Trieste
Page 4
Haya’s father, Florian Tedeschi, comes from a wealthy and fully assimilated Jewish family, not like Haya’s mother, Ada, who comes from a poor and altogether unassimilated Jewish family. Among Florian’s ancestors there are experts on the Talmud, financiers, chemists, glass-cutters, sculptors, failed students, musicians, seafarers, collectors, anti-fascists and, fascists. Some of them are buried in cemeteries all over Italy, Catholic and Jewish cemeteries, while the bones of others were swept up into dancing clouds, dropping black pellets laden with grey dust, as fine as grimy confectioners’ sugar. Some are here in Goriza, though not in Gorizia, but on the other side in Gorica, in a valley that isn’t much of a valley, in a valley meant to be full of roses, and Haya Tedeschi doesn’t remember any roses in that valley, because she hadn’t buried any of her own there, because her mother said to her, it was in a dream but she did say to her, bury me in the Valley of Roses, in Valdirose, because Haya misplaced her mother Ada in death, just as she had lost her grandmother Marisa, whom she never met, what else could she do, she was young and there was a war on, besides, that’s a Jewish cemetery with many small upright stones, by now old and aslant, chilled under damp moss like the amputated limbs of a body long since dead. And her dead, Haya’s dead on her father’s side, have not been buried in such cemeteries, Jewish cemeteries, for a long time, a hundred years or so. Haya Tedeschi knows that in Gorica, in Nova Gorica, a man named Wilhelm Tedeschi who died in 1891 was laid to rest. Born in Mannheim in 1837, he was a sculptor who gave painting lessons in Piran, Trieste and later Gorizia, yes, Gorizia, and before that in Pula, where his bust of Admiral Bourguignon may still be standing. In that family of Haya’s, on Florian’s side there are musicians and iron-casters, too, thank goodness, who create compositions of some sort for listening and viewing which are presumably meant to express beauty, though Haya doesn’t understand of what kind. All trace, apparently, has been lost of those composers and the casters, too. So, while she waits in the old building at Via Aprica 47, while she shuffles through the cards of all those lives, lives that are sliding through her fingers as if she were playing solitaire, Haya shakes her head every so often and says, We are a family with no traces.
In 1922 Claudio Magris returns his protagonist Enrico Mreule, a professor of classical philology, from Patagonia to Gorizia. The K.u.K. Staatsgymnasium has been renamed the Liceo Vittorio Emanuele III. Professor Schubert-Soldern (whom Ada Baar also remembers) has left by then. He is in Austria with no nationality of any kind and is undecided about what to choose, after having lost two monarchies, now that Gorizia has become Italian and his native Prague is part of Czechoslovakia. Just possibly he is not discontent with life in the draughty vacuum created by the cyclones and anticyclones of history. Enrico arrives, others depart.
On 30 October, Fascism officially takes its seat on the throne.
At the Vittorio Emanuele III Gymnasium, Italian is taught by Nerina Slataper with whom Ada Baar begins going out for sweets to the pastry shop on Via Municipio every Wednesday evening after she shuts the stationery shop. That is when Nerina tells Ada of her brother Scipio, who died near here, at Podgora, on 3 December, 1915, it seems so long ago, but it’s as if it were yesterday, Nerina says, when an enemy Croat shot him with a fragmentation bullet from a distance of only a few metres, when the bullet plunged into his throat, blew him to pieces and killed him instantaneously; then she gives Ada Scipio’s slender volume Il mio Carso, published a few years earlier, which Ada reads immediately and the next Wednesday tells Nerina that war has many truths, or perhaps no truths at all. Nerina tells her how she and her friends Bianca Stuparich, Maria Schiller and Lucilla Luzzatto spent a full three years, and the war was raging, she says, my brothers were at the front, Guido on one hill, Scipio on another, she says, they called us the “floral foursome”, she says, recalling how in their Trieste house at Via Fabio Severo 45 (I’ll take you there one day to show you, she says), how they spent three years sewing a tricolour, and how later, when the war was over, when the victory of the 39th Battalion and the 11th Regiment was being celebrated on 1 November, 1918, they had gone into the street and waved their flag and how the flag had billowed and how they had given it to the Bersaglieri.
