When I went up to see this variegated gentleman--whose personal
appearance is that of a bright yellow cat--he purred awhile upon the
sofa and then started striding up and down the room. As he sketched the
history of the town, which, he said, had always been Italian and would
insist on being so, he spoke with horror of the days when Jella[vc]i['c]
was in control, and then, remembering another trouble, he raised both
his hands above his head and brought them down with such a crash upon
the desk where I was writing his remarks that--but nobody burst in; the
municipal officials were accustomed to his conversation. He was reviling
at that moment certain Allied officers who had not seen fit to visit
him. "I care not!" he yelled. "We are Italian! I tell you we are
Italianissimi!" (He was glad enough, however, when his brother Hamlet,
who had remained a Yugoslav and was on friendly terms with the chief of
the carabinieri, managed to obtain for the mayor a passport to Italy,
concerning which the carabinieri had said that they must first of all
apply to Rome.) The doctor was sure that Yugoslavia would not live, for
it had two religions; and another notable defect of the Croats--"I speak
their language quite well," he said--was that in the whole of Rieka not
one ancient document was in Croatian. I was going to mention that
everywhere in Croatia until 1848 they were in Latin--but he saw what I
was on the point of saying and--"Look here! look here!" he cried, "now
look at this!" It was a type-written sheet in English, whereon was
recounted how the mayor had offered to four Admirals, who came to Rieka
on behalf of their four nations, how he had, in order to meet them in
every way--"They asked me," he said, with blankness and indignation and
forgiveness all joined in his expression--it was beautifully done--"they
asked me, the Italian mayor of this Italian town, whether it was truly
an Italian town!"--well, he had offered to take a real plebiscite, on
the basis of the last census, and the Admirals, while appreciating his
offer, had not availed themselves of it. (Maybe some one had told them
how the census officials, chiefly members of the "Giovani Fiumani," had
gone round, asking the people whether they spoke Italian and usually
filling in the papers themselves. Presumably the mayor did not propose
to allow anyone who had then been described as an Italian now to call
himself Croat.) I was just calculating what he was in 1910 when he
played a trump card and begged me to go up to the cemetery and take note
of the language used for the epitaphs. Then let me return to him on the
morrow and say what was the nationality of Rieka. There seemed to be the
question if in such a town where Yugoslavs so often use Italian as the
business language, many of them possibly might use it as the language of
death; as it happened the first Yugoslav to whom I spoke about this
point--a lawyer at whose flat I lunched the following day--produced a
little book entitled _Regolamento del Cimitero comunale di Fiume_, and
from it one could see that in the local cemetery the blessed principle
of self-determination was in fetters. Chapter iii. lays down that all
inscriptions must have the approval of the civic body. You are warned
that they will not approve of sentences or words which are indecent, and
that they prohibit all expressions and allusions that might give offence
to anyone, to moral corporations, to religions, or which are notoriously
false. No doubt, in practice, they waive the last stipulation, so that
the survivors may give praise to famous or to infamous men; but I am
told that they raised fewer difficulties for Italian wordings, and that
the stones which many people used--those which the undertakers had in
stock, with spaces left for cutting in the details--were invariably in
Italian.... I hope I have not given an unsympathetic portrait of the
mayor who has about him something lovable. Whatever Fate may have in
store for Rieka, Dr. Vio is so magnificent an emotional actor that his
future is assured. I trust it will be many years before a stone, in
Croat, Magyar or Italian, is placed above the body of this volatile
gentleman.... And then perhaps the deed of his administrative life that
will be known more universally than any other will be the omission of
an _I_ from certain postage stamps. When the old Hungarian stamps were
surcharged with the word FIUME, the sixty-third one in every sheet of
half an edition was defective and was stamped FUME.[19]