Eva Sleeps (11 page)

 

After spending months in the heat, the shouting and the smells of the large kitchen, the silence that had invaded her parents' house seemed to Gerda, whenever she went back there, as dense as mud dried after a downpour. Every word that was not strictly necessary, every comment, question, exclamation, adverb and adjective had been buried in it. All that remained were imperative verbs (take this; carry this; go out; wash it; eat this) and the names of things:
tello
, the bowl you reached out with so that soup could be ladled into it;
foiozoig
, the lighter to hand her father for his evening pipe;
holz
, the timber to stack up next to the stove. These surviving words would spring out of the silence the same way objects of a life that has been swept away emerge through a gap in the mud that covers a village buried by a landslide. Things like the back of a chair, a pan with no handles, an odd shoe.

 

* * *

 

The first time Hannes spoke to Gerda, he asked, “
Wo worschin bis iatz
?”

Where had she been until then? How was it possible that he'd never met her before in the streets of the town? She told him that for over a year now she had been spending most of her time in Merano, working in the kitchen. While she was speaking, Gerda noticed in Hannes's eyes that same look of defenseless astonishment her father had given her that morning, so many years earlier, when he had called her
Mamme
.

Now that she saw it, it was clear to her: this was what she'd been waiting for all these years without knowing it.

 

The cable car that would unload dozens of skiers on the top of the mountain, opening the doors to prosperity for the town and its residents, had now been completed by the Consortium. Half of the forest of larches, pines and spruces which covered the north side of the mountain, and which had been cursed by Paul Staggl's ancestors because it was steep and without sunlight, had disappeared. Now it had been plowed down by the winding paths of ski tracks, and the almost straight line that connected the pylons of the new ski lift. A few weeks later, its inauguration would take place. The red cabin with room for thirty, hanging from a heavy steel cable, would stand out against the blue sky and, flying above the heads of the band, all the gathered citizens, the mayor, and especially Paul Staggl, the visionary capitalist responsible for its creation, would show everyone the bright future awaiting the valley.

In view of the inauguration, last-minute safety tests and rescue drills in case of a power cut were taking place. Hannes persuaded his father's workmen to use him and Gerda as the victims of a pretend accident. They would act the parts of skiers on holiday trapped in the cabin because of a power outage, and the workmen would come and save them.

When Gerda walked into the lower station of the cable car, she thought it looked like a cave large enough for giants rather than humans. The huge wheels suspended from the roof were dragging a fake steel cable from which dangled a red cabin attached by a black clamp—like a cloth fixed with a gigantic peg to an enormous washing line. However, when it completed the tour around the pylon and drew near with the door open, Gerda thought it looked more like a squat, square tourist coach than something suitable for staying up in the air: it was both scary and ridiculous at the same time. Hannes noticed her hesitation. He held her by the arm and helped her walk into the cabin. The doors closed behind them, the large wheels continued to turn with the roar of a furnace, there was a sudden increase in speed, almost a change of state, the cabin got off the ground and began its suspended journey.

There was a sudden silence. What made Gerda's heart leap into her throat more than the growing distance between her feet and the ground, more than the treetops she was seeing from above for the first time, more than the horizon of glaciers and faraway peaks that spread before her, was the silence, which was interrupted only by light gusts of wind. It wasn't the silence of her childhood pastures, of windless, moonless nights when she huddled up with Michl, Simon and little Wastl in the hay, while telling stories of witches. Those nights, through the cracks of the mountain hut beams, an infinite, enveloping space resounded all around, and everything was a part of it—the four children, the starry sky, the screams of night birds, and the cracking sound of the mountain. That silence that echoed a thousand presences, and from which nothing and nobody was separate from it.

Here, however, the glass of the cabin was separating Gerda and Hannes from the noise of the world, from the rustle of the tallest fir tree branches, from the calls of the crows that were flying parallel to the cable, curious about that strange flying object, from the increasingly distant voices coming from the tiny houses at their feet.

