October 2 (Day Twenty)
After packing we make a Monday-morning errand run, set up by weekend events, down Trubarjeva cesta: I pick up my pictures of Trieste and Piran from a fast photo place that wasn’t fast, so this has to be it or... (they understand and the embarrassed woman this time has them ready for me on the counter); next door Lindy buys a discounted brown jacket she has been secretly eying for days for the Frankfurt Book Fair (because she is worried about not having dressy enough clothes there); then we stop at number 8, Zrno do Zrna, a natural-foods store that was closed all weekend, and restock on dried fruit, cereal, and crackers at (the guidebook translates its name as Grain to Grain, so Slovenian must have the equivalent of a dative or ablative for nouns).
The departure from Ljubljana is cheerful this time, and the highway across Slovenia to the border goes by in about an hour—quick passage, a trophy Slovenija stamp on the passport this time. We come back down from the Trieste hills into the city again (there are those Italian cops in their hats), but our carefully planned route to the James Joyce is aborted, as we get turned the wrong way in traffic without realizing it, can’t locate ourselves on the map, and so head to the waterfront for a point of reference—then back to the central piazza, up the adjacent narrow streets to the construction area above the Via Cavazzeni alley.
Paolo had suggested parking here and unloading our things. On that same brief trip up the alley, he pointed out informal spaces where we could stick the car for the entire time. Unfortunately, by contrast with then, the zone is completely wedged in, cars blocking other cars. We insert ourselves in this mess at least for the time necessary to carry our stuff to the Joyce. On the way down Cavazzeni we do have some second thoughts about our choice of accommodations, as dust and stones are raining down around us, soot into nasal passages and lungs. The entire block is being gutted, a city skinned to its bone. One could have easily avoided this mini-desolation, but fate has a way of choosing what it will.
“Buongiorno!” is our greeting; we are back in Italy. he owner, Andrea, on duty today, is a stocky, black-haired guy in his mid thirties with one of those ageless bulldog faces that can be either excessively harsh or friendly, and he is decidedly friendly. In fact, when we debate with him where to put our car, he proposes to give us a discount on our room to offset more than half the twelve-euro a day parking fee. “That ends the argument, no?” he says. “I call the garage.”
Of course.
The room is spacious and colorful, which almost makes up for the noise and dust outside as well as office windows facing us just across the narrow alley. We do a quick sink laundry and then prepare to go on a lunch expedition.
Downstairs I chat with Andrea while waiting for Lindy. We find many mutual topics, the first being basketball, starting with Bostjan Nachbar and then proceeding to other Yugoslavian players on the New Jersey Nets, the present Nenad Krstic and Mille Ilic, both Serbian, and one Croatian, Zoran Planinic, as well as the former Croat star Drazen Petrovic, killed on the highway outside Berlin in 1993 on the same rainy day we arrived there from Amsterdam during our first trip to Europe.
Andrea shakes his head in tragedy. “Half my family is from Croatia,” he says. “Petrovic was a hero.” He is led suddenly to try to reconstruct the trade of Petrovic to the Nets, and we both recall Sam Bowie, who went the other way, and then he uses the reference to the Portland Trailblazers, partners in the trade, to recall Clyde Drexler, a favorite of his whom he saw play here in Italy in some context. His Italian-accented version of the Trailblazers’ name makes it almost a Euro-league entry. He closes this discussion by reminding me that the number one pick in the NBA this year was, for the first time, an Italian. I had forgotten that.
Next I tell him about Hotel Milano, and it turns out that he is a long-time, though lapsed, friend of Stefano. “Stefano Stern! He and I studied at the university. We used to sit at the same table in the library. He was reading medicine. was reading law. Look at us now—both managing hotels.” He sneers clownishly and reaches for the portable receiver. He dials Stefano and succeeds in getting him at once to the phone. In his enthusiatic rush of words, I make out “Americano” and “medico.” He hands the receiver to me.
Stefano is delighted that I am back and hopes we can meet again. He regrets, however, that he might not be able to make it to the castle, as his job is interfering; the Milano is mobbed for a football match, and he must go to the market for more food.
After the conversation, Andrea muses about the difference between his hotel, which he purchased six years ago, and the Milano. He aims, he says, for a more literary, intellectual trade. “Maybe it’s our name, but I try to live up to it. That was the success of the man I bought it from. Lately we’ve been getting professors from England and Australia. We get lots of movie directors for film festivals, and poets, and statesmen. And another thing: this last year or two lots of people are returning to Trieste looking for their roots. American and British soldiers had kids during the occupation. They grew up in other countries, and now they are looking for their mother’s side of the family. I once got a former soldier staying here while he searched for a child he left behind. Too bad; he didn’t find her.”
