September 23 (Day Eleven)
Preparing to go to Trieste
I make a quick run back to the old city for one last round of email, to see if any place in Venice or Trieste has come through at the last moment. No, we’re on our own). I stop at a Frutta market and ask if they have organic frutta, biologique. From the response I see that I have drawn a solid negative on both accounts, English and produce. But there are so many beautiful fruits that I will not stand on ceremony. I pick out peaches, giant plums, containers of sliced watermelon, fat red currents on the vine, a bunch of purple grapes likewise, surreally large raspberries, and two salads: vegetable and calamari. I also get plastic forks, knives, and spoons. Added to the other food I have collected, this will contribute toward a picnic on the road.
We sit in the entranceway to San Domenica at the single table for travelers and manage breakfast without plates or bowls, using the utensils from the market. I open my bran flakes biologique from Esselunga back in Lucca and eat them by the fingerful, taking single big sweet raspberries and putting them in my mouth after the flakes. I did carefully wash this fruit in the sink in our room, not that that makes much difference; it’s the cells, after all, that eat the matrix of the soil. But these raspberries taste very sweet and distinct from any past ones. Lindy eats hers, one by one, while using the brie saved since Lucca and now rescued from the abbey refrigerator, spread on amaranth crackers from the shop in Siena.
Afterwards I do a run to the parking place, retrieve the car, find my way back to the nunnery along the complicated maze of one-way streets with fortuitously errorless choices of turns. We fill the tiny vehicle and are off. Siena was great, but now we are setting into the unknown—Italy beyond Rick Steves.
Driving to Trieste
Lindy finds A1 by always taking the downhill option. All downhills no doubt end in its vicinity. Then we are zipping back pretty much due North toward Firenze. Kilometers, at 1.6 per mile, tend to give the sense that you are moving quite rapidly, as distances on signs melt away. Thus we are rather euphoric at reaching the outskirts of Florence in under an hour. Last night we had been thinking to stop at some random town for lodging along the way, but now getting to Trieste is looking like a breeze, and then we can have Sunday free of travel. The trip is supposed to be a little less than six hours; I am guessing it is around 400 miles.
Heavy traffic around Florence dampens our ardor somewhat. We poke along in a single lane for twenty minutes before we are shot onto the open highway toward Bologna. The autostrada between Firenze and Bologna is very different from the one between Siena and Firenze. It starts out as an occasionally terrifying tour de force of sharp curves and tunnels through small mountains, bridges over ravines. The tunnels range from a brief hundred or so feet to maybe a mile at the most, and there are up to forty or fifty of them.
In addition, the road winds and curves continuously like an eccentric racetrack, into and out of the tunnels. It is psychologically and topographically much narrower than any equivalent American highway. Add the winding climb and an endless armada of huge trucks, most of them with Slavic writing on them, heading for central Europe—and you have a challenging course, especially for someone like Lindy who hates passing trucks, hates passing trucks on narrow roads, and hates passing trucks on curves. The gumption with which she dug into her two-and-a-half-hour stint was testimony either to her courage and realization that there was still a long way to do and she simply had to tough it out, or to her realization that it would be even more terrifying to be the passenger with me driving and have no control over her fate. Later, when I did drive, she was quite freaked at having the piloting taken out of her hands, as she kept reminding me that, because of the narrowness of the road and high speeds, there was no—repeat, no—margin of error. She was never sure I really got that because I am a looser, less intensely concentrated driver than she is.
After we passed Bologna, the road became straighter. Ferrara, Rovigo, Padova (Padua), and Venice made up the next leg—one that lasted two hours or maybe a bit more. Before undertaking this, I suggested that she pull into a gas station. It was half past noon; we were getting hungry. We needed a change of drivers. Plus the car, after seeming to have a stuck gas gauge, was finally giving some indication that it was consuming fuel, so it would need to be filled eventually, and here was as good a place as any.
Therein lay a problem. The manufacturer printed, “diesel/gasolio” right over the fuel tank, and I needed to figure out if this meant what it said in English or was a false friend, a cognate that meant something else.The phrase book confirmed that “diesel” is “diesel,” but I would have hated to lose something in translation and have the Renault grind to a halt and us get a bill for cleaning out its engine. I wanted to ask someone who knew the answer for sure before fueling.
At the service plaza Lindy and I stopped five different people, men and women, and queried if they parla inglise. It actually really only takes asking, “Do you speak English?” or “Inglise?” None of them did.
Then I had a perception. That other Renault Elf in the parking lot had a license plate with a blue square and a circle of stars on the left margin with the letters NL. I figured that corner must be where European cars display their flags. If that was true, NL was probably the Netherlands, and that meant the young couple sitting on the hood meant “English spoken here.”
Based on my question, the guy immediately struck up a conversation with us because he welcomed the opportunity to sing the praises of his Elf to another, albeit temporary Elf driver. Yes, the gas gauge hardly ever moves; he quantified it in miles per liter, but that part went by me. As I tried to ascertain whether to put in diesel, he grimaced at what would happen to the engine if unleaded went into it instead. “Yes, diesel; it means diesel.” He opened the gas door of his own to reveal the word “diesel” missing from the place above the cap.
So we fetched the car and got it filled. In fact, we could have proceeded right to the pumps because it wasn’t self-service, and the attendant would have known the correct fuel. It was about $30 American for half a tank.
Later I came back and asked the Dutch guy about picnic areas or scenic views. He rolled his eyes, “Not on this road,” and pointed to people standing by their cars, eating sandwiches and drinking beers and sodas on their hoods. “That’s as good as it gets.”
We figured to improve on that choice by sitting on the sorry excuse for a green mall, until we realized it was the dog running area with the attendant defects. We ended up making our picnic on a metal manhole-cover kind of object, hardly a bucolic Italian lunch, but quite Italian in its own way. I mean this wasn’t the Maine Turnpike with its picnic tables overlooking lakes. The fruits and squid salad made up for the locale, as we went from a plum to watermelon slices to currants and grapes, which gave an alternation of sour and sweet, while polishing off the entire salad and a large plastic-wrapped organic peanut-butter cookie. At least we weren’t using our car as a table like the other picnickers.
Now that we knew a bit of the code, we tried to guess the other names of countries of cars in the lot. “I” was obviously Italy. We figured “F” for France and “D” for Germany. “PL,” Lindy said must be either Poland or Palestine; “No, I’m joking; of course, Poland.” “SK” we can’t guess: Sweden maybe?
The high autostrada speed is somewhat surprising at first from behind the wheel and imposes an unfamiliar rhythm for an American driver. Yet it is nothing even close to the insanity people warned us about when they said not to drive in Italy, e.g. the peril Rick Steves portrays. You just have to be aware that, when you are passing a slow-moving vehicle at 125 or 130 kilometers per hour, you have to get out of the fast lane pronto because there is always some race driver closing fast at 180 kilometers or more, much more. It is true that there is no dawdling or spacing out on the Italian highway. It is a fast-moving video game that sets the heart beating and gives an occasional chill of pure terror.
The diversion here is not license plates of the different states, as in America, but nationalities of trucks. We call them out to each other as we pass them knotted in convoys of unaffiliated vehicles that have fallen in together under the inertial current of the road, sometimes ten or fifteen semis long, most with great swaths of Slavic letters and accents across their flanks: Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzogovinia (BH), Slovenia, Georgian Republic, Poland, Hungary, Macedonia, Croatia, Slovakia, Turkey, Lithuania, Estonia. The greatest number are Czech, Slovenian, and Hungarian, with the rest represented by an occasional truck or two. The growing mass of this armada is impressing us with where we are headed. As much as we are excited, it is a bit of a reality check. We are leaving the Romance and Germanic language groups. Of course, it is all the Common Market of Europe now. Despite myself (because I am rooting for the Eastern European countries and love the sounds of their names), I uneasily pass their sometimes swaying trucks, often covered with windblown canvass, with more trepidation than Italian or French ones.
As we get closer to Padua, the landscape becomes flatter, and fields stretch out to horizons. We have switched highways many times and yet we don’t hit our first tollbooth until outside Venezia: 14 euros for our biglietto that began at Bologna. At least there is a toll collector to tell us how much and receive it by hand. When we hit our first toll booth a few days earlier outside Florence en route from Lucca to Siena, there was only a machine, and Lindy was absolutely stymied as to how much we owed, let alone how to deliver it. I was no assistance. Finally, as we were creating a traffic jam, the woman in the car behind us got out, walked up and, without either English or exasperation, found the appropriate number of euros in our assortment and showed Lindy how to insert them in the slot.
I get a fairly easy stint on the straightaway, as we angle east, away from the mountains. My speed drifts upward effortlessly: 118, 122, 124, 128, 132, 136. Lindy is becoming increasingly nervous that I am getting in over my head, going too fast for my reflexes in a young person’s game. In fact, she requires I stay below 120. I tell her that’s 72 miles an hour, no big deal to exceed it when half the cars are going over 100, but she says she’s only concerned with our speed, and although she knows intellectually that 136 kilometers an hour is not miles an hour (and she will go a bit faster than that right away during her own next stint), the number itself scares her, so I slow down. Then I switch roles with her at a service area fifty miles short of Trieste.
When road and traffic seem safe, the drive is a lark, the rolling Italian countryside full of surprises: castles, towers, unusual colors, those tall thin trees, cultivated hillsides at steep angles, the covered trucks with Slavic letters and accent marks, the sound of being passed at 120 miles an hour when you are going 80. The day has become cloudless and magnificently bright, so everything to the horizons is in detailed rendition under the sun’s absolute probe. On the CD player we go from Slaid Cleaves to Emma’s Revolution to Tibetan chants to Dave Insley to Australian didgeridoo music. It has become a glorious all-day outing—the trans-Italian highway, no big deal.
Yet suddenly there will be a division of roads and confusion of which way to go or maybe a tight fit with a truck, and we are an immediate shambles. A few minutes later we are relaxed again.
When we planned this Italian trip, Venice was high on Lindy’s “A” list, along with Cinque Terra, Florence, and renting a house in Tuscany. We had more arguments about whether or not we were going to go to Venice than anything else during the months leading up to the trip. I said that it was going to be packed with tourists and grifters plus overcharges just for breathing, and we could do more interesting stuff almost anywhere else—say Slovenia—with the time. Lindy would respond, “How can you go to Italy and not see Venice?”
I had a joke line then that irritated her. “We’re not going to see the Taj Mahal or the Great Wall.”
“Yeah, but they’re not in Italy, wise guy.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re going to see some things and not see others. It doesn’t really matter what we see, as long as it’s interesting. We probably going to miss the Taj Mahal and Great Wall in our lifetimes because we can’t do everything. So maybe we’ll miss Venice too.”
Now, a week and a half into the trip and veterans of traveling in Italy, we have reversed positions. Lindy has heard so many horror tales of 600-euro rooms, skyscraper parking lots, and wall-to-wall people that she wants no part of Venice, whereas I am challenged to figure out how we can get there skillfully. Yet all of my intricate plans collapsed with our failure to get any reservation at all, even through Elena’s friends. Today as we approach the Venice uscita, I have misgivings about not going there when we are so close, whereas Lindy experiences only relief that we don’t have to have to deal with it. “You see where my images have led me so far on this trip,” she says. “I just want to get to the next stop alive and conserve my energy. I have no wish to be in long tourist lines. I don’t care how charming Venice is.”
Right, Florence and Cinque Terra are probably charming in their ways too, but we won’t see them either. Trophy tourism can be a dangerous game that kind of creeps up on you. As we swing past the turn-off to Venezia on A4, I experience a last bit of “trophy” regret—postponing my image of canals and gondolas till another time because my updated fantasy is bleak: parking structures and Disneyland-style hordes.
With the possibility of Venezia behind us, we are clearly going to make Trieste in one day, around 4:30 in fact with daylight to spare, so our minds and hopes turn to that in anticipation. Trieste is no doubt lovely too, but a complete unknown. In our original plans it was just a train stop conveniently close to the border. We were going to take a cab from the Trieste station to our second rental car and immediately head to Slovenia—no sightseeing at all. Now Trieste is expected to fill in the last two nights that we were going to be in our villa in Tucscany and also be a poor man’s substitute for Venezia—elevated by default to a destination in itself. We have no images of it—no information at all because it does not even have enough pizzazz to rate a mention by Rick Steves, let alone a full description with restaurants, lodging, and attractions. It is a total blank, a likely nondescript town with few attractions, tourist or otherwise. We have no idea of what we will do when we get there except maybe look for parks and museums, and rest. We are quite satisfied, as it is, with the accomplishment of getting across the country by auto and readying ourselves for Eastern Europe.
Arriving in Trieste
The last 45 kilometers seem long and we are surprised there is no hint of a city sooner. The first indication we get of Trieste is an option to take either A13 toward Trieste and Ljubljana or the side road to Trieste and accompanying small towns. We choose the latter and exit into a great sweeping turn. A sign says Trieste, 13. As we come around the hairpin to a straightaway, we see one of the most startling, stunning and unexpected vistas of our trip. We are high in hills, on a cliff’s edge, alongside a vast luminous sea. The change in panorama is almost dizzying, and the sea has a color all its own, as seas do. This body of water stretches dramatically to our right, azure blue-green, and immaculate in detail, little boats dotting it everywhere—sailboats, motorboats, a single giant liner, plus strange rows of dark buoylike objects near shore, all scattered over a gigantic canvas that swallows them into mere punctuation marks. Water fills almost 180 degrees of view, a thin lens of haze in the far horizon, the city of Trieste in the near distance, still very far away and down below. We have what amounts to an aerial view, the dense habitation signature jutting out from the coast on several small hilly peninsulas and one large flat promontory that holds an entire miniature city. Beyond Trieste at the horizon is a hazy blue line of land and mountains bordering the sea, probably the Istrian coast: Eastern Europe.
Lindy marvels at how immense the city is by comparison with what she pictured, some small old Italian backwater. As we descend and scoot along the sea, we pass large hotels, crowds along the rocks and on little shreds of beaches. There is lodging out here, but it seem resort like and is definitely not the city center, so we keep going until we hit full urbanization. Gradually we are enveloped in a very different ambiance: city outskirts, lots of houses, sidestreets, increasing density. It is remarkable how you see a city from so faraway and it looks Ozlike and mysterious, then suddenly you are inside it. You lose all exterior perspective. It is no longer a patch of magnificent architecture along the distant ocean; it is mundane businesses and dwellings.
We finally stop when we encounter heavy traffic in the Centro, right by the train station. We clearly need to orient ourselves and take stock. Anyway, there is a big “I” for Informacione at the station.
Getting a legitimate parking spot here is impossible, so Lindy pulls alongside a curb on a striped zone for motorcycles a block from the station, and I get out. I am risking that she might be asked by the polizia to move, and we are skirting getting separated and major trouble here in the middle of nowhere, but I am already running as I realize this. A stiff breeze from the sea hits me, a tug that feels as though it could pick me up if it tried, but it is balmy (I learn later that the wind off the sea in Trieste is famous, called the bora, and during the winter it can reach 120 miles per hour, so the police have to tie things down all through the town). The feeling is different from anything yet in Italy. The wind welcomes, plays with me. I dash through the square. The ambiance is not old Italy so much as Austria or Germany: large palatial buildings with ornate stonework, even here around the train and bus stations.
I reach the stazione and look for the booth. Not finding it, I ask a number of people. I am redirected back onto the street: a sign reads: “Hotel Information, Lodging,” but it is closed (chiaudde), probably because it is Saturday
When I return to the car, I realize we are stumped, but there is always a next move. You just have to find it. Lindy makes this call.
She goes to a parked cabbie and elocutes with the driver for a surprisingly long time. When she gets back, she possesses a wealth of data. We should go down that sidestreet where the P is, park in the lot, and get rid of the car. Then there are five hotels in this immediate vicinity. We can either walk around to them one by one or go into the station and call them by phone for vacancies and rates.
I am wary of the sidestreet. It looks like Shanghai central, an empty alley along the dock, but we are short on options, so start down it. Very quickly we are in over our heads. The routing is complicated, behind buildings and through other narrow alleys, not at all what we expected, which was a bunch of meters or an outdoor grid. A we enter a gigantic parking structure, the ramp is nothing we have ever encountered. It is so narrow that Lindy has to go into first gear and, even then, stop repeatedly and angle herself around curves. Poorly lit but with occasional blinding flashes of sun, it is painted with striping and rolls and pitches in midair like a roller coaster. Not only does it remind me of the funhouse at an amusement park; it carries that precise horror-film, living-dead déjà vu.
We try to exit at the first level, but a flashing sign says Completo. We go to the second, which is also packed but not completo, find a space, and squeeze in, barely.
