MEETING IN TRIESTE
I sit in wonder this afternoon in sweetly sad grandiose Trieste. Here with the Commendatore Dr. Alberto Hesse. Others have told me that his title, which everyone here seems to use, is authentic from a knighthood bestowed on him by the Italian Republic. During WW2 he was a renowned ace in the Italian air force. He plays this part well.
We are in his office, in his coffee trading company, his kingdom, in his building on a corner of Trieste’s imperial Piazza Unita d’ Italia—a joke name or is it a cruel irony? Trieste is hardly unified to Italy. Not yet in 1986 where I see myself sitting there. Not yet even today.
Hung on this building is a polished brass plate, Via San Nicolo 22, Hesse Alberto Trieste SnC di A. Hesse & P. Brusoni. Signor Brusoni does not seem to exist. He might be the ghost polishing the brass.
The huge square expresses Trieste in quintessence. It’s a bowl usually full of sunshine directly facing a wide glittering expanse of the Adriatic. Sunshine glances back into your eyes giving you a deceptive stark clarity of vision. Not real, not unreal, another kind of joke.
Everything, the grand piazza, the august buildings imagined around it on three sides, the sea, this office of Alberto’s- the two inseparable– are a Hapsburg illusion, a big dreamy antique shop, a pomposity that might make some beholders smile.
A large part of Alberto’s face is hidden. He wears with aplomb an elaborate Emperor Franz Joseph beard, sideburns connecting to voluminous and untamed ‘fat chops’ on his checks connecting to the flaring wonder of a thick handle-bar moustache that is twirled out into upcurving twin wildebeest horns.
The old man expects my respect, and deserves it.
Alberto is also the consul for the Cameroun in Trieste. A small Cameroun flag hangs still in dead air on one end of his desk, the Italian on the opposite. I’ve already learned enough about coffee to be impressed by the designation, implying as it does a lot of hijinks-or corruption- to varying significance in different places.
Cameroun is an important coffee exporting nation. The year when I’m sitting in its Trieste consulate the country ranks 12thin global coffee production among the 51 major exporting origins. To me this place oozes money, as does Alberto himself.
“I ask to meet you because of the European Coffee Federation, you know it I believe. I am its president. The congress this spring is to be held here in Trieste. This is a very important meeting with the leaders of the coffee industry coming from everywhere.”
His sky blue eyes sparkle like the light of the Adriatic that plays on the massive dark walls surrounding us in heavy book case towers, rearing row upon row of leather bindings looking as they must smell of musty coffee bean history, of maritime law in German, Italian and French, along with pile upon pile of business dossiers. Cartons bloated, bulging with stories of riches and good fortune, ruination too in a thousand bills of lading.
Here about me every scrap of paper relating to 40 years passed trading coffee from 50 origins, shipping it, warehousing it, selling it to any roaster among the 1300 of them in Italy.
Hesse is in his mid 70s. Gold capped teeth show when he smiles, as he is doing now to seduce me, otherwise he keeps a death mask trained on life. Gold wristband on his watch. Gold circlet around his throat. He sits waiting for me to compliment him, looking ten years younger than he is and swarthy from a life in the sun. He’s like an old book himself, gilt trim on embossed leather.
Bespoke tailoring of his Milanese suit, a frilled shirt, and those shoes. Handmade in Rome, not a doubt.
He lights another Sobranie Black Russian, gold tipping paper. These he chain-smokes, taking them from a gold case, tapping them vigorously on the lid, affixing them to a long amber cigarette holder. Manicured hand lifts a “C for Cartier” pink gold lighter.
Flash of fire in his eye glass frames and he’s set to go. Stand him in the midday sun of the piazza and he’d shimmer forth in a reflection of Trieste glory days.
Alberto suddenly weighs me down with all this gold. “Meester Bell, I speak directly to you. I need your help to fill my coffee boat.”
This confuses me, what boat. Is he taking a schedule of advertising in Tea & Coffee Trade Journal? He should, Trieste warehouses 1.5 million bags of coffee (each 60 kilo Weight). The port is receiving 2.5 million bags a year. It is the Mediterranean’s coffee bank.
This city belonged to the Hapsburg family for 500 years before being awarded by the victors of WW1 to Italy. It officially became Italian only in 1920. Yet even then in name only. Identity: Austrian-Slovenian-Italian- Hungarian-Bulgarian-Albanian-Jewish-Croatian-Serbian-Romanian-, take your pick. Could be lyrics for a song by the Rolling Stones? “Send It To Me”.
For more than half a millennium here was Vienna’s great port, the only port of the Empire, where it warehoused the goods of the world and the base for its Imperial fleet.
