October 3 (Day Twenty-one)
As Andrea rushes about, delivering breakfast to his little cafeteria full of guests, always at everyone’s service, Lindy compliments him: “Very nice.”
“I am happy,” he purrs.
Directed by him to a camera store just to the left of alley Cavazzeni’s lower egress, I hurry out and return with a new battery inserted by the clerk, anxious to try it to out. Paolo has arrived in the meantime, so Andrea leads him behind the counter, in front of the liquor bottles, and there they pose: Andrea, jacketless with a modern-art tie and a beatific smile; Paolo, his striped shirt opened a few buttons to a bare chest, the beginnings of an ironic grin. “The masters of the James Joyce,” Andrea proclaims.
“I’m James,” adds Paolo, “and he’s Joyce.”
The same woman is at the Milano desk as at the near-desperate moment we arrived the first time. Pleased to see us, apparently aware of our adventures in the lobby since our last contact, she summons Stefano from the office without being prompted. He is there instantaneously and continues right out from behind the front desk to meet us. Immediately, though, his happy greeting slides into a frown, as he confesses, “We cannot see the castle. Papa says we must go to the market for food. We have been mobbed by futebol crowds. Now we are empty. He is not strong enough to go himself.” He puts his right hand on his chest, “Heart. I am so sorry.”
“But I am unclear,” I say. “I thought your uncle owned the hotel, and you managed it for him.”
“No, it is my father who is the owner. You see, I am born to the business.”
“Maybe we can meet your father,” Lindy proposes.
“You have met him,” he declares.
I am baffled.
“The large man, Sergio.” It turns out that the person who came to confront me over the phone-bill matter, albeit with no English, was Papa. Now I understand: that was a “tough cop/friendly cop” tag team of father and son who came from the office that first day at the summons of the peremptory clerk. “Don’t you see the resemblance?” Stefano asks, patting his belly. Then he takes a step toward the desk and calls out, “Papa.”
Sergio emerges from the innards like a balloon propelled and is quickly before us, as tame now as he was ferocious then, bowing to kiss Lindy’s hand, nodding grandly to me. Stefano prattles on in Italian, while Papa remains a paragon of welcoming smiles and good will, casting benign looks upon us, as if we are good children deserving of great praise. I see the resemblance: Sergio is not so much very large as very round. He is no taller than Stefano, actually a shade shorter, but both his head and chins have expanded to their limits, so he is a huge melon without a neck, right out of The Sopranos crew at the Bada Bing.Yet he is not a “mafia don” type. When happy, he is an Italian patriarch. Displeased, he turns temperamental diva.
Somehow as an offshoot of his soliloquy to Papa, Stefano now wants to make sure that he will get my book about my father’s hotel, and I promise again that I will have it sent. “No,” he protests, “I want to buy it, right now. And I also want to get a book with pictures of your hometown. Do you have such a thing?”
By luck we do have a color-photograph book called Berkeley.
“You said you wrote another book about your childhood. If I get all three of them, how much will I owe you?’
I figure out the sum and rough postage to Trieste, cut it to a third, translate to euros, and propose an amount. He takes out his wallet and hands me some bills.
As he does this, I am slightly embarrassed at the transaction, so turn to the clerk and ask her if she will help Stefano read the book if he has trouble. “But I am just learning to read Italian,” she says. “I don’t read English at all.”
This confuses me—she speaks English so well, why wouldn’t she know Italian?
The answer comes quickly, exposing my incurable provinciality; she is Croatian, from an island off the Istrian coast. At Lindy’s request she scribbles down her name for us: Diana Radimiri.
Over at the bar Stefano asks what we will have. Lindy decides on cappucino, and I take a mineral water. He serves them up with napkins. I remark on how much of a connection there is between Trieste and Slovenia and Croatia. Stefano waves his hand in a “pshaw” gesture: “It’s an hour’s drive. My sister lives in Capodistra, and we think of her as almost in town.”
“What does she do there?
“She is a correspondent for Slovenian TV. She reads the news in Italian because Italians watch Slovenian stations. She is very popular.”
Lindy asks if there is any chance he will return to medical school.
