Eva Sleeps

by Francesca Melandri

  The top of his home mountain, which was dominated by cable car pylons, built seven years before by his Consortium, definitely had a splendid three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view, but it was a far cry from the Dolomites. The whole world was in love with those coral-colored mountains, and the hoteliers of the Ladin valleys already had all their marketing done for them thanks to the location. No. Because there were no Dolomites here, there was another way of attracting hordes of British, Dutch, and Swedish skiers, the new tourism frontier, now that German and Italian—and perhaps even American—ones had been secured. And it was very clear in his mind. “His” mountain had to be turned into such an extended and diversified skiing area that it would have something to offer everyone. Staggl stared at the beautiful girl’s naked belly and her pleasant curves for a long time.

  Were they called “carousels”? Well, then, this was his vision: a network of ski lifts spreading in every direction in a sunburst pattern. So large that a keen sportsman would be able to ski for days on end without ever going over the same piste. There would be more modern lift technology, cutting-edge track maintenance, an investment plan worthy of a big enterprise. All this would allow his creature always to be state-of-the-art, as his colleagues from Colorado put it.

  All his life, Paul Staggl had thought big. He didn’t intend to stop just because he was past sixty. There was wealth in winter tourism. For him, his family, his valley, Alto Adige, the Alps. He was certain of it: the future was as brilliant as a snow-covered piste at dawn. And now even Hannes, who was approaching thirty, had made up his mind to get married, and perhaps he would finally give him some grandchildren. Of course those born to daughters are also a joy, but when they are born to your only son, everybody knows it’s a special occasion for a grandfather.

  There was wealth in winter tourism.

  Paul Staggl was not the only one to have worked that out. Besides Gerda, many peasants were buying new shoes for their children for the first time that year. However, in return, these children had to sleep in the basement or under the stairs both in the winter and in the summer. Their rooms had become like gold dust: renting them to tourists for the few weeks of high season brought more money than a whole year milking cows. The bombings and attacks were over, and there were an increasing number of Italian tourists. Their rapport with the local population wasn’t always straightforward. They often mistook for hostility the dour lack of ceremony of certain landlords who were used to peasant manners. When a reply in Italian came too slowly, or there was a menu written only in German, the Italian tourists would protest, “We’re in Italy!”

  On the other hand some bus drivers displayed all their indignation at the unfair transfer of South Tyrol to Italy in 1919 by addressing rude grunts to passengers who said “Buongiorno.”

  Actually, Italians were wrong when they thought they were the only ones to be treated with coarseness by some South Tyroleans: as it happened, Bavarians were also derided because they were drunkards, Viennese because they were condescending, Prussians because they were arrogant. But one fact remained, and it was the only one that counted: tourists brought money and money has no language, no frontiers, no history.

  And no traditional costume either. Many new Italian guests had gotten into the habit of wearing and, especially, dressing their children in typical Tyrolean costumes. Platoons of mothers and daughters from Rome, Vercelli and Florence showed off identical dirndl with flower-patterned aprons, with a more uniform effect than the Musikkapelle. Miniature Bauernschürtze—the navy peasant aprons for which Hermann was beaten up during the Fascist era—were put around Milanese babies’ necks as bibs.

  At first, South Tyroleans were perplexed by this kind of masquerade (except for shopkeepers who made a lot of money selling Trachtmode39), but then they got used to it. Those who saw it, however, never forgot the Neapolitan family—mother, father and four children from three to sixteen—who, one August day, were seen walking down the main street in town, shouting and calling one another at the top of their lungs, twelve thighs fed on sartù and pasticcio di maccheroni coming out of their Lederhosen.

