Venices

IV IT’S EASIER TO START THAN IT IS TO END, AT THE DOGES’ PALACE, 23 SEPTEMBER 1967

WHO WOULD ATTEMPT to build Venice again? One man ventured to do so, Volpi, in full flight, in October 1917, anno fra i più tristi della storia d’ltalia. On land that one would hardly dare call firm, he constructed Italy’s second port, Porto Marghera, in a terrain that bred malaria, mosquitoes and frogs. It developed into two thousand solid hectares of refineries and factories producing aluminium or refined nitrogen.

In a few days’ time we shall celebrate the fiftieth anniver sary of this astonishing enterprise; in this very place, at the Doges’ Palace, the first Venice is to pay homage to the founder of the second, il signor conte Volpi di Misurata.

Having climbed the Giants’ Staircase, then the Scala d’Oro, I enter the Great Council room, and I stand beside the woman who was the constant and kindly shadow of the celebrated Venetian.

Seventy-two doges look down upon us, lined up between the victories won by la Serenissima that are painted on the walls. Facing one another are the Gothic bays giving on to San Giorgio Maggiore, bathed in the setting sun, and Tintoretto’s Paradise. Above our heads, as if sculpted from a massive piece of gold, the immense oval of the ceiling painted by Veronese pierces the joists that seem to be pushed upwards by the brushwork of the clouds towards a sky that is higher than the actual one; the structural details disappear beneath the golden profusion of this floating Bucentaurus.

The last time I had seen Volpi was in Paris, in his hotel bedroom, in 1943; I discovered a man who was worn out by events, and whose gigantic creation was being called into question from the Adriatic to Libya; within a quarter of a century everything had been lost. I thought again about what Philippe Berthelot had frequently told me, by way of justifying the long anti-Italian tradition of the Quai d’Orsay: “They’re a mediocre instrument, we shall never do anything with the Italians.” (That’s true of war, which is Death, but it’s not true of industry, buildings, agriculture, which are Life.)

The Venetians are made of stern stuff and are proof against the deluge. They always extricate themselves; their houses all have two exits, one on the water, the other on land.

A victory in Venice is worth a hundred victories anywhere else.

Tonight is very much a final victory for Volpi the Venetian. The whole of Venice is here: the Cardinal Patriarch brings the Pope’s blessing; Andreotti, that of the government; he reads a telegram from Saragat celebrating the “genius of the man”; the Under-Secretary of State to the Treasury pays tribute to someone who, as Mussolini’s Minister of Finance, and with the backing of the Bank of England and loans from Morgan, saved his country; the Syndic and the whole Municipality of Venice listen to an account of Volpi’s life over many reigns, not one of which witnessed an undertaking that could not be ruined: what Volpi wanted, fifty years ago, exists; the 100,000-ton and more oil tankers enter by Malamocco and arrive at Mestre. At home, nobody would mention his name; here, they think only of the glory of the very serene Serenissima; politics are forgotten; we are among Venetians; Italy is but one century old, Venice fifteen, and the old adage remains true: Veneziani, poi Cristiani! (Venetians first, then Christians).

OCTOBER 1970

YESTERDAY I WAS at the Venice Courthouse. A photographer from Chioggia was being tried, accused of holding arty parties, which were attended by young Venetian boys. Alerted by the number of cars with Treviso, Padua and Trieste numberplates that were being parked there at night, the Chioggia police burst into his studio; the guests fled through the windows. The man’s lawyer pleaded not guilty, Merlin’s law on prostitution not being applicable, according to him, to male prostitution.

8 OCTOBER 1970

AT THE FENICE, the first performance of Aretino’s Cortigiana, by the Teatro stabile, at the “Festival of Prose”. Two parallel “witticisms”: a man from Siena, a candidate for the cardinalate, is learning the art of becoming a courtier; he is brought on in a curious piece of machinery, a sort of oven for shaping courtiers; an amorous Neapolitan braggart (gran vantatore) arrives; a procuress, who is meant to smooth his path, substitutes the baker’s wife for the woman he idolizes. There were a great many secondary characters, the most successful being the caricature of a man of letters, attired in manuscripts, the pages of which were sewn on to his costume and hung down, making him look like a bookstall.

