“Hallo? Hallo, hallo? O.K., O.K.”
There’s also a baby who emits low wails, but is immediately quietened down. By a breast, a bottle, an adult entertaining him with a game of grimaces?
On the right-hand side of the train stretches Agro Pontino, flat like only land snatched from marshes can be. An expanse of cultivated plots, with heaps of plastic boxes: an exclusively dark blue heap, in the field next door just a yellow heap, then a red, then a green one. They look like pieces of Lego sorted by color by a bored child. They’re waiting for the next work day to be filled with vegetables. Here, the soil is the color of blood sausage, you feel like plunging your hands in and sniffing it, and even at a distance you know it’s extremely fertile, a far cry from the gray soil of my valley where you’re lucky if you can grow as much as potatoes. Far away, an elegant line of Mediterranean pines and then, beyond that, almost like a glow blending in with the light from the sky, is the first view of the sea.
On the left-hand side of the train, however, a different world is rushing past, a natural graduation of bare, arid hills covered in sparse Mediterranean woodland, and populated only by goats. Low, dry stone walls carve wretched little spaces for puny olive trees; here and there, the ruins of houses built with the same stones as the walls, which is actually what the hill is made of: stones on top of other stones, containing stones—that’s how hard this soil is, such an extreme contrast to the fertile plain it looks over. Every now and then, the chain of Roman hills opens up and behind it tall mountains appear that are even darker and more desolate, enveloped by clouds, with no trace of human habitation. We’re still almost at the gates of Rome, but it feels like we’re penetrating into Italy’s harsh belly, the land of wolves and brigands.
Then the train enters a tunnel, dark and very long, and you can’t see anything anymore.
Wesley, the one lucky man I’ve ever called my husband, albeit for just two weeks, always claimed that the first time he saw me he noticed me because of the way I was looking at the landscape. Perhaps. Even though, it must be said, that day I was on a beach in Sri Lanka, among a dozen women in saris, and I was the only blonde, the only one with blue eyes, the only one who was almost five foot eleven tall. The only one in a bikini, too. I was twenty-two, it was the first exotic holiday I’d allowed myself with the proceeds of my work.
Still, Wesley was right, I do pay attention to landscapes.
Just a few hours after we met we had dinner together, and it was one of those tropical evenings manufactured especially to get Westerners to wind up in bed together: curried lobster served by a graceful woman wrapped in silk, the ancient cries of a faraway peacock, the black waves of the Indian Ocean illuminated by phosphorescent plankton, the exchange of childhood memories. I told Wesley about how Ulli and I would go and shout at the rocks of a landslide which, a couple of years earlier, had washed away a slope of the mountain under which we lived. We would stand with our legs spread over the edge of the new ravine, where the flood had eaten away a chunk of field like a mouthful of Krapfen, and shout at the pile of rocks beneath us. The rocks answered with voices like ours but not identical, as though the mountain used our words to express something else. But what? Wesley looked at me with the expression of a gold prospector who had finally found a nugget in his pan.
“You really do have a romantic soul, you know?” he exclaimed. He was assistant professor of English literature at the University of Indiana, and spoke like the English poets about whom he wrote books with titles like Divine Manure: the Myth of Gea as Nostalgia in the Self-Conscious Narrative of Modern Intellect—that there are people in circulation who dedicate essays to “Divine Manure” is one of the many things I really didn’t know until I met Wesley.
The romantic soul, Wesley explained, is convinced that the landscape has something to tell it; that it’s always about to reveal something the human beings who inhabit it don’t know, or have forgotten, or consider irrelevant; that in reality geography is a book written in a language unknown to us, but whose significance will perhaps one day be revealed.
“‘Call the world, if you please, “the vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world.’ Keats.”
I raised my eyes from the lobster and looked at the waves. I wonder what Keats would have said about that phosphorescent plankton: it looked so poetic and artificial, like the anti-darkness stars in a child’s bedroom.
