by Jan Morris
In its dying years the Austro-Hungarian Empire found itself immortalized in a flowering of prose and poetry—often, rather like itself, essentially atmospheric or allusive, charged with wry and nebulous regret. It found its last laureates all over its territories, and three of the most celebrated wrote in this Urbs Fidelissima beside the sea. Italo Svevo the Triestino ironically commemorated lives and love in an essentially commercial city; James Joyce the Irishman extrapolated his view of Trieste into a view of the world; Rainer Maria Rilke from Prague was inspired, on a day of the bora in 191 2, to write the best-loved of modern elegies. All prosper greatly in Trieste now. Hundreds of people come to attend the university’s annual Joyce School, or study at its Laboratorio Joyce. Hundreds more follow the Joyce Trail, the Svevo Trail or the Rilke Path, armed with maps and pamphlets provided by the tourist authority, and pursuing in fact as in fiction the memories of the three writers—from site to site, apartment to villa, Golden Key brothel to Stella Polaris cafe, bench outside the railway station to guest quarters above the sea (for Rilke stayed in the princely castle of Duino, along the coast).
TRIESTE is re-inventing itself as a centre of science. It is up on the Karst, says one of the splendidly glossy promotional brochures that are the literature of the new Trieste, aon these hills from which the most ancient inhabitants of these lands used to look out to sea, that the Trieste of the third millennium is being constructed.” It is true that up there startling things have been happening. There is AREA, a great science park where scores of enterprising companies do research into the human papilloma virus or lignocellulose degradation processes! There is ELETTRA the Light Machine, which produces extra-penetrative X-rays! There is the Experimental Geophysics Laboratory, which monitors endogenous phenomena deep in the Grotta Gigante! But all over the city, too, a bewildering variety of scientific institutions has developed—a centre for theoretical physics, a neuroscience centre, a Centre for Advanced Research in Space Optics, a school for advanced physics studies.
Many of these organizations have international links. The World Organization for Women’s Science, for instance, is based in Trieste, with a president from Swaziland and vice-presidents from Nigeria, Cuba, Egypt and India. The Third World Academy of Science is here too, and so is the directorate of the International Centre for Genetic Engineering, with scores of subscribing countries and, I am sorry to say, its own Animal House. The conference centre on the Molo Bersaglieri is frequented by learned societies from all over the world. Optimists believe all this heralds a new place for Trieste on the map—a new dimension for the city. Mayor Illy himself wrote a booklet describing Trieste as “A Gateway to the New Europe,” and suggesting that the new Trieste can be “an effective point of reference for the entire European Union.” As the countries of eastern Europe are integrated with the European countries, so the theory goes, Trieste will once more be a Mediterranean outlet for a vast continental entity, standing at the very junction of east and west. Transportation, finance, science, tourism—diversification, Illy said, should be “united by the common element of the city’s international character” to create a harmonious and unified Trieste System.
IT WAS a dream, he said, but it seems to be a galvanizing dream. Trieste’s first summer of the new century—my last summer in Trieste—was a season transformed. For the first time in my experience Trieste felt a young city, perhaps a hyper-active city. More bronzed young sunbathers than ever packed the promenade of Barcola, flat out, buttock to bosom, along the stony shore, and scullers in the bay cockily swapped badinage with the elderly anglers on the Molo Audace.
Every morning something new and startling greeted me, when I walked through the streets after breakfast. If it was not a World Power-Boat Championship it was an International Exhibition of Pens, if it was not the Via Dante being repaved it was the Museum Revoltella being re-modelled. Almost every day I found a new series of marquees being erected along the waterfront, or another temporary stage. Music sounded across the city far into the night. There were book fairs, and antique fairs, and a Sissy exhibition, and an exhibition of old gramophone records, and a veteran car parade, and a dance festival, and a medieval festival, and discos, and flea markets, and the Beach City World Volley-Bail Tournament, and rock groups playing wherever you looked. And as that first bright summer faded, and autumn crept in with its promise of boras and gloomy streets again, there was celebrated the Barcolana, one of the chief yachting festivals of Europe, and Trieste’s one great living spectacle. The city prepared for it as a last fling of the season, and in a thoroughly nautical way. Every store displayed a maritime motif. Every hotel was full of yachtsmen. Another long parade of white marquees went up, offering every kind of seagoing accessory or gimmick, and outside the opera house the Association of Bakers set up a demonstration galley, where the bakers worked in full sight of everyone, and gave away free buns. Eighteen hundred yachts had assembled for the contest.
