This is an excerpt from an earlier draft of Free the Sorrow, written during my visit to Trieste in 2008.
Trieste, my father’s birthplace, crumbles slowly into the Adriatic Sea. An imperial relic born of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s need for access to the sea, it sags beneath the steep limestone and dolomite escarpments that define the edges of the surrounding Carso plateau. The waltzing Viennese architecture of its ramrod-straight center shrinks from the wandering maze of the medieval old city on one side and the writhing and drab 20th century apartment blocks on the other. The daily traffic in the streets gives the impression of vitality, but the cars, buses and motorbikes course through the arterial system of an old and tired body.
Behind the festooned facades of the older parts of the city languish thousands of empty, obsolete apartments. This provincial capital’s population has shrunk by a third since its prosperous peak at 275,000 just before the devastating losses of World War I. The city shrank despite the influx of nearly 50,000 ethnic Italians escaping the Communist Yugoslavia after World War II. The city is old without the virtues of age, the people are old without the hope of a future, and the few attempts at architectural restoration and economic stimulation create the same effect as makeup on an old woman’s cracked and sun-baked face.
Walking through Trieste invites a profound sadness, except maybe in April, when the Mediterranean sun begins to warm the city after months of gray riddled with blasts of icy winds crashing down from the Julian Alps to the north. Triestini call the wind “la bora” and it bores into you in gusts up to 100 miles per hour. As you walk the streets, la bora rises up and tackles you like a pre-teen wrestler just out of her first winning bout, grabbing at your coat and spinning you into a wall as she tries to knock you down and pin you for a point.
Combined with rain and cold, la bora paints the city, the cars, the harbor and the boats with a thick layer of ice making any movement dangerous at best. Even into March, la bora strips trees of their branches and shatters umbrellas into ribbons before it retreats to wait for another winter. As March moves into April, the trees come into their flowers, the bulbs produce their daffodils and tulips, and the cafes begin to set their tables outside again.
But even on a sunny Sunday in March 2008, the loss of hope remains. Walking among the crowds strolling giant Piazza Unita’, the few families with young children only highlight the gray. I can hear laughter in the bars and cafes, but when I catch people’s faces when they think no-one is looking, they are grim, tired, depressed, a grayness that no amount of fashionable clothing, elegant jewelry or handsome eyeware care can mask.
I found Trieste littered with broken promises. Below the stereotypical veneer of Italian warmth lies a Triestine substrate of resentments that shows up in how people look at you when you meet, how they pass by in the street, how they argue, how they love, how they live and how they die. None of it’s personal, it’s just the legacy of generations of aspirations manipulated and dashed, within and among families, within and among communities, within and among nations.
I could feel it. And among those broken promises were a few that my father made to me. It was the hope of finding out why that had brought me here. He was 82, long retired. I was 50, my life on hold for two months, sleeping on a sofabed in a friend’s den.
On that sunny Sunday, I went to meet a friend at Bacio sul Canale, a cozy family-run restaurant facing the Canal Grande in downtown Trieste. It was before the dinner hour, so the place was empty but for the bartender and a pair of young women seated at the small bar. The place still smelled of espresso despite the late hour, and I couldn’t yet detect the aroma of the evening meal being prepared.
“Buona sera,” I said, and continued in Italian, “is Simon here?”
“Not yet, signore,” the bartender said. “Would you like something to drink while you wait?”
“Si, grazie, a beer, una piccola.”
I shed my oil-cloth car coat and crushable fedora onto one barstool and sat on the other, next to the two women. They were in their 20s, dressed in what I guessed were fashion brand knockoffs, one of them wearing eyeglasses with an ostentatious logo on the sides. A cigarette pack and a lighter sat in front of them on the bar, along with two glasses with lipstick prints on the rim and half-full of white wine.
“Buona sera,” I said.
They looked over at me and replied, almost in unison, “Buona sera.”
“How do you know Simon?” the one in the glasses asked.
“Ah, you know him? I met him here. A friend of mine introduced me to the owner, and she to him.”
The other woman smiled and said, “You speak Italian very well. Where are you from?”
“Grazie. Seattle, in the state of Washington.”
The one in the glasses looked at me, puzzled. “Why the heck would you want to come to Trieste?”
“My father lives here.”
She turned away. “That’s not a good enough reason.”
I smiled at her. “OK, why are YOU here?”
She turned back to face me. “Because my family is here. That’s the only reason. And if it weren’t for them, I’d be outta here. Milan, Rome, maybe Germany. Anywhere. This place is dead.”
The other woman nodded. “I’m in the same situation. I have a college degree but the only jobs I can find are in places like this. That’s why I’m here, looking for a job.”
“I know the owner’s daughter,” the one in the glasses said. “There are jobs in shops, but the city isn’t growing, and the jobs go to family members first. There are jobs in restaurants, like this one. And there are jobs in the government, but to get one, somebody has to die. If you have money, you can buy someone’s shop. But the shops get handed down, and to open a new one would be foolish.”
I nodded and drank some beer.
“So how long will you be here?”
“I arrived on March 3, and I’ll be here until the end of April.”
“Two months? Why would you want to be in Trieste for two months?”
I hesitated to go into details, but I was curious to hear what they thought.
“My father is old, and I actually don’t know him very well. He left us in California when I was 16. I came to get his story and learn more about Trieste.”
She shook her head and fingered the cigarette pack. “There is nothing interesting about Trieste.”