Remaining triestina

 

    At the center of my resistance, my reluctance to take charge of my own life, was a quarrel I had with words. Words that never seemed to be capable of saying just exactly what I wanted them to say. Throughout my adolescence and early adulthood, whether I was writ­ing poetry, essays or letters, I felt fraudulent about using words. Writing appeared a far cruder tool of expression than painting or music. Perhaps, I used to think, this was because words are subject to pollution, are the tools of the advertisers, the promoters, the public relations hucksters, and any one of them has to be washed free of the muck of common usage before being put to singular, specific service. But was it really the abuse of language by mass culture that made words suspect to me? As I became older, I found the origin of my ambivalence, my grievance, led further back.

    It stemmed from my resentment at being taken away from the use of my native language, to which I already felt “married,” since I loved writing and—most of all—elaborating my own saga in it. There were some years, perhaps from six to eleven, when I created a fantastic tale for myself. In the warm seasons, going around the mulberry tree in the back yard (it really was a mulberry tree, a Triestine morero, still flour­ishing on my return from California, twenty-one years later,) I would recite a rhyming singsong to myself, “She galloped around the mulberry tree, braving the winds and braving the fears. . . .” (It was not difficult to find rhymes in Italian.)

    The mulberry tree grew in the backyard, which was divided by a low fence. On one side, the pavement was flagstones, a covered well stood against the wall topped with glass shards sheltering the yard from the back alley, and the tree was at the center. On the other side, a tree of chocolaty figs dominated and, in raised round beds edged by bro­ken tiles, grew white and velvet-crimson roses, of a dark deep scent, surrounded by peppermint and chrysanthemums. All was carefully tended and trees and plants were regularly watered with buckets filled from the well. Once, when my third grade class had a project raising silk worms, I was sent home in the middle of the afternoon, to collect mulberry leaves for their feeding. An owl made her nest among the ancient ivy lacing the high wall made by the apartment building next door. Probably because of its mournful calls, the civetta was said to bring bad luck: but once I saw two owlets, prematurely hopping about in the shrubbery, their feathers fluffed out like fur on kittens, and I kept their secret, praying that only their mother would discover them. (This was after I had witnessed the drowning of a litter of kittens in a pail of water, while the mother paced back and forth protesting behind the panes of the ground floor window.)

    This was the stage for my childhood saga. My recitation saturated with flowery terms, I would shape my tale in the past, and relate movement to abstraction, deriving plot from some feeling that belonged to the moment. My vocabulary was drawn from opera libretti, exploits of knights and political heroes and saints’ hagiography. (I’d found a book with realistic etchings representing the tortures of early Christian martyrs during the Roman empire: I could not bear to look at a particularly vivid one of the Circus Maximus, the lions with yawning mouths pacing around a cluster of dishevelled virgins whose eyes turned heavenward, only a trace of the pupils showing.) The perfor­mances crystallized and transformed the emotions of a child among adults, telling her story to imaginary listeners. I became the heroine of daring events, adapting roles gleaned from readings to give myself sub­stance and the friendship I found in books became an essential relation­ship. The interruption of this love affair with my first language was perhaps the worst of all the separations that occurred when I was twelve, because there was nothing at that age that meant as much to me as the world of books and fantasy. Words could afford solace on demand, as no one being ever did.

    I lived in a foster home, in the second floor apartment of a white house in a popular quarter of Trieste, the last port in the northeastern corner of Italy. Already, both the neighborhood and the city were becoming marginal. The rione of San Giacomo had once had some impor­tance, when shipbuilding and shipping had been thriving industries and Trieste belonged to landlocked Austro-Hungary. Then people in the green-shuttered houses, ordered on sharply inclining hills resembling San Francisco’s, were prosperous. They lived in view of the shipyards and the docks; some of the men shipped out to Genova, Tunis, New York, Rio and Buenos Aires. In 1918, after Trieste’s long yearned-for political reunion with its cultural mother, Italy, the port became superfluous and the inhabitants of San Giacomo impoverished.

