TRIESTE AT CHRISTMAS

An unedited diary entry 

Walking to the station in Venice to catch the train to Trieste, if I had looked to the blue sky beyond the terracotta roof tiles, I might have thought it was four o'clock on a midsummer morning but it is cold and we are all wearing hats and scarves. All along Strada Nuova the office girls with their high boots, cigarettes and sunglasses are hurrying impatiently as if they are important, which they are not, while tourists with their guide books edge nervously as if they are lost, which they are. Delivery boys smoke against their chariots, trying to look hard and pretending not to notice the hurrying girls. The stainless steel chariots are loaded improbably with bottled water, panettone, brown cardboard boxes (Sony) and potted plants. The boys will lean on this strange produce, continuing their pretence, until the shutters of the shops are opened and they unload their cargoes, rustle the papers to be signed and rush back to their boats to repeat their little piece of theatre somewhere in another part of the city.

The market stalls are piled high with nectarines, vegetables (chicory and the small, bitter and famous Venetian artichokes) and more panettone. There are little mountain ranges of shining black mussels and plastic buckets with two-inch thick eels. It is Christmas in Venice. 

At the station there are trains from Vienna, Paris, Zurich Hauptbahnhof, Bucharest. I am always intrigued by the fact of Venice as a crucible for all these lines to all these destinations. And it is a crucible, a melting pot, for things are mixed here, combined. The train from Vienna includes a coach from Germany, the one from Zurich a couple from Austria, that from Paris is half French, half Italian while the one from Bucharest seems to have got itself mixed somewhere with sleeping cars from Russia. These are painted in a dull grey and blue with mysterious Cyrillic script and none of those little bits of cosmetic graphics that you find on trains from other countries. It is as if there is still within Russian culture an instinct to supress information. I warm to this anonymity, to what seems to be a refusal to be globalised.

But my train is none of these. It's the interregionale and Trieste is only a couple of hours away. The names of the stations are like poetry: Quarto d'Altino, S. Donà di Piave – Jesolo, S. Stino di Livenza, Portogruaro Caorle, Latisana Ligano Bibione, San Giorgio di Nogaro, Cervignano Aquileia Grado, Monfalcone and Trieste Centrale. And the landscape: a flat land of brown earth and green pasture cut by pencil-straight ditches shining in the sun which is warm through the window. (Non gettate alcun oggetto dal finestrino). Some stunted willows, some vines, long-neglected and ruined farms, new industry, a cement works, pylons painted red and white. New roads, unfenced, as dull and workmanlike as perimeter roads around military airfields. Some rivers, some campanile, always the mountains, white and always appearing nearer than they are. A showroom for Mercedez-Benz cars and vans, a new pre-cast concrete factory, as yet without doors and windows but already adorned with bold graffiti. Plantations of poplars (bio-fuel?), a shroud of cupressus around a dark cemetery, a white egret unsteady on a telephone wire, bright against a now naval-grey sky. An empty football pitch with lights on high poles.

After San Giorgio di Nogaro there are more vines and the soil becomes more stony, almost rocky. Biblical you might say. You expect to see someone in sandals stumbling across the dry ground in a coat of many colours. And there are hills now so that the train is often in a cutting and between these you can see the sea, the Adriatic, far away and far below, shining like the green rippled glass that you used to find in bathroom windows. The sun, for so long constant on the right, now swings across the carriage and back as the train winds a level path between the hills. It is only an interregionale but there are armed police on board, one a woman, no more than a girl really, with a long blonde plait reaching to the broad white belt which holds her pistol, her radio and a long stick, shiny and black. Perhaps this is, sadly, what we need in England. I cannot help thinking that having a long plait can be a bit of a problem in a brawl but, also, that with the pistol and the long black stick, brawling is rare. Perhaps, of course, the plait is detachable, like the tail of the lizard.

After Monfalcone the Adriatic is closer. The Bay of Trieste. How beautiful the water from the high tracks on the top of the cliff. And over there, the other side, beyond the waiting ships, Yugoslavia, Croatia, mysterious, distant, secret. But I am here with work to do and not to dream. There is a statue of Venus in Piazza Unità d'Italia made by Ugo Haedti in about 1880 and I have come to make a drawing of her to illustrate one of the pieces in The Red Handkerchief. This Piazza is one of the great squares of Europe and, with its third side open to the Adriatic, it is the task of Haedti's Venus to protect the city from the sea. She does it with beauty and with the naked grace of Botticelli's much earlier Venus.

Three hours of drawing

Four or five hours later and I am on the return train. It is a good drawing — at least, it is a drawing I think I can use. But it was cold doing it and I couldn't properly hold my pencil. The statue was in the shade and I was unable to wear my hat for the famous Triestian Bora was slicing across the piazza and carrying with it cruel spirals of gritty dust which seemed to find my eyes however I turned my head.

People always look at the drawing when you work in public. It seems that you are assumed to be another tourist attraction, a sort of public property. They would never (would they?) read your text if it were made of writing but, being made of lines and shading, a text as I have made today is apparently in the public domain. It angers me but there's no point. Today a group of giggling schoolgirls seemed to find the idea of drawing a naked woman (even a stone naked woman) amusing although, presumably, the statue which they see every day engenders no such reaction. And there was a woman from Siena. Young. Pretty, I think and I think her name was Serena Machetti. She asked me (I suppose she was serious) if I could make a drawing of her that she could buy. Did she think she was going to sit down there, presumably with her clothes on, in the dusty breeze for a few minutes so that I could dash something off in a flourish like a street artist. I tried to explain that it didn't work like that. In truth, although I didn't admit this, I am not that clever. But she was a woman with whom I felt a sort of affinity, perhaps because she told me that she liked to feel the cold wind on her skin, as I do. Then her friend arrived, took a photograph of the two of us, then 'grazie', 'buon natale' and I continued my work. It wouldn't happen in England.