Actually, what Ulli and I were shouting at the landscape in order to obtain a revelation of its soul, were, at most, insults against our enemies:
“Di Greti hot dreckige Untohosn!”
“Do Sigi isch an Orschloch!”
“Do Pato Christian figgt mit di Kia,
und mit di Hennen aa!”
Rocks would confirm that our fury and our contempt were a good and righteous thing:
Gretl has dirty knickers (Untohosn . . . hosn . . . hosn . . . ).
Sigi is an asshole (Orschloch . . . schloch . . . loch . . . ).
Father Christian shags cows (mit di Kia . . . Kia . . . ) and also hens (Hennen aa!).
But I didn’t say that to Wesley.
That night, Wesley came into my bungalow on the beach, and stayed for three days. Sexually, he wasn’t as romantic as his poets. He had the body of a WASP who’s been practicing sport since kindergarten: long, toned, covered in fine blonde down, without an ounce of fat despite being over forty. With athletic efficiency he provided me, as well as himself, with strictly equivalent orgasms. When I took the initiative to give him pleasure, he appreciated it but then reciprocated immediately, as though it was very important to balance the double entry between giving and receiving. In other words, an accountant’s sexuality, but when you’re twenty-two, you’re not looking for subtlety. At least, I wasn’t.
On the morning of the third day, I went for a solitary dive in the ocean while Wesley was still asleep. When I returned to the bungalow, I woke him up by covering him with my wet body.
“I know why you sleep so little, Eva,” he said. “You don’t want to miss out on the secrets that the Archangel Michael confides to Adam.”
“What?”
“Milton, Paradise Lost, Book Eleven.”
I must have looked at him with the expression of a gold prospector who’s finally found a Rubik’s cube in her pan. He caressed my thighs, which were still damp and salty, with the patience of a lecturer who has to explain everything at length to ignorant, bikini-wearing students every single day—because, after all, somebody has to do it. “In the penultimate book of his masterpiece, Milton gets the Archangel Michael to speak with Adam. He shows him the future: Cain and Abel, the destruction of the Temple of Solomon, Kublai Khan, the Russian Tsar, Montezuma . . . ”
“What’s Adam got to do with Montezuma?”
“Nothing. Michael reveals to Adam the future history of man. That’s why he gives Eve a sleeping potion: she mustn’t hear, she’s a woman. And so, while Adam learns the secrets of the times to come, Eve sleeps.”
He slipped a hand into my bikini. “You’re also a woman, Eva . . . ” he started moving his fingers, “ . . . but you stay awake, so you can hear.”
A liquid warmth began to rise between my legs. “I’m not interested in knowing the future,” I said. “That’s a man’s desire.”
“And yet it’s obvious you don’t want to miss out on their secrets. That’s why you refuse to sleep.”
Something in Wesley’s words rang true, but I didn’t know what. Meanwhile, his fingers had found the center of me, and I couldn’t think anymore.
We got married a few days later in Reno, Nevada. I’d changed my flight from Colombo to Frankfurt for a Los Angeles one. I’d sent my mother a telegram: I gea heiratn, I’m getting married.
The Reno marriage license office promises its public to issue a license within ten minutes at most. They gave us ours after eight. An employee with a pock-marked face and the
aquiline nose of a Native American, asked our names, surnames, marital status, place of residence of our mothers (but, to my great relief, not our fathers) and fifty-five dollars in cash—the marriage license office must be the last place in the US not to accept credit cards.
Then we went into the office of the Commissioner for Marriages, half a mile away. It was a room covered in pink and orange carpeting. A black woman with monumental legs constricted in anti-varicose-vein pantyhose was standing in front of a chunky wooden desk. It was she who married us. Our witness was the cleaning man, a Mexican about my age. He had an upper lip like the baroque volute of a colonial church, and the eyes of a little girl. He’d just obtained his Green Card through a lottery, so the joy with which he added his signature at the bottom of our marriage certificate was very sincere.
