NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  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.

  11

  The Ferry Liburnija to Zadar

  My 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.

  “No tokens,” the young woman said. Her name was Marta. She spoke English.

  “I am a stranger here. I want to visit Pivka. Tell me, what is the best thing to see?”

  “There is nothing,” she said.

  She was wearily wiping wet glasses with a dirty rag. She sucked her teeth. She pushed a loose hank of hair behind her ear.

  “And the winter,” she said.

  “What is it like?”

  “Bad.”

  “What about the summer?”

  “Too hot.”

  “But there’s no fighting here.”

  “No, that’s—” She waved the rag to the east, slopping water on the bar’s mirror. “There.”

  The men in the bar, drinking beer, smoking heavily, did not acknowledge me. Through the unwashed window I watched a dirty yellow engine shunting on Pivka rails. I thought, as I frequently do in such places, What if I had been born here?

  Leaving my bag with the stationmaster, I walked into Pivka proper, which was a narrow road lined with empty shops. The town was sooty, just peeling paint and impoverishment, but it was not littered, simply fatigued-looking, like the people, like Marta at the bar. N
ow and then a car, always a small one, going too fast, sideswiped me as I walked down the narrow pavement of Koldvoska Cesta. A rusty Wartburg, a Zastova, some gasping Yugos. It was like being attacked by weed whackers. I could hear their whirring engines and frayed fan belts, the sputter of their leaking radiators. But even these little cars proclaimed their nationalism. One had a sticker Slovenia, the rest were labeled SLO.

  Walking along, I heard a child crying inside a house, and a woman scolding; then a slap, and the child crying louder, and more scolding. Scold, slap, screech; scold, slap, screech.

  I looked for a place to eat, I asked people—made eating gestures—“Station,” they said. That horrible little bar? So I went back to the station and saw that there was a train in an hour or so for Rijeka. I talked to Marta again. She urged me to go to Rijeka, even though it was in the foreign country of Croatia. I sat in the sunshine, reading, catching up on my notes, and listening to the dusty sparrows of Pivka until the train came.

  This two-car Polish-made train of Slovenian Railways was about twenty years old, filled with rambunctious schoolchildren on their way home. They shrieked at each other for a while, then shut up. There was a sort of hysteria here, probably something to do with political uncertainty and recrimination. Soon they all got off. There were now about eight of us remaining in the train: seven old people and me. And it was interesting that the countryside looked as seedy as the town, as bedraggled, not like nature at all, but like a stage-set designed to symbolize the plight of the country: thin rather starved trees, ragged discolored grass, wilting wildflowers. There was a six-thousand-foot mountain to the east, Veliki Sneznik, but even that looked collapsible.

  “Bistrica,” the conductor said, clipping my ticket and motioning me out the door.

  At Ilirska Bistrica a youth in a baggy police uniform flipped the pages of my passport and handed it back. That was one of the irritations of nationalism—every few miles, a passport check, just a ritual, at the frontier of another tinky-winky republic.

  The train jogged on to a small station building with wisteria clinging to the walls. We sat there awhile, the old folks muttering while I tried to engage one of them in conversation. There were no talkers.

  “Just tell me where we are.”

  “We are leaving the Republic of Slovenia,” an old man said. “We are entering the Republic of Croatia.”

  There was no sarcasm in his voice, yet the bald statement was sarcasm enough. We had gone—what?—about twenty miles from Pivka.

  “You will require a visa,” a policeman said.

  This was Sapjane, the frontier of the Republika Hvratska (Croatia). It was a place much like Pivka or Bistrica. When a country was very small even these tiny, almost uninhabited places were inflated with a meaningless importance. A breeze was ruffling the weedy tracks, and soughing in the pines; a cow mooed, its bell clinked. More sparrows. Customs! Immigration! You will require a visa! The officious but polite policeman laboriously filled in a form (“Father’s name? Place of birth? Purpose of visit?”) and stuck a pompous-looking Croatian visa into my passport, a scrupulous operation, taking fifteen minutes. I was the only foreigner. God help them when they had four or five foreigners on the train.

  We were all ethnically approved: one American, seven Croatians. Before the breakup of Yugoslavia the train would have raced through this station at eighty miles an hour. But I did not complain about the delay. This was all an experimental travel. If I had flown to Croatia from Italy I would not have been privileged to witness this sad farce.

  Having done his duty, the policeman became pleasant. His name was Mario, he was from Rijeka—he commuted to this outpost—and he was a mere twenty-three. I remarked on the farcical bureaucracy—after an hour we were still at the station, waiting.

  “Yes, there are delays, because we are all separate now,” he said. “Slovenia. Croatia. Serbia. In Bosnia you have Musselmans.”

  “They’re different, are they?”

  “Very much. You see, Slovenian people are much more like Germans or Austrians.”

  That became quite a common refrain: We are big bold Teutons, they are dark little savages. But in fact they all looked fairly similar and Slavic to my eye, untutored by Jugland’s prejudices. I soon learned that a former Jug could spot an ethnic taint a mile away. Here comes a Bosnian! There goes a Slovene!