The drawing done, my book and pencils packed into my aluminium case which doubles as a stool, I set off for the aquarium. But, as when I was last here, and the time before, the aquarium was closed. As compensation, again as last time, there were some graceful balletic jelly-fish (the Italian 'meduse' is far more flattering) in the cold, clear and deep water of the harbour. I had thought of them, wrongly, obviously, as animals of warm water. A black and white cat changed its sleeping place from a pile of nylon fishing nets to a white and rusting fridge as I passed by. Coffee in a little bar where I was the only white man. The rest were black Africans but it didn't seem to matter — I was not looked on as an intruder. The market was disappointing with its universal Christmas junk but that didn't appear to matter either. Trieste seems somehow deeply civilised, cultured, and it's more than just the lingering presence of Joyce and Svevo. It's more than that but I don't know what it is. I spent my last hour or so looking at things and trying not to take photographs. An elaborate nativity set up around the base of an elegant lamp post, a cupola, Christmas trees in the piazza, a salt-stained TIR wagon from Istanbul. Some boats. A carving in stone high on the façade above the port offices was a sort of Triestian equivalent of Eric Gill.

Why, I was wondering in that last hour of looking, is this city so very beautiful? It is an enigmatic beauty that you can't define and I think it is because, like Venice, it is a city unsure of its identity. And, like Venice, it has a 'Grand Canal', hardly grand, hardly a canal, and now little more than a mooring place for small boats. Once it was longer and would have been busy with the sails of merchant ships. At its head the neo-classical church of Sant'Antonio, the six columns of its portico now no longer fronting the water but still making a reflection of which Palladio would have been proud, if you stand far enough away. But, for all this change, the canal's proportions remain harmonious and, with the elegant and proud buildings that line it, it donates to the city a sense of space and peace that is now rare in an urban environment. If Trieste is, as it seems to me, a city unsure of its identity it will be for the inevitable outcome of its historical confusions. In so many ways heroic, romantic, its architecture impressive, sometimes ostentatious, as if claiming control and authority over the whole of the Adriatic. (Although Venice remains more perfectly placed on the map for this qualification). This city reminds me of Paris, but while Paris and Liberty are confident to the point of careless arrogance, Trieste's heroism seems designed, or has materialised, to mask an uncertainty. It is an uncertainty of provenance and ancestry. Trieste remains uncertain whether to be Austrian, Italian, Yugoslav-Croat, or whether to try to hold elements of all of these and more. This does not reduce the city's attraction — indeed it is the city's attraction. And you cannot leave Trieste with dry eyes.

While I was making my drawing I thought I had lost the little sleeve which protects the hairs of my soft brush which I use to remove eraser debris. It's only made of the flattened cardboard from a roll of lavatory paper and some masking tape but it does a good job, I've had it a long time since I made it in Menorca (strange how you remember these things) and I wouldn't want to lose it. I found it later in my coat pocket. Had it been something I had bought in a shop its loss wouldn't have worried me much and it got me to thinking about the value of tools, how a tool should last a lifetime — even a flattened cardboard tube covered in masking tape — and how we should look after our tools. And how tools should be handled as if they are extensions of our own hands. And how tools should be handed down from generation to generation. And how the only tools that should be bought are those we cannot make ourselves. Of course, this often (probably usually) cannot be done for most of our tools have become too . . . I was going to say sophisticated but I don't mean that. Complicated is the word. Sophisticated in this context means, or should mean, simple. And, in times which change so quickly, one generation now does not usually follow the trade of the previous one. A burin is not a lot of use to a computer programmer, nor a garden spade to a dentist. But certainly we should look after our tools. They are, as I said, the extensions of our limbs. The bloke whose adjustable spanner lies rusting and unadjustable in the back of his pick-up would laugh at me if he saw me putting linseed oil on the ash handle of my dad's digging fork. I don't care, and because of the oil my fork is more enjoyable and easier to use and so is more likely to do a better job. Economists and product designers would argue against these ideas but economists (not of the E. F. Schumacher variety) allow their worlds to be mediated by so much greed that they don't recognise it as greed at all. The economists and designers I mean are those of the Harley Earl school who have wasted so many of the Earth's natural resources in the misplaced belief that such resources actually belong to them, and have transformed them irrecoverably into landfill. No, we really should look after our tools. We would if we had to make them. A good tool . . . this is worth a paragraph on its own . . .

A good tool with a long history has a greater value to me than an artwork with an impressive provenance.

Heading back to Venice the train is warm, almost empty. But it is cold outside. Distant campanili are silhouetted grey against a pink sky. The low sun defining the different angles of far away factory windows. Quarto d'Altino, apart from Mestre, is the last stop and someone is taking in washing before it freezes. A pink inflatable Santa climbs a plastic ladder to an upstairs window. Late concrete is pumped on to the steel mesh of a slab where a new house will be (soon the boys will be out buying felt pens and spray paint).The concrete will have to be covered tonight — already a frost is falling.