Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (17 page)

It was a grand foretaste, I thought, of vitalities to come—or an echo of vigours past. Yet even as I watched, the Trieste effect intervened, like a migraine that clouds the vision, and in my dreaming eye I saw the whole bay empty and brooding again, and the castle all alone out there, and the float never bobbing on that fisherman’s line.

SIXTEEN
The Capital of Nowhere

For of course portents of twenty-first-century Trieste are irrelevant to the theme of this book. They are anachronistic to it—and to me. Seeing them is like seeing my own rejuvenation, resurrection even, and I record them only as a duty, because I love the old place and wish it well. Anyway I long ago conceived my own idea of this city’s real purpose. I believe it stands above economics, or tourism, or science, or even the passage of ships—or if not above them, at least apart from them. It seems to me that if Trieste were ever impelled to advertise itself on road signs, like towns in France (
“Son Cathedral, Ses Grottes, Ses Langoustines”
), all it need say about itself is “
Sua Triestinita!’
To my mind this is an existentialist sort of place, and its purpose is to be itself.

There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones! They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste.

THE ELUSIVE flavour that I enjoy here is really only the flavour of true civility, evolved through long trial and error. I have tried to get the hang of many cities, during a lifetime writing about them, and I have reached the conclusion that a peculiar history and a precarious geographical situation have made Trieste as near to a
decent
city as you can find, at the start of the twenty-first century. Honesty is still the norm here, manners are generally courteous, bigotries are usually held in check, people are generally good to each other, at least on the surface. Joyce said he had never met such kindness as he did in Trieste. Mahler just thought its people “terribly nice.”

So do I. I am only an outsider here, and my responses may be naive, but I am constantly struck by the public empathy of this city, expressed in small everyday matters—a comradely wiggle of the fingers from one driver to the other, when the funicular engine is hitched on to the Opicina tram, or the smiles women offer to perfect strangers when they join the queue for postage stamps. Time and again in Trieste I have made some casual contact, told somebody the time, asked the way somewhere, to find the encounter develop into a conversation full of delight. A man once noticed I had an antique Baedeker in my hand
(The Mediterranean
, 1911), and stopping dead in his tracks, there in the street, he engaged me in warm dialogue about the particular pleasures of old guidebooks. I much admired the reception Triestini gave to a couple of Romany musicians from Slovakia, who turned up one day to play sultry music in Via San Lazzaro: as the citizens walked up to place their lire in the open violin cases they laughed, sang, jiggled their heads to the music or warmly thanked the players, and some looked as though they would like to break into gypsy dance themselves, if they were not a little afraid of making fools of themselves.

And the fondness of Trieste people for their city’s innumerable half-feral cats always touches me. Old ladies emerge from their houses with scrunched-up bags of pasta, looking for favourite strays to feed. Outside the Trattoria Risorto in Mug-gia, while the Mayor took his victuals inside, I once counted eleven happy cats arriving with every sign of familiarity for their daily rations. On the Karst I discovered a little nest of cats, dappled and half-hidden by foliage, surrounded by the mess of spaghetti and fish-heads brought there every day by solicitous neighbours. In Trieste animals are rarely scared of humans, to my mind a sure sign of civic integrity, come wealth or poverty, fame or ignominy, empire or dictatorship or Autonomous Region.

COULD all this be the true meaning of nowhere—this half-real, half-wishful Utopia? Certainly I believe it is what Saunders Lewis had in mind, when he called the best sort of patriotism “a generous spirit of love.” Only the other day I tripped on a pavement in the Piazza Unita and fell to the ground, spilling straw hat, books, tape recorder and camera all about me. I was not at all hurt, but to amuse my companion I lay there flat out amid the debris, eyes closed, arms spread. I had not allowed for the patriotic citizens of nowhere, who came rushing to my help in their dozens, preparing handkerchiefs to staunch the blood or bandage broken bones, and murmuring soft sighs of anxiety.

EPILOGUE
Across My Grave

As we used to say at the cinema, in the days of continuous programming, this is where we came in. The clock-hand moves. The angel has passed, and the talk resumes in slight embarrassment. “Well now, yes, mm, what were we saying? Care for another glass . . . ?”

Another explanation for the kind of sudden silence which began this book is that somebody is walking over one’s grave. In my case it must be an angler casting a worm for sea-trout on an islet I own in the river Dwyfor, an all-but-island upon which my ashes will one day be scattered. The angler notion is as valid as the angel theory, when applied to the Trieste effect. I looked at this city in youth under the angelic influence; I am contemplating it now in old age like a poacher in the dusk. When I likened it to an allegory of limbo, back in my prologue, I might have added that it was the limbo of life itself.

Birth and death are the ultimate bookends, and between them a muddied narrative unfolds. In the course of it there crop up moments, experiences or places which in retrospect, rather like faces in an identification parade, we recognize as markers: the experience of first love, perhaps, a song or a book, the dread moment when we first needed spectacles, the impact of some particular corner of the world. Trieste fulfils such a function for me. When the angel flutters by I see myself sitting on that quayside bollard with my notebook in my hand, worrying out some meaning to my nineteen years of life: when the angler creeps his way through the shrubbery to Llyn Gwallt y Widdan, the Pool of the Witch’s Slope, there I am again, a septuagenarian, looking for truths still on the very same waterfront. Jorge Luis Borges got it right, when he told of an artist setting out to portray the world, but discovering that his “patient labyrinth of lines framed the image of his own face": so it is with me, after a lifetime of describing the planet, and I look at Trieste now as I would look into a mirror.

