For over twenty years, the janitor nun had been watching lonely, depressed young women crowding the dormitories, clinging to their children like buoys after they’d seen their lives sink before their very eyes. Every so often, the very men who hadn’t married them would turn up at the iron gates: boys with a shudder of regret or other women’s husbands who, after all, felt affection for the mothers of their bastards. They were all so universally inadequate to the drama being lived by the women they had made pregnant that the porter nun couldn’t bring herself to cast too severe a judgment upon those failed fathers. To her they looked like spoiled children unequipped to understand the harsh destiny awaiting their lovers. They would insist that the nun deliver cheap jewelry to girls who, instead, had to be watched so they wouldn’t commit suicide; they would propose romantic trips to remote little hotels, taking advantage of wives who were conveniently away, to women who were suffering from mastitis because they had just given their newborn up for adoption. And these weren’t the worst ones: they, at least, got in contact. They’d peep through the gates, looking awkward, wearing their best suits; the janitor nun knew they would have given anything to obtain from her a word or a look that would state that their choice not to acknowledge those children and marry their mothers was inevitable, understandable and right. The more of these men she saw, the less she understood what was so attractive about them as to lead these women to such disasters. It was a mystery to her, and meeting Hannes Staggl certainly did not shed any more light on the question.
When she pulled the heavy wrought iron bolt she noticed the cream-colored Mercedes 190 outside the institute gates. The janitor nun saw a large white bird on the chrome mudguards: her own reflection. It’s only when she looked up that she noticed Hannes. He was behind the car: standing in the middle of the empty road, he was looking at the windows beyond the top of the surrounding wall. The nuns were not so naive as to lodge the girls in rooms overlooking the street, or they would have spent entire days checking for themselves whether the miracle that would save them was coming. The windows through which Hannes was trying to catch a glimpse of the girl he had gotten pregnant belonged to the staff.
She was struck by the young man’s almost orange hair, his transparent skin and freckled hands. Hannes asked after Gerda Huber and the child she had given birth to, and the janitor nun found herself breathing a sigh of relief. She’d seen too many bastards forever condemned to carry around the faces of the fathers who’d abandoned them. Luckily for her, Gerda’s daughter looked entirely like her mother.
“It’s a girl. She’s healthy. Her mom is well too.”
He started blinking with those opalescent eyelids: the word “mom” had struck him with the force of reality.
“What’s her name?”
“Eva.”
He looked at the Mercedes for a moment. “It’s a beautiful name.”
“Yes, it’s beautiful.”
Again Hannes raised his eyes to the windows of the building, and squinted. Was it to glimpse the interior beyond the sky on the glass panes, to stall, to get used to this beautiful name?
Here we go, the janitor nun thought, he’s about to ask. He is not holding packages or flowers but it’s a rich man’s car and when a girl ends up here because of a man with money there’s not much point in fooling oneself.
“Can I see her? The little girl.”
The janitor nun tucked her chin into her throat and looked at him from below. “Yes, if you give her your surname.”
He lowered his eyes to his well-made shoes. He remained like this for a long time. The hazel irises of the janitor nun had lost their definition with age and blended into the cornea with the gray halo; but her pupils were still clear and black. Her expression was not severe but rather objective, patient, resigned; it did not express condemnation, but not his yearned-for absolution either. She knew he would leave without a word, his head down so as to avoid seeing the windows behind which he thought there was the daughter he did not acknowledge whereas, instead, there was the bursar nun examining the invoices of the suppliers, and the cook deciding on the dinner menu.
As the Mercedes vanished beyond the crossroads, the janitor nun wondered once again what the pleasure was that made all this worthwhile. She really couldn’t imagine it.
Gerda was informed, however, of the other visit she received.
When the janitor nun opened the bolt and found Herr Neumann standing before her, what she noticed were the puffy eyelids, the large belly that pushed against the buttons of his cloth jacket, and especially his age. She felt relief that the blond, solid girl who said little but was so helpful in the kitchen and whose gait everyone found attractive, even the nun, hadn’t been made pregnant by this man. Then Herr Neumann explained that he only wanted one thing from Gerda: that she should come back to work. Nobody would say anything offensive to her about what had happened, he guaranteed it. The janitor nun was sorry for having misjudged this generous man from his exterior look. As if the hairs on her chin truly revealed who she was! She mentally slapped her fingers and ordered herself to report her superficial arrogance to the father confessor.
When Gerda came out of the building, Herr Neumann’s breath caught in his chest and the buttons of his cloth jacket nearly exploded because of this extra pressure. Never in his life had he seen a more beautiful woman. It’s what he had thought the first time Gerda had walked into his kitchen wearing the scullery maid apron, but he never thought of it again in order not to make working next to her unbearable. Herr Neumann had been not unhappily married for almost thirty years, had grown children who had already made him a grandfather and, besides, he had promised to keep Gerda safe from insults. So he just said to her, “Gerda gibs lai oane”: there’s only one Gerda.