    Trieste has always lived with the sea. The vast central fish market is an art-deco landmark, alive with the bounty of the Adriatic. Crabs, mussels, crayfish and shrimp and the silver mackerel, sardines, mullet and bass, still quivering on the marble slab counters, sustain the discriminating eye of Triestine shoppers. The piers jutting out from the stately Piazza dell’Unità welcome strollers and the sweeping bay invites evening lovers to savor the briny air in sharp refoli of wind.

    The San Giacomo neighborhood is known as a rione popolare, a pro­letarian neighborhood. This sounded shabby when said by the children from other areas I sometimes met on early evening walks with Romana. In summer, we went to the Parco della rimembranza—a fascist homage to the fallen heroes of the struggles for liberation from the Austrians through World War I. Or we walked along the banks of the canal in the Ponte Rosso square, where the spherical watermelons floated, kept fresh for the contadine from the Carso, till they could sell them from the stalls in the open market. In winter, we walked down the Scala dei Giganti—a mammoth scalinade reminiscent of the Piazza di Spagna, with mock grottoes and a fountain. There we often saw an old man beg­ging and I would urge Romana for some coins to put in his chapped red palm. The walk led us to the Piazza Goldoni, where we sometimes stopped in a wine shop and I, too, was given a bicchierino of sweet Vermouth to warm up from the cold.

    On my first return to Trieste after graduate studies, I wondered if this was one of the bettole where James Joyce and Italo Svevo used to drink till all hours, till they broke into raucous dialect drinking songs. It was ancient enough: a step below street level, walls darkened by smoke and grime, with beer barrels for seats and pungent casks of the wine so dark-red that it’s called nero.

    The brother of the two elderly women I lived with spoke of the for­mer glories of Trieste. Umberto was a ship carpenter who drank too much most Saturday nights and was the disgrace of his family. (The family Mocenigo, so each member had told me several times, descended from one of the Doges of Venice.) He lived in the third floor apartment “in sin” with voluminous Rosina, who sang arias from “Norma” when she wasn’t yelling at her convivente. Their quarreling echoed down the airshaft into the kitchen window. Umberto would begin by cursing the woman and his job, and then, because he knew that his devout sisters could hear, the church, the Pope and various saints. He usually cli­maxed his tirades with, “Wait till the communists get in, we’ll get rid of all the priests and you zealots!”

    The rione had the reputation, of which some in San Giacomo still boast, of being a hotbed for communists and a refuge for Slavs. Ersilia and Romana feared both. They had been left in genteel poverty by their father, so neither had married. Ersilia had had a brief and intense engagement with a Sicilian. No one ever told me anything else about him. She would now and then sigh and say, “You know, I couldn’t leave my poor mother. I went down there with him; his family owned fields and farms . . .” She would pause for several seconds then shake her head. “It was just too, too far away.”

    In the living room was a large portrait of Ersilia, as a young woman, with wistful face under a huge hat, her head slightly tilted towards her shoulder. I thought she seemed to mourn her future, foreseeing it would be spent as a zitella in a proletarian neighborhood, among peo­ple who couldn’t appreciate her sensitivity and better breeding. She had once taught Latin, when her mother had been alive to manage and collect the rents on the six apartments. Now Ersilia ostensibly earned a living for herself and Romana as a seamstress of respectable talent, making dresses for women in the neighborhood and alterations for the clothes of their growing children. With the left-over material at times she made me a top or a jumper. (I wore a cream colored dress, with red trim at sleeves and neck-line, the night we took the train to Genova, on our way to America. I wore it till my legs grew too long.)

    I don’t remember being unhappy, living with the two “old maids,” as my mother called them. I was at times aware of a yearning melan­choly, in the late gray afternoons, as I played with left-over bits of material in the alcove of the bay window, while Ersilia sewed at her foot-driven Singer. I would imagine what the lit windows of other houses hinted at: saw the cheerful inhabitants, seated in comfortable armchairs, heard their subdued laughter, savored the rich smells of their meals. Apparently, I had been rebellious when I first was brought to the via San Marco, at two years old. Romana told me that I had cried and clung to my mother till she, exasperated, had slapped me. (It would be many years, a tired and harassed mother myself, before I guessed at the motive: guilt, weariness, frustration.) My mother was working as a housekeeper, my father had already been reported miss­ing in war, and I had been living with a family out in the country, who pressured to adopt me. My mother decided to move me to other caretakers.

