Eva Sleeps

by Francesca Melandri

  Over dinner, Sepp told Vito about the two years he’d spent as a prisoner of war. The beating Hermann had given him at the time of the Option hadn’t managed to convince him to abandon his maso, so, like all the other Dableiber, he’d been drafted into the Italian army. When the British captured him in the African desert, he asked to be transferred to the German camp so that he could at least speak his mother tongue with his fellow prisoners. However, as far as the camp commanders were concerned, Sepp was a soldier from the province of Bolzano, Italy, so he had to stay with Italians.

  “It was a stroke of luck for me,” Sepp told Vito.

  The potatoes given to the Germans were rotten, he said, the bread had worms, there was cardboard in the soup. The potatoes and bread for the Italians, however, were almost wholesome and there were real cabbage leaves floating in the broth. Sepp said that the British knew Italians: they may be docile as prisoners, but don’t you dare give them food that’s too disgusting, or you risk a rebellion.

  Vito served more artichokes. As he took the lid off the pan, a fragrance of garlic, mint and wild fennel drifted out. That aroma was for Eva like Vito’s presence: something enveloping and intense, which you’ve never tried before, but which you can immediately get used to.

  After two days off, Gerda returned to the hotel. There was something about her that even Elmar, the scullery boy, had never seen. It wasn’t the cheerfulness of when she was about to go out with Genovese, but a quiet, fulfilled contentedness.

  The consumption of alcohol that had carved a large purple nose on his old baby face had prevented Elmar’s career from progressing beyond washing pots. Even so, he felt no resentment toward Gerda, on the contrary, he kept laying his eyes on her whenever he could. That day, however, watching her beating steaks on the board with new tenderness, he observed her, puzzled. She noticed, looked up and smiled at him. It took Elmar’s breath away. Gerda’s love for Vito was so plentiful that there was even some left over for him, a wretched alcoholic scullery boy.

  KILOMETERS 1191 - 1303

  At Lamezia Terme, the Indians next door, the enthusiastic cellphone users, walk past the door of our compartment in order to get off. The woman with a deep voice is wearing jeans, white socks and flip-flops covered in little pearls, the men have bellies like billiard balls over skinny legs. Two enormous dark eyes marked with kohl peep over the shoulder of one of the men. Clearly not an Italian child—for one thing he hasn’t cried once in over five hours. I smile at him. At first he doesn’t reciprocate, then suddenly he reveals little baby shark teeth, and his eyes light up like sparks.

  A Sisiduzza.

  They’re met by an Italian woman who welcomes them with much laughter. The Indians also look pleased to see her, and unload their suitcases cheerfully. There are many of them, large, with sticky white bands that say FCO, for Fiumicino Airport. They must have just landed there from India, but despite their long journey they haven’t lost their good cheer. They go to the underground passage with their Italian friend, and their laughter echoes long after they’re out of my sight. I look at my three compartment fellows. It’s only us Italian citizens left now. Without American tourists and non-Europeans, this Easter train is really empty.

  Shortly after we depart, the ex-policeman exclaims, “You can see Sicily!”

  There’s tenderness in his voice. I go out into the corridor and, yes, it’s true: we’re near the tip of Italy, and with the sun already halfway down the horizon, you can make out the dark outline of Sicily. Looking north, however, the golden coastline is so curved in on itself that you can see Calabria and, higher up, Basilicata, as well as a large chunk of Campania. You can almost see it all—the elegant boot shape drawn between Naples and Sicily. In the mountains, the light is made of air and wind, as the frost is hurled down from the heights like a sharp dart; this light, however, is liquid, dense, as though it doesn’t color things but mingles their humors.

  Between the coast, where we are, and the island, the luminous sea is crossed by a long dark shape: perhaps it’s an oil tanker, or a large freighter that will unload thousands of Chinese containers in Naples. It glides like an apparition. On board, the sailors must be deafened by the racket of the engine but, seen from here, distant and silent, it emanates the grandiose fatality of intercontinental routes.

  At moments like these, I miss Ulli so much.

  The night he died, Costa had been gone a few days; Ulli had spent the first three on my sofa, trembling. I’d insisted he stay at home a little longer but he’d gone back to work a week earlier. I persuaded myself that being on Marlene, taking charge of a mechanical power, would do him good. That night I wasn’t with him. These twenty years I still don’t know why I didn’t go with him to beat the pistes. Was I with a man? Did he ask me not to go with him? I rule out this possibility because I would have been suspicious and wouldn’t have left him alone. But why wasn’t I with him? I have no idea. I only remember that when the phone call came, I was in my bed, and without company.