The performance was “perishingly” boring, as Lucien Daudet used to say. Dialogue in regional dialect, obscene allusions and anti-clericalism in the worst possible taste: “Here come the Turks! For fear of being impaled, everyone has fled, apart from the priests”; incomprehensible and ignorant comments on literature or contemporary politics. The actors declaimed for five acts, abusando del registro urlato; dramatic art nowadays consists of nothing but exaggerated and bawled-out aggression; actors, whose job it is to “look as though” they are doing something, ought to be taught that they should look as if they are shouting, without actually doing so. If only they would give us Aristophanes, Calderón or Shakespeare, instead of constant Brecht. The result was the following, from this morning’s Corriere: “The audience, which to begin with was very large, disappeared during the interval.” “Il pubblico, molto numeroso all’inizio, ha calato durante l’intervallo.”

AUGUST 1969

THIS EXTREMITY of the Adriatic is a real lobster pot… All the refugees throughout History; within the arms of her lagoons the sea cradles a never-ending exodus: confronted with swamps that are impassable, Goths, Avars, Lombards have had to relinquish their prey; it was here that Philip-Augustus watched the Jews slip through his fingers, and where the Pope gave up trying to track down Aretino. Today, it is still Venice, rather than Crete and Istanbul, that the hippies, those scavengers after the Absolute, opt for before they set off from “foul” Europe.

I was coming out of one of those little delicatessens that are hidden away behind the Danieli, among the narrow streets at right angles to the quayside, where bedrooms as big as trunks can be rented by the day. Beneath the span of the Bridge of Sighs my eyes were dazzled by the setting sun which had transformed the entrance to the Giudecca, to the west of San Giorgio Maggiore, into a pool of rose essence.

I had just caught a whiff of a stench of goat: I was to leeward of three young men whose bare torsos had been scorched in the furnaces of the travelling life; they wore gold crosses around their necks, naturally. Their beauty was more offensive than ugliness. A protesting Valkyrie, her hair spread across shoulders gnawed by salt, appeared to be keeping them on a tight rein, reminiscent of some stone-age matriarchy; their armpits smelt of leeks, their buttocks of venison; their sleeping-bags rolled beneath their necks, they were stretched out, looking as if they had been shot, on the floor of a money-changer’s shop, against a background of international gold coins. They had let themselves go to such a degree that they seemed to have forgotten how to use chairs and they squatted down nimbly and naturally. Their fingers, the colour of iodine, rolled forbidden cigarettes; the chewing gum in the mouth of the third of them, an American, incorporated the national pastime of masticating with a naturally bovine brutishness. What could possibly restrain these creatures: some Bonaparte who had mistaken the century, a Chateaubriand who would never write a word, a Guatamelata without a destiny, a Lope de Vega without a manuscript? To imagine them at the age of eighty sent a shiver down the spine.

I came across them again on my way back from the Lido the following evening, seated Buddha-like with their life-belts on, at the back of a vaporetto; these spineless young things did not know how to stand vertically.

We were approaching the Giardini. As we coasted along, the vapours ripped through the lagoon like scissors cutting through a length of silk; the water was frothy and whipped up with dirty snow like a real cappuccino.

I handed the Valkyrie my flask of grappa; the wretched ragamuffin grabbed it without a word of thanks.

“Man can revert to being an ape or a wolf in six months,” I launched forth, “but to produce a Plato, it must have taken millions of years… As for conceiving of Venice…”

“I shit on Venice,” replied the Valkyrie.

“You can leave that to the pigeons, Mademoiselle…” I said, taking back my empty flask.

1969

VENICE IN THE AUTUMN, disinfected of tourists (apart from the unbudgeable Buddha-like hippies, so lacking in any curiosity), her buildings decked in dust covers, cloaked in rain; it’s the least frivolous time. Venice in spring, when her paving stones start to sweat and the Campanile is reflected in the lake that forms in St Mark’s Square. Venice in winter, the time of the temperatura rigida and the congelamento, when the fire-wardens watch out for fires in the tall chimneys, and the wolves come down from the Dolomites. As for Venice in summertime, it’s the worst time…

1970

AN OVERCAST October sky this morning; an opaline grey, the colour of old chandeliers, so fragile that they sell marabou feathers with which to dust them.