She packed her suitcase and got into the pistachio-green Fiat 1300 with the white top, for which Herr Neumann had already payed half the installments. Leaving the National Organization for Mothers and Children forever, Gerda took two things away with her: a five-month-old daughter who never cried, and significant progress in mastering the Italian language. One thing, though, she left behind: the certainty that absolute love existed and that she was destined for it.
Once the Fiat 1300 vanished at the crossroads, the nuns, the Star of Goodness midwife, the Terrona nurse and the rest of the staff were on the sidewalk, saying goodbye, happy that Gerda—at least she—had somewhere to go. The following day, the janitor nun waited for her weekly interview with the spiritual father. She confessed all her sins. Then, with relief and regret, she handed the tweezers to the Mother Superior.
KILOMETERS 295-715
A year after the 1980 Bologna massacre, in the summer of my high school graduation, I was on my way to the Tremiti Islands with a school mate. I didn’t care for him but he fancied me so had persuaded his parents, rich shopkeepers in Bolzano, to pay for my travel and camping too. Until then I’d only ever seen the sea at Cesenatico, opposite the square buildings of the ex-Fascist colonies: the only travel agent my mother could afford was Caritas. Sea holidays for me meant the rancid smell of tomato sauce, the stench of too many badly washed children in a single dormitory, sand thrown into the eyes of the weaker children by older ones, abused by teachers angry with exhaustion.
It was before the days of the Italian Eurostar with compulsory bookings, and our carriage seemed full of war evacuees. Holiday makers going to the sea in August were bursting out of compartments as though from crammed cupboards that won’t close anymore, they sat on the foldaway corridor seats, on each other’s laps, on the floor, on the steps outside closed doors, inside the toilets (especially those traveling without a ticket, and there were quite a few of those). The boy ready to pay and I, like so many others, were overloaded with heavy backpacks made of thick, coarse fabric, with aluminum frames that were supposed to distribute the load on your back but just dug into your ribs. We smelled of feet, cannabis, strawberry-flavored Del Ponte chewing gum, an
d especially smoke: we always had a cigarette in our hand, you still could then. When we arrived at Bologna, our train stopped on the first platform and I saw right outside my window the tear in the wall, emphasized by the glass which even today commemorates the exact location of the explosion, and the clock fixed at that time: 10:25.
I grew up in the South Tyrol of bombs and attacks, and I was already old enough to have formed a definite opinion about Uncle Peter’s death; but even I, the child of a land of terrorists and roadblocks couldn’t—can’t—fully imagine the extent of the Bologna massacre. Eighty-five dead, hundreds of injured: a massacre that belonged to horror on a different scale. When the train started again, I tried talking about it with the boy. He didn’t reply, skated over the issue, and changed the subject as soon as he could, so that I had to keep my confused dismay to myself. I added this obvious lack of sensitivity to the many other factors indicating that he was unworthy of my love. The fact that he had paid for my trip didn’t seem relevant in evaluating the issue.
I spent the holidays allowing other people to come on to me before his eyes. In the evening, around the bonfire on the beach, I let other boys with sleeping bags or young residents of the island touch me, but then I always searched his eyes. He never protested. He paid for everything until the last day. It was only many years later, after I’d lost touch with him for a while, that I heard from mutual acquaintances that one of his relatives from Val Passiria had been among the Bologna dead. He had been very fond of her, they said.
Now, in the middle of the night on a train, we come into Bologna station. We’re at platform four and you can’t see the gutted wall from my window.
There is nobody beneath the drably-lit platform roofs. The loudspeaker announces the rare arrivals and departures like a voice in the desert: an invisible prophet with a thick Emilia accent. His hermitage isn’t made of mystical rocks but of marble benches, drink dispensers, tracks. His tiny community of followers is made up of me, the Neapolitan attendant, and the engine driver whose presence I’ve been sensing for hours as the train slowed and accelerated.
The prophet hurls his invectives at us: “The night InterCity train 780 ‘Freccia Salentina’ from Bari and bound for Milan Central, is about to depart from platform . . . ”
“The train 1940 ‘del Sole’ from Villa San Giovanni and bound for Turin Porta Nuova . . . ”
The train departs again while the voice carries on preaching in vain.
We exit the old-fashioned station light and dive once again into the darkness of the countryside, the great obscurity of natural night time which is neither hostile nor friendly, but simply different from us.
That’s exactly how it was when I kept Ulli company while he spent the whole night combing the ski pistes on Marlene, his snowcat that was more comfortable and personalized than a truck: the zebra seat upholstery, the heating turned up to maximum so you could sit in a T-shirt, the stereo light flickering to the rhythm of Queen or The Clash with dozens of luminous LEDs, still a novelty back then in the Eighties. Outside, the throbbing winter sky and the wind at 2,000 meters. And us going up and down the pistes, making the snow a perfect white velvet for the skiers, which the factory would churn out the following morning.