When the cable passed through the small wheels of the pylons, it produced for a few seconds a metallic screech which then made the silence that followed even more intense. It was a silence reserved for just the two of them. Gerda looked up at Hannes. This was the moment he seemed to be waiting for: he bent over her and kissed her.

At that moment, the cabin suddenly stopped and started swaying in the void. But Gerda wasn't scared. That swinging over the abyss, which tourists jammed in a cable car would always find scary, and which would provoke screams, fainting, and scenes of panic, was for her a sign: the first kiss of her life had to be precisely here, right now, with Hannes. It was written, it was fate. It was what she had always been waiting for. And now, finally, she knew it.

 

A few weeks later, when Gerda went back to the hotel for the winter season, she got Nina to read her fortune with cards. Gerda wanted them to say that Hannes loved her, that he thought of her every single instant just as she thought of him. She wanted to hear about his love and wanted an opportunity to say his name out loud: Hannes!

Nina had a wide face with dark eyes that were a little too close together, a beautiful straight mouth and almost all her teeth. She looked at Gerda without smiling. “He's rich, isn't he?” It was as though she was asking confirmation of a diagnosis.

“
Isch mir Wurst
,” Gerda replied. I don't care about that. It wasn't wealth but love that was important for her. Her love for Hannes, and his for her. Nina shook her head, displeased. She laid out on the table seven Watten cards, face down.

“Turn over one card. Don't think about it.”

Gerda didn't think and turned over the first card on the left. “Seven of acorns.”

Nina stared at the card with the bitter satisfaction of someone who has foreseen the worst and it is coming true.

She looked up at Gerda and said, “You're pregnant. And better give up any idea of his marrying you.”

O
n the Fortezza-Bolzano train there are two girls sitting opposite me, probably about sixteen. One is blond, the other dark. They look like the kind of scantily-clad young women you see on Italian TV, like the soubrettes in the programs my mother claims not to know because she watches only the Austrian ORF channels, but which she actually sits and gulps down for hours on end. They're dressed identically: black jacket with gray fur collar, black trousers worn very low on the waist, slid into black boots. They look like they're wearing a uniform. They get off at Bressanone, where Max, the largest discotheque in the area is situated: Easter Saturday or not, they're going dancing.

South Tyrol discotheques used to be closed on Easter Saturday. In fact there weren't any. Max didn't use to hold a gay night every third Thursday of the month. No South Tyrol hotel would have written “gay-friendly” in their brochure (but only in the English-language ones aimed at an Anglo-Saxon clientele, not in the German or Italian ones). In the snow bulletin issued by the pistes and the pharmacy opening times on the Internet, you didn't use to see a list of places where you could go cruising (in my town it's the toilets of the bus station and the parking lot by the river).

My land has changed a lot. And Ulli bears witness to that.

 

There's more waiting at Bolzano station, since the Rome sleeper leaves at midnight. I have a coffee. The barman is polite and speaks good Italian as well as German, with a distinct Bolzano accent, but his face, skin and body language are North African. I wonder which box he ticked on the
Sprachgruppenzugehörigkeitserklärung
form of the census, that heap of syllables and consonants, which intimidated even Signor Song.

Finally, it's nearly midnight. I go to the platform and the train is already there. In the distance, beyond the freight trains on dead-end tracks, beyond the electric lines, beyond the rooftops and the cleft of Val d'Isarco, illuminated by the moon, the mountain peaks, called
Catinaccio
in Italian and the
Rosengarten
in German. More than simply two different names, it's really about two different ways of living in nature. As a loudspeaker announces arriving and departing trains, the distant, pale presence of the Dolomitian needles seems to occupy, as well as another space, another time. Seen from the station, they look magical and unreachable.

 

The Neapolitan couchette attendant is about thirty, overweight, and has no wedding ring: it seems that the holiday shifts fall to the bachelors. He takes my ticket. “I'll keep it and give it back to you in the morning. This way the ticket inspector will wake me up and not you.”

