel, instead of colliers plodding into Cardiff, or banana boats for Avonmouth!

They are gone, all those great vessels, gone with the old greatness of Trieste itself. They had sad ends. The
Viribus Unitis
was meanly sunk that day at Pola—meanly, because she had already been handed over by the defeated Austro-Hungarian Navy to the new Yugoslav Kingdom, a possible rival to Italian pretensions in the Adriatic. The
Roma
was vindictively sunk by a German glider bomb in 1943, when the Italians had already signed their armistice with the western allies, and she was on her way to surrender to the British. As to the two magnificent liners, I mourned them in death as I had admired them in life.
Conte de Savoia
I saw for myself at last, after so many years of fancy, sunk, scarred and rusty in shallow water off Venice.
Rex
was lying burnt-out on her side, like a rotting and scabrous whale, when for the first time in my life I looked out from Trieste towards the coast of Istria.

EVEN in its prime there were signs of the city’s vulnerability. It was a one-purpose town, and seers recognized even then that it could easily be ruined. But it held on until the first world war. Until that catastrophe shippers the world over still preferred to send their goods Via Trieste, and the tall-funnelled steamers of Lloyd Austriaco were still to be seen basking on advertising posters, surrounded by sampans in exotic harbours, while passengers with parasols daintily disembarked. But the collapse of
K u K
meant that the city had lost its occupation. There was no money in its grand old banks: all their deposits had been removed to Vienna at the start of the war, and Milan’s
Corriere della Sera
likened the city in 1919 to a millionaire who had lost his safe, and was left to languish in poverty.

Handed over to Italy, Trieste had no organic purpose. It was not needed. Venice, Naples and Genoa were all well-developed ports. Trieste’s trade with central Europe calamitously declined, and it was like a last skewed demonstration of old functions when in 1920 shiploads of soldiers of the legendary Czech Legion arrived from Russia. Technically they were deserters from the old imperial army, but they were packed off in trains, like so many cargoes before them, into the heart of the disintegrated empire, where they were welcomed as patriotic heroes.

Only passenger traffic saved the port from ignominy, because from the quays beside the Piazza Unita liners did still sail across the world. Two 24,000-ton motorships of the Cosulich Line,
Vulcania
and
Saturnia
, maintained an Atlantic service, and the ships of Lloyd Triestino were busy too. Now many of their passengers were emigrants, and most of them were Jews. Thousands of disillusioned citizens of central Europe took passage to the United States of America, by the route that had so long been habitual to the old empire. Thousands more left the
shtetls
of Russia and Poland to look for their new Zion in Palestine. Those posters of sunburnt tourists in the east gave way to pictures of open-necked young pioneers making for the
kibbutzim
, beneath fiery slogans in Hebrew. Elderly vessels were mostly used for the trade, and they were like mirror images of those desperate old ferries one later saw being turned away from the beaches of Palestine: loaded not with despairing souls of exodus, but with emigrants full of hope. The business was profitable for Lloyd Triestino, which made its own direct arrangements with the Zionist movement, until the Fascist Government instructed the company “not to pay too much attention to the Jewish trade”; and Adolf Hitler doubtless watched with approval, for he had told the nations of the world that they were welcome to all the German Jews they liked, “even if they went there in luxurious ships . . .”

The Fascists, looking for purposes for their City of Redemption, hoped to make Trieste an exhibition of Italian modernity—like the Futurists, in their old dreams of fire, smoke and energy. For one thing they saw it as a centre of aviation. It had long been connected with flying. It was a military air base in the first world war, and several aircraft had been designed and built there. In 1926 a local company started operating flying-boats on regular services to Venice and Pola, with headquarters in a shed on the waterfront. In the 1930s this was replaced by a proper Maritime Air Station, boldly on the foreshore and conveniently near the Hotel de la Ville. It still exists, converted now to other uses (Port Captain’s office, Coastguard base, occasional concert venue) but still recognizably of its time and ideology—at its corners two very Fascist demi-torsos, male and female, strain themselves heroically towards
Cielo Nostrum
. I have in my hand now a modernistic catalogue cover from 1934 (Anno XII) which shows the Trieste waterfront as the Fascists liked to think of it. Stylized freighters line the piers before and behind; a sleek three-funnelled destroyer is at the Molo Audace; either
Vulcania
or
Saturnia
lies stately at the ocean passenger terminal; and among them all there sweeps towards its white station, leaving a plume of spray behind it, a streamlined black seaplane.

