Eva Sleeps

by Francesca Melandri

  Right there, sometime earlier, terrorists had killed three customs officers. The border was less than ten meters away and, using a kind of zip wire, they’d run a bomb from Austrian territory to the windows of the hut. Three men had been blown up in their sleep and a fourth had been blinded.

  It was too dangerous for customs officers to remain there. And so, for almost three months, it had been the staff sergeant’s lot to be there, in the hut in the pastures, and command a platoon of thirty men—well, men . . . it was hard to call these frightened boys that. They had dug out a dozen holes in the snow around the perimeter of the building, and when it was your turn to keep watch, you’d get into one of them, only your shoulders above ground like a pestle in a mortar. At night, he would place a soldier in every emplacement, but two or three were enough during the day. He’d put up a barricade of barbed wire all around and, as they used up the food supplies, they’d tie the empty sauce cans to it: all you had to do was touch a single point of the barbed wire and it would ring out like cow bells. Nobody would be able to approach the hut without making a racket.

  A few yards beyond no man’s land, there was an old Austrian customs house, much smaller than the Italian one. The zip wire that had killed the customs officers had been dispatched from there. He always kept an eye on it day and night. Was there anyone inside? Would they return and kill them from there? Sometimes, farther away, he could see two men with binoculars watching the horizon for hours. They never got close enough to be recognized. It was hard to resist the impulse to go check them out but the orders were quite definite: do not cross the border. The terrorists made relations between Italy and Austria tense enough as it was, the last thing they needed were skirmishes on the border.

  He was a soldier, he wasn’t in the business of politics. He used to think that Alto Adige folk, all of them, were ungrateful traitors to the unity of the country. Then he had arrived in Alto Adige. No sooner had he left the cities at the bottom of the valley, with their factories full of southern workers, and met the peasants, than he had immediately understood: there was nothing Italian about the people here. However, terrorists were bloodthirsty cowards who wouldn’t even let you see their faces.

  Since the recent attacks on fellow soldiers, the atmosphere in the barracks had become heavy. There was talk that an officer of the Alpini, a guy who used bombs and grenades as paperweights and who, instead of the President of the Republic, had a portrait of the Duce behind the desk, had declared, “It’s now the turn of a South Tyrolean.”

  The staff sergeant didn’t want to hear such things, not even as a joke. Then, a few days later, that young man from Val Pusteria had been killed at a roadblock. The soldiers who shot him were young conscripts, so it could only have been a tragic error due to the tension. And yet, when it happened, he’d remembered the officer’s words and, for a moment, felt the blood chill in his veins.

  Now he had received an order: the Italian flag had to flutter on the boundary stones. And so, every morning, the raising of the flag was performed with pride by the soldier in charge.

  However, there was another order to execute, which was no less difficult because he’d given it to himself: to return every one of these boys to his family.

  There was a false alarm at least once every night. “I heard someone cough,” one of the men would say. Or else, “There’s a small light among the trees.” And immediately, all the others keeping watch would confirm that yes, they too had heard a suspicious noise, seen a light, heard footsteps crunching in the snow. They’d stir one another like pigeons. Or else he would fire a reconnaissance flare with the Garand rifle, and in the eight seconds between the shot and the little comets lighting up in the sky, somebody would start screaming, terrified, “They’re attacking!” and perhaps even start machine-gunning at random with the Maschinengewehr. In the morning, they would find larches and fir trees mown down, stone dead: no wonder they used to call the MG 42 “Hitler’s saw.” It was a miracle that there weren’t any wounded among them yet. Thankfully, he didn’t have to give his superiors an account of the ammunition.

  Once when—by pure chance—the radio was working, he had begged for reinforcements: he’d explained to headquarters that the men were exhausted, that they couldn’t take it anymore and, especially, that there weren’t enough of them to take it in turns to keep watch. He could no longer guarantee the effectiveness of the service or the safety of his men. He’d even drafted an official report. It has become necessary to replace the soldiers who have been here for over a month—he had written. I, the officer in charge can no longer answer for those who are in such an altered state of body and mind. Then he had tied the envelope to the dangling wire attached to the belly of the helicopter that dropped supplies and ammunition.