The garage is hardly lit at all. Too many American action films make this seem just about the most dangerous place on the planet, at least at the moment but, as our eyes grow accustomed, we see that there are other shoppers, leaving cars and loading bags into back seats and trunks. Yet, under the circumstances, I grab the laptop, as we emerge like groundhogs from our car.
We mark our place on the grid by coordinates A and G and then look for the way out. The backstairs are uninviting, but a sweet young woman, expressing by pantomime a lament that she can’t have a decent conversation with us, guides us to the exit (uscita) and even comes back to rescue us on the baffling series of staircases and lead us out into the street. I don’t see how a uscita could be any more confusing if they tried to make it so, either as to how many floors to descend or which direction to go in.
If there were phones in the train station, we never found them. Instead we decide to walk around the neighborhood and try the hotels in whatever order we pass them. Again, these are still days we pre-paid at our villa.
Traffic is intense and unrelenting, and we respect the Italian custom of not crossing at corners that are chained and gated off to prevent pedestrians from using them. Only gradually do we come to the realization that, of course, Trieste has no subway and those underground stairs lead you across streets via tunnels. Prior to that, though, we worked our way gradually and indirectly, corner by corner, to a spot from which we could traverse the hotel-ringed region across the plaza.
We have no idea of what to expect in availability or price, so we hold our breaths. At the first establishment, Hotel Impero, a fashionably coiffeured stocky young man shakes his head that there is no vacancy and directs us to the yellow-faced Hotel Roma, around the corner on Via Ghega. To Lindy’s question about rates, he says to expect 115 to 125 euros. At the front desk of the Roma a young woman tells us they are full up and says to try Hotel Milano 15 meters down. As we negotiate that stretch, I reassure Lindy, who is getting very worried about our lack of a reservation, that we can always abandon the city center and just drive out of town until we find something. “One way or t’other,” I say, “it will work out.”
A diffident but friendly blonde lady behind the desk of Hotel Milano, says that she has a double, a special rate, 100 euros, another 10 for parking the car a few blocks away. She then spends a good twenty minutes with us, giving us maps of the city, patiently demonstrating orientations in slow, clear, but limited English, and on one of the maps she marks a viable restaurant, La Tecci on Via S. Nicolo, then the main square, Piazza Unita D’Italia. Finally she draws a walking route to dinner with her pen: “Ten minutes, here to here.” She gives us a remote to open the garage gate and a four-language blow-up page designed solely for getting from the Milano to the parking structure and then finding your designated berth inside it—but first we must retrieve the car and unload in front.
We go up to view the room, 405, on the miniscule but adequate elevator. From our window we look out at the tile rooftops and stonework in the courtyard. Then we clean up before going to retrieve the Renault. (By the way, one thing that you need to stay alert to throughout Italy: raised floors. Be prepared to step up or down between adjacent rooms or where otherwise unexpected. One thing new in this room: instead of the square button or pull-sash to flush, this toilet is worked by a faucet, and the off-turn has to be very tight to the right to stop the water from continuously running.)
We set the computer on the bureau and head back to fetch the car. Using a subterranean tunnel for a shortcut, we emerge by the station and immediately have trouble getting into the structure. The mouth where we entered before is only for cars, and they are careening in and out of it so carelessly that we actually have to run to get out of the peril into which we have bumbled. It is like standing in the middle of a busy highway. An elderly woman perched outside a giant discount clothing barn located in this god-forsaken spot has been observing our slapstick quietly and now trudges slowly to rescue us. She has no English but points through the store and to the right. The barn occupies the whole block and, when we walk through its aisles and turn right outdoors, we find the cashier for the lot. Unfortunately we didn’t know the system when we parked, and our ticket is in the car.
We get in a crowded elevator, full of jabbering Italian, and pour off at Number 2 with everyone else. The place is huge, and we cannot find the car—plus Lindy’s notebook with our license number is in her bag inside it. We could not even tell the polizia in an emergency.
We have no trouble finding A and most letters in the alphabet before and after G. But G and D are missing. Lindy’s questioning of a woman is useless insofar as her nonexistent English causes her to instruct us to try the floor above but, when we get there by elevator we see that that is merely 3—unrelated to our goal. But, as we head back down the stairs to 2, we realize that there are many different separate garages on this level, stretching in all directions. The place is gigantic, a large city block. We begin to freak.
We circle dim corrals of cars from alcove to alcove—no luck. Finally I decide to do a methodical run of the entire perimeter. Lindy is dubious and thinks I will only exhaust myself, but I can’t think of anything else. I eventually spot G. It bears no rational relationship to F, H, or I . Once we are both at the crossroads of G and A, however, we still have no luck finding the car. Then Lindy realizes that she has the key and begins pushing buttons.
“Here I am,” the flashing lights say, and we go running to our lost vehicle.
Hot and exhausted, we are ecstatic just to be back in the car. Still we have to bring the ticket downstairs, pay 2 euros, and find the Elf all over again. This we do with painstaking care and without incident, and then Lindy navigates the roller coaster out. We work our way around the plaza to the Milano.
There is no parking lane in front of the hotel, and traffic is thundering down Via Ghega, so we do what must be the custom—pull up on the sidewalk. It is hard for walkers and baby strollers to get by, but, scuse, scuse, we unload as fast as we can. Then I leave Lindy in the lobby and set out for the hotel parking.
That is another intense puzzle. I make a U-turn off the sidewalk, barely timing my passage through an opening in both stampedes of traffic, then turn down Via Roma and look for Via Milano three streets along on the left. The trouble is, there are no street signs and I am looking for the name Milano and forget to count. I obviously have gone by it, as streets are now flying past. Furthermore, something I have never encountered in a traffic grid before: you can’t turn off Roma either way because, both to the right and left, block after block, one-way traffic is entering it. I work my way to the right lane as the better gamble and am finally given a turn. I head back along Via Trento, a parallel street, expecting to cross Milano from it but, since most streets aren’t marked, I have to ask a pedestrian at a red light. He points to the next corner: “Via Milano.” I turn right and scout the length of the street without seeing any P or opening in the buildings. There is nothing to do but be patient, stay in the present. I circle through plazas, come back past Hotel Milano from the other direction, turn left again, go three blocks, vowing to pull onto the sidewalk if I have to—I will not race past the invisible garage again.
Then, glancing down at the inadequate hand-drawn map at a red light, I am inspired to a new interpretation of the geography and symbols on it. From the placement of the concave icon with the P, the garage must be under Piazza Vitorio Veneto, the one with the giant horseman at the corner of Roma and Milano; the trouble was, the P and the opening were confusingly placed seven-eighths of the way down map Milano, giving a false sense of scale and distance. The garage wasn’t down the block even one iota; it was immediately upon the turn.
I creep along Roma, looking for a ramp as I approach Milano. Luckily a traffic jam aids my goal. I begin clicking the remote even as I turn onto my street, and I see a gate lift in the near distance.
Elation rises yet again from incipient traveler’s panic.
Dinner in Trieste
While Rick Steves is MIA for Trieste, a brochure we get in the hotel lobby says that this is where the central European world meets Mediterranean culture. That is what the landscape looks like—how one would imagine Vienna, sort of grand in its architecture like Prague. Trieste at one point ceded itself to Austria to escape the hegemonies of Venezia. It was held by Tito as part of Yugoslavia after World War II and, though he got to keep the Istrian Peninusla and kicked most of the Italians out of what is now Slovenia, the city of Trieste was taken from him and returned to Italy in a final boundary settlement in 1954, not relevant to Rick Steves.
It is just past eight o’clock when we pull ourselves more or less together to seek the restaurant. We could just eat our remaining snacks in the room, and our weariness prompts that. On the other hand, this is a chance to walk the streets and see the city by night.
We review the map with our friend at the desk, ask her if the walk is safe, and upon her enthusiastic assurance that indeed all of Trieste is very safe, we head out and begin strolling down Via Roma, along my recent route, though it looks entirely different in the dark and on foot—gentler and more enticing. The breeze off the Gulf of Trieste is luxurious in fits and starts, too warm to be a problem. It fact it is a mead.
When we inquired about safety, Lindy was picturing dark secluded streets until we hit a main plaza, but in three blocks we encounter street vendors, and after another we are in the middle of a flood-lit street fair. Then two blocks later, at Via Rossini, we are standing in front of a giant gleaming colonnaded, cupola-topped building, like something you might see in Berlin or Washington, D.C. Flowing right up to it is a reflecting pool. By the map this is Piazza S. Antonio Nuovo.
The breeze has shattered the pool’s surface into so many crisscrosses that an extremely delicate scintillating pattern of broken lights appears in it like thousands of tinted minnows swimming back and forth just below the surface. Even more delicately described, they are fine threads or bits of colored wire, changing direction and mosaic as the wind keeps recomposing them in fits and starts—a kaleidoscope that it is hard for me to stop looking at.
But the scene is much vaster than just the water. In fact, it is not a reflecting pool; it is a canal. Later we learn it is the oldest one in Trieste. In the other direction, on the far side of Via Roma, it goes directly up to a low bridge against the sea, and small craft—rowboats and outboard dinghies—are parallel parked by rope, held at gentle distance from the curbs of Via Rossini and Via Bellini on the other side, all the way to the seawall, a few dozen of them jostling gently and aesthetically in the swell. It is a delicious scene.
Music is blaring. People are celebrating.The lit architecture looks like highly decorated wedding cakes. Suddenly a giant bouquet of pink and white balloons is released into the sky and separates above us, making the moment surreal.
We detour our journey to the restaurant and walk past the canal along a row of vendors. I stare at the chestnut cart of a monkeylike sideburned man; it is giving off the most delicious Old World smoke. As we pass him in my ambivalence about a snack versus dinner and how clean these roast shells aer, I decide to run back and at least ask the cost. He points to three tin cups of differing size. I pick the smallest. I misunderstand him and think it is half a euro. He scoops it overfull with chestnuts, blackened chestnut parts, and bits of shells, and pours them all into a little bag. When I hand him a gold coin with a 50 on it, he is disdainful, reaching right onto my hand and then treating my collection of small coins with disgust. I get more from my pocket and he immediately grabs one, two, three euros. I am surprised and irritated, and it shows. He is now glaring back at me, pocketing the money like a dog that has stolen a bone. My unconsidered reaction is, “Three euros?”
He shouts in Italian, holds up the small tin can, which indeed says 3 E on the side, and continues to yell at me as Lindy and I leave. A bad interaction, but now at least I have hot chestnuts to eat.
As we continue down the street, it becomes clear that this is no minor gathering of street vendors. It goes on block after block in all directions. It is a full Mercado—and more.
Here is someone drawing beer. Here is someone with a stand of sausages. Here is someone roasting rabbits on spits. We pass a full spotlighted fashion show with models traipsing in wedding dresses down a makeshift raised runway, the throng cheering while an amplified voices give even more lilt than usual to Italian. Here is a guy demonstrating panpipes and other instruments, playing songs for a crowd. Here is a humungous statue of a pretzel hanging over a booth of pretzels that range from very tiny to far-and-away the most obscenely large edible dough-twists I have ever seen, and then even larger ones.
Among the booths are people selling wooden placemats and table clothes; hats, ties and bags strung on wires, bright cushions with primary and secondary colors in irregular polygons; lipstick; perfume; weavings; wrapped hard candies and taffies; powdered cookies; sweetened frutta seccata (mango, papaya, pineapple among dozens of different hues); homemade pastas bare of wrappings (some white, some yellow, some whole wheat); cloths and kerchiefs of many dyes recalling the ancient route to Tyre; stacks of boxes, cans, jars, and wrappings of groceries; painted toys and puppets (lots of Pinocchios); little statues of animals and figurines; dried mushrooms; salamis of myriad sizes, shapes, and textures; Tiffany lamps; winter jackets; sections of boars; dozens of different-sized and various-colored sausages in rows; blue porcelain plates; vats of black and green olives; candles; small electronics; and so on. These are all mixed in with blaring speakers that change as you walk past them to the sound shadow of new ones. There is no live music, but everyone has his own choice of aural entertainment, most of it pounding and saturating its domain until the next takes over. We go from Italian rock to American rap to fifties love songs within a block.
We have graduated even further to an immense swelling crowd going in multiple directions such that we can hardly make headway, though the mood is so festive that we feel its contact high. The sheer number of people in the streets in states of merriment is stunning.
“It’s amazing,” Lindy says, “to get out of our little place and see how big and alive the world is. None of these people have anything to do with America. None of them care about America. Look at how much excitement and activity, camaraderie and richness there is. An American city would kill for this on a Saturday night. And all America wants to do is take it over and control it.”
“And this is just Trieste,” I added. “We happen to be here, seeing this one event. Think of a whole planet of cities and celebrations like this.”
“It’s a combination of a street carnival and a rave.”
“it’s like Mardi Gras and a parade with the mother of all yard sales.”
I experience a momentary epiphany that morphs from childlike joy into political outrage, a non-sequitur fantasy, some American politician, perhaps a future Barack Obama, addressing the people as regards W. Bush and his heirs:
I think: “Don’t you see. There is no war on terror. It is flimflam maneuvers with fake enemies and fraudulent imprisonments, to keep feeding the bloody machine. And they don’t even know why they’re running the machine, not really, beyond unexamined xenophobia and hard-hearted greed. They are not America’s protectors; they are destroying America. In fact, they are glorified sociopaths and war criminals. When you forfeit moral ground, you have only soul-less zombie weapons left to fight with. You have no hope of winning in the long run because there will always be more of them, and they will ultimately match your technology and dwarf your numbers. he only thing America really had in the long run ever was moral authority. When you start torturing innocent people and demanding young Muslim men admit to crimes they didn’t commit, you are nowhere; you have no hope left, none at all. When you lie and cheat routinely and suspend the rule of law, you remove the only safeguard America had from an antipathetic world. When you transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, you breed enemies who will mash you in the end. When you fight wars that don’t have to be fought, you demoralize your soldiers, disenfranchise your citizens, and drain your treasury into the coffers of your enemies.”
The ceremony in the streets of Trieste is a metaphor for me of a greater planet that intends to survive America despite us, that doesn’t believe in our imperial rule, that has its own celebrations, its own children.
We finally get to Via Nicolo, the block of the restaurant, and turn into it. It is little more than a café, almost a luncheonette—very disappointing. There are a few tables outside, two or three inside, mostly empty. We try inside first, then outside, but no one seems interested in serving us or even acknowledging our presence. they are involved in customers drinking alcohol, pouring in from the throng. We try looking purposeful and dinner-oriented by sitting in chairs outdoors, and a boy finally brings us menus. They are in Italian, so I get the phrasebook out but can decipher only insalatas, salads. We have been there ten minutes, and nothing further is happening vis a vis us, though more and more drinkers file in, packing the place. It is not even relaxing, for a speaker a few yards away is thumping Italian rap.
“Let’s bail,” says Lindy.
We continue down the street where she is sure there must be quieter restaurants, but it actually gets noisier. We never find an eatery. It’s just wine patios and beer gardens. If these places have anything but liquor, it is not apparent, and beyond the celebration, as we finally reach the fair’s limits, there are only darkened streets with banks and shops. We circle again, and Lindy tries investigating two crammed places while I wait outside. She departs each of them frustrated and disappointed. “I was looking forward,” she pouts, “at least to a salad and a bowl of soup. I just want to go back to the room and rest.”
We trudge along, having fallen out of spirit with the situation and each other, grumpy and unfestive. It is too wild and impenetrable, too adolescent with young people gathered in giant groups, too old and Italian as whole communities are socializing raucously. People passing along the streets greet others near and far, so we are, yes, little bugs in a very huge pond.
Without the fixed goal of a restaurant now, we feel somewhat lighter. We walk through the hoopla and energy silently, scanning and absorbing it. There is so much to see, so many unusual faces and bodies, such beautiful teenagers and young men and women, dark Italians, magnificent Ethiopians and other Africans giving the fair a pan-Mediterranean seaport feel, fantastically eroded elderly people, madonnas and boticellis, bambinos whose faces for centuries have been cast have in manger scenes. The series of songs, speaker by speaker, create magical cacophonous montages in zones where their influences overlap.
Now we reach a stand where a woman is carving a gigantic pig inside a booth, and people are buying slices. There is an odd empty table amid the dense melee. What to do is obvious. Once again, good-bye to dietary taboos. I would never have eaten this food normally, but this is a day that started out with nonorganic raspberries and currants, and I just got origin-less chestnuts from a grumpy street vendor. I get on line with Lindy for the sliced pink ham. We also buy calamari on sticks, an unknown breaded fish, onion rings, and a draft beer each (13 euros), and then grab the table and munch away. This is where we should have been in the first place instead of on a forced march to an irrelevant, arbitrary dining site.
