In this half-sleep I see myself as a little girl. I’m about to fall asleep in the furnished room where I lived with my mother during the low season. There’s an Italian Eurostar train standing still next to the bed she and I share. There are passengers looking at me through the windows. They have the expression of people who have already spent a long time staring at the passing panorama: a neutral expression untouched by the landscape rushing past them for hours. Some don’t even look up from the newspapers they’re reading. Only then do I realize something: they’re all men. And I notice that, lying next to me, there’s my mother Gerda as a young woman. She is supporting her head with her hand, her elbow digging into the mattress, her heavy, full breast falling on one side of her slip. She’s more beautiful than I will ever be. The train conductor whistles, the fast train starts again and crosses our room like a station. A man strains his neck so he can see the bed from his window for as long as he can. She puts a finger to her mouth and, addressing the train, murmurs suggestively, “Eva is asleep . . . ”
“No, she’s not!” Vito’s cheerful, musical voice breaks in. “My Sisiduzza is still awake.”
He appears next to me, with his laughing, loving eyes. To fall asleep more easily, I hold his hand tight. However, the Eurostar passes next to the head of the bed and wakes me up completely with its loud rattle . . .
An insistent metallic din wakes me up. The ladder the Neapolitan couchette attendant has taught me to use as an anti-burglar device is rattling against the handle next to my head.
“We arrive in Rome in twenty minutes!” says a male voice from the corridor.
I have no recollection of Florence Station, I must have dozed off in the Apennines. My eyes are puffy and my hands are clumsy from waking up suddenly; only after messing about and knocking metal do I manage to free myself from the prison of the anti-burglar ladder. Even before I open the door completely I can smell coffee. The couchette attendant hands me a plastic cup with a contrite air.
“It’s cold. I’ll make you another one . . . ”
“Oh, no, please don’t worry . . . ” I reply, taking it.
He also gives me a sachet of sugar and the little white plastic spatula that acts as a spoon.
“Thank you . . . ”
I drink the coffee in one sip and wipe my lips with my wrist. “The same gesture as your mother,” Ulli once said to me and once again I promised myself from then on to use my fingers, like everybody else, except that I never remember until it’s too late.
I stare at the Neapolitan couchette attendant with my hands still in front of my mouth, like a Muslim veil.
He’s also looking at me, with a serious expression. His forehead is a little low but he has the wavy mouth of the Southern seas. I also notice his neck, which emerges decisively from the light blue uniform shirt, his shoulders broad, just as I like them, the skillful hands of a man familiar with engines, minor home repairs and a woman’s body. I’m a lot taller than him. Neither of us has looked away from the other one yet. His eyes have clouded over as though with a sudden sadness. Or is it desire? My breathing has gotten deeper, and so has his.
And I find myself thinking: I’ve been faithful for eleven years—not to Carlo but to his wife. So why not betray her with an attentive couchette attendant who hasn’t taken advantage of the situation and is ready to make me another coffee if this one gets cold?
“Thank you . . . ” I say, returning the empty cup. He takes it, careful not to brush my fingers. I’m about to go back into my compartment. “I’m going to tidy myself up.”
“You don’t need to.” His beautiful, pearl-fisher mouth hints at a smile.
“Thank you,” I say for the third time and close the door behind me.
The train is already running next to the fork in the motorway past the Fiano Romano signal box. It’ll soon go past the ring road and we’ll be in Rome.
It’s six-thirty in the morning when we arrive at Rome Tiburtina, but it hasn’t been daylight for long: it’s already daylight saving time so the sun rises late. A middle-aged woman is watching our train as it stops at the platform. She has two commas of silvery eyeshadow beneath her plucked eyebrows, a purple coat that opens on a black sheath dress too short for her age, and gold leather shoes. She looks like the survivor of a night that has fallen short of her expectations. Behind her, there is a plaque on the wall commemorating the passage of armored trains carrying the Roman Jews rounded up in 1943. In order to send them to Auschwitz, the Nazis made them go up Italy along the same rail track I have just travelled on.
