A Dead Man In Trieste by Michael Pearce

Author:Michael Pearce [Pearce, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

He walked up from the docks thinking about it. On his way he passed through the Piazza Grande. The man who had joined them the other day, the friendly one, Ettore, was sitting alone in the Cafe of Mirrors. He looked up at Seymour and smiled.

‘I know!’ he said. ‘I’m early. I ought not to be here till later. In fact, I am not here. It is an illusion created by the cafe’s mirrors. Really I am at work. However, the meeting finished early and on my way back to the office, smelling the coffee . . .’

He was smoking, as, going by the other day, he seemed to do all the time. Seymour sat down to windward of him. Ettore noticed and waved a hand apologetically.

‘It is bad,’ he said, ‘I know. I am trying to stop. I have spoken to my analyst about it - did you know, I go to a psychoanalyst regularly? I said: “How can you claim to put the big things right when you cannot put the small things right?” “Who says they are the small things?” he replied.’

Seymour laughed.

‘For me, it is coffee,’ he said. ‘We all have our vices.’

‘For everyone it is coffee,’ said Ettore. ‘But in my case that is, too.’

Seymour asked him how he had come to know Lomax. Through James, Ettore said. One day after their English lesson he had brought Ettore to the table in the Cafe of Mirrors and Lomax had been there. They had not met through business. His father-in-law normally handled the foreign side. Seymour rather gathered the impression that in anything to do with work Ettore was dominated by his father-in-law. He suspected that part of the attraction for Ettore of opening a branch in England was the prospect of getting away from him.

They talked a little about life in England. It was the first time Seymour had had much of a talk with Ettore and he found him not just sympathetic but also vaguely comforting. It was a relief to find someone fairly normal at the artists’ table. Then he remembered that Ettore was himself an artist; at any rate, he wrote novels. He asked Ettore about that. Ettore said that his early novels had had such a hammering from critics, mostly on the grounds that, coming from Trieste, he couldn’t write proper Italian, that he had virtually given up.

Seymour had an idea.

‘Ettore, as a Triestian, could you give me some advice? It is about the meaning of what I gather is an old Trieste saying. Who is left behind when everyone else has gone home?’

‘Are you getting at me?’

‘No,’ said Seymour, surprised.

‘It is what my father-in-law is always saying to me. Pointedly. When I leave work at what I think is a reasonable time.’

‘Why? Who is left?’

‘The boss. It is a Trieste saying, I think a foolish one. However, it is very popular with small businessmen.’

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