Eva Sleeps

by Francesca Melandri

  A charge of explosives had knocked down an electricity pylon in Cima Vallona, Porzescharte in German, on the border between Eastern Tyrol and the region of Belluno. It was a trap: anti-personnel mines awaited the Italian soldiers who rushed to the location of the explosion. When the soldiers Armando Piva, Francesco Gentile, Mario Di Lecce, and Olivo Dordi, reached the fallen electricity pylon, they were blown up inside their van.

  In addition to politicians and generals, thousands of people visited the resting chapel. German-speaking South Tyroleans, Italians from Alto Adige, from Comelico, from Cadore, soldiers, tourists. Any sympathy for the attackers’ motivations had now run out. Nothing in the experience of the residents of San Candido, where the bodies were displayed, gave any meaning to this violence. A young peasant whose skin was already cooked by the sun, a navy-blue apron over his white shirt, stood by the bodies for a while, his head down. Then it was the turn of the old woman.

  She didn’t know the names of the four Alpini. Maybe they’d told her but they were Italian names, difficult to remember. They didn’t matter to her: names are the least of anyone’s worries. She stroked the coffins one by one. They were closed: an anti-personnel mine is not kind to the body that passes over it.

  Over a quarter of a century earlier, the war had taken away from her four sons. They were more or less the age of the Alpini shut away in the four coffins, give or take a year. She hadn’t been able to say goodbye to her sons, and all she had to mourn were the letters from the brigade headquarters. Their names, of course, were there, inscribed in the marble at the entrance to the cemetery, with the names of other fallen soldiers. But there’s not a lot you can do with a name. A name doesn’t reap the hay, doesn’t fix the tiles on the roof. Names are the least of your worries.

  The four young men were dead, just like her sons, what did it matter that their names were not Sepp, Gert, Manfred and Hans, but Francesco, Mario, Olivo, Armando? The name of the place where they had fallen didn’t matter either: Porzescharte, Cima Vallona, what was the difference? They were dead, her sons were dead, and all you can do for the dead is pray.

  The old woman pulled a rosary out of her apron pocket, and began.

  Silvius Magnago spread his elbows, bent his head forward, leaned his forehead on the interlaced hands over his desk. The shoulders of his suit, always too wide for his skinny frame, rose like wings on the back of his neck. His thick, black-rimmed glasses were in front of him, next to the pen, and the crutches were leaning parallel to the wood paneling on the wall.

  He remained like this, hunched over, his forehead on his desk, his eyes shut. He was tired. In June, in Porzescharte, or Cima Vallona as the Italians called it, four soldiers had been killed in a horrific attack. In July, the Neo-Fascists had demonstrated in Bolzano in favor of “the fundamental Italian nature of Alto Adige.” In September, at Trento Station, a bag had exploded in the hands of police officers Filippo Foti and Edoardo Martini, killing both on the spot. It was to be the last deadly attack by South Tyrolean terrorism, but Magnago had no way of knowing that. The TV news had broadcast one of his statements, issued right from that desk.

  “The recent dynamite attacks have left a deep mark on the Alto Adige population, whatever their language. It is only with the tools of democracy that problems can be solved. We refuse to believe that they can be solved with violence.”

  He had delivered it in his impeccable Italian, but his German accent had come across as harder than usual. The Italian television caption had presented him as follows: Silvius Magnago, leader of Südtiroler Volkspartei, former Wehrmacht.

  He hadn’t felt this tired since the war years.

  Besides, there was this heavy new atmosphere in the sleeper car. Now, when they traveled to Rome with him, the members of Parliament and senators of the Südtiroler Volkspartei—whose leader he still was, after all—no longer came to his compartment for a nightcap before bed: they’d wish him good night frostily then retire to their couchettes. Magnago knew what they said behind his back: that he’d sold out to the Italians; that they considered his attempts at bringing together the Italian government, the Austrian authorities, and representatives of Alto Adige Italians, as petty political bargaining; that they were muttering about the Heimat being sold off, about too much Realpolitik; that they uttered the word Kompromiss like the worst possible insult.