  Ulli, too, had to sleep in the attic: his and Sigi’s room was let to tourists during high season. With the money she made, Leni bought her parents a new kitchen with a Formica top, like the ones you saw on TV. While she was at it, she also got rid of a lot of old furniture. A man from Bolzano offered to take it away, and even gave her money in return. Leni really couldn’t understand what he saw in that old stove that had been in the kitchen for generations, or in that chunky painted cupboard that made the Stube dark. You could tell it was falling apart by the date under the decoration in the middle: 1773. Even so, she took the man’s money: it wasn’t her fault if some people just didn’t know how to do business.

  Among the Italian guests that came year after year, there was a family from Milan with three children. They had grown fond of the beautiful view over the glaciers enjoyed from the maso, as well as the hospitality offered by Leni and her parents. The landlords may not have been very talkative, with their caricature Italian, but they were honest, sincere and, in their way, even affectionate. From the way she treated them, never would the Milanese family have ever guessed that the young widow’s husband had been blown up while trying to attack representatives of the Italian government.

  Their youngest daughter was the same age as Eva, with black frizzy curls around her head like an electric halo. She showed a disconcerting indifference to her condition as a city girl and had gotten along with Eva and Ulli so naturally that they could do nothing but accept her. Ulli and Eva would never have dived into the hay with their Italian peers who lived in the town, or dams in the stream in the wood; but they did with that little girl from Milan. Besides, as everybody knows, you must beware of your neighbors but it’s all right to be curious about the inhabitants of other galaxies. Eva and Ulli would have been very surprised if she had said she was a friend: a friend doesn’t vanish down a black hole eleven months of the year. But she was an intelligent girl, so she never did so.

  As for Ulli, he’d always been Eva’s friend.

  Or perhaps he was also just a playmate until the day when, in the churchyard after mass, a child of the same age said that Ulli’s father deserved to be dead because he was a Verbrecher, a criminal, and that Eva’s father was alive but didn’t want her. Like so many other times to come in his life, the words to defend himself remained stuck in Ulli’s throat, rotting inside and infecting only him.

  So Eva stuck the index and middle finger of her right hand in the little boy’s eyes. Ulli and Eva became inseparable.

  Sigi, on the other hand, was never Eva’s friend, and she always considered him one of those unpleasant facts of life that you cannot eliminate or solve, but only ignore: a wood splinter that’s too deep to be extracted, a wobbly tooth that won’t fall, a father who’s never been there. And if Eva had ever risked feeling any kind of affection for Sigi, the danger was averted forever the day when, at the age of five, he started making trophies.

  It was Eva and Ulli, while Leni was in the cowshed, who found him sitting on the wooden floor of the Stube. Around him, there were a kitchen knife, nails, a hammer, pieces of wood, and the decapitated bodies of various stuffed animals: a red and white duck, a brown teddy bear with a red scarf around his neck, a hound with long black ears. The severed head of every cuddly toy had been nailed to a wooden plank.

  Eva and Ulli looked at the scene in silence: it was too strange to trigger a reaction. Not even Leni asked Sigi for an explanation when she came in and saw all those poor stuffed animals reduced to hunting trophies. All she did was raise her eyes to the larch wall. There, fixed onto wooden shields, hung the only remaining traces, besides her two children, of her husband’s passage on earth: the heads of deer, ibexes, chamois, their antlers as sharp as the day Peter had killed them.

  Every so often the Schützen went to ask the widow of their former comrade-in-arms if she needed
any help.

  Leni would reply, “No, thank you,” and her face relaxed with relief when they left.

  Ulli never stayed long in the Stube when they came.

  “Your father gave his life for you,” the men said to him, and these words triggered in Ulli a mixture of hunger, nausea and questions without answers. How could he ever repay such a disproportionate gift?

  Sigi, though, would follow them onto the street after they left: he thought they were beautiful. Soon, before he even started school, they began taking him along on their drills. They said, “Your father gave his life for you” to Sigi, too, but what he felt was the void without memories his father had left in his stomach finally start to fill up.

