Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (4 page)

Nevertheless standing as Trieste did so ambiguously between Latins, Slavs and Teutons, it was patently a city of Mitteleuropa. The merchant princes who ran it might be Italian, Slav or Jewish in origin, but like maharajahs in British India most of them shrewdly bowed to profitable imperatives, and were showily Austrian too. Sometimes they accepted Austrian titles; generally they lived in the Austrian style, florid and pompous but tempered by Biedermeier. It was natural that this cosmopolitan crowd should have contacts all over the world. When in 1817 the English piano-maker Thomas Broadwood wanted to present one of his instruments to his idol Beethoven, he shipped it to Trieste, where the local agents, who could arrange anything, had it sent on by horse and cart to Vienna. It is no surprise to learn that in 1909 the proprietor of a cinema in Trieste owned another in Bucharest and was presently to buy one in Dublin.

IMPERIAL Trieste was a well-ordered seaport. Streets were clean, crime was rare. Except at times of rebellious fervour, life was habitually calm. No gendarmerie could look much more reassuring than the officers of the municipal guard, called the
lamparetti
because of their nocturnal patrols, who glare back at us from their group photographs. They look a mature, stalwart, self-confident corps, more than a match for any hooligans or drunken seamen; all with virile moustaches, some with Franz Joseph whiskers too, wearing plumed Tyrolean hats and bearing themselves with tremendous authority (rather like the officers of the Monmouthshire Special Constabulary among whom my bearded maternal grandfather posed with equal firmness at about the same time). There was nothing provisional about the Imperial Government of Trieste. It was there to stay, and fine bodies of men were there to preserve it.

Trieste honoured all the forms of
K u K
—
Kaiserlich und Königlich
, Imperial and Royal. The Emperor’s postage-stamp portrait, in a peaked military cap and a white tunic, hung in every tobacconist’s shop, and beneath it was available the “chancery double,” the prescribed sheet of paper upon which every official transaction or application, however trivial, must by law be written. Protocol was cherished and public parades were frequent—Franz Joseph believed frequent parading was a way of exorcising wars. There was a barracks with a huge parade square, instantly familiar to old sweats who had served their time on any of the empire’s far-flung frontiers. Inspectors by the dozen supervised the quality of market food. Secret policemen tracked potential trouble-makers. An army of bureaucrats checked records, issued licences, ordered prosecutions, remitted discounts, inspected hygiene, regulated brothels, tabled statistics, sent reminders, received petitions, published decrees and sorted out problems of imperial etiquette. Trams, those emblematic mechanisms of Austro-Hungary, which trundled down the imperial streets in Serbia as in Poland, and were a part of the very ethos of Vienna—trams came early to Trieste, eventually even finding their way up the steep hill to Opicina and the Obelisk. Every house in the city was marked not only with a number, but with the name of its street too, with a single category of exception—and one can still hear some Undersecretary telling his clerk “But not, Ulrich, make it quite clear, not houses with subsidiary numbers like 41 A, or 24B”—“Oh most certainly, Excellency, I shall see to that, most definitely not street names for houses with subsidiary numbers . . .”

Most citizens of Trieste were undoubtedly grateful for these benefits. They were grateful for the order of it all, for the safety of the streets and for the huge municipal hospital, occupying two whole city blocks in the most valuable part of town. They enjoyed themselves when the military bands played, the 87th Infantry Regiment drilled outside its barracks, or best of all when the Emperor himself ceremonially appeared, like a god from over the Karst, with infinite splendour of flags, feathers, gun-salutes and fireworks. They knew that theirs was more than just another city of the southern provinces, like Bozen, Agram or Laibach (one day to be transformed into Bolzano, Zagreb and Ljubljana). It was unique. Its style was set and its affairs were largely governed not by any languid local aristocracy, but by the Morpurgos, the Carciottis and the other powerful go-getters of the Chamber of Commerce. And the most important functionaries in town were not members of Ministries or armed forces, but of the Imperial Maritime Government, which had its headquarters in Trieste itself rather than in Vienna, in a charmingly pedimented waterfront building with white picket-boats on davits outside it.

This institution was the agent of the Dual Crown in everything to do with the sea, and it was very big in Trieste, where almost everything revolved in one way or another around the docks. It was a proud calling, to be a member of the Maritime Government or its ancillary the Trieste Port Authority. The Authority’s grades of seniority were rigid, in the best imperial manner, and were emphasized for all to see by niceties of uniform: cocked hats for one grade, flat caps for another, dashing cloaks for senior functionaries, pilots’ hats to have brims two and a half inches wide. Cap-badges, of course, displayed a gold two-headed eagle surmounted by the imperial crown, and outfits were supplied by the uniform-makers Guglielmo Beck and Sons of Vienna, who had a lucrative local branch.

