The Pillars of Hercules

I saw some the next day—panhandlers holding politely worded signs, and disoriented families with bags and boxes idling at the port. After the Venetian capriccio, this sobriety. The Triestini themselves were taller than Italians I had been seeing, and paler, and rather laconic. It was a city of suits, a businesslike place with an air of solidity and prosperity.

James Joyce had been that most enigmatic of refugees, a literary exile in Trieste, sitting out the First World War in a Triestine apartment and writing his masterpiece about Dublin. But he had come there earlier. From 1904 to 1906, fleeing Ireland, practicing “silence, exile, cunning,” he was an English teacher in Trieste’s Berlitz School, while writing short stories. After a brief absence he returned to Trieste in 1907 and gave private English lessons. One of his students, Hector Schmitz, was middle-aged (Joyce was a highly excitable twenty-five-year-old) and a businessman, yet when Joyce showed him an early draft of his short story “The Dead,” his student brought out two novels he had written under his pen name. He told Joyce that they were old hat—he had published Una Vita, twelve years before, and Senilitá in 1898. The young Irishman declared him a neglected genius. Senilitá especially pleased him.

It is easy to see why. The novel is about desire as self-deceiving, and it is firmly located in a city. The style is remorselessly plain, and every phase of the main character’s infatuation is described. Emilio is a writer made susceptible by literary vanity, and obsessed by Angiolina, who both teases him and grants him the occasional sexual favor. Angiolina is a tricky and lovely young woman, who obviously has other lovers. The humiliations of passion in a labyrinthine city fascinated Joyce—both Schmitz and his hero were to become aspects of Joyce’s henpecked hero, Leopold Bloom; and Schmitz’s meticulous documentation of Trieste must have impressed the Irish writer, who was to fill Ulysses with the actual streets and pubs and theaters of Dublin.

Looking for Svevo’s Trieste I realized how much a knowledge of the city mattered to an understanding of the novel. The city is Emilio’s world. The love affair is enacted throughout the city. They meet in the center of town, on the Corso. Later, “They always met in the open air.” Emilio woos Angiolina on the suburban roads, all of them named, and then they keep to the edge of the city, the Strada d’Opicina and the Campo Marzio.

I went to the Campo Marzio in the southwest corner of Trieste, where Emilio “saw the Arsenal stretching along the shore … ‘The city of labor!’ he said, surprised at himself for having chosen that place in which to make love to her.” Some pages later Emilio is shadowing Angiolina on the opposite side of town. I went there too, to the Public Gardens and across to the Via Fabio Severo and down the Via Romagna. I climbed to the Castle and walked down the hill to the Piazza Barriera Vecchia and had a coffee and pastry on the Corso again, delighted to be able to guide myself through the city by using a novel that was almost a hundred years old.

There were no tourists in Trieste that I could see. That was a conspicuous absence, because Venice was so frenzied with them. But why would tourists come here? True, there was a Roman amphitheater in town, yet another, behind the Corso, and a broken Roman arch—the gate of the old city—but that was so ruinous and disregarded it simply stuck out of a seedy building in a backstreet, at the edge of a building site, and was somewhat in the way. Later I found out that it was the Arco di Riccardo, named after Richard the Lionhearted, who was imprisoned here on his return from the Crusades. There was no sign on the arch, only a recently scribbled exclamation: Fuck the Fascists Forever!

At about just the point I had decided that Trieste was the quietest, most law-abiding place I had seen so far, I witnessed a vicious nighttime street fight.

It was my second night in the city. I was walking through the lamplit Piazza Italia, having just eaten another good meal (and also thinking of the rationing in Croatia). I heard screams—a young woman howling; then men shouting, and loud bangs. It was outside a restaurant, the strange halting peristalsis of men nerving themselves to fight, like apes displaying anger. There were about eight or nine men, ill-assorted, first thumping on tables, then engaging in noisy sorties, drawing back and becoming more abusive with distance, then throwing the tables, a few chairs too. These were the economies of battle, just clatter and threats, a form of restraint; and all the while the young woman screeching. But at last there was no going back, and the men went at each other, kicking and punching, the wildest scene I had witnessed since leaving Gibraltar. It was the last thing I expected in Trieste.