MobyDick Shipchandler Co.,
Istanbul, Turkey.
Pavor watched as the
semi-trailer truck slow-geared past on the way to the commercial port
further on, the driver in the sheer faced cab, a powerful chin with a
massive tattooed forearm, the captain of his own ship, call him
Ishmael with his Moby flash-frozen in the trailer behind. MobyDick
Shipchandler out of Istanbul. Four foot blue lettering on a white
semi-trailer truck. He needed that. A jolt of East and West to pull
him out of his maunderings along the harbour. The name on the truck brought
up memories of Melville and also Conrad's Lord Jim, Jim working as a
water-clerk for a ship chandler's business in distant tropical ports,
ever moving from port to port in the romantic pursuit of a fresh
start.
The cars, trucks and
motorbikes sputtered and farted past as he waited on the sidewalk to
cross.
It had been a half-hour
since Pavor had left the stone pier and its dark iron cleats behind,
the winds having prevailed upon him; a half hour since he left his
conjectures over how many people have simply walked to the end of
that long stone pier and descended the few slime-slick stairs, water
rilling in the crevices, and surrendered themselves to the cold dark
waters. A long half-hour.
Nearby, to the bronze sculptures on the side of another set of stairs, these leading down to the water in front of the Piazza Unità, he had made
his way, and had gazed upon these realistic depictions of two woman
sitting on the concrete ledge sewing the flag of Italy, their dresses
rippled like water, their hair furrowed by the imaginary wind. One
woman had an all-knowing, all-seeing expression, wistful yet bemused.
Sewing time itself. The sculptures had made him think of the numerous
modern naturalistic bronze sculptures in Montreal, the man reading a
newspaper in Westmount, or the couple embracing on a bench, and many
others. There must be thousands of similar statues around the world
he had thought, an art movement away from austere representations on
high pillars and plinths, towards art for the people, eye to eye. He
had wondered if there might be a correlation between freedom and
natural interactive art, the more 'democratic' freedoms available,
the more natural and accessible the art? He had stood looking at the
bronze figures—not realizing tourists were hoping he would move so
they could take photos of the bronze sisters—remembering when a
friend of his had shown him a photograph of the statue of John
Diefenbaker in his home town, some prankster had climbed up and
screwed a cigarette between the former prime minister's lips and fitted a
condom on his outstretched finger, an example of the perils of
representation.
A grey and white butterfly
flittered around Pavor's head before swiftly flying towards
Bennigan's Pub across the street as if the smell of Foster's and
other fine ales were mimicking Valerian, lavender or the blue
flowering Hyssopus high on the Mountain slopes over-looking Trieste.
It should be sunning itself around Miramare Castle he thought.
Equally lost as himself perhaps.
Using the crosswalk near the
marina where he had found himself, he made his way over to the city
side of the harbour, redirecting his thoughts inland, towards the
hospital and the possible answers awaiting him. At the corner of the
Piazza Venezia, he made his way past the spicy aroma emitted by a
Chinese restaurant that tried to seduce his hunger, but his
fluctuating thoughts were preoccupied with Ishmael, Lord Jim,
Mélisande, sculptures, doctors, nurses, and Tullio on a gurney
possibly clinging to life like Ishmael to Queequeg's coffin.
He felt like he was entering
a maze as he made his way down the narrow Via Torino, which curved
round to the Piazza Attilio Hortis, a leafy refuge from the winds.
The large chestnut trees and Pines provided a welcomed canopy for
shade and softened light, an ideal resting place for his already
tired feet. Sitting down, he watched the other park denizens and
passersby, tireless mothers with their children in strollers, a few
elderly men in windbreakers and caps sitting on a bench deep in
conversation, arms crossed as if contemplating a chess move, the
bicycles and motorbikes passing on the side streets, a woman tugging
on the dog leash of her unseen pet intent on smells and odours on
the other side of a low shrub, and the dark-winged figures in the
trees above looking down on it all with possible distrust. Two short,
jowly elderly men, one with a wooden cane slowly scuffed past him,
their hats and well-cut suits from another era, brothers perhaps,
like mirror images of Jorge Luis Borges. Next, two elderly woman,
once again, one with a cane, possibly sisters, arm and arm, their
kerchiefs and low-heeled shoes emblems of acceptance and propriety.
A procession of twins or married couples? Friends reacquainted off
for a stroll and a breath of air? Pavor wondered how they managed the
heat during the long shuttered summers.
No one paid any attention to Attilio
Hortis, the former head of the public library honoured with a bust on
a plinth in the centre of the park. His nose had been broken off, a
paper weight on someones desk or crumbled dust swept away by the
grounds keepers long ago, Pavor would likely never know. The
expression was a bit haughty, even from afar. People, with a capital
P, do not like haughty when it comes to book learning it seems. The
lawyer turned librarian had a name that evoked, for Pavor at least,
Attila the Hun and Horticulture, such was his cultural bias.