With Andrea’s help on directions, Lindy and I set out looking for one of Paolo’s recommended restaurants, Mama Rosa. Skirting the edge of Piazza Unita D’Italia, we go down Via Cavana to Via F. Venezian, then turn onto Via A. Diaz. We are trying to locate Piazza Hortis but somehow end up in Piazza Venezia, so work our way back by Via Torino. Even so we cannot find the restaurant where it is supposed to be; we walk around the square, then up and down the streets leading into it. Finally we ask at a bar and, from the directions, realize we have been standing in the restaurant much of the time we were looking for it. All of the tables being served across the piazza belong to Mama Rosa, as it is called locally, though the formal name, Siora Rosa, presents itself rather modestly on a sign around the corner.
We select a table under a chestnut tree, and a couple of fat shiny nuts soon drop into the pile beside my chair. A laid-back, articulate waiter brings the menu and, as it is all Italian, he translates, in no apparent hurry despite the number of tables on his watch. He turns out to be the manager. When he asks us how we found the place and hears our answer, he is delighted because, he says, though he does not know either Paolo or Andrea, he always recommends the James Joyce to his customers. We order two vegetable dishes to share, spinach and artichoke hearts and a kind of nut ravioli.
While we are waiting for our food and staring at the mysteriously elegant woman seated alone at the adjacent table, silently making up our own romantic stories for her, we are interrupted by a burst of appellations directed our way. Realizing simultaneously that someone has recognized us and that this is near impossible here, I turn to see the two Austrian sisters from our breakfast in Ljubljana. Bubbling over with delight at finding us by chance, they take seats at our table but decline the offer of sharing a meal. Conversation ranges over their archaeology so far in Trieste, their choice of a hotel (down the coast on the water), homeopathy’s minimum dose, psychosomatic medicine, and energy medicine in general (we search for an English term for something Karin knows in German and settle on “vibration”). Of course, all of this conversation is with the doctor, while her sister smiles far more gregariously than in the Park cafeteria, the sustained pleasure (I think) of the unlikely coincidence. Karin is in all likelihood one of those great healers, a person whose heart and intellect are deep and transcend modality.
“Buonasera,” Andrea greets us that evening, as we come down to the lobby to wait for Paolo who is meeting us for dinner. “Paolo called. He is on his way.” The dapper student we met a week earlier arrives, shakes our hands, and a few minutes later we are cutting through alleys, heading for the fish restaurant that Lindy and I were not able to find on two separate occasions.
In answer to questions, Paolo summarizes his mixed-media electronic music career. After growing up outside Venezia, he came to Trieste because its university is pretty much the only place in Italy where there is serious interest in this kind of music. Ultimately, though, he is aiming at Santa Barbara where an important composer, a friend of his mentor at Trieste, teaches. Never having been to the U.S., he wonders about California—the kind of city Santa Barbara is, the weather, the distance (for instance, from where we live to there), public safety. He says that he needs to improve his English, and tonight is a good opportunity. I am surprised to hear that he, like the clerk in Piran, has no formal English-language education of any sort but has simply picked it up on the street. In fact he asks us what we think of his English, and Lindy says, “Very good”; at the same point I chorus, “Good, good.”
“I need to improve if I am going to study in the States. I need more than a few words. You will challenge me tonight with concepts, no?”
The fish restaurant turns out to be dark, closed Monday nights, so Paolo halts at a distance and proposes that we backtrack to Citta Pisino and, though we mention our earlier, rather drab and alienated meal there, he thinks we can order much more interesting dishes this time. We turn and head back toward the hotel
Though we pass Mama Rosa’s outdoor tables twice—going and coming—and see our lunch waiter both times, I can’t quite get up the gumption to introduce Paolo to him. It would be complicated language-wise and perhaps not appropriate by local etiquette, plus he is very busy. Speaking of waiters, we have the same one as before at Citta Pisano, though he doesn’t seem to recognize us, maybe because we are without the computer and accompanied by a real Italian, a regular—or maybe he just doesn’t acknowledge recognizing us.