That October the ruffian wind of Trieste blew in early. The trees were whipped by it, the sea was heavy, rain poured down and mists magnificently swirled. As the regatta assembled for the start, beyond Miramare, the central harbour came thrill-ingly to life with speedboats, inflatables and rescue craft. A big white Coastguard cutter stood ready at the Molo Bersaglieri. A helicopter came and went from the Molo Audace. Loudspeakers boomed across the waterfront. All day long crowds surged this way and that, and the myriad flags and pendants of the festival fluttered in angry parallel through the tempest. It was a scene of mighty animation. More boats battled against the wild sea that day than I had seen in my life before—perhaps more boats than anyone had seen, yachts of all sizes, yachts of all classes, their sails spread far over the water in the wind, the spray and the gathering darkness.
It was a grand foretaste, I thought, of vitalities to come—or an echo of vigours past. Yet even as I watched, the Trieste effect intervened, like a migraine that clouds the vision, and in my dreaming eye I saw the whole bay empty and brooding again, and the castle all alone out there, and the float never bobbing on that fisherman’s line.
SIXTEEN
The Capital of Nowhere
For of course portents of twenty-first-century Trieste are irrelevant to the theme of this book. They are anachronistic to it—and to me. Seeing them is like seeing my own rejuvenation, resurrection even, and I record them only as a duty, because I love the old place and wish it well. Anyway I long ago conceived my own idea of this city’s real purpose. I believe it stands above economics, or tourism, or science, or even the passage of ships—or if not above them, at least apart from them. It seems to me that if Trieste were ever impelled to advertise itself on road signs, like towns in France (“Son Cathedral, Ses Grottes, Ses Langoustines”), all it need say about itself is “Sua Triestinita!’ To my mind this is an existentialist sort of place, and its purpose is to be itself.
There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones! They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste.
THE ELUSIVE flavour that I enjoy here is really only the flavour of true civility, evolved through long trial and error. I have tried to get the hang of many cities, during a lifetime writing about them, and I have reached the conclu
sion that a peculiar history and a precarious geographical situation have made Trieste as near to a decent city as you can find, at the start of the twenty-first century. Honesty is still the norm here, manners are generally courteous, bigotries are usually held in check, people are generally good to each other, at least on the surface. Joyce said he had never met such kindness as he did in Trieste. Mahler just thought its people “terribly nice.”
So do I. I am only an outsider here, and my responses may be naive, but I am constantly struck by the public empathy of this city, expressed in small everyday matters—a comradely wiggle of the fingers from one driver to the other, when the funicular engine is hitched on to the Opicina tram, or the smiles women offer to perfect strangers when they join the queue for postage stamps. Time and again in Trieste I have made some casual contact, told somebody the time, asked the way somewhere, to find the encounter develop into a conversation full of delight. A man once noticed I had an antique Baedeker in my hand (The Mediterranean, 1911), and stopping dead in his tracks, there in the street, he engaged me in warm dialogue about the particular pleasures of old guidebooks. I much admired the reception Triestini gave to a couple of Romany musicians from Slovakia, who turned up one day to play sultry music in Via San Lazzaro: as the citizens walked up to place their lire in the open violin cases they laughed, sang, jiggled their heads to the music or warmly thanked the players, and some looked as though they would like to break into gypsy dance themselves, if they were not a little afraid of making fools of themselves.
And the fondness of Trieste people for their city’s innumerable half-feral cats always touches me. Old ladies emerge from their houses with scrunched-up bags of pasta, looking for favourite strays to feed. Outside the Trattoria Risorto in Mug-gia, while the Mayor took his victuals inside, I once counted eleven happy cats arriving with every sign of familiarity for their daily rations. On the Karst I discovered a little nest of cats, dappled and half-hidden by foliage, surrounded by the mess of spaghetti and fish-heads brought there every day by solicitous neighbours. In Trieste animals are rarely scared of humans, to my mind a sure sign of civic integrity, come wealth or poverty, fame or ignominy, empire or dictatorship or Autonomous Region.
COULD all this be the true meaning of nowhere—this half-real, half-wishful Utopia? Certainly I believe it is what Saunders Lewis had in mind, when he called the best sort of patriotism “a generous spirit of love.” Only the other day I tripped on a pavement in the Piazza Unita and fell to the ground, spilling straw hat, books, tape recorder and camera all about me. I was not at all hurt, but to amuse my companion I lay there flat out amid the debris, eyes closed, arms spread. I had not allowed for the patriotic citizens of nowhere, who came rushing to my help in their dozens, preparing handkerchiefs to staunch the blood or bandage broken bones, and murmuring soft sighs of anxiety.
EPILOGUE
Across My Grave
As we used to say at the cinema, in the days of continuous programming, this is where we came in. The clock-hand moves. The angel has passed, and the talk resumes in slight embarrassment. “Well now, yes, mm, what were we saying? Care for another glass . . . ?”