WHEN the Italians took over Trieste, in 1919, even they admired the legacy of the Maritime Government, but long before then the empire had been losing its assurance, and Trieste had grown less and less the Most Faithful City. Musil satirized
K u K
in decline as the kingdom of Kakania, the kingdom of shit, and despite appearances by the turn of the twentieth century the whole grand structure was beginning to rot. Its methods were tangled in obfuscation, its protocols had become absurd, its armies were ineffective and Baron von Bruck’s international fraternity was falling apart. It is the way of all empires, when they last too long. As their confidence shrivels and their apparently permanent convictions fade, they become caricatures of themselves. In my own empire the Victorian archetypes of lean frontiersmen or utterly incorruptible pro-consuls gave way in the end to silly old Colonel Blimp, with his walrus moustaches and his antediluvian ideas. In the empire of the Habsburgs the genial philosophy of muddling through degenerated into what Musil characterized as “the magic formula
Ass”
written at the bottom of almost every official memorandum and short for
Asserviert
—Awaiting Further Consideration.

No such prevarication had been necessary when, in the great days of the system, His Excellency had instantly determined that a 21A or a 42B did not merit a street name on its number-plate.

FOUR
Only the Band Plays On

K u K
, all the same, never lost its spell over Trieste. Charles VI is that peremptory emperor on his column in the Piazza Unita. Leopold I holds his orb and sceptre above the Piazza Borsa and the Empress Elizabeth, “Sissy,” Franz Joseph’s wayward Bavarian wife, stands in the shade of the trees outside the railway station. Official buildings of the imperial prime still dominate many streets like so many mummified swells. Banks and insurance offices boast of old glories, with their marble and mahogany counters, their mosaic floors and their portentous statuary: within my own memory you had to bang a big silver bell with your hand to get attention in such a place, your cheque was authorized by rubber stamps with big wooden handles, and your money was discharged with a masterly hiss through a polished brass tube.

It is easy to enter the home of one of imperial Trieste’s presiding grandees. It is a museum now, but a very personal one—a museum of him, really. Baron Pasquale Revoltella was an enormously rich bachelor, Venetian by origin, who had made his fortune by sometimes dubious speculations in grain, timber and meat. He spent a short time in jail, but worked his way back to respectability, and converted himself in later years into an archetypal tycoon of Franz Joseph’s Trieste. He had a finger in a multitude of pies. He was a founder of the Assicurazioni Generale, one of the greatest of European insurance companies, and he owned the Hôtel de la Ville, the best in town. Most profitably of all, he was among the first to recognize the benefits of a canal through the Suez isthmus, eventually becoming the Austrian representative on the board of the Suez Canal Company, and its largest private shareholder. He had a villa in a suburban park, with its own chapel for his eventual burial, beside his mother; but it is his town house, designed for him by a German architect, that best expresses him, his vocation, his time and his city. Nowadays it overlooks the Piazza Venezia. When he built it the square was called
Piazza
, Giuseppina, in honour of the Emperor Joseph II, and outside its windows was a statue of Rear-Admiral the Archduke Maximilian, late commander of the Imperial Navy, bald but bearded and in full uniform. Franz Joseph had been present at its unveiling, and the Baron was a prominent member of its sponsoring committee, which met inside his house.

Revoltella died in the 1870s and left his house to the city, stuffed with the works of art that testified to his culture and his wealth—“handsomely fitted up,” commented Baedeker’s
Austro-Hungary
approvingly in 1905. It has been enlarged in recent years to incorporate Trieste’s civic gallery of modern art, but much of it is the same today as it was when he and his mother lived in it, an opulent hothouse of silks, velvets, chandeliers, tassels and gilts. It is not exactly Germanesque, it is not precisely Italian: it is in a mercantile high capitalist style that is very Triestine. Up its velvet-railed staircase, on one of Revoltella’s grand reception nights, we imagine the
beau monde
of Trieste sweeping with their fans and sashes, some genuinely flattered to be invited to the house of the legendary nabob, some still loftily condescending.

Clutching the catalogue which the Baron has had printed for his guests, they inspect the wonders of his affluence. They marvel (or scoff) at the emblematic sculpture, half-way up the stairs, which is called
Cutting the Isthmus of Suez:
this has a plaque of Ferdinand de Lesseps on one side of its plinth, and a plaque of the Khedive Abbas of Egypt on the other, and is illuminated by a red electric bulb held between the wrought-iron fangs of a snake. They admire (or deplore) the specially commissioned painting, by Trieste’s own master Cesare dell’ Acqua, entitled
The Proclamation of the Free Port of Trieste
and tactfully honouring the origins of all this grandeur. They wonder how many of the leather-bound books in the library have actually been read, and how often anyone has sat at its purpose-built reading-chairs, with their folding bookrests, to consult Plutarch’s
Life of Alexander
.

