Eva Sleeps

by Francesca Melandri

  They kicked doors down, barked orders as though the war wasn’t over and Italians and Nazis were still allied, they fired at panic-stricken hens around their boots, turning them into motionless heaps of blood and dirty feathers. They forced everyone out of their houses, men, women, old people and children. A soldier burst into a Stube where a deaf old woman was spinning, shut away in the private silence that had enveloped her for decades. He was a young man from Niscemi, outside Caltanissetta, just two months in the army. He was eighteen, and was holding an assault rifle he barely knew how to use. When he saw the old woman motionless amid all the screams and shots, he was certain she was hiding something. He shot at her face. The bullet missed her and got stuck in the pine-coated wall right next to the gray plait twisted around the old woman’s head; like a new knot in the old timber. Only then did the woman raise her head.

  Two other soldiers burst into Leni’s parents’ house. When Ulli saw them, he ran across the kitchen and buried his face between his mother’s legs: perhaps to blot out that unfathomable nightmare. Leni lowered the pan in which she was about to melt some butter and turned it sideways, placing it in front of his head like a shield. One of the soldiers remained on the doorstep; the other one went up to the little bed in the corner of the room and pointed the automatic rifle against the head of little Sigi, who was asleep, shouting at Leni to tell him where her husband was or he would shoot.

  Leni didn’t know where Peter was. She didn’t know where he went, what he did, or why. She’d never known or asked. She wasn’t even certain that the furtive man who had come in and out of her bed in the middle of the night a few hours earlier had been the same to whom a long time ago she had sworn to be faithful before God. She hadn’t seen her husband’s face in the daylight for months. All she knew was that the head of one of her children was sticking to her thighs with the frying pan shielding it, and that the other one, so soft and smelling of sleep, was in the firing line of the rifle on the opposite side of the kitchen. Her children’s heads seemed farther apart than two continents; between them, like an ocean, stretched her powerlessness as a mother.

  Leni and the soldier remained looking at each other in silence, as though searching for an answer neither of them knew. After a while, the soldier (aged twenty, born in Bucchianico, near Chieti, education level: elementary school) frowned and blinked like someone with a speck in his eye but who can’t rub it because his hands are occupied. Then he lowered the rifle.

  All the men and a few women had been assembled and handcuffed. Tied up like that, they were led to the stream behind the houses. Among them was also Sepp Schwingshackl and his elder sons. When the raid started, his wife Maria was in front of the hayloft with Eva in her arms. She barely had the time to put her down on the ground before they clipped the handcuffs around her wrists and took her away. Eva remained sitting amid chamomile flowers, her hands on the ground, spread open like fans. Her fingers weren’t stepped on by spiked boots, her face wasn’t burned by the incandescent barrels of automatic rifles, but nobody entirely knows why. As though saving Eva had become her destiny, Ruthi ran to her. She lifted her up against her protruding left hip, the way mothers do when they want to keep their right side free, and remained there, motionless, frozen by uncertainty and fear, amid hen feathers and the traffic of soldiers. One of these (born in Accettura, near Matera, age: eighteen, school qualification: three years of middle school), with forehead and cheeks covered in pimples, his upper lip with just the shadow of a velvet down, had started firing at the crossing point of the beams that were holding up the roof of the hayloft. Eva opened her eyes wide at every shot. She followed with her gaze as the cartridge cases splattered and fell on the ground like crazed insects, the cloud of smoke that surrounded the barrel like the steam from a pan cooling down. Tff! the BM59 made a noise, and Eva’s eyes became two dark blue buttons, Tff! and Eva held her breath. T-Tff!

  The men were kept standing by the stream for several hours. The soldiers fired at the walls of the houses, threw grenades into the haylofts, stole Speck, cheese, bread and beer. Four drunk Alpini grabbed Eloise, Ruthi’s eldest sister, by the arms and dragged her behind a manure pit. They had already thrown her to the ground when the lieutenant-colonel commanded them to let her go. The girl was about to run home crying, but was put together with the group of people tied up the stream. When the sun began to set they were all still there, standing, supporting one another to avoid fainting.

