Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (6 page)

ALL IN all Habsburg Trieste was a complete and interesting city, and its citizens were proud of it. Theirs was an age of burgeoning, confident municipalities throughout the industrialized world, with strong municipal governments that made some of them almost city-states. In Trieste the degree of autonomy achieved long before was transmuted into something called
municipalismo
, a conscious sense of separateness that still exists. This was an innovative, technological place, not hampered by nostalgia, and like the Chicagos and the Manchesters it looked eagerly to the future. Its young intellectuals were much taken with the ideas of the Futurist Filippo Marinetti, who believed in a fresh start for everything, artistically, politically, socially, historically. Marinetti in return thought of Trieste as an ideal model for his explosive theories, and called it
la nostra bella polveriera
, “our beautiful powder-magazine.” In 1910 a great Futurist meeting was held in the Politeama Rossetti, and half the local intelligentsia attended it. Most of them thought Marinetti went rather too far in demanding the burning of libraries and the flooding of museums, but nevertheless he was right in judging this a society by no means shackled in tradition.

Trieste had its own language, and this helped to heighten the sense of civic completeness.
Triestino
was descended from the Venetian dialect, and was similarly rich in slur and sibilant, but it had absorbed words and idioms from the many other languages of this municipal melting-pot
(sonababic
meant “son-of-a-bitch”). It was not simply a lingua franca of the uneducated, but was commonly used by people of all ranks and resources, in many subtle inflexions—even the Austrians had their own version of it, known as
Austriacans
. Poetry was written in it, speeches were made in it, and to understand it was a mark of civic membership (James Joyce was fluent, and apparently made use of it in the neo-language of
Finnegans Wake)
.

The dialect lives on, and so does the familial kind of civic identity. Educated, respectable middle-class citizens still set the style of Trieste, and mould much of its life in their own image. Remember those comfortable rentiers and professionals we saw at their victuals on our first evening in Trieste? I may have been wrong about them, for when I dined there on another evening a table-full of citizens just as respectable, just as discreet, turned out to be writers one and all. Conversely I may be wrong about the customers at the Caffè San Marco too—those professors are probably company accountants really, the novelist is preparing a computer programme and the sages are not contemplating Time, but waiting for the football on TV. With this superficial homogenization goes a more real general pride in the city, and interest in it. Hundreds turn out when they are asked to help clean up the city streets. Books and pamphlets about Trieste pour from the local presses: one published in 1999 contained a local general knowledge quiz, asking for instance who was represented in the marble sculpture in the atrium of the Revoltella Museum (the nymph Aurisina), and how many ice-cream parlours there were in the Viale XX Settembre (five).

By contemporary European standards this is still a calm and self-controlled city. It is one of the few big commercial centres of the continent that was not half-destroyed during the second world war, and in many ways its nineteenth-century moderation has survived. I happened to be sitting on a bench one day when a Chinese man had a heart attack on the seat next door. His wife was distraught, but the responses of passers-by were steady. One man gently laid the poor fellow out on the bench, and propped up his head with a rucksack. Another comforted the weeping wife. A third ran off to call the emergency services, and in a matter of moments, with a minimum of fuss, a woman doctor and two stalwart para-medics arrived to whisk the man away to hospital. “Who must I pay?” asked the wife helplessly. “Nobody, Madame,” she was proudly told, “it is a service of our city.”

Can it all last? Young people tell me they find the civic ethos oppressive. Others say it is being whittled away by the influx of migrants from Italy, who bring with them what one informant defined for me as
caosmismo
, chaoticness. Certainly the Trieste bourgeoisie seems to get older every year. Watch its representatives, any fine summer day, going down for their morning dalliances at the outdoor cafes beside the Canal Grande, with their sticks and spectacles and sunhats and little dogs on leads, and you may well think them a dying caste. I once came across a open-air concert in the Piazza della Borsa where a few hundred of them had assembled. From the waterfront there sounded, on the evening air, the thump of a rap band, but in the piazza all was fond sentimentality. The performer was a well-known Trieste artist called Umber to Lupi, who sang songs in the Trieste dialect. He was of a certain age himself, and he sat at his keyboard altogether relaxed, in shirt and slacks and anorak, while before him his elderly audience responded as they might to a family friend. They knew him well, and he knew them. As he sang they sang with him, laughed with him, swayed and tapped their feet as he did.

They were singing their own songs, in their own language, out of their own past. I noticed that some of their eyes were full of tears, and I almost wept a little myself: because of their age, because of mine, because of the hard times they had lived through, because Signor Lupi was a true professional, because of the sweet songs, because I feared that nobody would be singing them much longer, because of the decline of the bour-geosie across the world, and because—well, because of the Trieste effect.