  Yet he also knew that the only alternatives to Kompromiss are heroes and, from Andreas Hofer to Sepp Kerschbaumer, Südtirol had had its fill of heroes. Even those wicked bombers who carried on killing probably thought themselves to be heroes. Magnago knew he was the only one able to obtain from the Italian government those guarantees of linguistic and administrative control that his people had been waiting for for half a century, precisely because there was nothing of the hero about him.

  He raised his hollow face. Before him, on the walnut desk, there was a stack of papers: the first draft of the Autonomy Statute of the future autonomous province of Bolzano. He would still need to take tiring trips to Rome, engage in exhausting negotiations, before it would assume its definitive form: one hundred and thirty-seven articles, thirty-one marginal notes. There was still a lot to do.

  Silvius Magnago rubbed his eyes, put on his glasses, and picked up the first sheet of paper.

  When they were together, Gerda would take Eva into her large bed in the small ground-floor room. Eva would cling to her, her mother’s body both the lifeboat and the ocean where she would lose herself. And Gerda let her.

  Eva had started to notice that she didn’t have a father like the other children. She wasn’t the only one: Ulli and Sigi, for instance, didn’t have one either. But they’d lost theirs, whereas she’d never had one. She wasn’t sure what the difference was but there clearly was one.

  Another thing Eva had never had: new shoes. She’d always inherited Ruthi’s old ones or those of her sisters, and even Ulli’s boy’s shoes. However, Gerda had been promoted to cook, her salary had increased, so she had decided to buy her a pair. Now, sitting on the bench in the shop beneath the town porticos, Eva couldn’t believe there was such beauty at the end of her shins. They were solid shoes, with rubber crepe soles, but to her they were more splendid than if they’d been made of black patent.

  When they left the shop, Eva walked with her eyes down, not to miss the sight of the new shoes that followed her every step.

  “That’s your father.”

  Eva was reluctant to look away from her feet, but what her mother had just said wasn’t something you heard every day. At the age of five, she had never yet heard it.

  “The one in the dark suit.”

  Eva looked up. There was more than one man in a dark suit on the sidewalk and in the street.

  “Which one?”

  “The one looking at us.”

  Several men were looking at Gerda, but not because they were the father of her child.

  “Giamo,”37 Gerda said with a sudden impatience. She took her by the hand and dragged her away with long strides. Eva carried on searching the passing men for a resemblance, a specific sign, a clear trace of belonging. But she couldn’t find it: when he’d seen Gerda and that little girl, Hannes Staggl’s face had turned the color of the geraniums on the balcony beneath which he was passing, and he’d already walked away. The young woman at his arm, elegant and slim, in a coat that Audrey Hepburn could have worn, asked, “Who was that woman?”

  “What woman?”

  “The one with the little girl.”

  “I didn’t see a little girl,” Hannes replied to his fiancée.

  3:45 A.M.

  At 3:45 A.M., while patrolling the guard stations, I was reaching station 6 North-West, which was assigned, as per—

  The pen wasn’t writing anymore. The ink must have dried up. He slipped it under his clothes, under his armpit, like a thermometer. It would take a couple of minutes to warm up enough to write again. He struggled to
move his fingers despite the woolen gloves.

  The staff sergeant had decided not to add wood to the stove. There was only a small heap piled up against the wall of the old finance police hut. Also, he would make too much noise going out and coming back in and he didn’t want to deprive those asleep of even just one minute of the remaining fifteen minutes’ sleep before the change of guard. Still, it was bitterly cold. The kind of cold you just can’t imagine unless you’ve known it. How can you convey this kind of cold to someone from Reggio Calabria?

  He’d tried to describe it the first time he’d been back home on leave (forty-eight hours on the train there and back, seventy-two with his family): “You feel your fingers, your feet, and your nose burning, not from the heat but from the cold.”

  “Burning?” his mother had repeated, perplexed.

