December Suite IV: Ghost Hardware

Most people got off the train in Venice, but I registered their leaving just as a rustling of luggage and low voices at the end of the wagon. I was busy warding off the small cold animal. When the train got rolling again, I fell asleep and had a nightmare where a group of people kept recommending books to me and I in turn kept immediately forgetting the titles and the author names and the faces of the people recommending the books; and when I woke up from my chaotic nap the train was rolling into Trieste.

I grabbed my things and got off the train. It was night. I had a room booked in a small hotel on the Viale Oberlin slightly uphill, but before going there I wanted to quickly step onto the Piazza Unità d'Italia.

The Piazza had always seemed old to me, and seemed even older now; it had always seemed lonely to me, it seemed even lonelier now. As always, it was wide and damp and nonsensically majestic like a parking lot in a dream. It stretched out and on and on and out onto the black-blue Adriatic softly gurgling in the night. The cafés were already closed, only a kiosk was still open, projecting a bone-white neon onto a small part of the wet pavement. The newspapers spoke of imminent war; I saw a customer inside the kiosk, in a blue jacket, talking to the woman behind the counter.

I tried to take a mental photograph of the Piazza; or, better still, breathe it in. I had always felt the Piazza Unità d'Italia had a way of blurring all sense of place and dimension; it seemed wide as a country and too narrow for the sea; I had the impression that you could fit the whole city into this square and conversely the square seemed so much like just a bit of air and water, like something you might find behind a hotel room radiator.

Next to the radiator, there stood a tiny table with a stool; there was a window above it and then next to the tiny table the room corner and then the door to the bathroom and then next to that a cupboard where I could hang my coat, next to that the hotel room door and then corner again and, following that, the wall along which stood the bed. It was altogether small and almost austere I liked it, except I would have loved to run a bath after the journey but the room had only a shower. A shower with, as it turned out, barely any water pressure.

After showering, I lay on my bed and read. Apart from the book on Constable, I also carried Les Forces by Laura Vazquez and Tomboy by Thomas Meinecke, and I read in the Forces until I became too tired. I resisted the urge to look at my phone and instead watched a stain on the ceiling for a few minutes before falling asleep.

I got up some time between eight and nine, took another shower because I felt I needed it, got dressed and then went back out into town.

It was a cold morning under an overcast sky, but with something like a promise of coming sunlight in the air; hints of a clear winter noon unfolding behind or above the cloud curtain.

As it was day, I avoided the Piazza Unità. By day, I thought it only terrifying: the way everything just spilled into the Adriatic, or rather got sucked into it by this absurd stone void. Even here, in the small streets of the old town, I could feel the pull, and did my best to not think of it.

I took a seat in a small café. There was mild light and warmth, I had a small round table and almost all of the café to myself. There were three elderly women at the back, by the leather settees, and there was a patron at one of the other small round tables, an old man with a brown suede jacket over a white shirt and a checkered beret on the head, intently reading the Gazzetta dello Sport. There was a decorative jukebox, a newspaper stand like in a Viennese café, and a Cinzano advert at the wall slowly turning into Cenotaph for Joshua Reynolds.

The waitress came over and I ordered an espresso, which came in the inevitable white Illy cup, and scrambled eggs. While eating, I doomscrolled absentmindedly.

I had first come to Trieste twenty years before. I had still been in school and our Latin teacher had brought us here as a part of a trip through Northern Italy undertaken simply because he loved the region and wanted to show it to us; on the pretext that Italy had once been the center of the Roman Empire, so it made didactic sense to travel through Italy as a part of the high school Latin curriculum. It was the feeblest of alibis, but it brilliantly took advantage of the moron that had been our high school principal, an arch-conservative terrorist of the boring. He hated history and made no attempt at disguising it, which meant – and that was the lesson said Latin teacher taught us more than any other – that you could make him believe almost anything about history, even that it is absolutely necessary to go and drink Campari in Florence for a week in order to understand anything about Ancient Rome. The same teacher, a former stage designer, had founded a theatre group at the school that served as an oasis for all students struggling with the school's old-fashioned authoritarian style, with its rigorous attempt to make everyone become a doctor, a lawyer, or a banker ("Or else you will be lost in life, with no money and no orientation!"). It had also been all but an open secret that he made the oral graduation exams extra easy if he knew a student was struggling because of a problem in their lives rather than with the school material itself. An eternal bachelor, he was confronted with queerphobic rumors that he must be a closeted homosexual and 'therefore' probably a pedophile. To my knowledge, he was not; in fact, he and I had later had a falling out over his behavior towards (adult) women, which I thought grossly objectifying. But his impact on my life, and my knowledge of his, was big enough that when I much later heard that he had taken his life, I could guess the chosen place and method even before his sister told me.

And since that first Trieste experience, the town haunted me. I had liked Florence, Verona, Mantova, Vicenza, Padova, and Venice – but Trieste preoccupied me. I returned there several times, once with Alma and once alone after the end of that affair, twice with friends, and now once again. But when I wasn't there, something in me was always aware of that town in the hills by the sea, framed by two castles – Miramar in the West, and Duino in the East – half post-fascist, half post-Jugoslavian, completely post-Austro-Hungarian, markedly Danubian as well as Adriatic; rectangles of pale white and Tiepolo pink and in its midst that Piazza, hemorrhaging into the ocean. It was less a town than a ghost hardware on which ran something like a program that I could feel in my entrails, somewhere below the small cold animal; and now I was here again.

And sitting in a café in the old town, eating scrambled eggs, drinking Illy coffee, thinking all that and waiting for Kaufmann to arrive.