TO CELEBRATE the start of the third millennium the whole of the Piazza Unità, the largest square in Italy, was officially painted over with an enormous picture to mark Trieste’s place in Europe. It showed a brave young woman, blond hair flying, riding a bull towards the open sea, with a sun and a moon above, and seven stars against an azure sky. Hundreds of citizens, young and old, had helped to spread its four tons of blue, yellow, red and white paint over the surface of the square, and they had been encouraged to add a thousand slogans and messages of their own, so that the whole was like the biggest graffito ever scrawled. Nobody could see all of it, except from a helicopter, and people wandered the piazza all day long, exploring the different corners of this communal signature.

The Irish-Triestine scholar John McCourt (to whose book
The Years of Bloom
I am much indebted) has likened the Trieste dialect to “a living encyclopedia of the cultures, nations and languages that had been assimilated by the city.” In the same way I thought the millennium painting in the Piazza Unità a proper index of the city’s character (and I considered it only proper, too, in a city of intelligent dialectic, that the management of the Caffè degli Specchi, which was obliged to close its doors during the months it took to clean everything off and resurface the square, should have declared the whole project just another example of The Arrogance of Power).

SIX
Sad Questions of Oneself

On July 2, 1914, the 22,000-ton battleship SMS
Viribus Unitis
arrived at the Molo San Carlo in Trieste bringing the corpses of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew and heir to the Emperor, and his wife, Sophie. They had both been assassinated at Sarajevo, in the Austrian territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, five days before.

Their coffins were carried in funeral procession through the streets of Trieste, before being sent by train to Vienna. This was an imperial frisson of an altogether new kind, and I can sense the shock of the occasion from an old photograph I have before me now. Sailors line the street, imperial infantrymen escort the cortège, led by mounted officers with cockaded hats. Every window and balcony, attic to ground floor, is crowded with people. Black flags or carpets hang from walls and flagstaffs. A mass of citizenry fills the pavements, the women in dark clothes, the men removing from their heads the boaters which every self-respecting male wore in summer Trieste. The photograph was taken by the local photographers Giuseppe and Carlo Wulz, whose very names give it a true Trieste evocation.

At the moment they clicked their shutter the procession has momentarily halted in the Corso, the main street of the city, now the Corso Italia. There is no apparent reason. Everybody in the crowd, from every window, is looking towards the coffins. The soldiers are rigid. The officers have turned in their saddles to see what is happening. Beside the bier a solitary courtier stands motionless, his top hat in his hand. Soldiers, sailors, citizens, officials, all wait still, silent and expectant. Did some of them guess that the saddest of angel messengers was passing by, foretelling the world’s tragedy, the empire’s humiliation, and their own proud city’s long decline?

IT WAS when those bodies returned from Sarajevo, I suppose, that tristesse was decreed for Trieste, but long before then melancholy had found its proper image here. Miramar contains its very essence. It stands on its promontory weeping, and to my eyes even in the sunshine its walls are never sparkling. A pleasant park surrounds it, and its rooms are full of treasures, but nobody who goes there can fail to sense its numen of regret.

Maximilian, having ably reformed the Austrian Navy, retired from the sea in 1856, but he did not get on well with his elder brother the Emperor, and was happy to live well away from Vienna with his devoted young bride. He was a dreamy sort of man, somewhat liberal in his views and much influenced by his uncle the crazed romantic Ludwig I of Bavaria, so he was not at ease with the stiff autocracy of
K u K
. He was actually removed from a post as Governor-General of Lombardy as being too progressive (and a good thing too, perhaps, for he wanted to plant the Piazza San Marco at Venice with orange trees, and turn its campanile into a lighthouse).

However, in 1864 he was called to take part in a fateful imperialist scheme. The French had suggested to Franz Joseph that to counter the growing strength of the United States, there should be an attempt to re-establish European sovereignty on the American continent. The idea was that with French military support a European monarchy should be restored to the throne of a key Latin American republic, Mexico. This was in the hands of a left-wing revolutionary, Benito Juarez, and there was thought to be a strong conservative faction in the country in favour of such an intervention. Besides, it was the nearest of all the republics to Washington. The Americans were in the throes of their civil war, and probably distracted from the principles of the Monroe Doctrine: an alliance might perhaps be struck with the Confederate States of the South, much more sympathetic to European ways and monarchical instincts than were Abraham Lincoln’s modernist northerners.

