Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere

by Jan Morris

  I have often wondered how he got on. A shy, well-scrubbed young man, born to the English countryside, how easily did he adapt to the ornate opulence of the place, somewhat akin as I imagine it to the decor of Baron Revoltella’s mansion? His chief passion was steeple-chasing. Was he not repelled by the stuffy smells inside, of scent, cheap powder and cigarettes? Was his need really so urgent that he could disregard it all, and plunge himself, eyes closed and thinking of Becher’s Brook, into such sleazy sublimation?

  James Joyce is said to have been an assiduous drunken frequenter of the Trieste whore-houses, allegedly preferring La Chiave d’Oro, the Golden Key, or the poky Il Metro Cubo, the Cubic Metre. Drunken he certainly was, often having to be taken home by his brother Stanislaus, and very unlikely to be chaste. It was in Trieste that he wrote A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a searing record of repentance after lustful sin, and he must have known what he was talking about. How strange it is nevertheless, that the man who wrote “Watching the Needle-Boats at San Sabba” in the daytime could stagger sozzled from pub to prostitute at night! Joyce adored his children and loved his wife after his fashion, yet apparently he still felt the need to wander, night after night, down the Via del Soli-tario to the House of the Golden Key.

  I am of the opinion that lust is one of the more banal impulses, essentially functional and familiar not just to the birds and the diligent bees, but to any old lop-eared tomcat. In Trieste I ponder the mystery of its power over the most fastidious of point-to-point riders, or the very greatest of geniuses.

  LOVE generally supersedes lust as we grow older, and nowadays a more amorphous kind of eroticism seizes me in this city. It is a sensuality of homesickness. I have always been homesick on my travels, missing my own people, my animals, my books, my house, my country, but somehow in Trieste it becomes homesickness of a wider range. It gives me a yearning pleasure when I telephone Wales before I go to sleep, and hear the beloved voices of home wishing me goodnight; yet it is a yearning that goes beyond them, to make me long for some even greater loving whole. There is something libidinous to this feeling, like the lusting of nuns for their God. Is it a latent religious instinct, or just the fathomless expectancy of Trieste, which always makes me look for something grander yet to come? Perhaps everyone feels it, in this city of hiatus. Perhaps my anxious subaltern, waiting on the doorstep, felt that he too was moving towards some more universal fulfilment, and Joyce knew that his whore’s bed was a bed of Heaven after all, even if he had to be carried insensible home from it.

  Certainly I sometimes think that transient love, the sort that is embodied in a one-night passion, or even a passing glance, is no less real than the lifelong sort. Even imagined love is true! It all comes from, and goes back to, the same illimitable reservoir that lies somewhere beyond my bedside telephone. Of course this foggy fancy suits my idea of Trieste. This is a place of transience, where power and prosperity come and go, and even the stateliest palaces of State or commerce seem insubstantial when you are in the mood. It makes me more than usually vulnerable to momentary consolations. The sight of a ship hull-down on the horizon—a sudden vision of the Dolomite snow-peaks—a cheerful gesture from a traffic-cop—a scrawny white cat looking up at me proudly as she chases her kitten to safety off the street—all such trifling incidents, in Trieste, sentimentally comfort me.

  Long ago I was going out through the door of the Albergo Savoia Excelsior when a man simultaneously entered. We bumped into one another, our bags and luggage got mixed up, and we both apologized. He was a theatrical-looking character, with a camel coat slung over his shoulders—perhaps one of the opera singers from the Teatro Verdi, who habitually stay in the hotel. When we had disentangled ourselves he stood there for a moment motionless.

  “Where are you from?” he said.

  “Wales.”

  “Wales! How wonderful!”

  Oh you splendid liar, I thought to myself, you’ve never heard of the place. There was a pause. I laughed, and so did he. He shook my hand in both of his, we lingered for a moment and parted. When I think of Trieste, love and lust, I often think of him.