  Another month had passed. No reinforcements or replacements had arrived. And even the helicopter hadn’t appeared for days because of the strong winds. They’d finished almost all the cans of food, and all they had left was a little flour. Those with a good aim had been given permission to go hunting, so they’d eaten the odd hare. But they were beginning to feel hungry. They’d spend the evening huddled around the radio, trying to make out the warm trace of human voices through the crackling. Like miners who go deeper into a dark and muddy gallery in search of rubies.

  He took the pen from under his armpit. It gave out much more warmth than he felt inside. He read what he’d written up to then, and resumed his writing. The ink ran fluid once again.

  3:45 A.M.

  At 3:45 A.M., while patrolling the guard stations, I reached station 6 North-West, which was assigned, as per schedule of watch shifts, to the auxiliary Carabiniere Ciriello Salvatore until 4 A.M.

  I found it empty.

  The staff sergeant paused. Then he crossed it out and corrected it.

  I found it undefended.

  When I got back inside, I went to the dormitory where, even though there were thirty-five minutes to go before the end of his approved watch shift, I found the above-mentioned auxiliary Carabiniere Ciriello Salvatore sleeping on his camp bed.

  The staff sergeant re-read what he’d written. He took a deep sigh. He looked up at the peeling wall. He put the pen under his armpit: he wanted to take time to think without the ink freezing. But he didn’t think for long. He resumed writing on his notepad in a hurry, with renewed urgency.

  However, I finally decided not to write a report and not to punish the man responsible for the episode because he’s just a boy who’s dead tired and who hasn’t slept properly for a month, and now he’s also hungry and now this icy wind is making it impossible to keep your eyes open, so no wonder they’re so exhausted and end up mad, but those people down there don’t realize it, they really have no idea . . .

  He stopped as though he’d been running: suddenly, with a residual thrust that almost made him fall over.

  He never showed this personal notepad to anyone, certainly not to his superiors. Even so, just to be careful, the staff sergeant began to cover the words “Ciriello” and “Salvatore” with thick lines of the pen. The name of the guilty auxiliary Carabiniere vanished in a black patch.

  You never know.

  Instead, he put his own name at the bottom of the page. As though this page of the notebook were an official report, a document for whose contents he took full responsibility, as a soldier and a non-commissioned officer.

  Then he signed: Staff Sergeant Vito Anania.

  KILOMETER 903 - 960

  The greenhouses of Villa Literno roll by in the distance: you can’t see either the tomatoes or the foreign-born slaves without whom they would rot. A long tunnel takes us to Bagnoli, an uninterrupted series of industrial ruins. They’re surrounded by tumbledown apartment. Blocks coated in peeling plaster of an unmistakable color, one we’ve always given a specific name: fascistagrau, or “Fascist gray.” It’s the color of the houses Fascism built in Alto Adige for all the employees it imported en mas
se in order to Italianize it: teachers, civil servants, road workers and especially rail workers. It’s the color of an era and an ideology, but for me it’s also an ensemble of smells. As a child, whenever I went past the houses next to the station, which bore the inscription ANNO IX EF under the cornice, I’d smell aromas unknown in the Schwingshackls’ kitchen drifting out through the windows: the acidic smell of tomato passata, soup with Parmesan. Nice smells, but which I didn’t stop to inhale: after all, I had nothing to do with the homes of the Walschen.

  Relations between us, Daitsch children, and Italian kids were simple: they didn’t exist. They were Walschen, precisely; we were “Krauts” or at most, “pylons” in homage to the electricity pylons our terrorists enjoyed blowing up so much. There were districts, areas of influence, territories. It was preferable for us to keep walking straight past the houses of the rail workers, and the same when we were among the social houses behind the barracks where the soldiers’ families resided. The children who lived there seemed totally inscrutable and fierce to me, even though, if you thought about it, they were probably as frightened of us Germans: there were many more of us. In any case I didn’t play with them. Never.

