A Fictional Inquiry tells of an unnamed narrator visiting Trieste and London to retrace the footsteps of a fabled literary figure. The novel is inspired by the life of Trieste-born Roberto (“Bobi”) Bazlen, who helped found one of Italy’s most celebrated publishing houses, Adelphi Edizioni. Bazlen—a mentor to Adelphi’s publisher Roberto Calasso and friend of Eugenio Montale, Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba—has long fascinated writers. Enveloped in a mysterious ethos, he has been accorded the status of a philosopher of absence and negation.
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Even if it’s just a brief nap, like this half-hour one, afterward you have to start all over again. These are normal operating procedures, and sitting in a train I can deal with them easily enough. I begin by just listening: we are stopped, but not at a station, it’s too quiet; on the other hand the holdup seems too resigned for it to be a stop signal.
I open my eyes, and I may not be ready. The middle-aged military man, whom I had loaned the newspaper to before falling asleep, says with a smile, “The train broke down.” He gets up, grabs his cap and raincoat from the wire rack along with his leather satchel; then he looks out the window and nods decisively, “We’re better off walking.”
I look out too but it’s hard to say: we’re between the rocks and the sea, right in the middle of nowhere. He turns to the compartment door, adjusts his raincoat, tugs down his uniform. He says, “It’s only a kilometer to the station, after the curve. If we wait for them to come up from Trieste to tow us it will take an hour.” He waves goodbye, but doesn’t leave. I’m just waking up, and my amenability is as yet merely an intention that I should not abort so quickly. So I gather my things and follow him.
When we pass the locomotive he speaks with the engine drivers. They talk about technical things, pat the stuck engine; they look up at the overhead wires and laugh. The morning is crystal clear, almost springlike; or maybe it’s the fact that I’m here, inexplicably and lighthearted. I try to adjust my steps to the cadence of the ties, but I’m always a few inches short, and every now and then I have to take a double step. Hurriedly too because the army officer is moving very swiftly.
He explains the train’s breakdown to me in detail. Soon we are talking about lines and tension, curve radii, incline gradients; or rather, he talks authoritatively and casually, while I struggle with a language limited to “up” and “down.” We descend the slope: he with his body tilted back, swinging the satchel, I with my hands in my pockets. He asks, “See that perspective?” I’m seeing the city for the first time, the gulf and the mountains, the lighthouse, the castle, the houses here and there, and of course I think it should have some effect on me. He starts laughing, he was talking about the tracks: here they are consistently parallel, then they gradually converge like an arrowhead as they draw closer to the station. He says, “Just think, we do scores of calculations for perspective, to reproduce a defect of vision.” I think about it, but I don’t know how to respond, so we walk on in silence.
Now I’m feeling the lack of coffee, or of any real breakfast. We see the dwarf signal approaching, moving closer to the train, bigger and bigger; we watch it pull away from the station, and afterward the sound of the diesel can be heard.
Train signals are visible only from a distance; up close they grow dim, from below they seem to be turned off. The officer explains the reasons for this as well. After a while I ask him if it’s true that in designing bridges they also include a spot to undermine them. He stops; for the first time he seems tense. I reassure him, as if clearing away a cloud from the vista. He starts walking again, and says, “Some blast chambers are included, where the support is greatest.” He’s still not confident, though, and asks me why I want to know. I tell him I merely thought it seemed like a good design feature: you conceive of something and realize it fully, including the right place to destroy it with minimum effort. He says, “It’s a good practice, but those blast chambers aren’t made much anymore. Nowadays war doesn’t involve such modest retreats, with bridges destroyed behind you.”
By now we’re on level ground, nearing the city. During the last stretch I dodge a couple of indirect questions about why I’ve come here. I don’t want to talk about it and in any case I haven’t even arrived yet. Instead, bridges seem to interest him, and I never get a chance to talk about them. I tell him the time I saw one being mounted, in concrete, on a highway. The deck was prefabricated, resting on pylons. It was longer than the supports, and looked like it didn’t fit; it was unimaginable that they had gotten the measurements wrong. Steel cables emerging from the four corners of the platform had been secured to hoists, then lifted. They were pulled slowly, with a lot of shouting. First the concrete compressed, then it expanded, and finally there was a sharp crack, a roar in the valley, and the bridge fell into place. I don’t tell the officer that it had been a moment of absolute simultaneity, in which everything appeared to be copresent.
This time too he stops, tucks the satchel under his arm, and marks off various bits of sky with his hands. He repeatedly says “See . . . ” as he singles out various types of concrete, spans, jacks, load capacity. He asks if I understand. I say yes, though I got distracted during the last part; I was watching him standing between the tracks, and I was grateful for him. We pass the last few switch points, choose a central platform. I’ve often imagined these visits, though probably everything will be different; maybe it already is by arriving in Trieste as if I myself were the train. In the station hall the officer stops again. He takes off his hat, straightens his hair. He says, “Is there anything else you want to know about bridges?” I say no, smiling. He can point me to an antiquarian bookstore, though.