We have joined the celebration or, more properly, stopped trying to impose our agenda and are accepting what is right here, before our eyes. The whole world was screaming, “Street food! Italia!” And we were looking for some formal dining situation, aloof from the riches before us. Of course, the restaurants weren’t serving. Fare was everywhere else.
Finally we are at peace, as we sit there, devouring ham and calamari. I muse about how I am using little bits of Italian automatically now because it sounds better in discourse: si (instead of “yes”), buongiorno (or just giorno for good morning or good day), buonserra, sinistra (during directions), gracie (Lindy sometimes slips into the Mexican gracias), scuse (necessary in poking through throngs), prego (my old favorite from the Bologna conductor, often used as the check digit for “you’re welcome” after gracie), ciao, inglise?, and Lindy’s favorite, quanto?, a much better bleat in every sense for what it means than “how much?”
On our way back I see a familiar panne vendor and pick the very loaf of rye that I had envied when passing through the first time.
On the way past the chestnut man, I can’t resist the smell of his wagon again, plus I have a chance to make amends. I get three euros ready and wait my turn, expecting his face to show surprise (as though to say, “I guess they were pretty good, not worth 3 euros, eh?”). But he acts as though he has never seen me before, grabs the small can, fills it, pours the embers into a bag, then takes my money smiling and jabbering away. Four blocks later, Hotel Milano.
September 24 (Day Twelve)
An interesting thing at Hotel Milano: the halls are dark but, as you walk down them, lights turn on automatically. Thus, going downstairs at night to write in my journal (so as not to disturb Lindy), I set off whole sections of corridor ahead of me as I advance.
Last night closed with an enigmatic event. I used the Milano computer to check my email on the server and found a message from Hotel James Joyce, confirming a reservation for the following night in Trieste. This confirmation came quite a bit after the fact: three days of writing them and three phone calls were all unsuccessful, so we gave up. Hence, we arrived in Trieste without any reservation. Now their email implies that this is their first response to us, suggesting that Lindy’s phone calls that each time elicited only a word she interpreted as pieno must have ended her up somewhere else. Perhaps she transposed a digit; perhaps Elena’s email had an error. In any case the James Joyce sounds interesting from its name alone and, even if moving would be quite inconvenient now, going to see it provides a possible goal on a morning exploration of town.
The day has a ruder surprise. Going online again at the hotel computer after breakfast, I find an urgent email from Auto Europe, informing us that we cannot take our present car into Eastern Europe. There has obviously been a misunderstanding in the transfer of reservations, they say, and someone overnight in Portland has just recognized it and is freaking out. A bold sentence telling us not to drive the car into Eastern Europe is repeated, like a court summons, between each paragraph. At the end, they give me their toll-free number and insist that I call at once.
I go to the lobby phone booth and, after some experimentation, get their number and speak to a woman on the night shift back in the States. It takes six separate phone calls to complete our conversation, as we are cut off each time by something that sounds like another call dialing through but whose dialing never stops until it washes out the voice.
The relevant issue is that Auto Europe is the car guarantor, and only some autos are insured for travel in Eastern Europe. We have to be driving one of those, which means Avis not Hertz because Hertz has no cars in Trieste designated for Eastern European use.
When we finally complete the exchange, the upshot is that they will try to reinstate our Avis reservation. After all we are in Trieste where we were going to be anyway on the 25th. The only difference is that we drove here rather than taking the train, but that affects the Elf not any new car. There is some concern about getting a new car on short notice, as the prior reservation cannot simply be recalled.
As for the Elf the woman says it will be no problem to return it to Hertz in Trieste rather than Pisa, as originally required, or Venezia in ten days, as the present reservation, assuming a Slovenian run, states.
After the cloud of the impending disaster—being stranded here without a vehicle—has lifted, I leave the phone booth relieved and walk into a different buzzsaw.
The morning desk clerk at the Milano, a previously unnotable young man who at worst seemed slightly officious when setting me up on the computer, is now behaving like an arresting officer. When he left me on the computer, he told me it was 3 euros per fifteen minutes, a standard fee that, if it had been mentioned by the female clerk the previous night, was lost in translation. can live with that charge, though it is a little disappointing, as I thought the Internet was a perk for guests. The clerk did look at his watch, indicating that it would be a “hard” fifteen minutes—a kind of punctilious policing I found menial. It was not anything, however, that I dwelled on.
Now, as I blithely leave the phone booth, assuming my business is done, he hails me from behind the desk and announces very loudly and accusingly that I have been calling America and owe the hotel money. It is as if I am being arrested on the spot. He actually orders me to stop right there as though I have been trying to get away with something and it is time to summon the polizia.
I immediately explain that I have been dialing a toll-free number, but he is having none of that. Lapsing between Italian and English, he works himself into seeming apoplexy. I can’t really understand what he is saying—that is, with any precision—except his pure repetition gets across to me the concept that the hotel will be charged for my calls; thus I must reimburse them. He is checking some sort of video screen behind the desk, which apparently logs all calls and made and instantaneously registers their costs. Twelve euros in this case, or $16.
I am not really that upset; I presume that I can recover the cost from Auto Europe, and anyway, such are the hazards of traveling. Yet his rude manner elicits aggression back from me. I complain about being cut off five times—as a good part of the cost is the separate rate for initiating individual calls—but he jumps at the opportunity to blame that on the American, not the Italian, phone system and concludes with a peremptory flick of the hand, as if to affirm it is my business not his.
My explanation about the toll-free number simply agitates him because it feels, no doubt rightly, as though I am trying to impose yet another idiotic, juvenile American reality on Italy, which has its own rigorous and derelict bureaucracy but one that is familiar and covertly admired and certainly defended in any squabbles with foreigners. I am being the “ugly American,” but I don’t care because I dislike this young guy and his supercilious tone.
In the midst of this brouhaha, he scans the other side of the room and triumphantly declares that because the computer is still on, I owe for an entire hour, not just the five minutes I was online. In truth, I went up to the desk and briefly interrupted his exchange with another patron to tell him I was leaving the computer at the time I entered the phone booth. There is even a specific moment I can cite to jog his memory: I borrowed a piece of paper and a pen from him for my conversation with Auto Europe.
He either doesn’t understand what I am saying or, more likely, is indulging a combined militaristic and sadistic streak, so he repeats that he is going to put an 12 additional euros onto my room, as though daring me to do anything about it. Even as I try to say a word, he shouts over me in mixed English and Italian, pointing across the lobby again to the computer. “You are still using it!” he insists. “It’s still on.” I know this is provocation—intentional and blatant harassment. He is doing it to bully and provoke, so I am going to fight back vigorously. I repeat several times that he knows very well I was off the computer, gaining steam with each one. He takes my outraged resistance as insolence, throwing up his arms dramatically, turning to his left, and shouting for reinforcements.
Two large men come out of a room adjoining the space behind the front desk. A real fat one in his mid-sixties, very red-faced and speaks no English and is mainly yelling at everyone, including the clerk, in a spate of apparent assertions that are of course unintelligible to me. He is like an electric organ that someone has turned on. A second, more pleasant-looking man in his late thirties follows; he enunciates in strained but adequate English. He gets the issue across to me diplomatically: it is not the hotel’s fault; the free number is probably fine, but the Italian phone system is incompetent. Kind of heavy-set with a very wide face, wire glasses, and a conservative but spikey hairdo, he is actually quite sweet and patient, the sort of politician who kisses babies and magister who spoils children—a born mediator.
The situation has also drawn a woman with an Australian accent and very fluent Italian. Perhaps (I suspect) to show off her Italian, she now starts arguing with all three men about my “free” number and it being unfair that I am charged for their problem. At this point I consider this issue pretty much resolved, but she is really getting into it with the sweet guy, which re-arouses the rotund one just as he is leaving. He sets his imposing bulk back behind the desk and shouts uncontrollably to no one in particular, like an opera singer belting out an aria. Apparently her Italian has had a bite. Everyone seems to be trying to calm him down, e.g. the two other hoteliers behind the desk—but this Pavarotti guy is really going at it obliviously. As the Australian woman fires back in Italian, he seems ready to explode. I am a mere bystander now, making no further protest, while she seems delighted with her Italian oratory, flying back and forth between English (for my benefit) and Italian like a bird.
Afterward she explains to me that she merely asked the large one to put a sign on the phone, advising people that American European toll-free numbers would cost money here—but big man takes this as a slur: he will not have any sign on the booth implying a failing of the hotel. The failing, he insists, is either of the Italian or American phone systems and has nothing to do with the Milano or its responsibility to its patrons. This is the point he has gotten himself so lathered up to make. Sometimes, he has been saying, calls are free; sometimes they are not. The phone system is imperfect, and this is a fact of life. The hotel only charges what it is charged. No sign is necessary. Absolutely no sign. Ever. Not in the Milano.
That is the gist of it.
When she finishes her account, she oddly presses my hand to her bosom and suggests a drink, but I tell her that my wife and I are headed out for a walk. Not missing a step, she coos, “Have a good holiday,” and departs.
Now the asshole clerk is attacking me again on the matter of the computer. A newly-arriving spikey-hairdo man takes a moment to grasp the dilemma but, when he does, he indicates very cordially that there will be no charge at all for the computer, only the phone. The clerk looks visibly crestfallen; then he regains steam and, after arguing heatedly with his superior in Italian while counting with his fingers and pointing at me, he starts to defy his instruction and keyboard a charge anyway. The other man halts and reprimands him, then turns to me and says with an affable smile that I will only be charged for the previous evening’s use, nothing at all today.
The clerk stands to the side, glaring, nursing his wounds from this slight. He is a hanging judge who wants to throw the book at me, just on principle and from general envy and colicky constitution, perhaps also in reprisal at Americans—he is from the same school as the conductor on the train out of Bologna. As a new guest arriving requires his attention, the event is effectively discontinued. The manager and I introduce ourselves to each other. He is Stefano, and now he wants to try to understand my auto issue (that caused this whole confrontation) and also to help me with it.
His English is not good enough to make this simple. It is amazing how many different subtle concepts are involved in communicating the single state of affairs in play—so many nuances involving insurance of cars in Eastern Europe, our method of travel from Siena to Trieste, my use of an intermediary in the U.S., the timing and logistics involving the return of one car and the getting of another, and the relationships among all of these. After many passes with course corrections to handle just about every imaginable misunderstanding, I succeed. Then we go through a perusal of the phone book together, trying to see where the Hertz and Avis offices, respectively, are. For a while it appears that there are only rental-car offices at the airport, 45 kilometers away in the opposite direction of Slovenia. That would be a major hassle. But it could be even worse: what if only one of the rental agencies is at the Trieste airport? Then we will have to return one car and get to the other somehow by public transportation, unless we rent the new one first and drive in tandem for an hour to the second. The exchange will consume the better part of a day.
A long time is spent going back and forth, trying to choreograph how my wife and I will solve this riddle, much of it an English lesson for Stefano. Then a breakthrough! As he is looking through the phone book maybe for the fifth time, he sees that there is a pier right in town on the Gulf of Trieste where cars are also rented. Immediately he tries to confirm this solution (to verify Hertz and Avis are on the same pier) by cross-examination of addresses and then clinching phone calls to both companies.
I am not sure what to hope for or how to interpret this new tack. After all, the woman at Auto Europe did mention the airport too as the locale for the cars; yet I have just as little wish to travel out there as to flaunt the rules and risk consequences. I also have no desire to call her back for clarification, though I would gladly spend the money again if I could convince her to transfer the rental to the pier…as long as both Hertz and Avis are there, which Stefano is checking. (In fact, he will eventually call Auto Europe himself, from behind the desk on the Milano’s dime, and ask them to email reservations so he can print them out and we can view them together. When he gets them on the phone, they do not have the new reservation ready yet—it will take another two hours. But they have already generated a replacement form for returning the Elf. They email that at once. It happily turns out to say: Molo Bersaglieri, Centro Congressi—the pier in Trieste).
Somewhere in this conversation while we are waiting between busy signals on one of the calls, I tell Stefano the story about the James Joyce which, though complex in itself for our limited language compatibility, gets across to him on my first try, maybe because he is used to hotel reservation imbroglios. Despite the fact that it involves a rival establishment, he looks it up for in the phone book and draws me a route on the map to get there. During the next gap in phone calls he marks another route, to a site where we can sign up (if we want) for a walking tour later that afternoon. This is quite prescient on his part, for it is the very tour that we have had our eye on since the previous evening, as it is advertised on the lobby wall.
During this latter conversation Lindy finally joins us from her breakfast and needs to be brought up to speed on everything that has transpired, beginning all the way back at my email from Auto Europe. Hearing about the tour, our most recent topic, she starts asking Stefano for directions into town so that we can go make reservations. It is difficult to explain to her, in a way that he will understand too, what is happening right at that moment, for instance, that I already have two very adequate routes and our friend is quite busy on other matters. Feeling expendable, she heads upstairs in the elevator to retrieve her own map on which she has marked some things she wants to see too, like museums and historical sites, with the hope that he will mark out those routes too. While this is going on, Stefano makes a call to the walking tour and tentatively reserves places for us and confirms the hour. All we have to do is go down and pay. I am surprised that he picked up those nuances between Lindy and me, and I thank him for his graciousness.
While she is upstairs, the conversation between us now takes yet another turn. He tells me that he has to leave soon because he is going to an art exhibit in Croatia for the afternoon, but he will be back tomorrow in time for work. He wonders if I would like to have a drink with him now before he leaves. I ask him if he could postpone it till the morning, presuming he is back in time and we are still at the Milano by then—both of which we agree, with gathering enthusiasm for each other’s company, are likely. I mean, why should I want to leave this hotel now that I have made a friend? Somewhere in the conversation I take out my wallet and hand him my card. He sees my name, Grossinger, and hastens to his office to fetch his card: Stefano Stern. Then he holds up two fingers together, touches his heart and laughs with a warmth that almost brings tears to his eyes, as though he is weeping for joy. “We are like brothers,” he declares, as he shakes my hand. I am not sure if he means German or Jewish, but I am not going to probe this outburst of affection, as I don’t want to talk him out of the least bit of enthusiasm for our new friendship. We are human and have rapport, and that should be enough. I am not particularly Jewish except ethnically and I am certainly not German, but who cares? In any case, he has moved on to another discovery—that I am a publisher, pointing to that designation on my card.
I circle the website on my card and tell him to look up my books. He says that they will be his English lesson and that once upon a time he wanted to be a publisher himself, or perhaps to go to work for an Italian publisher, but—and here he gives a deep sigh and pantomimes “alas”—he must make money for familia.
“Bambinos?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “Papa.”
Lindy has returned and is surprised by the deepened tenor of our exchange. She stands there for a while, as we talk about literature and our upcoming travels respectively in Slovenia and Croatia, and she gets a bit impatient with these two guys waxing melodramatic for reasons she doesn’t understand. Finally we all have to move on, Stefano (looking at his watch) to slip out of work and get to Croatia, and us to saunter downtown. He asks me to promise, if we don’t see each other again, that I will email him and start an exchange about literature when we get back to the States. I promise but also proclaim that we will of course meet on the morrow.
Only when Lindy and I are out on the street and headed to the corner of Ghega and Roma can I communicate the detailed subtext. She is as delighted as I am but also quite curious to know if Stefano is Jewish or not. I prefer leaving it ambiguous and dismiss her idea of asking him.
The event has actually delighted me to the point of being slaphappy, unable to stop giggling; in fact, I can barely talk I am laughing so much. I surprise even myself. I realize I am so moved that I am just about crying too. This is a little over the top for Lindy, as she is more concerned about the car crisis and whether it will get resolved in time for us leave for Slovenia the next day. I am in my bubble, enjoying the goofy energy while indulging in an entire juicy mental review of the entire lobby theater while appreciating scenic Italy.
Walking down Via Roma, we stop often to look at amazing architecture. So many of the buildings have decorative stonework in them to a degree that summons closer examination. Scrutiny reveals enough artistry that a whole photography book could probably be created from the details on each and every building, even though most of them are mere apartments and offices. They are palaces, composed of giant frescoes and sculptures, all the more so when they are official edifices or take the most ornate route: the Trieste museum and the opera house. When I say “decorative stonework,” I mean whole three-dimensional statues built into indentations in the buildings, depicting Roman, Christian, and Renaissance figures. These statues across the fronts of walls are larger-than-life and fully inset so that their outer edges are no more than flush with the façade itself. Not only are there statues but fleur d’lis designs, friezes, gargoyles, and all sorts of other devices that no doubt have formal names in art-theory books. Here is Mercury; here is Pan; here is the crucifixion; here is a Roman senator; and so on.
