Eva Sleeps

by Francesca Melandri

  Ever since a grenade had torn off his leg, Silvius Magnago hadn’t slept well. The physical pain in the phantom limb had been his secret companion for over twenty years. Only to it did he feel he could reveal his true nature: his strength, his anger, his tenacity and despair, his resentment toward healthy people who don’t know what it is to live with the suffering of the flesh, but also his ability to focus on what’s essential. Ever since Magnago had received those pieces of rough toilet paper purloined from the jail in Bolzano, however, the pain in his leg seemed like nothing in comparison with his other pain: that of not having done anything for those who had placed their last hope in him.

  The clothes returned to the wives of those imprisoned after Feuernacht, some time after the arrests, were covered in blood, vomit and excrement. However, the Bumser of the BAS were, after all, simple men. In spite of everything, they trusted the fact that if the world had known about the inhuman treatment they were suffering in Bolzano prison, it would have done everything to save them. They’d done all they could to communicate information outside the prison about the torture they’d been subjected to. A few notes were intercepted and their senders punished, but others managed to evade censorship. The obvious addressee of their request to help had been him, Silvius Magnago, the most authoritative political voice in South Tyrol.

  Magnago had received those wretched pieces of paper in late 1961. And he, who knew physical pain only too well, had felt the spasms of lactic acid in arms kept raised for hours as if they’d been his own; the tissue torn by fists and the sinister clicking of shattered bones; the retching of incredulous horror of someone forced to eat his own excrement; the lungs bursting because your head is kept under water; the delirium of sleep deprivation. He’d read the notes almost without breathing. He’d wept in the silence of his pale, wood-paneled studio overlooking an exclusive Bolzano street. Episodes he’d witnessed as a young Gebirgsjägerleutnant12 at war had flashed before his eyes, images he’d hoped never to have to remember again. He’d directed his gaze outside the window, at his beloved chimonantus tree that was now bare; the yellow flowers that announced the spring with their scent of vanilla hadn’t blossomed yet. They couldn’t comfort him either.

  The Südtiroler Volkspartei, the party he led, couldn’t afford to be associated, even from a distance, with the Bumser. The process of acquiring true autonomy for South Tyrol was still too fragile. The biblical timing of politics, the dance of talks, of promises and threats on the part of a government that had denied the problem so long it had allowed it to fester, and was beginning to realize that a plan for this province was necessary only now that it had become a ticking bomb—all that had to be taken into account.

  Magnago had started to weave a fine and delicate canvas of negotiations and compromise in order to obtain that provincial autonomy (“Los von Trient!”) which alone could resolve the South Tyrol deadlock and prevent the worst possible scenario: an ethnic war. He knew very well that the strong German accent with which he spoke otherwiseimpeccable Italian convinced his Rome interlocutors a priori of his fundamental, encysted hatred toward them. He knew how much diplomacy, patience, and deliberate deafness to jokes was necessary even just to explain the starting point of the negotiations: South Tyroleans did not hate Italians but rather the colonization they had endured on the part of the Italian government. He knew that he couldn’t take the risk of being painted with the same brush as those who had resorted to bombs even simply against infrastructures.

  However, there was another reason for anxiety, which wasn’t linked to considerations of political opportunities but rather an existential one, in those little sheets of paper which were written on literally with the blood of tortured men. At his Bologna alma mater, from where he’d graduated in Law, Magnago had become convinced that only dialogue, the search for a compromise, the hard but honest meeting between positions, no matter how different, were tools superior to any—any—form of violence. Whoever gives up on verbal discussion and resorts to destructive action against people or things, no matter how justified the reason, automatically gets on the side of the wrong: that was Silvius Magnago’s one and only political creed. Never had he been seduced by any of the ideologies of this fire and arms century. He’d reached adulthood just before the start of the world massacre, and had seen only too clearly what is achieved when politics gives way to violence: a planet in flames. He felt in his own amputated flesh and the pain it radiated every second the duty to safeguard bodies, always. Not just the bodies of the people of his Heimatland, those who’d charged him with a mandate to represent them; but also the bodies of his opponents, of the ignorant politicians in Rome, even those of the administrators who from their positions of small, obtuse power made his people’s lives difficult. His duty was as follows: to separate, always, political struggle from physical destruction, even that of electricity pylons.

