A Different Landscape

This story is part of the literary competition created by In Trieste magazine in collaboration with Comune di Trieste called “Stories from Trieste to the World” which was open to all female writers living in Trieste as part of the annual “Festa della Donna” initiative by the city of Trieste.

by Anna Pettener

Looking outside from my favorite café, I feel sad. Tomorrow everything will close down again – bars, restaurants, cafés – in an attempt to stop the virus. Another last day to celebrate, another date to remember. One of many, as many as Svevo’s last cigarettes.

Since lockdowns have become a habit, I have been forced to reconsider my perception of Trieste. It used to be crowded, full of people and opportunities. Now places close at 6 pm and there are no more late meetings or evenings out. We are well aware of the illness which silently spreads among us although nobody seems to care. As if we weren’t scared. The enemy is here, hidden somewhere, ready to suffocate us. A silent treacherous killer we are trying not to believe in.

You don’t know what you have until it  is gone. Oh it is true. I had a whole city at hand. The place I call my own, I identify with. When I was young I didn’t like this identity. I felt I was a citizen of the world, I belonged to it. I was going to visit places, speak languages, meet people. Who wants to come from a little provincial town? Who doesn’t want to escape, as from a prison, to take a look outside, to travel the wide world?

When the lockdown was stricter I looked outside my window trying to visualize the sea. Seeing no trace of it for weeks, not even a little blue triangle, is a sort of punishment for Triestini. As well as never feeling the wind in our hair. Sea and wind together make a colored and lively company for us and we like to challenge them, even in winter. Luckily Bora – surely a female spirit – was careless of the lockdown, she kept blowing to remind us where we belonged.

Too many old people in Trieste, I thought when I was young. A sad place for retired seniors. But it was only when my first love-story finished that I decided to go away. The beautiful sunsets, the smell of linden trees, the crowds in piazza Unità on Sunday had become unbearable. Every little corner painfully reminded me of him. I needed a different landscape, different people he had never met, different languages in which nobody would ask about him or say his name, places where I would be as much a stranger as they were strangers to me. Other lands.

The world seen from Trieste is no bigger than a half moon shape of Adriatic coast stretching from one side to another of the horizon, from Grado to Salvore, from Italy to Slovenia, without end. No borders in sight, only a long green line between land and sea. I loved this little kingdom I was locked in, as much as I loved him. But after we split, the landscape seemed to shrink, together with my heart. No more blue pebbled coast where we sat hand in hand for hours. No more black pine woods where we walked hand in hand for hours. No more old Austro-Hungarian buildings where we talked hand in hand for hours looking up to the beautiful decorations, finding new shapes every day.

The streets were silent during the lockdown last year, the shops were closed. All the life had gone. The city was a desert. I pretended I had to buy things, mostly food. I knew I shouldn’t have. It was childish and irresponsible but it was the only public life I was able to keep: going shopping, selecting goods, meeting other people who were probably doing the same, paying at the counter, going home. All the other habits – a walk with my daughter, a drink with my husband, lunch with my friends – they had all gone. Annihilated. Everyone’s normality gone with the wind. Bora wind.

When I was young I managed to escape but at a certain point, after all the traveling and all the studying and all the languages in which his name was pronounced, after all this, to my own surprise, I returned. When I had left I was not aware of how much I would miss my dialect or a walk on the side of the sea. I did not know how much I loved the last station where my grandparents had stopped. Trieste had become a place in my mind, a vast loving space made of colorful impressions, a world.

I am looking outside from my favorite café. Tomorrow another lockdown will start, a softer one this time. We won’t meet, we won’t even go out perhaps. The enemy we have been fighting for months is still here, invisible and fatal. Whatever our destiny is, we shall meet it as we have done for centuries, with Bora in our hair.