I cross the city from which Stendhal, suspect and barely tolerated, fled as frequently as possible to Venice, on “unauthorised transfer” (this Foreign Office, Personnel Department style survives still), as soon as he had drawn his salary as consul sans exequatur, the Austrian police resented the bold Jacobin innovations of his Histoire de la peinture; this was the Stendhal who, in January 1831, was beginning a short story, Les Mesaventures d’un Juif errant, whose hero kept all he possessed in a violin case, and who, after each disaster that befell him, started again with noth ing; a penniless Stendhal who was waiting for Louis-Philippe’s government to pay him his wages so that he could buy shirts and who, like Joyce later on, was growing bored here; both men were biding their time awaiting the great regrading of human beings that is known as death. For Beyle, in Trieste, just as in Milan and Civitavecchia, it was always a case of an ill wind; it was one of fate’s ironies that this eternal loser should have had ancestors whose name was Gagnon [gagner means to win]; what winnings could there be for someone who always took the wrong turnings in life? Beyle only ever loved Italy, which gave him the pox: “Kiss the lady,” his mother told her little boy, aged five; instead, he bit the beautiful lady.
The Grand Canal, Trieste
Through the villa’s old Austrian postern gate, blinded by some tame turtledoves flying past, after crossing an old-fashioned park I reach the house belonging to my two female cousins by marriage that clings to a spur out of which some depressed-looking trees, one on top of another, are searching for air, hemmed in as they are on all sides by twenty-storey blocks of flats that take advantage of the lack of foliage to peer out, between the bare branches, to see what is happening among their neighbours. It is the setting for a novel by Boylesve or Mathilde Serao. Quincunxes of rheumatic plane trees, their ancient scars filled with cement; the sea in the background; down below, the invisible city rumbles and weeps and murmurs, waiting for the moment to devour this old neighbourhood which makes its skyscrapers feel ashamed.
Intersected by two terraced ornamental ponds, and with box hedges shaped into balls, the path continues to climb up to the steps and towards the verandah of the Maria-Theresa dwelling, its pediment surmounted by some Vertumnus or other, eaten away by lichen, and flanked by fake Gothic towers from the time of the Emperor Franz-Josef, a noble residence from which the black smoke of its oil-fired heating system was now rising into the morning sun.
I come across my recluses, returning from their vegetable garden, carrying leeks in their baskets and holding between two fingers the first lady’s slippers, which they have picked in their latest luxury, a greenhouse for orchids. At table in the vast dining-room, where the Viennese silverware, a relic of long-vanished banquets, Héléne’s maternal grandmother — a grey tulle boa round her neck and with her hair cut short and very curly in the style of 1875 worn by the Tsarina Maria Feodorovna and her sister, Queen Alexandra of England — gazes down on the ritual of the midday dinner (with soup), and supper, eaten at half past six in the evening.
Trieste is a strange pocket of civilisation indeed, a city that conceals itself, with a population that is silent, reticent and fearful, and which still has a flavour of bygone times, surviving as if she were an exception, her tail between her legs, embarrassed by her Latin character in the midst of the blond Slovenes, the new conquerors from the opposing shore.
My cousins link every general political matter to news from a member of their family, one that is dispersed widely from Canada to Bombay, or to those of it who were left behind after the anguish brought about by dictatorships of the left or the right.
“The Trautt… you know: they were shot by the Nazis and thrown into a common grave…”
“Calliroe has just been thrown out of Alexandria, and given six hours’ notice…”
“Aristides’s memoirs have been banned in Athens…”
“Uncle André died in Vienna during the war, but what a wonderful way to go: he was listening to Tristan for the umpteenth time!”
“Dimitri is still doing hard labour on the Danube… When the Liberation came, he was able to identify his daughter because of a bracelet she wore on her arm.”
On the menu for the day is chicken fried à la triestine, which reminds me slightly of the way they cook it in Virginia, and it is brought in ceremoniously by their old Dalmatian servant who, in 1944, opted to be Italian rather than become a Yugoslav. Seen from Trieste, Venice is the southernmost point of civilization.
“Martha Modi in Parsifal, now that was quite something!”
“Karajan is no longer the figure he was twenty years ago…”
“It’s the soothing effect of that French woman…”
“What a mess she made of The Valkyrie!”
“Bertha’s spending the summer at Irène’s…”
“Sophie’s in Rome…”
“Athenai’s is expecting her second, in Salzburg.
“And Hilda’s having hers in February, in Marseilles…”
My room is ready; a hot air heater that must be a hundred years old has emitted a column of black grime up the walls as far as the ceiling, where the Baroque period Venetian stucco is congested with Viennese Second Empire shells. There’s a cup of herbal tea by my bedside light; my dear cousins had deliberated for a long time while they waited for me: “The last time he stayed, did he have camomile or verveine?” “No, I believe it was orange flower. I don’t know what’s happening to my memory!”
Tomorrow morning, we shall visit the Orthodox cemetery, as I had requested.
Greek independence, one hundred and fifty years ago, was responsible for a sudden dispersal of the Greek people; some set out once more on the ancient paths towards the Black Sea and the trade in wheat, from Galatz at the mouths of the Danube, as far as Odessa; others, feeling their way along the shores of the Mediterranean, like a blind man along a pavement, had gradually reached Trieste or Marseilles; later, they would venture as far as Bombay, London and New York. The E— had lived in Trieste, in their gardens on the headland, or in a house on Station Square that was as square and massive as a Genoese palazzo. Today, nothing is left apart from this villa, which is struggling to survive Italy’s present plight. Perfect French is spoken here, as well as German with an Austrian accent, otherwise it is the Dalmatian spoken in Trieste. “In the spring of 1945,” Triestinos say, “Field Marshal Alexander could have landed here, driven out the Croat partisans, and spared us forty days of deportations, pillaging and assassinations; in order to bar the way to Tito, who wanted the whole of Julian Veneto as far as Isonzo, thus presenting the West ‘with á. fait accompli’, no less than three months of negotiations were required in Belgrade and in London. How feeble all these experts were, with their A zones and B zones! Trieste had to keep her head down in order to avoid being caught in the vast net which the Slavs wished to cast over her.”
1971
A CEMETERY IN TRIESTE
WHAT FATE LIES in store for the souls belonging to these various cemeteries that separate the dead just as religions divide the living? Their tombs rise up along the slope of the hillside in a diversity that is the last luxury of the West: Italian, English, Russian necropolises, Jewish, Orthodox and Greek; all of them cared for, tended with flowers and set among wild grass, beneath ornamental holm oaks shaped like some dark drapery in the sunlight; the gardens of an archduke.