  The lieutenant-colonel of the Carabinieri didn’t like the way things were going. This was not the fight against terrorism he had in mind. He was here, in a village that looked like an idyllic vision in the golden September light, directing an operation that was tactically a failure, as any first-year military academy student could have seen. Moreover, it lacked any sense, both in its operational orders as in its means: could anybody please explain to him just what there was to gain with hunting down terrorists who would slip away up and down smugglers’ paths between Austria and Italy in an M47 armored vehicle, an exasperating mass of caterpillars and iron which would stop after an hour even on a plain, let alone up here?

  He hadn’t even been able to pick the men he was now commanding. On the contrary, these troops seemed to have been selected precisely because of their inefficiency: drafted boys capable only of scorching their fingers on the barrels of the BM59s, people who’d been handed Berettas without any training . . . All you could do was close your eyes and not even think of the damage they could do with those sub-machine guns in their hands.

  Still, what worried the lieutenant-colonel most were certain non-commissioned officers, people who said strange things and showed off too much historical knowledge of, and even nostalgia for, the Mussolini era. Sometime earlier, when he was still in Rome, the army commander General De Lorenzo had personally given the lieutenant-colonel a worrying order: to pick out the men willing to fire even on civilians, and add their names to a special list. The lieutenant-colonel could not refuse but, in the best military tradition of passive resistance to senseless orders, he had shilly-shallied, beaten about the bush, and stalled for time while awaiting developments. For as long as he had been commanding this motorized battalion in Alto Adige, nobody had mentioned the list of the “willing,” as De Lorenzo called them, to him again. But now, seeing all these non-commissioned officers who weren’t lifting a finger to stop their men from looting, getting drunk, and firing at random, the lieutenant-colonel wondered if that perverse selection hadn’t already been implemented by someone else.

  Marshal Scanu, for instance, a trusted non-commissioned officer for whom he had respect: the lieutenant-colonel had received the explicit order to exclude him from the operation. As though the human compassion, despite the official jargon, which Scanu had shown in his report on the living conditions of Hermann Huber, the father of the wanted man Peter Huber, had not been appreciated. The lieutenant-colonel was beginning to wonder if perhaps someone wanted to keep away from operational duties anyone who could build a bridge of understanding between the armed forces stationed in Alto Adige and its residents. Someone behind a desk in Bolzano or even in Rome, someone more interested in blowing on the flames of this land that was already on fire than in bringing moderation or soothing the violence. Someone who wanted the situation to come to a head. It wasn’t a certainty but a feeling he couldn’t share with anyone, let alone substantiate. But if it really was a matter of strategy, then what could be the reason? For whom would it be advantageous to trigger violence instead of soothing it? The lieutenant-colonel really couldn’t understand, he just sensed that there was a lot, too much, that he didn’t know. And, remembering with a lump in his throat the solemn moment when he had sworn loyalty to the Republic and the Constitution, it was a thought he didn’t like. Not at all.

  At that moment, in the lapis lazuli sky of almost autumnal high pressure, the helicopter appeared. It ruffled the tops of fir trees, grass, jacket lapels, with its spinning blades, and landed in the field. A c
olonel of the Alpini got out. He spoke quickly, abruptly, without looking the lieutenant-colonel in the eye.

  “How many people have you arrested?” he asked.

  “Fifteen.”

  “Good. Stand them against the wall and shoot them.”

  The lieutenant-colonel stared at the officer. The noise of the helicopter was impairing his hearing, he must have misunderstood. “Excuse me?”

  “Stand them against the wall,” the colonel articulated. “Every one.”

  The lieutenant-colonel stood motionless. He spoke softly, politely. “I’m here to deal with crimes and make arrests. I’m not a murderer.”

  The colonel started to shout. “You have to shoot them, do you understand? And then burn the village. Raze it to the ground!”

