Eva Sleeps

by Francesca Melandri

  “Fo wem isch de letze?”

  “Fo niamandn.”

  Whose little girl is this?

  Nobody’s.

  Until she turned thirteen, when she went to high school as a boarder in Bolzano, Eva lived with Maria, Sepp, Ruthi and the entire Schwingshackl family for ten months of the year, during the hotel’s summer and winter seasons. In November and again soon after Easter, from the steep slope to which the maso clung, Eva would start scanning the cars driving on the highway down along the river like busy ants. She learned when she was very young that joy arrived on a blue bus with yellow letters. She soon grew able to differentiate it from other vehicles: cars, trucks, tractors, tourist buses, and vans. When the bus from Bolzano emerged from the bend at the bottom of the valley, her heart would leap in her chest like a grasshopper in a cage. She would start following it with her eyes as it turned at the intersection, tackled hairpin curves, disappeared in a thicket of fir trees, reappeared, then stopped, huffing, in the space in front of the little church.

  Then Eva would let go of Maria’s hand, stop playing with Ulli, disengage herself from Ruthi’s arms, and would have even taken leave of herself if she could have, in order to run faster, and she never tripped over so she wouldn’t waste silly time on getting back up. But for days on end she ran in vain: the bus doors would open like a promise but the people who got off were useless, and not her mother. Then, every time, in fall and spring, during all those years, just when a desolate hollow was beginning to grow in Eva’s chest, and a grayness would extinguish her thoughts, then, lo and behold, a pair of long legs would appear on the steps of the bus, then a face that was astoundingly beautiful albeit familiar, two strong arms would lift her up and hold her tight, and the smell, the smell, the mammal smell of happiness. Gerda was back.

  The tourists who stayed in the town while Gerda was working in Frau Mayer’s hotel would all leave during the low season. There were plenty of vacant furnished rooms when she came to stay with Eva, and it wasn’t hard to rent one. Gerda was now earning enough to provide for herself and her daughter without needing to ask anyone else for anything. Not that Gerda or the other members of staff were earning a fair wage. Yet nobody protested: everybody knew the story of the Trade Unionist, as she was still called.

  It was Nina who had told her about the Italian waitress who had been kicked out a couple of years before Gerda’s arrival. She was a young woman with more education than the rest of them: she had attended high school for at least two years. She was in the third year of her bookkeeping course when a two-hundred-pound hook had fallen on her father’s skull—her father who wore himself out working overtime at the steelworks in order to give his daughter a qualification, and the possibility of a better life. Left with a widowed mother and three little siblings, she’d had to abandon her studies. After working in Frau Mayer’s hotel for two years, she noticed in her work booklet that she had received only one month of employer’s contributions per season, instead of five. She had protested. Not only that, but she also dared make another demand. The weekly day off started at three in the afternoon and lasted until eleven the following morning: she and the rest of the staff would have to be remunerated for the missing four hours off.

  Fray Mayer fired her on the spot. She even took care to report the episode to all the young woman’s future potential employers. Despite the demand for personnel caused by the tourism boom, the Trade Unionist, as everyone was now calling her, never managed to find work in the hotel industry again.

  As she told Gerda the story, Nina’s close-set eyes were impassive. She commented neither on Frau Mayer’s behavior, nor on that of the young woman. She let Gerda make up her own mind.

  And she did. She checked her own work booklet. And that’s how she discovered that she had lived the recent years of her life on an eternal, careless vacation: only a handful of working days a year were recorded in the work booklet. She also saw that Frau Mayer knew how to time travel, from the present into the future, to steal the pension of the elderly Gerda.

  Thief! she wanted to scream at her.

  But Gerda had two things, and no more: a daughter and a job.

  And Gerda knew only too well the terror of losing everything.

  So Gerda said nothing.