  TWELVE

  The Wild Side

  One evening I heard music in the street, and looking out of my window I saw two strange figures passing. One was a young man in a tall brown hat, blowing on a shepherd’s flute. The other was attached by complex apparatus to a variety of apparently home-made instruments—bagpipes, drums, cymbals, a triangle I think—and in order to beat the biggest drum he had to move in an abrupt but creaky shuffle. Slowly and sporadically these engaging characters pottered down the pavement below me, tootling and drumming as they went.

  In Trieste that day they were like visitors from another, less inhibited world. They brought a touch of the maverick to this ordered city. They were musicians from the Karst, strollers from the wild side.

  EVERY great city, in my view, needs some element of disorder, or at least of the eccentric or the atavistic, to temper its arrangements. I mean dis-order as against un-order, as being dis-interested differs from being un-interested. Venice has its lagoon of floods and mudflats. Edinburgh has its grim Old Town on the hill, permanently sneering at the Georgian urbanity below. Until recently Hong Kong had its notorious Walled City, a cloistered labyrinth whose very sovereignty was indeterminate. Most old cities have pockets of sin, where cautious visitors do not care to go, and it is a weakness of planned capitals that generations must pass before any of their districts acquire disreputable qualifications.

  When the conscientious enthusiasts from Vienna first mapped out the New City of Trieste, they made no provisions for such districts either—no back-alleys or cul-de-sacs suitable for mayhem—but the gods of disorder have always been present here. Claudio Magris has pointed out that in the Public Garden, among all those honoured busts, hens and chickens have gone more or less feral, and scrabble about in the shrubberies like wild birds. He wonders if this portends similar regressions among other domestic species, but when I stand by the garden railings and watch them there, returned to the habits of their ancestral forests, I prefer to suppose they represent an instinct in the city itself to do the same.

  I have seldom seen disorderly conduct in contemporary Trieste, but Paul Theroux witnessed a brawl on his second night in town, a perhaps invigorating surprise for him—he had thought Trieste the quietest and most law-abiding city of his Mediterranean travels. II Piccolo does often report skullduggeries. Ironically the borgo teresiano, pride of the Akademie der Bildenden Kiinste, crops up in these dispatches most often, in connection with drugs, prostitution, Chinese feuds or illegal immigants—clandestini; but all I have myself uncovered, when I have poked around those shops with the paper lanterns, is an uncomfortable sensation that I am asking too many questions. One morning I read of a murder on the other side of town, near the industrial port. I went there at once, but my haul of misbehaviour was sparse there too: a few drunks, some obscene graffiti, and a mad woman who swore at me in the street (“Don’t be scared,” a passer-by reassured me, “I’ve known her for years, she swears at everybody"—and indeed, when in my discomfiture I dropped the jumper I was carrying, the lunatic hastened to return it to me with elaborate courtesy).

  Of course war and politics have often brought atavism to Trieste. Irredentism introduced its undercurrent of delinquency to Urbs Fidelissima, and other peoples’ conflicts have repeatedly alerted this peaceable place to the parallel energies of violence: Napoleon’s battalions marching in; English guns bombarding them; the rumble of gunfire in the hills in the first world war; bombing and unspeakable cruelties in the second; the triumphant bersaglieri spilling off Audace; Tito’s savage partisans flooding into the suburbs; New Zealanders riding their war-battered tanks past the railway station; the riots of the i9£os and the battles of the old Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which never reached Trieste but were fought not so far over its horizons. And the bora itself is like a blast of war: if maps were still symbolically ornamented it would be represented by a
thug in a camouflage suit, toting a Kalashnikov.

  THE PERMANENT element of dissent in Trieste, though, its immovable reminder of an alternative world of strangeness, harsh challenge, mystery and unconvention, where strolling instrumentalists may whistle the days away and the fearful excitements of battle are ingrained in men’s memories—the city’s real zone of disorder is the Karst. It is not disorderly in any criminal sense, no longer the haunt of highwaymen, by no means a desert nowadays, but even now it remains an antithesis of civic normality. Karstic landscapes in a generic sense extend far beyond Trieste, but the Karst proper, the limestone plateau over the sea which first gave its name to a geological category and an adjective to go with it, is mostly within the province of Trieste. Its presence is part of the civic consciousness, the origin of its melancholy perhaps, for before the Illyr-ians, before the Romans, before the Austrians or the Italians, the arid rocky Karst was always there—brooding sea on one side, frowning Karst on the other. Even now you can see the plateau from the very heart of the city, and in particular a great quarrying gash in its flank which always suggests to me a scar of surgery. Trieste cannot escape the Karst, and no other city I know is so obsessed with stones.