When we came out of there, Wesley suggested we celebrate our wedding night with Joan and Elliot, a couple of friends of his who lived on Lake Tahoe. Now he was a married man, he said cheerfully, he’d be able to have sex with Joan: he had me to offer her husband.
I told you, his book keeping was precise.
I remembered what was written on the inside flap of the book about divine manure:
Before becoming Associate Professor at the University of Indiana, Wesley Munro was a shoe repairer, a member of youth gangs, a boy scout, a dish washer, a golf caddie, an undertaker, a coffin shiner, a hamburger maker, an engineering worker, an assistant plumber, a voluntary subject in medical experiments, a lab assistant in charge of cleaning hamsters’ teeth, an organist in a Baptist church, a soap dialogue writer, a private tutor for wealthy teenagers, a translator, a truck driver.
He collects stamps.
Only then did I realize that “collects stamps” should have rung alarm bells.
“Pull up, please,” I said, and got out of the car.
Our marriage lasted two weeks for the simple reason that it was only two weeks later that we were together again in the same room, that is, in the office of the Commissioner for Divorce.
It was identical to the other one, but with gray and green carpeting, colors more suitable to a failed marriage, in fact, than pink and orange. The two weeks between wedding and divorce, I spent with the Mexican cleaner cum witness, who shared with me his joy about his Green Card. As for Wesley, I have no idea. With no hard feelings, we signed the document which separated our fates for ever, left that green and gray room dazzled by the naked desert light, and never met again.
Over twenty years have passed since my brief and only taste of that legendary status: a married woman. Now, however, whenever I need to renew my identity card, I can put “divorced” on the marital status line. Not “single,” as my mother has had to do all her life.
“What would Vito say?” had been Ulli’s comment when I told him about my lightning marriage.
An impossible question, of course, which never got an answer. Now, however, there’s another one: what will Vito say when he sees me? He’s sure to ask me if I’m married, if I have children. Will I tell him about Wesley? I don’t think so, not because I’m ashamed, but because we won’t have any time to waste on what’s irrelevant. And what about Carlo, who doesn’t speak about his wife and children and after whom I don’t enquire? If Vito were my real father, would I confide that in him? If Vito were my real father, would my life be like this?
My throat feels tight. I’d better go back to observing the landscape outside the window.
After Monte San Biagio, the mountains on the left of the train are triangular peaks, almost like pure geometrical forms, without a single human construction. However, toward the sea, the stretch of greenhouses on the plain continues. Once again the windows on the right and those on the left seem to give onto two opposite worlds, very distant from each other.
The skinny American girl, whose waist is narrower than one of the other girl’s thighs, hands the latter a cookie. Her gesture is that of a tamer: she holds it in front of her but at a distance, denying it to her, expecting obedience. The fat girl has the expression of someone ready to do anything just to get that cookie; the skinny one, that of someone who knows it. Only after a while does she grant it to her with a smile that suggests power. Her companion grabs it quickly, immediately looking away from the one who is both the perpetrator and the witness of her humiliation and, chewing, returns to her book. The title is embossed in gold lettering, illegible, and I only manage to make out the subheading: A true story. I imagine it must be the story of a tormented life, complete with a difficult childhood, abuse, and an edifying final redemption.
Finally, after another tunnel, the sea. Close, infinite, luminous, sunny and, especially after the constriction of those ragged mountains, wide open. In the warm April sun, it’s animated by sailboards, by the even lines of clam cultivations, by people celebrating Easter with their first trip to the beach. Formia Station is slightly uphill from the town, and it has such a wide view over the gulf that it makes you gasp. But not even now that the joyful light of the Mediterranean is flooding in through the window, that agaves, bougainvilleas, plumbagos, lemons, jasmines, hibiscuses, wisterias, and oleanders are hitting us in the face with their multicolored vitality, and that the sea is glistening like wrapping paper around the gift that is Italy, not even now do the two girls look up from their bestsellers. And so all this splendor is wasted before their eyes. I feel the same kind of disappointment as a proud hostess whose guests are too absent-minded to notice how beautiful her apartment is.