Trading, constant maneuvering on the world coffee market, manic negotiating –on everything even to the color of the sky– a sly mercantilism pervades the city. I am no match.
Trieste is not at all a cookie-cutter Italian city, it has no strata’s of Renaissance, Mannerist or baroque. It is an Austrian copy of these ideas. Physically not a very Italian looking place, rather its physical presence is a Viennese dreamscape of one, risible in massive buildings with flamboyant flourishes.
No catholic cathedral glorifies its skyline, rather there are the three bulks, of the Serbian Orthodox cathedral, the Greek Orthodox cathedral, and of the great synagogue of Trieste, proud statement by its wealthy and once influential Jewish community. Synagogue is triumphant built opulent and immense around 1900, with a capacity for more than 1600 worshippers.
Dislocation is a theme in this odd, old city. It connects to the rest of Italy by no more than a thin strip of land 30 km long, 10 km-wide, an umbilical cord corridor. The city dangles on this suspended precariously between the Carso Triestina high above, rough and desolate karst, and the Adriatic’ where land drops into sea over high white cliffs. The road doesn’t really go anywhere except out into mainland Italy away from the claustrophobia of the corridor. Is this a lifeline for the city or an Emergency EXIT in case of cataclysm. It ends at the city’s airport where there are barely any flights to nowhere.
The city speaks Italian (its own dialect), but soon as one leaves it and the ephemeral corridor, Slovenian takes over. Cuisine can be Italian, while sauerkraut and strudel are common.
Trieste has been Italian territory for only a few years, thus still searching for identity among many to choose from. It was only given to Italy as a punishment on Austria by the allied powers in 1920. It was ruled by the fascists until 1945, ‘liberated’ briefly by Yugoslavia. Then to prevent further slaughter the UN took over, proclaiming it a sovereign state of its own, The Free City of Trieste. UN control lasted until 1954.
In the 20thcentury Trieste has been kicked about like a soccer ball.
When at last it became legally Italian again Trieste was left dangling like an after thought for poor Italian souls in a sea of Slavs, a tight knot of capitalism amid a swarm of angry Yugoslavian communists.
Yugoslavia is not so angry now, in 1987. But still surrounds the city. By 1990 Yugoslavia will cease to even exist blown away into oblivion by ethnic conflict.
Trieste has uncommon interest for me because S. Mancil Bell came to be here with the 88thUS Infantry, February and March 1947.
I know nothing of his time here. He hid it carefully along with all the rest of his years in Europe. Burnt to the core I surmise by horrors that he could not tell witnessed wherever the war took him.
He was sent here during a vicious ongoing civil war between Italian and Yugoslav partisans for control of the city. This culminated with the First Trieste Crisis of August 1946 when Yugoslavia forced down two US airplanes, within a space of ten days.
The passengers and crew of the first plane were secretly interned by the Yugoslav government. The second crew perished. Historians label this the first conflict of the Cold War.
I see my father a dream man being taken about the town’s rubble strewn streets by his frightened native driver. He’s in a standard issue army jeep. The rank of major gives him that perk. A handsome man, serious but ever ready to grin charmingly, his foxy grin that was so beguiling. A man who saw the world in layers of religion, history, art and literature. What did he see here?
Mobs of excited men throwing stones, lighting fires, smoking cigarettes obsessively except in the dark when it could kill them. Everywhere a redolence of garlic.
Multiple oddities, the headquarters for father was halfway back up the corridor toward ‘real’ Italy, on the coast. That’s Miramar Castle a fantasy built by Archduke Maximilian for his beloved duchess, Charlotte (who is said to haunt it bellowing out his name).
Maximilian the younger brother of Franz Josef. Maximilian and Charlotte becoming the Emperor and Empress of Mexico before Maximilian was shot there by firing squad. His statue stands looking pensively out at the port of Trieste.
The longer I sit in the heart of it the more Trieste turns into a mischievous delusion. Even the Commendatore looks devious, Italian in that but shaded darker by Austria and the Balkans. In fact his parents came here from Romania, immigrants to the richesse of the Empire’s great port where so many are either Balkan or Mitteleuropean.
I’ve been plying my wares in Italy for no more than a year but already have some tricks in hand. I use the first name of my clients, perspective clients, all male. This is not done. The first name is reserved for one’s mother and mistresses to use.
My using ‘Alberto’ is a reminder to him that I am different, foreign, an always smiling and harmless barbarian. I am luxuriating in the power journalism gives me, mine are the words that coffee people read around the world.
