Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

by Jan Morris

  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 o
f 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.

  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:

  I heard their young hearts crying

  Loveward above the glancing oar

  And heard the prairie grasses sighing

  No more, return no more.

  O hearts, O sighing grasses,

  Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!

  No more will the wild wind that passes

  Return, no more return.

  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.