Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (7 page)

Imagine the accumulated psychological deposits of a million boras, deposited in this city over the millennia and augmented by sundry more tangible despairs, and it is not surprising that in recent times Trieste has not been naturally blithe.

IT WAS not always so. Before the gods of capitalism adopted Trieste, before it was properly Austrianized, visitors thought it a regular beaker-full of the warm south, joyous with Latin vivacity.

The young German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, arriving in 1803 and still half aghast at the awfulness of the Karst, was delighted by its lively night-life. Soon afterwards a Romanian traveller, Dinco Golescu, felt much the same, and wrote of a city brilliant with great lanterns, and an opera audience of three thousand so moved by the performance of the evening, and so emotionally uninhibited, “that I hardly saw one hundred who did not have to wipe their eyes.” Nowadays not so many Triestini cry in public, even when Signor Lupi is singing, and going to the opera is not the heart-on-sleeve experience it can be in more Italianate parts of Italy. Over the years I have spent five or six evenings at the Teatro Verdi, just on impulse, and I have found myself content but not exhilarated.

This is partly because twice the opera of the night has happened to be a work by a local composer, Antonio Smareglia (1854–1929), whose operas are hardly ever performed anywhere else. But it is also, to risk a generalization, because of the modern Trieste temperament, bred by history out of race. This is an audience courteous, interested, informed, but hardly demonstrative. Its response is measured. People don’t wipe their eyes much in these stalls, no claques break into hysterical applause. Divas need not expect mid-aria encouragement. There is no wild covey of music students in the upper balconies, as ready to boo as to cheer, and when we all file out into the night not a soul is going to be whistling that love-aria from Act 2 (not even me, if only because, not being very familiar with the melodies of Smareglia, I can’t remember how it goes).

NO MORE, never again,” is the refrain that haunts the last pages of Svevo’s tragic novel
Senilità
. It is a refrain of Trieste itself, embodied in the presence of Miramare, and James Joyce caught its melancholy in a poem. “Watching the Needle-Boats at San Sabba” is about watching the sculling-crews which in his time, as in ours, were often to be seen training or racing in the waters of the two bays:

The water was calm and still that day, I feel sure, and the poet could perhaps hear the hard breathing of the oarsmen above the swish of their oars. He could also hear in his head the last chorus of Puccini’s
La Fanciulla del West
, “The Girl of the Golden West,” so full of plangent yearning.
Mai più ritornarai, mai più
. . . Half a century later I heard that same refrain on a trading schooner anchored in the bay of Trieste, within sight of Maximilian’s castle. Two of us had gone on board to visit its captain, taking with us a couple of bottles of sparkling
prosecco
wine. We sat there drinking while the sun went down, and as the dusk fell upon Miramare the captain softly sang to himself that very phrase—“
Mai più ritornarai, mai più”:
“No more, return no more!”

SEVEN
Trains on the Quays

Until the 1950s freight trains ran along Trieste’s central waterfront, connecting the Sudbahn station at the northern end with the Campo Marzio station at the southern—each the terminus of a separate system. The tracks are still there, with a turntable halfway along, but the southern station is now a railway museum, and nowadays trains going to the industrial quarter and the modern docks on Muggia bay pass through an inland tunnel. I miss the trains on the quays. With their panting steam locomotives and their clanking wagons they passed slowly along the waterfront, and often workmen sat on their flat-topped wagons, hitching a ride from one siding to another. They were shabby, noisy old trains. When Gustav Mahler, staying at the Hotel de la Ville, complained about the mercantile racket of the city, it was probably because he was kept awake by their pantings, whistlings and rusty squeaks outside his window.

Sometimes, even on spring days, there used to be a crust of snow on those passing trucks, and this seemed pathetically metaphorical to me. Snow from where, I used to wonder? Snow from Carpathia, from Bohemia, from the Vienna woods? By the time it reached Trieste it was broken and grubby at the edges, mouldering at the heart, and struck me as sad stuff. It was like snow sent into exile, banished from its bright cold uplands, wherever they were, to drip into oblivion in this grey enclave by the sea.

The trains themselves made me think of exile, too, for there is nothing more evocative of goodbyes than the sound, look and smell of trains. When you see people off at an airport you know they can be home again in a few hours, but a last kiss at an international railway station is like a premonition of infinity. My own archetypal exile is the Russian writer Ivan Bunin, author of
The Gentleman from San Francisco
, who lived outside his own country for the last forty years of his life, and who, if he was never in Trieste, certainly ought to have been. Bunin was haunted by trains until the end of his days, seeing in them reminders, I suppose, of his homeland’s immense track-crossed spaces, the heart-rending gaps of time between departures and arrivals, partings and reunions.

