METASITE
MARCEL ŠTEFANČIČ, JR.
No one dies in Trieste.
The great Italo Calvino could easily rank it among his Invisible Cities – somewhere between Adelma, in which “you only meet the dead” (and where you “come dying”), Eusapio, in which “it is no longer possible to know who is alive and who is dead”, and all three versions of Laudomia, “the city of the living”, “the city of the dead” and “the city of the unborn”. Trieste could easily be bordered by “invisible places”: Trieste – a city where no one ever dies! Metacity.
Who knows, maybe this Trieste would also border Penthesilea, in which “it is never clear whether you are already in the middle of the city or still outside,” as well as it is never clear “whether there is an exterior outside of Penthesilee.” I vividly imagine how morbid this question sounded during the Cold War, when the exterior of Trieste was without exterior, or rather – when the exterior of Trieste was “invisible” Yugoslavia.
Trieste could be neither the “invisible” Olinda, “the city that grows in concentric circles”, nor the “invisible” Leonia, the city “that expands every year” – Trieste had nowhere to go. It could only grow in height. Upwards. Like the “invisible” Isaura, “a city that moves entirely upwards.” Trieste showed this tendency – and built a skyscraper. Grattacielo via Campo Marzio. His only one. “In every skyscraper, someone gets messed up,” Calvino says, referring to Zirma, a “redundant city” that “is so repetitive so that people at least remember something.” Trieste could only become skyscraper – vertical. Like the “invisible” Octavia, a “cobwebbed city” that hovers between two mountains connected “in ropes and chains and a footbridge” (and the inhabitants know that “the net will not last forever”). Or as the “invisible” Baucis, the city above the clouds, the city that “does not touch the ground” and to which you “climb the ladder”. The inhabitants have everything they need up there, so they “prefer not to go down at all”, but observe life with binoculars and telescopes. They could have been turned towards Slovenia – they would have been at the same height. Like the two Gorizias, “connected cities” (as the subtitle of the book reads) Gorica Nova Gorica Andrea Bellaviteja). We would look at each other face to face. Trieste and New Trieste – a utopia that never existed, so that there is a hole up there, beyond the Fernets – would rub against each other, looking for a position that would give them the greatest pleasure. Like Calvin’s two “invisible” Valdradas, who – lying on top of each other – are mirrored in each other, so their inhabitants must not leave anything to chance and superficiality. They must not die. If they don’t want the image in the mirror to die.
Trieste – a city where no one dies – could be advertised with the slogan: You don’t want to die – go to Trieste! Or more precisely: You don’t want to die – step into a Trieste bar! You know, one of those things that people stand in. They prefer to stand rather than sit. They don’t even think about sitting down. Seating is not missed. And they enjoy standing endlessly. We couldn’t sit and drink and enjoy. You wouldn’t be able to sit and chat, talk, discuss, chat, squat. When they stand, they are more precise, stronger, more convincing, more literary.
But it was in these Trieste bars that I realized that Trieste is a city where no one dies. Why? When you look at old farmhouses in Slovenia, you notice, to your great surprise, that people used to sleep in very short beds. How they could even lie down, I always wondered, and then a guide told me why the beds were so short – because when people slept, they didn’t lie down at all, but sat up. They sat down for fear of dying – people always die when they lie down. When they sleep, they lie down. That’s what they believed. The one who died was said to have “clenched.” When you die, you “tighten up.” Ergo: if you cringe in bed, you can die. That is why Slovenians preferred to sit in bed.
The people of Trieste, whose metaphysical whims were empowered by Cold War anxiety, are just a radicalization of Slovenes – they don’t even dare to sit down. Just in case, they prefer what they stand for. So that they don’t die. All the more reason that Trieste was created for writers who write stands. A number of writers wrote stand-up – Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, and most of all, Ernest Hemingway. “A work habit that he has had from the beginning: when he writes, he stands. He stands in his oversized loungers on the sunken skin of a smaller kudu — opposite him at chest level are a typewriter and a reading board,” The Paris Review reported. Because he was standing, he was always engaged, creative, offensive, action-oriented, says Girish Shukla (Times Now). As he stood, he wrote with all his body. Because he wrote standing, he could be sharp, fast, lively, forceful, chubby, simple, concise, precise, clear, concise, direct and essential, but also unconventional. Writing standing up shaped his style — and kept it focused. Disciplined. It put his mind, his tongue and his heart in order. He could throw away all the ballast. And all the boredom. As he stood on tiptoe, so did his prose. Novels To Have or Not, To Whom the Bell Tolls, Paris – A Moving Feast, The Sun Rises and Sets, The Old Man and the Sea and Farewell, Arms! could write in any Trieste stand-up bar. And as you read them, it seems that there are. In Trieste, no one dies while writing standing.
I’ll bet James Joyce wrote stands, too. And I bet that’s why he came to Trieste. Ulysses a novel about a walk around Trieste?