Hostess?
All of a sudden, a simple syllogism:
South Tyrol is my Heimat.
South Tyrol is in Italy.
Ergo
Italy is my . . .
How do you say Heimat in Italian? It’s a word that has nothing to do with Italy, that feels too much like bread with cumin seeds, like a warm Stube when it’s cold outside, like Adventskalender21. “Homeland” isn’t right either because it feels like monuments made of granite, like borders traced by absent-minded chancellors, like poorly-equipped boys sent to their deaths by elderly generals. “Country?” Yes, right:
Italy is my country.
I’d never said it before. But perhaps today is not the right time to do so, now that I’m traveling down the whole of this long, long Italy, splendid, defaced, dressed in flowers, monuments, and unregulated buildings, in order to reach the only man who’s ever made me feel at home. The man who hasn’t been my father, but almost.
Vito.
1965-1967
It was always the same question.
“Fo wem isch de letze?” Whose little girl is this? It would happen at the wedding of a great aunt’s son. Or at a nephew’s christening, with the Pate22 and Patin, the most smartly dressed people there because it was their day. Or at the collective first communions of the first, second, and third cousins all turned twelve the same year, and who, that morning in church, had been given the communion wafer by the priest’s hand in succession, like young battery hens. The result was that every time there would be a crowd of people in their best clothes—the women in dirndl but the men in jacket and tie so they wouldn’t look old-fashioned—gathered in the area between the Schwingshackls’s hayloft and house for a party after the religious ceremony. Everybody was linked to almost everyone else present by either blood or marriage: all were grandchildren, uncles, nephews, grandparents, godparents, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, cousins, great-grandchildren, sons-in-law, mothers-in-law, and daughters-in-law of one another. The relationships between them were woven with invisible threads, a large quilt of belonging, perhaps threadbare in places where two brothers weren’t speaking or because of an obvious dislike between a mother- and daughter-in-law, but which, nevertheless, was spread over everybody and from which no one was excluded. No one, except Eva.
Like a tiny, disorientated buoy, Eva floated in that sea of people, the only one without relatives—even though Sepp and his wife always
treated her like one of their own. Thirteen pregnancies had rounded Maria’s body until it had lost its shape. Even the color of her eyes was no longer well-defined, although they were still sharp and luminous like the diamonds on the peacock-shaped brooch she would pin to her dirndl on celebration days. She wore her hair twisted around her head like Frau Mayer, but while the hotel owner’s plait was the product of care and perfection, Maria’s looked like a work of nature, unavoidable and necessary like an ear of barley, a tree, a potato. Her hands were so rough that when they squeezed Eva’s soft, fat fingers, they were almost scratchy, yet they also conveyed a calmness that erased every anxiety—almost. Nobody knew how Maria, with her thirteen living children and dozens of grandchildren, found the time to walk hand-in-hand with a girl that didn’t even belong to her. But her religion had taught her that there is no limit to the love of one’s neighbor and, like Sepp, she was a strong believer.
Even so, sooner or later, there was always some distant relative from a neighboring valley, a partially deaf great-aunt, the mother of a young bride who’d just become part of the family, who’d ask who that little girl was.
“Fo wem isch de letze?”
Maria, Sepp, Eloise, Ruthi had tried to explain. “It’s the little Huber girl, not the ones in the maso above us, but the ones in Shanghai, the daughter, Gerda, got into trouble and . . . ”
However, what the nosy parkers wanted to know wasn’t Eva’s story, with its difficult side plots (unmarried mother, terrorist uncle, and a grandfather who gave you the creeps when you so much as looked at him). All they wanted was to see the stitch that reassuringly darned the communal cloth of belonging. People like Sepp and Maria, generously tolerant of loose threads and frayings, are few and far between. Therefore, a different answer became commonplace:
Eva Sleeps Page 18