Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Prenz was born in Buenos Aires but his roots were in the hinterland of Croatian Istria. He taught in Italian and wrote in Spanish. He taught and wandered in the most diverse countries this side and that side of the ocean. Perhaps he settled in Trieste because the city reminded him of the cemetery of boats and figureheads at Ensenada de Barragán, between Buenos Aires and La Plata, which only lives on now in a slender volume of his poems. He sits in the Caffè San Marco still feeling the gaze of the figureheads on him – worn by wind and water, and dumbstruck at the approach of catastrophes that no one else can see yet. He leafs through the translation of one of his collections. There is a poem dedicated to Diana Teruggi, who was his assistant at the University of Buenos Aires. One day, in the time of the generals, the girl disappeared for ever. Once again poetry speaks of absence, of something or someone who is not here any more. It’s not much, a poem. A little card left in an empty place. Poets know this and don’t give it too much weight, but they give even less weight to the world that celebrates or ignores them. Prenz pulls his pipe from a pocket, smiles at his two daughters sitting at another table, chats with a Senegalese who’s going round the tables selling junk, buys a cigarette lighter from him. Chatting is better than writing. The Senegalese moves on, Prenz sucks on his pipe and makes a start.

  It’s not bad, filling up sheets of paper under the sniggering masks and amidst the indifference of the people sitting around. That good-natured indifference balances the latent delirium of omnipotence that exists in writing – purporting to sort out the world with a few pieces of paper and to hold forth on life and death. Thus the pen is dipped, willingly or otherwise, into ink diluted with humility and irony. The café is a place for writing. One is alone, with paper and pen and at most two or three books, hanging onto the table like a shipwreck survivor tossed by the waves. A few centimetres of wood separate the sailor from the abyss that might swallow him up, the tiniest flaw and the huge black waters break ruinously, pulling him down. The pen is a lance that wounds and heals; it pierces the floating wood and leaves it to the mercy of the waves, but it also plugs the wood and renders it capable of sailing once again and keeping to a course.

  Keep a hold on the wood, fear not – a shipwreck can also be salvation. How does the old story go? Fear knocks at the door, faith opens; there’s no one there. But who teaches you to go and open? For some time you’ve done nothing but close doors, it’s become a habit; for a while you hold your breath, but then anxiety grabs your heart again and the instinct is to bolt everything, even the windows, without realizing that this way there’s no air and as you suffocate, the migraine batters your temples; eventually all you hear is the sound of your own headache.

  Scribble, free the demons, bridle them, often simply presume to ape them. In the San Marco the demons have been relegated up on high, overturning the traditional scenario, because the café, with its floral decor and its Viennese Secessionist style reminds us that it can be alright down here: a waiting room in which it’s pleasant to wait, to put off leaving. The manager, Mr Gino, and the waiters, who come to the table with one glass after another – sometimes off their own bat offering, but not to everyone, salmon canapés with a special prosecco – are angels of a lower order, but they are trustworthy, enough at any rate to keep an eye on things so that these exiles from the earthly paradise feel at home in this clandestine Eden and no snake tries to tempt them away with false promises.

  The café is a Platonic academy, said Hermann Bahr at the beginning of the century – the man who also said that he liked being in Trieste because here he had the impression of being nowhere. Nothing is taught in this academy, but sociability and how to break spells are learned. One may chat, tell stories, but preaching, making political speeches, giving lessons are against the rules. All, at their respective tables, are close to and distant from the person next to them. Love your neighbour as you love yourself, or bear your neighbour’s mania for biting his nails just as he endures some habit of yours that is even more unpleasant. At these tables it is not possible to found a school, draw up ranks, mobilize followers and emulators, recruit disciples. In this the place of disenchantment – in which how the show ends is common knowledge but where no one tires of watching nor chafes at the actors’ blunders – there is no room for false prophets who seduce those vaguely anxious for a facile and instant redemption, misleading them with empty promises.

