On this hill of the Dead, situated opposite Italy’s last industrial valley, the cypress trees and cold marble slabs rise above the tall furnaces; here, stern mountains, balder than Mount Sinai, surround Trieste like an earthenware bowl that has been hardened by the sunlight and dried by the fearful northern bora. It’s the same scenery that impressed Stendhal as he arrived from Venice: the lower slopes of the Carso, the white limestone amphitheatre, extend southwards along the Istrian coast. From Trieste, Stendhal wrote: “Here I confront barbarity.”
I venture to fall in behind him.
The Italian-Yugoslav border divides two worlds; facing one is Asia, and those state-controlled lands that swallow up individuality as the plain imbibes the sand. Trieste is encircled, just as our little world is, just as Berlin is, and Israel, Madrid and the West; the rising tide does not attack head on, it takes the shore route, past millions of slip-knots, and progresses at a constant tangent; you might think that the ebb and flow of the Slavic sea, spurred on in turn by the Mongol ocean, bides its time; can no one see that it is advancing at the gallop?
With the city’s unresolved status, and a truce lasting a quarter of a century that has not brought peace, Trieste is reminiscent of a forgotten corpse that has been left hanging at the top of the Adriatic ogive, in poignant dereliction, during an interminable diplomatic winter; through a blank wall, there are a few windows for foreigners, such as the sinister road that leads to Ljubljana, the tourists’ entrance to the iron curtain. What does Tito want? Who shall succeed him? Supposing the Russians grow angry, what if the tanks of Prague… Trieste wonders.
My own family is buried in France, more than a thousand kilometres from here, in boundless peace, beneath an almost wordless tombstone (this was what my father wanted), at Yerres, where my great-grandparents had acquired a small property, part of lands that had once belonged to the monastic order of the Camaldules,1 which had been acquired by the State during the Revolution and later resold; because there was no more room in the family grave that I wished to be my final resting-place, I took refuge in the mausoleum of the E— family, offered to me by my cousins through marriage; it dates from the time of Franz-Josef, when Trieste was Austria’s port on the Adriatic, when Trieste was still alive.
It is a noble stone pyramid, six metres high, a piece of typically Italian eloquence, above which an angel twice as tall as a human opens a black marble door to the afterlife, as thick as that of an empty safe.
It is a tomb that is very different to the funereal sites of the great capital cities, with their crowded tombstones and their serried ranks of monuments that are frequented by enemies and strangers alike. The greenest of graveyards surrounded by the desert of the living. Blond or dark, Nordic or Latin, Orthodox or not, what will it matter beneath the ground?
That is where I shall lie, after this long accident that has been my life. My ashes, beneath this earth; an inscription in Greek will testify to the fact;2 I shall be watched over by the Orthodox faith towards which Venice has conducted me, a religion whose joy lies in stillness and that continues to speak in the first language of the Gospels.
NOTES
1. A religious order of monks and hermits, founded by St Romuald in 1010, in the valley of Camaldoli in Tuscany. [Tr.]
2. In translation this reads: Traveller go on your way with her, who was, who is, who will for ever be your guardian angel. [Tr.]
AFTERWORD
WHEN PAUL MORAND wrote Venises, at the age of eighty-two, he had finally achieved the recognition which had eluded him for a quarter of a century. His literary beginnings had been auspicious enough; many of his pre-war novels proved to be bestsellers. But after 1945, his reputation was ruined as the full extent of his wartime political activities came to light. Morand’s unfailing support of the collaborationist regime of Pétain and Laval during the darkest hours of the Occupation, rewarded with an ambassadorship to Switzerland, and his subsequent denial of any wrongdoing, had resulted in a long self-imposed exile in Vevey, along the shores of Lac Léman. Morand’s universe had collapsed. His books no longer sold, and he had to endure constant slights. Ironically, he was being persecuted for political beliefs which were never deeply held; rather, he had been opportunistic, short-sighted and foolish. Yet it is during those years of uncomfortable purgatory-like isolation that Morand wrote some of his best novels, and a masterpiece, Hécate et ses Chiens. His friends in France felt it was time to launch a campaign for his rehabilitation. After much discussion among literary and political circles, in 1968, General de Gaulle lifted his veto to Morand’s election to the Académie Francaise. This bittersweet victory, far from taming him, gave the ageing writer a partial sense of vindication.
But perhaps there is another explanation for the lack of esteem in which Morand was held until those late years. For much of his life Morand was preceded by his reputation: as a lightweight, a social figure who dabbled in literature — a certain kind of effortless but shallow travel-literature — the inveterate traveller, always hurried, restless, distracted, never grounded, never satisfied. Family connections, not to mention Marcel Proust’s friendship with the young writer, were thought to have advanced his literary career, when he actually saw himself as a solitary, melancholy, introverted adolescent whose literary ascent was hesitant1. Indeed, in his Journal inutile, Morand recalls his distaste for the sort of social life which would become his trademark.
There is little doubt that Paul Morand lived a privileged childhood; summers were spent in Italy, and he was first taken to Venice at the age of sixteen (in September 1904). His parents rented a small apartment in a palazzo near the Traghetto San Maurizio and would return to it every year. Evenings were spent with Eugene Morand’s artist-friends and poets, Brianchon, Dunoyer de Segonzac and the near-mythical figure of Henri de Régnier among them. Together they formed a small circle of high-minded friends who shunned publicity and ostentation in favour of refined intellectual pleasures. Often they would congregate in the cafés of a deserted Piazza San Marco. Amidst the universal theatre of his adolescence loomed the eccentric, extravagant figure of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the poet of immense erudition and charm. It did not take long for the young Morand to fall under the spell of the city that worships beauty, and, being an avid reader, he delighted in Venice’s historical associations with great literary figures, from Shakespeare, Goethe and Byron to Chateaubriand and Alfred de Musset. He also admired the more decadent figures of Casanova and Georges Sand. In Venice, the aspiring writer discovered the meanderings of a cultural tradition of which the Laguna itself provided a fascinating reflection in its layout. The sense of exhilaration derived from seeing the art of the great masters, from Crivelli to Tiepolo, from the innocence of the early masters to the decadence of the eighteenth century, helped define Morand’s aestheticism. Crucial to him was the understanding that Art is the path towards self-realization. This notion never left him, even in the bleakest moments of his life. In Venice, he also met his first great love, the young painter Lisette Haas. The impression La Serenissima left on the adolescent was such that he would return to it throughout his life, not unlike a man who revisits an old flame. Venice appears to be the thread that binds together the disparate episodes of the novelist’s long life.
At the end of 1910, Morand wrote his first novel, Les Extravagants (the manuscript, thought to have been destroyed in a fire, was found in Los Angeles in 1977 and published by Gallimard in 1986). In this first novel, Venice appears alongside London and Oxford as the city of youthful artistic and aesthetic dreams. But more interestingly, the same novel introduces Morand’s “cosmo politan” ideal, the meeting of culture and diplomacy among Europe’s elite which he felt was rooted in the humanist tradition. The gradual disappearance of this fragile order is at the forefront of Morand’s enquiry in Venises.