Eva Sleeps

by Francesca Melandri

  I don’t know why I suddenly remember when I told her I wanted to move to Australia and she replied that she would finally see kangaroos, that she’d always wanted to.

  Wait a minute. I was the one going to Australia. Not her.

  And we’re not the same thing, are we?

  1968 - 1970

  Cousin Wastl had gone to do his military service. Since he’d been playing the clarinet in the Musikkapelle for years, they’d taken him into the Alpini band in Rome. He liked the capital very much, and especially Roman women. When he came back on his first leave, at the end of June, he was in an excellent mood. The day after that, the umpteenth ceremony took place at the foot of the granite Alpino that bore his name. The monument had once again been rebuilt, identical to the one before.

  They were strange times.

  A handful of Schützen had gathered to protest against the inauguration. That wasn’t unusual per se: the opposition of men in costumes against the symbols of the Italian government was commonplace. What was odd, however, was the group of youths that had gathered under the Wastl and wasn’t just protesting against the monument, but also against the Schützen.

  It was hard to understand, least of all for Eva and Ulli, who’d been brought here by their cousin in uniform to watch the ceremony.

  The students were holding raised fists and were screaming slogans “against nationalism of any kind” in two languages. And that was something else nobody had ever seen before: a demonstration of Italian and German young people together.

  Eva had never heard the word “nationalism.” She looked up at Wastl, the flesh and blood one who was holding her by the hand. She was sad that some people considered it wrong to have a monument dedicated to him. People wanted to hear her dear uncle-cousin play even in Rome: she felt strongly that he definitely deserved a statue.

  There wasn’t a single white hair in Frau Mayer’s blonde plait, gathered in a crown, even though she was approaching sixty. Every morning, she would spend almost half an hour on a single objective: to make her hairstyle identical to that of her mother, and her mother’s mother. It was the rest of the world that had gone haywire.

  A year had passed and now in fall 1969, spontaneous strikes at the Bolzano steelworks were gaining wide support. But they were not the only workers to speak out; pretty much all the workers, in every sector, had realized that they weren’t alone. The unheard-of had suddenly become probable: that the scullery boys, assistant cooks, and cooks at a large hotel should strike together in order to obtain fair remuneration was no longer an outrageous hypothesis but a concrete possibility. Menacing or exciting, depending on your point of view.

  All the kitchen staff had to do was threaten to strike. It was the end of December and the hotel was full. Frau Mayer capitulated within a few hours.

  From that moment on, the pay contributions reflected the actual days worked; for everyone, even the lowliest scullery boy. And the four hours of extra work that were deducted from the day off started being remunerated. However, the contributions Frau Mayer hadn’t paid during the previous years weren’t recovered by anyone. When, at the age of sixty, after almost forty-five years of work, Gerda retired, whenever she returned from the post office at the end of the month, she would always calculate the difference between how much she had in her handbag and how much she would have had if Frau Mayer hadn’t stolen from her old age all that time ago. Every time, after placing the envelope with the modest sum on the television doily, she would pull out of the sideboard the set of colored glasses that Eva had given her one Christmas, pour some of her favorite limoncello, and drink a toast to that young woman she’d never met: the only waitress who, when times were still hard, had dared to protest and been fired with the nickname of Trade Unionist pinned to her like an infamy.

  Vito Anania had now been in Alto Adige for almost three years, mostly spent patrolling or supervising the border in extreme conditions. When he was promoted to sergeant, his superiors put him to work “in the warmth,” as they said: they made him responsible for the provisioning of the barracks stationed in the plain. They thought they were doing him a favor, but they weren’t. Vito soon discovered that the recollection of those moments spent in the rawness of nature, in animal communion with his men, was something he missed. But he was a Carabiniere, so he applied himself to executing his orders to the best of his ability, as he had always done.

  The first day he went to see the suppliers, he thought: at least in the mountain masi, they’d say “Grüß Gott” to you.