We reach the central plaza, Piazza Dell’Unitá d’Italia, from where the wide-open vista of the Gulf of Trieste is dramatically visible, hundreds of boats separated on the great expanse, hordes of people walking beside this Adriatic inlet, many sitting on the wall right over the water.
After a number of false trails using the map, spiced by a few queries of women with baby carriages (after all, they are probably local), we find the Information Center at Piazza Squero, arriving by a back route through a dark, urine-stenched alley after passing right in front of it unknowingly ten minutes earlier. There, after waiting on line behind yet an obnoxious American couple in Italy determined to get at least fifteen minutes of advice—fuck the line of tourists behind them—we register for the walking tour at 16:30. Then we continue on our jaunt to try to find the obscure narrow little street, Via del Cavazzeni, which houses the James Joyce.
This is a worthy adventure, taking us perhaps only a few blocks from the Information Center but to the edge of a much older, more eroded part of town, one that resembles Siena and Lucca. We know we are on the right trail because we pass a number of plaques commemorating “James Joyce in Trieste. ” Later we learn that he spent ten years in this port at the turn of the century, teaching English. Always short on cash and behind on his debts, he moved from dwelling to dwelling, one favorite dining spot to another, leaving behind a host of unpaid obligations. All in all, he lived at more than twenty sites, providing many plaque opportunities.
When looking for a one-block street in a maze of winding viae in a foreign city, you rely on the inevitable logic of the map. It is the sole thread through the tangle. But the map, as Gregory Bateson pointed out long ago, is not the territory, and there are always—as we found out in Siena— surprises, whether of orientation, scale, or interpretation. In this case we track ourselves along a slightly wrong path, thus are lucky to pick up a different end of an adjacent street to the one we were looking for and from there turn unexpectedly right into Cavezzini, as marked by a charming board-sign for the James Joyce. It is a tiny alley off another tiny alley, curling sharply downhill alongside some major construction and restoration. The hotel’s brief residential door-front is tucked away in an urban gorge, dark as twilight because of the towering height and proximity of pinkish-brown walls on either side of the passageway. Opposite walls of this alley inflatedly called Via del Cavazzeni lean so close to each other just past the James Joyce that they seem about to touch. A person could not even lie head-to-toe across the street without bending.
It may be somewhat unclear why we have taken this journey in the first place. The last thing we want to do is move ourselves, our luggage, and our vehicle. Perhaps it is that the name “James Joyce” is magic. Initially the challenge was just to see where it was—we wanted to go on a quest; we wanted an excuse to explore Trieste’s interstices.
The secret reason for our visit becomes clear upon arriving, when identifying ourselves as the people who have reservations and got the email. A studious and obviously intelligent bespectacled young clerk in a blue and white pinstriped shirt is excited to greet the writers of the many messages. He is a friend of the owner, on duty only during weekends, and the more astute custodian of the computer. Our query had been overlooked by everyone else initially, but he found it yesterday and answered, obviously a bit too late.
He quite understands that we want to stay put at the Milano, but he wants to take us upstairs to show us the rooms. The hobbit-like entry opens to floors that are unexpectedly vast. The suites are tasteful, even elegant, unlike the Milano, which is a classic old dive by a train station, clean but institutional. The James Joyce has vitality and style. The colors are subtle, the paintings daring, the rooms different in design and ambiance. It is more like a bed-and-breakfast.
Our new companion’s name is Paolo Girol, and he pours us mineral water after which we sit at a table in the tiny lobby talking. He explains the hoopla of our previous night’s experience: Europafest takes place one weekend a year, the reason also why it was hard to find a room. As for our failed restaurant expedition—well, he says, the part of town we were in is mainly wine bars. Beyond the James Joyce, down toward the water, are very good fish and general Italian restaurants.
He is a music-composition student from outside Venezia, going for a Ph.D. at the local university—his instrument is classical guitar. He might like to come study in California next with a professor importante in Santa Barbara.
He lets me use his laptop to get our confirmation number from Auto Europe. Soon enough, as we discuss with him our forthcoming travel plans in the context of this recreational visit to his friend’s hotel, we decide impulsively to book a room at the James Joyce for two nights in early October when we are on our way back from Slovenia, a time we had previously reserved for either one last shot at Venice or an extra couple of days in Slovenia. We schedule dinner with him then, as well.
Elated at this new connection and pleased too by our firming up plans and getting a reservation for two undetermined nights on the horizon (plus dispensing with Venezia in favor of newly favored Trieste once and for all), we leave the James Joyce and work out way down alleys and streets to the waterfront itself. The Adriatic sits right there, pushing against the city with its breeze and enormous water. Later we learn that all of this downtown part of Trieste is landfill on saltpan, a project going back centuries. The original city rests, unvisited yet by us, on a series of hills, including a central one, overlooking its extension into the sea.
Here the interface with the Gulf of Trieste is extremely intimate. The water laps onto pavement and, at one point, there is a broad polished stone staircase descending right into the sea, like a spot Aphrodite might use to submerge or return from a meta-marine passage between dimensions. Several people are wading on the steps, so I take off my shoes and stand in the tide.
Perhaps from my considering the dominance of the three-quarters of the Earth by such water, I feel a mixture of awe and apprehension on the edge of Trieste. There is no gap between land and sea. Pavement ends; water begins maybe a foot or so below it. The pavement is as flat as the sea, and there is no barrier. It is as though every effort has been made not to protect the shoreline, not to separate humankind from its fierce neighbor. In fact the relaxed strolling pedestrians are treating a lion like a pussy-cat. The land is so low; the sea, barely contained, is so high and full and wide. Not only am I tiny against this cosmos of ocean and history, the entire city is but a glyph, a scratch on a rock.
A couple with canes strolls along the very edge, a few millimeters from Okeanos. The sea could hiccough and swallow them. The balance on these stairs feels ninety-hundred-ninety-nine thousandths sea, one thousandth civilization.
The water is really warm on my feet. I feel the tiniest connection, an umbilicus to the blue, the primordial Greek thalatta, the ancient cyan Phoenician and Cretean sea, sea of Roman and Hapsburg empires, and my own itinerant ancestors, some of whom could well have passed through this port en route to Poland or Germany.
We walk back to the Milano, make lunch from our reserve of food (cheese sandwiches, salad, and a big raspberry-centered cookie) and then rest till we set out at 15:10 for our walking tour.
Starting on Via Roma again, we work our way back to Piazza Dell’Unitá d’Italia through the mobs of Europafest, but are very early, so we sit on a bench beside a statue of the indigenous peoples of the world as known soon after Columbus and watch the pigeons land on its different figures, creating absurd little subtexts and vaudeville with each other and the silent artifact. Kids wrestle roughly before our eyes. Lindy figures out that the more she shows disapproval, the more they pretend to be murdering each other, and the louder they squawk.
We finally go to one of the overpriced cafés and order mineral water and gelatos (lime and coffee ones) 12 euros total, and sit there nursing them and a plate of free macaroons until 16:20.
A group of twelve tourists has gathered at the piazza for the walking tour, almost evenly split between Italian and English speakers, though we are the only Americans. The other English speakers are Australians, two couples traveling together and a separate woman our age who has come back to Trieste to see where her grandfather dwelled and from where he sailed over a century ago. Sadly, she says, the site is now all apartments, no original house left.
The guide is a young woman with a pageboy haircut and a light, slightly playful or irreverent manner (even as she is precise in her diction, scrupulous in her detail, and relentlessly neutral as to any politics subtexted in the things she is describing). We have until 18:30 to complete the itinerary, and the basic course leads, first, through the various connected squares of the downtown, her narration elaborating statues and buildings. Then we detour along the canal, past the Serb Orthodox church with its luminous blue and gold exterior painting and dome; up the steep Colle di San Giusto, past the ruins of the Roman amphitheater to the founding point of the city with its the great mediaeval church and adjacent fortresses, the former incorporating the ruins of a Roman temple. The tour completes itself by our passage down another side of the hill, past other churches, to our starting point.
The advertised roster promises us Piazza Verdi, Borgo Teresiano, Teatro Roman, Colle di San Giusto (climbing up stairs through hairpin alleyways of often fancy apartment to the top of the hill), Via dell Cattedrale, Cittavechhia, and Piazza della Borsa (the business center and stock exchange).
Our chipper, sometimes bemused guide provides each narration and history first in English, then in Italian (while the English speakers peel off and wander about the site). Up on the hill she switches to the reverse. At the end of the tour, she admits that English is her sixth language and fifth-best one for translation. Given that handicap, she is remarkably flawless, lacking but a word here or there.
One can read about Trieste in books (other than Rick Steves’ Italy), so I will recount our journey only in terms of those things that were memorable to me:
The first statue we looked at, the one with the pigeons, actually is the oldest in the city. It is an intentionally amorphous pile of rubbery-looking semi-square blocks that give it an unfinished clay look, capped by a perfectly rendered stone bird of prey, its long, almost-delicate wings shooting out at forty-five degrees from the peak. The statue’s figures, semi-camouflaged in the stone, represent the players of terra orbis as known at the time: an Indian, an African, a lion, a snake or fish navigating downward, a satyr bathing at a fountain, and so on, but, our guide jokes, no Australian Aborigines or Maoris because Australia and New Zealand were uncharted at the time.
Next she points to the sea and a great cruise liner docked along a wharf. This is her cue for a Chamber of Commerce narrative: Trieste was a poor city a century ago, and immigrants mostly sailed from this port for a better life in the States, South America, or Australia. Now people are starting to come here as a tourist destination and even for work. Trieste has awakened and is at the brink of a new renaissance.
In the series of piazzas through which we then trek, she talks about how all these buildings with their elaborate friezework, colonnaded windows, complex porticos, and giant statuaries along rooflines and rising on ledges between windows, are very late by comparison to equivalents of their approximate styles throughout Europe. Trieste was nil, a little colony of 10,000 on a hill until the eighteenth century when, reannointed as a major Hapsburg port, it exploded to 250,000—its prime influences Austrian, not Italian.
We are looking, she explains, at gradations of neo-Baroque, neo-Classical, neo-Byzantine, neo-Gothic, neo-whatever, as well as late Art Nouveau, oftentimes each consecutive grand building on a block a different style, as the architects of Trieste mimicked and riffed improvisationally on what was already parading through Germany, France, Austria, and the like. The overall effect is majestic, palatial, and sumptuous. In this part of town, there are no ordinary structures. All apartment buildings are grand. (Elsewhere, as noted—or as we shall see later—Trieste looks like Siena or even a larger Chiavasso with its commercial strips and crumbling Renaissance edifices.)
On a bridge over the main canal is a bronze life-sized statue of James Joyce slightly hunched and walking. He would be mortified to be so literally epitomized. Jean Cocteau, enemy and creator of statues (and mirrors), would be embarrassed for him, to be posed like this with the post-modern, yellow-shirted vulgar Italian yuppie from our tour, his arm around the author of Finnegan’s Wake, his wife, a cigarette fuming from her mouth and wafting unpleasantly across the group, taking his digital photo. So here is the real price for all those unpaid bills and bad charges! Is this how Trieste decides to sentence the artist as an old man, for the duration, for dying famous, yet leaving rancorous debts in town? The creditors will get their due yet. But what a horrid literary fate!
The saving grace is the plaque onto which JJ will step if he actually begins walking: James Joyce, 1882-1941; at its upper margin: …la mia anima è a Trieste… (Letters a Nora, 27 Ottobre 1909).
It was simply life as lived. He could not affect the outcome.
Now we stand before the Serb church with its multiple Cross-topped cerulean crowns, one great cupola-like one overlooking different levels and scales of other, symmetrically placed colonnade-capped turrets and alcoves with smaller scallop-edged cupolas. Two large haloed saint figurines ascend where arch-topped windows might be on the outer wall, flanking the entrance against gleaming gold-leaf backdrops. Just above the door a haloed angel (of course), made larger by his open wings against the gold, fills the lower half of an intricately-curlicued frieze with a triangular top. The edifice is a contrast of extremely fine stonework and garish imagery and coloring that give it a peculiar quasi-Romanesque, almost Rosicrucian and South Carolina Pentecostal look—a mixture of epic architecture and tarot card.
As we continue around and past this structure, we begin our ascent up snaking stones stairs that will lead us to the mast we view, high above, at the very top of the hill of San Giusto, original fortress Trieste in the sky. Hard to believe we will have stamina for attaining that. Yet it turns out to be less steep than it looks from the base.
Old Trieste is a Roman frontier city, high ground in times of imperial wars, as Trieste was always vulnerable from both the East and the West, Venice after Rome, Vienna after Venice. New Trieste lies on the table of the Adriatic, merely on loan, darling of the global market and fashion industries.
The Roman amphitheater no more than a quarter of the way up the hill, marks the original shoreline. In its moment of long-ago time, plays were put on before the sea—no wonder the modern water seems so omnipresent in much of the downtown.
The structure of the amphitheater is more ruins than stadium, but the basic footprint remains: an eroded wall like a honeycomb with tiny square portals like bar code, jagged gaps in it forty to seventy-five percent of the way to the ground; along its length catacombs and tunnels crumbled into half-catacombs and mere arches. Down below are sleek, slightly rounded rows of benches, probably reconstructed, as others are almost completely missing. As we learn from the guide, plays are put on here on every summer.
At the exposed margins of former cohesions and supports, the decay has the pleasant appearance of lunar pumice, for we are seeing a unique x-ray of masonwork, a cross-section of not only the original skeleton but the effects of wind and water and time on stone, perfectly imprinted as a timelapse snapshot of Trieste onto Rome.
At the top of the hill the view from the old church and fortress is stunning. One can see up and down the coast, its hills densely dotted with towns, castles, towers, apartment cubes squat and giraffe-like, classic Italian reddish pipe-shingled roofs with enigmatic chimney urns, piers, warehouses, the lighthouse. It is a layout that might be seen from a plane.
While we are overlooking the Gulf, the guide answers a question I have been holding in mind since our drive from Siena: what are the dark objects in the water? Up close, she says, they are actually multicolored bars for cultivating mussels. I then ask her about the magnificent stand of trees beside the church. I had never seen nuts like those on them, clustered like berries or marble-size castanets at various nodes of one. Split open, they gave off the pungent aroma of an entire sachet. These, she says, are different species of cypress, very very old.
An Ethiopian or maybe Nigerian teenager sits by the big wooden door to the church, his right foot on a lower step than his left one, a posture which raises his knee to his chin: immobile, impassive, utterly black and lovely, imposing a powerful multi-tiered rebus—old Rome and New Carthage, medieval Rome and the Mediterranean, Italy and Africa, Libyan trade and Catholic missionaries, Mussolini and Qaddafi—a sound of Italian rap faintly rising from the city. Up above him a giant delicately stone-sectored stained-glass floral mandala is imprinted in the mange of the church’s irregular brick.
We pass what is left of a Roman plaza and forum. This is the spot from which the city was ever and again protected from warriors. The hundreds of thousands who died on this front in World War I are commemorated on the hill of San Giusto by a completely black, twisted 1930s statue of stylistic soldiers. The cast fuses three figures, one with his right arm thrown up in the chaos of battle, his left outstretched with a shield; the second a dying companion he is supporting; the third kneeling on a helmet. The war’s date is MCMXV-MCMXVIII
Around the hill, viewed on our descent, a single Roman pillar stands alone among fashionable and run-down apartments. It is the last of its kind, heavy post-punk graffiti on adjoining buildings giving it a surprising free pass.
As is so often the case, my favorite thing on the walk was not listed in the formal itinerary. It is the wooded area on the side of the hill, stretching over a great distance and populated by feral cats that are fed, says the guide, by a single woman. The full import of her aside about cats does not hit until a few moments later we pass the first giant tabbies and black-and-whites sunning themselves and eating from bowls. There are so many and they are all so leonine.
We are very, very lucky. We get to see the saint of gattos in session. A few yards further an old woman manifesting like Clotho of the Fates is pulling goodies from a small sack, filling dishes for her flock of courtesans, probably a dozen or more cats of all varieties, mostly huge, crowded together and touching bodies, more appearing every moment from the complicated background, as she reaches through grillwork to resupply their bowls—a stupendous feline exhibition.
Passing her, we see cats everywhere. The footpath winds in and around wild areas, and you can look at just about any spot and not spot a cat, but then one always appears to longer scrutiny: there under a tree snoozing; two more Cheshirelike up in another tree; three standing altogether, looking like one rock; another prowling behind a bush. It is like a page in a gamebook; the caption tells you to find all the cats disguised in this picture. At first there might seem to be a dozen, but the instructions insist that you can find fifty if you really look.