  Every day, Herr Neumann’s legs hurt more and more, and he had to leave the kitchen increasingly often to urinate: his diabetes was getting worse. One spring day he was standing by his table and, trying to ignore the hollow throbbing of the poor circulation in his shins, he was cutting open, gutting and slicing a kid with expert fingers, the only remaining tapered part of his body. The carcass was losing all semblance of an animal and assuming that of biblical matter. When Herr Neumann had finished, he carefully arranged on his right hand side the dead meat which, soon, through the mystery of digestion, would become living flesh again, but made human: and on his left he put the insides that were now chaotic and deprived of any function.

  From the salad counter, Gerda had been watching attentively, as usual. She approached the head chef and pointed at the liver, dark red like a carnivorous flower, with the small heart-shaped bulge attached to it like a uvula it could have been a creature apart from the rest of the carcass. Shyly, she asked if, instead of his throwing it away, she could use it.

  For a second, Herr Neumann forgot the annoying throbbing inside his legs. He’d been expecting this moment for a long time: he’d always been certain that, sooner or later, Gerda would ask to experiment, invent, try something out. Trying not to show how pleased he was, he nodded. Gerda cut the liver into very thin strips, quickly fried it on the hotplate, seasoned it with thyme, marjoram, shallots, garlic, and lemon, poured it all into a bowl full of purslane and, finally, seasoned everything with a few drops of balsamic vinegar. With the understanding expression of a child showing the drawing she’s proud of, she proffered him her invention. Herr Neumann stuck three bare fingers into the concoction, squeezed them like pliers and, while Gerda watched him, put a handful of salad and liver into his mouth. It was balanced, flavorsome, satisfactory. Just like Gerda: simple and very well put together.

  From his first courses and cooked vegetables counter, Hubert had watched the scene with vague condescension. He handed Gerda a handful of chopped chives.

  “A bissl Schnittla aa . . . 23”

  Herr Neumann gave a definitive shake of the head. Gerda’s invention already had everything a successful dish needed: any further addition would have been too much.

  Peeved, Hubert pirouetted on his long wiry legs without a word and went back to his first courses. He had just finished stirring a pot full of Schlutzkrapfen in browned butter. He took the handful of the snubbed chives and threw it in, as though hurling an insult.

  One morning, when he woke up, Herr Neumann’s legs were inert like undercooked chops. Urgently called by Frau Mayer, the doctor administered insulin and anticoagulants, then said that the kitchen would have to do without its chef for a few days.

  The meat counter was only a couple of yards away from the first course counter but Herr Neumann’s kingdom had always been inaccessible to Hubert—as it had been to everybody else. Hubert suggested standing in. “Temporarily,” he said, but it was clear he was considering this, finally, to be his chance. He was wrong.

  Herr Neumann had a wife and three children who lived in a respectable apartment with geraniums at the windows, at the far end of Val Venosta. Like the lowliest of scullery boys, like Gerda, like all the hotel staff, Herr Neumann returned to his family only during the low season closure. During the working months he stayed in one of the two single rooms reserved for the staff: besides him, only the maître enjoyed the privilege of not sharing with others the tiredness at the end of the day, the body smells and the indiscriminate, revealing sounds of sleep. Until the doctor arrived nobody had ever entered Herr Neumann’s room except him. And now Gerda was there.

  Ever since, at the age of sixteen, thi
s beautiful, very beautiful woman, too beautiful for him, had walked into his kitchen, there had been one thing he’d wished to do more than anything else, and he was doing it now: initiating her into the secrets of meat.

  It was Elmar who helped her carry a quarter of beef weighing eighty pounds to the little room in the attic, puffing and stopping halfway on the steep wooden stairs where Gerda had tried not to become a mother. They were both wearing the woolen greatcoats you used for entering the refrigerated cell and which were now protecting them from the blood and the grease. Gerda had set up a work table on Herr Neumann’s desk, dragging it from the little window overlooking the mountains to the bed to which he was confined. She had retrieved all his knives from the meat counter: for carving, boning, filleting, the bone hatchet, the carving fork, the flintlock, knives forged into specific, unmistakable shapes for roasts, hams, cured pork and venison. Gerda could barely believe that she was able to touch their impeccable, functional forms: to hold them, use them, and even wash them was the head chef’s exclusive privilege. Their cold, steel glow highlighted further the sad physicality of the sickroom.