  Ulli didn’t want to go to live in Berlin, London, or Vienna, like everyone was telling him to. He didn’t want to be the schwul son of the hero who’d given his life for him. He didn’t want to be a mother’s obedient son, whose brain gets fried by electric shocks while they’re showing him pornography—no doubt the therapy devised by that doctor in Val Sarentina so that he himself could watch images of homosexual intercourse to his heart’s content. He didn’t want to marry a woman, manage to have children with her only by closing his eyes and imagining she was a man, then make believe that he had a lover and, instead, go to the toilets in train stations. He only wanted to be himself where he was born and to love the person he loved.

  He wanted the one impossible thing.

  He went with the snowcat up the steepest piste, the one used for World Cup training, sixty percent of uninterrupted gradient. The caterpillars bit the snow while the safety cable dragged him up. When he reached the top, he unfastened the cable, turned the front of the snowcat toward the valley, stepped on the gas, and let go of the brake. That’s how I’ve always imagined it, Marlene, the snowcat Ulli loved like a truck driver loves his truck, like a cowboy loves his horse: it slides elegantly along the piste, gets underway, a stack of snow makes it tilt to the side but the top-quality caterpillars keep it in line, it descends down the piste, acquiring speed without grazing the snow any more, flies and bounces like a child skier, crashes against a tree on the edge of the piste, then into another and another, until it ends up going over the cliff.

  Marlene was red, vigorous and almost unstoppable, just like the blood pumped by the muscle we have in our chests. It deforested an entire slope before it stopped. Larches, spruces, pines, broad-leaved trees, it swiped them all like toothpicks.

  The death notices in Dolomiten are in code, and you need to know how to interpret them, especially with regard to the cause of death of the people you’re mourning.

  “After a long, painful illness” means cancer.

  “In a tragic road accident”—if it took place on a Friday or Saturday, it means drink driving.

  When a young person suddenly dies, the family—to prevent confusion with one of too many peers who hang themselves every year in our Heimat—takes care to clarify the cause of death, which is generally the second one.

  If the cause of death isn’t stated but there’s only an adverb (“unexpectedly” or “suddenly”), it’s undoubtedly suicide.

  In Ulli’s case, the wording was “an accident at work.”

  1972

  Any idiot would have noticed. And Mariangela Anania, née Mollica, was no idiot. Besides, a mother knows these things.

  She’d started to get an idea a year earlier, when Vito had come down on leave and told her he’d be staying up there a little longer, eating sour cabbage and balls of bread. She quickly put two and two together. If, after five years of honorable service in that land at the very top of Italy, his superiors weren
’t sending him back to his mother, then there could only be one reason: he’d asked to stay on.

  So she really wasn’t a fool, but not a whiner, either. She didn’t ask him anything, she wasn’t offended, she said, “Oh, really?” and didn’t mention it again.

  Then there was the picnic on the beach on Easter Monday, with the neighbors and their daughter Sabrina, you really couldn’t say she was beautiful but she was well put together with everything in the right place and even in abundance, two beautiful, shiny green eyes, and she was even qualified. You could see a mile away that Vito wasn’t interested in her, so Signora Anania and the girl’s parents had exchanged looks as if to say: let’s leave these young people alone, if they start talking and getting to know each other without us butting in, it’s no bad thing. But, instead, every time that poor girl came anywhere near Vito, he got up, found a coffee pot to move, a glass to fill . . . anyway, it was obvious he was doing everything just so he wouldn’t be alone with her. Now this isn’t normal for a young man whose heart is free. On the other hand, if it’s taken . . .

  Then, a few months earlier, Auntie Giovanna, the one famous for always saying things other people think but don’t dare say—something which had earned her universal—albeit peeved—respect, asked him, “So when are you going to get married, then?” Vito hadn’t giggled like a donkey, the way young men do when what’s on their mind is just easy-to-bed women, and that there’s plenty of time to find the woman who’ll sleep in just one bed for ever, but you can’t say this to an elderly relative so they just giggle slyly, all cocky and embarrassed. No, Vito had looked down at his shoes and not raised his eyes for a good half hour, and that’s something you do when you have a secret, and a very particular secret—one with a name and a surname.

  In other words, Gerda Huber.

  It took her ages to work out that you say Gherda and not Gierda. Not to mention the surname, I mean, how can a word start with an H and end in a consonant? Yes, it can, Vito said, and in fact, there’s even one in Italian: “hotel.” And then, Vito said, this isn’t even as bad as some surnames, surnames you just can’t pronounce, not even he after all those years, and he listed them. She didn’t understand a word so, to entertain her, he wrote them down on a sheet of paper.