I can’t tell you how many cats were on this hill, but it had to be in the hundreds if not thousands. Spotting them became my obsession of that phase of the walk. It brought sadness and sympathy both. felt for their plight, though they were clearly happy, even pampered, and I found myself wishing I had contributed some euros when we passed the Lady of Fates herself.
I wonder how this population can be controlled or fed forever, and what will ultimately become of its threatened community, blissfully in its own world, unaware of perils among the doings of men.
After a rest back at the Milano we set out for dinner at one of Paolo’s recommended restaurants, using the map. We actually leave our room at 21:10, so it is going to be a late meal in the local tradition.
To avoid the jam of people along Via Roma and adjacent streets, we route ourselves beside the waterfront. The sea is absolutely black and placid. The human throngs grow until they are thick alongside the Piazza Dell’Unitá d’Italia. Lindy thinks there might be fireworks at hand, and she will turn out to be right. After we pass the Piazza, we have trouble finding the correct districts for any of the restaurants. The map just won’t bend to the territory. As we pass some punk street scenes, boom boxes and ganga smoke, we hear explosions and see the kids’ sudden shadows in the glow. So we retreat to the Piazza to watch the presentation of fire.
It is a superlative display of choreographed incendiaries. Great bursts of stars of different colors explode through one another in perfect syncopation so that it seems orchestral. The windows of the palatial buildings rattle and resonate as the Piazza thunders with deafening noise, so loud that Lindy and I both react with a start at each new burst, even though it is expected. Globes of stars seem to be flying right at us until they dissolve.
With the explosions unabated, we give up on Paolo’s list and pick a random restaurant down an adjacent alley. We learn later it is a “tourists only” joint. We park ourselves at one of its outside tables and await menus. The waiter is theatrical; it seems that he has been at the game for at least thirty years. He has stock lines in broken English and Italian for everything—every dish on the menu, every romantic cliché—but at least we can send away the musicians with their violins.
The fact that we are worn out and in disarray and simply want to eat fast and get back to our room does not dampen waiter’s ardor. He is up for a long Italian meal with all the extras, so we disappoint. We do not order much, and the highlight is a plate of sections of fish caught that day. Shrimps, swordfish, and octopus are obvious in the mix, arranged in an artful pattern on the plate. Other species are unknown, including one little whole fried flatfish, head, tail, and all.
As we meander back to our room, the festival is packing up. Traffic is reduced, but we still have to dodge hornet cars: You may stand at a red light and look both ways and see nothing. till half the time, before you can hustle across the street, some little vehicle has shot from nowhere like a bullet and is almost upon you before you hit the next curb. We take to waiting for green lights even when no vehicles are apparent in the dark, and even then we look carefully.
September 25 (Day Thirteen)
This is a day for transitions. We have to check out of the Milano, switch cars at the Molo Bersaglieri, get our stuff into the new car, and make it to Ljubljana at a reasonable hour.
I was up working on my trip journal in the middle of the night before going back to bed, so I got a late start and Lindy was already in the breakfast room by the time I got downstairs. I was happy to find my buddy Stefano in the office, and he immediately wanted to help us again on the cars with his Italian intercession. His call to Avis to confirm our reservation ominously brought no recognition from them of anything but the cancelled one, so he put me online behind the front desk to try to pull down the actual voucher from Auto Europe (I had graduated from thief to associate). When he printed it, it turned out not to be Avis at all, but a completely other firm, EuroCar (not to be confused with Auto Europe), which, fortunately turned out to be on Molo Bersaglieri too. When he called EuroCar, however, to confirm, they had wrong date for our availability, the 26 th instead of the 25 th. t one point I was talking to Stefano in English and he was talking to EuroCar in Italnia, but the exchange got complicated enough that he suddenly turned the phone over to the present clerk, the woman who checked us in the night before. Forceful and decisive, she negotiated a mid-day pickup (at 14:00 rather than the next morning).
“She speaks better English than you?” I wondered aloud afterwards.
“Everyone here speaks better English than me,” he sighed.
Now he and I head across the lobby to the bar to have our drink; only it is not exactly a bar and we wouldn’t have drinks at 9 in the morning anyway, so it is coffee for him, mint tea for me—plus more conversation.
It turns out that Stefano’s story is more complicated than the frustrated desire to be in publishing. The Milano was started by his great grandfather in the 1920s and is now run by his uncle. He was interested not only in literature but medicine, in fact to the extent that he completed 34 of 52 hours of medical school before dropping out and coming to work here as the manager. When I tried to ascertain if he was returning to medical school anytime soon to finish, he said, ”Too bad, no; this is my career now. It is the family business.”
I tell him about my own family’s involvement in the hotel business beginning around the same world era. Like Stefano’s family, the Grossingers launched their enterprise in the early part of the twentieth century and expanded during the Depression. My father wanted me to go into the hotel business, so I worked for him one summer during college before escaping for good. Grossinger’s was a full thousand-acre resort, much larger than the Milano, but at least the Milano is still a going concern. Grossinger’s slid from its pinnacle to crash in bankruptcy in the mid-eighties.
It is a striking if asymmetric parallel in our lives. I offer to send him my memoir that includes the story my family and history of their hotel; he promises to try to read it. (To show how much can get lost in translation: he assumed we were returning to the States and then coming back to Trieste and he wanted me to bring my book with me—even though I had told him a number of times we were headed to Slovenia and then Frankfurt.)
We then discuss getting together in October when we return; he reiterates that he would like to take us on a tour of the castle.
After our tete a tete, I had first thought to go to Molo Bersaglieri to make sure we had a car, then come back, get the Elf, and return it to Hertz while picking up the new car. I considered at least getting the paperwork done for the second car before returning the first so we wouldn’t get stuck without transportation. But now that our reservation is confirmed, I feel we can condense the exchange to one trip, driving to the Molo and leaving the Elf at Hertz before picking up the new vehicle. In fact, we can eat lunch in town after leaving off the Elf and before getting the Eurocar. That way we do not either have to walk the mile again into town or find parking there while we eat.
With that in mind, we put our bags in storage, hang out at the Milano till near lunchtime, and take the Elf toward the Molo Bersaglieri. The streets flow perfectly into the waterfront drive, and we are there in no time (the wharf juts into the Gulf just off the central piazza). It is hard to imagine a rental cars on a pier, but a walk along the concrete into the Gulf reveals an airport-like string inside a big swinging door near the end: all three companies that we know about and no more. The cars clearly must be elsewhere.
Here Italy confounds our plan. We miss the lunch deadline at Hertz by five minutes, and now the office is on siesta till 15:00. Luckily, though, we found a legal blue rectangle for parking the car right in front of the wharf, so we leave it there and set out to hunt down the restaurant recommended by Paolo, the one that we couldn’t find the night before: Citta Pisoni, supposedly on a small street between Via Della Pescheria and Via San Sebastiano.
On the map the intersection looks very close to the Molo, but the same tangle of crisscrossing streets in between that defeated us the night before defies both our maps. As we are walking past La Piazzetta, the restaurant we ultimately settled for the previous night, Lindy decides to stop a young woman with a baby carriage. Not only does she know Citta Pisano, she happens to be going in that direction and will revise her route to lead us right to it. We walk together and chat. A kindergarten teacher (we collaborate for a while to find the English name for her job) with a six-month old in the stroller, she is the one who tells us that La Piazetta is only for tourists; Citta Pisano, she says, is far better, a place that locals like, hardly ever any tourists.
It looks like nothing from the outside, a drabness that probably is intended. The old man behind the counter stares at us for almost an hour; a few of the elderly partrons do too, especially after I take out the laptop. We need to spend about two hours here all told, so we will take our time. We order some vegetable soup each and then I ask for spaghetti with tomato sauce, the most bare-bones dish, you’d think, one could get in an Italian restaurant. We were hoping it wouldn’t come too soon but hadn’t considered it mght take forever. Once a spaghetti-less hour had passed after the removal of empty soup bowls, with us reading and trading the laptop back and forth, we began to be concerned about the trajectory of the day and getting to Ljubljana before nightfall. We could see into the kitchen at counter level behind translucent glass, just hands working on dishes, and there was no spaghetti on the horizon, though the brazenly bare-handed preparation of food did give me a moment’s pause.
Lindy tried to summon the waiter, but he avoided direct contact (he barely spoke English anyway) and kept holding up two fingers. It certainly didn’t mean two minutes, and there was no obvious measure between minutes and hours. Maybe it was really two minutes, but he kept renewing it. Finally, at nearly 14:00 my dish arrived. It couldn’t have been simpler—plain spaghetti noodles, with a gob of tomato sauce in the middle for mixing in with the noodles, nothing else. Yet it tasted amazingly good. I have never cooked noodles so perfectly firm, neither soft nor hard. Lindy shared the plate, and then we vamoosed out of there, briefly back to the Piazza Dell’Unitá d’Italia where Paolo told us there was wireless. Despite the lateness of the hour I was wanting to send our stacked-up emails and pull down messages off the server.
We sat in different parts of the piazza, but either there was some configuration problem or I did not know how to get wireless in these circumstances because in all parts of the piazza different free wireless networks (no password required) showed on the “location” screen, but none of them worked. The computer would grind away and each time generate the message that I was not configured for an automatic connection.
We walk back to the Molo, down along the side of the building into the auto zone. There we wait for the woman at Eurocar to finish a conversation. She seems about nineteen and is a lot more interested in her cell than us, talking to “friends” intermittently while slowly filling out our form. Her phone keeps playing its catchy tune and she keeps answering it, so we make very slow progress. We will, however, be out of there before the Hertz guy returns from siesta (the Eurocar lady says he is always very late), so she shows us how to leave the keys and paperwork for him in an unmarked box, something for which there are absolutely no instructions anywhere in the vicinity of the Hertz window.
We get into her car and are driven a mile or two further along the waterfront to a lot. She points to our new vehicle, a tiny blue Alpha Romeo. Then she stands over Lindy, issuing instructions, watching her start the car, and answering questions about the parking brake, lights, and so on. Her favorite English word, like Esperide’s, is tonal variations of “exactly.” After she leaves, we have to figure out how to exit the lot, as a truck is blocking the only path.
“Kaput,” the driver says to Lindy when she remonstrates, and he throws out his hands at the hood under which he is at it with a screwdriver.
Better to make a gradual U, go around the circle counter to its directional arrows, and try to squeeze between his rear and a parked truck than to try right there to get through the narrower space between his front and another parked truck. Probably there’d be a fist fight by now in America—three trucks collectively all but blocking the only exit and entrance to a busy lot, the pivotal one being worked on by a guy with seemingly no sense of urgency, whistling as he alternately puffs the hell out of a cigarette, drinks a beer, and taps his screwdriver idly here and there—but things are cool and people make do.
It’s back past the train station, up on the curb alongside the Milano, scuse, scuse again to the throngs, pay the bill, get the luggage, say a fond farewell to Stefano, promise to visit the castle with him in a week or so, whip around the corner, hang a left on Via Corolneo, an extension of Via Milano—and we are headed toward the border. Wow!
We ascend quickly through the suburbs of Trieste and out of town. To our left the entire metropolis sweeps out toward the sea, “a view to die for,” Lindy says. It is dramatic, almost iconic, the Mediterranean standing in for seaports everywhere, for spaceship Earth. This is where the UFO should land if it wants to send back one picture of sapient habitation, on this hill overlooking Trieste and the Adriatic gulf. But the vista is soon gone, and we are moving through hilly countryside, coming quickly to the border at Firente.
It is like a glorified toll plaza, as most borders are. Italy-Slovenia was one of the less rigid of the hard borders during the Cold War under Tito’s liberal regime, anyway and now it is softer than U.S.-Mexico. Some wry policemen look at our passports, cut up a bit, and we are waved through. The landscape, both human and natural but mostly human, mutates dramatically. We have seen rolling hills in Italy, but these are wooded and look like Oregon or Colorado. They do not sign themselves as European most of the time. When they do identify that we are not in the Pacific Northwest, it is by little villages and cantons that look Swiss or Austrian and somewhat mediaeval, large stone houses with clean rectilinear styles: lots of perpendicular lines, a tendency to high first floors and wraparound balconies and flower-boxes. Bony cows in small groups look individual enough to have personalities; they are not transgenetic cows but creatures from old children’s books that should have names and speak Slovenian if not English.
Mostly, it is rush just being here. We feel our journey shooting out behind us like a jet contrail. We have surged across Italy, one end to the other, all the way to its corner at Trieste, and now we have climbed out of Trieste, over the mountains, into eastern Europe. The license plates are mostly SLO, with a majority of sequences of numbers and letters beginning LJ for our destination. The language on road signs has turned Slavic and, by comparison to Italy, the words don’t have any friends, false or otherwise; the unfamiliar letter combinations and accents don’t get you even close to a sense of how things are supposed to sound, let alone what they mean. Lots of Hungarian and Serbian trucks barrel along with us.
Ljubljana is less than sixty miles away when we begin picking up road signs at ninety kilometers. A giant stony mountain sits menacingly to the left, but we will not have to cross it—the road bends away.
Don Edwards doing Western songs on the CD player, providing a counterpoint to the Colorado-like landscape, Lindy heralds it as her most ecstatic moment of the trip so far—it feels free and radical. I don’t mean that our journey has been strenuous or daring in any major sense, but the full import of what we have taken on is exciting. We are beyond Italy, and Italy was famously hard to drive across. We are in a country that we barely heard of ten years ago, the northernmost province of Yugoslavia. Just the idea of having gotten ourselves into Slovenia and driving its highway is enough for delight—novelty of scenery and concept and fulfillment of goal. Our path is across Eurasia. The trip has taken on a shape because it has a trail. We can look back to Torino and Siena and see the figure we are tracing.
The signs for Ljubljana get very low, like 6 kilometers, with no indication at all of a city, so I pull out the map just in time, as the road divides, and I tell Lindy, bear left toward where a big sign lists only Ljubljana, not Ljubljana and Zagreb. We then make a guess as to which Slovenian word means “center city” and follow its signs—but it was clearly the wrong choice, as soon we are on the streets of a small village with stone houses that look at once unreal and all too real. The scenery feels like Prague of our 1993 trip to Europe but also has an ambiance of the Navaho Indian reservation 1966 with its small hogan villages. Houses seem like individual stone huts, set apart, each one fabulous in an ordinary sort of way. All those Slavic letters on everything create a feeling that is slightly extraterrestrial or a destination of time travel.
As it is much too rural, Lindy stops and asks a woman in the street. I expect the worst in terms of language, but what we get back is almost perfectly English, not only from the first woman but a second one whom the first calls over, as they debate the best way to dispatch Anglophonic neophytes from here into their city. They decide we should retrace our steps, take a left, then another left, drive for a while, and ask directions again. We do that and, after two more course corrections with pedestrians, the streets are beginning to look like any old European city, quite a bit smaller and more open than, say, Amsterdam but part of the same general continent.
This landscape is more comforting than the villages we first hit off the highway, as it is likely to present our hotel. We come down a sort of main street of big department stores and Soviet-era institutional buildings with a few Trieste-like majestic apartments before we are baffled again. At a red light I shout to a young woman biker, “Hotel Park?” She ponders how to direct us and then says to go right at the corner, wind with the street and, after a while, ask someone. We follow her course, and the next girl we query gives us another set of complicated directions. Before we are done with those, we are seeing signs for Hotel Park.
Because traffic is heavy—stop and start—I take out the laptop and begin playing with it. I am mainly looking for the phone number of our contact here, novelist and screenwriter Miha Mazzini, but I am curious to see if any networks show under “location.” To my surprise, there are wireless sites everywhere, some of them free, so as we drive along, I keep hitting the rescan button, hoping that we will stop somewhere long enough for me to get online and send and receive. Yet, we keep moving along a hair too fast, so it’s always “rescan” at the next stop.
Lindy has plenty of signs now, so she doesn’t need my participation on the map. I am totally involved in chasing networks as she turns into Tabor Street and starts backing into a parallel space alongside a park. A network is coming in—Netgear—and I hope it configures okay and we don’t move out of range. All of a sudden, new emails are pouring in, even as we are still maneuvering into the space. In the combined excitement of arrival and computer success, I decide to stay in the car while she walks down the street to see about our room.
There is a story about the Hotel Park, and I will have to backtrack in order to tell it. Miha Mazzini is the author of a novel Guarding Hanna, which Lindy and I have been reading the last week with dueling bookmarks that keep passing each other. We are now both around page 90, a third of the way through. Our friend Roger Conover, editorial director at MIT Press, who lives outside Portland, Maine (remember our stop in Freeport en route to Logan Airport), gave us this old (2002) galley of it back in July when we passed through his town for lunch, but we were collecting lots of books then and did not focus on it. As early as mid-July, in fact far earlier than that, we planned to visit Slovenia during our trip to Europe, in order to take his partner Eda up on her offer to stay in her apartment in Ljubljana if and when we went.
