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.
In a few minutes time we’ll be in Val Padana. Aussi. I’m coming out.
1962 - 1963
Paul Staggl was a businessman, so it was important for him to have his finger on the pulse of the world. He read Dolomiten but also Süddeutsche Zeitung and Corriere della Sera. When people talked about his homeland, more often than not, they did so in terms of “the South Tyrolean issue,” “attacks,” “bombs,” and he didn’t like that. It was not a good thing that Italians heard so much about Alto Adige in this worst possible light. In addition to his other worries, the winter didn’t look promising: it was already late December and there had been very little snow. Now that the new cable car had been inaugurated, the pistes were full of stones and desolate patches of brown. For some time now Paul had been thinking about the possibility of pistes that were no longer dependent on snowfall. He’d heard of Swiss research on the creation of artificial snow but the technique was still in its early stages and the results had been disappointing. However, Paul’s belief in technology was equaled only by his belief in himself. The matter was still futuristic and experimental but, of this he was certain, it was the future.
Paul also knew all about that girl his Trottel of a son was fooling around with. The cable car workers had told him and it all was very clear to him. Of everyone in the valley, Gerda’s father was the last man Paul wanted to be related to. Not because Hermann was a Rückkehrer, a Shanghai resident, or because his terrible temper had now turned him, even though he wasn’t even sixty yet, into one of the many characters in provincial towns: Hermann, the abrupt, silent type, the one you couldn’t get a smile out of even if you paid him. (Once, at the tavern Stammtisch, as a bet, a joker had offered him a nice little sum of money if he would only lift the corners of his mouth, but no one could tell if Hermann was offended by that or not: the dark, universally disgusted expression with which he had reacted was his usual one.) No, Hermann’s only true fault was to have been Paul’s schoolmate at a time when the land on the steep, north facing side, hadn’t yet become synonymous with skiing slopes, tourists cable cars, wealth—just with abject poverty.
Paul decided that his son’s professional training had been delayed enough. He sent him on a
long educational tour of Engandin, Carinzia, Bavaria, and even Colorado: it had become imperative for him to study the management models of the most reputable ski resorts. Gerda never found out what Hannes thought of all this. When she called him from the hotel to tell him about her pregnancy, he had already gone. His father’s polite voice advised her to call back after at least six months.
Gerda spent a few days in a state of shock. It’s not that she became inattentive in her work. She cleaned, cut, sliced, beat, grated, kneaded, stirred, whipped and chopped as she had always done. She was no less careful than usual. She didn’t burn the sauces, overcook the pasta, didn’t slice julienne-style the vegetables she was supposed to slice à la brunoise, or vice-versa. As usual, she left her workstation clean and tidy at the end of the day, which is something that couldn’t be said of her male colleagues. She had convinced herself that if she ignored what had happened to her, it would go away without a trace, just as you ignored a burn caused by a splash of boiling oil and it left a small scar. Nevertheless, persevering in her belief required an effort of concentration, so she had to eliminate any superfluous mental activity: talking to other assistant cooks, saying hello, responding to non-essential requests.
Even so, despite the intensity, the determination of her belief, her already full breasts were growing and swelling under her apron. It was as though she didn’t just have one pregnancy, and not just in her belly that was still flat, but also in each of her breasts.
More than once a day, especially in the morning, she had to run and vomit in the staff bathroom. She would return to the kitchen with blue shadows under her eyes, pale lips, her cheeks still moist from the icy water she had splashed herself with, and resume her work with a neutral expression. Her silence stopped any comments or nosy looks on the part of scullery boys, cooks and waiters. And yet despite all this self-discipline and determination to deny reality, Hannes didn’t call to tell her that he loved her and would marry her soon, nor did her pregnancy vanish. Gerda realized that cultivating the certainty that it would go away was no longer enough.
One evening, at the end of the shift, when even Elmar, the scullery boy, had gone to sleep, and the guests of the large hotel were having their nightcap on the terrace overlooking the mountains, Gerda went from the deserted kitchen to the vegetable store room. There were crates of Rovigo asparagus, Treviso radicchio, and lettuce from local peasants, all lined up methodically so the contents wouldn’t get bruised. Gerda reached out for a bunch of green leaves in the corner reserved for aromatic herbs. It wasn’t chives, sage or even marjoram. She took a whole handful, then another, until her arms were full and carried it up to the kitchen. She put it on the board and started eating one leaf after another. Her lips turned green, the leaves got stuck in her teeth, but she kept tearing more from the slender twigs and stuffing them in her mouth, chewing like one of the cows she used to look after during those distant, happy summers. Soon, there was a halo around her mouth, and she wiped it with the same gesture of the wrist her father used when wiping his lips after drinking milk as a child. Except that her mustache wasn’t ivory but green, just like the leaves which, twig after twig, one handful after another, she chewed and swallowed.
Elmar, the scullery boy, returned to the kitchen. As he often did, he was coming to steal a drop of brandy or marsala or any other liquor from the spice and seasoning shelf. He looked at her, guilty at first then puzzled, his face too long between the protruding ears, like an eggplant.
“Wos tuaschn?”
“I’m making green sauce,” Gerda said, her lips appropriately green. The absurdity of her lie didn’t make her cast down her eyes and in the end, as usual, it was Elmar who had to look down.