  When I was small I was always excited by the Mendip Hills in Somerset, in whose lee my maternal forebears lived. They seemed to me hills of queerness, tantalizing hills, more disturbing by far than the stately old mountains of Wales that sheltered my father’s people. I thought of them as mysterious places, and I imagined wild beasts and hermits up there. I have only lately realized that they too are karstic highlands, made of limestone and riddled by just the same caves and fissures as riddle the plateau above Trieste. The underground river Timava that flows into the Adriatic out of the Karst is attended by many a myth and legend—“vast with a murmur of mountains,” Virgil called it; the river Axe that flows from the Mendips into the Bristol Channel is probably the original of Coleridge’s sacred river Alph, emerging “Through caverns measureless to man/down to a sunless sea."The uneasy allure of the Mendips always made me think of outlaw lives, lives on the fringe, and perhaps it was a geological effect, because almost a lifetime later I am given a similar frisson by the presence of the Karst. Maybe Richard Burton felt the same, when he retreated from the Consulate with its flags, rules and dockets to his high study at Opicina.

  Actually Opicina today is no more than a suburb, and Trieste’s Karst as a whole is patterned by roads and by the big autostrada which sweeps across from Italy towards the Balkans. Many a commuter drives down to the city every day, or takes the funicular-tram. The boulevard along the ridge that nineteenth-century weekenders loved to walk is more popular than ever now: it is called the Via Napoleonica because it is thought the French made it for military purposes, but now it makes a perfect Sunday morning jog, with a pause to admire the sea-views occasionally, or a rest on a bench, and a cool drink or a coffee awaiting you at the other end. Bird-watchers, ramblers, collectors of mushrooms or wild asparagus, all use the Karst as a kind of park. I was at a children’s party once at the extreme eastern end of the plateau, the very last protrusion of Italy into the world of the Slavs, and the families who brought their children along in their shiny Fiats and four-wheel-drives seemed to me just like enthusiastic supporters of a Parent-Teacher Association in some well-heeled suburb of the American Middle West.

  Yet within the cramped confines of this territory—some twenty miles long, never more than eight miles wide—there are still haunting suggestions of stranger things. For a start there is the fact that closely all around lies a foreign country. There are six border crossings into Slovenia, and they still retain, for me at least, the old fascination of a frontier. I have always loved the moments of travel when, brought to a halt by a striped barrier, approached by unfamiliar uniforms, you feel yourself on the brink of somewhere unknown and possibly perilous. How expressionlessly that policeman waits, as you fumble for your passport! How uncomfortable is the silence, as he looks at its picture, then at you, then at the picture again! Do they put those sniffer dogs in everyone’s car, or has somebody tipped them off that you are carrying cannabis?Will they find those uncomplimentary things you have written about their republic, in the manuscript in the boot? Is your visa out of order? Are you on a blacklist?

  Nothing like that happens any more, when you drive out of Trieste into Slovenia, and all around the frontier posts today are welcoming bazaars of exchange booths, souvenir shops and cafes. Not so long ago, though, when Communism was in power over there, it could still be a darker experience. I remember approaching the border one Sunday evening on my way down to Montenegro. In those days of the Cold War, when Tito’s relatively relaxed Communist Yugoslavia allowed a chink through the Iron Curtain, hundreds of Istrian Italians came to Trieste at weekends to shop or visit relatives; when it was time for them to go home again their cars approached the frontier in long slow queues, engines throbbing, sometimes lurching a few feet forward, sometimes subsiding into silence, waiting in the gathering dark to run the gauntlet of the security guards and the customs officers of the Socialist Federal Republic. The Karst was dim and empty all around us that evening; when I looked behind I could see the lights of waiting cars bumper to bumper up the hill from the city.