1970

ON THIS OCTOBER EVENING, it was still summertime; the surface of the water was like a piece of shattered glass, with tug-boats wailing, transporter bridges scattering the flocks of seagulls that rested on the mud-flats, pilot ships towing sea-going oil tankers, ferries from the Lido disgorging their vehicles from both ends, and motor boats constructed of nickel, chrome and mahogany clattering against a surface hardened by speed; they are driven by elegant bare-chested Tritons who steer standing up — they are ashamed to steer sitting down in Venice. Everything seemed to be churning up the brackish water and to be drawing it towards itself as one might a sheet; this water disappeared beneath the hulls, just as in those regattas painted by Guardi in which the scores of gondolas transform the Grand Canal into a pontoon bridge.

THE SAME DAY

VENICE… rather than being a seminary of morbidezza is an academy of energy; Barrès might have been able to draw strength here by touching the water rather than the earth. That evening Venice-the-Red, where, in Alfred de Musset’s time, not a boat stirred, could offer nothing but deafening sirens, whipped-up waves and a sky perforated by jet planes; everywhere lights burned brightly, people shouted and everything was steaming with perspiration.

As we drew up in front of the Danieli, night was falling, but the constant hubbub continued; the flecks of froth clung to the bows until we reached the steps of the jetty. This screech of outboard motors wailing at five thousand revolutions per minute and the traffic pounding by all served to mount a challenge to that old literary hack whom we call Death; everything seemed to cry out: “Enough debris, enough relics, enough remains, put a stop to all this twilight! Enough of this moaning from such a gay city!”

In the old surroundings, life went on, rather like a play by Beckett performed in the amphitheatre at Nîmes.

Venice became once more what she had been in the fifteenth century, a sort of Manhattan, a predatory city of extremes, howling with prosperity, with a Rialto which had been the Brooklyn Bridge of its age, and a Grand Canal that was a sort of Fifth Avenue for millionnaire doges; her airfields recalled the fleets of galleys sponsored by bankers; an Italian city without any Italians, like New York without Americans, where the Blacks, in this case, were fair-haired Dalmatians, and the Jewish brokers Greek shipowners (for, in the vicinity of San Giorgio dei Greci, the Greeks, who had come from Rhodes and Chios after the fall of Constantinople, were the true monarchs of the Republic, and her most famous courtesans were Greek too).

Throughout History, Venice has shown two faces: sometimes a pond, sometimes the open sea, one moment peddling lethargy in bookshop windows, the next exploding into a far-flung imperialism (one that was so despotic that Christian Levant, weary of her harshness, came to prefer the Turk).

Venice will be saved; offices installed in the Palazzo Papadopoli, run by scholars from every nation, are dedicated to doing so: a Californian oceanographer, an expert in smoke pollution, has flown in from Los Angeles; a specialist in terrestrial sub-stratas from Massachusetts, and another, an earthquake engineer from the Soviet Union; it’s called the Bureau for the Study of Maritime and Terrestrial Movement. Venice’s fate lies in the hands of these men. Based on information received from computers, their great project is to close the three entrances to the lagoon with gigantic air balloons that can be inflated or deflated at will.

Due to the proximity of the two shores, tides in the Adriatic are much more violent and unpredictable that those in the rest of the Mediterranean; storms blow up as if inside a shell. (I was once nearly ship-wrecked, off Ancona, in 1920.)

Venice is sinking thirty centimetres every century, which is not much more than the rest of the world, but Porto Marghera and Mestre, by pumping out excessive amounts of water, have destroyed the natural balance of the lagoon.

SEPTEMBER 1970

A FASCINATING EXHIBITION at the Palazzo Grassi: “The History of the Venetian Lagoon”; the geology, hydrography, botany, the navigation, the Gondola through the ages; hunting, fishing, the Lagoon in Literature and History. There were excellent ten foot-long maps on parchment: one by Ottavio Fabri and Sabbadino, from the sixteenth century; another by Minorelli and Vestri from the seventeenth. A Venetian mosaic of the Flood, dating from 589. Some xylographs depicting the construction of a twelfth-century Venice; no machinery, no dredger, nothing but human labour; wooden stakes are being dug in by hand by two workmen lifting wooden mallets; it really was the republic of beavers of which Goethe spoke.