At night, lying in her cot in the large attic where she slept with the rest of the female staff, Gerda held onto her stomach, suffering terrible pain. She got a fever, diarrhoea, vomiting, then a couple of uterine contractions which gave her great hope. But nothing else.
The parsley didn’t work, so Gerda tried with the pine wood stairs. They led to the attic where she slept, the only non-refurbished part of the hotel, unchanged from the time when this was still the southern stretch of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Viennese middle classes would come and spend the winter.
To avoid cushioning the blows, Gerda kept her legs straight. She would push herself off with her elbows and throw herself down the stairs, hitting every step, which meant fifteen hard knocks. Knocks to her hips, which was fine, but also to her ribs and shoulders which was useless, however. When she reached the bottom, for a few moments light and dark would swap places: the lights that coming in from the narrow window would become black and sticky like tar, while the shadows would light up with a supernatural glow. Then, she would stagger back upstairs.
There were fifteen steep, narrow steps made of pine wood time had turned gray, slumping in the middle after centuries of use. The ridges and depressions of the grain were in relief and the knots were like dark, oblong spirals, like miniature galaxies. But Gerda wasn’t admiring the perfection of the old wood: she would climb back up to the top, sit and throw herself down again.
She hurled herself down the stairs twice, five, ten times. Twenty times. She lost count. Her coccyx hit the steps with a nice full sound, like a musical instrument: the stairs were like a xylophone and she, the mallet. After a while she thought she would go on like this forever: throwing herself down these steps all her life, then go back up with more and more bruises, to play that rhythmic composition of wood, anger and determination, hollow, without thought, simple, almost pleasant. At the bottom of the stairs, sprawled on the ground like a disjointed puppet, Gerda closed her eyes. The shadows were throbbing, fluorescent, and there was almost no light anymore. On all fours, she climbed the stairs again.
To Eva, a tiny little lump, the knocks were cushioned: out there, things had boundaries that could hit one another, slam into one other violently, and get hurt. But that couldn’t happen to her. Those knocks were no more than little waves in the boundless ocean that contained her.
Finally, Gerda lay almost unconscious at the bottom of the stairs. She looked up. Outside the narrow attic window, clouds were rushing over the mountains: tall, incessant, implacable. She stared at them for a long time without focusing. The dark shadows of the nimbus clouds brushed the wooded slopes and pasture against the grain, scraped the bare rocks of the crags, and she thought she heard the rustling sound of this outsized caress. She remained like that for a long time, her body aching, her mind a blank. Then she slowly got up. Supporting herself against the wall she went down the corridor to the staff sleeping quarters that gave on to the narrow corridor.
She had failed.
Eva’s eyes were just two dark bulbs, huge compared to the rest of her body. They had no eyelids or lashes, and still couldn’t close. But Eva slept the sleep of fetuses, that of creature and creator joined as one, the sleep of a god who dreams the beginning of time: his own.
KILOMETERS 230-295
Fifteen minutes’ walk from my nice, elegant apartment, as you leave the Medieval city, following an ascending path, you get to a wide clearing where corn and potatoes grow. In the middle of the field there’s a small chapel. From there, the slopes of our valley open up and the sky grows very broad. People come and sit on the bench along the low wall of the little church, and enjoy the sunset and the view over the glaciers.
My mother used to bring me here on her visits when I was a child. I didn’t dare tell her that I would have preferred to spend my precious time with her going to the pond on the other side of the fields, and giving pieces of dry bread to the ducks who had hard, voracious beaks; or else slipping between the bushes along the path and picking raspberries until our faces and fingers were red, and perhaps even taking some back home in a glass jar. I didn’t say a word about my wishes, and would run after her with my short legs, clutching her hand. All I had to do was feel how tight she held my hand to realize that she w
as distracted and wasn’t thinking about me—and yet her hand was always wrapped around my fingers.
It was only a few months ago, coming back from a weekend in Paris, that I realized where she had taken me during all those years. Countless times, even as an adult, I have sat on that bench, looking at the sky, gone into that chapel, and looked up at the fresco decorating the small apse. Staring into space, Mary is about to tread on a little dog who, poor thing, is standing up on its hind legs, trying to show affection. I’ve never paid attention to the sign the Tourist Board put outside the chapel a few years ago but that day, for some reason, as I was reading it, that my mother must have always known the story of that chapel, just as she had known, ever since she was a child, the story about the bearded female saint in the little church among the masi where I grew up.
The chapel was built by a local nobleman who had led a dissolute life as a young man. He was punished, after a marriage that sanctioned his return to sobriety, with the birth of a son with the body of a dog (the sign states as fact the direct relation between his previous depraved behavior and the monster: “and so a son was born that . . . ”). The man made a vow to the Blessed Virgin that he would build a chapel in her honor if she would show him the grace of making the child die. Judging from the fresco of the poor little dog about to be squashed by Mary, the nobleman’s prayers to the Virgin were granted. In fact, the sign above the altar, in high German, says: IN PRAISE OF GOD AND WITH CHRISTIAN THOUGHTS THIS CHAPEL WAS BUILT IN 1682 A.D. As I was reading it, I thought: my mother would never have done that. Even if she had had the necessary means to make a vow of an entire chapel, she would never have asked for my death.
Eva Sleeps Page 9