    I met that first foster family again, the day of my first communion: they ran a sort of inn in San Giovanni, a village on the tram-line out­side Trieste. With my mother, grandmother, aunt, cousin and sisters, we had lunch under a grape vine. The courtyard was gravelled and ours was the only table occupied. As we ate prosciutto, mortadella, hard boiled eggs and salame with rolls, washed down with blond young wine, (for us children, watered), the daughter was urgently trying to remind me of when I had been small. But I could not recall anything. The mystery of my birth I would try to unravel as an adolescent, by pulling together threads of memories, gossip, hearsay information and history from various sources.

    The most dramatic memory comes from when I was about seven. I woke up from my afternoon nap in the cot in the bedroom I shared with Ersilia and Romana, hearing sounds like wood pieces scraped together, and smothered voices from the kitchen. I kept very still, trying to deci­pher what was happening. I realized a fire was burning in the white tiled corner fireplace when I heard hissing—as of something being scat­tered on it. Ersilia was whispering, words repeated over and over, like a litany to the Virgin. I knew there was a third woman in the kitchen when Romana spoke in a comforting tone and I could make out: “. . . That’s how it is, signora. They’re all the same . . . Even the father of that poor creature. And he’s a Jew . . . Yes, yes, yes.”

    I tensed, knowing instinctively that she was referring to me, just as it immediately registered that the fire had to do with Ersilia’s mysteri­ous activities, with all the visits she got from unknown women. (But it wasn’t until a long time afterwards, in California, that I understood she was a midwife and, very likely, also performed abortions when necessary.)

    My mind went back to some two years previous, when Ersilia, Romana and I had moved, for safety’s sake, to an old office building downtown. The Americans and the English were bombarding the har­bor, where the Germans had ensconced themselves, in a last-ditch effort to hang on to the part of Italy they considered by historical precedent theirs. The space was shared with Umberto, Rosina, Ersilia’s and Romana’s mother and their niece Lisetta with her husband Dante and their daughter. There was also someone we did not know well, a schoolteacher, Signorina Elide. Romana, Ersilia, their mother and I slept in one huge bed (or maybe two double beds pushed together) in one of six offices that made up the floor. I slept with my head at the foot of the bed, to have more room. Each night, Romana set the trap for the mice and most nights I’d awaken to the squealing of a trapped mouse jumping within the trap and dragging it across the room. In the morning, Ersilia would pick up the trap, the long bedraggled gray tail hanging out, and empty it in the wooden trash box. Rosina cooked for all of us. Usually, lunch was the main meal of the day, and consisted of soup made with gray pasta and black beans. The grey macaroni and spaghetti reminded me of the mouse tails. Once in a while, we’d have bread smeared with oil or lard for the evening meal. Often, I would vomit after being forced to eat the soup with gray pasta. Several times Elide comforted me by bringing me some cookies or caramelle, which only she, by some miracle, could conjure up.

    Elide seemed altogether magical to me. Her room smelled of lilac water, of wild broom, her bedspread was pink and satiny and her dresser had the most surprising objects on it. There was a silver-backed hair brush, mother-of-pearl opera glasses, a stole with a fox face and various little bottles filled with golden liquids of delicious scents. She had books in boxes stacked all around the walls of her cubbyhole. I pre­tended to read them.

    “You’re really old enough to begin to write, you know that?” she said to me one day. She took a notebook out of a box, gave me a pointed pen­cil and started to teach me to form letters of the alphabet. The notebook was of the purest white paper, lined in blue and red: still my favorite kind of paper at the stationer’s. It was a pleasure to fill up the pages with my careful strokes. I tried to copy her lettering, elegant, also because it was made in ink. Until I myself learned to shape the pen to graceful curves and lines, I would lift to my face the page she’d written on and breathe in the inkiness she’d left. Ink is still to me a voluptuous smell.