  “Buongiorno!” he called out with a bright smile as he entered the butcher’s that had been supplying the barracks with meat for years. The butcher looked at his tense hand as though it were a bunch of offal, and replied, “How much meat?”

  It was the same with the baker and the peasants who supplied the barracks with milk and butter; even the half-Trentine fruit seller didn’t respond to his greeting. Vito was used to anti-Italian, not to mention anti-military, resentment. Later, however, he checked the accounts books and realized what was really happening.

  For years, his predecessors, in provisioning, had skimmed some of the money intended for supplies. They’d accumulated debts with everybody and never paid anyone back. The situation was clear to these tradesmen: the Walschen are dishonest, with an arrogance that is typical of the military, they take advantage of their position not to pay. The butcher, the baker, the peasants, nobody could afford to refuse the barracks’ custom. Four hundred and fifty pounds of meat a day, six hundred and fifty pounds of bread: nobody can turn down a customer like that. However, they weren’t obliged to say hello.

  Vito made a decision: to persuade each and every one of them that not all Italians were crooks. It’s another way of serving your country, he thought.

  For months he saved on the orders and managed to put aside some money which he used to start repaying his predecessors’ debts. By spring, they would all be repaid, he hoped.

  Now, when he walked in, the suppliers said hello.

  The winds of change were also blowing beyond the barbed wire walls and into the barracks.

  The lives of the Carabinieri stationed in Alto Adige had always been hard, even when they weren’t patrolling the ridges on the border and had been assigned to duties in “the warmth” of the barracks. The weekly day off was an illusion: people talked about it but nobody had ever seen it. In the daybook of work shifts and leave, the commander wrote them down but only in homage to bureaucracy: you still had to go to work that day. If anyone complained he risked a poor evaluation.

  But for some months now, Vito Anania, who had now been promoted to sergeant, enjoyed one real day off a week, like the rest of his colleagues. Even if it was just to catch up on some sleep: Vito hadn’t slept nearly enough for years. The soldiers also obtained other new rights and contractual guarantees. It was Giorgio Almirante, the secretary of the MSI party, in particular, who fought to obtain them; when it came to voting, many soldiers would never forget that.

  Vito considered these novelties in the life of a soldier very positive. Not other things, however.

  “Sure, you’ll get it when I’m done,” he heard a sergeant say to an officer in the corridor one day. He knew that the two men had known each other for a long time, having attended military academy together. But the casual tone with which he was addressing his superior was something Vito considered inconceivable, and always would. More than shock or indignation, that “you’ll get it when I’m done” made him feel deeply ashamed: for the officer, for the sergeant, and for himself.

  Now that there was less work, Sergeant Anania sometimes got bored. He wasn’t like Second Lieutenant Genovese, a Neapolitan constantly chasing after Fräulein and adventures. Genovese was good fun but it was better not to follow him all the way. On the occasion of the anniversary of the 1918 Italian victory over Austria-Hungary, he threw a party at the Marlinderhof Hotel, which he called a “non-commissione
d officer party,” as though they were in Cinecittà. He also invited commanders and officers as long as they arrived “in fair company,” a category which, Genovese had firmly underlined, did not include wives or fiancées. In other words, they had to bring women who were unattached. And if their center of gravity was high up, then so much the better.

  More than a hundred soldiers arrived with their female escorts. Vito, too, went: the butcher had allowed his daughter to be out until midnight. If you could trust a man who saves up in order to pay back other people’s debts, he thought, then you could trust him to bring a girl back home on time. As a matter of fact, by eleven fifty-five, his daughter had already walked in through the front door. Vito went to bed, even though when they’d left the party things were just getting started. He had no regrets. He’d watched Genovese at work: as a master of ceremony he’d encouraged everybody to drink boundless amounts of grappa, while not drinking a single glass himself. Vito was certain that he had a plan. He knew him well enough and he preferred not to be there when the plan was put into action. It was fun hearing about the exploits of that second lieutenant whose hair was slightly too long, and whose buttons were a little too loosely fastened; but taking part in them wasn’t his kind of thing.