  The lieutenant-colonel realized he was hungry, or rather his stomach contracted in a spasm and he remembered that he hadn’t eaten for several hours. He felt a hungry man’s anger explode inside him and also began to shout. “You’re crazy!”

  “It’s an order!”

  “It’s a crazy order!”

  “I’ll report you for insubordination if you don’t obey!”

  “We’re not Nazis!”

  Men of every rank, both Alpini and Carabinieri, had drawn nearer. Not even the older ones had ever seen two officers screaming at each other like that in front of the troops. Jaws dropped, many men remained with their mouths open, forgetting themselves. The lieutenant-colonel took the colonel by the arm, dragged him to the helicopter, and threw him inside with a shove. Like a backpack, or an ammunition box.

  “Take him away,” he said to the pilot, more like a prayer than an order.

  The pilot had watched the scene in silence without leaving the cabin. His mouth hadn’t fallen open. On the contrary, he’d kept his lips so tight that all that remained in the middle of his face was a purple line. He started the engine, avoiding the lieutenant-colonel’s eyes, like someone bound by the selfsame sense of shame. The engine began to stir the air, the soldiers all raised hands to their heads to stop their berets from flying off, and some of them started closing their mouths.

  The helicopter flew up, metallic and animal-like, like a Medieval war fantasy. The lieutenant-colonel watched it grow distant, smaller, and finally disappear in the sky, which was beginning to have pink streaks across it. He felt overwhelmed by a warm flush of gratitude for that pilot who was now risking punishment at the very least, and whose name he didn’t even know. He’d even already forgotten his face.

  The consequences of the military operation that took place on that golden September day in 1964 were many and various.

  No terrorist was arrested during the operation. All the men who’d been arrested were released within a few days as it was proved that they had nothing to do with the recent dynamite attacks. Only an old man who was hard of hearing, and who didn’t manage to communicate with the investigators, was transferred to Venice where he was kept in custody for almost three months, until the following December.

  Sigi was marked forever by that rifle barrel pointed at his baby head: he grew up to be a nostalgic devotee of Andreas Hofer, full of rage and exultation, and joined the Schützen. At least that was Ulli’s version whenever he tried to find a reason for his brother becoming an obtuse, homophobic racist. However, this explanation circumvented the fact that if anyone was traumatized that day, then it was only Ulli and his mother: Sigi had slept through it all.

  One night at home, after the auxiliary Carabiniere from Niscemi had been relieved of his draft duties, he dreamed of the moment when he’d fired at the deaf old woman. This time, however, after he’d pulled the trigger, the old woman’s face disintegrated before him in an explosion of fire, blood and horror. The morning after, the young man ran to the church of Santa Maria Odigitria, where he prostrated himself fervently at the feet of the Madonna, who had already granted him most precious grace: poor aim.

  The Italian newspapers didn’t report the raid, only the local German-language ones did, and were then accused of propaganda against the government. A representative of the provincial council began collecting evidence from the village residents: he meant to present them at a memorial in support of a parliamentary investigation by the Südtiroler Volkspartei. He was working on his paper when, a couple of weeks after the events, he died in murky circumstances while rock climbing. They even said that the rope he was tied to had been sabotaged. In any case, the parliamentary investigation at the Chamber of Representatives on 25 September 1964 took place without the documentation, which the councillor hadn’t had sufficient time to put together. Member of Parliament Almirante therefore had no trouble in describing as “Austrian-sympathizing propaganda” any allegation of abuse committed by the Italian Armed Forces. That’s how he used to refer, in all his official appearances, to German-speaking South Tyroleans.

  When he returned to base, the lieutenant-colonel immediately telephoned the army commander General De Lorenzo. He informed him of the crazy orders he’d received, and of his obvious refusal to implement them.

  “Yes, they have already informed me that you refused to fight,” the general replied.

  The lieutenant-colonel’s hairs stood up on his forearms, as though in the presence of a strange, incomprehensible phenomenon.