Another explanation for the kind of sudden silence which began this book is that somebody is walking over one’s grave. In my case it must be an angler casting a worm for sea-trout on an islet I own in the river Dwyfor, an all-but-island upon which my ashes will one day be scattered. The angler notion is as valid as the angel theory, when applied to the Trieste effect. I looked at this city in youth under the angelic influence; I am contemplating it now in old age like a poacher in the dusk. When I likened it to an allegory of limbo, back in my prologue, I might have added that it was the limbo of life itself.
Birth and death are the ultimate bookends, and between them a muddied narrative unfolds. In the course of it there crop up moments, experiences or places which in retrospect, rather like faces in an identification parade, we recognize as markers: the experience of first love, perhaps, a song or a book, the dread moment when we first needed spectacles, the impact of some particular corner of the world. Trieste fulfils such a function for me. When the angel flutters by I see myself sitting on that quayside bollard with my notebook in my hand, worrying out some meaning to my nineteen years of life: when the angler creeps his way through the shrubbery to Llyn Gwallt y Widdan, the Pool of the Witch’s Slope, there I am again, a septuagenarian, looking for truths still on the very same waterfront. Jorge Luis Borges got it right, when he told of an artist setting out to portray the world, but discovering that his “patient labyrinth of lines framed the image of his own face": so it is with me, after a lifetime of describing the planet, and I look at Trieste now as I would look into a mirror.
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself.
Much of this little book, then, has been self-description. I write of exiles in Trieste, but I have generally felt myself an exile too. For years I felt myself an exile from normality, and now I feel myself one of those exiles from time. The past is a foreign country, but so is old age, and as you enter it you feel you are treading unknown territory, leaving your own land behind. You’ve never been here before. The clothes people wear, the idioms they use, their pronunciation, their assumptions, tastes, humours, loyalties all become the more alien the older you get. The countryside changes. The policemen are children. Even hypochondria, the Trieste disease, is not what it was, for that interesting pain in the ear-lobe may not now be imaginary at all, but some obscure senile reality. This kind of exile can mean a new freedom, too, because most things don’t matter as they used to. They way I look doesn’t matter. The opinions I cherish are my business. The books I have written are no more than smudged graffiti on a wall, and I shall write no more of them. Money? Enough to live on. Critics? To hell with ‘em. Kindness is what matters, all along, at any age—kindness, the ruling principle of nowhere!
My Trieste has been a place of transience, but dear God we are all transients, and sooner or later we all become out-of-date—or as another generation’s jargon has it, pass our sell-by date. I know very well that my computer, my fax machine, my mobile telephone, my video, my CD player, my hi-fi and my 16-valve four-wheel-steer air-conditioned car will seem as quaint to my great-grandchildren as the brass-and-mahogany relics of Victorian technology do to me now. And if for so long Trieste has staggered through history from one disillusionment to another, sometimes there have been moments when I have perfectly understood the self-portrait called Man Screaming which Egon Schiele painted after his return from Trieste to Vienna, and it has dawned upon me what a nightmare hiatus we all pass through, on the way from birth to death. Surely the only logical response would be to stand on a bridge and scream? But no, self-deception sees us through.
For all its traditional sobriety Trieste is a hallucinatory city, where fantasy easily brushes fact, and a lot of what I have written about it has come from my own mind. I could have gone much further. Haven’t you heard Haydn’s Trieste Symphony, or read that famous passage of Conrad’s about the Trieste longshoremen? Didn’t Mann write part of Buddenbrooks, the ultimate novel of the bourgeoisie, during his stay at the Hotel de la Ville? Wasn’t Bunin’s most famous tale originally called The Gentleman from Trieste? Didn’t Eichmann escape through Trieste, on his way to Argentina? Don’t they say Lord Lucan has been spotted here, working in the aquarium? In Trieste anything might be true. I wrote a novel once about an entirely imaginary Levantine city, and found when I finished it that between every line Trieste was lurking. I wrote a book about the entire European continent in the years after the second world war, and lo, there at the centre of it all was Trieste.
Life ends with that Triestine leit-motif “No more, O never more,” but it need not end unhappily. In death there is no exile, no hiraeth, and my own hazily agnostic conception of an afterlife is rather Triestine too: a blend of the genial and the melancholy, the bourgeois and the conspiratorial, the plush and the seedy, t
he backstreet and the cross-roads, the wild and the respectable, in a place where regrets, hopes and high memories merge. Citizens of nowhere, unite! Join me in Trieste, your capital, and together we will watch the sun go down on the Molo Audace, along with Casanova, Isabel Burton, Joyce and Svevo, melancholy Saba, a couple of cats, the Eagle of Trieste, the King of Westphalia, old Signora Revoltella in her wheelchair, Mahler and Freud and Lord Lucan and all the others who have loitered here before us—calculating profits, polishing phrases, memorizing Smareglia, eating spaghetti scraps, plotting revolution, denying truths, imagining loves or just watching the ships or the girls go by.