  Therefore, Vito wasn’t there when Genovese, having made sure that the officers had drunk enough alcohol to disinfect a leper colony, began circulating through the party with, in his hand, neither a bottle of Schnaps, nor a young woman’s wrist, but a camera with a built-in flash.

  “Give Captain a kiss,” he told one officer’s “fair company,” The young woman bent over the sweaty face of her escort and brushed his mouth with her lips, while Genovese pressed the shutter button like a trigger. Click.

  ”Give a kiss to the Major, the Lieutenant, the Colonel!”

  The Fräulein would press their scarlet lips on the foreheads and cheeks of the officers and Genovese would take a photograph. Click. Click.

  The next morning he printed the photographs.

  He never showed them to his superiors. There was no need. All you had to do was let them know of their existence. From then onwards, Genovese had a very easy life in the barracks.

  Gerda was in one of the photographs, too. She had accompanied a forty-something colonel determined to kiss her ear. She let him, high cheekbones reflecting the light like polished wood. Perhaps if Vito had seen that photograph, he would have fallen in love with her then and there. But he didn’t see it, nor did anyone else, not even the colonel’s wife. As a matter of fact, Genovese never had a reason to show it to her: his superior always treated him with consideration and respect.

  When Herr Neumann retired early for health reasons, he had no concerns about finding a worthy replacement. Gerda smoked more than a faulty kerosene stove, and worked with more energy than a man. The scullery boys would have done anything for her, the assistant cooks a little less: they weren’t used to being bossed around by a twenty-five-year-old ex-Matratze. Yet there was also something good about those strange times: unimaginable things were happening everywhere. After twelve hours working in the kitchen, in the evening, Gerda would go to the dance hall.

  In her letters to her daughter, Gerda wrote about the “handsome young men” who took her dancing. Eva had learned to read and write from Ulli, and she was so bright, she was accepted at elementary school at the age of five.

  In the evening, lying in the bed she shared with Ruthi, Eva would fantasize about her mother’s nocturnal activities. As though she were sitting in the darkness of the parish cinema, watching a sped-up film of what she imagined Gerda doing with her escorts: eating pounds of ice cream, spending entire days at the fun fair without paying, throwing custard pies in each other’s faces.

  Teixel, ist das wenig!

  That had been his second thought: good grief, is that all!

  Silvius Magnago had been in the Kursaal of Merano for seventeen hours: from ten o’clock in the morning the day before, November 22, 1969, following an extraordinary plenary assembly of the Südtiroler Volkspartei. To the party delegates’ credit, they had put up with those wooden reformatory chairs without a single complaint and now, in the middle of the night, they were even more numerous than in the afternoon. They were there before him, those in favor of the Package and those against, Paketler and Anti-paketler, and they were looking at him. How long had he been working on his draft? It felt like forever, to Magnago. It was only his war memories that stopped him from believing that he hadn’t done anything else all his life. It was precisely this extreme argument that he had used at his last appeal and declaration of vote.

  “Ladies and gentlemen delegates, do you really believe that I would advise you to vote in favor of this agreement if I weren’t convinced, after working on it for twenty years, that we cannot obtain more than this?”

  For the umpteenth time, he had declared that if the delegates didn’t approve of the Package—along with the measures with which the government guaranteed a large degree of autonomy to the province of Bolzano—it would be a disaster. He would resign as party Obmann, but his fate would be the better for it. On the other hand, those who were now saying he had sold out, calling him “Tolomei” and “digger of the Heimat grave,” they would have to start negotiating with the Italians all over again from scratch, and he would have the bitter satisfaction of seeing them knock their heads against the fact that you can’t get anywhere without the Kompromiss. Sooner or later, they would learn—they were neither stupid nor in bad faith—but, meanwhile, years, decades of work would be lost. With Italian governments falling and rising again like in a puppet show, there was no knowing when there would be one willing to take on the responsibility of a definitive agreement. And there was no knowing when they would find another interlocutor like Aldo Moro, who had inserted into article 14 the sentence according to which the defense of minorities was in the national interest, but without attracting too much attention on the part of his fellow party men because, as he explained to him in private, they would have repealed it if they had noticed it.

