A DIFFERENT SEA

Perhaps it had begun there when he had entered those classrooms and felt that something was missing. The inkwell on the desk was the deep, dark eye of a cyclops, while the reflected blue of the ink’s wavy lines on the glass recalled the distant sea – or even simply the mountains of the Collio, so easy to reach after school. The longing to immerse himself in that blue emptied lessons of meaning. And, as he waited impatiently for them to finish, how painful, how futile the present seemed. Why was it not already over and done with?

Now, all around him is the sea, nothing but sea. No longer the Adriatic of Pirano and Salvore, where a few months before everything had happened, nor even the Mediterranean, subject to the ancient authority of the aorist and the sequence of tenses, more familiar to him than Italian or even German, but instead the ocean, monotonous and without limit. Big waves in the darkness, a spray of white foam, the wing of a bird plunging into the shadows – standing motionless for hours on deck, he never tires of the unchanging scene. The bow of the ship slices the water without ever seeming to touch it as it falls into the void of the trough opening beneath; the muffled sound of the wave breaks further back against the ship’s side.

It is now night, and nothing is visible. But even before, with his eyes half-closed against the relentless sun, with dark red blotches appearing beneath his eyelids, the deep blue of sea and sky had seemed black. After all, the universe itself is dark, and only the eye, like some pedantic philologist, is obsessed with the translation of invisible wavelengths into light and colour. Nothing is really visible, not even in the noon sun’s blinding reflection on the shimmering sea. A magical time, when gods appear.

Whether this voyage of escape marks the beginning or end of his life is uncertain. His curriculum vitae reads: Enrico Mreule, born Rubbia 1st June 1886; son of Gregorio (deceased) and Giulia Venier; home address since 1898, Flat 1, no. 3 Via Petrarca, Gorizia; final school examinations taken at the Royal Imperial Gymnasium. And so on. A list of incontrovertible facts, which, perhaps, he can no longer readily list in their entirety – not because he wants to cover his tracks or put anyone off his trail, but because, rising up from that dark, forever resounding sea, comes an overwhelming sense of the utter triviality of all such personal detail. He feels pride, but anonymously. It is not his personal virtue, although in some way it brings him honour, as Nussbaumer liked to put it in their translation classes.

Enrico left for Argentina on 28th November 1909, boarding ship at Trieste. He informed almost no one of his real purpose and told his mother that he needed some money for travel in Greece, to set the seal on his degree in philology at the Universities of Innsbruck and Graz. His father had died many years before, but his family had been able to maintain a certain modest affluence, thanks to some mills in the vicinity of Gorizia. And anyway, money was all his mother was capable of providing to help him on his way.

His younger brother is their mother’s favourite. Yet it is not easy for either of them, any more than for their sister, to kiss her bitter, unmaternal face. Enrico feels pity for that mouth, twisted and hardened by the mysterious pain common to all hearts that have difficulty in loving. But his pity is devoid of compassion. There on deck, as he watches the ship’s wake being swallowed by the night, Enrico determines to think no more of his mother’s face, of their mutual and unpaid debt, of the misunderstandings that have entangled them both. That thought loses itself among the ship’s masts and the darkness, loses itself for ever. It is strange how easily and painlessly one can free oneself. And a moment later even his sense of surprise disappears, together with any lingering feelings of remorse. Now he feels merely listless, deafened by the night wind and the sound of the sea.

Only Nino had gone to see him off at Trieste. In the ship’s navigation room there must surely be a sextant to chart their position by the height of the stars from the horizon, stars which sink imperceptibly as one travels south. Enrico tries to imagine the sextant and the other navigational instruments that prevent them from getting lost, that confirm their position, indeed their identity, on this vast and uniform expanse of water. His life, he muses, whatever happens to him – on either side of the ocean – will always be directed by the trigonometry of that attic room, where each day the three of them – Carlo, he and Nino – used to meet.

