Free Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris Page B

years I have spent five or six evenings at the Teatro Verdi, just on impulse, and I have found myself content but not exhilarated.
    This is partly because twice the opera of the night has happened to be a work by a local composer, Antonio Smareglia (1854–1929), whose operas are hardly ever performed anywhere else. But it is also, to risk a generalization, because of the modern Trieste temperament, bred by history out of race. This is an audience courteous, interested, informed, but hardly demonstrative. Its response is measured. People don’t wipe their eyes much in these stalls, no claques break into hysterical applause. Divas need not expect mid-aria encouragement. There is no wild covey of music students in the upper balconies, as ready to boo as to cheer, and when we all file out into the night not a soul is going to be whistling that love-aria from Act 2 (not even me, if only because, not being very familiar with the melodies of Smareglia, I can’t remember how it goes).
    NO MORE, never again,” is the refrain that haunts the last pages of Svevo’s tragic novel Senilità . It is a refrain of Trieste itself, embodied in the presence of Miramare, and James Joyce caught its melancholy in a poem. “Watching the Needle-Boats at San Sabba” is about watching the sculling-crews which in his time, as in ours, were often to be seen training or racing in the waters of the two bays:
    I heard their young hearts crying
Loveward above the glancing oar
And heard the prairie grasses sighing
No more, return no more.
    O hearts, O sighing grasses,
Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
No more will the wild wind that passes
Return, no more return.
    The water was calm and still that day, I feel sure, and the poet could perhaps hear the hard breathing of the oarsmen above the swish of their oars. He could also hear in his head the last chorus of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West , “The Girl of the Golden West,” so full of plangent yearning. Mai più ritornarai, mai più . . . Half a century later I heard that same refrain on a trading schooner anchored in the bay of Trieste, within sight of Maximilian’s castle. Two of us had gone on board to visit its captain, taking with us a couple of bottles of sparkling prosecco wine. We sat there drinking while the sun went down, and as the dusk fell upon Miramare the captain softly sang to himself that very phrase—“ Mai più ritornarai, mai più”: “No more, return no more!”

SEVEN

Trains on the Quays
    Until the 1950s freight trains ran along Trieste’s central waterfront, connecting the Sudbahn station at the northern end with the Campo Marzio station at the southern—each the terminus of a separate system. The tracks are still there, with a turntable halfway along, but the southern station is now a railway museum, and nowadays trains going to the industrial quarter and the modern docks on Muggia bay pass through an inland tunnel. I miss the trains on the quays. With their panting steam locomotives and their clanking wagons they passed slowly along the waterfront, and often workmen sat on their flat-topped wagons, hitching a ride from one siding to another. They were shabby, noisy old trains. When Gustav Mahler, staying at the Hotel de la Ville, complained about the mercantile racket of the city, it was probably because he was kept awake by their pantings, whistlings and rusty squeaks outside his window.
    Sometimes, even on spring days, there used to be a crust of snow on those passing trucks, and this seemed pathetically metaphorical to me. Snow from where, I used to wonder? Snow from Carpathia, from Bohemia, from the Vienna woods? By the time it reached Trieste it was broken and grubby at the edges, mouldering at the heart, and struck me as sad stuff. It was like snow sent into exile, banished from its bright cold uplands, wherever they were, to drip into oblivion in this grey enclave by the sea.
    The trains themselves made me think of exile, too, for there is nothing more