Mussolini’s Government also imagined Trieste as an imperial port once more. From here, they resolved, a re-born Italy would exert its power abroad. In 1935 the Italians invaded Ethiopia, intending to combine it with their existing colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland to create a great new empire in east Africa. Here was a purpose for which Trieste, “third entry to the Suez Canal,” was better fitted than any other Italian port, and the Ministry of Public Works announced that the city had been “destined for imperial functions by the Duce.” The port’s own commissioner said Trieste would be the pivot of an undertaking that would “open up a new epoch in the history of national expansion, and in the colonial history of the world.” Tanks, guns and aircraft became the port’s chief commodity then, and its ships carried the pith-helmeted New Italians who were to colonize the new empire—“armed emigrants of the Dark Continent,” the port commissioner called them.

Some of the rifles that were then sent to Africa, captured by the British a few years later, ended up as drill weapons for the Officers’ Training Corps at my school in Britain. They seemed to me more like muskets than rifles, but I dare say some of them were presented in salute when Mussolini came to inspect the port in 1938. By then, although an invasion of Albania was still to come, it was really too late for imperial destiny. It was Anno XVI of the Fascist era, but before Anno XXI arrived the Italian empire was dissolved, Mussolini had been hanged from a lamppost and Trieste had lost its purpose once again. On the central waterfront at Trieste today, the chief reminders of those years are a liner terminal without liners, an air station without aircraft, the Saturnia rowing club and the Ristorante Vulcania.

THE NAZIS found no real use for Trieste. Their brief empire was doomed too, and it was their final annexation. When the Italians deserted them in 1943, and they declared Trieste an integral part of the Reich, they thought of it as a bulwark against the threat of Slav
untermenschen
from the east—a last bastion of civilization, as Metternich had declared it long before. Their local newspaper,
Deutsche Adria Zeitung
, forecast that it would know splendid times again, revived by “the European idea,” but in the event almost the only use the Germans found for the port was the transport of coal and bauxite up the coast from Is-tria. The British and Americans did no better either, during their period of governance. The British used Trieste as the terminal of the trans-continental route by which they transported troops to their own fading empire in the Middle East, but in general both Powers were more concerned about who Trieste should belong to than what it was for.

The place just struggled on, when once Trieste’s post-war status was settled, and the Cold War of the 1970s and 1980s did briefly restore to the city some of its original functions. Eastern and western Europe were then divided into rigidly discrete blocs. The west boomed with capitalist progress, the east skulked in dogma. One country stood half-apart from this stagnant conflict: the Federation of Yugoslavia, which was ruled by Communists indeed, but had declared its emancipation from Stalin’s Soviet Union, and which thus occupied an equivocal half-way position between east and west. Trading with the west, or even travelling there, was harshly regulated within the Soviet-dominated States, but people could go relatively easily into Yugoslavia. It became a sort of de-pressurising chamber, a rat-run through the Iron Curtain, and from Yugoslavia entrepreneurs could easily reach the easternmost outpost of the materialist civilization, Trieste.

The city responded, and became an international emporium once more. For some years it was a murky exchange for the commodities most coveted in the deprived societies of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Yugoslavia itself. Jeans, for example, were then almost a currency of their own, so terrific was the demand on the other side of the line, and the trestle tables of the Ponterosso market groaned with blue denims of dubious origin (“Jeans Best for Hammering, Pressing and Screwing,” said a label I once noticed). There was a thriving traffic in everything profitably re-sellable, smuggleable or black-marketable—currencies, stamps, electronics, gold. Not far from the Ponterosso market was Darwil’s, a five-story jeweller’s famous among gold speculators throughout central Europe. Dazzling were its lights, deafening was its rock music, and through its blinding salons clutches of thick-set conspiratorial men muttered and wandered, inspecting lockets through eye-glasses, stashing away watches in suit-cases, or coldly watching the weighing of gold chains in infinitesimal scales.

After the fall of Communism in eastern Europe, but before the re-emergence of the market economy there, all this half-clandestine trade briefly mutated into a legitimate Balkan market, in the gardens opposite the railway station where Nora had waited for Jim. Thousands of Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians and Yugoslavs came in buses to shop there. They used to seem to me like looters of a despoiling army, except that in those early years of Europe’s re-awakening they were shabby and diffident, were slung about with carrier bags, and were in search not of masterpieces, but of cooking utensils, anoraks, shoes, suitcases, toys and household gimmicks. The market had a gypsy air to it, and its wares were often picaresque. I was amused one morning to see a substantial housewife inspecting a line of sports luggage designed, so a sales leaflet said, “For Who Live Within One’s Opinion For Our Own Adventure Instinct To Walk Around Metropolitan Jungle For Ever.” What could such a slogan mean? I asked her. But she did not reply, perhaps because she only talked Ruthenian.