Eva Sleeps

by Francesca Melandri

  It was a mild day. It was mid-November but the sun was more like September and made people’s eyes glisten as they smiled and greeted one another, even strangers, even if they came from different valleys. Peter was right: this festivity in Castel Firmiano, Sigmundskron in German, was something that had never been equaled before in the whole of South Tyrol.

  There were banners, signs. On many of them, Gerda, read: Volk in Not, a nation in danger. The rally was surrounded by two rows of Carabinieri, black as tar, with red stripes down the legs, which made them look like strange insects, their hands on machine guns. They watched tensely as the crowd went up to the ruins of the castle. They were young, some very young. They were more afraid of all that crowd than the crowd was of them, and Gerda saw that as soon as she caught the eyes of one of them. He was only a little older than her: eighteen, nineteen at most. He kept his eyes on hers as though finding comfort in them. Gerda had already realized that “they” were not a part of that thing she and Peter and all the others belonged to. On the contrary they represented exactly the “danger” her “people” were in. However, the boy in uniform, with his hat lowered too far down on his forehead, kept looking at her as though clinging to the grace of that little girl with dress that was too tight, in order to be able to bear his fear more easily. Gerda couldn’t help but smile at him. The red handkerchief she was wearing around her neck got untied and fell to the ground. Instinctively, the Carabiniere made to bend down, and the hand that wasn’t on the machine gun reached out to pick up the handkerchief.

  The comrade in arms next to him turned abruptly and stared at him. He gave him a hard look, one that promised he would be reported to his superiors, or worse. The young Carabiniere’s smile stiffened into a mask tenser than before. He hesitated, then his trunk became rigid and straight again, and his hand returned parallel to his hip. Gerda looked away. She picked up the handkerchief by herself and carried on walking. Peter didn’t notice anything. The crowd was already pushing them ahead, to the top of the hill.

  Bunches of people were hanging from the trees. They were gathered in the castle clearing, on the high ground around, on the battlements of the dilapidated bastions. It looked to Gerda that this field of people had germinated from the soil like gigantic grass made of flesh, clothes, hats, faces: you couldn’t see the ground in between the people. Only on the overhanging rocks, from which the ruins sprang like fairytale excrescences, could you get a glimpse of the blood-red porphyry in between people’s bodies.

  There was a man on stage at the foot of the castle tower. Gerda couldn’t decide which looked more stripped of flesh—him or the crutches on which he was leaning. He wasn’t old, but he looked ill and very fragile. Gerda had seen many veterans who carried in their bodies the memory of the war that had ended just twelve years earlier: she immediately recognized the thinness of disabled people, those who had lost a leg, like this man who was now talking to the crowd, or a hand, or an arm. The part of them that no longer existed was in constant pain, which radiated and sucked the life out of what remained of the body, draining it like a vampire. The same man really looked as though he was prey to this phantom parasite: he spoke in a brooding, metallic voice that had nothing of the orator about it. Yet the crowd was listening to him in absolute silence. Only when he mentioned the then Minister of the Interior Tambroni did he have to interrupt his speech because of the hisses and boos. He did not lose his composure but waited, calmly, without betraying signs of impatience, and let the crowd boo the representative of the Italian government to its heart’s content.

  A minute passed. The catcalls continued.

  Two minutes. The soldiers and Carabinieri forming a cordon at the foot of the stage began to exchange looks, as though wondering if they should do something.

  Three minutes. The hissing directed at the government minister to whom they answered gave no sign of subsiding. Gerda picked a blade of grass, dusty and trampled on by the thousands of feet that had walked on it. She raised it to her lips which the same gesture John Gallagher, from Leeds, United Kingdom, had seen at the hut. She blew and produced a very high-pitched whistling sound. For the second and last time in her whole life, Peter turned to her and gave her a pleased smile.