And what a surface! There are examples here of the silt, of reeds used for the first fences, of lichen hanging from some nameless mush.

Sometimes I attempt to drain the lifeblood out of myself by imagining Venice dying before I do, imagining her being swallowed up without revealing her features upon the water before she disappears. Being submerged not to the depths, but a few feet beneath the water; her cone-shaped chimneys would emerge, her miradors, from which the fishermen would cast their lines, and her campanile, a refuge for the last cats from St Mark’s. The vaporetti, tilting under the weight of visitors, would survey the surface of the waters where they coalesce with the mire of the past; tourists would point out to each other the gold from some mosaic, held afloat by five water-polo balls: the domes of St Mark’s; the Salute would be used as a mooring buoy by cargo ships; bubbles would float up from above the Grand Canal, released by frogmen groping around for American ladies’ jewels in the cellars of a submerged Grand Hotel. “What prophecy has ever turned a people away from sin?” said Jeremiah.

Venice is drowning; it may well be the best thing that could happen to her.

IN CRETE CANDIA (HERAKLION), APRIL 1970

ONE IS STILL in Venice, here, on the square where the lions on the Morosoni fountain belch forth from their mouths the melted snow from Mount Ida upon the citizens of Heraklion. It is a Venice that is far removed from the dreaded gusts of the bora, a Venice for the end of winter. On the square, the tables and chairs from the café spill out over the pavement and on to the road; I watch the passers-by; a bearded pope upon a puny donkey, people selling foreign newspapers that arrived on the midday plane, elderly peasants, still dressed in the Turkish clothes that were worn before the revolution, with a black turban wrapped around their grey heads, baggy trousers and scarlet boots made from goatskin.

Venice is returning to Greece what she stole from her; for more than four centuries she protected Crete, especially this town of Candia, which was besieged by the Turks for twenty-three years. This morning, I climbed the ramparts and clambered up on to the old red-brick parapets with their imitation fortifications, that first line of walls, built at the foot of Foscarini’s breaches, from which the scree crumbled, carrying down with it the jumble of centuries in an avalanche of stones emblazoned with the coat of arms of la Serenissima, Roman sarcophagi and curtains worn away with age.

El Greco left for the city of Toledo just in time, but Candia, confronted with Islam, stood firm. In those days, the white race was not ashamed of its hegemony, or of its Duke of Crete, who was appointed by the Adriatic doge; it scoffed at the wrath of Ahmet, the grand vizier who burned his prisoners alive. La Feuillade and the Due de Beaufort (the “roi des Halles”, and natural son of Henri IV), and the Hanoverian or Bohemian conscripts died here, for the West, adding their bodies to the ramparts built by San Micheli, the Venetian architect.

At dawn, facing the old port, the still sea beneath the sun-shades, a scene from a Claude Lorrain greeted me upon waking; everything was there, the vaulted docks that had been dug to house the old Venetian galleys, the crenellated battlements along the winding road, the black, tarred fishing-nets laid out in half-circles, the lateen sails with their oblique initials that impede the background view of the barbicans and casemates that had been demolished by earthquakes. The surface of the sluggish waters had not yet been scored by any propeller, or carressed by any oar; only an underwater swimmer’s flippers appeared between the breakwaters, like the dorsal fin of some submerged monster.

Venice had handed over her authority to other imperial powers; would the most recent of these, whose net was cast from Odessa to Mers el-Kébir, last longer than that of the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Normans, Byzantium, the Turk, or the British? The Venetian empire is still alive in Crete; here, she still holds sway; she is the “great presence” that the Italienische Reise talk about. It is as if Venice had never been expelled from the Orient; the day that Christopher Columbus discovered America was when la Serenissima chose to let herself expire; Vasco da Gama, by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, delivered the fatal knot; she survived for no more than three centuries, which is a great deal when one thinks that it only took a mere twenty years for the British Empire to become but a shadow of itself.

At midday I entered the bazaar, which was ablaze with oranges and lemons spilling from their baskets, peppers the colour of the Spanish flag, and kid goats with their throats slit. Between the arsenal and the cemetery the shops were parading their right to life, stretching out their medieval awnings, which were doing their best to support the overhanging moucharabies built of grey sycamore wood, dating from before Independence.

