Eva Sleeps

by Francesca Melandri

  The wife looks at me and catches me by surprise: “Sorry to ask but . . . Do you feel more German or more Italian?”

  And she didn’t even put down her bags before asking me! I catch my breath. Naturally, my answer is well rehearsed. “I have an Italian passport but my language is German, my land is the Southern part of Tyrol, other parts of which, however, like North Tyrol and East Tyrol, are in Austria. We call it Südtirol but in Italian it’s Alto Adige, since the difference has always been where you’re looking from: from above or below.”

  My answer silences her. She looks at her husband.

  “But didn’t they speak Ladin in Ortisei?” she asks him.

  “Yes.”

  “Which is actually a different Ladin from the one they speak in Val Badia,” I say.

  “What a complicated place!”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Until a few years ago, when you said you were a German speaker from Alto Adige, they thought you were a terrorist. At the very least they’d ask: but why do you people hate Italians so much?

  Then things changed. In the weekly supplement of the newspaper, a few months ago, the front cover was devoted to separatist ethnic movements in Europe. It mentioned:

  Corsica

  Slovakia

  Scotland

  Catalonia

  the Basque Country

  Kosovo

  Montenegro

  Slovenia

  Croatia

  Bosnia

  and

  the Po Valley.

  The Po Valley!

  No sign of Alto Adige.

  Once, when I took Zhou home after she’d been at my place, I met Signor Song, who was at home. A rare event since he’s always out on his business, which is spread throughout the North-east of Italy. He asked me in and opened for me the box for fighting crickets, the only possession he took away from China. Inside, there were two miniature plates, one for water and one for food, finely decorated in enamel; the microscopic wedding cage where thoroughbred fighters are made to mate with the most fertile females; tiny scales for weighing the crickets in order to organize equal sides in terms of bulk and strength; a kind of small brush with a single horse hair at the end which, Song explained, was necessary to spur the crickets on before the battle and make them more aggressive. In that kind of tiny dollhouse the absence of the cricket, any cricket, evoked exile.

  “Why don’t you catch two crickets from our fields and try and make them fight?” I asked.

  Signor Song looked at me with polite eyes. Without a hint of impatience, he replied, “Only a Chinese cricket can fight in a Chinese way.”

  I remember feeling it was a sentence full of great wisdom, so I kept quiet.

  However, now I wonder, is that true?

  In 1981, Ulli and I went to shut ourselves in iron cages on a Bolzano bridge with many other young people. We were protesting against the ethnic census included in the new autonomy statute.

  It was seven years before his, well, let’s call it accident at work. Ulli was nearly twenty, he could already vote and I would also soon be eighteen. Every Alto Adige adult had to state whether he or she was German, Ladin or Italian.

  Those who refused to fill in the statement wouldn’t be able to teach, claim state benefits, or work as civil servants. Above all you could not describe yourself as multi-ethnic. It was the Sprachgruppenzugehörigkeitserklärung so longed for by the old Magnago. He, of all people, the son of a German mother and an Italian father, had started saying, “Nicht Knödel mit Spaghetti mischen,” you shouldn’t mix Knödel and spaghetti. Schools, libraries, local authorities, cultural centers: in this vision everything had to be separate.

  My mother claimed she was convinced this was the right solution.

  “A marriage between an Italian man and a German woman could never work,” she claimed.

  It was already eight years since Vito had left.

  In any case, my mother has always worshipped Magnago. As a little girl, she too was at Castel Firmiano, and she never tired of telling how she had shaken the hand of the Father of Autonomy in the hotel where she worked. We young people, however, didn’t like him that much. The Greens had organized the demonstration. They were led by Alexander Langer, a visionary elf with rabbit teeth who, for our now autonomous Heimat, entertained dreams of a larger soul, less petty, and not such a narrow-minded mountain apartheid. That’s why so many good South Tyroleans hated him, and so did Magnago, more than anyone else. On each of the two iron cages on the Talvera bridge there was a sign. DEUTSCHE, was written on one, and ITALIANI on the other. Anyone walking over the bridge was invited to come into the one corresponding to his or her ethnicity. Once you were shut behind the iron bars you could no longer communicate with the occupants of other cage. Exactly what the heads of the SVP hoped would happen between Daitsche and Walsche.