It was on one of those nights that Ulli told me he was no longer afraid of being a Schwul. He used that very word. Not gay or homosexuell, but the term used by pontificating retirees in the tavern Stammtisch, the one Ulli had heard uttered behind his back by his peers, by the neighbors’ children, by his younger brother Sigi, ever since, at the age of eleven, he no longer wanted to play football or ice hockey, but only spend time with me.
A month earlier, Ulli had been to London. There, his homosexuality hadn’t ensured him original status in the least. On the contrary, he’d been treated almost as someone quite ordinary. He’d liked that. It was also on one of those nights that I’d told him of my lightning marriage, celebrated and soon afterwards annulled, in Reno, to Lesley—or was it Wesley? I pretended not even to remember the name of that two-week husband. Naturally, Ulli didn’t buy it and laughed. Afterwards, however, he’d fallen silent and looked at me with that sad, tender expression he often had.
“I wonder what Vito would say.”
I sniffed hard. There we were again, Ulli and I, on the same wavelength. Every time it came as a surprise and yet it was almost taken for granted: at that moment I was also thinking about Vito. And yet he hadn’t been mentioned by anyone for years, either by Ulli or me. And especially not by my mother. What would that duty-bound Carabiniere from the South have said about me and that lightning marriage? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
To prevent the snowcat from overturning on the steep slope, a cable secured/hooked to its front was attached to a winch at the station above. It shone like a precious necklace in the headlights. I remained silent, watching it tighten.
I began telling Ulli about how I’d met his brother Sigi at the Altstadtfest11 wine bars the previous summer. Along with the stench of beer and Currywurst, these words had come out of his mouth: “If I ever read in the paper that you’ve ended up badly because of a man, I’ll be sorry but not surprised.”
Ulli had continued to maneuver Marlene in silence, staring at the cone of light from the headlights on the snow ahead of him. He had long-term experience of Sigi’s brutal and obscene way of speaking. Many times he’d asked me to help him understand just when exactly, and why, his little gentian-eyed brother, whose shoe laces he had tied for years, had turned out . . . like that. Now Ulli’s eyes suddenly opened wide as he turned to look at me. In the dim light of the cabin his eyes glowed with indignation. “He wants to fuck you! Even Sigi wants to fuck you!”
“Why are you so surprised?”
“I don’t want to fuck you.”
“You don’t count; you’re a Schwul.”
Ulli stopped the snowcat and jumped out, closing the door behind him. I was afraid I’d offended him, even though he’d used the word Schwul about himself earlier. But it wasn’t that. He was picking something up he’d seen in the snow. Lit up like a rock star in the middle of the huge stage of the entire mountain, Ulli lifted his arm to show me what he’d found: a strange pink animal with two heads, no body and a long string of a tail. Only when he came back into the cabin, bringing in with him the night frost, I saw what it was: a lace bra.
We spent the rest of the night up and down the mountain’s immensity inside our heated microcosm, wondering how it could have ended up there. During that harsh December which had made the stream in the middle of town freeze over, who—and especially why—had someone felt like peeling off, like an onion, the complex layers of ski wear in order to slip off the bra? And why on that particular track, the black slope where champions of the special slalom trained?
We talked about it all night without finding an explanation.
When I met Carlo, I decided for the first time in my life that I would be faithful to him. Carlo should never know that, of course, but it was a great relief to me, and still is, eleven years later. No one can deny that for me this was progress.
We’re now between Bologna and Florence. The darkness outside the window has lost the deep breath of the night sky, but is now black, narrow and noisy: we go in and out of tunnels beneath the Apennines, just as I go in and out of my thoughts. What would Vito have said about me? If he’d been there, he would have said . . .
But he wasn’t there.
Did he ever think about me? I’m sure he thought about my mother. Why didn’t he phone her?
Vito called me. And now it’s me rushing to him. Carlo knows nothing about Vito. I’ve never mentioned him. Realizing this is like one of the dams Ulli and I used to build as children: it stops the flow of my thoughts just as we would stop, albeit briefly, the streams. With splashes and hollow thuds, like a drum, we used to drop the largest stones we could find into the water: porphyry the color of black pudding, gray-green granite, sa
lmon-streaked pale dolomite, schist glowing like cat’s-eye. Our arms hurt from the effort and our hands, after soaking for hours, would become white and wrinkled like blind creatures from the abyss. When we managed to disrupt the water’s course, it would start flowing in strange ways: it would dig furrows through the emerald moss hairs on the shore, form unexpected bogs in the grass, and start spinning in whirls in front of certain streaked rocks which up to then we hadn’t considered as part of the stream but of the undergrowth. Still, it didn’t matter how tall the pebble barrier we built was, or how much moss and bark cement we used to plug all the leaks: in the end, and always, the water found its way.
I have never told Carlo about Vito.
That “never” is like a slab of rock thrown into the flow of my thoughts. They stop for a moment. When they start flowing again their nature is altered and they have become something halfway between sleep and waking, something different, just like the secret water of a bog is different than the fast and gurgling water of a stream.
Eva Sleeps Page 11