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Eva Sleeps

Page 20

by Francesca Melandri


  Magnago knew very well that the hard German accent with which he spoke, however perfectly, the language of Dante, and the fact that he had done his war service in the Wehrmacht made his interlocutors immediately associate him with Nazism. He knew how futile it would be to try and explain that not all German officers had been Nazis, and that he’d been drafted into the German army because the residents of his land had had to choose between . . . No, it was impossible: he couldn’t forever inflict a compendium of South Tyrol’s complicated history.

  And so the word “Nazi” remained implicitly and powerfully unspoken between him and almost all those with whom he spoke on board the ocean liner that is the Italian Parliament, and something he was very much aware of. Every so often, the label would become explicit, especially on the part of certain right-wing leaders, particularly those who really had some explaining to do as to where they had been after September 8. They, of all people, weren’t ashamed to call South Tyroleans of German ethnicity the name given to traitors during the Risorgimento: austriacanti. As though the Italianization of Alto Adige from Fascism onwards had been the Fifth War of Independence, as though here too Italians had been the oppressed and Austrians the invaders, instead of the other way around. Magnago had lived and studied in Bologna, where he still had many close friends from his university days; and because he knew them very well, he knew that when Italians are given the choice between identifying with the role of victim or that of the aggressor, they will always choose the former. Even in the face of historical truth, if necessary. “Self-pity,” a concept that has no lexical equivalent in the language of Goethe, and which Magnago, even when he spoke German always used in Italian.

  However, fortunately, the thought process of the man sitting next to him was not as lazy as that of so many of his fellow countrymen. Naturally, he wasn’t the only intelligent Italian politician. Of course there was Andreotti, for example, though his subtlety and complexity, Magnago thought, sometimes verged on the abyss. Then there was the intellectual refinement of Fanfani, although somewhat corrupted by the envious nastiness typical in some people of small stature: Magnago knew that his own grenadier height triggered irremediable aversion in Fanfani which, he felt, would yield nothing worthwhile in their negotiations. No, the Obmann thought, the intelligence of this man who had allowed the waiter to pour his wine with absent-minded indolence but who had then muttered a submissive “thank you” was as refined as that of Andreotti and Fanfani, but much more humane. When he had met him for the first time after spending years in the baroque halls of Roman palaces, in order to bring to the government’s attention the necessity of a negotiated solution in Alto Adige, years of absent-minded interviews lasting just a few minutes and with a quick handshake for the sole benefit of photographers, Magnago had asked him, “How long can you give me?”

  And he had replied, “As long as it takes.”

  This interminable luncheon wasn’t just celebrating the start of real talks on the future of South Tyrol, Magnago thought, dabbing his mouth with a linen napkin—picked out especially by Frau Mayer in the workshop of artist weavers in Val Venosta. What was also worth celebrating was the fact that his interlocutor was none other than Aldo Moro.

  After lunch, Herr Neumann, Gerda, Hubert, Elmar and the entire kitchen staff washed their hands, straightened the white canvas caps on their heads and, under the fiercely proud eyes of Frau Mayer, stood in a row in order to say goodbye to the illustrious guests.

  Gerda didn’t meet Aldo Moro’s eye, and barely heard him say goodbye. Later, she wasn’t even able to say whether his hand had brushed hers or not. However, when Silvius Magnago shook hands with her, she recognized the skinny man she had seen, as a little girl, direct the course of the crowd in Sigmundskro like a captain on a ship. He was barely ten years older now but already looked like an old man. And yet during that time, Gerda thought, the one who had been most transformed by life wasn’t the Obmann: it was her. And the thought made her feel pride as sharp as the steel in Herr Neumann’s knives.

  The political reconciliation in South Tyrol that was beginning to be planned wasn’t good news for everyone: there were those who did their best to sabotage it.

  The newspapers became war bulletins.