A French expedition accordingly invaded Mexico, drove Juárez out of Mexico City, installed a puppet administration and awaited a new Emperor of Mexico from Europe. Who better to send than Maximilian the Habsburg, with Carlotta of the Belgians as his Empress? His love-castle at Trieste was not yet completed, the trees were still saplings that he had planted with his own hand, the last of the ornamental statuary had yet to be installed in the park, when a Mexican deputation arrived at Mir-amar to offer him the throne. Maximilian was understandably reluctant, but he obeyed his brother’s wishes and sailed off with Carlotta to Mexico in the 2,600-ton frigate
Novara
, recently converted from sail to steam in a Trieste shipyard. He was never to see his Miramar again, for the French presently deserted him, the Mexicans put him against a wall and shot him, and Carlotta was left to return to Europe and go mad.

The castle, its name now Italianized as Miramare, is Maximilian’s only remaining memorial in Trieste: that statue of him outside Revoltella’s house was eventually pulled down after all, and stands today in the castle park. Miramare is a museum now, and full of grief. Its lavish royal trophies are pathetically ironic—none more so than the crimson canopied bed that Napoleon III gave Maximilian and Carlotta as a wedding present, or the marble-topped table, a present from Pope Pius X, upon which Maximilian had signed his suicidal commitment to the Mexicans. Two big celebratory pictures by dell’Acqua hang in the castle’s Historical Room, to pile on the agony. In one Maximilian, in a brass-buttoned frock coat, is accepting from a respectful huddle of Mexican functionaries, including the Archbishop of Mexico City, the invitation to become their Emperor. In another the Archdukely couple, standing in a barge rowed by bearded sailors and flying an imperial ensign, are offering a restrained goodbye to a crowd of well-wishers on the castle steps, while a second, less dignified audience waves its hats from the jetty beyond. Boat-crews salute with raised oars, and off-shore the frigate awaits them dressed overall.

The castle has often been unlucky, and gloomy legend attends it. The Empress Elizabeth, Franz Joseph’s consort, often stayed there, and was eventually stabbed to death at Geneva. Carlotta briefly lived there, and in the end went off her head. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II stayed there once, and soon had to abdicate his throne. The first King of Albania spent a few nights there, and his throne lasted only six months. The Duke of Aosta sailed away from Miramare to be Italian Viceroy of Ethiopia, and never returned to Italy. When the British General Bernard Freyberg chose it as his headquarters at the end of the second world war he preferred to be on the safe side, and slept in the garden; but one of his American successors defied superstition and was later killed in Korea, and another died in a car crash on his way back to Trieste from the United States.

For me looking out from Miramare’s luxurious drawing-rooms, hung with chandeliers and royal portraits, and equipped with tinted windows to add lustre to the view—looking across the empty water to the city of Trieste is almost an ecstasy of the poignant. Once when I was there a frightful thunder-storm burst, and a few raindrops seeped through the ceiling of the castle’s throne room to fall heavily on the floor: only a few of us were present, and with silent respect we stood around the spot as the water slowly and rhythmically fell—drip, drop, drip, drop, like the sad ticking of time. Shortly before he died Maximilian wrote from Mexico ordering two thousand nightingales to be sent to him from Miramar, and I can still imagine them, freed from their cages, fluttering westward out to sea.

ARISTOTLE, I have been told, believed that every interesting man possessed a streak of melancholy. I feel the same about cities, and in this respect Trieste is a winner. Melancholy is Trieste’s chief rapture. In almost everything I read about this city, by writers down the centuries, melancholy is evoked. It is not a stabbing sort of disconsolation, the sort that makes you pine for death (although Trieste’s suicide rate, as a matter of fact, is notoriously high). In my own experience it is more like our Welsh
hiraeth
, expressing itself in bitter-sweetness and a yearning for we know not what.

Even Marcel Proust, who never visited Trieste, has his Narrator think of it as “a delicious place in which the people were pensive, the sunsets golden, the church bells melancholy.” Um-berto Saba, the Trieste poet
in excelsis
, seems to have been habitually melancholic in the city he loved: he thought the street called Lazaretto Vecchio “mirrors me in my long days of closed sorrow,” on the Molo San Barlo he could “dream my days were almost happy,” and when in exile he remembered a time in Trieste when he
was
happy, even then he felt obliged to add “God forgive me that great tremendous word.” The German novelist Ricarda Huch said the melancholy of Trieste affected her more than its beauty, so that only when she went home did she remember “the way the crest of the Karst disappeared in a shimmering of violet into the horizon.” Even Italo Svevo’s great Trieste novel
La Coscienza di Zeno
, which is often very funny, is infused with a haunting sense of unfulfilment.