He's protecting my sleep but, for a moment, the thought of being without my ticket makes me feel at his mercy.

“You're all alone in the carriage,” he adds. That's exactly what he says: “all alone”—and his tone is formal. It's true that I'm all alone: all the other compartment doors are bolted, except for mine. It's Easter Saturday, after all. Anyone gone to see their relatives for Easter has already arrived, and anyone who's taken two weeks' holiday is already in the southern seas. I too would be at my mother's now if I weren't here on a train, going to see Vito. Consequently, I have the compartment all to myself. The light is on and, neatly folded, the blanket with the embossed logo of the
Ferrovie dello Stato
, the towel and the sponge slippers, are waiting for me. With a creaking sound, the train departs.

“Would you like a nice coffee when you wake up?”

The couchette attendant comes knocking several more times, always for a different reason. After asking about the coffee he wants to make sure I lock myself in properly. He shows me how to arrange the ladder for the top bunks as an anti-burglar device: you have to jam it in the handle in such a way that if anyone tries to open the door, it'll fall with a crash. He wants me to arrange it as he says, so that he can prove that if you want to force the handle from outside (he does it), the ladder would make quite a racket (it's true) and I would wake up (that's assuming I manage to get any sleep, I think, doubtfully). He keeps repeating, “It's just the two of us in the entire carriage.”

Then he goes back to his compartment at the end of the carriage. But he hasn't finished with me yet, and shouts, “What do you think, shall we turn down the heating?”

He's gone from addressing me as “you” to referring to “we.”

As a matter of fact, it's too warm, and my throat is beginning to feel dry.

“Absolutely!” I also shout back to make myself heard—there are at least four compartments between his and mine.

“Perhaps I'll turn it up again before dawn when it's colder!” he yells.

“All right!” I yell back.

We keep shouting like that from one compartment to the other but it's something very intimate and confidential, like a husband and wife would talk to each other loudly from one room to the other in their home. (My mother's always doing this when she comes to stay. She begins to cook and starts yelling a long speech about Ruthi from the kitchen, while I could be on the phone to a client. I've never managed to tell her just how annoying it is.) Well, at least, as Carlo would say, the couchette attendant didn't decide to talk to me about his unhappy marriage. Perhaps because he's a bachelor, even though I have a creeping suspicion that he might take off his wedding ring when he's on night shifts—you never know if you might find yourself with a lady, “all alone.” Or perhaps because he's tired, poor man.

I lie down on the bunk, facing the window. It's almost one o'clock in the morning and I switch off the light. Since I'm lying down, it's only when the train tilts on the curves that I can see the streetlights. Otherwise all I can see is their reddish glow reflected on the pale rocks of Val d'Adige, which consequently look as though they are bathed in their own light.

HAPPY EASTER OF THE RESURRECTION!

HAPPY HOLIDAY BUT ONLY TO BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE!

TAKE CARE, MY FRIEND.

HAPPY EASTER!

It's late, but not all my friends lead the kind of lives where this is an important factor; besides, some of them live in different time zones. That's why I keep receiving text messages wishing me a happy Easter: secular ones, religious, jokey, affectionate ones. The screen of the cellphone I'm holding lights up every time and for a couple of seconds, my face, illuminated by its blue light, is reflected in the window in front of me.

HAPPY EASTER, MY LOVE.

Carlo. I keep my finger on the keypad so the display doesn't go off and I remain illuminated for a long time. My somewhat ghostly reflection is superimposed on the nocturnal landscape rushing past outside the train, with vertical, luminescent rocks and the star-studded darkness. My face flies over churches, over many castles on rocks, each and every one of them a cultural jewel of which I don't even know the name (except for those where I have organized memorable PR events).

Suddenly, the lights and racket of the tunnel: we're cutting straight under the Prealps and leaving Val d'Adige.