  23 MAY 1966: ATTACK ON THE FINANCE POLICE AT PASSO DIVIZZE. CUSTOMS OFFICER BRUNO BOLOGNESI IS KILLED.

  24 JULY 1966: NIGHT ATTACK WITH MACHINE GUNS ON THREE CUSTOMS EMPLOYEES IN SAN MARTINO IN VAL CASIES. CUSTOMS OFFICERS SALVATORE GABITTA GIUSEPPE D’IGNOTI ARE KILLED. A THIRD, COSIMO GUZZO, IS SERIOUSLY INJURED.

  3 AUGUST 1966: DYNAMITE ATTACK ON THE PALACE OF JUSTICE IN BOLZANO.

  20 AUGUST 1966: DYNAMITE ATTACK ON ALITALIA OFFICES IN VIENNA.

  SUMMER 1966: THOUSANDS OF DRAFTED AND REGULAR SOLDIERS, AND ANTI-TERRORISM UNITS ARE SENT TO ALTO ADIGE. ROAD BLOCKS, SEARCHES AND ARRESTS ARE A DAILY OCCURRENCE.

  SEPTEMBER 1966: EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD PETER WIELAND FROM VALDAORA IS KILLED AT A ROAD BLOCK—HE HAD NOT STOPPED WHEN ASKED TO. MASS DEMONSTRATION OF MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN AT HIS FUNERAL.

  It rained, it rained, it rained. In 1966, the sky never seemed to run out of its water reserve. As though it had stored it up for decades with the sole aim of pouring it out on human beings all in one go. Florence had been buried in mud, and the mountain slopes all over Italy were sliding downstream. Even the river that crossed Gerda’s home town had burst its banks and filled houses with mud and detritus, taken chunks out of roads, washed away bridges, and killed people. The flood also invaded the chocolate and Magenzucker30 (small digestive, aromatic sugar lumps red as rubies) factory. For days on end, aid workers shoveled mud that smelled of cinnamon, cloves, and bitter chocolate.

  Then the snow came. It fell abundantly on the town, and then some more fell and didn’t stop. Snowflakes continued to fall, lace hexagons fluttering in the air like butterflies. It was only the beginning of December, the beginning of Advent, and children were starting to think that it would never stop, that it would snow forever, till the end of time, and that the world would become a giant snowball, but then who would throw it?

  A muffled silence had filled the space between sounds: the gravelly tone of discontented wives had softened, the crying of babies almost seemed a melodic call, and the insults shouted by drunkards as they came out of the Kneipen31 had now acquired a faint elegance. Even the rattling of military vans on the motorway, with heavy chains wrapped around their wheels, had become vague, soft, almost evocative. However, the night of December 2 was torn apart by a specific, pure sound: the roar of an explosion.

  Nobody had ever believed in the recycling of the monument to the Alpini into a symbol of reconciliation between South Tyrol and the Italian army—especially not now, with the ubiquitous presence of military columns, barracks in a state of high alert, road blocks, arrests, searches.

  Neo-Nazi paramilitary explosives experts from beyond the border had been well-trained: this time the charges were placed perfectly. Not even a fragment remained of that poor, ugly, coarse granite Wastl, the hapless ambassador of Italian humanity and of its humble Alpini.

  Things had changed since the last time it had been hit: nobody considered these to be childish actions any longer. The terrorist from the new bloodthirsty BAS who claimed responsibility for the attack was sentenced to seventeen years and called “government enemy number one.” The verdict was pronounced in absentia, however, because he was on the run.

  A life on the run was what Peter had been looking for ever since, as a boy, he would walk around the woods and glaciers, his soul stripped bare by solitude, like a shelled kernel,

  That’s what he’d always wanted, to find himself exposed to the non-human: the perfect Y-shaped tracks of a hare in the March snow; marmots blinking in the June sun, thin and bewildered after the long fast, the same ones which, in September, after a summer of eating their fill, with fat behinds like babies in diapers, whistle while doing clownish somersaults; needles that loo
k gold in the October light, raining down from pine trees at the first gust of a northerly wind, messenger of winter; the horizontal pupils of an ibex, caught unawares a few yards away, its alien expression free of reproach, even toward the bullet seconds away from killing it. And now, in addition to all this, Peter also had a mission: the Heimat had called him and he had answered. It was his answer to every other question.