Paolo suggests that we order in classic Italian fashion: a first course and then a second. We are not that hungry but agree to follow his lead and order spaghetti and mussels and a vegetable soup. Our second course, requested at the same time, is a platter of orata, a small flatfish freshly caught; in fact, the waiter brings out a giant pan of them to show us, whole fish just arrived from the dock. I don’t remember such a presentation from the kitchen to the diners in any restaurant before, a whole day’s catch, but it makes a certain sense and adds a funky authenticity to Citta Pisano, even if a little more than one might want to know about the items for consumption. I actually have no idea what kind of fish it is, and later that evening, after being shown the page in my notebook, Paolo has me cross out “errata,” which is what it sounded like, not a comment on correctness, and spells out the accurate Italian name. “I don’t think there’s an English for it,” he adds.
While we are working the first course, his cell phone rings and, after a brief conversation—“ciao!” he tells us that that was his ex-girlfriend. She has just gotten into town from Croatia and maybe will be joining us. During the ensuing conversation he explains that they recently split up but are still good friends. She is Croatian; he met her at the university, but she has finished her studies and is moving to northern Italy, near Austria, to take a job.
While we are finishing our first courses and still, in fact, hearing the nuances of Paolo’s and Katya’s situation (without learning much of substance), she arrives. There is a moment, even though it is long before she is expected, that I think the very woman we are characterizing might be striding confidently in the door. She is. Even at a distance she is striking, kind of like an Italian model—very tall, thin, lithe, wearing a pale green jacket, a white polo shirt, and dungarees. As she takes the empty chair and flashes a quick ambiguous smile at Paolo, one feels her skittery energy and intelligence, an almost crane-like presence—she is a woman to notice, a woman who will be heard. Since Paolo is a handsome young classical musician in his own right, they make quite a celebrity couple, a bit off-Hollywood, maybe more Cannes, except that they are not a couple anymore. She wears small black rectangular glasses on a very round symmetrical face, pointed chin. Once she starts talking in earnest, she sounds like the graduate student she is.
Her thesis in Italian was on Austrian German writers, particularly Arthur Schnitzler, the Viennese novelist whose book was the basis of Stanley Kubrick’s last movie (finished by Steven Spielberg), Eyes Wide Shut. She is very interested not only in that novel and Schnitzler’s work in general but the circle of literature and psychological theory around him. Her specialty, though, is modern Austrian fiction, and she intends to keep pursuing it, even though her job is in the natural-foods business.
She has provided a lot to talk about in just a few minutes, and Paolo is more or less left out as we discuss both the Kubrick movie and her job. Because we have not read the novel and do not know German, we are, by her estimate, quite a ways from qualifying for a cogent discussion on her thesis, but she condones some exploration of psychosexual and existential themes based on our knowledge of the movie and European literature in general. When I point out that Kubrick possibly borrowed aspects of the terrifying masked orgy ball from a Kenneth Anger experimental movie of the 1950s or 1960s with a Janacek score, she writes that down on a pad, as Lindy and I struggle to remember the title and settle for Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, which might or might not be exact. We each have edgy ideas to supply about Eyes Wide Shut, a provocative movie by any standard, from political conspiracy theories to levels of neo-Freudian symbolism. We all agree that the single piano notes used to cover Tom Cruise’s character’s entry into the estate where the masked ball is being held are remarkably spooky—skeletal keys emptied of corporeality.
Katya has no particular knowledge of the natural-foods business, but this company, she explains, is well funded and own a lot of Italian farmland on which to do organic agriculture. “It may not be the best job for me, but it is the best opportunity. I can still study Austrian. We will be opening the Croatian market to organic products from Italy. he market is small now, but it is growing very rapidly. I speak all three languages, so that is why they recruited me. And, of course, I am from the place they want to sell to.”
She doesn’t even consider English one of her languages. Like Paolo, she just picked it up. owever, she is a natural linguist because she is able to be playful and wry in a language she doesn’t consider that she knows, something that Paolo can’t yet do with his English.
We tell her about our publishing, the many natural-foods and health-oriented books we have done, and I say we will send her samples of anything she thinks she can use in her job, though of course we are publishing in the wrong language. She asks for cards from us—we each give her one—and she writes down her name and email address on a page from her pad and hands it to me: Katya Rose, with a Croatian circumflex over the “s.” I don’t know if Rose is her surname or middle name, but I assume the former.
My journal notes from the meal indicate a few other random things:
•I remark that Trieste is where we have come instead of Venice, but now I don’t regret it. Katya responds, “Venice is impossible. It is always the same. You can’t escape it.” As far as she is concerned, it is no contest.
•She comes from a part of Croatia that was not affected by the war, in fact to where others fled during her adolescent years.
•She has no interest in ever seeing America but leaves it up for our interpretation why that is. “There are many places I would like to go, but you would have to say that America is lowest on the list. Maybe Texas. I’d like to see Texas, but that’s all.” Odd exception.