  Herr Neumann was neither embarrassed nor humiliated by the stale smell, the small window, the modesty of his quarters despite his status as head chef. There was joy in his heart and his legs were no longer throbbing, or at least he didn’t notice: Gerda was there sitting next to him on the wooden bed and he was guiding her hand, showing her how to bone, slice, and scoop.

  The huge quarter of beef, he explained, was like a block of marble in the hands of a great sculptor: all it required was for its true shape to be revealed. The long, fleshy cylinder of the fillet, the triangle of the rump, the deformed pyramid of the shank with that bone sticking out, so graceless but so full of flavor . . .

  Querrippe, Entrecôte, Steak, Lende, Kugel, dickes Bugstück, Zungenstück, Hüfte, Hals, Zwerchfell, Schulter, Schulterspitze, Dünnung, Schenkel. The names of the meat cuts in German were precise and unambiguous, like everything else in that language of philosophers and mechanics.

  The Venetian, Calabrian, and Sicilian workers of which the Bolzano slaughterhouse was now full, and where Herr Neumann bought his supplies, had also taught him the most florid words from the South: filetto, sottofiletto, fesa, spalla, costata, piccione, cappello del prete, campanello, pesce, lacerto, piscione, lattughello, imperatore, manuzza . . .

  The cut was everything, Herr Neumann explained. No amount of perfect timing, flavoring, stuffing, marinading, browning, or salting can save a poorly cut piece of meat. The frying pan, tin or pot where it’s cooked is like the bed where the marriage between the meat and its cook is consummated; but the house where the couple lives more or less happily is the chopping board where it takes on its shape. If it’s cut badly, in a rush, or carelessly, the meat will behave like a woman who’s badly treated by day: however much her husband might flatter her at night in the bridal bed, she remains cold, unresponsive, depressed. When you handle her right, however—Herr Neumann was looking at Gerda, at her lips, the curve of her breasts pushing against the apron splashed with blood, the roundness of her behind digging a hollow in the mattress and almost brushing his deformed leg—meat is like a satisfied lover: it melts, becomes yielding and tender, and gives up its juices.

  These, however, were thoughts Herr Neumann perhaps couldn’t allow even to brush his mind.

  By the time the chef returned to his kitchen, Gerda had been promoted to assistant cook at the meat counter and, whenever he had to go to his increasingly frequent medical appointments, his substitute. Hubert, never much of a talker, stopped speaking altogether. Naturally, Gerda paid no attention: ever since she was a child she’d known how dense the silence between two people can be. So it was she who made the Wiener Schnitzel, which had now become her specialty, for the prestigious guests who sat at Frau Mayer’s tables on that Sunday in 1965.

  The hotel owner had rushed into the kitchen, her turquoise eyes blank like those of a crazed clairvoyant, breathless from pride and excitement, to tell Herr Neumann that tomorrow he would be cooking for the Obmann of the Südtiroler Volkspartei and his guests, representatives of the Italian government. What with local and national politicians, lackeys and undersecretaries, there would be over fifty people eating.

  Frau Mayer had no interest in Italian politics, but not because it was so convoluted and incomprehensible to the uninitiated. In her eyes, as in the eyes of almost all German-speaking South Tyroleans, the only noteworthy politician in the country whose citizenship they had was the figure leaning on a stick, with a hollow face and straight hair: Silvius Magnago. The residents of the rest of the peninsula were starting to get used to their politicians, like relatives to whom, no matter what, you’re linked by fate; Frau Mayer, on the other hand, didn’t even know their faces. Therefore, she didn’t recognize Magnago’s guests, nor did she feel any curiosity toward them. Only after an obscure master of ceremonies informed her did she realize that the Prime Minister himself (as well as interim Foreign Minister) would be sitting in her dining room, stopping in on his way to the Alpine hut between Alto Adige and Austria where he was to meet the Austrian Foreign Minister Bruno Kreisky. But this seemed a privilege less extraordinary than being able to serve at her Obmann’s table.

  Herr Neumann was requested to provide a menu of samples illustrating the Alto Adige gastronomic tradition to the guests from the capital city.