  Out there, the false Messiahs have an easy time of it, as they drag their followers blinded by mirages of salvation down roads they cannot travel and thus setting them off towards destruction. The prophets of drugs, men who can control their own habit without being overborne by it, seduce helpless disciples into following them on the road along which they will destroy themselves. Someone, in a drawing room, proclaims that revolutions are made with rifles, knowing well that this is an innocuous metaphor while leaving other simple souls to take them literally and end up having to pay the penalty. Among the newspapers on their long sticks an illustrated magazine displays the face of Edie Sedgwick, the beautiful and vulnerable American model who believed in the testament of disorder preached with order and method by that tribal guru Andy Warhol. She let herself be convinced to seek not pleasure, but an indefinable sense of life in those feverish sexual transgressions, those ingenuous group rites and those drugs that led her, with painful banality, to unhappiness and death.

  In the San Marco no one has any illusions that the original sin was never committed and that life is virginal and innocent; for this reason it’s difficult to pass off anything phoney on its patrons, any ticket to the Promised Land. To write is to know that one is not in the Promised Land and that one will never reach it, but it also means continuing doggedly in that direction, through the wilderness. Sitting in the café, you’re on a journey; as in a train, a hotel, on the road, you’ve got very little with you and you cannot in your vanity grace that nothing with your personal mark, you are nobody. In that familiar anonymity you can dissimulate, rid yourself of the ego as if it were a shell. The world is a cavity of uncertainty into which writing penetrates in obstinate bewilderment. To write, take a break, chat, play at cards; laughter at the next table, a woman’s profile, as incontrovertible as Fate, the wine in the glass, time the colour of gold. The hours flow … amiable, carefree, almost happy.

  The owners and the ex-owners of the café – almost a list of the sovereigns of ancient dynasties. Marco Lovrinovich of Fontane d’Orsera near Parenzo, who started restaurants and wine houses much as others write poems or paint landscapes, opened the café on 3 January, 1914 on the site where The Trifolium Central Dairy had once stood, complete with cowshed. Officially Lovrinovich said he had named it San Marco in his own honour, but he took every opportunity to repeat the image of the Venetian lion, the irredentist Italian symbol even in the decoration on the chairs. Perhaps he was convinced, deep down, that the winged lion was indeed a tribute to his Christian name. You don’t reach the age of ninety-four, as he did, without being intimately convinced that the world revolves around you.

  And yet some died young and alone among his tables, devastated by the imbalance between their spirit and the world, which was definitely not tailor-made for them: for example that youngster who was always a bit sweaty, the one who went round like a hunted animal; his eyes forever spoke his awareness of being already caught between the tiger’s jaws. He used to come every afternoon with so many sheets of paper which he filled one after another and always carried with him, until one day he came no more; he’d thrown himself into the courtyard the previous evening.

  The cafés are also a sort of hospice for those whose hearts suffer need and café-owners like Lovrinovich are benefactors too, offering a temporary refuge from the elements, like the founders of shelters for the homeless. And why shouldn’t they earn something on the side, even patriotic glory as Lovrinovich did following the devastation of the San Marco and his detention in the Austrian punishment camp in Liebenau, near Graz, where the Austrians sent him because he’d infected b
oth eyes with trachoma to avoid being sent to fight against Italy.

  Among the various owners the Stock sisters stand out, minute and relentless. And then there are also memories of a seasoned barwoman with lank blonde hair; they still talk about the occasion when an enormous drunk, to whom she’d denied one final whisky, threatened her with a little demonstration, lifting up the coffee machine – a massive weight – from the bar as if it were a twig, then dropping it with an almighty clang. Meanwhile the nearest regulars, among them one intently writing at his usual table, alas all too close to the bar, looked around in fright, hoping that someone else might nobly step forward to prevent the slaughter of the woman. Finally the enraged giant lunged at her just as she pulled a hatchet from a drawer and jumped at him, ready to plant the thing in his neck and the dutiful customer, who had stood up from his paper-strewn table and had been moving as slowly as possible towards the furious colossus, was only too glad to tackle the barwoman, firmly seizing and twisting the wrist that brandished the hatchet, and thus saving the impulsive youngster’s life.