Now you may remember that in Freeport on our way Logan, in place of the apartment Roger and Eda offered contact with a couple, Miha, a Slovenian novelist and screenwriter, and Eda’s best friend, Irena. However, I did not connect that information to Guarding Hanna until we were on the trip. Luckily we had the galley with us, and I had read maybe forty pages by Lucca. Foreseeing the approaching meeting with Miha, Lindy picked it up in Lucca and immediately passed me. Then we took to sharing the copy.
This novel was published in English by Scala House, a small press in Seattle, one of several novels of Miha’s that have been successful in Slovenia but not so much so outside. In fact, he sold 57,000 of one, The Cartier Project, an incredible number, especially for a literary work in a country of only two million.
Guarding Hanna is set in contemporary Berlin. It is quite a remarkable book. The main character and narrator, identified only passingly as Dogsbody, is presented as a horribly deformed, hairy man who was left at an orphanage at birth and distinguished himself there by acts of vandalism and violence, including biting off two fingers of a blind boy trying to feel his face. He is later recruited by a gang patriarch for whom he does odd jobs while keeping himself hidden from most of humanity except prostitutes whom he pays for terrifying theater but not actual sex in a darkened room (he requests, for instance, that they feel his hairy face and boarlike teeth under the threat of their hands being bitten off or his gnawing into their bodies).
Then he is asked by his boss, Maestro, to guard Hanna, a witness to a crime, whose testimony is needed to save his son from jail. As Dogsbody has avoided contact with humans thus far, the necessarily close contact with Hanna has a huge effect on him.
The novel is primarily about Dogsbody’s emerging inner life, as he experiences for the first time how normal people go about their days. Highly intelligent but utterly misanthropic, fundamentally alienated, disdainful of all human activity as folly, Dogsbody begins to live his life through Hanna and discovers unknown and gentler parts of himself.
It is not a horror tale but a delicate awakening wrapped in an ugly, sometimes vicious exterior. Dogsbody has been made who he is by circumstance; he has become a fixture in a world of degradation and crime because he has known no other, but now a new self is emerging, and he is discovering, to his horror and wonder, that he is human, not animal. The text has almost the reverse feeling of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in this case an animal gradually awaking to find himself a man.
The writing is not either Lindy’s or my usual sensibility, but we both love the book. It is beautifully composed, and its wry wit comes through in translation. Both the actions and perceptions of the narrator are original, Beckett-like, and provide an offbeat context for the modern world, as we see our civilization through Dogsbody’s eyes.
Miha has also been a lively email correspondent during our trip. At Roger’s suggestion we asked him for help in booking us a room at the Grand Union Hotel, which Roger portrayed as expensive only by Slovenian standards. When Miha does so and the hotel emails us back that the cost will be almost 200 euros or more than $250 American per night, I abort the reservation and ask for another option.
Miha’s response is: “Richard, I don’t get it—you choose GRAND HOTEL, the most expensive place in the country? Of course it’s expensive, it was meant and built for this! I’ll call around and find some other options in the center of the town.”
I am embarrassed by this misunderstanding, but spending money on luxury hotels is not a good use of our resources. Having survived L’arancia in Lucca, we do not need to blow our budget on the Grand Union. In any case, Miha writes back moments later to suggest Hotel Park. It is a third the cost, so we jump at it.
In a subsequent email, Roger is disappointed by our thrift: “Personally, I would stick with the Union. There is no comparison between it and the Park, and any of the other options I would not recommend … you’d be driving into town as opposed to stepping out of the hotel and being in the middle of everything you want by foot…I’d pay the extra and stay at the Grand Union.”
Miha and I continued to correspond as we move across Italy. He remarkably set up a reading for me in Ljubljana and has proposed other things we could do together. At one point he wrote of Hotel Park: “BTW, I once spent there 6 months; their top 2 floors are cheap and reserved for the people in marriage trouble; it’s full of men with one suitcase, staring out of windows deciding between jumping and getting drunk. On Sundays they walk around in their best clothes holding their children—daddies for few hours. You’re tourists, you won’t see this. If they will want to put you above 10th floor, grab Lindy by the hand and start screaming ‘I’m married, you see, I’m married!’ And Lindy will look at you coldly and say: ‘Take the b******rd!’”
When Lindy returns to the car and says that Hotel Park is fine, I am also relieved. When I get inside the lobby, I see that it is essentially a college dormitory in a part of the city that turns out to be filled with dormitory-like buildings, many of them (we learn) for high-school students in from the sticks to do their education in the big city. One immediate curiosity: there are two elevators, and the first is for odd floors and the second for evens so, after we hasten into a crowded car, we are baffled to find no 6 on control panel. It takes a moment to solve, as neither of us has seen this sorting system before. We dash out just ahead of the closing doors and take the adjacent elevator.
Room 619 is spartan and small, but light streams in through its giant window, and the view of the turrets, steeples, and red roofs of the city beyond the institutional buildings is dramatic. The space is in fact curiously comforting with its bare-bones presentation—no decor, no carpet, sparse furnishings. Lindy and I do better in non-luxurious situations. We feel guilty in expensive hotels and restaurants, as though we don’t belong among such folks, the various new global royalties—and also there is a certain hubris to traveling high on the hog and pretending that the planet can sustain such luxury while most of the Earth is so poor. Hotel Park is right for us, simple and functional without drama or hoopla of any sort, filled with young and very old people—a room and a bed and a bathroom with a shower, plus a giant communal cafeteria. We score one of the few parking spaces for guests in the roundabout in front. And there is a free wireless spot half a block away.
While I am sitting on a curb, briefly doing email there, Miha shows up on his bike and calls Lindy in the room—so, as I am heading back on the sidewalk, I am startled to see them already coming toward me. He is a quite tall, stocky vibrant-looking, almost-bald guy, between ten or fifteen years younger than us, a bit of professor, radical artist, and pro screenwriter about him, a bit of avant-garde fierceness in his air too. He is like someone you’d meet in Hollywood or on the Berkeley campus. He is headed to karate practice but will meet us for a late dinner if we want to stay up. Yes, we do.
We agree to reconnect downstairs at 9:30, enough time for a quick nap.
He and Irena arrive on bikes and, as we walk in a fluid cluster toward the center of town and talk about the passing Ljubljana scenery. We also touch upon writing and publishing, Irina’s job (editor of the magazine section of the largest newspaper in town), Miha’s bread-and-butter work (as computer consultant at the phone company—he is a programmer as well as a novelist), the difficulty of being a writer in the Slovenian language, a bit of bio (mostly me to him while Lindy and Irena walk separately, for he must introduce me the next night).
We start out on Vidovdanska cesta and then Trabarjeva cesta. My keyboard does not have most of the Slavic graphemics—the many circumflexes and accented consonants—so I won’t even try to reproduce those. This is a studenty commercial stretch, mildly resembling Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley but much quainter and cozier, more mom and pop in its businesses. Young people are everywhere, eating standing up, parking bikes, talking on cells, creating traffic jams while congregating on the street.
The walk has the sense of a fairy-tale, as though we are passing through a stageset of small lit cafés and shops closed at night. The sound of Slovenian in the air, a kind of light Italian Slavic to the ear, is magical also, as though a very offhand post-modern opera is going on around us in which the characters don’t really sing their parts but are performing roles in an epic blank-verse musical that has no stage or boundary.
The first restaurant candidate, which we reach fairly soon, is proposed and then just as quickly withdrawn by Miha as serving only potatoes. I say that would be okay by me.
“But I don’t eat potatoes,” he remarks.
We continue along this strip in active conversation. As we cross a major road, Resljeva, Miha dashes our brief love affair with Trieste, calling it “the saddest city in Italy.” When Lindy asks why, he says, “It is the only city in Italy with bad food, and the average age of the population is seventy.” This conflicts with the youth scene we saw in the streets, so Lindy mentions that. “Must all be Slovenians partying”: Miha’s response. Then Irena says that Trieste used to be a major shopping area for Slovenian kids as the closest site to get jeans, music, and the like, but no longer since Slovenia has become part of Europe and the Common Market. Miha continues in his critical vein: “Trieste used to be part of Slovenia anyway. Mussolini took it, and somehow in the final settlement Italy got it back. It is still the center of Italian fascism. It was really nothing until the Hapsburgs made it the port for Vienna.”
We come to three bridges right next to each other across the Ljubljanica River at a square marked Preservnov Trg graced by a large statue which Miha explains: it is the Slovenian national poet France Preseren being visited by the muse flying above him and bearing a bright gold leaf that she extends over his head. The collective spans are known as Tromostovje, the Triple Bridge, and they mark the center of town, are its favorite meeting place, Miha says, and then he points to the Grand Union Hotel, not far away. We share a laugh, as we see folks exiting in evening finery.
The bridges all have ornamental spires; the middle one is for cars; the other two are pedestrian. Bikes go on all three. They are very busy.
A large, old salmon-colored Franciscan church, Marijino oznanjenje cerkev, quietly oversees the square, its front painted with saints and inlaid statues, the words Ave, Grate Plena! inscribed on it in gigantic letters. Among the icons in little squares above the entrance is a Rosicrucian-style eye inside a triangle. It sometimes slips one’s mind that Eastern Europe was more hermetic than Western before it slipped behind that fascist occult and iron curtains.
We turn here, cross one of the bridges, the pedestrian one, and then walk along the Ljubljanica on Petkovskov nabrezje beside the narrow river, almost a canal. Flanked by cafeterias and an interesting porticoed wall with boat landings and floating restaurants, it has somewhat the feeling of the Seine, though it is a mere fraction as wide. The lights and buildings from either side of the river reflect in the water’s stillness to their vanishing point.
Miha points to a spiffy looking café, Zlata Ribica, and we take seats outdoors at a candlelit table. I can’t read the small English type below the Slovenian on the menu in this light, so Lindy takes it inside and orders for me too, mushrooms and noodles.
Our meal and conversation continue for another hour and a half, through dessert, ranging over a variety of topics, our life narratives mixed with discussion about Slovenia. While we are waiting for our food, Miha and Irena do a medley of tourist explanation around the theme that Slovenian culture has three main influences: Austria and Germany to the north, Italy toward the coast, and Hungary to the east. I ask where Ljubljana stands in this trio, and he declares as though I have remembered my cue in the script, “The meeting place of all three.”
Miha describes winning an audience award for a screenplay with only three votes because that’s how small Slovenian art-film audiences are. He says his programming job has a sanity time limit on it of five years, so Lindy asks how long he has been at it. “Five and a half.” He also explains how he will not translate my reading tomorrow but may have to translate my remarks for the director of the Writers’ Guild, who does not speak English.
“Unless he has learned since we last saw him,” Irena comments wryly.
I ask why so much English is spoken here compared to Italy, a country whose language is much closer to it. “Small countries and poor countries always speak English,” Miha explains. “In France and Italy, there is little English. In Slovenia or Portugal, you find English everywhere.”
We order desserts. At Miha’s suggestion Lindy and I share the Slovenian national dessert, a layered cake of poppyseeds, apples, walnuts, and cottage cheese, while they get an ice-cream-looking chopped-nut froth. Irena says that ours reflects the Hungarian influence on Slovenian cuisine. Both are very, very sweet.
Miha grandly takes the tab.
They walk us back along the river, pushing their bikes down the avenue until we see Hotel Park lit in the distance; then they hop on, and we split until 19:00 the next day when they will pick us up for my reading.
September 26 (Day Fourteen)
This day held a nip of fall in it, a sharp transition from Italy’s Indian summer. Hotel Park’s free communal breakfast was mobbed with a mixture of young and elder-hostel people, bringing back college-cafeteria memories, though the fare of eggs and ham was more for Lindy than me. I toted my bran flakes, dried apricots, and a jar of honey-sweetened lemon marmalade, items that I was still carrying from Lucca and Siena, while the Park provided me with some watermelon slices and a hard roll to spread the jam on.
After the meal we retraced Miha’s route from the night before, into the center of town past the statue of Preseren and the three bridges. The area was full of bike-riders of all ages: students, old people, women dressed to the nines for work. Bikes are a fully integrated mode of transport here, as there are more of them than cars, and they require greater alertness than cars as they go flying past pedestrians much closer to them and with far less regard for the peril, the liabilities being less cataclysmic.
We spend a couple of hours wandering around the downtown of the old section. The urban landscape is distinctive, yet elusive. What gives it its unique quality? Looking down a street, any street of the many that run semi-parallel more or less, you see long flat vistas of colored fronts of buildings flowing smoothly together, one into the other with highly designed faces and vistas of windows. The colors are subtle and change, often dramatically, from façade to façade: darker and lighter shades of a kind of pink yellow, tan brown, tan ochre, also peach, dark mauve, light mauve, plum, bluish gray, greenish gray, aqua lime, off-white. The whole reality is tastefully and gently tinted and worn. It is regal and old.
Flowery sculpture borders the stone around so many of the windows, and each floor of the same apartment house or commercial structure has a different sculptural colophon or decorative theme, those of the same emblem going in horizontal rows from window to window. The buildings also have friezes, medallions, statues built into their outer walls, colored tiles and mosaic patterns near their roofs, and statues sitting atop them somewhat like in Trieste. The mosaic patterns are like little labyrinths, some almost cartoonlike.
Roofs are red or reddish orange, and many are very steeply pitched, some more than others. The most sharply pitched v’s could hardly have much of an attic inside. These latter, almost vertical, make near caricatures of their houses. Many of the less slanted roofs have varying warp to the point of seeming a moebius surface. The roofs of quite a number are graced with multiple and complex turrets and cupolas, their designs so intricate that turrets are sheathed inside turrets inside other turrets, each with its own distinctive style of ornamentation. Some are actual square clock towers with gold leaf. A number of them have weathervanes and intricate grillwork on top, some of it in bright gold.
One moment from an arbitrary angle Ljubljana looks like a giant mediaeval village, and the next from a different angle it looks like a neo-baroque city. With the appearance sometimes of a town of small castles, it resembles pictures of Vienna and German Switzerland, but it also feels like France and, in a different way, like Prague and parts of Berlin. The chief characteristic of the architecture is its decoratively individual character from building to building with a startling variety of levels, layers, and shapes that cohere in a distinctive and unified motif. Even a few decrepit, crumbling buildings have intricate ornamentation. On the whole the architecture is more varied and complex, yet, for the most part, less ornate and majestic than Trieste.
Language is a major part of the vibration of Ljubljana. I recognize the sound of Slovenian and also other heavier Slavic tongues, perhaps Serb, Russian, Slovakian, Czech. There is a lot of English, including pop music in the air. I also hear occasional German, Italian, French, and maybe Portuguese. The Slavic alphabet soup pasted on the landscape gives it a particularly fantastic quality for someone speaking a more Western tongue. Bizarre letter combinations and impossible words cover objects near and far and charge the ordinary world with the sense of a myth or dream—also like a hypothetical Eastern European country in a lost seventies episode of Mission: Impossible! The fictional Slobovia and the real Slovenia oscillate within the same reality. For a short stretch I scribble a list of some of the more striking words and letter combinations: “z” standing alone as a whole word, zrno, zborrnica, Stritarjeva ulica (a street we pass), a word beginning “drz,” obutev, vrvana, zelesniska, trgovina, iriski, huala za, zisto.
Spellcheck should go hide somewhere. This is the land of the Grimm Brothers, the Muffin Man, Humpty-Dumpty.
We acquire some Slovenian currency with our bankcard because it is needed for many circumstances instead of euros. After I press the button for English, the “fast cash” option yields a single 5000 tollar note. I have no idea how much this is, so we go immediately into tourist information on the corner. It is worth about $31 U.S., so it is not as frightening a withdrawal as it seems.
It is ironical that the currency name is so close to ours—like a dialect joke or an intentional parody of the word “dollar”—and at the same time so out of scale that it is almost toy money. On January 1, 2007, Slovenia will go entirely onto the euro, and Irena says that this conversion will reduce the standard of living by 40%.
It does seem an amazing fact of economics, that a mere change in an artificial symbol representing value can affect not only the relative scale of things entering and leaving the polity—imports and exports—as one would concede and expect but the cost of goods being sold from person to person within a region. Somehow the same local egg from the same farm becomes a whole lot more expensive for the neighbor. This impending conversion puts the tollar on about the level of Damanhur currency; its usefulness and security are tied to a provincial situation.
