Why all this hatred?    "Why all this hatred?" said the Slovene woman behind the bar. "I've lived all over Italy and on other frontiers, but I have never felt this hatred outside Trieste. Why is it?"    I shrugged. It was a bright morning last autumn and I had stepped in to a friend's local for my start-up coffee. There was a drunken woman in the cafe, pouring out her alcoholic grief in a Dalmatian Slav dialect to the barmaid, who was answering in Slovene. That was remarkable enough, for it is not done to speak Slovene in Trieste city. But even more remarkable was the phrase she used, though without explaining what the Dalmatian woman had been saying. For it is not done, either, to talk about the hatred that Trieste sometimes exudes. A pretence of multiculturality is maintained.    Yet visitors are often taken in. Some seem to think that nowadays Trieste is a bilingual city. An alert Italian friend of mine who has lived in Trieste for years recently told me she thought that the throngs of Slav shoppers in the downtown area were local townsfolk. Actually, they must have been day-trippers from the former Yugoslavia. It is as if Boulogne or Calais were to be considered English towns because of the English day-trippers and lager louts strutting around its streets, or to assume that Venice is the summer capital of Japan.    It really is a strange kind of hatred, not to be confused with ordinary Italian racism towards non-European immigrants from the Third World.. It really is the local equivalent of anti-Semitic utterances or racial slurs.    Secondly it spills over in public and if returned by the Slovenes, it is returned in an undertone at the price of causing a fight. But I keep seeing examples of it. When I was living there a couple of years ago, a Slovene-owned bank was temporarily shut down on the orders of the Italian government. At the time of the closure, a woman in a Slovene-owned restaurant was shouting one lunch time that the Slovenes were a gang of thieves. And nobody answered her back, least of all the Slovene clientele or the equally Italian Slovene owners. Well, in the end I muttered something ineffectual. Which only maddened the woman who immediately took me for a Slovene, so thick is my accent in Italian.    In the house where I lived, and occasionally still revisit, high on the hills above Trieste, there are six flats facing out over a sea of forest and the frontier to the Slovene mountains 20 miles away. Four flats belong to Slovene speakers and two to non-Slovenes, one of the two latter myself, and the other a native Italian-speaker. I hear Slovene spoken on the staircase only if I greet someone in the language. But when the other tenants step into their own apartments they nearly always switch from Italian to Slovene.    In fact assuming you know that the Slav-speaking shoppers come from across the border with the former Yugoslavia, you could live your whole life in Trieste and not realize that upwards of 17% of Trieste Province's population speak another language at home, a secret tongue hidden from outsiders. <<< © Bernard Meares 1999 >>>