“No, I will follow Papa, sad to say. In many ways I follow Papa. Unfortunately I will attend the University of Eating too; I am already studying, as you can see.”
“Oh, you are quite slim and handsome,” Lindy says. “All you have to do is be careful over the years, and you’ll be fine.”
He thanks her and then asks, “Did Andrea tell you we studied together at University?”
I nod.
“We used to sit at the same library table, planning that we would be a lawyer and a doctor. Now we are hotel managers. We could not escape our fates.”
A little later, taking a paper place mat, he asks me if I can show him where I live, both in Maine and California. I am not much of an artist, but I draw an amorphous outline of the U.S., putting in rough humps at Maine, Florida, and Texas. He is shocked at how far apart our two homes are, like from England to Russia. The concept of living in two such houses is as inexplicable to him as the fluid multilingualism of Europe is to me.
As we get ready to say goodbye, he excuses himself, marches behind the desk, and unexpectedly produces the Milano laptop, extending me one more free round on it, an offer I won’t decline. In fact, as I am writing on it, I show him the email I have just sent, conveying his order.
Now that we are leaving in earnest, he calls Sergio—even Diana comes from behind the desk for our parting. I take two photographs of the group: Diana, Sergio, Lindy, and a beaming Stefano. Then Lindy insists on one of just me and Stefano. “We can email forever,” my friend says as we pose together. “And when you come back, you have to visit. We can go to the castle. Nothing will stop us this time. It doesn’t matter where you stay, the Milano, the James Joyce, because we are friends.”
We hug, and he touches cheeks with Lindy, both sides. As Papa Sergio bows yet again, we discover from an incidental comment that, despite appearances, he is exactly our age, born the same year, 1944. This adds to his appreciation of us, and he proceeds to say many things, none of which are translated, finally a booming “Arrivederci!” to send us on our way.
En route back to the James Joyce, Lindy and I follow Andrea’s directions to Umberto Saba’s store, only to find that it is closed. There is a bronze statue of Saba nearby on the sidewalk, out for the day in hat and cane and full-length evening coat, perhaps to meet the statue of James Joyce by the canal. Eschewing kitsch, Lindy poses beside it for me to photograph her, mainly an acknowledgment of her enjoyment of his poems the previous night.
We stop at the outdoor market and, finding the one biologique farmer there, procure a bunch of grapes, a nectarine, two small plums, a tomato, and a pomegranate to go with our crackers and last cans of soup and beans (from the Esselunga outside Lucca) so that we can improvise a lunch at the James Joyce.
Passing the Roman ruins and amphitheater, we realize, to our surprise, that this site is pretty much in the center of town. Today a crew of workmen doing restoration work is taking a lunch break, their food and drink spread on the old rocks themselves, a black cat stalking them from behind a pillar.
Back at our hotel, Andrea is anxious to help us set up the dining room for our private picnic, producing pots and knives and forks, and leading us to the stove and sink in the back. Then he introduces us to new guests from Vienna, a couple—bookstore owners who come, he says, every six months and stay at the James Joyce because they love Trieste. “I get all the literary visitors,” Andrea announces proudly with a glance at the photograph of his patron saint on the mantle.
These Austrians are just finishing cups of coffee, and the gentleman rises and immediately hands me his card: Walter Lux Und Sein Team, bringen mehr Licht in die Bücherwelt. Their English is minimal, but we have a point of common interest, the Frankfurt Book Fair, as we are headed there tomorrow. This year, they say, they are skipping it after twenty-one straight times, but they laud the event with a respect approaching awe, conveying a familiar sentiment that it will be overwhelming. The man is saying that something is “two times, three times,” and I don’t understand, so he repeats it in Italian, and then Andrea tells us that the restaurants in Frankfurt are not very good, but nonetheless they will double and triple their prices for the fair.
After lunch we decide that we will explore separately for the afternoon. Without a concrete goal but a craving for more roasted chestnuts, I try to find out from Andrea if there is a reliable vendor anywhere. He says, “No, not for sure,” but he takes the map and shows me a spot where I would be most likely to find one. Then he circles it. It is a part of the city we have experienced only when driving to and from Slovenia, maybe a mile from the Joyce, but I decide to go on the hunt.