  It was a warm sunny day and the bodies of the demonstrators all crammed together in the Daitsche cage smelled of wool and sweat. That’s when Ulli said to me, “I’ve been living in a cage like this since I was born.”

  I couldn’t turn around because we were too tight.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He answered, “Ever since the midwife told my mother: it’s a boy.”

  We’re still crossing a timeless landscape: streams of limpid water, forsythias set alight by the sun, prickly pears clotted together like coral colonies, olive trees with manes wide enough for a whole family to fit underneath. Sitting under an almond tree in blossom, a young woman is breastfeeding her child. And once again, high above the gorge, the arch of a bridge of an ancient, vermillion brick ballast. That’s the only place where the ancient railroad has been preserved: where it passes through the air and doesn’t steal land from anyone, or where it has been incorporated into a new building.

  Maybe the same is true for one’s own identity, that very fundamental human fixation: either it remains unchanged outside History, or it gets transformed, or dies.

  We emerge from tunnels to a view over the sea, then more tunnels, and more again. After Policastro, with its grey Medieval walls right over the sea, we’re about to leave Campania.

  1971

  White veil, long white dress, white scapular down to the ribcage: except for her little girl size, Eva looked like a novice.

  But not Gerda.

  She was wearing a chiffon outfit with aquamarine patterns, not as short as the ones she wore to go dancing, but almost. That “almost” had caused her much concern. She had carefully considered the amount of thigh she could show on the occasion of her daughter’s first communion. Not too much, in order not to offend. Not too little, so no one would think she was trying to camouflage herself. Gerda fully intended everyone to know: she wasn’t ashamed of being a free woman. She didn’t need to ask anyone for the money to buy bread and milk for herself and her daughter; therefore, she was the one to decide whom she let into her bed and whom she didn’t.

  Even so.

  Gerda had to concentrate very hard so that nobody would notice, especially not herself, that among all the mothers of the communicants, she was the only one unmarried. Therefore, for the whole duration of the mass, she kept her eyes on the stained glass that illuminated the ugly 19th-century frescoes, the depictions of the hapless bearded female saint. She would occasionally lower them and only once or twice looked at the children, her daughter among them, who were sitting on the bench in front of the altar while waiting for the sacrament—the girls dressed as nuns or brides, the boys like little masters of ceremonies, white shirts under satin waistcoats, clean but often threadbare because they had been handed down by more than one older brother. Above all, Gerda never turned to the rest of the congregation.

  Eva, on the other hand, always remembered the day of her first communion because of the skis.

  Coming back home after the service, she’d found t
hem propped against the front door of the furnished room where she lived with Gerda during the low season. They were taller than her, lemon yellow, very heavy to lift. She tried immediately, still dressed like a sexto decimo nun, but barely managed it. She was particularly struck by the grips: the metal double bites, even though she hadn’t put her feet in them yet, gave her an oppressive sense of constriction.

  When she saw the skis, Gerda grew wary. The furnished room was on the ground floor of a new building several stories high, each of them a tourist apartment: now, in May, they were all empty. It was on the outskirts of the town, not far from the slope leading to the little church and to Ulli’s, Wastl’s, Sepp and Maria’s masi. Opposite the apartment block there was a potato field left fallow that year, crossed by a white gravel road bordered with lilacs. The white, pink and lilac flowers spread their fragrance in the air. The cream-colored Mercedes 190 was parked there. Hannes was leaning against the trunk, his legs crossed, with the eyes of someone who had been staring at the same thing for a while: Gerda.