We say goodbye; he goes toward the exit, I head for the coffee bar.
I expected the bookshop to be small, reserved for a select few. It is a monument. Monumental in its arrangement and the extent of the shelving, in the leather binding of the volumes, in the polite but firm custodial attitude shown by the well-dressed, bespectacled man. The very tone in which he says “Can I help you?” discourages browsing. One must ask, and when I ask the answer is negative: “No, books about Trieste or by Triestines are the first to go.” It seems that people too, in this temple, are given but a very brief welcome. Playing for time, I ask, “Is there a catalog?” He shakes his head, takes a halfstep toward the door. Since the titles I am looking for are not there, I bring up the subject generically. He takes another step, says, “No, nothing. Try a bookstore with current titles.” With that “current” one must imagine the deficiency of contemporary books, of bookstores with no history; where things are found easily, you enter, you pay, then leave.
As he continues toward me I step to the side. When we are just about parallel to each other I resort to asking for street directions. These are enthusiastically offered to me, along with topographical minutiae involving street maps and house numbers. As I trail after him to consult the yellow pages, I realize why the image of a temple is fitting: the spot we’re standing in—he won’t let me go any farther—is the vestibule; then there’s a pronaos from which two shelf-lined corridors extend laterally. Still farther on, as in a small chamber, is an enlarged poster of Umberto Saba: quite old, diminutive, dressed in black, his decisive step halted midway, his cane parallel to the leg that lunges forward. Down below a woman in a blue apron is shaking out a quilt.
That’s not what diminishes the sacredness of the place; rather it’s the numerous scratches in the wood or the empty spaces on the last shelves. There’s an overall tone of brown wrapping paper, and a smell to match. While I’m still looking, the man holds out his hand; it’s a grip that lacks the pressure of several fingers.
Outside, I take a final look at the few volumes confidently displayed against the backdrop of a red pleated cloth, as in a beauty parlor window.
I continue along on the straight avenues, laid out according to a plan that enables you to easily count the cross streets. I spot an ordinary bookstore, which I essentially enter and leave. Nevertheless, I got some further directions there, and now I’m following them down toward the sea. It’s a clear day, hardly cold; only the presence of the sea is strange, maybe because I can picture this city only from the south, and I’m disoriented by the position of the sun relative to the water and the type of light and color. Or maybe it’s because I’m used to seas flowing by tangentially, not beginning, as here.
I’m in another bookstore now: an overall impression of remainders. Quite a few books, with no pretense. The bookseller, with his massive build and V-neck sweater worn over a crewneck, looks more like an arms dealer. Lots of unsold copies: these mark the true heroism of a bookseller, entire series not antiquarian but merely old. I ask him for two titles; he climbs to an upper floor, to which I cannot be admitted despite the informality of the setting. After a while he comes back down with a book from about thirty years ago. On the cover is a photograph of the author, seemingly colored by hand: blond straight hair pulled back, glasses and tie, and a wrinkle circling his neck. The bookseller and I agree on an acceptable price, still less than a newly published volume.
I go over to a section labeled “Trieste.” There’s no journal with the writer’s article, but there is a book of her essays, and the article is in there. The bookseller has started cleaning the floor. I show him the back cover of the book, tapping my index finger on the name. I say, “Is she still alive?” He straightens up from the mop. He glances at the cover, then says, “Yes, I think so. She’s not well, people go to see her.”
I want to browse through the books one by one, some series that I have always been looking for, several titles that I try asking about in every city, in every bookstore. I try here too. He frowns, says, “No, not those.” How come? He says that in this city, because of its different languages, numerous professions, and limited number of bookstores, you have to stock everything from technical manuals to literature. But even all of that undoubtedly has a limit.
As I leave the store, I’m uncertain. I should continue on my way to the university, following the antiquarian bookseller’s useful advice, not to mention the city library. But at this moment I feel more tempted to lose myself, to wander. Maybe there is no route, only an intermittent wavering between probability and improbability. It’s as if I were deciding each move right there and then, to see where it might lead, and that discovery, then, is none other than the beginning I was looking for. I want to maintain a certain inertia, with small urges that are indispensable and sufficient.
Eventually I arrive at the city library. I comb through dozens of catalog cards; every so often I skim through them quickly, running my thumb over the edge, and the writing starts streaming by. Finally I begin pulling the drawers out and carry them to a table, between two girls. From the cards you can get an idea of the city’s history. Some eighteenth-century titles intrigue me: Il viaggio parallelo del libro e della vita (The Parallel Journey of a Book and Life), or Di come un luogo vecchio invecchi lo scrittore (On How an Old Place Ages the Writer). But how long can I lose myself? And how far can I stray?
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From A Fictional Inquiry by Daniele Del Giudice (trans. Anne Milano Appel). Used with permission of the publisher, New Vessel Press. Copyright © 2025.