Enrico Mreule says—or is it Claudio Magris?, Haya is no longer sure, time is melting in her mind like chocolate—someone says that Monsignore Fogar, their religious teacher and now the Bishop of Trieste, is doing as much as he can to protect Slavs from Fascist oppression and violence, but that the Slavs retreat behind an impenetrable wall, and he says that a Ceccutti, the only other lay teacher among the cassocks, is furious at the squadristi, who also gave his cousin the castor-oil treatment, and says that they who are furnishing the squadristi with money without dirtying their own hands, the big estate owners or top civil servants, are far worse than the squadristi themselves.
Gorizia is in a new phase of its coming of age. Who can say how many phases there have been since its beginnings? It is baulking and petulant, caught up in rebellion against its parents, who leave it, return, then leave it again. Different lives are taking tiny ballet steps (petits pas) in Gorizia. Some trip and stumble, cave in. For instance, the life of Enrico Mreule who walks around barefoot, like a sort of Christ figure, in order to buy off his destiny, or with an open umbrella, to shield himself from both his destiny and Gorizia, from its caprice with light and dark. Other lives drip. They make notches and grooves, the edges of which they erode and undermine. They make scars which gape into wounds and then heal over again. Yet other lives lie down, arms and legs spread wide, and let themselves be washed by the rains from the nearby mountains, they go back into the Soča.
Florian Tedeschi tells Ada Baar his brief history. He arranges and sets out his brief history, making space for the future, which will become Haya’s past, which will be lost, which now, eighty-three years later, she searches for, arranges, orders, catalogues, this here, that there, something into the rubbish, something on to the desk by the window, to shine like a tiny light. Florian tells his story, and Haya is already wiggling in Ada’s belly. Florian speaks about how his father Paolo Tedeschi marries Emilia Finzi, daughter to Emma Teglio and Constantin Finzi, all of them from the most prestigious Italian Jewish families. Some are annihilated and others are not. Some convert, others do not. Later, books are written about them and films are made, and Haya watches the films after all the horrors have supposedly passed. She watches, and then again she says, There was a war on, what else could I do? The Teglio family have an entire fishing empire today stretching across several continents, which were conquered, thank goodness, without war, circumventing war, despite war, thanks (?) to war. Florian has had word from time to time of Elsa Finzi,* his aunt, though he has never met her. She is always winging around the world in the company of remarkable women, particularly an Englishwoman named Sylvia Pankhurst and a German woman named Rosa Luxemburg, who also travels from one country to the next, and Elsa doesn’t ask after him to see how things are going in the wasteland of Gorizia where he hasn’t even adequate pocket money, let alone the wherewithal to start a family. Furthermore, Elsa Finzi is always up in arms about one thing or another, fighting for some kind of so-called equality for everyone, and it bothers him that she is alive while her sister, his mother Emilia, is not.
Ada listens and says, That is a stupid sort of equality. Lets forget about Elsa Finzi. And this Aunt Elsa of his, Florian Tedeschi says, is a show-off, as if her family coat of arms were special, but it isn’t, it is a perfectly ordinary coat of arms, a coat of arms like any other, he says, un albero di pepe fra due leoni, and he can’t remember whether the family of his father, Paolo Tedeschi, have a coat of arms, which wouldn’t be bad if they did, and Ada asks, Why weren’t you circumcised? And what is Elsa after, anyway? says Florian. She has a baby, but she won’t marry, and besides, children irritate her, and Ada says, Our child will be called Haya. If it is a boy his name will be Orestes, and Florian says, Orestes is a dangerous name.
Haya remembers Elsa Finzi. She no
longer recalls her funeral, which as far as she is concerned never happened, because Elsa only allowed the select to come, to attend the funeral, so around the grave stood a little cluster of senile former revolutionaries in rumpled trench coats, bedraggled partisans, that is what the papers wrote, so Haya did not go, and even if Elsa had permitted her to be there Haya wouldn’t have gone; instead she would have sat as she is sitting now, locked in her locked-up world, waiting. Haya remembers Elsa’s flat at Via Santa Maria alla Porta 11 in Milan. She remembers (from Nora’s letters) that Elsa’s husband throughout all of 1944 plies Ada with Pierrot absinthe (once she had wearied of the revolution Elsa did marry, after all, but someone else), and how in that year, 1944, her family in Milanino drank liqueurs instead of water, so they were cheery but ate very little, mostly carrots and cabbage, their bellies often ached and the bombs fell.