  He had carefully folded up the sheets of paper, placed them in an envelope, and put them where only he knew. Later on, people found out about the torture in Bolzano prison, but it wasn’t Silvius Magnago who reported it.

  In the two years that followed, two BAS men had died in prison from beatings and their consequences. Many had suffered permanent damage. Torture left the indelible mark of suffering on their bodies, just as the war had done on the body of Gebirgsjägerleutnant Magnago. The Carabinieri guilty of mistreatment were tried, and their defenders claimed that, to the contrary, the prisoners’ wounds were self-inflicted—despite dozens of medical certificates documenting otherwise—with the sole purpose of discrediting Italy. The theory was accepted, the defendants acquitted and, as the verdict was read out, they walked out of the court free, celebrating with their relatives. All were officially praised by the chief of the Carabinieri, General De Lorenzo. Their victims, the prisoners they’d reduced to the state of broken, weeping creatures, were sent back to prison in handcuffs.

  Silvius Magnago never revealed what his decision not to act on the Bumser’s desperate request for help cost him. Or if their martyrdom brought nightmares to his already scarce sleep at night.

  Bodies. To safeguard bodies. He hadn’t been able to do it for them.

  In autumn 1963, a young girl dressed in white, holding bunch of flowers, smiled from the posters that papered the streets of Milan. A Mediterranean version of Gerda: full breasts, soft lips, high cheekbones, but dark-haired. It was the Christian Democrat party’s way of projecting a more youthful image, and to do so it had turned to Ernest Dichter, the American guru of motivational research in advertising—creator of the famous dried Californian prunes campaign. It was he who had coined the slogan that appeared under the beautiful girl:

  THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS TWENTY!

  From Domodossola to Siracusa, from Udine to Bari, on posters throughout the entire peninsula, anonymous hands added a note underneath, in felt tip pen:

  TIME TO FUCK HER!

  That was something Mr Dichter had not foreseen.

  The incitement to do to the twenty-year-old Christian Democratic party what every Latin male would have liked to do to its flesh-and-blood contemporaries was followed by many: in the 1963 elections the Italian Communist Party obtained, for the first time in its history, over a quarter of the votes. The absolute hegemony of the Christian Democrats had been broken.

  Under the leadership of Aldo Moro, the first center-left government in Republican Italy was formed. Once the votes had been counted somebody delivered a large box of dried prunes to the headquarters of the Christian Democratic party in Piazza del Gesù.

  Nobody laughed. This was a disaster for the Yalta equilibrium. Secret services on both sides of the Atlantic agreed that it was necessary to start playing a different game than the one that had been played up to then. Once again Gladio—the secret paramilitary organization formed in Italy in the 1950s by the CIA in order to counter the advance of the Left—proved useful. The so-called “Solo Plan” was devised. It had three objective
s: a military coup that would bring down the newly-formed government, the institution of a “public security” government led by right-wing members of parliament and the military, the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro.

  The Solo Plan was never carried out, and only the last of the three objectives was achieved, albeit with a belated operation—fifteen years later—and by a third party. However, a secret new game, much dirtier and more violent than before, had begun. Italy was about to enter a season of bloodshed.

  On 9 December 1963, four days after the Moro government was formed, the biggest political trial since the end of the war started at the Palace of Justice in Milan: the trial of the Feuernacht attackers. There were ninety-one defendants, twenty-three of them on the run.