  Then, when I went to high school as a boarder in Bolzano, I found myself rubbing shoulders with children who’d lived in fascistagrau-colored houses. Now they were grown up, there was nothing inscrutable about them. On the contrary. While my German peers would throw coarse remarks, prickly like timber, at the girls, the Italians searched me with velvet eyes. I need not say which I preferred.

  Ulli agreed with me, wholeheartedly, in fact. When he went to do his military service, the soft sentiments of Italian boys were a revelation to him. And the sadness that grew within him, the sadness which took him away in the end, was also partly due to that: with us he only met men who had sex as a physical need, something which isn’t good manners to mention in one’s own life, and which is done in the dirtiest place in the house. Ulli, too, had done it that way for many years, but only because he hadn’t found anything better. When he did fall in love, it was with a boy from the south, as it happens.

  One night, when Marlene was combing the snow on the tracks with its caterpillars, Ulli said to me, “I’m in love.”

  His name was Costa, he was Greek, he had long hands and dark eyes, and worked in a pub in Innsbruck. When the winter season was over, he and Costa were going to live together. Ulli couldn’t stop saying his name: Costa, Costa, Costa, Costa. He also said, “I am his, and he is mine.”

  Then, “When we’re together I understand why I was born” and “Our love is bigger than we are.”

  Ulli had started to talk like fortune cookies.

  I should have been very happy for him. But I wasn’t. Not at all. What was happening to Ulli was that thing everybody talks about, sings about, writes about. The only thing, they say, which, alone, makes life worth living, opens the doors to heaven, hell, and all the secrets next to which nothing else is important.

  That night, it was as though my friend, almost my brother, had suddenly revealed that he was the secret son of an emperor, and the owner of boundless riches, palaces and servants, and that he’d been eating bread and onions with me until thenout of sheer curiosity.

  That’s how I felt: poor.

  “How nice. I’m happy for you.”

  I couldn’t expect Ulli to believe me, he knew me too well.

  As a matter of fact, he stole a glance at me but didn’t reply. Perhaps he appreciated the effort it took for me to lie to him, that first and only time.

  There was a lot of snow that winter, not only in our mountains but also farther south. The television news showed pictures of a white St Peter’s Square, with the fountains on either side of the obelisk embellished with ice patterns like lace. That year, the ski pistes were easy to beat, the skiers were enthusiastic, the hotels full. In other words it was an abundant year. But not for me.

  And now, when I look out, I feel like one of two travelers sitting on different sides of the train, seeing two different landscapes from their windows. At least Ulli did once catch a glimpse from his window of the vast horizon of love. Just as my mother did from her window. Whereas I have been married, divorced, chased, I’ve had men waiting for just a sign from me; I’ve felt desire, esteem, affection—for example for Carlo. But I still remember clearly my mother with Vito, and Ulli’s eyes as he said, “Costa! Costa!” and I can tell the difference.

  I must have sat by the wrong window.

  I met Carlo in a beautiful villa outside Bolzano. It was at the inauguration of a large private design studio, an event I had organized. It was the end of the evening and everything had gone well, the many guests had had a good time. I could finally relax a little. It’s perhaps superfluous to mention that Carlo was without his wife. What I remember of that first conversation was that, at some point, he said, “The majority of Italian-speaking Alto Adige residents think that you German-speaking South Tyroleans are all Nazis.”

  I replied, “The majority of German-speaking South Tyroleans thinks that you Italian-speaking Alto Adige residents are all Fascists.”