They are bemused, perhaps, by the plethora of commemorative coins, baronial crests, mementos of royal favour, images of Newton or Galileo and putatively panoramic views of the Suez Canal. They peer through the big telescope on its tripod, permanently aimed at ships in the harbour. They bow or curtsy to Signora Revoltella, who is too ancient to take part in the evening’s festivities, but has been helped down from her bedroom to greet them. They sink gratefully into the soft red-plush chairs of the saloon, and even more gratefully at last into the dining-room, its immense table laden with crested silver, Bohemian glass and china from Bavaria.

Young Helga von Krantz whispers what a waste it seems, that the Baron should be a bachelor. Her husband the general growls that he’s a lucky fellow. The Governor chats with his host over a large cigar, urging the benefits of preferential loading tariffs. Several gentlemen are huddled in a corner, deploring the effects of preferential loading tariffs. Several ladies tell the old Signora how much they admire her Modena lace collar, and she pretends to hear them. All is normal, all is stable, all feels as enduring as the empire itself. Still, a century and more later you and I may think the most revealing thing in Baron Re-voltella’s mansion is a small gilt-framed picture we spot in a corner: for when we look closer we find that it is not a picture at all, but a camera obscura set among the canvases, enabling the billionaire to keep an eye on the piazza outside, and make sure His Highness the Admiral is not vandalized on his pedestal by louts or nationalists. The Baron knows a thing or two, and does not have complete faith in those pompous old duffers the
lamparetti
.

THERE are many other places I like to go when I wish to sniff the imperial breezes. One is the railway station, southern terminal of the Sudbahn, which was the first of the lines connecting Vienna with Trieste. It is a building yellow, lofty and assured, in a mixture of classical and Renaissance modes that Habsburg Trieste particularly liked. Corinthian columns support its glass-panelled roof, sculpted women hold laurel-wreaths or engine-wheels, and there is any amount of floor-space for ceremonial welcomes. Silvio Benco, an eminent Trieste littérateur of the last
fin de siècle
, thought its architecture had “an athlete’s poise, grace and nobility,” and in his day, with its fashionable station restaurant and its hissing brass-bound locomotives, it must certainly have had confidence.

Then I like to wander around the old Central Hospital, in its day so generous an institution that poor mothers in labour were given a poverty payment—direct so to speak from the Emperor, like our donation from George VI. There is a quadrangle inside it, frequented by many cats squatting around a central image of the Virgin, and there I like to fancy the great medical men of old, taking a break in their pince-nez and white coats from the morning’s consultations. Here comes Teofilo Koepl the obstetrician, deep in the latest paper on Caesarian parturitions from Vienna, and here is Arturo Menzel the chief surgeon tapping him on the shoulder to remind him about the staff meeting that evening, and importantly ignoring them both is Dr. Antonio Carlo Lorenzetti, who has no time to chat because, as everyone knows, he is also a member of the Governor’s Council, not to mention being a Cavaliere of the Order of Franz Joseph. Patients lying on their beds in the sunshine respectfully watch them pass, and among the shrubberies the cats sit bolt upright, only their heads showing, like lemurs or prairie dogs.

The General Post Office of Trieste reminds me of the General Post Office in Sydney, Australia. Each is a telling memorial to its respective empire. Sydney’s office is buried among skyscrapers, but holds its own by sheer Victorian assurance. Trieste’s remains hugely dominant in a square of lesser institutions. Flags fly inside the Sydney building, and there are pictures of Queen Elizabeth II. In Trieste a stately carpeted staircase leads through a central salon to a bureaucratic maze of offices beyond. The post-boxes at Sydney are set in magnificent brass surrounds. At Trieste customers are provided with public lavatories and a bar. The sculptures on the outer wall at Sydney show contemporary postal services in action and were considered indecent when they were first unveiled. The presiding frescoes at Trieste present a female Mercury surrounded by happy cherubs playing cards. The Sydney General Post Office looks out on a Cenotaph, guarded by stone sentries with bowed heads. The Palazzo delle Poste in Trieste overlooks a mammoth fountain supported by tritons, their knees made green by the dripping of the water.