  It might be one of the few places in Trieste where there are plenty of young people to be seen, but the San Marco suggests a rejuvenated existence, it seems to imprint on the faces of its habitués the same seasoned and decorous robustness that a little restoration periodically confers on the decor. The Triestine Mephistopheles is a prudent, bourgeois demon; his rejuvenation of the friezes when they are about to crumble away and of the walls cracked like a wrinkled face, provides a noble, vigorous middle age – not the tempestuous and improvident youth of a Faust that spells Marguerite’s ruin, but the charm of the teacher who in bed concludes the seduction of the pupil begun austerely in the classroom, a little misunderstanding soon to be dissipated.

  So far as the structure is concerned, the rejuvenative function tends to be carried out by the Generali insurance company, which restores to the cafés and public buildings of Trieste the ordered and mysterious beauty of the florid bourgeois city it once was. The portrait of the writer who spends much of his life at the San Marco, receiving mail and visitors who ask him about that flourishing, lost city that once was – a city which he only knows about second-hand, through other people’s gossip and nostalgia – the portrait, by Valerio Cugia, hangs on the lefthand wall as one enters, in front of the board with the plaques dedicated to the illustrious patrons. The portrait could justifiably be replaced by the old nineteenth-century portrait of Masino Levi, insurance director, which hangs in the foyer of the Politeama Rossetti theatre, next to the Public Garden: waistcoat, paper in one hand, goose quill in the other, a discreet and elusive Jewish smile on his lips. A Mephistopheles insurer of lives and guarantor, with a policy to boot, of a healthy middle age for which it’s worth signing and handing over one’s soul.

  Indeed that middle age – or post-middle age – offers good possibilities for success, delayed yet sweet. On certain evenings the sun lights up the broad, gilded coffee leaves that surround the medallions on the walls; the light as it moves sinks the mirror behind the table into a lake of shadow enclosed by shining borders, the last rays of a distant sun that gleams and sets over the sea. A nostalgia for marine clarity reflects on the half-submerged faces in the dark waters of the mirror, the insidious call of real life. But one is quick to shut it up, if it is too insistent. When, in a certain period, assiduous regulars who also attend the adjacent synagogue stop coming and disappear one after another from their usual tables, then almost no one, not even those who up until recently loved to chat with the people who came out of the Temple and into the café for refreshment, almost no one asks indiscreet questions about their absence.

  In the café the air is veiled, a protection against remoteness; no gust blows the horizon open and the red of the evening is the wine in one’s glass. Mr Crepaz, for example, certainly does not regret his youth; in fact just now he’s busy touching it up, like an unsuccessful painting that’s not beyond repair. As a young man things never went well for him with women. Oh, nothing dramatic – simply nothing happened, or very little, ever since he was a youngster, since the time when they all used to meet up at the summer cinema in the Public Garden, just a few hundred metres from the San Marco. The girls were kind, pleased if he was there too, but when the dark white-capped sea of the Bounty appeared on the screen, bright spray and black waves, a black as deep as the night so that it seemed blue, and there was freshness and darkness around them and noises among the leaves, the girls’ eyes shone and tender laughter in the shadow was the promise of happiness, and he felt that none of this was for him. He felt it in the awkwardness of his body which was a barrier between himself and those tanned arms that, all right, they were flung about his neck at the moment of going home, but it was nothing to compare to what happened with the others, even just the clasp of a hand in the dark.

  It had been more or less always that way, at any rate often; those beauties opened up like flowers in water, and in vain he’d passed them by, the art of placing a hand on another’s had remained an unknown initiation. Until once, many years later, he had seen Laura again – beautiful in her ageing, which was already clear in the lines in her face and the abundance of her breasts; suddenly she had looked at him differently and everything had loosened up, it had become so easy. “You were so immature,” Clara said to him months later, in bed. They used to sit together at school and then, as now, she would throw her black hair into his face like a wave, although now it had the odd streak of white.