Good old Hortus warranted a
photograph for Mélisande, so he took out his cell phone and walked
over to take a series of shots of the white stone bust while the old
men on the bench stared at him open-mouthed as if surprised that a damaged sculpture of a forgotten librarian could possibly be of interest
to anyone. Turning around, he made his way over the dusty ground to
Italo Svevo who stood in Bronze on the sidewalk nearby, book in hand,
hat in the other, a Triestine stroller frozen in time. With the toe
of his shoe, he swept a few leaves off the bronze plate affixed to
the sidewalk and took a number of photographs, Svevo lost in
thought, perhaps thinking of that near-sighted, guitar strumming
exile from Eire. Pavor had hesitated with James Joyce as many have,
and finally having read Ulysses for
a University course, he had felt riven from his Jamesian fixation, the author weaving the
English language, history, Catholicism and the classical past and
wrapping the reader like a top and pulling the umbilical cord and
setting the reader off into a vortex of dizziness, coming to rest on
the soft rich earth, eyes to the sky, head spinning, re-birthed with
the depths of the idea of love, yes, yes, yes, love. This aroused a
memory of the picture he took of Mélisande one crisp yet dusty
spring morning, Mélisande leaning on the plexi-glass surround to the
Robert Indiana sculpture in old Montreal, the psychedelic colourful
letters spelling LOVE, evocative of the Beatles music, I love you,
ya, ya, ya, a counterpoint and contrast to the nineteenth century
limestone architecture that loomed above and around it. Mélisande,
love, marriage, equanimity and contentment. Were not Joyce and Svevo
married and conventional? Italo Svevo, the elder protégé of
the younger Irish flanneur, had fallen within the Joycean shadows,
and yet his writings were still unknown to him. People had told him
he should read The Confessions of Zeno, As A Man Grows
Older, and A Life, and though he owned paperback copies
purchased from The Word bookstore and Grange Stuart Books
back in Montreal, books taking up valuable real estate on his jumbled
shelves, he had yet to venture into them; three more books on a
seemingly endless scroll of a books-to-be-read bibliography easily
catalogued by his love, Mélisande the librarian.
He wondered if Joyce had
frequented Benington's Pub. Perhaps there was an unpaid bar tab
framed and labelled, a tourist tidbit, a draw for the wayward
scholar. Another pint if you will, sir. Another toast to that
fearful jesuit. Such places as the pub and the Chinese restaurant
provided a change for some, but Pavor had avoided them, their
appearance so much like places back in Montreal. He had tried to seek
out the little family run establishments where locals gathered for
local sourced foods and recipes, from seafood and pasta dishes, to
sauerkraut and sausage soup, so diverse the cultural mix of Italian,
Austrian, Hungarian, Slovenian and Croatian cuisine available. His
stomach gave a preliminary growl, a troubling presentiment of
possible hospital cafeteria food. Checking his watch, he decided his
landfall was well behind him, the journey to the hospital at the
centre of this maze of streets lay before him like an uphill
endeavour, and so off he trudged like a reluctant Theseus without his
thread.
Adrift without a map, he
headed along the Via di Cavana with its stylish shops and small
restos, where locals let their dogs pee against the light posts and
flower stands, then took a right on Via Madonna del Mare, its narrow
sidewalk just enough for a svelte solitary stroller. He yielded to an
older woman and her plump canvas bags in each hand like comically
over-sized boxing gloves, by walking onto the street only to have a
spluttering Vespa make him jump with its horn. Looking over his
shoulder, he caught sight of an attractive young woman, gleeful in
profile—was that a wink? ogling his tight pants—her scarf flowing
behind her like a banner.
On he walked, the crumbling
buildings and their proximity producing in him a sense of
claustrophobia. An officious flag fluttered above a doorway ahead of
him, and as he approached it he could make out amidst the strange
illiterate scrawls of graffiti, a ghostly sentence half scrubbed away
on the stone base of the building. He crossed the street making his
way between the line of parked Vespas and motorbikes, and took out
his note-book and pencil and began to write the words down.
Il futuro non e'scritto. il passato non si riscrive. riprendiamoci il presente.
He
could see the shadowed remnants of other words scrubbed away from
previous scrawls of protest, as if the rough stone was a poorly
cleaned black board of unrest. It is written in the future
not the past, reclaim the present. And
further on, in a different hand, La liberta é tutto.
Freedom and everything. A brass
plaque revealed it to be the offices of some state magistrate. The
seemingly endless playing out of the past and the present, the
pyramid of old wealth over the positionless strugglers beneath, the
generations rising and falling in a cycle of circumstances, stoically
impaired. The writing on the wall, letters falling between the
cracks.
Ahead, a
four storey building with lemon coloured upper floors caught the sun.
A huddle of five youths stood before the rusticated doorway, their
cigarettes and conversation in the air; three young women and two
men, not anarchists and futurists, but pleasant students before the
open door of learning, the public library, a building more
reminiscent of an apartment block. The address number was 13,
making him wonder if Italians lacked a superstition over the number.
“Biblioteca?”
Pavor enquired disingenuously.
Roused
from their closed thoughts, they welcomed the chance to interact with
a stranger. “Si, si, biblioteca,” said a tall, very thin young
man, his thick dark hair tousled above his long neck helping to exaggerate his
pronounced Adam's apple. Confident, and sensing a late season tourist
in their midst, he flourished his cigarette in his long fingered
hand, sweeping the air before him, “Yes, but books in Italian, yes,
no many Inglese. Sistema Dewey. You look for James Joyce?”