The couchette attendant brings my suitcase down from the train. He hops off the footboard with an agility that betrays his youth. However, he’s all grown-up and earnest as he holds out his hand.
“My name’s Nino.”
“I’m Eva,” I reply, shaking his hand.
“A beautiful name, almost like you . . . ”
Driving my trolley suitcase, I walk away cheerfully: nothing puts a spring in a woman’s step more than a compliment. Something my mother knows very well.
1963 -1964
The pact between Frau Mayer and Herr Neumann was clear. If he really wanted to have back in his kitchen that assistant cook who’d gotten herself in trouble and whose trouble, as it happened, was already two months old, with fat pink cheeks and her mother’s transparent eyes, then she wouldn’t stop him. For years, the chef had filled her esteemed guests’ bellies with Tyrolean specialties which, if they were not fancy then at least were perfectly produced, and thus contributed to their return season after season. So now she had no plan to deny him this favor.
Frau Mayer was a woman of about fifty who could have been described (and, in fact, was at one time described) as a “classical Aryan beauty”: slim, with athletic legs, a bosom not large but emphasized by the low-cut bodice of the dirndl and a thick blond plait twisted around her head from which no one had ever seen a hair stray. She spoke good Italian with an almost elegant turn of phrase, being a former pupil of a Fascist period school, but it was when she spoke Hochdeutsch with tourists that she revealed her deep love of correct language.
Everything about Frau Mayer was controlled, except for her blue-green eyes. Frightening yet beautiful, they suggested that, instead of spending her life bestowing dignified smiles upon her guests, she could just as well have lived a life of wild excess. It wasn’t impossible to picture her as a temptress in a Kabarett who drives men to the brink of suicide, a barbarian female warrior with dragon blood on her dagger, a prophesying poetess in touch with the underworld.
Perhaps it was that talent for the absolute which shone from her eyes that had led Frau Mayer to give up the chance of a family and devote herself to the well-being of her guests like the worship of one god. Despite the large number of staff upstairs, in the dining room, and in the kitchen, not a single detail of the hotel management escaped her. The correct plumping up of the goose feather pillows in the birch bedrooms; the supply of sacks of sawdust to throw on the kitchen floor; the decorations made of dried flowers and the threads of plaited hay that embellished the dining room; the boiler repairs: everything had to be approved by her. Even the choice of music played by the small orchestra on the terrace during warm summer evenings relied on her taste, which was based on a very simple premise: always—always—favor sad love songs! Those guests who were lonely and melancholic would feel understood and in harmony with the atmosphere, those happily accompanied would generously take part in the wide range of human emotions, and everybody would have more drinks.
The only detail that sometimes escaped her control was death. Almost all her guests were there because of the town’s spa, whose waters were renowned for being beneficial to a wide spectrum of ailments. Therefore, many of them were of an advanced age and unfortunately this carried a corollary: every so often, they died. Moreover, with little consideration for Frau Mayer, sometimes they even did so in the rooms of her hotel.
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br /> Frau Mayer didn’t think of herself but rather of her guests (the live ones, that is). For them, witnessing the transfer of the dead body of someone their age just as they were searching for relief from their own ailments wouldn’t have been pleasant. For that reason Frau Mayer had agreed on a special service with the local undertaker. The corpses were not taken away in traditional coffins but in single-door wardrobes made of good, ancient walnut, thus giving the impression of a house move rather than a funeral. So the only guest whose holiday was disturbed was the one who—peace be with him—would not be having any more of them.
The Mayer family had owned the hotel ever since the noble families of Felix Austria would come to take the waters here, in this southern outpost of the Empire, where the sun shines for two thirds of the year. The Kaiser, coming down to Tyrol in person to check on the emplacements of the Great War, had spent the night here. Frau Mayer retained a vague impression of an imperial hand, gloved and splendid, being placed on her blond curls. Was it an actual memory or a story someone had told her when she was three, and which had been repeated countless times? She didn’t wish to know with certainty.