  The head cook took the request to heart.

  As a starter, he suggested top quality Speck and Kaminwurz24, accompanied by Schüttelbrot from Val Venosta and apple horseradish; goat’s cheese with herbs spread on Breatl25; little Tirtlan with sauerkraut, spinach and potatoes. These were served very hot and crisp straight after being fried, and the Roman lackeys asked for a double portion.

  The same members of the political underworld, however, wondered if the second helping had been a good idea when, arriving on trays garnished like paintings by Paul Klee, various kinds of Knödel were served (with liver, Speck, cheese, spinach), Spatzlan, Schlutzkrapfen served on slices of Graukäse and red onion rings, and wine soup.

  There followed the pièces de résistance, an appropriate word since many guests were beginning to feel as if they were on that frontline where exhausted gastric juices, heroic but desperate, put up resistance before advancing battalions of food: oven baked shank, lamb chops in herb crust, Greastl scented with bay leaves, venison shoulder on red cabbage and, finally, accompanied by blueberry sauce, Gerda’s Wiener Schnitzel.

  There were cooked vegetables to lighten the load: asparagus in vinaigrette sauce, young watercress salad with Kohlrabi26, sauerkraut with juniper, and Rösti27 with potatoes from Val Pusteria. When the desserts arrived, the members of the government, who had wanted to try everything for love of novelty, felt discouraged: the capacity of their stomachs had gone beyond all natural limits, and yet more dishes heaped with delights were coming their way. Assorted cakes (carrot cake, buckwheat cake, cake with berries, walnut cake), Linzertorte, Buchteln28, apple fritters with vanilla cream and, to finish, hot slices of the unmissable Strudel with vanilla cream. Moreover, besides delighting the members of both delegations, Gerda’s Wiener Schnitzel (her secret: before dipping the veal slices in flour, rolling them in breadcrumbs, and frying them in an abundance of lard, she had marinated them for half an hour in marjoram-flavored lemon juice) had triggered a discussion about history two tables away from the table of honor. Middle-ranking government representatives from the Bolzano Christian Democrats and the Südtiroler Volkspartei were seated there. The South Tyroleans had surprised their interlocutors with their correct, albeit rigid, Italian; nobody among the government delegates in charge of solving the Alto Adige issue, however, had deemed it necessary to learn a single word of German. The discussion therefore took place in Italian, more or less as follows:

  “The breaded cutlets, like so many good things in the North, were actually copied from Italy by the Austrians.”

  “W
e had nothing to copy, we’ve always breaded our meat. Like in the Wiener Backhendl29, which is also called poulet frit à la viennoise.”

  “But it’s a well known fact that it was Radetzky who took them to Vienna! He may have fired his cannons at the Milanese, but he certainly liked their cutlets.”

  “That’s a myth! Both in Vienna and here in Tyrol, we’d already been eating them for centuries.”

  “Cotoletta alla milanese or Wiener Schnitzel, what’s the difference? You’re all Italians now!”

  (No reply; the sound of chewing, embarrassed clearing of throats.)

  The person who had less food than anyone else was the Obmann Magnago, sitting at the table of honor, but his guest the Prime Minister also ate with moderation. There’s a singular man, Magnago thought, watching him toy unnervingly with his food before putting it in his mouth: closed, introverted, he never looked his interlocutor in the eye and when he laughed it seemed he did so under duress. He listened with heavy, half-closed eyes as though his mind was far away. He spoke very softly with sleepy, exasperating slowness, and his gestures and movements were limp, as though as a child he used to trip when he ran, slam drawers on his fingers, and forget to tie his shoelaces. Everything about him seemed helpless, weak, certainly not a man of action but rather, the classicist Magnago thought, a cunctator. And yet, over the course of several personal meetings, the Obmann had had occasion to see that this inexpressive face concealed highly subtle political intelligence. Unlike so many other representatives of the Italian government, the man sitting next to him was an intellectual, as well as a high-ranking lawyer. Above all, he was a man out of whose mouth, no matter how tired or distracted he was, stock phrases would never come.