And there is always the Piazza Unità, the showpiece of the city then as now. There it is easy to summon back the high times of Trieste—1897, say, when Franz Joseph was about to celebrate the golden jubilee of his rule, and the city seemed to the world at large permanently fulfilled in style and function. The Piazza was rather a different place in those days. It was called simply the
Piazza
. Grande, and a garden of trees almost filled its seaward side, between the palace of the Governor and the offices of Osterreichischer Lloyd, Lloyd Austriaco. The premises of the Assicurazioni Generale occupied the Palazzo Stratti, above the Caffe degli Specchi, and on their parapet a benign female figure held a protective arm over a pillar, a human bust, a painter’s palette and a railway engine, to represent Trieste guarding (for a proper premium) the interests of all the world. A tramline ran across the square, and now and then a No. 3 clanked along it. There was a bandstand in the garden; half-hidden by trees the liners of Austrian Lloyd tied up at the pier where the ferry from Greece ties up today.

Four cafés flourished in the piazza then, their summer tables almost meeting in the middle, and I prefer to hang out at the Flora, the most easy-going of them, frequented by journalists, poets, artists and such, dropping in from their homes in the Old City just out of sight. All around me first-class passengers, awaiting the time to board their ship, are enjoying their last half-hour on Austrian soil before sailing away to America, Alexandria or the east. There they sit at their tables in the sunshine, with their parasols and their ebony walking-sticks, greeting old acquaintances or introducing each other to fellow-passengers. Groups of friends fresh from Vienna or Budapest walk about the square, admiring the architecture, laughingly stepping back from the tram, the women holding up their skirts, the men often enough in the fancy uniforms of
K u K
. There are splashes of colour everywhere—braids and gilded epaulettes, bright silks of summer, gaudy parasols and pink fringed reticules. The music of a waltz sets people flirtatiously swaying as they chat: it sounds to me like something from Franz Lehár, and very likely is, since he is the handsomely pomaded bandmaster of the 87th Infantry who is conducting it in the bandstand.

Beyond the garden the harbour is alive. The big Lloyd liner has steam up: it’s the new
Bohemia
sailing today, 4,380 tons, Trieste-built and famously luxurious, with double-headed eagles on all its drawing-room furniture, including the piano. Lesser traffic jostles around the piers. Vessels of the Hungarian-Croatian Line load up for Fiume and Spalato. Small steamboats with spindly funnels sail away to Grado, Venice or down the Is-trian coast. Three-masters dry their sails in the roadsteads. Schooners from Greece or Sicily unload oranges or watermelons. Old black barges, with awnings and lines of washing, look like sampans in China, and Adriatic fishing-craft with red sails and blunt prows are painted with cabalistic symbols for luck. Sometimes a trader’s launch or a pilot boat runs out to meet an incoming vessel (“A pilot for you to Trieste?” cried the cheeky boy on Waring’s boat, but the master of that English brig had been here before—“the longshore thieves are laughing at us up their sleeves . . .”). Up the coast from the south comes a spanking warship, flying a huge imperial flag, and while the ladies at the cafes make a point of jumping in alarm when the saluting gun goes off from San Giusto, young Captain Lehar does not miss a beat.

Time to go aboard. A smart seaman in blue and white hastens around the square ringing a bell, and with handshakes and salutes gradually the crowd disperses towards the quay. A final sip of coffee (getting cold by now), a quick dash to retrieve that forgotten hatbox under the table, and the band speeds them on their way with a last lilting melody, the bandmaster bowing as he conducts when General von Krantz and his lady pass by. “Charming man,” says she. “Humph,” says the general.

THEY are only shadows, now, though, these vestiges of Habsburg Trieste, like so much in this crepuscular city. The great steam locomotives do not hiss in the station now, the Sudbahn station-master no longer welcomes important personages in his tight-buttoned livery; there is no express to Vienna any more, and when one day recently I went to see the morning train leave for Budapest I found it waiting rather pitifully at its platform—a diesel engine, two coaches, an uninviting dining car and only a handful of passengers at its windows. The mighty old hospital is still there indeed, but has long been superseded by a still mightier modern block on foothills behind the city. Only a solitary layabout was drinking in the bar of the General Post Office, when I last looked in. As for the scenes we shared in the Piazza Unita that day in 1897, I can hear the music still, but all the rest is phantom. The last passenger liner sailed long ago. The schooners, steamboats and barges have disappeared. No tram has crossed the piazza for years. The Caffe Flora changed its name to Nazionale when the opportunity arose, and is now defunct. The Governor’s Palace is now only the Palace of the Prefect and the Lloyd Austriaco headquarters, having metamorphosed into Lloyd Triestino when the Austri-ans left, are now government offices: wistfully the marble tritons blow their horns, regretfully Neptune and Mercury linger upon their entablatures. Those silken and epauletted passengers, with all they represented, have vanished from the face of Europe, and I am left all alone listening to the band.