Eva Sleeps (28 page)

Ulli was maneuvering the large shovel at the front of Marlene. He was sitting in profile, in his eyes the reflection of the snow lit up by the headlights.

“You've no idea how often it happens, to how many women. I know, because I know their husbands.”

He used the lever next to the steering wheel to stop the shovel full of snow, which remained halfway up in the air. He turned to look at me. He still had the roebuck eyes from when he was a child, and eyelashes too long for an adult. “Eva, no woman deserves that kind of lie.”

And he stroked my face. It was a brief, light, protective touch.

Question: if a man who loves men could love a woman, would this woman finally feel loved?

A useless question. Ulli is dead, so I'll never know.

The plain has grown wider, and now there's more space between the sea and the mountains. The contrast is now smoother: the soil of the plain is less red, shameless and fertile, and the mountains in the background less forbidding. We pass a tiny station and a blue sign runs outside the window. I read it quickly before it disappears: MINTURNO SCAURI.

Then, with a screech of the brakes, the train stops right in front of a huge industrial hangar emerging from the countryside like a spaceship. There's a sign in huge letters: MANULI FILM. Just outside my window, a billboard illustrates its activities. The train isn't leaving yet, so I have time to read it.

 

PRODUCTS:
Mineral water, other, carbonated drinks, cocoa, coffee, infusions, tea, sugar, meat and derivatives, tobacco industry, graphics/publishing industry, fresh pasta, dried pasta, rice, ready meals, baked products, sweets, fish, fruit and vegetables, frozen foods, cosmetics, sauces, dressings, seasonings, salt, soft drinks
.

 

PACKAGING:
Bag in box, plastic bottles, multifunction envelopes, envelopes, pillow packs, labels (sleeve, decorations, seals), plastic film joined together and co-extruded, mono-material plastic film, thermal retractable film, wrapping material, adhesive tape
.

 

A complete list, obviously. Shame, though, that the Manuli Film hangar should be empty, and that weeds should be sprouting from cracked cement forr, and that the windows have never been fitted. There's a whitish dog lying on the stretch of dirt track behind the billboard.

When the train starts again with a squeaking noise, the dog remains motionless, enjoying the sunshine.

 

Shortly after Sessa Aurunca, the American girls, while munching their chips, stop reading and look outside. As luck would have it, at that very moment we enter a tunnel. And so their eyes can feast on one of Italy's most famous and renowned beauties that is the envy of all the world: the white strip that zigzags past in the darkness of the vaulted tunnel.

T
he old woman was about seventy, but ten or twenty years from now she wouldn't be all that different. Under the handkerchief tied beneath her chin, her cheeks were marked by intricate, purple capillaries. She was hunched over, one shoulder lower than the other, her hands leaning on the handle of the stick she held very straight in front of her legs. She was wearing a long skirt, like her grandmother had: the twentieth century, which was already two-thirds of the way through, had taken a lot away from her, but left enough fabric for making skirts. Above her skirt there was a forget-me-not-colored
Bauernschurtz
, boiled wool gray slippers with leather soles.

There were four coffins in front of her, covered with white cloth, tall candles, flowers. The picket Alpini were young men, the same as, until yesterday, those who were lying inside. They had their arms behind their backs in an alert at-ease position, and the sad, impartial expression one wears when everything has already happened and what is about to happen hasn't started yet.

A few hours earlier, Prime Minister Aldo Moro had paid his final respects to the four victims of the terrorists. He had stayed in the chapel of rest for a long time, hands linked in front of his body, shoulders low, embarrassed pity on his face. Next to him, the right-eye monocle of General De Lorenzo caught the photographers' flashes.

A charge of explosives had knocked down an electricity pylon in Cima Vallona, Porzescharte in German, on the border between Eastern Tyrol and the region of Belluno. It was a trap: anti-personnel mines awaited the Italian soldiers who rushed to the location of the explosion. When the soldiers Armando Piva, Francesco Gentile, Mario Di Lecce, and Olivo Dordi, reached the fallen electricity pylon, they were blown up inside their van.