While Lindy heads toward the waterfront, I use the ruins as my directional marker and aim for the outer territory. The journey takes on a life of its on. I soon end up on Via Carducci with its mobs. It feels like Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan, just traffic, narrow sidewalks, massive construction diverting pedestrians. A perception I had when we were in Trieste the first night returns: There are so many human beings, so many faces, uncountable by any real census, unconnected to other locales. Geopolitics says you can move all these people at once and make them an army, and history proves that you can do it, and history also proves in the long run that you can’t. Because here they are in the twenty-first century, marching outside of history, through the global market.
I am walking in a generic European city, with the direction of policemen detouring pedestrians around caverns in the road, as traffic zooms along—unlike my fellow walkers going nowhere, purposeless, agendaless, hoping to stumble upon something interesting, trying to decide at every point how far to keep going and whether I really care about chestnuts or this is just a game.
It is a game; I have lost any other meaning and am playing tourist. I figure that if I can merely find the place that Andrea indicated, the round will mercifully be over, but I never do, and after a while the goal changes: I consider myself lucky just to find a recognizable route back. Even to accomplish that, I have to work my way from well beyond the Milano to the vicinity of the James Joyce.
Of all my outings on the trip so far, this is the most nondescript and uncharming. It is just through the commercial district of some city that happens to be Italian. But then that’s how life is much of the time everywhere, the mythology of tourism and adventure merely disguising it.
At dinner time we make our third attempt to eat at Paolo’s favorite fish restaurant, this time with a reservation phoned in by him. We get confused again around Piazza Hortis (with its five different streets leading in and out) and then, as we pause under a street lamp to ascertain where we are, realize we are almost in front of the restaurant. Each of our errors magically canceled another one.
Weary but not very hungry, we are hardly in the spirit of a reservation for an Italian dinner. Those are meant to be many-course, all-evening affairs in which you get an appetizer and then two main dishes, as well as salad, soup, and a dessert, bottles of wine, and sit around talking and drinking, eating in spurts. We order only two appetizers—spaghetti and clams, and stuffed squid—and are out in forty minutes, a total embarrassment. In fact, Lindy apologizes for occupying a table.
On the way back to the Joyce I am looking for an Internet point off Via Cavana in a business called Knulp, proposed earlier by Paolo as a mixture between a café and a library, but we cannot even find its street on the map, and Lindy is impatient to get out of the neighborhood. I want to persist just a little longer, even though the setting is unpleasant: dark streets, young drunks along the buildings, smoking and shouting, draining bottles. Yet I remained convinced it is not dangerous.
Knulp is such an odd word. Finally, asking directions from a group outside a bar brings immediate recognition and leads us down an adjacent street that is not on our map. There we find a bunch of college-age people drinking coffee, playing chess, reading books on couches. For three euros we get online and read our email.
It is a pleasant evening, once we are out of the alleys, so we hang out in Piazza Unita D’Italia. A warm breeze coming off the Gulf, we walk to the water.
Smoking here is so ubiquitous and unexamined, as automatic as a blink, completely stylistic. As often as not, a hand is a gesture holding a cigarette. There is no sense, not even a glimmering, of negativity or toxic risk.
A terrible rock band is playing in front of one of the restaurants in the piazza. They keep turning up the speakers, and that finally drives us back to the Joyce. While Lindy goes upstairs, I sit with Paolo and Katya, who arrived while we were at dinner, but I soon sense that I shouldn’t be there. What seemed fluid and light the prior evening feels heavy and awkward tonight. Maybe they have stuff to work out. After all, who am I anyway? Just some tourist probably the age of their parents. I suddenly feel like an intruder latching onto their troubled romance and youthful energy.
It is easy to forget that one isn’t young any more, to inflate superficial camaraderie. I wonder if the undercurrent of sadness I feel is that Katya and Paolo are encountering the end of their affair and struggling with it. I sense that from her, but it could also be a projection of my own melancholy mood.
“See you in America,” they say almost simultaneously as I head upstairs.
But where or when? Texas? Santa Barbara? Berkeley? Never?