  Four minutes. The hands of the younger Carabinieri were beginning to leave sweat halos on the machine gun handles. The man up on the stage calmly looked at the tens of thousands of people catcalling. He was in no rush to resume his speech. He was taking advantage of the interruption to calculate the turnout to the demonstration he had organized. He was pleased. There, before him, Silvius Magnano, on that 17 November 1957, at Castel Firmiano, there were at least thirty, forty thousand people. Seeing that the total population of South Tyrol was scarcely three hundred thousand, that meant at least one tenth, possibly more, was there. Like Gerda and Peter, they had left in the middle of the night on trucks, buses, cars, motorcycles, tractors. They came from the outskirts of Bolzano, Oltreadige, but also from valleys farther away: Ahrntal, Schlanders, Passeier, Martell, Gsies, Vinschgau. From places where, in dialect, you count oans, zwoa . . . and also those where you say aans, zwa . . . And so they continued to hiss and boo, as though they never wanted to stop.

  Five minutes. The Carabinieri looked at their superiors.

  The skinny man onstage caught his breath and opened his mouth as though to resume his speech. Silence returned at once.

  Silvius Magnago reminded the crowd of Canon Gamper di Bressanone. The clergyman, who had been persecuted by the Nazis, had launched an appeal a few months earlier: “Es ist ein Todesmarsch!” A death march was what South Tyrol was heading for, if things carried on like this: with forced immigration from Southern Italy, jobs being denied to the natives, the growing poverty and emigration. South Tyroleans would soon become a minority in their own land, before being finally swept out of History.

  What he would fight for, promised Magnago, the head of the Südtiroler Volkspartei, the German-speaking South Tyrolean party, was an autonomous province that wouldn’t be attached to another Italian-speaking province, like Trento. A true autonomy that would allow South Tyroleans to take back control of their own land.

  He ended his speech by shouting once, twice, many times: “Los von Trient!”—Away from Trento! Away from that region with an Italian majority where, once again, Germans were in a minority and unprotected. The crowd cheered, and seemed never to want to stop.

  Suddenly, the sound of a sheet being beaten came from the keep of the dilapidated tower. Everybody looked up. Two young men had penetrated the ruins and now, leaning out of one of the slits, had deployed a long, red and white flag. Displaying the Tyrolean flag was still forbidden by Italian law: one of the many Fascist laws no one had bothered to repeal. A small group of Carabinieri started to run toward the tower. Before they were arrested, the two young men began to shout, “Los von Rom!”

  Peter and the others, mainly young men, joined them. “Los von Rom!’ cried a small part of the crowd.

  In other words: No to the autonomy of politicians, of diplomacy, of compromise. It’s not enough just to leave Trento. Leave Rome. Leave Italy.

  Magnago pursed his lips as the activists were being taken away by the Carabinieri.

  Just over a year later, the monument to the Alpine troops in the town where the Hubers lived was targeted once more. This time, there was no red and white paint, no student-like provocations, but an explosive device blew up the pedestal. However, Wastl, little Johnny made of stone, was not destroyed: the charge was faulty.

  That day, Peter was in a nearby valley, helping his father with a load of timber. After a quarter of a century driving trucks, Hermann was starting to have back problems. His son’s help became necessary, even though that meant giving up the extra money Peter could have brought home from other work. In the evening, when they came back home, Johanna did not comment on what had happened to Wastl that morning. She felt sufficiently relieved that, this time, it hadn’t been her
son.

  One June day a couple of years later, a man from Merano came to see the Hubers. He was Daitsch but swore in Italian. All the South Tyroleans were now swearing in Italian everywhere, even in the privacy of their own homes. During Fascism, so many of them, like Hermann, had had to endure disapproval and even blows if ever they let exclamations slip in German dialect. So the entire population was therefore convinced that perhaps it would be better to swear in Italian even at home, just to get used to it. However, nobody can tell for sure if there wasn’t perhaps also the hope that the daitcher Gott, the German good Lord, might not be that well versed in foreign languages: perhaps He wouldn’t have entirely understood a walsche swear word, and would therefore have been less offended. Whichever way you decide to interpret this, the unanimous adoption of Italian swearing on the part of German speakers turned out to be, of all the Italianization imposed by Fascism, the only success story. But a lasting one.