  It was pointless. The cold up there was like the sea, you couldn’t describe it to someone who’d never been there. The night before, the thermometer had plummeted to minus twenty-three Celsius. But the worst time wasn’t at night. Even then, with the wind hitting your face like a spiked shoe, and homesickness which always grows stronger in the dark, night time wasn’t all that bad, with those stars as pure as gemstones and that all-enveloping silence like the dome of a basilica. It was dawn that was ugly, with its promise of sun and heat, which it betrayed with that humid, gray light that made your bones stiffen worse than before. It was horrible to force a nineteen-year-old auxiliary, grown incapable of thinking through solitude, to wash his face.

  He was a non-commissioned officer, he’d gone to school and was prepared. But these conscripted boys who were born in Salemi, Sibari or Bisceglie, they just couldn’t cope with being at 2,000 meters without going down into the valley for months on end.

  Of course he’d also found it tough when he’d first arrived in Alto Adige.

  He had enrolled at the German language course for non-commissioned officers of his own free will. He liked the idea of chewing on another language, even though he’d only spoken Calabrian at elementary school. In fact, he hadn’t found it too hard, nor driven his teacher to despair, like that guy from Bari who, when asked “Wie alt bist du?”38 always replied, “One meter sixty-three!”

  Alto Adige was the right place for serving your country in danger, of that he was convinced, so after his two years of training, he took his oath and was proud to go.

  His first disappointment was when he arrived at the barracks near Merano. Headquarters wasn’t prepared for such a large dispatch of soldiers, and everything was provisional. The courtyard was full of weeds, the dormitories filthy and with peeling walls, so there were one hundred men cramped together in a single place with all their bodily smells, just a tent to separate him and the other Carabinieri from the Alpini. There was no kitchen, so meals were cooked on large camp stoves that stank of kerosene, and there wasn’t even a mess, so you had to eat in the freezing courtyard from the same mess tins you then used for washing yourself.

  And forget about the troops. These young conscripted and auxiliary Carabinieri had been selected of course, but not for their abilities. On the contrary: military service in Alto Adige was a punishment.

  Many could barely read or write, and hardly had any sense of discipline or order. More than once, at 6 A.M., when it was his turn to do reveille, the staff sergeant had narrowly avoided being hit in the face with a shoe. The same boys who, after a month in the passes and screes, if asked the name of their hometown, would burst into tears like children.

  And then there was the cold. What can a Calabrian possibly know about the cold? A Calabrian knows stifling heat and scirocco, he knows drought, he knows the cannibal sun that sinks its teeth into your head, and the wind that makes you mad, euphoric or unconscious; but a Calabrian certainly doesn’t know this cold. The first time he’d experienced it was in the barracks courtyard, squatting like a beggar, eating soup that had frozen before he’d had the time to put his spoon into it. That was nothing compared to the freezing cold he was to suffer whilst patrolling the border crossings, but he didn’t know that yet.

  His only consolation, during those first months in Alto Adige, had been the pasta with chilies in a trattoria near Ponte Druso, owned by southerners, where he went with his comrades. And of course, there were the Fräulein.

  He’d always pictured German women like the singing Kessler twins, with their never-ending long legs, glittering bodices, backcombed blonde hair. South Tyrolean women were not as elegant even though they were blondes, and didn’t have toupees but plaits twisted around their heads like spare wheels. Still, you had to admit it: South Tyroleans legs were much more beautiful than Calabrian ones.

  “These,” the mad second lieutenant Genovese would say, “have a high center of gravity.”

  He’d spent the first year patrolling the border, the only Carabiniere among platoons of eighty or a hundred Alpini. Their mission: to stop terrorists from entering Italian soil. Or, better still, catch them so that he, who was on police duty, would hand them over to the law. They would hike up and down the passes beneath the peaks on the border between Italy and Austria—Passo Resia, Vetta d’Italia, Val Passiria. His backpack weighed over ninety pounds: weapons, machine guns, sleeping bag, tent and canvas, army meal supplies, mess tin with its little stove, shovel, pickax. All that on your back: the point was to go where no van could. They looked like tortoises, with all that stuff on their backs, except that nobody has ever ordered a tortoise to walk up to its waist in snow for hours on end.