In addition to politicians and generals, thousands of people visited the resting chapel. German-speaking South Tyroleans, Italians from Alto Adige, from Comelico, from Cadore, soldiers, tourists. Any sympathy for the attackers' motivations had now run out. Nothing in the experience of the residents of San Candido, where the bodies were displayed, gave any meaning to this violence. A young peasant whose skin was already cooked by the sun, a navy-blue apron over his white shirt, stood by the bodies for a while, his head down. Then it was the turn of the old woman.

She didn't know the names of the four Alpini. Maybe they'd told her but they were Italian names, difficult to remember. They didn't matter to her: names are the least of anyone's worries. She stroked the coffins one by one. They were closed: an anti-personnel mine is not kind to the body that passes over it.

Over a quarter of a century earlier, the war had taken away from her four sons. They were more or less the age of the Alpini shut away in the four coffins, give or take a year. She hadn't been able to say goodbye to her sons, and all she had to mourn were the letters from the brigade headquarters. Their names, of course, were there, inscribed in the marble at the entrance to the cemetery, with the names of other fallen soldiers. But there's not a lot you can do with a name. A name doesn't reap the hay, doesn't fix the tiles on the roof. Names are the least of your worries.

The four young men were dead, just like her sons, what did it matter that their names were not Sepp, Gert, Manfred and Hans, but Francesco, Mario, Olivo, Armando? The name of the place where they had fallen didn't matter either: Porzescharte, Cima Vallona, what was the difference? They were dead, her sons were dead, and all you can do for the dead is pray.

The old woman pulled a rosary out of her apron pocket, and began.

 

Silvius Magnago spread his elbows, bent his head forward, leaned his forehead on the interlaced hands over his desk. The shoulders of his suit, always too wide for his skinny frame, rose like wings on the back of his neck. His thick, black-rimmed glasses were in front of him, next to the pen, and the crutches were leaning parallel to the wood paneling on the wall.

He remained like this, hunched over, his forehead on his desk, his eyes shut. He was tired. In June, in Porzescharte, or Cima Vallona as the Italians called it, four soldiers had been killed in a horrific attack. In July, the Neo-Fascists had demonstrated in Bolzano in favor of “the fundamental Italian nature of Alto Adige.” In September, at Trento Station, a bag had exploded in the hands of police officers Filippo Foti and Edoardo Martini, killing both on the spot. It was to be the last deadly attack by South Tyrolean terrorism, but Magnago had no way of knowing that. The TV news had broadcast one of his statements, issued right from that desk.

“The recent dynamite attacks have left a deep mark on the Alto Adige population, whatever their language. It is only with the tools of democracy that problems can be solved. We refuse to believe that they can be solved with violence.”

He had delivered it in his impeccable Italian, but his German accent had come across as harder than usual. The Italian television caption had presented him as follows: Silvius Magnago, leader of Südtiroler Volkspartei, former Wehrmacht.

He hadn't felt this tired since the war years.

Besides, there was this heavy new atmosphere in the sleeper car. Now, when they traveled to Rome with him, the members of Parliament and senators of the Südtiroler Volkspartei—whose leader he still was, after all—no longer came to his compartment for a nightcap before bed: they'd wish him good night frostily then retire to their couchettes. Magnago knew what they said behind his back: that he'd sold out to the Italians; that they considered his attempts at bringing together the Italian government, the Austrian authorities, and representatives of Alto Adige Italians, as petty political bargaining; that they were muttering about the
Heimat
being sold off, about too much
Realpolitik
; that they uttered the word
Kompromiss
like the worst possible insult.

Yet he also knew that the only alternatives to Kompromiss are heroes and, from Andreas Hofer to Sepp Kerschbaumer, Südtirol had had its fill of heroes. Even those wicked bombers who carried on killing probably thought themselves to be heroes. Magnago knew he was the only one able to obtain from the Italian government those guarantees of linguistic and administrative control that his people had been waiting for for half a century, precisely because there was nothing of the hero about him.