He would have been among friends in Trieste, for this is a city made for exiles. Many exiles, of course, are given no choice, but I imagine most of us sometimes tire of living in the open, where everything is plain to see and we ourselves are obvious, and for anyone with this sporadic impulse to withdraw into somewhere less transparent, Trieste offers a compelling destination—surreptitious itself, and ambiguous. It has offered a new home to many expatriates, voluntary or compulsory, but in the event many have spent half their time here wistfully wishing they were somewhere else. For this is an ironic gift of the place—to attract and to sadden, both at the same time. You can hardly come to Trieste without responding to its natural beauties—the sea at its best so profoundly blue, Miramare wistful on its promontory, Istria running away like a mirage to the south and the harsh hills of the Karst a tantalizing backdrop. But then that train goes by, with that layer of old snow, to remind you that you are far away.

FAR AWAY from where? Exile is no more than absence, and it can take many forms. Some say a sense of exile is built into us when we are weaned from our mothers’ breasts; others that it begins when we are told for the first time to leave the family table, or are left self-conscious and apprehensive at our first children’s party. At the other end of life I have often met exiles from their own times. I think of old British colonialists, bred to authority and the wide horizons, living out their pensioned lives in semi-detached houses of cramped suburbia. I met a man in Mississippi who subsisted, all too late, in one of those great ante-bellum mansions of the Old South, looked after by a single black woman instead of a dozen house-slaves, still talking about steamboats, balls and thoroughbred horses, and eating his fried chicken off a bedsheet. In Stalin’s Leningrad I found myself minded, courtesy of the KGB, by a woman of such exquisite aristocratic grace that she seemed to have stepped straight out of a ball-room of Czarist St. Petersburg. In India I met an old English couple who were so wedded to the lost Raj that they were spending their last years in the stables of a Punjabi racecourse, drinking tea out of chipped mugs and recalling glittering meets of long before.

For myself, absence from place is the truest exile. I first experienced its pangs when I was sent away to boarding school—exile was mine when, rising that first morning from prickly institutional blankets in a loveless dormitory, I crept to the window and saw outside a totally unknown landscape. Bunin in his exile pined not so much for Russian life as for Russia itself, because being far from the place you love can mean more than being far from the people you love. “Oh what have I done,” a nineteenth-century English imperialist was heard groaning from his bed, during a tour of duty in the generally delightful Ionian island of Cephalonia, “oh
what
have I done, that Her Majesty should banish me to this vile and abominable place?” Countless other expatriates, of all nationalities and in all ages, have cried the same, when the incurable and sometimes unaccountable longing for a homeland seizes them, and many of them have groaned it in Trieste.

NAMELESS foreigners by the thousand have come to Trieste and lived here happily ever after—all those Greeks, Armenians and Turks of the Habsburg port, some of them so delighted to be here that before they had houses, they lived on boats in the harbour. Many of Trieste’s more famous expatriates, though, have not been content for very long. Waring himself, their poetic prototype, did not linger—his original was a poet named Alfred Domett who ended up as Prime Minister of New Zealand. Richard Coeur de Lion probably never came at all: legend says he was imprisoned here on his way from the Holy Land, and Arco Ricardo, the Roman arch we passed on the way up San Giusto hill, is supposed to have been called after him, but scholars scoff. Casanova stuck it here for two years between 1772 and 1774, having by his own account a pleasant enough stay, but as soon as the Procurators of Venice allowed him to go home, he was off within the week.

The Austrian artist Egon Schiele came for a time, recovering from the effects of a short jail sentence, but he painted only a few watercolours of the harbour before hastening back to Vienna. And the German art historian and archaeologist Johann Winckelmann, “the Father of Neo-Classicism,” stayed in this city only eight days, because having arrived on June i, 1768, he was murdered on June 8, and thus provided the most dramatic of Trieste’s exile stories.

Nobody really knows why this world-famous and universally admired scholar was killed. He had made an unhappily abortive visit to Germany from Rome, where he was living. On the way back he had stopped in Vienna, where Maria Theresa presented him with two gold medals, and he had arrived in Trieste planning to take ship to Ancona. He put up at the new Locanda Grande, one of the buildings which then blocked the seaward end of the Piazza Grande. There he apparently made friends with Francesco Arcangeli, a young man staying in the next room, and they spent much of the week strolling the city together. On the eighth day Arcangeli murdered him.

The villain was caught, confessed, turned out to be a convicted thief and was broken on the wheel outside the doors of the hotel, providing it with the ultimate in publicity. His motives remain murky. Perhaps he had planned to steal the gold medals, perhaps he had some obscure political purpose, or perhaps he had embroiled the scholar in a homosexual entanglement. Winckelmann was famously ecstatic about Greek male statuary, “clothed with eternal springtime” and “perfumed by the essence of the gods.” Missing his home comforts even at the Grande, perhaps he had found himself a rough companion, had squabbled with him in a moment of jealousy or condescension, and had paid the price twice over.