The very sea of Trieste, although it lies very beautifully beneath the hills, seldom seems to me a laughing sea. Some seas are different in character every day, with the light, the tide and the ripples, but Trieste’s sea invariably strikes me as
brooding
. In winter it can suggest somewhere cruel, on the Black Sea, or in the Baltic. On a hot summer day it can acquire an unearthly stillness; the sky merges metallically with the water, ships stand leaden on the horizon and one can’t quite make out where the hull of a moored boat ends, and its reflection begins. Nowhere can be much more peaceful than the bay at dead of night, with only a few motionless lights of fishing-boats about, a faint insomniac hum from the city, and a tinny clang when Michez and Jachez wake up to clash the passing of another hour; yet somehow or other, through it all, the sea of Trieste broods away the aeons, rain or shine, light or dark.

Trieste makes one ask sad questions of oneself. What am I here for? Where am I going? It had this effect upon me when I was in my teens; now that I am in my seventies, in my jejune way I feel it still.

HISTORY is one source of these sensations—
men are we, and must grieve when even the shade of that which once was great has passed away
. Isolation is another. Trieste still stands out on a limb, and even in the age of the web and the television, its young people in particular often feel cut off from the life of the great world: at the start of the twenty-first century Munich was the only city outside Italy which had direct scheduled flights to Trieste.

More directly, though, an uneasy climate is probably the cause. Summer is seldom decorative here, but more often hangs heavy and sullen on the city, malignantly bronzing the sun-bathers who lie in their hundreds on the corniche of Barcola, between the city and Miramare. “The damned monotonous summer,” Joyce called it, and I remember with horror the mosquitoes which, high on San Giusto’s hill, used to hurl themselves at the mosquito nets of my youth. But the winter’s the thing. In particular it is given a baleful excitement by the terrific Trieste phenomenon called the bora (a dialect variant of the Latin
boreas
, the north wind). This ferocious wind from the east-north-east long ago became fundamental to Trieste’s self-image. There is a street named after it in the Old City. The pine-woods on the slopes of the Karst were planted specifically to shield the city from it. Sometimes railway wagons used to be blown over by it, and long ago in some streets railings were attached to the walls for pedestrians to hang on to. Trieste makes the most of its bora. On the wind-rose at the end of the Molo Audace, on the central waterfront, the four conventional Mediterranean winds occupy their usual places on the roundel, but the bora is all alone, away at the edge, a wind spectacularly on its own. Local historians assure us that the outcome of a battle fought up on the Karst in A.D. 394 was so affected by a bora—they call it the Battle of the Bora—that it led directly to the end of the Roman Empire.

Citizens love their visitors to encounter this most Triestine of experiences, and they have celebrated the bora in wry art and anecdote. The artist Carlo Wostry, who died in 1943 and declared it to be “the only original thing we have,” did a famous series of bora cartoons—skirts flying, top hats tumbling, horses halted in their tracks, papers whisked about all over the place and women huddling in phalanx to keep themselves upright. They say the bora is cyclical, and blew less frequently in the last decades of the twentieth century, but when one morning I opened my curtains in the first year of the twenty-first, I was delighted to see the old monster whipping through the trees below, sending the leaves scudding madly across the sidewalks and boiling the lethargic sea.

However, whenever down the years I have been caught by the bora in full blast, it has left me strangely disturbed. I love demonstrations of nature in the raw, but when this fearful zephyr has howled away I feel curiously enervated or desolate. Stendhal, in 1839, defined the sensation as rheumatism in his entrails, and perhaps it is the source of Trieste’s endemic hypochondria. Imaginary illnesses have always been prevalent here, in literature as in life. Svevo’s fictional
alter ego
Zeno suffers every kind, eventually reaching the conclusion that a
maladie imaginaire
is worse than the real thing because it is incurable. During his stay here James Joyce experienced as many fanciful afflictions as real ones, and I myself, as I write, seem to feel a peculiarly developing pain in my right ear-lobe. I was once woken in the night by a portentous flashing of lights through my window. Rushing to my balcony I saw that offshore a great cruise ship was standing, brilliantly illuminated, while below me on the quay, lights were blinking urgently on a police car and a white ambulance. A passenger on the ship was being brought ashore for surgery; but ominous though the spectacle was, and awful his predicament, as I returned sleepy to my bed I could not help wondering if, being where he was when the emergency seized him, he was not fancying the whole thing.