    I didn’t know it then, but Elide was the first person I fell in love with. I also loved Dante, but he was claimed by his daughter, whom he played with much more often, filling me with jealousy. Elide had sin­gled me out for attention and seemed to speak very little to anyone else.

    One afternoon, Rosina called everyone to the table for dinner, but I didn’t hear, because I was in Elide’s room, immersed in drawing in a notebook. Romana came to fetch me.

    “Here you are, again! Excuse me, Signorina Elide, but you shouldn’t let her bother you so much . . . We can’t get her to eat, either, because of course she prefers to wait till you give her sweets . . .”

    “She is really not any trouble to me. I am alone, and she’s good com­pany. But I won’t give her any sweets, if you prefer it that way.”

    When we left the room, Rosina was waiting to scold me: “You’re a bad girl, everybody has to eat at the same time; now the soup’s cold and I suppose you’ll throw it up!”

    As we sat down to eat at the big, black wood conference table, Rosina turned to Ersilia, rolling her eyes in the direction of Elide’s room, “You ought to keep her away from that senza Dio. Who knows what she’ll teach her!”

    Kindly Romana objected: “She’s a poor unfortunate, that woman, leave her alone, the Germans give them enough trouble already.”

    I turned to Rosina perturbed, “Why did you call her ‘without God’?”

    “You, bambina, be quiet and eat.” Romana hissed to me in a low voice, “Because she’s Jewish; they don’t believe in Jesus.”

    Ersilia added urgently: “But don’t speak about this ever, to anyone.”

    I remained captivated by Signorina Elide. She taught me to write the first sentences that rhymed, she admired my drawings, and, once in a while, broke the rule against giving me mints and cookies. But now, there was a barrier between us. I felt that I was betraying her, because I did not dare ask her if she believed in Jesus: Ersilia’s voice had been threatening. I prayed, instead, to Mary, who had a kind face in the wall calendar kept above the trash box. I thought that Mary would help Signorina Elide out of whatever trouble the Germans wanted to cause her, even if she didn’t believe in Jesus. She left, one morning early. I did not wake up in time to say good-bye to her. The evening before, she’d hugged me and promised that she would send me a post­card from Florence, where her brother was waiting for her. (It was on the Ponte Vecchio that she’d bought the mother-of-pearl opera glasses.) I never knew whether Signorina Elide was able to reach Florence and no one was ever able to enlighten me.

    Since this occurred close to the end of the war, she probably escaped the fate of the 5,000 Jews rounded up by the Nazis and taken to San Sabba, the only extermination camp in Italy. (The warehouse of a rice factory was made into a slaughterhouse when exhaust from the huge trucks was pumped into it. Those who survived were disposed of by cruder methods: they were clubbed to death, with the customary German efficiency, to save bullets.)

    We lived in the office building for over a year: during that time, Romana’s and Ersilia’s mother, Vittoria, died. I was awakened one night when Romana picked me up, her nose red from crying. She couldn’t stop hiccuping, so it was Ersilia who told me, “Our poor mother died in her sleep.” I immediately felt her words as an accusation: on several occasions, I had eaten some of the English “biscuits” that Romana put in the metal box by her bedside. As Ersilia too began weep­ing, they started to undress the body and Rosina came to take charge of me. I didn’t want to leave, because I wanted to know whether dead people really got all stiff and I thought I remembered feeling her cold feet at night. But her feet had always been cold, and with their boni­ness, almost stone-like.

    From that period I remember periodic flights during bombardments, to the tunnel or the basement of the nearby hospital. While the sirens were bleating mournfully, everyone grabbed heavy coats, blankets, pil­lows, bags of food, and scurried out the building. Down the street we joined many others, rushing, sometimes crying, but mostly silent, as if the bombs might hear us and know where to strike. These flights filled me with excitement, the main component of which was joy rather than fear. On the floor of the tunnel or the basement of the hospital, against the wall, were masses of people—families sharing their bread, oranges, canned powdered milk. Sometimes, I found playmates. We were not allowed to stand up or wander away, but we invented quiet games, with stones or spent matches, and exchanged information about other bombardments, about our families or our favorite fairy tales. I was upset when one girl I’d made friends with in the tunnel did not reappear. Her grandmother had been too slow in getting out of their house, Romana told me, and the house was struck by a shell, burying the whole family. Like in other bombed buildings I’d seen, some fix­tures remained intact: staircases, sinks, and paintings on the half demolished walls. Piles of rubble were still mounded in that part of the city when we left for America.