In the inside pocket of his uniform, one might say close to his heart, Florian keeps a sepia photograph, by now already creased, covered in a web of white lines through which stares a tight-lipped, black-haired woman. Emilia Finzi (Tedeschi by marriage) awaits her death in style. Barely thirty, she dies on 13 November, 1910, at St Moritz, the “magic mountain”, at the Schatzalp sanatorium for wealthy patients afflicted by tuberculosis. She is buried at the Jewish cemetery in Milan. In a tin box resembling a miniature coffin, Florian keeps several more photographs and this postcard of the Schatzalp sanatorium, which Haya pats and says, What a nice place for dying.
O, i giorni felici, whispers Florian into the scant evidence left of what was once a crowded landscape of devastated memory. Yes, happy days. Back in 1904, in their De Dion-Bouton, Paolo and Emilia go for afternoon spins along village roads that run between two rows of sycamores, when the sun is mild and there is a gentle breeze. Meanwhile, the servants make hot cocoa, bake amaretti, petits fours, from time to time the more dramatic ganache and obligatory Linzertorte, that delicate marvel, the work of Jindrak, an Austrian confectioner. In the evening, wearing a gown of emerald-green shantung with a high collar of black lace, Emilia reads I promessi sposi aloud yet again, first published, what a coincidence, in Gorizia, a distant and unknown place as far as she is concerned, in another empire. The Monarchy is mighty. Within it, from Voralberg in the west to the easternmost village of Bukovina (1,274 kilometres), from the smallest Czech town in the north to the Dalmatian fishing villages in the south (1,000 kilometres), order, serenity and a single currency reign. All across this great and happy land the same products and the same brands are distributed, the same food items of equal quality, with only the names adapted discreetly to the language of each of the peoples: in Hungary the Julius Meinl chain of shops is called Meinl Gyula, while Jules Verne becomes Verne Gyula; Knödel become knedliky in Czech; the Wiener Schnitzel is called bečka in Croatian and in Italian, cotoletta Milanese. The distant centres of the Monarchy, its balls, waltzes and its coaches, schnapps and Sachertorte, its painters and its imperial family, all this becomes intimate and dear in the provinces as soon as it is ever so slightly Italianized, Croaticized, Magyarized, Bohemianized; die grosse glückliche Familie, oh, happy days.
As a naval engineer, widower Paolo Tedeschi ventures to Libya, where he finishes installing some sort of electric generator, meanwhile sending his son Florian off to the Beretta boarding school on the western shore of Lake Garda, in the little town of Salò, which would become the seat of a small puppet Fascist state some twenty years later called Repubblica Sociale Italiana, otherwise known as Repubblica di Salò. On a visit to his boy, Paolo makes the acquaintance of Rosa Brana, a Catholic school teacher, and for the sake of peace in bed he relinquishes his Judaic faith in which he had not, to be fair, placed much stock to begin with. Meanwhile, Paolo goes bankrupt, so he and Rosa live off her modest income and have more children, three new Catholic children bearing the Jewish surname Tedeschi, who would, when the moment came (with the exception of Ugo, the flautist), first salute alla Romana, then shout Sieg Heil, and live until their deaths in the romantic little town of Salò on the shore of Lake Garda. Florian continues his schooling at the Collegio San Alessandro in Bergamo and grows a moustache. He enrols in the military academy in Rome in 1919, and off he goes in 1920 to do his military service, first in Mestre, then in Gorizia, where he meets the love of his life, Ada Baar. When Ada’s bulging belly can no longer be concealed, Florian asks his father Paolo to bless the marriage, but Paolo declines. Ada is poor, she has no pedigree. Ada is a Jewish woman and screws extra-institutionally. Florian relinquishes his right to his mother’s inheritance, which includes villas and factories, paintings and books, silver cutlery and money, hardly a negligible legacy, and marries Ada Baar the day before Haya is born, on 8 February, 1923. A new life begins.