  Leni wasn’t happy about Sigi spending time with the Schützen, but what could she do about it? The Schwingshackls agreed with her. Eva’s adoptive parents felt sorry for Leni and the children, and also for that sick soul that was Hermann, who had lost his only son and disowned his daughter. But the fact that Peter was a hero was something they did not agree with. There are so many ways in which you can be useful to others, some of which require courage and sacrifice, but what was heroic about blowing up Christian folk and yourself was something Sepp and Maria would never understand.

  Then the Open Air Concert arrived. Even saying the name tasted like the future.

  It wasn’t music. It was something solid that wrapped around you, which you didn’t listen to with your ears but with your feet, your stomach, your hair. It would make your hairs stand up on your arms, grab you by the knees, and make you say yes to anything. And that rhythm! Who had ever heard such rhythm? The drummer shook his hair, long like a woman’s, like snakes, spraying sweat all around: it was impossible to believe that the instrument on which he’d let himself go in a crazy solo could be a relative of the snare drum of the Musikkapelle. And in fact it wasn’t. Nothing was the same. Even the castle, up on the hill over the town, where Eva, Ulli, Ruthi and Wastl were now, wasn’t the same as before. Not even during Medieval assaults had those ancient bastions ever been shaken to their foundations by anything like this: a rock concert.

  There had never been so many people like that, on the grass and under the larches around its ancient walls: girls with bare legs and long hair tied with leather strips, boys with colorful T-shirts and handkerchiefs on their heads, entangled couples touching each other everywhere and kissing on the mouth. And, around and above everything, like thick liquid in which Eva, her cousins, young people in love, and the castle all floated, there was that divine devil music. Eva did not have the eyes, nor the ears, nor the skin for what was happening around her.

  Ruthi, however, was sad. The little girl who had welcomed Eva like the present of a gift doll had become a girl of fifteen. She was still very blonde and a little too thin, but beneath her white lashes her eyes were so interested in others that everybody liked her company. Wastl, too. Very much. And she was beginning to realize that she found his company not just pleasant but almost indispensable. However, Wastl had just told her that after he finished his military service, he would save some money with the Val d’Adige harvest and that he’d then go to Morocco.

  Morocco. It was the name of a place very far away, Eva thought, perhaps near America? Yes, that’s right. Not so long ago, on Ulli’s new television, they were talking about its capital: Morocco City. How did you get there? On the same bus that took her mother away? Perhaps Morocco City was in the same direction as the kitchen where she worked, only a little farther.

  No bus, Wastl was saying. He’d be hitchhiking to Morocco. But he didn’t ask Ruthi to go with him. The girl tried not to cry but the group on the stage, ineffably called The We, didn’t make things any easier: they’d just started singing a slow, very sad song,with the electric guitar screaming in pain like a wounded animal.

  Hitchhiking.

  Another beautiful, cheerful-sounding word. Eva wasn’t sure she knew what it meant but she said to herself: I’ll do that too when I grow up.

  KILOMETERS 960 - 1126

  Once again we’re far away from the sea, with the mountainous mass of the Sorrento peninsula between us. From Angri downwards, whenever the train slows down, there’s a terrible smell of burning rubber. I imagine it must be the brakes.

  The farther south we go, the farther ahead we are in the season. Here, the fruit trees have no blossoms but already young green leaves. In the middle of the highway intersection, there stands an incongruous wrought iron and delicate glass Art Nouveau gazebo, like the pavilion of an Italianate garden. A little temple to beauty in the middle of nowhere.

  All the rail tracks of Salerno Station are white with disinfectant, or perhaps lime. The impression is that here they’re very keen on neutralizing those impolite people who go to the toilet when the train is stationary. The hill beyond the platform roofs is covered in identical buildings, really identical, identical in every detail without the slightest variation.

  But they certainly do have quite a view of the sea.

  The two American girls get off, presumably to go to the Amalfi coast. Once again it’s the chubby one who pulls down both backpacks, while the other one just sits and watches her, impassive and sullen. This time I don’t get up to give a hand, either, I don’t know why. The stout girl puffs under the weight of her backpack with the pink teddy bear.