  They wouldn’t return to the barracks for weeks.

  By day, they walked along the watershed; at night they would make holes in the snow a couple of meters long, throw the tent canvas over it like a cover, camouflage it with some snow, then go to sleep inside. Two hours of sleep, two hours of watch. There was always a fierce wind blowing on the border—he came to realize that mountain passes are like open windows on both sides of the house, they compete. That’s why they never put up the tents: if there was a snowstorm during the night, they wouldn’t notice they were being blown away, they were so exhausted.

  Already after the first week, some would start hallucinating. It was the cold, the lack of sleep, the tiredness. Those who were constipated would start hallucinating first, un-expelled toxins mixed with exhaustion going straight to the head. Every so often, someone would become delirious. Everyone, sooner or later, would start calling for his mom.

  Sometimes, the staff sergeant wondered what the point of these operations was. A hundred soldiers clinging to a snow-covered slope are more visible than a line of armored cars, whereas the terrorists moved about skillfully, two or three at most, and knew every scree, every rock, every protrusion in these granite mountains, and would slip over the border and back beyond the boundary stones, like chamois, without leaving a trace.

  As a matter of fact, they hadn’t seen a single one.

  However, the motto was, “Usi obbedir tacendo.” Keep silent and obey. If he’d considered questioning orders he wouldn’t have become a Carabiniere.

  Another consolation was reaching the masi. There were some even at high altitude, especially in the neighboring valleys of Val Venosta, beneath the glaciers. It was normal to be welcomed by ten or even thirteen children. They were poor peasants with many children but they always had enough to eat. 50,000 lire was enough to produce a hot meal for the entire troop. The women would serve them then watched them eat, silently but without hostility. Not like some waiters in the town cafés, who pretended not to speak Italian and when he ordered a coffee, replied, “Nichts verstehen” or “Wiederholen Sie auf Deutsch,” so then he would enunciate with correct pronunciation, “geben Sie mir bitte einen Kaffee,” and then, Deutsch or not Deutsch, they had to bring him coffee. These mountain peasants, however, genuinely didn’t speak Italian, and when he tried to communicate in German they didn’t exactly smile but, well, almost. Then they would send their children up to the attic and give thei
r eiderdowns to officers and non-commissioned officers, so that they could lie down on the tables of the Stube, in the warmth. He, however, would go into the hayloft with his men, without a single regret: lying in the fragrant hay, with the warm breath of the cows rising from the cowshed, you slept like a king.

  Not so, here, in the hut abandoned by the customs police, where he couldn’t sleep at night. During the day he’d lie on the camp bed for a couple of hours, and perhaps also have a snooze before evening. But never after dark. To keep awake, he would write. He brought along many notepads, the kind with the sheets bound together at the top, like the ones used by cartoon journalists. He also had pens, but now he realized he should get a supply of pencils instead: lead doesn’t shrink in the cold like ink does. His handwriting was tidy, diligent and what he wrote was also precise: whether a magazine was jammed, how many tins of food had been used up, the sighting of a capercaillie. And, of course, the watch shifts.

  He wrote on his rickety table, watching all those who slept and going out for a quick chat with those on watch. His hearing, which had always been sharp, had become even more so. He heard every sound in the night: the rustling of trees, the call of the night predators, the stones rumbling down the screes, the cracking of glaciers. Sometimes, he thought he could detect the buzzing of constellations that stood out with their sharp light from the cosmic blackness. That’s when he knew he was really tired.

  He was twenty-four years old while the eldest among his men was four years younger. He watched over them like a mother over sick children. After all, they were somewhat ill: with fear, isolation, cold, and homesickness. With silence, too. With that motionless, unknown mountain that gave birth to sons who could pop out of nowhere, massacre the bodies of fellow soldiers, then disappear again into her lap.