When they first got to know each other, at school, Carlo was still listed in the class register as Karl Michelstædter. He immediately became, as Enrico had written to him shortly before sailing, “the friend who would fill all space and embody the world I was searching for”. They derived enormous pleasure and a sense of wonderment from their shared view of the world. Up in Nino’s attic in Gorizia they would read Homer, the tragedians, the Pre-Socratics, Plato, and the New Testament in the original Greek, and Schopenhauer – also, of course, in the original; the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Sermon of Benares and the other teachings of Buddha; Ibsen, Leopardi, and Tolstoy. They used to exchange their thoughts and describe the day’s events, like that story of Carlo and the dog, in ancient Greek, and then translate them into Latin for fun.

Something had happened in that attic, something both straightforward and definitive – a call, or rather a summons, as clear as the limpid air of those days when they went swimming and skimmed stones in the Isonzo river. A smile from Carlo – a wave’s white crest beneath dark eyes and black hair – and off they go, assured, as though leaving the table to step on to the dance floor, or to climb Mount San Valentin – with persuasion.

Nino Paternolli, then, had accompanied him to Trieste from Gorizia – a short journey past rugged rocks and rust red sumach, the clotted blood of autumn beneath a heavy sky. It was evening when they arrived at the port. Up above, banks of dark cloud shifted apart, and a limp breeze wiped their faces like a cloth. The Columbia’s lights lit up a greenish patch of water beneath her bow where a pumpkin bobbed up and down among rinds, peelings and other rubbish, like a swollen breast of a ship’s figurehead fallen from some prow and gnawed by the sea.

The ship’s lantern threw a cone of light on the water, as did the Florentine lamp on the paper-strewn desk – an oil lamp, with a tall stand and hooked, religious burners, which illuminated Carlo’s sheets of paper as he covered them in his large, bold hand. He enjoyed the act of writing. Free and direct as he was, never anxious or fretful, never hurrying to fondle the finished and bound volume, never like an actor eager to perform but impatient of the work involved in producing the play. The lamp still sits on Nino’s desk in the attic, its lampshade decorated with phrases from the Pre-Socratics. But the pistol must lie in some drawer. Enrico had wanted to take it with him but it was not permitted on board ship. So he left it with Carlo, the only person with whom he could leave anything.

Carlo had told him that he would go up to the attic window at the moment when the ship was due to weigh anchor and look through the gathering dusk towards Trieste. It was as though his eyes could search out things in the darkness, saving them from obscurity. Carlo had taught him that by virtue of philosophy – the love of seamless wisdom – distant things could be seen close up, and the urge to grasp them could be overcome, since, after all, they exist in the great quietness of being. Who could tell what expression Carlo wore as he leaned out of the window, his dark eyes peering into the night? An ambivalent tinge of sadness, possibly; a bitter longing to prevent this escape which had, perhaps excessively, fired his admiration?

On board that ship now making its way across the Atlantic, is Enrico intent on escape or on arrival? Does he wish that he had already escaped, already lived? He himself is not actually moving. Even those few steps from his cabin to the deck or to the dining room seem out of place in the grand stillness of the sea. The sea remains the same, always at its place around the ship. The ship presumes to furrow it, the water falls away just for a moment and then closes in again. The earth, with a mother’s patience, tolerates the plough that gashes, but the sea is a huge, unattainable smile where nothing leaves its mark. Swimmers’ arms never embrace it: they only drive it off and then lose it. The sea gives itself to no one.

Carlo had said that. Or rather he had placed it at the beginning of his masterpiece now nearing completion. Maybe the original suggestion for the image had come from Enrico himself or from Nino – without their even noticing it – while out in the boat or lying on the white rocks of Salvore. It is one of those images that flit through the mind and disappear, unless picked up by someone who knows just where to put it to make it shine. Similarly, perhaps, it was a disciple who, without realizing its significance, pointed out to Jesus a lily in the field. He and Nino brought to that attic numerous notes gathered from their own thoughts, from people’s expressions, from the yellowing leaves of the horse-chestnuts in Piazza Ginnastica. But it was Carlo alone who knew how to unite them into a ninth symphony.

