Paul Morand: Venices

My room is ready; a hot air heater that must be a hundred years old has emitted a column of black grime up the walls as far as the ceiling, where the Baroque period Venetian stucco is congested with Viennese Second Empire shells. There’s a cup of herbal tea by my bedside light; my dear cousins had deliberated for a long time while they waited for me: “The last time he stayed, did he have camomile or verveine ?” “No, I believe it was orange flower. I don’t know what’s happening to my memory!”

Tomorrow morning, we shall visit the Orthodox cemetery, as I had requested.

Greek independence, one hundred and fifty years ago, was responsible for a sudden dispersal of the Greek people; some set out once more on the ancient paths towards the Black Sea and the trade in wheat, from Galatz at the mouths of the Danube, as far as Odessa; others, feeling their way along the shores of the Mediterranean, like a blind man along a pavement, had gradually reached Trieste or Marseilles; later, they would venture as far as Bombay, London and New York. The E— had lived in Trieste, in their gardens on the headland, or in a house on Station Square that was as square and massive as a Genoese palazzo . Today, nothing is left apart from this villa, which is struggling to survive Italy’s present plight. Perfect French is spoken here, as well as German with an Austrian accent, otherwise it is the Dalmatian spoken in Trieste. “In the spring of 1945,” Triestinos say, “Field Marshal Alexander could have landed here, driven out the Croat partisans, and spared us forty days of deportations, pillaging and assassinations; in order to bar the way to Tito, who wanted the whole of Julian Veneto as far as Isonzo, thus presenting the West ‘with á. fait accompli ’, no less than three months of negotiations were required in Belgrade and in London. How feeble all these experts were, with their A zones and B zones! Trieste had to keep her head down in order to avoid being caught in the vast net which the Slavs wished to cast over her.”

1971

A CEMETERY IN TRIESTE

WHAT FATE LIES in store for the souls belonging to these various cemeteries that separate the dead just as religions divide the living? Their tombs rise up along the slope of the hillside in a diversity that is the last luxury of the West: Italian, English, Russian necropolises, Jewish, Orthodox and Greek; all of them cared for, tended with flowers and set among wild grass, beneath ornamental holm oaks shaped like some dark drapery in the sunlight; the gardens of an archduke.

On this hill of the Dead, situated opposite Italy’s last industrial valley, the cypress trees and cold marble slabs rise above the tall furnaces; here, stern mountains, balder than Mount Sinai, surround Trieste like an earthenware bowl that has been hardened by the sunlight and dried by the fearful northern bora. It’s the same scenery that impressed Stendhal as he arrived from Venice: the lower slopes of the Carso, the white limestone amphitheatre, extend southwards along the Istrian coast. From Trieste, Stendhal wrote: “Here I confront barbarity.”

I venture to fall in behind him.

The Italian-Yugoslav border divides two worlds; facing one is Asia, and those state-controlled lands that swallow up individuality as the plain imbibes the sand. Trieste is encircled, just as our little world is, just as Berlin is, and Israel, Madrid and the West; the rising tide does not attack head on, it takes the shore route, past millions of slip-knots, and progresses at a constant tangent; you might think that the ebb and flow of the Slavic sea, spurred on in turn by the Mongol ocean, bides its time; can no one see that it is advancing at the gallop?

With the city’s unresolved status, and a truce lasting a quarter of a century that has not brought peace, Trieste is reminiscent of a forgotten corpse that has been left hanging at the top of the Adriatic ogive, in poignant dereliction, during an interminable diplomatic winter; through a blank wall, there are a few windows for foreigners, such as the sinister road that leads to Ljubljana, the tourists’ entrance to the iron curtain. What does Tito want? Who shall succeed him? Supposing the Russians grow angry, what if the tanks of Prague… Trieste wonders.

My own family is buried in France, more than a thousand kilometres from here, in boundless peace, beneath an almost wordless tombstone (this was what my father wanted), at Yerres, where my great-grandparents had acquired a small property, part of lands that had once belonged to the monastic order of the Camaldules,1 which had been acquired by the State during the Revolution and later resold; because there was no more room in the family grave that I wished to be my final resting-place, I took refuge in the mausoleum of the E— family, offered to me by my cousins through marriage; it dates from the time of Franz-Josef, when Trieste was Austria’s port on the Adriatic, when Trieste was still alive.

It is a noble stone pyramid, six metres high, a piece of typically Italian eloquence, above which an angel twice as tall as a human opens a black marble door to the afterlife, as thick as that of an empty safe.

It is a tomb that is very different to the funereal sites of the great capital cities, with their crowded tombstones and their serried ranks of monuments that are frequented by enemies and strangers alike. The greenest of graveyards surrounded by the desert of the living. Blond or dark, Nordic or Latin, Orthodox or not, what will it matter beneath the ground?

That is where I shall lie, after this long accident that has been my life. My ashes, beneath this earth; an inscription in Greek will testify to the fact;2 I shall be watched over by the Orthodox faith towards which Venice has conducted me, a religion whose joy lies in stillness and that continues to speak in the first language of the Gospels.

NOTES

1. A religious order of monks and hermits, founded by St Romuald in 1010, in the valley of Camaldoli in Tuscany. [Tr.]

2. In translation this reads: Traveller go on your way with her, who was, who is, who will for ever be your guardian angel. [Tr.]

WHEN PAUL MORAND wrote Venises , at the age of eighty-two, he had finally achieved the recognition which had eluded him for a quarter of a century. His literary beginnings had been auspicious enough; many of his pre-war novels proved to be bestsellers. But after 1945, his reputation was ruined as the full extent of his wartime political activities came to light. Morand’s unfailing support of the collaborationist regime of Pétain and Laval during the darkest hours of the Occupation, rewarded with an ambassadorship to Switzerland, and his subsequent denial of any wrongdoing, had resulted in a long self-imposed exile in Vevey, along the shores of Lac Léman. Morand’s universe had collapsed. His books no longer sold, and he had to endure constant slights. Ironically, he was being persecuted for political beliefs which were never deeply held; rather, he had been opportunistic, short-sighted and foolish. Yet it is during those years of uncomfortable purgatory-like isolation that Morand wrote some of his best novels, and a masterpiece, Hécate et ses Chiens . His friends in France felt it was time to launch a campaign for his rehabilitation. After much discussion among literary and political circles, in 1968, General de Gaulle lifted his veto to Morand’s election to the Académie Francaise. This bittersweet victory, far from taming him, gave the ageing writer a partial sense of vindication.

But perhaps there is another explanation for the lack of esteem in which Morand was held until those late years. For much of his life Morand was preceded by his reputation: as a lightweight, a social figure who dabbled in literature — a certain kind of effortless but shallow travel-literature — the inveterate traveller, always hurried, restless, distracted, never grounded, never satisfied. Family connections, not to mention Marcel Proust’s friendship with the young writer, were thought to have advanced his literary career, when he actually saw himself as a solitary, melancholy, introverted adolescent whose literary ascent was hesitant1. Indeed, in his Journal inutile , Morand recalls his distaste for the sort of social life which would become his trademark.