Much of this little book, then, has been self-description. I write of exiles in Trieste, but I have generally felt myself an exile too. For years I felt myself an exile from normality, and now I feel myself one of those exiles from time. The past is a foreign country, but so is old age, and as you enter it you feel you are treading unknown territory, leaving your own land behind. You’ve never been here before. The clothes people wear, the idioms they use, their pronunciation, their assumptions, tastes, humours, loyalties all become the more alien the older you get. The countryside changes. The policemen are children. Even hypochondria, the Trieste disease, is not what it was, for that interesting pain in the ear-lobe may not now be imaginary at all, but some obscure senile reality. This kind of exile can mean a new freedom, too, because most things don’t matter as they used to. They way I look doesn’t matter. The opinions I cherish are my business. The books I have written are no more than smudged graffiti on a wall, and I shall write no more of them. Money? Enough to live on. Critics? To hell with ‘em. Kindness is what matters, all along, at any age—kindness, the ruling principle of nowhere!

My Trieste has been a place of transience, but dear God we are all transients, and sooner or later we all become out-of-date—or as another generation’s jargon has it, pass our sell-by date. I know very well that my computer, my fax machine, my mobile telephone, my video, my CD player, my hi-fi and my 16-valve four-wheel-steer air-conditioned car will seem as quaint to my great-grandchildren as the brass-and-mahogany relics of Victorian technology do to me now. And if for so long Trieste has staggered through history from one disillusionment to another, sometimes there have been moments when I have perfectly understood the self-portrait called
Man Screaming
which Egon Schiele painted after his return from Trieste to Vienna, and it has dawned upon me what a nightmare hiatus we all pass through, on the way from birth to death. Surely the only logical response would be to stand on a bridge and scream? But no, self-deception sees us through.

For all its traditional sobriety Trieste is a hallucinatory city, where fantasy easily brushes fact, and a lot of what I have written about it has come from my own mind. I could have gone much further. Haven’t you heard Haydn’s Trieste Symphony, or read that famous passage of Conrad’s about the Trieste longshoremen? Didn’t Mann write part of
Buddenbrooks
, the ultimate novel of the bourgeoisie, during his stay at the Hotel de la Ville? Wasn’t Bunin’s most famous tale originally called
The Gentleman from Trieste?
Didn’t Eichmann escape through Trieste, on his way to Argentina? Don’t they say Lord Lucan has been spotted here, working in the aquarium? In Trieste anything
might
be true. I wrote a novel once about an entirely imaginary Levantine city, and found when I finished it that between every line Trieste was lurking. I wrote a book about the entire European continent in the years after the second world war, and lo, there at the centre of it all was Trieste.

Life ends with that Triestine
leit-motif “No
more, O never more,” but it need not end unhappily. In death there is no exile, no
hiraeth
, and my own hazily agnostic conception of an afterlife is rather Triestine too: a blend of the genial and the melancholy, the bourgeois and the conspiratorial, the plush and the seedy, the backstreet and the cross-roads, the wild and the respectable, in a place where regrets, hopes and high memories merge. Citizens of nowhere, unite! Join me in Trieste, your capital, and together we will watch the sun go down on the Molo Audace, along with Casanova, Isabel Burton, Joyce and Svevo, melancholy Saba, a couple of cats, the Eagle of Trieste, the King of Westphalia, old Signora Revoltella in her wheelchair, Mahler and Freud and Lord Lucan and all the others who have loitered here before us—calculating profits, polishing phrases, memorizing Smareglia, eating spaghetti scraps, plotting revolution, denying truths, imagining loves or just watching the ships or the girls go by.

There are places that have meant more to me than Trieste. Wales is where my heart is. A lost England made me. I have had more delicious pleasures in Venice. Manhattan excites me more than Trieste ever could, and so does Sydney. But here more than anywhere I remember lost times, lost chances, lost friends, with the sweet tristesse that is onomatopoeic to the place. What became of that innocent young man I escorted to the brothel on page 138? Dead and gone, and all his horses too, from an English countryside that is no more. The friend who came with me to the schooner on page 83? Still sailing his yacht about the seas, loaded with rank and honour now, but no longer the lithe young bravo who clambered on board with the
prosecco
that evening. Otto, my natural Triestine, was stabbed to death in Arabia long ago. The woman who slept one dreadful night at the Risiera has gone to her peaceful rest at last. And the stranger I bumped into that day at the Savoia Excelsior? What swing doors is he passing through today, with what arthritic difficulty, and what tender lies is he telling now that he is old and grey?

As for me, when my clock moves on for the last time, the angel having returned to Heaven, the angler having packed it in for the night and gone to the pub, I shall happily haunt the two places that have most happily haunted me. Most of the after-time I shall be wandering with my beloved along the banks of the Dwyfor: but now and then you may find me in a boat below the walls of Miramar, watching the nightingales swarm.

Trefan Morys
, 2001