You know how to exist entirely in the present, Rico, they had said to him as he left. You do not search apprehensively for a harbour when out at sea; you do not devalue your life through fear of losing it. Enrico watches a wet patch dry out on deck. Evaporation is rapid and the moisture-darkened surface becomes steadily lighter as the elements separate out almost visibly. Sweat too dries on the skin. You belong, Rico, on the raging sea. Enrico looks towards the horizon. Those words should make him happy. And they do – to a certain extent. But he stands up and goes for a beer, just for something to do. He has always liked beer, especially the German variety. In his student days at Innsbruck he used to cross the border to drink, since he found the Austrian beer insipid.

Perhaps he did not explain himself properly, even though they talked all night before he left. For a start, he left Gorizia to avoid military service – but not because he is opposed to the Dual Monarchy as are so many of his irredentist friends. On the contrary, he likes the idea of Gorizia as a sort of Habsburg Nice: the image of a retired colonel out for an ever gentler stroll, the two-headed eagle with its wings inadvertently beginning to fold and its eye, scanning the far-flung corners of its empire, a glass button sewn on a stuffed bird. Gorizia’s ethnic mixture and its painful struggle had turned it into a great place of learning, of civilization, and of death. It was also a centre for linguistic studies, for death specializes in the pluperfect and the future perfect. The linguist Graziado Isaia Ascoli of Gorizia died in Milan shortly after they left school. Like Manzoni he had been made a Senator. Jews from those parts had always had a weakness for Italy, but Ascoli had realized only too well that it was no use trying to rinse the languages of the multilingual Isonzo in the waters of the Arno or any other river.

Enrico has a gift for languages. He speaks and writes ancient Greek and Latin as well as he does German or even his own dialect. And now on board a ship bound for Argentina he is having a go at Spanish too. Federico Simzig, headmaster of the Staatsgymnasium, would count him a true Gorizian. For, to lead a full and satisfying life in his view, you need Italian, German, Slovenian, Friulan, and Trieste-Venetian. Enrico is also fairly fluent in Slovenian, which he picked up as a child playing in the streets at Rubbia. And later on, while swimming in the Isonzo with his friends, when he saw that Carlo and Nino did not understand what Stane Jarc, his class-mate, said to Josip Peternel as he splashed him for fun, he thought to himself how so many things in life remain unheard and undeciphered.

Nussbaumer was right to insist that Greek be translated into German, for they are the two indispensable languages, perhaps the only languages in which birth and death can be discussed. Italian is different. Italian for him is not the language of statements, or of definitions which stun with their brightness or their space. Instead it is the language of postponement, of digression, the language for coming to terms with the unbearable, for keeping destiny at bay for a while by dint of constant chatter. In short, Italian is the language of life, the language of reconciliation, of indebtedness like life itself, or, at most, like a suit – worn to satisfy social convention.

Besides, Enrico’s Italian falters every so often, even in letters to his friends. That reminds him, he must write to Carlo, who is doubtless anxious to have his news and to continue their dialogue. Enrico too is eager to communicate. Long and detailed letters from Carlo would surely already be on their way aboard some following ship.

Enrico too has already written. When the Columbia docked at Almeria on 3rd December, he had disembarked, bought some writing paper, and settled down in the café nearest the port. He had sat there staring at the white sheet of paper, in front of a glass of thick, rather too syrupy wine, rolling his pen down the slightly sloping table and catching it before it fell. He had wanted to write of his journey, of the advantages and disadvantages of leaving, and of that perilous and unworthy self-love which enslaves one with homesickness. This voyage will be no escape, his departure no form of death. It will on the contrary come to represent life, existence, and an unshakeable stand. It is fear, striving, and ambition that will be routed and disappear.