Florian works at all kinds of jobs. He sells typewriters in Gorizia and then in the evenings on a 1915 model bicycle—precursor to today’s mountain bike and designed by acclaimed Edoardo Bianchi for the Alpini and the Bersaglieri—he delivers his daily takings to the factory outside town, then he picks up copies of Gazzeta dello Sport and Lo Sport Fascista, and stops in at the Taverna I Due Leoni or, less frequently, at the Doppolavoro. He sips a glass of home-made red wine to relax. He listens to the news broadcasts people listen to in Gorizia at the time in the café bars and taverns, and he is indifferent to what he hears. Sundays, when he listens to a broadcast of a football game, Florian is far from indifferent, he is captivated. The tavern is lively and stifling. The customers wrangle, then quarrel and shout. Reporter Niccolò Carosio invents a new football language, much like the new culinary language Marinetti has already ushered in. Florian is a Juventus fan, though perhaps he shouldn’t be. He begins to have second thoughts about football and “his” club after the World Cup in Italy in 1934, when Mussolini orders presidents of football clubs to be members of his political party. Leandro Arpinati holds the Italian football federation, the FIGC, in a stranglehold for years. In 1926, Il Duce pulls off the famous “carta di Viareggio” move, which means every team can take on only one foreign player per season; in 1927 every foreign player who is not a “son of Italy” (the homeland) is sent packing. After that there are almost no Hungarian players left on the Italian team, which Florian regrets, because they are his favourites. In 2006 Haya happens to be watching television when she sees Paolo di Canio take the defeat of his Lazio like a hero, greeting the Livorno players with the “Roman salute”; his fans wave their swastikas, the Livorno fans wave their red flags. This never ends, Haya says.
Haya is not fond of football.
Obsessed with radio equipment and radiophony in general, Florian gets a job in 1925 at a shop called Marconi. Florian listens to the speeches by Guglielmo Marconi, whom Mussolini, the best man at his wedding, names President of the Royal Academy of Italy. When Marconi weds his second wife Maria Cristina Bezzi-Scali in June 1927, Florian listens to the broadcast. While they are playing Wagner’s wedding march, Il Duce’s dog Pitini can be heard barking in the background. A year earlier, Florian also hears over the radio that Mussolini is introducing a tax on bachelors. Lucky I have Ada, he says.
Ada goes out into the nearby woods and picks mushrooms and sings the opera arias that come back to her. She goes to her stationery shop. Under the counter she reads various magazines, mostly ones with photographs. In La Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d’ltalia an article about Margherita Sarfatti at the Venice Biennale XV catches her eye. Margherita Sarfatti praises a painting by Oskar Kokoschka. Several years later, two world leaders will declare that same painting to be degenerate. Ada regularly reads the monthly Rivista delle Famiglie, because it prints many articles dedicated to woman and her family, and family is everything to Ada: Haya and Florian—my greatest riches, she says. Haya has kept an issue from 1936, and she leafs through it with her dry fingers as she sits by the window and rocks. Then she puts it down on the little desk.
Ada regularly brings Il Giornale della Radio Leonardo Bottinelli home from the stationery shop, because this newspaper publishes the Italian radio schedule a
nd listings for another ten European countries. Aside from that, the paper registers cultural events of note, and since nothing of note ever happens on Gorizia’s cultural scene, Ada at least reads of the notable events. Once the race laws are introduced, Jewish names no longer appear in the listings, particularly those of musicians and singers. This, however, happens later, after the Tedeschi family move south and when they are no longer so small. The Tedeschis are an entirely respectable and appealing family with four children, when Ada tells Florian, Perhaps we should be baptized, and when Florian tells Ada, I went to the fascio and signed up. There, in the south, they mainly read Il Mattino Illustrato, because it is published in Naples. It comes out on Sundays and has engaging fashion articles, cartoons (Haya remembers them) and beautiful pictures of both ordinary and high life. There are political articles, too, but the Tedeschi family skip over them.
In the late 1920s Trieste is already ailing. Its breath rattles, as if on its deathbed. It is crippled. German schools are closed, street names are changed or Italianized. Trieste is becoming a little world inside a little world. Its centripetal forces are dwindling, it is sucked in by forces separating it from its very self, its organs are near collapse, it is dispersing into microparticles of its history that do not know where to settle or what to latch on to. At the beginning of the twentieth century people abandon it as it lies motionless abed with sores: Conrad, who writes about its dockers, Joyce and Trakl and Rilke and Freud and Mahler and Mann and Slataper; Thomas Mann tinkers with the Buddenbrooks at Hôtel de Ville, Egon Schiele paints a red fisherman’s scuttle moored in the harbour, Rainer Maria Rilke composes his Duineser Elegien. Back then, and still today, with an occasional twitch, as if nodding to its late great friends and summoning them, come, as if pleading with the few friends it has left, stay, Trieste is becoming an exit point, a city opening its gates so people can flee, leaving the elderly and small house dogs to count out their days in peace and quiet.