  This was the day, or rather the night—since it was three in the morning—of judgment. If the Südtiroler Volkspartei approved the Package today, then the Italian government would take it up to Parliament where its approval was certain. And then the foreign ministers of Italy and Austria would provide the signatures that would ratify peace in their land.

  If, however, the Package was rejected by the party assembly, then . . . Vogel, friss oder stirb!—Eat or die, little bird! Magnago could not explain it to the delegates any more clearly.

  And now, he was exhausted. He had a lot more resistance than his emaciated appearance suggested—without it, he would have already collapsed. That’s what they always say, don’t they? It’s the skinny ones that are tough. And Magnago was no exception. The more the hours passed, the longer the debate lasted, the more he was on the war path. He knew that his people had many doubts: the Italians had been “ripping them off,” as they put it, for fifty years, and the delegates were terrified by the idea of not doing the right thing for the Heimat. He had to conquer their votes one by one.

  At this point, however, he couldn’t bear it any longer. A little earlier he had said: “Enough, it’s past two-thirty, let’s vote.”

  The decisive ones had already slipped their piece of paper into the urn. The only ones still clutching theirs were the ones who had wanted to listen to all the orators before making up their minds.

  The delegates from Schnals, Unteretsch, Gsies, Pfitschtal. From Sexten, Bruneck, Wolkenstein, Latsch, Kasern, Burgum. People who at this time were normally awake at the maso, not because they had been up all night, but because they were already milking their cows. On them depended the outcome of the vote. Eat, little birds, eat.

  One by one, they slipped their crumpled pieces of paper into the urn. From there, they were extracted and counted.

  And marked on the register.

  The p
resident of the assembly read out the results.

  “Total votes: one thousand one hundred and four.

  Votes in favor of Mr Magnago’s resolution: five hundred and eighty-three.

  Votes against Mr Magnago’s resolution: four hundred and ninety-two.

  Unmarked or spoiled ballot papers: nineteen.

  Mr Magnago’s resolution is hereby approved with 52.8 percent of the votes.”

  52.8 percent.

  Teixel, ist das wenig! That had been his second thought: good grief, that’s not much!

  But his first one had been: Du hast es geschafft. You did it.

  Paul Staggl, too, would have liked the bikini-wearing model.

  Or rather: he would have liked the photo of the bikini-wearing model. Or even better: he would have liked the bikini-wearing model, too, but would have liked the photo even more. Or the other way around.

  Anyway.

  If only the Consortium he managed were able to host the skiing World Cup like Val Gardena! The publicity shot in Time Magazine had deeply angered his associates, but not him. Paul Staggl had been born to extreme poverty, in a sunless maso: if he’d wasted time and energy envying other people’s good fortune he wouldn’t have gotten this far. His thoughts spun like the wheel of a downhill cable car station: well oiled, constant, and with the sole aim of carrying it up high.

  That’s why he had paid great attention to the photo of the beautiful girl wearing nothing but panties, bra, ankle socks and ski boots, with one ski on the ground and the other stuck vertically in the snow in front of her, against the background of snow-covered Dolomites. And not just because some things are always a pleasure to look at, but because, as he was studying it, he’d had several thoughts. The first, and most obvious one, was that his town was not in the middle of the Dolomites. In the 1930s, somebody had tried to draw postcards with the pink needles of Monti Pallidi standing out behind the profile of the Medieval castle. A famous geographical forgery that was still possible in the prehistoric times of mountain tourism, but which nowadays was out of the question. Tourists watched television now, were informed, and couldn’t be swindled like that.