  And so his life had changed. Not that he’d become a womanizer, anything but. He was faithful, he was only interested in the women he’d desired in vain in his youth, he wanted to square things up. He was methodical in his research; the girls had left him behind, but he had caught up on more than one of them. Slowly things reverted to a new order, a new balance. He was making up for that day of useless heartbreak at the seaside with Maria, the unbridgeable distance he’d felt then as he gave her his hand to help her up on to the rock. He made revisions to that lunch when Luisa, with that sidelong, teasing glance of hers, had eyes only for Giorgio, while now her soft, plump fingers, so practised in awakening desire, were only for him.

  Little by little he retraced his path backwards, back to that little girl in the white socks in the cycling area in the Public Garden, the one who’d ordered him sulkily to sort her wheel our for her and then had shot off without so much as a glance. But now, she was an odalisque, a woman with avid, imperious lips who would have inspired envy in the fine daughter she’d had all those years ago by one of the lucky ones, a rival who in the meantime had been removed from the scene with a divorce.

  And then there were the ladies he’d pined for in an even more distant time, his mother’s friends and his friends’ mothers, elegant and perfumed women who always picked up and cuddled the other children, kissing and stroking them on the cheek or putting a chocolate in their mouths, even pushing it through their lips with a finger, the nail varnished. Indeed there was even a rumour – but it’s easy to exaggerate in the café – that he recently had gone to bed with Mrs Tauber, perhaps the doyenne of her line, who some fifty years previously had been a real beauty; even now she still had the pert little nose that was his by rights. Anyway, gentleman as he was, he said nothing because they all knew her and she sometimes still came to the café with the few surviving friends of her own sex.

  Giorgio Voghera has for years sat at a table on the bottom right, as one comes in. He is an acknowledged leader and purported author of Secret, a distasteful and charming masterpiece, its subject, renunciation seen in its heartless geometry, a book written against life that serves to highlight all of life’s seductive qualities. Next to Voghera sit mild-mannered ladies, cousins who are also writers of some merit, undemanding friends, aspiring writers who cling to past literary glory, journalists who every two or three months come up with the same questions on Trieste, students looking for dissertation topics, the odd scholar from far away perhaps sniffing out a future banquet of unpublished works. Piero Kern
, expert in oral literature and a protected specimen of the grand Triestine cosmopolitan bourgeoisie now in danger of extinction, if it ever existed, tells of a robbery in a Rio de Janeiro travel agency; he is highly critical of the robbers’ lack of professionalism, but even more so of the unseemly behaviour of a fat American, a fellow victim.

  Voghera listens good-humouredly, patient and distrait, letting his own words and others’ slide into the great indifference of the universe. Those watery sky-blue eyes have seen the other side of life, its underside, and their glance roves meekly among the tables. “Basically, I’m optimistic,” he loves to repeat, “because things always end up working out worse than my gloomy predictions.” He’s been through historic catastrophes and personal hells, skirted abysses into which he cannot have found it easy to avoid being swallowed, especially as a young man.

  It’s not easy being in the desert, outside of and far away from the Promised Land. It’s not just the big sand storms in the desert, the strong wind that stuns and sweeps one away; there are even more venomous dangers – the grains that stick everywhere and take the air away from one’s skin, the dryness that desiccates the body and dries up the soul’s sap. Perhaps as a young man, before he reached this state of indulgence for his own and others’ shortcomings, Voghera must have been fairly unbearable – an irritable teacher who found life slapdash and in need of correction and failed it. But his syntax is clear and smooth, doggedly honest, like Ariadne’s Thread running through the labyrinth without getting tangled and implacably weaving the image of a random, painful, grotesque reality.