The hotel was destined for the eldest son, while Irmgard, the third of six children and the only girl, would give up any claim on her father’s estate by getting married. History, however, had not treated the Mayer family plans with much consideration.
Julius, the eldest brother, had died in Montenegro as early as the first year of the second world massacre.
Karl, the second son, had been captured near El Alamein and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp in Texas. There, although he had never had any Nazi sympathies, he had refused to renege on his oath of loyalty to the general staff of the Wehrmacht, something required by the Americans of German officers in order to free them. He returned home almost three years after the end of the war, gravely ill. His fellow townsfolk shunned him as an ex-Nazi—especially those who really had worn the brown uniform of the SS. He passed away shortly afterwards because of “general deterioration” as the family doctor wrote on the death certificate.
Anton, the fourth son, who at the age of twenty had gone to seek his fortune in Brazil in the 1930s, had found it in a coffee fazenda, a mulatto wife, many lovers of various ethnicities, and a dozen children. That he would come back and manage the family hotel was out of the question.
Stefan, the fifth son, had died at the age of three in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919.
Josef, the youngest, had been hit right in the forehead by a Russian sniper at Kalitva, on the loop of the river Don, south-east of Stalingrad, in 1943.
There was only she, little Irmgard, left to help the parents broken by grief. The profession of faith to the god of hotel hospitality, which marked Frau Mayer’s entire life, was, in other words, the result of a dynastic accident.
The only employee who dared escape Frau Mayer’s total control was Herr Neumann. It was he who made up the menu every day, who decided on the orders of the raw materials and who paid the suppliers. It was he who managed the kitchen personnel. This exception had been agreed on by Herr Neumann and Frau Mayer ever since he had first been employed, just a few years after the end of the war.
“Chef means boss, you don’t need to speak French to know that. You tell me how much I can spend and I’ll make sure the dishes reach the dining room. If the guests are unhappy you can fire me. But you can’t tell me what to do. I’m not working in a kitchen where I’m not the one in charge. Take it or leave it.”
Frau Mayer had taken it and had had no regrets for almost twenty years.
Now that Herr Neumann was asking her to employ Gerda again, she had no reason to refuse. Of course, even she could see that she was a beautiful girl and her suspicion that this somehow accounted for Herr Neumann’s stubbornness did not make her happy. However, she dismissed the thought: the chef had never tolerated anyone who didn’t work hard in his kitchen and, until her belly had started knocking against the food counters, Gerda had been no exception. Besides, there wasn’t exactly an abundance of good assistant cooks around to whom you didn’t always have to explain everything, and that also had to be taken into account. However, she laid out very clear conditions: the baby was not to be seen or heard. And the possibility that she could disturb guests in the dining room wasn’t even worth mentioning. No point in considering the inadmissible.
The day she returned to the kitchen, Gerda took an apple crate made of compact smooth wood and no prickles. She lined it with cushions and towels, placed it in a corner where it wouldn’t be in the way, and put Eva inside it. Then she went back to work at Herr Neumann’s side as though she’d never been away.
Even now that Gerda had gotten herself into the kind of mess that perfectly defines the Matratze—getting herself pregnant without making a man marry her—none of the other scullery boys, or assistant cooks, or waiters showed her disrespect. Perhaps it was Eva, in her apple crate in a corner of the kitchen, who made that impossible. Her presence diverted attention from the activity that is the usual subject of coarse jokes to what the aforementioned activity can produce: irresistible, pink, chubby babies. Nobody made any comments even when, several times a day, Gerda would untie her apron and, without taking it off, turn it to one side, unbutton her blouse and give Eva her breast. Of course, everybody looked. Waiters looked, while passing through the kitchen, shouting, “Spinatspatzlan, neu!.” Cooks looked, while frying, stirring and tasting. Elmar looked, while dropping leftover food from plates into the garbage buckets. That white roundness with blue veins and a dark nipple that glistened with milk that would appear and disappear into the little mouth was the focus of all the eyes in the kitchen. While in the sudden silence all that could be heard was the powerful sucking and clicking of the baby feeding, everybody contemplated, speechless, that part of Gerda about which they had always fantasized but which, now that it was performing its primary task, silenced them.