  The man from Merano had come to tell Hermann that he wanted his younger daughter to work in the kitchens of a large hotel. Tourists had only recently started coming back to Alto Adige after the war, so anyone looking for a job could now find one in tourism’s new frontier: the Dolomite valleys. The large pre-war hotels in the health resorts in the Adige valley were therefore short on staff. The man was offering a good salary, free bed and board, and an apprenticeship in a steady profession: cooking.

  Maybe if Hermann hadn’t been a frightened little Knecht who wetted himself out of sadness; if he hadn’t spread excrement over the doors of the masi during the dark months of the Option; if he’d chosen a woman to marry out of love and not powerlessness; if he hadn’t done and seen things on the Eastern Front that nobody could talk about; in other words if Hermann hadn’t lost love a long time ago, too long ago, then maybe he would have taken into consideration the fact that the hard times were over, that his family was no longer grindingly poor, that his truck kept his children fed and clothed, nothing more than that, but at least that, and that everyone knew from many stories what awaited his daughter if she went (there was a reason they called young female cooks Matratzen: matresses).

  And he would have said to the man: Wort a mol, wait a moment. He would have said Des madl will i net weggian lossn, I am not letting this little girl go. Her cheeks are still round like a child’s but she already has a woman’s shape, and slender legs, she is beautiful, very beautiful, she is exactly like her grandmother, but she doesn’t know it yet so I have to protect her, which is something only I can do, and must do, as her father. I will take her to dance the polka at the Kirschta’ in the summer, to show all the young men how desirable she is but also how protective and careful her father is and that he will never allow anyone to hurt her. So, no, I will not let you take her to hotels for foreigners so she can be called a Matratze.

  Instead, Hermann said, “Passt.” All right.

  Gerda was sixteen. She left.

  The journey to the health resort wasn’t long but it was complicated. When she arrived at the train station in Bolzano, she was taken aback: she could hear only Italian spoken around her andcould see only dark complexions. This was, after all, the same city where, a few years ago, Peter had seen immigrants arrive from the South.

  She was supposed to catch the bus to Merano, but she couldn’t see any. There was a wide, tree-lined avenue in front of the stairs to the station. She went there clutching the ticket on which the man had written the name of the hotel where she was going. The flowers of the chestnut trees on the avenue gave off a powerful scent. The man from Merano had told her to walk halfway up then turn left. Gerda walked, uncertain, intoxicated by the scent of the clusters of flowers above her, clutching the handle of the small suitcase containing her few possessions. The bus station was there. Gerda approached the driver but didn’t dare ask him for information: she was embarrassed to speak Italian.

  “Schnell! Der Bus Richtung Meran fährt jetzt!”7 she heard a couple of elderly German tourists. She ran after them to a bus with the engine already started, and got on. She was lucky: just a few seconds later the driver closed the doors and drove off.

  KILOMETERS 0 – 35

  I call my mother and tell her that I’m not coming to Easter lunch. I won’t be eating the delicacies she and my Patin Ruthi have been preparing for the past week. She won’t be able to show me off in front of the tribe of relatives, or get the usual compliments on how beautiful and clever her daughter is, but such a shame she never married (I’m greatly relieved they now say “never” when they used to say “not yet”—turning forty brought with it that achievement).

  “I must go away,” I say to her, “it’s something urgent.”

  I’ve never missed a festive meal with her. Therefore, this exception can only be something important. As a matter of fact she doesn’t demand an explanation. She simply asks, “Do I know him?”

  Does she have any doubts that this urgency might not be connected with a man? No, none whatsoever.

  I look at the glaciers in the distance, or at least at what global warming has left of them.

  “You might do,” I say, and she doesn’t persist.

  It’s impossible to find a plane to Calabria the day before Easter. I call all the airlines, and then the airports of Bolzano, Verona, Venice, Milan, Munich, Innsbruck and Brescia. I try for hours on the Internet. Nothing. The first seat on a flight to Reggio Calabria is in three days’ time, after Easter Monday. That could be too late for Vito. There’s just one other option: a sleeper train to Roma Termini, and from there another train to Calabria. It will take a long time. Italy is a long country. And so, here I am on the local train that’s taking me to Fortezza/Franzenfeste. High up at the other end of the carriage, there’s a poster of the Deutsches Kultur-und Familienamt, the local government’s family and culture department for the German-speaking population—strictly distinct and separate from its Italian counterpart. It’s publicizing training courses for adults in the Bolzano area. There’s a picture of a man in blue overalls sitting in what we imagine is his workshop. He must be a mechanic, an electrician or a welder. With his large worker’s hands and the expression of an attentive child, he’s folding a pink sheet of paper carefully and turning it into a delicate origami.