  The equipment, the lifestyle, and the way his days panned out, weren’t that different from when he was a hunter. Ankle boots, knee-high socks, binoculars around his neck, a peaked hat, a backpack, a rope, a shotgun. For a few weeks now, he and his companions had been calling home a rocky recess of green granite with black streaks from the humidity, its open side shielded by boughs. It was comfortable. They’d built themselves benches and a kind of low table with carved branches tied together. Nails in the walls acted as a wardrobe, the nearby stream as a bath, shower and sink. A trusted woman who understood them and shared their views, not like that silly Leni, climbed up from the bottom of the valley every so often. She would take winding paths so as not to be followed and bring blackened pans full of food, bags of provisions, bottles and cigarettes. But it was risky, so they mostly managed by themselves, crossing the border to Austria where there was no danger and they could even go to the shops.

  Sometime earlier, the Bavarian chemist with fingers fluttering like butterflies had returned to the cave, panting from the effort of dragging his huge baby thighs all the way up there. He had topped up their supplies of raw materials—which was neither food, nor grappa, nor cigarettes. He had also brought along what would make that inert material alive and exciting: wire, fuses, detonators. He’d given final instructions but hadn’t stayed long: he really didn’t care for the life of an explorer. He was a civilized man! A city man! An intellectual! One day, the war would finally break out in Südtirol, he thought, and then these mountain people who stank like goats and hid in caves like in the Stone Age, would realize that only they, the pan-Germans from across the border, could lead them. Meanwhile, they might as well be useful.

  And now, hidden in the ditch next to the motorway, on a night of the waning moon, Peter was fearlessly tinkering with sticks of dynamite and fuses. He didn’t picture the faces of his future victims, the Carabinieri on duty who would be passing there a few hours later. If he really had to think about his targets—which he almost never did—he thought of uniforms, ranks, machine guns and, mostly, of sentences in a language with too many vowels that called for you to halt.

  He was working, his fingers agile even in the dark. His opaque eyes had never needed much light, and the crescent moon over which clouds floated like the figures of a magic lantern was enough for him. The clover crushed by his boots gave off a fresh, sour smell.

  He picked one and put it in his mouth. He felt an explosion of sharp, peppery taste which made him happier than he had ever been. Happier than that time when the Carabinieri had surrounded him but he had managed to escape. Happier than when he had entered Leni’s body on their wedding night. Happier than when he had killed his first chamois. Happier than when his mother was nursing him and—at the age of twenty Johanna could still do it—smiling at him. Happier than before he was born, and the world was One.

  The happiness Peter felt was blinding, luminous, total. Perhaps even eternal.

  When her sixteen-year-old cousin Sebastian, known as Wastl, laughed, he sounded like a woodpecker digging a nest in a trunk: “T-t-t, t-t-t, t-t-t!.” To Eva, it was the most cheerful sound in the world: whenever she heard it, she was shaken from top to toe by a laughter the reason for which was irrelevant. This, too, her cousin-uncle, who was almost a man, had taught her: that you could always find a reason to laugh, laugh, and then laugh some more, if you really wanted to.

  In the field between the Hubers’ maso and that of Leni’s parents, Wastl was showing off an imitation of a distant relative who liked Schnaps a little too much. “Madoja, oschpele, hardimitz’n”32 mumbled Wastl, swaying with the dignity of a drunkard, almost falling over his intertwined legs; there was no doubt he was about to end up on his face but no, he managed to stand up, then he would arch his back and almost fall backwards . . .

  Eva watched with her mouth open, her eyes shining, breathless, her belly sore. She was laughing uncontrollably. Next to her, Ulli, her other cousin, a year older than her, was laughing a little because of Wastl, and a little because of Eva, who was now spread on the ground like a broken doll and couldn’t stop giggling, not just at the drunken imitation, but because laughter had made her limbs limp and she was unable to stand up, and then because Wastl and Ulli had started laughing at her, and finally because, when the desire to laugh hasn’t stopped yet and nothing can be done, you have to drink it up, until the last spasm in your solar plexus, until the last tickle in your throat.

  When Leni appeared in the hayloft, they were still laughing, but no sooner had they seen her face than all three of them stopped abruptly.