  I feel like saying, turn the teddy bear over, you can’t go around with a cuddly toy hanging head down! But I don’t have the courage. It’s unpleasant, and it’s not a nice way of communicating, remember you’re traveling, you need the kindness of strangers . . .

  Perhaps, ever since Sigi, I’ve been too sensitive to the subject of “cuddly toys being used inappropriately.” The two girls have already left the compartment without saying goodbye. We travelled together for almost three hours and didn’t exchange a single word.

  “One of these days you should really hurl the backpack right at that anorexic tyrant.”

  Before the train leaves again, a couple in their sixties and a young woman of twenty-five, thirty at most, with slightly pimply skin she clearly feels embarrassed about, the beautiful long eyes of a gypsy, T-shirt and jeans, come and sit across from me. The lady, her mother, I think, is right opposite me. She’s holding her handbag, jacket, and a large plastic shopping bag, and doesn’t look like she’s going to make herself more comfortable. She doesn’t put anything down even though there are two empty seats next to her.

  There’s loud snoring coming from the Indians in the compartment next door, as expressive as the recent, “Hallo? Hallo?”

  From Battipaglia onwards, once again, greenhouses, greenhouses, greenhouses. Purple ones (curly lettuce), bright green (round lettuce), and red (tomatoes)—extend as far as some apartment blocks. There are even lemon groves in the midst of the buildings. The fallow field is covered in yellow, fuchsia, purple, blue flowers and, next to it, a field of brilliant green wheat. So many colors in this country.

  On the other hand, the elegant spans of the decommissioned old railroad bridge are made of vermilion brick. It has a very narrow gauge, and the tracks look like those of a toy train set. I wonder if it dates back to the Bourbons, when Naples was one of the most modern cities in the world.

  We cross a pair of small valleys with no houses and only after we’ve crossed Vallo di Lucania do the bricks of the ancient railroad reappear. Another bridge of that beautiful warm color launches itself over a gorge. The winding ballast carries on until it ends up against a house! Does it continue inside? Who knows? Perhaps it’s like some houses in Rome, built around aqueducts: a span that, two thousand years ago, carried water to the Eternal City, and now acts as an architrave. It must be something, I think, to have a historic railroad going through your living room.

  Some things happen only in Italy.

  Now, whenever the train brakes, a sharp smell of dioxin penetrates my nose.

  “What a stench!” the lady opposite me
says.

  Even though she boarded the train almost an hour ago, she still hasn’t let go of anything: handbag, shopping bag and jacket, she keeps it all close to her chest as though we were on an overcrowded Indian train and not in a half-empty carriage over Easter. She even has the train tickets in her hand, ready to show the guard. After the usual Signora/Signorina ballet, we’ve started chatting.

  They’re from Messina. The husband is a retired policeman, as I should have guessed from the salt-and-pepper mustache and the formerly athletic physique. The daughter has a degree in ancient literature and is training to be a teacher. She is outraged.

  “Even people with behavioral problems are admitted to the program, people who shouldn’t ever be in contact with children. Or stupid people who have never studied but who know the right people.”

  They ask where I come from. I tell them.

  The mother has been listening attentively from behind her barrier of possessions. Her arms must be aching by now and perhaps that’s why she’s raised her heels and is on her toes: in order to hold on to everything better so it doesn’t fall off.

  “Once, we went on holiday to Ortisei. When the kids were still little. Alpe di Siusi, it’s so beautiful, isn’t it, Mario?”

  “Yes, very beautiful. A paradise.”

  Wife and husband smile at each other. Perhaps they’re remembering a special moment they spent at Seiser Alm.

  “You really do have regional autonomy! Not like us in Sicily, where we’re autonomous from the Italian government but subjects of the Mafia. If I were to start my profession all over again, I’d move to the North and raise my children there. Without all those people with recommendations.”