A huge farmer’s market along the Ljubljanica, the Trznica, consists of roughly twenty dense rows of stands. We wander amid wonderful fruits and vegetables—tomatoes, eggplants, greens, potatoes, honey, and many varieties of grapes and mushrooms. I choose an old farmer with only a few crops for sale and pick a bunch of carrots. Unlike most Ljubljanans he does not speak English, so I have a hard time figuring out the degree to which his vegetables are organic or not. I think he finally communicates that they are clean with sweeps of his hands and shakes of his head. I hand him the 5000 tollar note, which he considers ridiculous. It is embarrassing to me too. Then he takes a long look at the coins in my hand, searches through the bills in his wallet, frowns, then smiles, selects a euro from my palm, and throws in a second bunch of carrots.
Of all the varieties of grapes, I go for a basket of concords back at the beginning of the market because they are the only ones that wasps are crawling over. I mean “crawling,” because this woman’s stand looks like a hive. All her grapes have squads of wasps on their surface, and each whole basket is an airport of wasps arriving and departing. When I pick up one, she puts it on the scale and then shakes it many times so that the visitors vacate in a swift trail. Standing at a safe distance, Lindy is still worried that I have bought us trouble, but I am convinced this grower knows how to read the riot act to her guests when the hour of commerce comes. I try to barter for less than a full container, as each basket is double-size by American standards and contains more unrefrigeratable grapes than we will ever be able to consume without digestive disaster before they start attracting lesser insects to our room, but she shakes her head “no” because, it turns out, a basket is only one euro anyway. I leave the market weighted down with carrots and grapes, as I will be now for the remainder of the morning.
We go looking for Town Hall, Mestna Hisa Ali Rotovz, on the map, because, although we are too late for today’s advertised walking tour of Ljubljana from there, we plan to try tomorrow and want to pin down the correct spot in advance. We can’t seem to find the fifteenth-century building where it supposed to be, so we go into a church that seems open. Guards at the door ignore us, and there is apparently no fee.
Oddly modern rather than religious art hangs inside, and this includes an exhibit of surrealism by someone named Miro Preston: canvasses with anomalous objects resembling Yves Tanguy or Remedios Varro but denser and less figurative. These giant colorful artifacts are hung not indoors but on the rough stone walls of a courtyard where you wouldn’t ordinarily see formal art.
As we leave, Lindy asks one of the guards where City Hall is, and he points to the building we were just inside.
Tired of trekking around, we sit on the City Hall steps. There is an interesting pattern in front, a design of light and dark cobblestones making a geometric, almost Byzantine motif of curved triangles, diamonds, and squares. What care, to lay down an ordinary street, brick by irregular brick! Such a different sense of time and space. When an urban landscape is this consciously aesthetic, it usually elicits a civilized, responsible universe of social life.
While we are resting, French and Japanese tourist groups arrive simultaneously, and pictures are snapped of the Mestna Hisa with us on its stoop while the docents speak different tongues; then they move on in separate directions. Tomorrow we will be on one of these trajectories, but in English.
We go back to Presernov trg, the central square across the river, where a small train, a mode of transport at about the level of a golf cart pulling a child’s toy, hauls people uphill to Ljubljanski Grad, the Ljubljana Castle. Overlooking the city from a steep hill, this mediaeval relic has been rebuilt many times and, though originally the military basis of the town and erected as protection for the region, in the last century it has been both a prison and actual cheap living quarters for families before its final residents were resettled and the structure was restored as a museum and tourist site. Ljubljanski Grad is considered a can’t-miss destination and, since we prefer riding to walking now, even on this silly little tram, we figure we will check the castle off our list.
The long-haired, unshaven conductor behaves like an out-of-work Shakespearian actor or failed poet who hates his job big-time. I imagine him at a bar afterwards, cursing that fucking little wagon of a train he is sentenced to operate. He is dragging a last smoke out of butt as we pay him with Slovenian currency, a wonder the ember isn’t singeing his hand, there is so little of it. Taking out a fat pouch, he easily breaks the 5000 bill into 1000’s and 100’s, waves us aboard. En route while winding uphill, we get a canned tour of the city from a tape. The conductor says nothing, working a new cigarette and talking on his cell. Because of traffic, the tape is soon unsynchronized from the scenery and describes sites well before we get to them, then switches to irritating ads.
As we gain height, we see that the original old town is a mere concentrated area around and out from the Triple Bridge, and there is a much bigger span of Soviet-era institutional architecture surrounding it, combining with the center city to make an urban area of some size, all contained within a ring of hills and mountains. The Yugoslavian buildings are massive and dreary; they retain faint tints: pale tan, pale green, pale blue, pale pink, faded lemon.
We tourists are unceremoniously let off outside Ljubljanski Grad and must make our way from there. It is not even obvious whether one has to pay to enter or not, but there is no toll-taker or other impediment, so we wander inside with the rest of our group. The structure, so charming when viewed at a distance from the city, is kind of ordinary, even ugly inside. The Lonely Planet guidebook says that it has been ruined by many generations of reconstruction, particularly some bad sixties architecture heavy on the concrete. Most of the tourists get themselves out on a ledge between parapets and view the city from above. Ljubljana sits in the valley, glittering, breathing, letting off irregular metallic sounds like a giant organism.
The castle becomes tedious in about twenty minutes of tourism (it actually would cost us about twenty dollars to take the elevator to the very top turret), so we sit outside waiting for the train. It turns out to be forty minutes late in returning. A warm autumn breeze blows blizzards of leaves off the trees. We stand in their descent, so thick that they whisper against our skin, engendering a wondrous sensation of climate. I have never experienced such a dense fall of leaves and certainly not one that tickles.
I am now suddenly so sleepy that I recline on the jagged stones of one of the ruins, so serrated it is as if it is specifically designed for not lying on. Yet slumber descends so rapidly and drowsily that I fall into and out of trances and strange landscapes. Vivid mediaeval scenes flare up and fade against stray moments from my life. It is almost a lucid dream, a lucid trance, as I know I am dozing, yet at same time, I cannot resist the suction of images and fall of leaves. I am able to tell myself in some sort of detached internal voice-over that I might be tuned to subtle energy from the stones themselves, transmitted into my cells through a blunt acupuncture, but this sounds also like whimsical dream logic. The artifact becomes a cluster of subtle time capsules, each containing fragments of memory of older times within its atomically oscillating fields. Maybe my somnolence struck at just their vibration or is generated by them, and they broadcast former landscapes of their world and times.
I lie there enchanted by this state. Then the wind blows another plethora of leaves dizzily out of the sky, and I am lured back into the world. While I consider the paraphysical proposition with mild commitment, at the same time I assume it is pure vagrant imagination.
We walk around the castle, visit its parks, look at graffiti-covered statues of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasant uprisings, sit on various benches and walls. Finally the train arrives, and we are carted back to the Triple Bridge very hungry. It is almost 14:00.
Wandering among various squares, we do not find a suitable restaurant that is not too noisy or smoky. Then we cross a different bridge, come back along the Ljubljanica on Petkovskovo nabrezje, and find ourselves approaching same outdoor dining terrace validated by Miha and Irena the previous night, Zlata Ribica. Seating ourselves, we even get the same handsome young waiter.
The major drama at lunch is provided by the pigeons. They are so aggressive that they are landing on tables and actually taking morsels from people’s plates. The food is an irresistible magnet, and these birds have no fear. They have to be continually chased away, and that in itself is causing a commotion. A German guy at a nearby table, after a pigeon lands on his arm to peck at his meal, gets so upset that he starts shooing all birds indiscriminately, as though for revenge, regardless of whether they are close to him or on the other side of the dining area, so disturbed creatures keep flying our way. After a while there are so many under our table where I dropped a tiny piece of bread, now long gone, that Lindy gets involved in waving them off and knocks her beer bottle onto the stone. Broken glass now lies among the birds.
Eventually the waiters settle matters down and clean up, and we order the kind of thing you would in Slovenia: stuffed cabbage rolls and a rump steak from a local small farm. I challenge you to find something more organic or vegetarian on the menu.
Miha meets us downstairs at 19:00 and we set out on foot for the Writers’ Guild where I am to present. As we traipse along, he is inspired to prepare me for the evening by talking about a variety of Slovenian issues. He describes what he calls “the crossroads of modern Slovenian history when Tito broke with Stalin in 1948.” Tito wanted no part of Soviet colonialism, but then he shot down an American plane to make clear he was not going to be under Western domination either. By those acts he defined post-War nonalignment and set the direction of Yugoslavian life for decades to come.
Slovenian writers are a naturally obedient and cautious lot, Miha explains, and the Writers’ Guild is a bastion of conservative Slovenian culture. It will be interesting to see who shows up. He imagines that a few people will only pay attention to the words “American” and “publisher” and fantasize their own books being translated—something, he adds, that almost never happens in reality for Slovenian authors, who are stuck in their private time warp.
When asked by Lindy about his relationship with the Guild, Miha is candid, “I don’t have one. They don’t regard me.” He reiterates that the Guild is devoted to Slovenian purity and tradition, to honoring the past. Writing in Western pop genres and getting translated into English disqualify him from the club, and perhaps, he thinks, he is looked upon with disdain or disapproval. He elaborates on this point by discussing the relationship between Christian guilt and Slovenian relativism here: One of Slovenia’s most significant writers, Ivan Cankar, claimed that thinking about murdering a man and actually murdering him were the same thing, morally equivalent. This kind of apolitical elitism, Miha proposes, arising in part from the Biblical notion that to sin in the mind is just as bad as to do the thing, leads to fascism and a kind of fashionable smugness and insularity. He will have no part of that vestigial philosophy and wants instead to introduce a distinction between thought and action in his work, so he engages an active imagination of darkness and evil. He also wants to make a bridge from classical Slovenian sensibility into more global aesthetics because, after all, he is a screenwriter, working sometimes in English, trying to create cinema for international markets.
While waiting to cross a street, we talk about Dusan Makavejev, the once-prominent Yugoslavian—though not Slovenian—film-maker of the 1960s, director of WR: Mysteries of the Organism and Montenegro. He has become totally irrelevant now, Miha says, and is not referenced at all; yet, he adds, “in a 1960s guide to film in English, he occupies more space than Hitchcock.”
The Writers’ Guild is in a traditional old building, a walk of maybe half a mile from the center of the old town, a pleasant journey across the darkening evening. Our destination turns out to be across the street from the American Embassy, which is a small multi-turreted castle lit like Christmas tree.
We enter the building to find the room locked, so we sit on a ledge in the stairwell for twenty minutes, continuing to talk, until the young woman from the Guild arrives with a key.
I converse at length with a poet and critic who writes his name out for me (with email address) as Robert Simonisek. He has the look of a handsome European boy poet, Cocteau’s Cegeste (who is struck by a motorcycle at the opening of Orpheus), but he also seems a bit the priggish lit crit, here to judge, to test his analytical mettle, as well as to listen to me. In fact, he says so. He is openly ambivalent even about having showed up, confessing he was headed for a beer and then remembered about the reading and decided he might check it out and see if he wanted to stay.
“We can offer you water,” Miha announces, holding up one of the bottles on the table.
“Pour,” Robert says.
As he and I chat, we locate the work of William Carlos Williams as a meeting-place and, on the basis of shared poetic taste, he says he is now comfortable staying.
Miha doesn’t start the reading right away, waiting about twenty minutes after the appointed hour of 20:00 to see if we will get more of an audience but, even after the delay, there are only three people besides Lindy, Miha, me, and Irena (who arrived soon after us by bike). During my actual reading two latecomers will walk in. Except for the last man, who is older than the rest and dressed in a double-breasted suit (more about him later), the audience is young kids, college age or so, two boys and two girls.
Miha chooses the seminar table instead of next door’s formal reading space with podium and chairs. The audience sits around the table, me and Miha at its head. I have selected eight and a half pages of recent writing from the summer, wanting to present something fresh and alive for me rather than published pieces. My selections include a variety of ecological, political, and spiritual/metaphysical themes from a book that I will eventually call The Bardo of Waking Life.
Miha surprises me by framing the reading in interview form. He holds up a copy of Out of Babylon, sent to him by Roger and Eda, and he asks me to talk about my family and origins as a writer.
It is hard getting started. I feel as though I cannot sail along in my usual English because it will be too fast to be understood, but the moment I slow down, I fall out of rhythm and start to stumble. It is as though I am talking to children, very deliberately and artificially. I hear the echo of my thoughts in my voice. It is like speaking through molasses. I try to regain a normal pace, but I never quite get it, so am briefer and more pedantic in answering than I intended to be.
Next Miha holds up On the Integration of Nature, a recent book that I am carrying with me; in fact I brought it on the trip solely for the purpose of reading from it in Ljubljana and then giving it to my host. He remarks how different it is from Out of Babylon and asks me to explain the relationship between the two and also to cover the matter of why I write about baseball and sports. The question is tough to negotiate in this situation: Out of Babylon is pure memoir and was written almost fifteen years ago; Integration has memoir in it but draws from science, Buddhist epistemology, politics, science fiction, and the like, and it was written just last year. Meanwhile my baseball prose is like memoir but also in the spirit of a jive sports journalist.
Taking into account my audience, I labor through a rather linear and literary answer, more or less based on the notion that I am a writer and I take on what topics have interest and meaning for me. Pointing to Integration, Miha asks me to read something from it. Because I decided not to read from it tonight in favor of newer work, I am caught off-guard and stumped as to which sections to select on the spur of the moment. There is so much that I could read; yet I seem to find a reason to reject each piece I consider: too long, references they won’t follow, too similar to stuff I want to read from new work, Lindy has already heard it too many times, etc. My indecision makes the segue awkward, as I am having trouble figuring this out and also keeping contact with the audience. Finally, spur of the moment, I choose a couple of lyrical descriptions: the first very brief: the Milky Way as it might fit concisely on the haunch of a skunk; and the second: a longer exegesis concerning tidepools in Maine, comets, and complexity theory.
It is not reassuring that, before starting the second piece, I ask if people know the word “tidepool,” and no one does—so I explain it with a lot of gratuitous gestures to show how the sea comes up on the rocks and leaves behind these little reservoirs of water. I feel foolish doing this, as though I am enacting a poetic affectation typical of a reading. I hate the way I must sound.
As I read, I am again struggling with an echo of myself, part of my mind scanning for what the audience will be able to follow in English, ruing what will probably elude them. The tidepool piece is usually one of my favorites, but this time to my ear it comes off hollow and turgid, over-intellectual. I can’t wait to get through it and on to something they can better understand. There is just too much language, too many detours from the main theme— which is the random creation of enduring objects in a chaotic universe. I am amazed, as I labor through the sentences, how fragile language is. This cherished piece of mine quickly unravels when the listeners don’t even know the word “tidepool.” The literary quality of the language is engendered by striking metaphors linking small objects at the scale of tidepools to cosmic ones, and making the links at many levels at once. Yet those distinctions I carefully imbedded in moments of inspiration become only ephemeral sounds in ranges of partial denotation. When those are lost, the beauty and poetry evaporate too, like the tidepool creatures themselves, and I am left with the rhythms, but I am not a rock singer or Dylan; I can’t pull it through on melody and beat alone.
As I question in my mind (while reading aloud) the audience’s capacity to understand my words, the writing loses its magic and delicacy for me. In fact, I stop at a convenient point two paragraphs short of the end, admit I am going to break off before finishing, and then, before Miha can ask another question, seize the initiative, and introduce a piece about advertising, a short narrative depicting a series of events in my childhood, a transition from my boyhood when I fell for hyped-up ads and believed in the magic of their products to the discovery in my adolescence of real tarot cards and the power of visualization.
The piece is centered around Zest Soap, a brand from the fifties. As I try to set the story up before reading the piece, “zest” turns out to be another word that no one in the audience knows, so about five minutes are spent laboriously creating a context for “zest.” I define it as excitement, passionate enthusiasm. Then Lindy takes a crack at it—exuberant fun, joy of life. Then some of the audience suggest other possible meanings.
Even after all that, I feel as though we have missed some connotation crucial to my piece, so I come back to the word and expound on the notion that zest is not a particularly good thing, even though the literal meaning is super positive. Zest is usually something artificial and deceitful, a superficial advertising conceit, more a word to sell a commodity by than a feeling to experience authentically. It even has a competitive edge to it. A person with zest is a person on the go, on the make, trying to show how much fun they are having, sort of self-delusional. This word play is actually more engaging and interesting than reading from my work.