  Leni approached Wastl and said something to him. Eva, who was still only four, didn’t understand much. She just understood that it had something to do with Ulli’s Tata, the one who wasn’t there. And now, judging from Leni’s confused words, he would carry on not being there, but differently. For the first time in her life Eva noticed something: that there are many ways in which a father can be not there, but some are worse than others.

  Gerda sat before the same officer who, sometime earlier, had called her in to request information about Peter. This time, it was he who imparted information: her brother had been blown up while preparing an attack. He was no longer outraged, but rather stiff with embarrassment. How do you express condolences to the sister of a man whose death has avoided the one he was planning for five of your fellow soldiers? Gerda thought she felt in her chest the explosion that had torn her brother to pieces. Her heart stopped. So did her breath, and the growth of her nails and hair.

  The soldier standing next to the desk was also the same one as the previous time. He leaned toward her and with awkward concern asked if she had understood. Gerda half closed her eyes and this was correctly interpreted as a “Yes.” He offered her a glass of water and she cocked her head: “No.”

  The officer reassured her: she didn’t have to worry, his remains had already been identified by the wife of the deceased. Gerda wanted to stand up but didn’t quite know where she had put her legs and hands, and yet she’d had them when she’d come in. When she found them again, she stood up without a word and left the room, supporting herself against the wall.

  The soldier ran after her and, on the same spot on the sidewalk where the other time he’d asked her out to dance, he said, “My condolences.”

  She looked at him like someone searching for something. “He with me, once . . . an Ausflug . . . How do you say?”

  The soldier spoke a few words of German but couldn’t remember that one. He felt sorry for it. Gerda walked away, straight and stiff like a sentry box in the barracks. She knew only this: that if she didn’t lower her head or curve her shoulders, if she could walk in a precise line, without smudging it with wayward steps, then she would be able to reach Frau Mayer’s hotel. Only when she had disappeared behind the block did the soldier remember.

  An outing.

  Ausflug is an outing.

  Peter was not buried in the town’s largest cemetery but in the tiny village gathered around the bulb-shaped belfry on the northern side of the mountain.

  The living had been generous to the dead: on that steep, vertical land, they had dedicated to the little cemetery, surrounded by a low lime wall, a precious plot of flat land which stretched out, like a minute soul, toward the imposing vastness of the glaciers. For centuries, it had been the Hubers’ final resting place. Even the younger offspring, the ones who through the hard but necessary law of the maso were kicked out to go and seek their fortunes elsewhere, were welcomed back, in death, to the soil of their forbears. A cemetery is ce
rtainly not like a hayfield which, when parcelled out, drives everyone to poverty within a few generations; in a cemetery people cultivate memory and identity, facts decided by destiny that never diminish, not even if shared with others. This is where Hermann’s parents were buried after the Spanish flu had swept them away, both on the same night. This is where Johanna rested and, next to her, there was space for her husband. This is where they buried Peter.

  Crowded funerals for Bumser people were a thing of the past. Tens of thousands of South Tyroleans had taken part in the funeral procession of Sepp Kerschbaumer, the gentle idealist who’d died in prison after the conclusion of the Milan trial. However, nobody understood these new terrorists who not only struck at Fascist monuments or electricity pylons but also at people, even if those people wore uniforms. They killed and maimed then ran across the border, giving soldiers an excuse to make the lives of family members in the maso even harder, as had happened right there during that raid, just over two years earlier.

  That day was still spoken of with terror, as well as with incredulity and relief: it really had happened right there, where the last noteworthy event had been the passage of a Russian prisoner who’d escaped during the Great War. And that helicopter! It had appeared in the sky like a deus ex machina in reverse, a dazzling incarnation of Evil which, however—as everybody knew because every line of the dialogue between the two officers had been repeated countless times—had been vanquished by an unlikely hero, the officer commanding the raid, the very man who until that moment had played the part of the bad guy. It therefore didn’t seem strange that Peter, the search for whom had been the trigger behind the event, was buried there. The soldiers were welcome to come back and look for him now: they would find him, with no need for all that Schweinerei33 again.

 

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