  Up to then, Italians had being totally ignorant about Alto Adige. Almost nobody knew that German was being spoken on a stretch of the national territory. It was only by following the trial in Milan in the newspapers that they began to discover the existence and the character of this borderline province. About a month after the hearing started, on a cold January morning, the doors of the High Court opened its session before an unusually colorful audience. The rows of chairs behind the wives and relatives of the defendants were occupied by dozens of men wearing Lederhosen, red waistcoats, boiled woolen jackets, little felt hats with feathers: Schützen. Among them, with his garrison almost all made up of hunters like himself, was Peter Huber. Just like the wives of the defendants, who’d shared the trouble and expense of the journey by Tränenbus, the so-called Bus of Tears, the Schützen had also hired a bus to arrive en masse at the Milan courthouse. They could only attend a few sessions, no more than a couple of days—they all had jobs and families to get back to—but they felt it was important to show the “BAS Heroes” the support Silvius Magnago had always denied them. Still, the attackers of the Night of Fires continued to disappoint the expectations of those who wanted to see exceptional figures: be they heroes or murderers. Their moral leader was the owner of a small shop in Frangarto, just outside Bolzano. Sepp Kerschbaumer’s body was marked by torture. He was a small man with a gaunt face, an absurd 1920s haircut, and the rather sad eyes of someone who feels more comfortable in the world of ideals than that of commerce where, however, he has to earn his living. For years he’d forced his wife to chase after poor debtors while he recited the Lord’s Prayer several times a day and forgave them their debts. His intelligent, fervent idealism, and his determination to explain the human reasons behind the BAS actions before the historical ones, inspired real respect from the jury in Milan. Kerschbaumer expressed simple concepts which everyone could understand. He talked about the humiliation of going into a government office and not being understood by the staff, about not being able to fill out the forms in Italian, about doctors in hospitals who demanded that the patients—no matter how ill or wounded—should express themselves in a language they didn’t speak, about the lack of prospects for a German-speaking South Tyrolean looking for work outside his own maso. In the heaving courtroom, the crowd of Italians listened to Kerschbaumer’s quiet eloquence, and didn’t find his arguments unfounded.

  During the hearing, in order to illustrate the abuse suffered by the South Tyroleans, another defendant said, “My mother-in-law hasn’t received her pension for over six years.”

  There were titters of laughter in the courtroom, murmurs of approval. Also, clearly sympathetic shouts from the audience:

  “Neither has my mother!”

  “Neither have I!”

  It took a long time to restore order.

  That’s how, thanks to the sessions in the Milan courtroom, Italians discovered not only Alto Adige but also the meticulous mechanics, peasants and small craftsmen of the BAS, and many South Tyroleans became aquainted with an Italy beyond the straits of Salorno, that oblong boot of which their Heimat, whether they liked it or not, was now a part. They too began to realize that also in Lecce, Rome, Novara,, and even Milan, the Italian government treated its citizens carelessly, and that the slowness and convoluted nature of public administration was therefore not a form of ethnic discrimination. In other words, the pachydermic inefficiency of Italian public administration had nothing personal against South Tyroleans—or at least not them alone.

  Peter looked at the faces of the audience in the heaving courtroom. These were not the Italians he’d seen arrive at Bolzano Station almost ten years earlier. They didn’t have the gaunt faces of people running away from poverty, eyes blank from hunger, hope and fear, the dirty fingernails of people who, the night before leaving for the factories of the North, had brought their goats back to the stone fold for the last time. These Italians could call the cities where they were living “home.” There were beautiful Milanese girls with their hair in beehives; young men with thick black-rimmed glasses bending over their notebooks; housewives with swollen ankles but shrewdness in their eyes, accustomed to tackling the prices at the market every morning and often having a laugh with their friends; metalworkers who would come to the courthouse on their way home after an overnight shift to see the faces of the peasant Krauts who had proved to have such rebellious organizational skills that they might even be able to teach the workers’ movement a thing or two.

  There, next to citizens of boom time Italy, sat a company of Schützen in 19th-century costumes. Peter wore the capercaillie feather on his hat, the waistcoat with crossed straps like the one worn by Andreas Hofer when he was pushing back Napoleon’s army, patent shoes with silver buckles over white cotton socks. Maybe it was precisely because of the incongruous clothes he was wearing that the Milan trial had a different effect on him—the opposite effect—than it did on the majority of South Tyroleans. He became convinced that the protest actions against electricity pylons carried out by the Bumser sitting there in the defendant’s dock, were no longer enough. It was time to step up the game.