  There’s a caption at the bottom of the picture: Wer Lebt, Lernt. Those who live, learn.

  Did I ever think about Vito while I was growing up? I’m not sure. He exited our lives so suddenly. So unexpectedly, at least for me. Not for my mother, of course, but no one explained anything to me. Vito left just when I was thinking that he would now always be part of my world, and we of his. I was his daughter now, and Gerda Huber his woman. He was there. Then, suddenly, he was gone.

  No, I haven’t thought of Vito very much.

  Fortezza/Franzenfeste is so narrow! The steep slopes of Val d’Isarco come so close together here that they barely leave room for the bottom of the valley, which they enclose like a bite. I always wonder how anyone can live here. What could the railroad men Mussolini brought here from Rovigo, Caserta, Bisceglie, Sulmona have thought when they saw that this valley is so narrow that to see the sky you don’t just have to look up but also bend your neck back? Rumor has it, when the Nazis were fleeing to Brenner, they hid the gold stolen from Italians in the dark fortress the town is named after, and, every so often, someone starts shifting a few stones and digging beneath the bastions. I suspect it’s just a legend invented to give a meaning, however absurd, to such a claustrophobic place.

  I’d better have dinner here. The connection to Bolzano is over an hour away.

  The pizza restaurant next to the station doesn’t seem to have updated its menu for twenty years: Knödel, Wiener Schnitzel, steak, salad, spaghetti with tomato or meat sauce. There’s nothing else. The pizzas, though, include the Hawaiian, with pineapple, and the Treasure Hunt (Schatzsuche): cherry tomatoes, anchovies and olives stuffed with capers. Could they be the treasure?

  As I ea
t a cutlet that’s not particularly tender, I look around. In the bar mirror opposite my table I can see my head against the light. I immediately look away, startled. High up among the bottles of liquor no one ever orders, I’ve seen three of those damned targets. I really hate them.

  They’re hand-painted wooden circles. At the center of two of them there’s a capercaillie holding a coat of arms in its beak, while on the third one there’s a pheasant. High up on the edge there’s a different date on each: 9/8/84, 12/5/88, 3/10/93. And three names: Kurt, Moritz, Lara. Dates of birth and names, just like those my uncle had written on the target dedicated to the newborn Ulli. Here too there are tiny holes in the center, in the picture of the animal. The owner of this restaurant is obviously a hunter, just like Peter, and like him, he and his friends celebrated his becoming a father by shooting (my God, shooting!) at the names of the newborn children. But he was a better shot than my uncle, or perhaps he had drunk less: because instead of the picture in the middle, Peter hit his own son’s name.

  The last time I saw it—that horrid target even Ulli had always hated—it was being lowered with him into his grave. It was easy to believe that being such a bad shot, his father, the uncle Peter I never knew, had riddled with bullets not just his son’s name, but also his life. Yes, I remember it now. That day I missed Vito terribly. The day Ulli’s coffin was lowered into the grave.

  “We’ve lost a friend, a wonderful person,” someone said to me. I was so angry I clenched my fists in my coat pockets. I hadn’t lost anyone! I hadn’t gone to the supermarket with Ulli and suddenly turned around and not found him like it happens with children. I hadn’t put him in a drawer and then couldn’t remember which one. I hadn’t left him on the bench like a newspaper or my cellphone. Or in somebody’s house, like an umbrella. Or on the train, like a suitcase. I hadn’t lost Ulli. Ulli had killed himself. And there were many people there who could have spared him a few reasons to do it. My anger rose and dropped like a wave, then all I felt was great tiredness. That’s when I missed Vito.