The Triestini were aware that in certain walled cities of the Istrian archipelago there dwelled persons so wealthy that their stonemasons might inscribe the following in their names: Receive, Our Father, this little church as a present. Captain Vasojevic was now believed to secrete a hoard of silver somewhere in his house, although the night-burglars who investigated this supposition found nothing but death. Captain Robert and Luca Morelli (who never made captain) had to pay off three new widows. In fine, the other merchants’ attempts to find out, emulate or ruin these Serbs remained as crude as the shield and letters on a fifteenth-century gold coin of King Sigismund. Cirtovic knew how to hide whatever mattered.
He certainly kept his daughters sequestered, all right — not that other men didn’t do the same in every petty kingdom of Italy. A few of the dandies still hoped vainly. One remained single all his life on a girl’s account. His name was Alberto. A night came when he wavered, for his best friends Fabio and Marco invited him to hear the singer Emanuela, by whom many ladies were annoyed because she demanded silence, silence, which is not necessarily a condition appropriate to people who are sipping wine together. She wore a long tight crimson robe whose gold buttons marched all the way down. The way she could enclose her fingers around certain words of her songs was something no one had ever witnessed before. She was said to be forty-seven but looked older. When she sang, three little beggar-girls who lived in the street began dancing and fanning themselves with branches; and the sky over Trieste became a domed ceiling with a golden snowflake-sun in the center, connected to many crowned Graces who balanced all longings and judgments upon their pretty heads. Most of the men watched this Emanuela submissively, and when each song ended there were those who wiped their eyes. Alberto was nearly enchanted. The women (who they were you can work out for yourself) shrugged at the floor, wiggling their fingers or whispering to the men who sat beside them. If the whispers got loud, Emanuela would stare at them with her sunken, glittering eyes. Alberto, I repeat, remained almost enchanted, but failed to expel his desire for Cirtovic’s daughters, and particularly for the youngest, whose name he had once overheard, and indeed, possibly misheard, as Tanya. In his hot sad life her image was as shade-rich as a grape arbor. Even as an old man, walking slowly with his hands behind his back, he annoyed others with his praises of a certain Tanyotchka, whom nobody else remembered, although in fact she still lived, and promenaded every day between church and hill, dressed in black. When he closed his eyes, Alberto, who did not recognize her, seemed to see the hollows of her white back, and rain was running down her shoulders. Opening his eyes, he sought out whitenesses in the sky to match her, but these proved all too grey or too blue. Just as a woman’s heel rises away from her sandal when she takes a step, showing for an instant a bit of sole whose pallor proves its kinship to white tubers and other such things which ordinarily live concealed, so this old man’s otherwise sun-tanned fantasies and illusions rebelliously bedecked themselves with the onion-jewels of the unknown. Thus he fell out of time, like a certain skull which anyone who can obey the obscure visiting hours is welcome to see in the Antiquarium; this skull is crumpled like a deflated gas mask from the First World War, the latter’s metal-rimmed goggles gaping, the former’s eye-sockets decorated with mineral stains. Who are you, skull? Whom did you love? Tanyotchka, Tanyotchka. Perhaps it was to placate people of his sort that Tanyotchka’s father Italianized his surname to Cirtovich. Although Captain Vasojevic declined to adopt that fashion, most Triestine Serbs accommodated themselves sooner or later. For example, I remember once unearthing a barely yellowed albumen print of Darinka Kvekich, dated circa 1860; she was bell-shaped in her immense skirt with ribs of pale embroidery; her exotic femininity was walled like a sailing ship. A Genovese notary who occasionally came to call was astonished at how rarely she appeared, although her tactful servingwoman explained: Every day she takes care of her very ill sister and of her other sister who is a little less ill. — But then where
are these sisters? — The servingwoman smiled sadly. — Sweet Darinka, said the notary, I need to know how much you love me. — Indefinitely, she replied.