  She didn’t look down. She just slightly moved her focus so that her gaze flew over the head of her child’s father, drifted serenely beyond the shape she wasn’t noticing, and rested, detached, on the line of glaciers on the horizon.

  Eva immediately understood who he was.

  Hannes came up to them. Gerda lit a cigarette and began smoking, holding her elbow in her cupped hand, her gaze lost in the distant infinity,

  “Do you like them?” the man with orange hair asked.

  “They’re heavy,” Eva replied.

  “Because they’re good quality. With these you’ll be able to ski like Gustav Thoeni.”

  “I can’t ski.”

  There was a silence. The daughter of the son of the winter carousel king had never worn a pair of skis; this discovery seemed to disconcert Hannes Staggl.

  “I’m a cook, not a lady, I have no money to waste.”

  Gerda’s voice, although it came from her mouth, less than a yard away from Eva, seemed to come from a faraway place. Hannes didn’t turn to look at the woman—still very beautiful—he had impregnated not so many years earlier, and kept his face down toward the miniature white nun. “If your mother had wanted to marry me, she wouldn’t be working in a hotel like a slave now. She would own a hotel.”

  Gerda dragged on the cigarette and kept the smoke in her mouth for what seemed to Eva like an eternity. Then she let out perfect blue rings that floated toward the flowering lilacs like small, brave spaceships. But their epic crossing failed: they all dissolved in space before landing.

  “Nobody asked me to marry them when I was pregnant.”

  The cigarette wasn’t finished but Gerda let it drop on the ground and crushed it with her heel. Then she took Eva by the wrist, walked with her through the front door, and closed it behind them. Gently, however.

  It soon became evident that Hannes’s present was incomplete: it didn’t include ski boots. After trying to slide her rubber boots into the grips, Eva gave up.

  It was Sepp who found a solution. He built two wooden stools and nailed one on each ski, which he had sawed a yard from the point, and to which he had also fixed a kind of handlebar. When winter came, Ulli and Eva came down the long slope behind the hayloft on their two Böckl40 hundreds, thousands of times, without ever tiring. Gustav Thoeni would also have enjoyed it.

  A few months later, Genovese invited Gerda several times to be his “fair company.” The soldier had noticed her at the non-commissioned officer party, but he was already busy with other female attendees, almost too many even for him: it was impossible to add another one. The last one, not long before, had taken her leave after throwing an iced drink in his face in the lobby of the Greif Hotel in Bolzano. Genovese had appreciated this gesture: his reputation was important to him. Only now, over a year later, was he free to go with Gerda.

  She quite liked going out with that Neapolitan who came up to her shoulder and never shut up. At the dance hall, the difference in height wasn’t a big deal: nowadays it was no longer necessary for the woman’s waistline to be lower than the man’s. The Tuca Tuca, a dance that consisted in stretching out your hands and feeling your partner to the rhythm of the music was very suitable for non-commissioned officer Genovese, so much so that he might as well have invented it, and not the singer Raffaella Carrà. Even in sex, he came straight to the point and couldn’t be described as a generous lover. But that was nothing new for Gerda. Afterwards, however, he was relaxed and pleasant. He would tell her about his wonderful city illuminated by the moon in the Bay of Naples, his agitated ferret eyes would soften, and he’d say, “One day I’ll take you there.”

  She wasn’t supposed to believe it but she appreciated the fact that he felt the need to tell her this lie. Above all, he made her laugh.

  “Si accussì bella ca si faciss’ nu pireto m’ ‘o zucass’!” he told her one day while getting dressed again next to the bed.

  Lying on her side, her smooth and voluptuous body on top of the sheets like an all-consuming letter S, she had looked at him without understanding. From under Genovese’s shirt sprang his pendulous sex; short legs covered in black curly hairs, ending in the socks he would never take off, one of which had a hole in it. He spread his shoulders, straightened his back, lifted his chin, and declaimed in the accent of an Italian language academic, the translation in Italian: “You are so beautiful that if you farted, I’d suck it.”