Gathered together around a glass of water outside the bars, with their bulging stalls and the cafés whose floors were pink with the dissected prawns consumed with apéritifs, were a dozen or so notable Cretans; the cheap restaurants hissed with the smoke from the frying. Clusters of hippies, perpetual castaways on the raft of leisure, drooled at the sight of cauldrons full to overflowing with snails cooked in onions, of grills upon which meatballs with lemon, or giouvarlakia, steamed alongside mizithra, cheeses made from honey, piled up in stacks.

In front of the Takio taverna, an English minibus, looking like a prehistoric cavern on Dunlop tyres, had given up the ghost; the foul stench of a public rubbish dump seeped from the open door, through which could be seen the remnants of gnawed bones on aluminium plates that had been placed on jerrycans; from the roof hung used espadrilles and plastic bags. A smell of pork in wine-flavoured sauce had enticed out of the vehicle a group of Nordic creatures, whose skin had turned to leather, and whose dark glasses were attempting to make a home for themselves in the fur-covered faces from which the only thing to emerge was an aubergine-coloured nose. In the winter the hippies had covered their naked torsos with a sheepskin bought from some shepherd or other on Mount Ida. I recognized these famished creatures: they were my English friends and my Yankee with the structuralist beard, the ones I had come across last summer in Venice. Exhausted by all the spare time they had on their hands, the little band were examining their pocket money, scrutinizing the menu in Greek and consulting one another, torn between the desire to eat something other than stolen chickens and the threat of arrest, followed by repatriation by the British consulate. (The Orthodox Church is not as indulgent towards vagabonds as the Roman Church.) Painted in white on the sides and on the back of their minibus, in three languages, were the words:

THE BOURGEOISIE STINKS

“A conventional fellow invites you to have some lunch,” I told them.

What would be the use of achieving my grand old age if one did not feel closer to a tramp outdoors in Crete eating two-drachmas’ worth of spaghetti from a paper plate, than to a conventional French family sitting at table in front of a haunch of venison braised in port wine?

I often feel jealous of lovers of the open road; they provide substance for a whole variety of dreams that Balzac described as: “the life of a Mohican”, and they remind me of our own life in 1920, of the way we heaped insults on society, our need for destruction and our defiant challenges scrawled on posters at the time that the Treaty of Versailles was bleeding Europe to death; they make me relive our attitude of “to hell with everyone”, “to blazes with everything”. But as for this lot, what will they do when they have finished wandering along the verges of non-existence? I make fun of them, I feel sorry for them, I envy them.

I asked them about how they spent their time: “We are reinventing Man’s relationship with the Earth,” was their reply.

I was expecting to see emerge from the minibus the British Valkyrie who, having consumed my grappa straight from the bottle, said she had no time for Venice; I could see again her blue eyes seeped in mascara beneath her headband, her mahogany lips and, beneath a Carnaby Street frock so long that it mopped up the spittle on the ground, her large feet, cracked and filthy, and her silver-painted toes.

Their mouths full and belching forth garlic, the wandering Pithecanthropi, having accepted my invitation to lunch, recounted how they had cremated their companion in the ancient manner, on the shores of the Libyan Sea, as recently as Christmas, on a morning when, after consuming a great deal of mastic resin, ouzo, raki and heroin, she had not woken up. She was the daughter of an ecclesiastical peer, a life peer… “That’s actually what explains why she wanted to do away with herself… Basically, she suffered from not being the daughter of a hereditary lord,” said the driver of the minibus (Magdalen and BBC accent) as he scratched a head of hair that was as greasy as a poodle’s; “People can say what they will, but Burke’s Peerage was always her little red book…”

1971

TRIESTE, VILLA PERSEPHONE

THE VENICE-TRIESTE TRAIN puffs away for two hours as it follows the new motorway that links the two cities: Jesolo, Aquilea, Monfalcone. There are skyscrapers amid the cornfields, hidden canals in the vineyards, out of which rise up purple-tinged osiers and the stumps of willow trees. North of Venice industry extends indefinitely, stretching up the boot of the peninsula up to the top of the thigh, as far as Trieste.

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.

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.]