The crux of the piece is to demonstrate how, in childhood, I was fooled into believing that the mysteries I intuited in Zest Soap ads really were released by bathing with this brand (as opposed to other soaps) when they were really fake images from pop commercial culture. For years I imagined that a soap was responsible for certain epiphanies. Years later, after I understood the sociology of advertising and had abandoned such beliefs, I wrote a paper for high-school English on subliminal messages in ads and debunked them. Later, though, I regained the power of icons through studying occult symbols, and I developed a more mature understanding of the workings of the imagination. I came to understand the true profundity was in myself, not the soap. All of us have feelings that need to be probed in order to become who we are, but the capitalist culture attempts to market and subvert them before we can internalize their meanings and claim their energy as our own. That is a rough, tedious “plot outline” of a much goofier short-story-like piece.
During the latter part of my reading about Zest and tarot cards, the afore-mentioned older man in the suit walks in and takes a seat. He is slight, dark, sparkly-eyed, partly bald, Hungarian-looking. I am sure, with no intro or context, he will not understand what I am reading, but the moment I finish he jumps up in delight and declares that of course the power of sacred images must be upheld; then he urges me to read more at once. Miha interrupts, querying me again about the great variety of subjects on which I write, perhaps for the newcomer’s benefit.
I now have some energy. I respond by saying that it is not so much different subjects that I write about as writing itself as a process of focusing attention, of changing one’s inner being by translating intuitions and feelings into focused meditations through the oddly fluctuating relationship between meanings and sounds of words; it is a practice, I add, much like yoga or meditation.
Miha next asks me about the role of science in my work, and I say that I am simultaneously embracing scientific method and critiquing and digging under it. I propose that science is the modern language of nihilism, that science in its most orthodox form is the means by which humanity has divorced itself from its divine core and convinced itself of its own relativism and meaninglessness—but also science is a clue to what we are in the universe, how God and nature, karma and thermodynamics have made us, and thus it is a glimpse of how we can get back to our essence. As the measure by which we have bound our imaginations, it is the means by which we can unbind them. It is the labyrinth in which we have become hopelessly lost, so it is the labyrinth through which we will find our way out. Unless you deal with science, I say, you cannot break into the twentieth—and now the twenty-first—century’s dialogue with itself.
I briefly describe each of the three main topics on which I wrote books for mainstream publishers in the 1970s and 1980s: medicine/healing, astronomy/cosmology, and embryology. I explain how I later rewrote and enlarged all of these books and reissued them myself. The new arrival then asks me to elaborate on embryology. I explain that it is a unique way of understanding the relationship between life and consciousness. It is the link between holographic cellular organizations and Darwinian algorithms underlying them. I then offer the possibility that the universe is structured in two separate overlapping principles of generative motion and development. The first is circumscribed by the laws of physics and comprises primarily heat, gravity, and entropy. The second is matrixed by evolving cell activity and embryological development and determines how the innate intelligence of matter shapes itself into, first, agency, then, mind, culture, and symbol.
I continue by reminding everyone that science, of course, claims that embryology is subsidiary to thermodynamics, a subset of it, as Darwinian logic proceeds from matter and heat effects, to life by arguing the advent of information from binary processes sorting and storing random codes.
My counterargument is that a fundamental embryogenic module is imbedded from the get-go in atoms and molecules at a far deeper and more differential level than electrons, quarks, or quantum effects, and that its dynamic morphology emerges autonomously through matter, organizing itself into the shapes and meanings it already contains within it, ultimately expressing worlds that are intrinsic to it. Thus embryology not only is a study of the syntax of creatures getting bodies but is the map of esoteric meaning in the cosmos at large. Organisms are literally the universe writing itself on its own body, and the embryological event is the sacred dance that the universe reels off in order to pull meanings out of its core and express them in organic forms, in actual living species.I
later learn that the late-arriving gentleman is Vladimir Gajsek, the author of the longest novel in the Slovenian language, a recent Joyce-like epic that has never been translated. Its English title would be Icarus’ Feather. When Mr. Gajsek gets the book for me to view from the Guild Library after the reading, I see that it is truly the size of a dictionary. “I also drew the art,” he proclaims proudly, pointing to the cover.
During my elucidation of science and meaning, however, all I gather is that Gajsek is apparently on my wavelength, and before long he and I are discussing alchemy, anthroposophy, and Damanhur. It is not clear whether he is a spiritualist himself or merely a stylistic adventurer for whom metaphysical notions provide surrealist patina for his fiction, as for instance they do for Borges. He may have explored these occult systems and metaphysical ideas, for instance, because they help provide an inner geography of his writing, or he may be an actual hermetic practitioner. He is certainly smart in discussing them, much smarter than anyone else there.
Miha asks me out of the blue if I believe in God, and I say, “Well, not that God, but I have a piece I was going to read anyway. I wrote it a month ago.” I want to get back into reading anyway before we end up in a free-for-all. The piece closes with these lines:
“If God were not perfectly camouflaged from us in her thousand veils, each as subtle and opaque as the next, then this trance would end and this world would no longer exist. God must hide from us to keep the world going, the enchantment real. His disguise is foolproof, and we are the fools kept in the dream. If he were not disguised, the whole game would be up.
“Who would live, who would stay here if he could see God through the hole in reality? Everyone would say, ‘Oh, you’re God. Well, I’m out of here.’ It would be a joke, or worse, a bad play.
“Yet, ironically, that same camouflaged figure is us and we cannot, no matter how good an act we put on, hide from ourselves. This is one of the least publicized aspects of human existence. We may deceive others, even royally, hook, line, and sinker, but we always know who we are. Even a sociopath’s true nature is disclosed to him, elude it though he tries through his charm, through trying to charm himself. He can conceal the internal dialogue, but it is always there, nudging at him. He too is part of the God that can’t be seen—but that’s the way it works: all paradox, no certainty, lifetime after lifetime, no memory, an inexorable karmic universe of the vastest dimensions and depth, of which we are the creator, across whose desert we now convoy.”
Mr. Gajsek is enthusiastic and claps, though Lindy immediately comments, “I would worry reading such a thing in a Catholic country. We might be struck by lightning.”
“Lindy,” I protest, “this is a socialist country before it’s a Christian country—and it’s not Catholic.”
Miha agrees, “We are most recently refugees from Tito’s enlightened communism. To all appearances we are quite secular.”
Then one of the girls adds, “I think an atheist would be more upset by the piece than a Catholic. A Catholic would say: ‘He’s misguided, but at least he believes.’”
Her name is Veronica; she’s a poet who’s also pre-med. She came to the Writers’ Guild quite prepared for our event, having read about Lindy’s and my old magazine Io on the Internet and also having explored Lindy’s personal website. During a half hour of informal camaraderie after the reading, she and Lindy will strike up a promising friendship.
I then move on to some pieces about Bush as I promised at the outset. Their introduction bringa chuckling and applause I begin by admitting that I know he’s an easy target, “as we say, the broad side of a barn because you can’t miss it. But as one poet in the States remarked to me, we have to keep bearing witness. That is our responsibility. t doesn’t matter if it’s obvious. Bearing witness itself is an essential act with its own unassailable power. Failing to bear witness tacitly says that it doesn’t count; it is not important. If everyone simply bears witness, things will eventually have to change.”
The first piece begins:
“Odd as this seems, Bush has made Saddam look like a genius. The sociopathic Iraqi dictator kept peace in the streets and Iran at bay, the two things we most need now.”
It ends:
“Saddam was a beast who just hacked and blasted and bombed away. W. is a corporate killer who does it with an insolent command and euphemisms like ‘shock and awe.’ They have mastered equally the shutting off of compassion or concern for other flesh, though W. sort of knows how to mask his arrogance with insincere sound bites referencing freedom and religiosity. Both believe that their kind of people (Baath loyalists/wealthy conservative Republicans) are the only ones whose lives are worth valuing. Everyone else is a potential mercenary, enemy, customer, or sorry: collateral damage.
“Yes, Saddam did his job with stark brutality, but at least the electricity ran in Baghdad and people could buy groceries and enjoy their dinner.”
This is well received by the entire audience, as Miha comments, “You better be careful. The American embassy is across the street.” Everyone laughs.
My reading of the second political piece, however, takes an unexpected turn after I interrupt myself to acknowledge that some of my ideas have roots in, guess who, the popular Slovenian writer Slavoj Zizek. Immediately Mr. Gajsek begins shouting, “Zizek is a fascist. Zizek is a fascist. He supported Mussolini. He admires Stalin.”
Veronica interrupts: “No, you are falling for the bait. Zizek is a performer. He simply tries to provoke.”
“He is a fascist,” screams Gajsek, his face contorted. “Do you know how many died in Mussolini’s concentration camps? This is not funny. You think it is a joke? Zizek is a big joke to you, all right. It is not a joke at all. You’ll see if the fascists get power again. Zizek will be there, giving the execution orders, and you will not be laughing when people start dying again.”
This is all proclaimed so suddenly and with such passion and rage that it stops the show.
All I can say is “Wow, that’s a detour I didn’t expect. But really isn’t Zizek is just an intentional provocateur?”
That sets Gajsek off again. I interrupt him this time by saying I want to finish the piece.
After the dramatic interlude, what I read turns out to be more powerful than I expected, even to me, and it brings the reading to a cathartic end. Only when people applaud and stand up and Gajsek continues cheering after the others have stopped do I realize that I have ended and couldn’t have done it better (and also that I nor only do not understand the subtleties of politics in this room), vut clearly I will not be reading any more pieces tonight. Here is how I closed my small Ljubljana Writers’ Guild reading:
“The suicide bomber has established that there is another angle on this whole affair; the world is not solely markets and products. While jihadists are hurling explosives at the West, most of all they are hurling another meaning, another interpretation of day and night. Life is not life, and death is not death to them. They are demanding that the West wake up and see where this whole planet, us and them both, sits in the greater zodiac. It is not about shareholders or job security; it is about the raw crocodile phenomenology of existence, as absolute in a Gaza refugee camp as at a Texas barbecue. The Sun and Moon don’t play favorites and, even if they did, the stars surely don’t. This whole thing is gambit of destiny not privilege—stone and dust and water, not commodity markets and bank accounts.
“As is so often the case, our enemy is the only teacher motivated to teach us what we need to know.”
Afterwards, as noted, we stand around talking, gradually moving out of the room onto the staircase. This is when Gajsek brings in his mammoth novel to show me. Robert and Veronica promise they will visit us in the U.S. The young woman with the key to the room, the representative of the Guild, brings me a stack of books by Slovenian authors translated under her organization’s sponsorship into various languages, and she invites me to select the ones I want. With Miha’s help I pick three in English, two of which are anthologies.
As Miha leads us upstairs to the restaurant on the top of the building, Lindy remains in the street visiting with Robert and Veronica.
Before she rejoins us, Miha and I bumble back into the matter of recent contention, Mr. Zizek. It originates this time from Miha’s musing aloud about Gajsek. He has heard about him for a long time but never met him till tonight. He wonders about the roots of his outburst, as he is too young to have any direct experience of World War II, and he is not Jewish.
I blunder into trying to dismiss the criticism of Zizek again by presuming it is just words. “It is not just words,” Miha snaps.
“But I mean he is using words to shake up ideas, and he is interesting because, in his quasi-Freudian analysis, he brings things up from the cultural and political unconscious and poses conventional global dilemmas and conflicts in new ways with unforeseen twists.”
“Yes,” Miha acknowledges, “in that regard Zizek is brilliant, but he is also a fascist, and that is what I am talking about, his fascism, not his brilliance.”
He then talks about three Romanian writers, one of whom is Mircea Elliade, the esoteric religious philosopher and symbolic archaeologist whose work I have read in translation; another of whom is named Emil Cioran; and the third of whom I forget, but he is the real villain of this tale. Then he mentions Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian Jewish author in the middle of this group that was slowly turning fascist, who ultimately died in a concentration camp when his friends ignored him and distanced themselves from him.
I start to comment idly on this, but Miha cuts me off with agitation and an edge of emerging rage. I see him differently now: the ferocity, the conviction, frustrated somewhat by our language barrier: “Let me finish, please. After the war, Elliade [and the third man] said, ‘Oh, we didn’t mean any of it. That was just words. It was just ideas. It was an intellectual discussion. We didn’t mean any harm.’ But they didn’t lose their lives for those words. Other people did. They were not just words for them.”
I get it and tell Miha so, but he is still stewing. This stuff counts for him. I grew up pampered in the States, encouraged to think of everything as a realm of ideas. I am a bit of a lazy relativist like Mr. Cankar or Elliade. In fact, I am repeating their mistake. I am forgetting that the ball is in play, always in play. The world is real.
That is a difference between Slovenians and Americans. They just got through a revolution and war of independence. Concentration camps are local history here.
Upstairs turns out to be a formal and exclusive club, the most expensive restaurant in Ljubljana, Miha says. The waiter presents a menu verbally in English but then says that we can order whatever we want and they will make it if they have the ingredients. He brings some very good bread and olive oil and then some garlic bread too.
Bear is an item on the menu and Miha teases Irena that he will order it. She says she will not permit it and goes on about how sad it is that France and Germany are importing Slovenian bear meat, killing poor Slovenian bears, because they have killed all their own.
Midway through the meal, in a context created by another discussion, Lindy and I bring up our trip to Mexico, and I recall the moment of hearing Tom Petty sing “Free Falling” while sitting in a cab passing through slums and abject poverty in Mexico City, a condition that stretched for miles in all directions, quietly terrified about being awash in an ocean of alien culture, separated from the law of the jungle by the thinnest shell, my fate not really in my own hands, the driver a teenager who didn’t understand the words to the song he had tuned to for our shared entertainment on his cigarette-pack-sized portable hanging from the mirror. Miha knows the song and the condition and thinks it is the right soundtrack for the situation.
Irena looks at Miha with a smile and remarks that he has a Mexican connection and should tell us. Lindy and I want to hear about it. It turns out to be very complicated. A screenplay on which he is presently working in English has a Mexican theme, and a Mexican cinema company found it on his website and has recently gotten interested in distributing it in North America.
The plot involves a period of time in Yugoslavia in the 1950s when Tito had cut the country off from both Soviet and American influences. There was no cinema except Mexican, so Mexican films had become all the rage. However they had a different effect in Serbia and Croatia than in Slovenia. The Serbs and Croats threw themselves into Mexican culture: wore imitation Mexican hats, cultivated bandito mustaches, and organized very bad mariachi bands. The Slovenes looked down on this and parodied the Serbian and Croatian Mexican genres with their own camp Mexican styles and intentionally ridiculous mariachi bands. One part of Yugoslavia was imitating Mexican culture guilelessly; the other part was imitating their imitation as farce. “After all,” Miha says, “please remember, we are in the Balkans.”
Against this comedic backdrop, the screenwriter poses a tragedy: the story of a soldier in charge of executing dissidents in one of Tito’s prisons who decides he cannot execute one more man. That mutiny will require his own death sentence, but he doesn’t care. He just can’t do it anymore.
His superior sends him on a mission that allows him an escape. He must go to a dissident village that is piling up weapons. I forget the precise nature of his mission or the turn of the plot here, but the point is: now he is a traitor for his failure to execute orders but, if he goes to the village and converts them, he can only be a hero. He either will be killed by the villagers and die a martyr, or he will succeed against impossible odds and be celebrated for his accomplishment.
It is against the backdrop of the soldier’s mission that the mariachi-band culture operates in the village. Again, I do not remember the exact context. “I believe,” Miha concludes, “that the best work is serious and tragic against a background of human farce and irony. Humor provides a context for tragedy.”
Lindy and I both agree that it would make a great American movie. “The world is ready for dueling mariachi bands in Tito’s Yugoslavia,” I say. “It could initiate a whole new genre using two cultures that people are really curious about.” We both promise to try to pass the script around among contacts in the U.S. when we get back. (You can see the trailer for this on YouTube by searching under Miha’s name or the mariachi topic and Yugoslavia. It is still available: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYR21-kmHYY&feature=related.)
At the end of the meal, Miha is our benefactor again. Since I did the reading, he says he will pay for the lavish meal. Earlier Lindy and I had talked at length between us about how we would take all future tabs when with Miha and Irena but, in this circumstance of the reading, I am inclined to let the matter go, as I sense it would be an insult to the hosts to pay for an honorary meal after my own reading. Lindy, however, is going through her own thought process on this and is ambivalent about what to do. She starts to reach for the check.
Miha is running on high energy now and, I think, a bit pissed at our casual American carelessness, our failure of precision, our indecisive lameness before Slavic grandness. “Don’t pretend,” he says to her. “Don’t even begin to pretend.”
It is an out-of-nowhere devastating cross-cultural critique. It could be taken as harsh, but it is actually the height of generosity, a growl of the Slovenian bear he didn’t order.
“It’s the Balkans,” Irena explains, pushing away Miha’s card and putting down her own in its place. “In the Balkans Miha always pays.”