Hesse makes a shooing gesture at me to show how in control he is, as if I needed help in seeing it. Alberto Hesse is shrewd in an elegant way. Alberto Hesse is a consummate coffee broker.
I’d like to tell the Commendatore about my father but don’t. I’m not sure he’d have much admiration for a US army chaplain. I fear he’d give me the condescending half smile he’s bestowed on me already. Then I’d hate him which I don’t wish to do.
“There is the European Coffee Confederation, you know it I believe. I am its president. And its congress this spring is to be held here in Trieste. This is a very important meeting with the leaders of the coffee industry coming from everywhere.
“This is the first time the European Coffee Congress is hosted in Italy. To make it most memorable we have decided to hold it as a coffee cruise. For this we have taken a large and very beautiful ship.”
So this is why I’ve been summoned. He wants me to climb aboard. First thing, I note the price of a passage and then feel like puking.
“The ship is to pick up delegates in Genoa and sail down the Tyrrhenian all around Italy and up the Adriatico, to stop just outside the window, here in Trieste. It will be a cruise of four days. We will sail past Elba and Stromboli, we sail through the Straights of Messina. The ship passes Brindisi, Bari, Ancona. Rimini!”
Alberto is truly enthusiastic about this litany unifying Italy as he speaks.
“When we arrive here the congress itself will be held on this very piazza of our most beautiful city. There will be a gala evening with orchestra and entertainment. After we are to sail on to Venice for a momentous entrance into the Grand Canal. Water spray from tug boats. Marches by the Carabiniere band.”
Commendatore twirls one of his handlebars and pierces me to the back of a splendid leather armchair.
“She is the Eugenio Costa. Beautiful, is she not. This ship sadly is that ship’s sister ship. She carries 1600 passengers in luxury. She has a movie theater. Only the best Italian chefs. She has two swimming pools and better another one for children.
“Unfortunately there is a small problem, Meester Bell. “ Alberto smooths down his volume of sweeping dyed locks blow-dried into a puff ball like Engelbert Humperdinck in the 1970s. “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.”
“You have heard of the Achilles Laura. A tragedy.” I nod, for who has not heard of the Achilles Laura. Three months before the Italian ship had been hijacked by terrorist from the Palestinian Liberation Front who murdered a handicapped passenger, an American Jew, when their ransom demands were not met. It was a crime at the time when Italy was already living in dread.
But then again, just a month ago from now in this meeting, came the attack at the El Al counter in Rome’s Fiumicino airport leaving 16 dead and 99 wounded. No, it wasn’t a good time to be selling a cruise around Italy to American and European coffee moguls.
“Help me with marketing and I offer you the cruise. Are you married? Bring madame too.” I explain we have a three year old, then feeling that I’ve erred in implying I’m not in the class to have a servant for my toddler. “Bring your bambino too! Bring the nanny.”
Outside I hear the clatter of a school of scooters darting into the expanse of the Piazza Unita d’ Italia. Beep beep. Egg beaters on parade going gang busters below Alberto’s windows. Seagulls scream appreciation. A ship horn blasts out on the Adriatic. Another replies. The sound of coffee on the move.
Cacophony is welcome. It eases the miasma of this office, intrigue in stale air plucking on my nerve strings.
This is the moment when Alberto and I come to terms and I’ve just earned berths for three on the Eugenio Costa. I am trading marketing, a load of it, apparently more valuable than coffee from Brazil.
“Meester Bell, I want you to write this in your magazine. Our magnificent coffee cruise from Genoa to Trieste and to Venice will be escorted by the Italian navy. Safety is guaranteed 100%.”
I know enough not to laugh out loud at this. He’s merely working me. What a clever old salesman.
His pricey perfection nettles me. Although I am enthralled by the Commendatore’s charm I find myself wanting childishly to give him a little prod, perhaps shaking loose a hair or two.
I ask sweetly, “Alberto, how do you manage to stay so young looking.” He accepts this with a gracious nod. Is that how he greeted a squadron of enemy fighters in the skies over Belgrade?
“Ah you see, I am married to a beautiful youngwoman, a Brazilian.” Alberto just brought the weight and dignity of his presence to gild that lily ‘young.’
I shall be meeting her on the Eugenio Costa, a beauty for sure and an original like many upper class Brazilians, actually a Portuguese explorer held captive by an exotic land. Did he barter her for coffee?
Do I hear the Commendatore purring to the room?
“Also, I go hunting every weekend on my estates in Slovenia.”
My father is before me. In his own perfection of army uniform. He’s got the same look of full enjoyment. He showed it to us often over a good meal or a memorable character he’s met somewhere and about whom he’s getting ready to tell a story.