  She asked him what “farted” meant. He explained it. She burst out laughing and didn’t stop, even long after he’d gone.

  That was why Genovese hadn’t yet been stabbed by jealous husbands or trampled by the many fellow soldiers from whom he’d swiped their Fräulein, or demoted by all the superiors to whom he was forever supplying a new reason for doing so: for all his vulgarity, his lies, his betrayals and his idleness, he cheered you up. Therefore, that day, knowing that Genovese would come in the evening and pick her up in his Cinquecento, a car more suited to the length of his legs than hers, she was singing the Tuca Tuca song, with a hint of swing in her hips and shoulders as she came down the steps to the pantry. She threw the woolen greatcoat over her shoulders, walked into the refrigerated cell and, still singing, took off the hook the half torso of lamb she would be using to prepare the plat du jour: ribs with fine herbs.

  In the frost of the freezer the rhythm of her song became visible, every syllable a puff of condensation in front of her mouth.

  Yes, Gerda was in an excellent mood today.

  At that precise moment, in a corridor of the barracks, Genovese was talking to Vito. He had a date that evening, he said, but something new had also arrived, something called Waltraud, and he didn’t feel like turning it down.

  “Do you want to go instead of me? Gerda is a very beautiful Fräulein, you’re bound to thank me afterwards.”

  Vito didn’t feel like going out that evening. The following morning he was due to go on patrol before dawn. Still, Genovese insisted, it’s not nice—practically a mortal sin—to leave a beautiful blonde girl without an escort, and so, almost out of duty, Vito agreed.

  Subsequently, when Gerda and Vito remembered the first time they saw each other, and compared their first impressions, they realized they’d been very different.

  When Vito saw her, he considered running away. He could have done it: she hadn’t yet made him out as the Neapolitan’s substitute. In fact, she didn’t even know someone else was coming. She’s too beautiful for me, he thought. Not beautiful like any other healthy girl with a good body and a face without flaws. But so beautiful you felt pain, you felt longing even while she was right in front of you, so beautiful you wanted to hold her in the circumference of your arms and never let anyone or anything hurt her.

  When Gerda, on the other hand, saw a Carabiniere in uniform waiting for her outside the staff entrance, her stomach seized up. What new terrible, unexpected event, was that Carabin
iere about to inform her of? Was it to do with Peter? No, Peter was dead. Eva, then?

  Meanwhile, Vito hadn’t run away. He told her that Second Lieutenant Genovese sent his heartfelt apologies but had been prevented from keeping his date. However, if she was happy with the substitute for an evening’s entertainment, then he was respectfully at her disposal. The language of an official report at the same time as a jungle inside his chest: as he spoke, his heart beat in his rib cage like a bird of paradise that’s just been caught.

  Only then did Gerda manage to see in Vito traits other than the fact, predominant up till then, that he wasn’t Genovese. He was the same physical type as the Neapolitan. He too was short, dark, with the pronounced nose of ancient seafaring people. But as far as his personality went, he might as well have come from a different continent: as noisy and over the top as the other man was, this one was silent and serious. A man who, moreover, looked straight into Gerda’s eyes, and not at her hips, where her dress was a little tight, or at her breasts.

  Gerda wasn’t too disappointed. It was almost part of the deal that Genovese would one day disappear, and, as it was, their acquaintance had lasted longer than expected. Ruining her evening wasn’t her style, so she accepted Vito as her escort.

  Subsequently, even their memories of that first evening didn’t match. Vito claimed he had taken her to dinner at the Trattoria near Ponte Druso; she was certain they’d gone straight to dance. In reality, Gerda didn’t have many images of those first hours together. She didn’t remember what music the small orchestra played, or their first dance. He probably stepped on her toes, though that wasn’t a memory but rather deduction: Vito never was a skilled dancer. Gerda did not keep a particular memory of what the Carabiniere said or did. She was much more struck by what he didn’t do.