  I said this in a polite form to Mario.

  “That is because we married each other before,” he said. “But we don’t marry each other now.”

  “What a shame.”

  “Well, you see, it was Marshal Tito’s idea to have one big country. But maybe it was too big.” He was digging a big polished boot in the railway gravel. “Better to have our own countries, for political freedom. Maybe like America. One government in Washington and every state is separate.”

  “Mario, we don’t need a passport and a visa to go from New York to New Jersey.”

  He laughed. He was intelligent, his English was good enough for him to understand how I had shown him the absurdity of what he had proposed. And after all, the war was still on.

  “Will I have a problem going to Montenegro?”

  “I think, yes,” he said. “And Serbia is a problem. Where do you come from?”

  “Boston.”

  “Kukoc plays for the Bulls,” he said. “Divac plays for the Lakers. But I am for the Bulls.”

  “They’re not doing very well.”

  “They won last night,” Mario said.

  Here, in the farthest corner of Croatia, on the wrong side of the tracks at Sapjane, among mooing cows, the latest NBA scores.

  “Michael Jordan,” Mario said. “He is the greatest player in the world.”

  The Slovenian train had returned to Pivka, and at last a Croatian train arrived in Sapjane from Rijeka, to take us on the return trip. I got into a conversation, speaking Italian with a Croatian. I remarked on the complexity of the republics that had sprung up.

  “It’s all shit,” he said.

  Rijeka had a reputation for being ugly, but it did not seem so bad, another Adriatic port city, rather steep and scattered, with an air of having been forgotten. Many people still spoke the Italian they had learned when the city was part of Mussolini’s empire, and named Fiume (meaning “river,” as the word Rijeka also did). “Fiume is a clean asphalted town with a very modern go-ahead air,” James Joyce wrote in a letter in 1906. “It is for its size far finer than Trieste.” Within minutes of arriving I changed a little money and left the money-changer’s a millionaire, in dinars.

  Earlier on this trip I had read Nabokov’s vivid memoir Speak, Memory. He had remarked on his childhood visits from St. Petersburg to a resort, Abbazia, much frequented by Russians at the turn of the century. I had inquired about the place while I was in Italy (Abbazia means monastery), but there was no such place on the coast. But I saw the name in parentheses on a Croatian map, and I realized that just a few miles away, down the coast, the penultimate station on the line to Rijeka, was Abbazia, in its Croatian form, Opatija.

  “There are dimples in the rocks, full of tepid sea water,” Nabokov wrote of the place, “and my magic muttering accompanies certain spells I am weaving over the tiny sapphire pools.”

  It was 1904, Nabokov was five, he was with his doting father and mother. His family rented a villa with a “crenelated, cream-colored tower.” He remembered traveling to Fiume for a haircut. He described hearing the Adriatic from his bedroom: “The ocean seemed to rise and grope in the darkness and then heavily fall on its face.”

  This was my excuse to stay in Rijeka that night, eat another pizza, sleep in another bargain-priced hotel, and to go to Opatija in the morning. The seaside resort was deserted. It retained its elegance, though, and looked like a haunted version of Menton. An old man swept the broad promenade with a push-broom. The boardinghouses looked abandoned. The restaurants were closed. The day was warm and sunny, the sea lapping at empty beach.

  “People come on the weekends,” a Croatian wo
man at the newsstand told me in Italian.

  Returning to Rijeka, I made inquiries about the train to Zadar, which had recently been under heavy Serbian shelling.

  “Ha! No trains these days!” the woman at the hotel said. But she took charge of me.

  “You want to know the best thing to do? Leave this hotel right now. Go straight to the port. You can’t miss it. In two hours the ferry leaves.”

  It was the coastal ferry to Zadar and Split.

  “You think I’ll get a ticket?”

  “Ha! No problem!” she said. “No one comes here anymore!”

  I snatched up my bag and hurried to the port and within fifteen minutes was in possession of a five-dollar ticket to Zadar on the ferry Liburnija, with a hundred or so Croatians, and soon we were sliding past the islands of Krk, Cres, Rab, Lošinj and Pag in the late-afternoon sunshine, and I was happy again, on the move.

  There were half a dozen German tourists on board, who were taking advantage of the bargains created by the war—desperate hotel-keepers and empty restaurants, unlimited beach umbrellas, cheap beer. The rest were Croatians. I had the only ticket to Zadar; everyone else was going to Split.

  The effects of the war were evident on the Liburnija, too: the chain-smoking adults, looking shell-shocked, the children, in their mid-teens, a great deal more manic and aggressive than any I had seen so far—and I had seen a large number, since they often took trains home from school. These Croatian children acted crazed—they swung on poles, vaulted barriers, punched each other, screeched and wept—this was at eleven at night off the Dalmatian coast—and well into the night kept trying to push one another over the rail into the Kvaneric channel.