    I was filled with morbid curiosity, fomented by the horrors everyone lived with, every day. One time, Ersilia had to drag me off down the street, after telling me that she’d seen “a horse, split exactly in half, down the middle, as if it had been cut at the butcher’s.” She did not let me see it. In the tunnel, for a while, there was a German Red Cross unit. Once, a German nurse smiled at me and gave me a can of dried honey. I remember my surprise, because I had been told that all Germans were evil. German military police had stopped my mother, after some Triestine partigiani killed a patrol unit near where she lived. She later told me how she was afraid she would be shot, during the three hours that she was held without explanation, on the sidewalk in front of a bank with a handful of other terrified people. Instead, without explanation, the Germans let them go. Another time, when my mother had not appeared to visit me as she had arranged, Romana and I went to the quarter in the old city where she lived. It was an ancient build­ing; she lived in an attic apartment, with Rosalia, my baby sister, and Alba, cheerful and chubby, who was Rosalia’s godmother. (Francesca, my other sister, was then in an convent school run by nuns who were strict disciplinarians.) I remember being fascinated by the ceilings in this apartment, which slanted in the bedrooms, while the entrance had a sky light to the roof. But this time when we arrived, Alba barely opened the door and told Romana that my mother had been “picked up.” Some time passed before she visited us in San Giacomo.

    I would be thirty-four years old before I learned from my aunt that the Gestapo had raided the tenement after being informed that my mother had a child whose father was Jewish. That was me.

    Worst of all, of course, the Germans hated the Jews and the Americans. I hadn’t yet formed any ideas about the Americans, but I knew that Signorina Elide was good, and she was Jewish. Back in via San Marco some two years later—in the knowledge I’d managed to put together from whispered warnings and newspapers front pages dis­played outside the kiosk across the street—I knew that being a Jew was a dangerous thing. Mentioning Jews made people stammer or brought them to angry tirades. The fascists had given the Jews castor oil as pun­ishment. Umberto also had been arrested, taken to the police station and given castor oil. And Umberto was a disgrace, who embarrassed his sisters. Now, I had to make sense of the fact that Romana had said my father was a Jew.

    That night I had a frightening dream, which was to recur. I dreamed that I was walking across the square in front of our local church with a young man holding me by the hand. The young man I recognized as one of the angels painted on the vault of the cupola. But as I looked at him, his face turned menacing and he said: “You had better come with me, we have to find your father.” I immediately understood that I was in danger, and tried to wrench my wrist from his grasp. He held tight; I finally found myself running up a hill, with the young man following close. When the dream ended, I was running upstairs to our apartment, and he was calling out after me, “If you won’t come along with me, I will bash your head in with this iron.” He suddenly was armed with a pressing iron, red-hot from the stove. I dreamed this often, always waking up sweating.

    That my father was a Jew, I did not doubt when I was a child. It was confirmed for me by the fact that I always felt different from my schoolmates. This was the proof, more than Romana’s hesitation fol­lowed by grudging affirmation, when I asked her shortly before leaving for America. Because my father was a Jew, I didn’t have a uniform like the other children at school. Because he was a Jew, I didn’t live with my mother. Because he was a Jew, Ersilia, Romana and the mothers of my schoolmates whispered together about “that poor creature”. Because he was a Jew, I was given shoes at a shop downtown which I didn’t have to pay for. Because he/I was a Jew, the teacher in second grade said that I was intelligent, but not diligent, making both sound like flaws.

    Life in San Giacomo remained vividly sharp in my mind, like all my childhood. Returning to Trieste after years in America, I was able to recall what lay around each street corner: every square, gallery, shop, church, kiosk, bench and doorway. And yet, gradually, after more vis­its, the sharp edges of early memories smudged: it was as if I had fixed the pastel memories of childhood into etchings, clutching the images to me, until I could return.

 

Itala T. C. Rutter