She asks for our point of view, and I give a short speech about how space is not particularly well used in America , so becomes part of a tyranny of isolation and distance. Things here are crafted and organized complexly to fill geography. Objects and relationships between objects are textured and cared for on a micro-scale.
When she asks next why guns are so common in the States, I am now able to say they are necessary to fill and guard the space because with so much exposure, with such undetermination of territory, one is constantly vulnerable. America is linear in terms of danger and threat, and the outlaw mentality breeds the constant illusion of victory over space by attack. Here everything is wound tight, like the James Joyce itself, an enlarged nautilus shell.
Her expression and quick glance at Paolo, I fantasize, convey that she is confirmed in her preference of Vienna over Santa Barbara.
•There is no great interest in “biologique” in either Italy or Croatia at present; in fact, Italy is notorious for “spraying everything.” (Her emphasis on the word “everything” has an immediate impact on my enjoyment of the present meal, plus I think about our other restaurants since Damanhur. Oh well, you can’t protect yourself from the cosmos.)
We pick up the tab for dinner, and Paolo immediately offers that they will take us for dessert, but first let’s walk in the piazza and along the waterfront.
As we enter Piazza Unita D’Italia, we hear a strange lilting music; it is quite loud and from across the other side. The melody is very familiar, I think something like “Lullaby and Goodnight.” We walk toward it. “Maybe he wants we should go to sleep,” Katya says.
A shabbily dressed figure is standing at the corner of the piazza, hunched over an indescribable instrument with a box for donations.Either he is strumming a harp with strings so thin that I cannot see them, or he is pulling on an imaginary harp, pantomiming music with theatrical fingers in midair, while a hidden speaker is blaring out a recorded song.
“That’s a theremin,” Paolo says. None of us have heard of it. In fact, Lindy thinks he is making it up, that there is no instrument there, just a tape playing.
“No,” says Paolo, “it is a real instrument. It works by a magnetic field. He is disturbing it with his hand.”
Lindy still is disbelieving. The song changes to “Ave Maria,” which we hear in the background as we cross the piazza toward a dessert place. Since Lindy is unconvinced, Paolo continues to describe the theremin. “It’s glissando, a gliding across scales. There is no gap between frequencies. One turns into another as field changes. They just slide along. That’s what makes the haunting sound.”
“It could be a more interesting selection,” Katya remarks in regard to the tunes themselves.
“There are whole classical symphonies composed for theremin,” Paolo says. “He may not know them. Or maybe he thinks these songs will bring money.”
The next morning he hands Lindy the following page, printed out from the Internet:
“One of the first electronic instruments, and the only instrument played without being touched, the theremin (taer’-uh-min) was invented in 1918 by Leon Theremin, a Russian physicist born in St. Petersburg who stumbled upon the device while working with radio signals for the Russian government. It was first sold in 1929 by RCA; Big Briar (Robert Moog’s company) is the leading manufacturer today.
“The theremin is a synthesizer that uses a field monitored by two antennae (one horizontal and one vertical, forming a right angle) as the input device (instead of, e.g., a keyboard). The field created within this right angle reads ‘capacitance’ to produce noise sounding something like a cello. Moving your hand (or a wand) within that angle disturbs and changes the electromagnetic field between the antennae, one of which reads changes in amplitude (and produces changes in volume) and one of which reads changes in frequency (and produces changes in pitch)…. The produced tone is the ‘pulse’ frequency between the two oscillator frequencies.”
The piazza is quite magical with its great wide space so fully lit and bounded majestic buildings and the Gulf. We end up at the same expensive dessert place as before our walking tour and, when Lindy wants to order tiramisu, Katya coaches her on the correct way to pronounce it, prompting her on the long “u” so that the two women repeat it a number of times to the point of goofiness, “Tira mis-uuuu.” She suggests we also try the signature Viennese chocolate marmalade cake called sacher tort—so those are our two desserts. Paolo remarks that Unita D’Italia is the only piazza in Italy that has no church and also the only one that goes all the way to the water.
As we walk to that water after dinner, I ask him about the mysterious blue alchemical lights that line the sidewalk at various points here. He says, “They mark where the sea came to before the human construction.”
With other evening strollers we head out on the public pier, Molo Audace. All along the shore here, little Roman-style pavilions-tents with curtains have set up in a row and sailboats have docked in preparation for the weekend’s coming spectacle and races. From out in the dark of the gulf on Molo Audace, the night city shines with its own signature. I have the intimation that “now” is both fleeting and forever. It is not a new intimation; it comes and goes.