  “They should form an alliance and wage war on the rest of the world. Except that I’m not a Fascist. Are you a Nazi?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. I’m the son of a rail worker from Isernia and a teacher from Salerno, but I was born and I live in Bolzano, the only place in the country where Italians actually feel like Italians, and not like Sicilians, Neapolitans, Venetians or Piedmontese. Unless they’re actually Acitrezza residents—which is something completely different, so different in fact that you shouldn’t ever confuse it with the people from Acireale.”

  “But at least,” I said, “those who live from Verona down don’t ask you the famous question.”

  “Let me guess what it is. ‘May I take you out to dinner?’”

  “No. It’s ‘Do you feel more Italian or more German?’”

  “Do they really ask you that?”

  “Always. Everybody.”

  “It must be really annoying. Look, I’d like to ask a question. Do you feel more Italian or German?”

  “ . . . ”

  “All right, then I’ll ask another one: may I take you out to dinner?”

  Napoli Campi Flegrei, then Napoli Mergellina. We’ve penetrated the belly of Naples, the city’s intestines: we’re going through the metro tunnels.

  One after the other, we go without stopping through the underground stations of Piazza Amedeo, Montesanto, Piazza Cavour. They whizz past, separated by long, pitch-dark tunnels: they appear like lightning bolts imagined by a person whose eyes are closed. We’re hurled onto the central rail track at great speed, while on the benches of the lateral tracksthe platforms people are waiting to go to work, to the dentist, to see a friend. In contrast with their everyday lives, our train looks like a supertanker on a river, a heavy truck on a cycle path. You get the impression of rattling your way into the city’s intimacy. Almost like in my dream! Except that the roles are reversed. Now I am the passenger looking out of the train window into other people’s bedrooms.

  We stop at Piazza Garibaldi Station. It has light blue neon lights, tiles like a mortuary, deserted benches. It gives you the impression that if you got off here you could disappear into thin air and never be found again.

  “Orangejuicemineralwatercocacolapizzassandwiches!”

  They must have boarded in the rarefied silence of that Cold War-like station and now, to compensate, they’re screaming with no thought for their vocal cords. They’re dragging huge plastic bags and dark blue window-washer pails where they keep the drinks cool. They’re young, elderly, children; there are no women. A dark man with the thick arms of an expectant mother looks into our compartment. The two American girls look at him, terrified as though he were a murderer, and the bag full of sandwiches a lethal weapon. I shake my head and the man walks past,
an overfilled pail leaving a wet trail behind him.

  One thing is for sure: The illegal vendors of food and drinks perform a fundamental service on a long-distance train where the restaurant car and the bar have been abolished. Since we’re in Naples, a land where politics and shady business merge, you start toying with the idea that maybe the two things are not coincidental.

  Finally, the sun once again. Naples has swallowed up the train, turned it over in its mouth, and spat it back out like an olive stone.

  I can see the dark blue signs of Napoli Centrale but not the station. Right up against the tracks there are apartment blocks the color of human skin, cubic, square, graceless. Then the cranes in the harbor appear. Beneath, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of containers, almost all with huge writing like HANJIN or CHINA SHIPPING: you would think Italy has trade exchanges only with China.

  Here we are, a few yards away from the sea, you can almost touch it from the window; we haven’t been so close to it since we left Rome. Cliffs, waves glistening in the sun, fishermen with lines and pale hats, but also people wearing coats. Everyone interprets spring their own way. At Torre del Greco a wall acts as a vertical rubbish dump: a pile made of trash bags and other detritus climbs up it. Where there are gaps between the garbage, there are tender declarations: I’M SORRY, MY LOVE, I LOVE YOU PUPPY, I WANT YOU.

  I’ve gone to the restroom and stolen a glance at the compartment of Indian telephone callers. It’s four men and two women, one of whom has a little child curled up in her arms. Lying on the pulled-out seats, they’re all asleep.

  We’re now south of Vesuvius, you can tell by its caldera. My mother has a dream: to visit Pompeii and Herculaneum, then spend a few days on the Amalfi coast. I really should take her—I did promise.