“His
ghost perhaps, il suo fantasma,” Pavor said with a smile.
Their
laughter united them. “Si, il suo fantasma ossessiona Trieste,”
the youth said with open arms, “garda, eccolo!” he said pointing
to an old man who had emerged from a side street and was walking away
from them, cane in one hand, “James Joyce!” They all laughed and
bumped shoulders, enjoying the moment.
“Al
secondo piano si trova il Museo Joyce,” one of the bespectacled
girls said looking up from her cell phone.
“Oh,
grazie, domani, domani,” Pavor said pointing at his watch, and with
a friendly nod he was off.
“Buono
fortuna!” they called after him.
He
turned and gave them a friendly wave, “Grazie, buono fortuna.”
Could
Joyce really haunt Trieste? Dublin perhaps, but not Trieste. How
could anyone dominate a city of countless lives and diversities of
experience? Cities are inexhaustible. A hundred writers would come up
with a hundred different stories, each representational, each
capturing a time and place.
Stubbing
his toe, Pavor managed to keep upright. Why do people look back? To
admonish the uneven stone? To fix it in memory for the next time? To
reveal to others that the fault was not in their stride, but in the
stone? His thoughts and steps had brought him to a crossroads, a
thirty foot cobblestone circle surrounded by three buildings, their
concave colourful facades facing each other like three card players,
the balconies and flower boxes their cards held close to their
chests. The ground level windows and doors were protected with iron
bars like laced boots, a common sight in Trieste, a leitmotif, a
motivo conduttore or was the Italian phrase filo
conduttore? The two streets climbed before him. Left or right?
He chose the darker one to the left, and climbed the Via della Valle,
thinking of being with Mélisande in Old Montreal, playing tourist,
ice creams and window shopping, coins for jugglers and mimes. It
would be about 6:30 a. m. in Montreal now. Still asleep. Clio pawing
or kneading the covers perhaps.
Arriving
at the end of this small street, he turned right on Via San Michele.
Not a soul in sight. Coming to a small white mausoleum-like building,
a Neoclassical facade with two Tuscan pillars and additional posts
beneath the pediment with its small cross, a smooth, simple and
unadorned white washed building. Christ Church, Anglican. The address
was 13. He began to worry about Tullio. Two thirteens in a row made
him feel his desultory steps were being guided by a higher hand. If
the number was not inauspicious, then the library and the church
could be seen as positive signs, a possible location for a marriage
ceremony, and Tullio would be found sitting up in a hospital bed
complaining about the food. He stood before the whitest, most reflective
building he'd come across in Trieste, and crossed his fingers.
*
Upstairs in Jerome's painting studio,
Arthur Roquebrune quietly paced the room, his hands clasped behind
him, whistling softly. The nervous whistle filling the silence with
innocuous innocence, it's just me, the well-meaning landlord. He
scanned the worktable, the bookshelves, the floor and furniture for
anything anomalous. There had been no answer to the phone, nor to
the door bell, and he thought he might look about in the early
morning light for other possible clues. Justifiable under the
circumstances, a dispensational right, at 6:45 a. m.
Certainly Jerome was interested in
Bronzino, the stack of McGill library books on the painter and the
studies of the portrait of Lucrezia Panciatchi, made their silent
case.
The oddly titled book by the author P.
K. Loveridge lured him, intrigued him, and he opened it to the title
page and read the inscription to Jerome by the author. A close friend
of Jerome's. Trieste. Fetid paints? He sniffed deeply but couldn't
say they were fetid. Slightly astringent perhaps, a touch of linseed
oil in the air, but not fetid. Trieste? He wouldn't have left for
Italy without telling him; he had arranged with Jerome to be made
aware of any long excursions abroad, and Trieste was hardly a long
weekend. Turning over a few pages of the book, the name Mozart caught
his eye, and he stopped to read a poem:
-A lyric sadness in the
air. Mozart?
Or Haydn? Almost sounds
like Arvo Part.
-She is superb this busker
near the curb.
-A
balm for equine meditated flight.
-She
raises all our darkness to the light.
We join the crowd. The
pigeons we disturb
Advance and peck the
concrete looking lost.
Our coins, festina lente,
tempest-tost.
The sharps and flats and
pitch are anchors thrown
To still our stride, like
snares of sound our own
Hearts recognize. Becalmed
in placid seas
Of melody, she bows us
into port,
Slow sarabandes for
landfalls soft, they court
Our wayward variations
with a breeze
Of interlude. You take my
arm and draw
Me on, exampla of Newtonic
Law.
He turned back to the title
page, making a mental note of the publisher Oxtoby & Snoad, Rye,
as a possible outlet for his translations, and put the book back in
place and went to the window. When would this fog relent he wondered?
He would have to phone Jonathan Landgrave. Honesty generally proved
to be the most reliable remedy. No point going in circles like a
circus bear on a bicycle.
© ralph patrick mackay
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