However, there were also difficult hours. When bitterness gained a specific flavor through the incessant rhythm of the daily actions and tasks, just as the bitter taste of radicchio suddenly explodes in your mouth after hiding among the other ingredients of a salad.
In the evening, before going to sleep, Gerda would give Eva her breast one last time in her bed in the attic dormitory she shared with the rest of the female staff. The little one suckled expertly, then both would fall into a deep sleep, the daughter huddled in the crook of her mother’s arm, both enveloped by the smell of milk and diapers. On the first night they were back at the hotel, Eva woke up after just a few hours and began searching for the breast. Gerda’s fingers, numbed by sleep, took a long time to unbutton her nightgown. At first, Eva emitted breathless little moans, then cried increasingly loudly. Protestations, huffs and half-accusations rose from the beds of her dormitory fellow-occupants, which ceased only when Eva found the nipple and quieted down.
The following night, Gerda gave her the breast straightaway to prevent any protest. However, after the feed, Eva began to cry. Gerda lifted the baby from the bed and started walking up and down the dormitory, patting her on the back with the palm of her hand, as the Star of Goodness had taught her. Once again, sleepy voices commanded silence. Gerda was able to go back to bed only when a nice big curdled-milk-smelling burp put an end to Eva’s crying.
There was a repeat of this for a few nights, always in the darkest hours before dawn, when anyone waking up has to fight their own ghosts before they can fall asleep again, and doesn’t necessarily succeed. After a week, her roommates gave Gerda a brief, not impolite but direct speech: if she wanted to carry on sleeping there with her daughter, she couldn’t disturb their sleep anymore.
Gerda could understand them. Like them, she knew the tiredness at the end of the working day, limbs hard as stone, joints on fire, a foggy brain: only sleep can, at least in part, make the idea of starting all over again the next day bearable. The protests were fair: you can’t run around all
day from the dining room to the kitchen, your arms loaded with plates, or tidy up dozens of rooms and leave them as new even if they’ve been used by vandals, or wash the floors of a four-story hotel as well as an outbuilding, if you haven’t had enough sleep. Nor could you stir, slice and cook in the overheated kitchen, for that matter, but that baby was her daughter, not theirs. It was therefore her problem. They made a deal: Gerda could stay in the room until the feed before dawn. Then she’d have to go out.
For weeks, Gerda spent the final hours of the night strolling in the corridor with her baby on her neck. Exhaustion and fatigue separated her from the rest of the world like the walls of a prison: she couldn’t imagine ever escaping. Sometimes she fell asleep on the very steps from which, a few months earlier, she had thrown herself precisely so she wouldn’t have to hold a fatherless child in her arms. But Eva was here now, and would let her little blond head down on her shoulder, in a pose of total trust. Gerda had never felt so alone.
Sometimes, during the day, she would fall asleep for an instant while standing at the work table or between steps as she went to fetch ingredients from the store room. Once, she was suddenly overwhelmed by sleep while inside the meat freezer. She had put on the heavy, coarse wool greatcoat, and couldn’t resist lying down on the ground among the quarters of beef and the kid halves covered in brine. If Herr Neumann hadn’t come down immediately after her to fetch a turkey for roasting, she would have frozen to death.
That day Nina, the waitress from Egna, offered to mind the little girl during the Zimmerstunde.
“It won’t do you any harm to get a couple of hours’ sleep,” she said, taking Eva from her arms. Gerda looked into her disillusioned eyes that were too close together. She felt gratitude take over her body, like wind before a storm, and she burst into tears. She calmed down only when she was in her bed. However, sleep was waiting to ambush her and grabbed her suddenly, the way you capture a prisoner.
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