“Audace is named,” Paolo says, “after the first Italian warship to dock here when Trieste was returned to Italy after the fall of the Austrian Empire.” I ask him about the name of the street—almost a parkway—between the water and the piazza, as it has my birthday: Riva Tre Novembre. He doesn’t know.
We dash across the street to the piazza ahead of a swarm of motorcycles and set a course back to the James Joyce. Passing kids in groups on the sidewalk with guitars, couples out strolling in the piazza—an active night life—we cut through a couple of narrow twisting alleys that smell like dust and urine. As a small detour Paolo leads us to the site of the walls and entrance of the one-time Jewish ghetto. This remains a poverty-stricken area: a few small scooters parked along a stone wall that merges into a towering wall of corroded concrete, windows in its crumbling façade. A tiny passageway in the stone, maybe seven and a half feet tall by three and a half wide, is unexceptional until Paolo says that this is where they shut the ghetto closed at night.
Standing here in the dark three quarters of a century later, I feel some of the resonance of that event, as one wouldn’t by just looking at a photo or hearing an account. The massive fortress of stone walls, even in decay, contrast bluntly with the constriction of the opening and the general squalor to cast a montage of the word “ghetto,” as it might be used both, say, in Los Angeles to depict a neighborhood, and, quite differently, in the forerunner of a twentieth-century prison camp (e.g. concentration habitat) or a contemporary American jail packed with political prisoners bearing life sentences (i.e., drug users and urban poor).
A mood of oppression, separation, and persecution still come across, along with the mystery of cruel human behavior, which has after all, apocalyptically, gotten even more callous and heedless in the decades since. It occurs to me passingly that I am Jewish, something I don’t often think of. I try to identify as a representative within our present group but, in truth, the “Jewishness” of this spot is not the main referent I feel for the situation—I imagine Somalia, Darfur, Bosnia, Gaza, the Mexican border—an indication of how the holocaust and its trademark European shibboleths of ethnic oppression and genocide have been fully globalized.
Yes, there is an “Anne Frank” moment here too, a sense of humans scurrying though this opening like farm animals into their sty—but we are too close to Bosnia and Sudan not to feel the modernity as well.
Back at the James Joyce, Andrea is in high spirits at our return. He wants everyone to sit down, as he announces, “Schnaps” and goes for a bottle of liquor from the pantry.
“Andrea, what is Tre Novembre—Riva Tre Novembre?”
He stops and thinks. “Maybe it is the martyrdom of Saint Giusto. That’s what I think.”
“It’s his birthday.”
“Oh,” Andrea stops, giving me a curious glance.
I try to take pictures of everyone, but my old-fashioned camera, operated by a conventional battery, won’t snap when pushed. Andrea, Paolo, Lindy, and Katya form a group and pose before the front desk, but nothing happens, though I keep pressing frantically.
“The camera is dying,” Katya proposes with mock drama.
“You need a new battery,” Andrea says.
Just as the group is breaking up, it clicks and the flash goes off. I have a few pictures like that of the evening, not what was posed but what was shot after we had given up.
After one round of schnaps, Andrea goes and gets some prizes from his library to show off. One of them is a fat bilingual translation of the poems of Umberto Saba, a Jewish writer of the last century about whom Lindy and I know nothing. A brief glance at the poems shows them to be wonderful—moving, spare, contemporary. Andrea tells us that Sabo had a bookstore in town, and it is still there, a small place selling used books now, and we can go in the morning, he will give us directions. The Australian professor who assembled this book, he adds, stayed at the James Joyce during the process.
The edition is Australian, a publisher called Aeolian Press. Lindy asks to borrow the book, and Andrea grandly extends it. Then she takes the elevator to read it in our room. I decide to bide a little longer with the group.
“Look in the eyes when you say ‘Cheers!” Paolo almost chides me because I am bashful as we clink glasses on our second round.
Andrea proposes a third round, but I am feeling like heading upstairs. “It’s early,” he roars. But I am not quite sure I belong in this group. I think that these friends might like to be alone together.
Andrea pours, so we are to drink again. “We are all getting so old,” he moans as he raises his glass. But he is in his late thirties; Paolo is 31, Katya 25.
That night I write in my journal something that I have said more meticulously and poignantly elsewhere, but these are the words at this time: “I think we are all just frequencies, sliding along a scale, sustained by something invisible as we materialize and vanish through this realm, this place where we work so hard to be in bodies. Time for anyone is always slipping away. These solid shapes are just the ghosts we inhabit to be in this realm, this realm of solid-seeming confections and landscapes, made of electrical charges held between orbits to simulate the music of our lives.”