  That very evening, an urgent dispatch arrived relieving him of his charge in Alto Adige and ordering him to transfer within twenty-four hours as assistant commander with the Legion in Udine. As is customary whenever there is a change of destination, his superiors gave him the usual report, an essential evaluation for advancing his rank. Ever since he’d entered the army he’d always obtained the maximum grade, “excellent,” but now they only just gave him “average.” This was an indelible stain on his career.

  KILOMETERS 715-850

  The 11:28 from Rome to Reggio Calabria leaves on time. To my great relief, it’s not one of those torpedo-style Italian Eurostars with over a hundred shouting, eating and especially phone-calling people, forced to share the same space for hours. This is a good old long-distance train with six-seat compartments, one of those where, if there’s nobody opposite you, you can pull out the seats and lie down, and then if you close the curtains, nobody bothers you. Why don’t they make them all like that anymore?

  My compartment fellows are two twenty-year-old American women, one overweight, the other underweight, both in jeans and T-shirts, unassuming, with not particularly clean hair, and huge backpacks in the best tradition of Inter-Rail travel. The one belonging to the chubbier of the two is particularly dirty. It’s covered in felt-tip pen scribblings and coats of arms of cities and countries sewn on, but something doesn’t add up: the dates go from 1993 to 1999, when this woman must have been in middle school at most. Perhaps it’s a hand-me-down from an older brother who used it to roam during his year off? It hasn’t occurred to her to clean it, but she has added a personal touch: a soft pink teddy bear tied to the zipper upside down, swinging in a macabre way, as though from the gallows.

  The line of the other girl’s shoulders, however, is defined by sharp, unhealthy corners, her legs are like sticks wrapped in jeans. Despite being so thin, she has huge tits. They’re like two balls added to a pole, and perhaps they are—added, I mean.

  The fat girl lifts the backpacks and puts them on the baggage rack, filling the whole space between the seats with her outsized behind. She pants, puffs, stands on her toes, reaches up with her arms while two dark circles of sweat spread in her armpits, her T-shirt comes away from her low-waist jeans, baring her large stretch-marked hips. None of this prompts the skinny one to get up and give her a hand. She contents herself with watching her, detached, as though patiently waiting to see whether or not she’s going to make it. I stand up to help but the fat girl places herself between me and the backpack she’s lifting (the one belonging to the other girl), making it impossible for me. I sit back down, made slightly uneasy by her refusal. A
moment later, I work out what happened: my gesture of kindness was something she simply didn’t recognize. It’s obviously something she’s not used to.

  We’re barely out of Termini and already crossing an extraordinary landscape which, in any other part of the world, would merit a special journey: a countryside with the ruins of Roman aqueducts. But we’re in Italy and nobody pays attention to these monumental vestiges of efficiency, grace, and longevity. Not even my fellow travelers, even though, after all, it should be their job as tourists to look at the view. They’re both immersed in reading paperbacks, iPods in their ears. I’d like to say: Quick! Look up! Don’t miss it! These aqueducts are one of the wonders of the world! But they just sit there. In fact, it’s worse than that: when they first look up, it’s when we’re going past a graveyard of cars, the banal degradation of an urban suburb. One of them immediately goes back to reading. The other one, as though on purpose, looks back down just a second before the Roman chaos once more gives way to the countryside, with fragments of aqueduct standing out, slender and arcane. All around, there are sheep lying on the ground: sleepy, motionless, exhausted after Easter. They must be the mothers of the lambs Romans will have for lunch today. Maybe they miss their babies but don’t know how to say it. It looks like a watercolor by a Grand Tour traveler with the title: Beneath ancient ruins, wistful sheep.

  “Hallo? Hallo?”

  From the compartment next door, a male voice with an unmistakable accent: Indian. After a brief pause, a female voice. It sounds mellow, with a tone suggestive of flesh and soil trampled on with bare feet—even though, in Italy, this Indian lady wears shoes. What about a sari? Who knows? This is another advantage of carriages with separate compartments: you can fantasize about what your neighbors look like from their voices. The concept expressed by the woman is not very different: