NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (35 page)

At the western edge of Venice, towards the quays where the largest ships are moored, and next to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, is a large medieval and mournful-looking prison. Being in prison in Venice seemed to me like the classical definition of Hell—that you are near Heaven but denied it absolutely.

That was also how I felt when I had to leave Venice, on a crowded train to Trieste.

All the way to Trieste I caught little glimpses of the sea, and after the train climbed to Aurisina in the hills that funneled the famous Bora wind into the city, I had a panoramic view of the enormous notch in the Adriatic, called the Gulf of Venice on the map. It was the last gasp of Italy—you could almost spit into Slovenia from a window on the left side of this train.

The late-afternoon sun, misshapen by the risen dust, lost its lightness and its gold, and thickening, growing orange as it descended, began to break slowly, the white sea dissolving the sun’s rich pulp.

With a little shudder the train, with far fewer passengers, stopped at Trieste’s South Station. I walked out and sensed that I was no longer in Italy. It hardly looked like the Mediterranean anymore.

Trieste was once the noble port of Austria, and it still looked to me like Vienna-by-the-Sea. The city still had those gray Hapsburg buildings, every one of them looking like the headquarters of an insurance company (and that included the Church of St. Anthony the Thaumaturgist), sloping up from the port, in austere and forbidding terraces. The structures of Trieste have big flat faces. It is a city of apartments and suites, not private houses, nor any small stucco dwellings on backstreets. No chickens, hardly any cats; all the dogs on leashes, like its sister cities in northern Europe, composed of seriousness and gloom and the fragrance of sticky pastries. It is the city closely documented in the novels of Italo Svevo,
Confessions of Zeno
, the ultimate account of a man trying to give up smoking, and
Senility
, the story of an infatuation. Svevo’s friend James Joyce urged Svevo to call the latter book
As a Man Grows Older.

Joyce lived in Trieste off and on for about seven years, and wrote most of
Ulysses
there, gave English lessons, fell in love with one of his students. Sir Richard Burton, one of the world’s greatest travelers, was British Consul here in Trieste towards the end of his career, and while his wife Isabel worried about the welfare of Trieste’s stray cats and overworked donkeys, Burton had worked on his books. They also spent time up the line at Villa Opicina. The Burtons liked Trieste so well they eventually colonized seventeen rooms in one of these large apartment blocks. Sir Richard filled it with his spears and his dueling swords and collections of pornography and incunabula; he wrote a dozen books, including his translation of
The Arabian Nights;
and here in Trieste he died.

It was just a few hours by train from the incandescent lightness of Venice to the lugubrious gray of Trieste, but of course being in the Mediterranean was all about surprising transitions. Indeed, ever since arriving on the Adriatic shore I had been anxious about my next move, the onward journey to Croatia. I had seen the ferries leaving for Split from Bari and Ancona. “No service to Dubrovnik,” I was told. None to Montenegro. I guessed the reasons why. The thought of going there preoccupied me; I knew a bit about it, just enough of the atrocities of its war and its recent
devastation so that images of it invaded my dreams. Trieste was safe, but Trieste was a more serious place than any I had seen, and it seemed to be preparing me for something grimmer.

Just at dusk the city was almost empty of pedestrians. I walked the length of the port and then back on the inside streets, and found a place to stay.

“So what brings you to Trieste?” the clerk asked.

“I was curious about it,” I said, and thinking of the writer who had made the city real to me, I added, “And I have read Svevo. In English, though.”

“It is better to read Svevo in English. He’s too confusing in Italian.”

Italians were full of compliments, even here at the edge of Slovenia. The Spanish were too restrained to praise, the French too envious and uncertain, the Corsicans too proud. For the more generous and extrovert Italians, praise was normal, words cost nothing, so the flow of daily life was eased. I had lost an important ticket in Venice. At first the ticket collector mildly scolded me by clucking, but when I said, “I am a cretin—I am really stupid,” he said, “No, no—it is usual to lose a ticket, don’t be hard on yourself.”

More urgently than I intended I said to the hotel clerk, “I want to go to Croatia. Do you know anything about traveling there?”

“Nothing,” he said. “But sometimes we get the refugees.”

I saw some the next day—panhandlers holding politely worded signs, and disoriented families with bags and boxes idling at the port. After the Venetian
capriccio
, this sobriety. The Triestini themselves were taller than Italians I had been seeing, and paler, and rather laconic. It was a city of suits, a businesslike place with an air of solidity and prosperity.

James Joyce had been that most enigmatic of refugees, a literary exile in Trieste, sitting out the First World War in a Triestine apartment and writing his masterpiece about Dublin. But he had come there earlier. From 1904 to 1906, fleeing Ireland, practicing “silence, exile, cunning,” he was an English teacher in Trieste’s Berlitz School, while writing short stories. After a brief absence he returned to Trieste in 1907 and gave private English lessons. One of his students, Hector Schmitz, was middle-aged (Joyce was a highly excitable twenty-five-year-old) and a businessman, yet when Joyce showed him an early draft of his short story “The Dead,” his student
brought out two novels he had written under his pen name. He told Joyce that they were old hat—he had published
Una Vita
, twelve years before, and
Senilitá
in 1898. The young Irishman declared him a neglected genius.
Senilitá
especially pleased him.

It is easy to see why. The novel is about desire as self-deceiving, and it is firmly located in a city. The style is remorselessly plain, and every phase of the main character’s infatuation is described. Emilio is a writer made susceptible by literary vanity, and obsessed by Angiolina, who both teases him and grants him the occasional sexual favor. Angiolina is a tricky and lovely young woman, who obviously has other lovers. The humiliations of passion in a labyrinthine city fascinated Joyce—both Schmitz and his hero were to become aspects of Joyce’s henpecked hero, Leopold Bloom; and Schmitz’s meticulous documentation of Trieste must have impressed the Irish writer, who was to fill
Ulysses
with the actual streets and pubs and theaters of Dublin.

Looking for Svevo’s Trieste I realized how much a knowledge of the city mattered to an understanding of the novel. The city is Emilio’s world. The love affair is enacted throughout the city. They meet in the center of town, on the Corso. Later, “They always met in the open air.” Emilio woos Angiolina on the suburban roads, all of them named, and then they keep to the edge of the city, the Strada d’Opicina and the Campo Marzio.

I went to the Campo Marzio in the southwest corner of Trieste, where Emilio “saw the Arsenal stretching along the shore … ‘The city of labor!’ he said, surprised at himself for having chosen that place in which to make love to her.” Some pages later Emilio is shadowing Angiolina on the opposite side of town. I went there too, to the Public Gardens and across to the Via Fabio Severo and down the Via Romagna. I climbed to the Castle and walked down the hill to the Piazza Barriera Vecchia and had a coffee and pastry on the Corso again, delighted to be able to guide myself through the city by using a novel that was almost a hundred years old.

There were no tourists in Trieste that I could see. That was a conspicuous absence, because Venice was so frenzied with them. But why would tourists come here? True, there was a Roman amphitheater in town, yet another, behind the Corso, and a broken Roman arch—the gate of the old city—but that was so ruinous and disregarded it simply stuck out of a seedy building in a backstreet, at the edge of a building site, and was somewhat
in the way. Later I found out that it was the Arco di Riccardo, named after Richard the Lionhearted, who was imprisoned here on his return from the Crusades. There was no sign on the arch, only a recently scribbled exclamation:
Fuck the Fascists Forever!

At about just the point I had decided that Trieste was the quietest, most law-abiding place I had seen so far, I witnessed a vicious nighttime street fight.

It was my second night in the city. I was walking through the lamplit Piazza Italia, having just eaten another good meal (and also thinking of the rationing in Croatia). I heard screams—a young woman howling; then men shouting, and loud bangs. It was outside a restaurant, the strange halting peristalsis of men nerving themselves to fight, like apes displaying anger. There were about eight or nine men, ill-assorted, first thumping on tables, then engaging in noisy sorties, drawing back and becoming more abusive with distance, then throwing the tables, a few chairs too. These were the economies of battle, just clatter and threats, a form of restraint; and all the while the young woman screeching. But at last there was no going back, and the men went at each other, kicking and punching, the wildest scene I had witnessed since leaving Gibraltar. It was the last thing I expected in Trieste.

That was an exception. It was a solemn and even dull place, but with the most attractive women I had seen so far, taller, more angular, brisker and better dressed than elsewhere, not the duck-butted women of the Marches. Trieste’s food was not highly flavored, but it was hearty, mussels and spaghetti, fruit and fish, and the fine wines of its region, Friuli. I began to understand why Joyce had decided to live here and engage in the stimulating monotony of writing a novel.

Leaving Trieste meant leaving Italy, where knowing the language with reasonable fluency I had been happy—well-treated and well-fed. Now I was boarding the train into the unknown—the new nation of Slovenia and its neighbor, the crumbling republic of Croatia.

            
M
y destination today was Pivka, “somewhere in Slovenia” (so I was told), reachable on the Budapest Express by my getting off very quickly at a thirty-second halt after about two hours’ traveling from Trieste. It was a sunny morning; I was dozing in the midday heat. The border formalities brought me fully awake.

Until now I had hardly shown my passport anywhere, but leaving the European Community for the hastily improvised republics of former Yugoslavia meant that I was now under scrutiny. High in the Carso plateau that formed the Italian frontier, Italian officials stamped my passport and looked through my bag. A few miles farther down the line, at Sežana on the Slovenian border, there was another search, but a stranger one. The Slovene customs man ordered me outside, into the corridor, and then kicking my bag aside, he set his sights on removing the seats from the compartment. He fossicked in the crevices where I might have hidden lawyers, guns or money. He found nothing but dust. He jammed the seats back into the racks and said good-bye in English. In the matter of visas and border crossings, the smaller the country the bigger the fuss; like a tiny cop directing traffic.

It was such an empty train. Obviously no one wanted to leave Italian abundance for the relative deprivation of Ljubljana or Budapest, or any of
the desperate little stations in between. For example, I was the only passenger to alight at Pivka, a railway junction.

After all that traveling and trouble I was nowhere. Yet I had to admit that it was a satisfaction being on this tiny platform, among unreadable signs, particularly after the celebrated places I had passed through. The pathetic name Pivka seemed curiously belittling and joyless, like a nickname for a dwarf. But because travel is often a sad and partly masochistic pleasure, the arrival in obscure and picturesquely awful places is one of the delights of the traveler.

It was like one of those remote junctions you see in depressing East European movies where people in old-fashioned clothes commit meaningless murders. It was now the middle of a hot afternoon.

I walked into the station bar, feeling like a conspicuous stranger, and ordered a cup of coffee. It was dark inside, and shabby, and the air was dense and stinging with the smoke of cheap cigarettes. I had no Slovenian currency, but Italian money was good enough—probably better. Citizens of these new little nations were forced by circumstances to be accommodating, and to speak English. I handed over a small Italian bill and received a wad of Slovenian money in return, with the newness and inkiness of inflated currency. I calculated that the large cup of coffee had cost me thirty-five cents, the cheapest I had drunk in fifteen years.

Pasty-faced men with greasy hair chain-smoked and muttered. I wanted to make a telephone call from the rusty phone on the wall, but no one could sell me the token I needed to make the thing work.