  The Istrians were used to it. Somebody had set up a mobile canteen, and they were selling coffee and hamburgers from the back of a pick-up. Once a pair of gigantic trucks jumped the queue by sheer bulk, forcing their way to the front of the waiting line yard by juddering yard until, with a hissing of airbrakes and roar of engines, they triumphantly disappeared. At last I reached the frontier post myself. Its lights were dim. An official with a red star on his cap beckoned for my passport without a word, and slowly examined every page. Without a smile, without a flicker, only a gloomy stare he handed it back to me. “Cheer up,” I said. “Enjoy yourself,” he morosely replied, and waved me through.

  IN THOSE days this narrow countryside seemed to me instinct with subterfuge. As a lifelong aspirant anarchist I have always been attracted by the idea of a life of crime (feebly sublimating the instinct by taking face flannels from expensive hotels, to use as handkerchiefs), and there were taverns of the Karst then where the fancy seemed exhilaratingly real. How enjoyable to sit in some tumbled courtyard, high on the flinty plateau, eating home-cured ham and drinking chilled wine from the vineyard next door, while planning if only in the imagination escapades of bloodless villainy—smuggling spirits out of Bosnia, say, or robbing the downtown Banca d’ltalia! How piquant to spend an evening in a crowded noisy inn somewhere near that froward frontier, trellised, trestle-tabled, jam-packed, with waiters dashing madly in all directions and jolly groups of friends drinking beer, and thinking that all around me conspiracies might be flourishing or double agents practising their deceptions!

  Today the excitement has gone, and there are no sinister delays at the borders. Even so, sometimes I feel a tremor of the undercover still. Only the other day I stopped for an early breakfast at a cafe a mile or two from one of the frontier crossings, and there I got into conversation with a Dutch lorry-driver. He told me he had been delivering a load of tomatoes in Zagreb, and was on his way back to Amsterdam. It was his own truck, he said. He drove it all over eastern Europe, delivering one thing and another, picking up this and that for transport to the west. He seemed relieved to be over the border, though, and even as he mentioned the random nature of his commerce, I wondered if he had Chinese, Turks or indigent Romanys hidden silent in his trailer as he drank his coffee and prepared to move on.

  EVIL memories of war linger in the Karst. Romans and Turks fought in their time up here, and there were terrible confrontations between Italians and Austrians in the first world war—down by the coast, the Wolves of Tuscany, two snarling animals of bronze, represent one of their most famous battles, when two unconquerable Italian battalions defied the worst the Austrian army could do to them. Many a village war memorial—very likely no more than a chunk of pocked and pitted limestone—remembers t
he men of these parts who fought with Tito’s partisans, and near Basovizza, only a mile or two from the Slovenian frontier, there is a horrible reminder that in the wars of the Karst, as in all others, many victims get no memorial at all.

  It is a creepy kind of memento mori. It is a pot-hole, one of those sudden natural pits in the limestone which are as common in the Mendips as they are here. It was excavated in the 1970s, and on a big stone nearby are inscribed the archaeologists’ findings. At the bottom of the pit they found guns and equipment thrown there by the Austrians after their defeat in 1918. Near the top they found miscellaneous munitions from the second world war, together with the junk and rubbish that is thrown into holes anywhere. But half-way down the pit there was something horrible: a tangled mass of human corpses, male and female, some roped together. We are told that they were Italian opponents of Yugoslav Tito, both soldiers and civilians, some of them shackled while still living to the dead.

  Whoever they were, they are not forgotten now. The hole has been stoppered with a big slab, and memorial stones are dotted around, as in one of the lesser battlefields of the American Civil War. The surrounding grassland is a popular place for picnics. When I was there one day a class of schoolboys was practising the skills of orienteering, and groups of them kept emerging from nearby thickets scratching their heads, arguing and anxiously consulting their maps. Two of their teachers sat reading in the shade of a tree near the pot-hole, and I asked them what the Italian word salme meant—I had read it on the slab, and didn’t recognize it. “Corpses,” they told me, “dead bodies"; and they looked at me with a touch of disappointment, I thought, as though I might have used my brains and guessed that for myself. And so I might.