  When Peter came back home after a few days in Milan, over the course of which once again he hadn’t taken the trouble to send news of himself, he found that his wife had gone: Leni had returned to her parents’ house. She was two months pregnant with her second child, but she no longer wanted to live in that house of absence and silence.

  Eva was growing. Week after week she slept a little longer without interruption. After a while, Gerda stopped falling asleep on her feet: her daughter no longer cried at night. From the crate, she watched, wide-eyed, the red sauce being poured into pots, the clouds of steam rising from uncovered saucepans, the long, springy legs of Hubert, as he drained Schlutzkrapfen with one hand and browned sage in butter with the other. Eva’s eyes, very long and transparent like Gerda’s, didn’t possess her mother’s haughty expression but gave and yearned for affection. The expression in other people’s eyes had never meant anything to Gerda; but to Eva it seemed to mean everything.

  They’d put tiny pieces of carrot, slivers of fennel, flakes of Grana Padano into her hand. They laughed at the seriousness with which she would lick them, suck them, nibble them with her toothless gums, testing their consistency like a scientist, her face scrunched up when she discovered that the yellow half-moon they had handed her was a segment of lemon. Like parents proud of their offspring, the kitchen workers sought one another’s eyes in order to enjoy her irresistible baby deeds together. During the months when Eva quietly occupied the apple crate there were almost no screams and insults between cooks and waiters.

  Gerda had begun to laugh again. Her full lips would stretch to reveal white teeth that were still very young in spite of everything, especially when she was looking at her daughter. And then all the men around her, cooks, waiters, Elmar the scullery boy, felt something stir inside them. As for Herr Neumann, when Gerda laughed, he would wipe his forehead with his apron to hide his face.

  Gerda had changed: she was now aware of men’s looks. And she didn’t pretend not to like it.

  Months went by. The apple crate was no longer large enough for Eva. Elmar helped Gerda build
a kind of cage by nailing different crates together. They put it under the dessert counter, safe from splashes of boiling oil, large meat knives, bottles of detergent. Occasionally, flour and sugar fell on her head, making it comically white. Die letze, the little one, was a braves Schneckile, a well-behaved little snail who did her best not to cause any bother. She’d lie there in her spot, looking around hesitantly as though asking: I’m doing alright, aren’t I? Nobody refused her the smile she asked, but it was clear that she couldn’t stay there forever.

  “What are you going to do when she starts walking?” Nina asked one night in the attic dormitory.

  After a day imprisoned under the dessert counter, Eva was swimming on the wooden floor of the dormitory, propelling herself with her arms and legs, her bottom puffed up with a diaper and held high like a flag. She’d reached one of the beds at the end of the room and now, gripping the iron bedpost with her fat hands, had managed to raise herself on her feet. With a triumphant gurgle she searched for her mother’s eyes to share her victory. She couldn’t find it: Gerda’s head was bowed and her eyes downcast. She had no answer to Nina’s question.

  Everybody feared Eva’s eviction from the kitchen but nobody was surprised when it came. One day, cooks, scullery boys, and assistant cooks were in the dark little room next to the store room, eating the lunch prepared by Herr Neumann. Gerda had stayed behind in the kitchen to warm up the baby bottle. When she approached the dessert counter, she noticed that one of the bars on the cage had been moved. Eva wasn’t there. The hot baby bottle in her hand, Gerda rushed around the kitchen. On the meat counter, heavy, sharp knives were less than an inch from the edge, ready to fall off like axes. There were burning hot metal handles on the lit oven right at the level of the baby’s hands. Even a child bigger than Eva could have drowned in the pail of dirty water next to the sink. Gerda didn’t find her daughter sliced, scalded, or drowned, but each new relief soon became deeper panic: her daughter wasn’t there. She came out of the kitchen.