Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere Read Free Page B

was in its powerful prime, it was a loitering kind of place. The English writer Robert Hitchens thought it half-asleep. Joyce liked walking about it, polishing phrases in his head. Italo Svevo wrote a novel largely concerned with strolling its streets, and the poet Umberto Saba composed a lyric about wandering the entire city contemplating his own “grave evasive life”—my own practice exactly, except for the gravity.
    SO OUR entry into Trieste is unlikely to be demanding. Since we have arrived in the evening (vide the Governor’s dinner party) and on a day in the fall (cf Maximilian’s shuffling of the leaves) the traffic is thick, but not frenzied. There is not much blasting of horns—road-rage is not a Trieste failing—or blowing of police-persons’ whistles. When the street lights come on they are subdued, and at the end of an autumn day’s work the city hardly feels as though it is preparing for an evening out, only ambling home to the game shows on TV.
    It is hardly an inspiring introduction, either. The outskirts of the city are shabby, drab and colourless, the downtown centre is sombre. Statues, fountains and frescos are everywhere, but in the gathering dusk all seems monochrome. Heavy arcaded streets lurch in parallel past our windows, with pompous palaces of plutocracy one after the other, a Gothically steepled church here, a stately railway station there. The General Post Office is enormous. The Banca d’Italia is immense. The Palace of Justice is foreboding. Steep stone staircases link one street with another. A tunnel inexplicably disappears into a hillside. What looks like a prison is only an old dock warehouse. What is surely the Prefect’s Palace is a branch office of an insurance company. Paul Theroux, recording his impressions of Trieste in 1995, employed the adjectives serious, gloomy, dull, solemn and lugubrious . To me Trieste on an autumn evening suggests the work of those English Victorian painters who specialized in seaports at the end of the day, with pale gaslight shining on wet pavements, and pub windows dimly illuminated. Also at such twilight moments I find it easy to imagine a Trieste handed over to the authority of some now defunct People’s Republic, as it so nearly was in 1945, to be re-created swart, suspicious and smelling of sausages.
    But if after checking in at the hotel we stroll around the corner to a restaurant, we shall find it, on the contrary, comfortably bourgeois. No fragrance of offal here, only of mushrooms or vegetable soup. The furnishings are plush, the lights are not glaring, near the door there is a serving-wagon loaded with fish on ice. No more than a dozen customers, I would say, are at their victuals in this decorous retreat, and they all look like members of the upper middle classes, of a certain age: doctors and their wives, we may surmise, a few academics, a bookseller perhaps, a couple of cultivated businessmen. They all seem to know each other, swopping pleasantries across the tables and eyeing one another’s dresses without embarrassment. They listen with attention to each other’s conversations, they are careful not to notice when a rucksacked couple comes in wearing jeans and T-shirts, and they are all clearly well-known to the management. For that matter so am I, if this is, as I rather think it is, the same restaurant at whose table, in 1978, I wrote with vinous pleasure in the book I was reading “Am I really paid to do this?”
    And yes, presently the proprietor, excusing himself from his conversation with the obvious Professor of Slav Linguistics eating alone at the corner table, comes over to greet me. “How are things?” I ask him. “Much the same,” he tonelessly replies, sweeping a hand around his half-empty restaurant. “We are still happy.”
    HE WAS surely speaking only half in irony, because it always seems to me that despite its public disappointments down the years, privately this city is generally content. In the morning, when