He raised his hollow face. Before him, on the walnut desk, there was a stack of papers: the first draft of the Autonomy Statute of the future autonomous province of Bolzano. He would still need to take tiring trips to Rome, engage in exhausting negotiations, before it would assume its definitive form: one hundred and thirty-seven articles, thirty-one marginal notes. There was still a lot to do.

Silvius Magnago rubbed his eyes, put on his glasses, and picked up the first sheet of paper.

 

When they were together, Gerda would take Eva into her large bed in the small ground-floor room. Eva would cling to her, her mother's body both the lifeboat and the ocean where she would lose herself. And Gerda let her.

Eva had started to notice that she didn't have a father like the other children. She wasn't the only one: Ulli and Sigi, for instance, didn't have one either. But they'd lost theirs, whereas she'd never had one. She wasn't sure what the difference was but there clearly was one.

Another thing Eva had never had: new shoes. She'd always inherited Ruthi's old ones or those of her sisters, and even Ulli's boy's shoes. However, Gerda had been promoted to cook, her salary had increased, so she had decided to buy her a pair. Now, sitting on the bench in the shop beneath the town porticos, Eva couldn't believe there was such beauty at the end of her shins. They were solid shoes, with rubber crepe soles, but to her they were more splendid than if they'd been made of black patent.

When they left the shop, Eva walked with her eyes down, not to miss the sight of the new shoes that followed her every step.

“That's your father.”

Eva was reluctant to look away from her feet, but what her mother had just said wasn't something you heard every day. At the age of five, she had never yet heard it.

“The one in the dark suit.”

Eva looked up. There was more than one man in a dark suit on the sidewalk and in the street.

“Which one?”

“The one looking at us.”

Several men were looking at Gerda, but not because they were the father of her child.

“
Giamo
,”
³⁷
Gerda said with a sudden impatience. She took her by the hand and dragged her away with long strides. Eva carried on searching the passing men for a resemblance, a specific sign, a clear trace of belonging. But she couldn't find it: when he'd seen Gerda and that little girl, Hannes Staggl's face had turned the color of the geraniums on the balcony beneath which he was passing, and he'd already walked away. The young woman at his arm, elegant and slim, in a coat that Audrey Hepburn could have worn, asked, “Who was that woman?”

“What woman?”

“The one with the little girl.”

“I didn't see a little girl,” Hannes replied to his fiancée.

 

3:45
A.M.

At 3:45
A.M
., while patrolling the guard stations, I was reaching station 6 North-West, which was assigned, as per—

The pen wasn't writing anymore. The ink must have dried up. He slipped it under his clothes, under his armpit, like a thermometer. It would take a couple of minutes to warm up enough to write again. He struggled to move his fingers despite the woolen gloves.

The staff sergeant had decided not to add wood to the stove. There was only a small heap piled up against the wall of the old finance police hut. Also, he would make too much noise going out and coming back in and he didn't want to deprive those asleep of even just one minute of the remaining fifteen minutes' sleep before the change of guard. Still, it was bitterly cold. The kind of cold you just can't imagine unless you've known it. How can you convey this kind of cold to someone from Reggio Calabria?

He'd tried to describe it the first time he'd been back home on leave (forty-eight hours on the train there and back, seventy-two with his family): “You feel your fingers, your feet, and your nose burning, not from the heat but from the cold.”

“Burning?” his mother had repeated, perplexed.

It was pointless. The cold up there was like the sea, you couldn't describe it to someone who'd never been there. The night before, the thermometer had plummeted to minus twenty-three Celsius. But the worst time wasn't at night. Even then, with the wind hitting your face like a spiked shoe, and homesickness which always grows stronger in the dark, night time wasn't all that bad, with those stars as pure as gemstones and that all-enveloping silence like the dome of a basilica. It was dawn that was ugly, with its promise of sun and heat, which it betrayed with that humid, gray light that made your bones stiffen worse than before. It was horrible to force a nineteen-year-old auxiliary, grown incapable of thinking through solitude, to wash his face.

He was a non-commissioned officer, he'd gone to school and was prepared. But these conscripted boys who were born in Salemi, Sibari or Bisceglie, they just couldn't cope with being at 2,000 meters without going down into the valley for months on end.