Nothing could be much sadder—far from his books poor Winckelmann died, far from his pleasant quarters at the Vatican, alone with a young scoundrel on a foreign shore. Classicist that he was, he thought Ulysses a symbol of longing for a fatherland, and in his last moments he must have been horribly homesick too. At the time all educated Europe, we are told, was saddened by the news of his death—“universal mourning and lamentation,” Goethe wrote—and the Winckelmann story long ago entered the somewhat meagre tourist repertoire of Trieste. It was Domenico Rossetti who thought of establishing a Lapidary Garden in his memory. It is close to the cathedral, a mellow clutter of slabs and ancient stones in an expanse of rough grass. In one corner stands a cenotaph in Winckelmann’s honour, erected under the patronage of an emperor, three kings and a grand duke, containing a fine marble image of Dr. Winckelmann and sundry examples of the busts, torsos, thoughtful muses and fragrant heroes of his enthusiasms.

By now his name is unknown to all but the most erudite visitors, but every tourist is directed to his monument. The great scholar is depicted in a toga, leading towards two ancient sculpted heads the adoring female figures of Architecture, Criticism, History, Philosophy and Sculpture, who are prettily holding hands. Such is Trieste’s remorseful tribute to—who was it again? Winkler? Vogelmann? That guy who got murdered? Winckelmann, that’s it, Winckelmann, whoever he was.

EXILED royalty have sometimes found more comfortable refuge in this outpost of an imperial monarchy. It was a convenient substitute for a capital of their own. They would not be patronized, they could be reasonably anonymous if they wished it, there were agreeable villas to buy or rent and Trieste’s efficient communications could keep them in touch with affairs and well-wishers at home in Ruritania. Whether of ancient or of upstart blood, they could be fairly sure of respectful treatment, especially if they were rich (which, in the way of dispossessed royalty, they nearly always were).

When two elderly daughters of Louis XV of France, Marie-Adélaïde and Victoire-Louise, arrived in 1797, escaping the revolution, they were accompanied by a large entourage, they were put ashore with a salute of twenty-one guns, they were honoured as Les Mesdames de France, and when they died they were buried ceremonially in the cathedral. Carlists from Spain were equally honoured. In a dim side-chapel of the cathedral a covey of them lies. When they failed to retain the throne of Spain against their Bourbon rivals they had gravitated naturally enough to Urbs Fidelissima, where they could be sure of official hospitality and protection against assassins. How grandly they must have moved through town, when State or Society called them, and how loftily patrician they must have seemed, descended from a hundred crowns, in this city of merchants! The most rigid Spanish etiquette protected them from the vulgar, and they received visitors in audience in a throne room in the Via Lazaretto Vecchio.

In 1922 Ivan Bunin, then living in a dingy villa above Grasse, went down the hill to Antibes to see the lying-in-state of the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, brother to the late Czar. He found that Russia itself was reconstituted around the catafalque: incense burnt, choirs chanted, officers of the lost imperial armies were magnificently uniformed, and for an hour or two Bunin felt that he was not in exile at all. In their deaths the Carlists of Trieste fostered the same illusion. They were given solemn stately funerals at San Giusto, with muffled drums and furled flags of Spain: the tomb of the first of them, in their shadowy chapel up there, describes him grandiloquently still as “Carolus V Hispaniorum Rex,” and since 1901 the last of them, the pretender Carlos VII, has mouldered in his grave dressed in the full regalia of a Spanish captain-general.

SEVERAL Napoleonic notables spent exiled time in Trieste. Napoleon himself came in 1797, during one of his occupations of the city, but he stayed only a single night. His various myrmidons stayed longer. No doubt they had heard good things of the place from Comte Henri Bertrand, the most faithful Bonapartiste of them all, because he had been briefly Governor of Trieste in his hero’s phantasmagorical Province of Illyria, before following him to a less agreeable place of exile. Napoleon’s sister Elisa lived here during her brother’s last years, and his sister Caroline came here, bringing a niece of his Empress Josephine as governess for her children, and one of the best-known of all the city’s refugees was Prince Jérôme, Napoleon’s youngest and raciest brother. He was the so-called King of Westphalia, and turned up here in 1814, with a suite of fifty-four courtiers, when Napoleon abdicated in Paris. He was very much a man of the world, and had lived for a time in New York, where he found himself a wife. Napoleon had made him first a general, then a king, annulled his American marriage and wedded him off to a daughter of the King of Württemberg. In Trieste, his own trumped-up monarchy having collapsed, he called himself at first the Comte de Hartz; but when Napoleon escaped from Elba and he himself he went off to share the defeat at Waterloo, he returned to the city as the Prince de Montfort.