  Schwingshackl. Niederwolfsgruber. Tschurtschenthaler.

  She didn’t find them funny but, on the contrary, they annoyed her, there wasn’t even one vowel, all consonants, and not even normal consonants but Ks, and Hs, and Ws. What kind of names were they, anyway? Besides, they reminded her a bit too much of the days back in 1943, in Reggio, when her son was in her belly and her husband in a mass grave in Greece, though she didn’t know that yet, and the Germans went from one house to another, banging on doors and screaming, “sheenél actoon ràus capùt” and it was a miracle she didn’t miscarry from fear. But she didn’t say that to Vito because once he’d told her, “Look, Mom, just because they’re Germans doesn’t mean they’re all Nazis.” So she figured it was better to drop it, because luckily he’d never had to hear those voices that sounded like machine guns, by the time he was born the Americans were already there.

  In any case, since Vito had explained everything to her, she was reassured.

  Because, it must be admitted, at a certain point she’d started to fear the worst.

  If the woman he’d met was a good, patient girl, then he wouldn’t be the first soldier who goes and marries a foreigner where he’s stationed, but why keep it a secret from everybody for over a year?

  She started to worry again. What if, behind all that looking down at the tips of his shoes, there was some problem, some lie, some dishonor? Her son Vito was a dependable kind, he’d never acted on a whim, even as a child. When he was six years old she’d send him to get the bread and give him extra money on purpose, to see if he came back with the change, but he wasn’t just the future Carabiniere, he was like a finance policeman, one of those who check the accounts books, giving/taking all nice and precise: he’d come back clutching in his hand the little lire coins all counted, the five-lire ones with the little fish and the ten-lire ones with the ear of wheat and the plow, never any mistakes, he didn’t even buy candy without permission. But then everybody knows sometimes it’s the straightest sticks that end up in the fire.

  But now he’d reassured her. He’d shown her a picture. Sure, she was beautiful, no doubt about that. Almost too beautiful, she thought, but didn’t say it. And Vito was looking at the photo of that piece of blonde woman with a blank expression, so imagine how he must have devoured her with his eyes when she was there. Of course, besides being too beautiful, she was also almost too German but, oh well: a mom needs to know how to accept things, and she’d always disliked those mothers-in-law who make the lives of their sons’ wives impossible just because they don’t correspond exactly to their idea of how a daughter-in-law should be. Mariangela Anania, née Mollica, a war widow with a newborn son, knew how hard life can be for women, and while she was looking at the photo she was already thinking: if this is really the one Vito is going to bring home, I’m going to teach her to cook swordfish and eggplant with almonds and walnuts, I’ll comfort her when she’s homesick for her land, I’ll treat her like the daughter I never had.

  But the thread of her thoughts got tangled up and snapped on something Vito said: “Except that there’s a problem.”

  She felt cold inside. Something tight. And the certainty: here we go, now he’s going to tell me about the lie, he’s going to tell me the problem and the dishonor. She instinctively tightened her mouth and also the other orifices, those low down, like you do when you don’t want trouble and pain to enter your life and especially that of your adored son. But she also knew that when you keep the doors of your body firmly shut, it means that troubles and pain are already inside.

  And yet.

  “She has a . . . she’s much taller than me,” Vito had said.

  She had felt relief warm her whole being like a good broth on a winter’s night. But since she was his mother, she saw it: a thing, a little thing that remained without a name or a surname, deep in her son’s eyes. But she wasn’t an idiot, and since Vito wasn’t telling her, she also knew this: whatever this little thing he wasn’t mentioning was, it wouldn’t be up to her to fight it. It was her son, alone, who would see to eliminating it.

  “So what?” she therefore said. “Your father wasn’t much taller than me. Take her a piece of ‘nduja to try.”

  Eva and Ulli spent their afternoons after school on top of the Himalayas, on Nanga Parbat, to be precise. They had named their refuge at the top of the hayloft, the wooden balcony where the architrave meets the oblique beams of the roof, in honor of Reinhold Messner, the climber who tackled the twenty-six thousand feet with nothing but the power of his lungs, without tanks of oxygen. They would also climb their Nanga Parbat without artificial help and especially without Sigi: Ulli’s little brother was forbidden from accessing the peak. The only time he tried to join them they named him the Yeti, but Sigi didn’t like being abominable so he never came back.

  Eva had stopped ignoring her cousin during Gerda’s visits. Now she gave him permission to join her, her mother, and Vito. Sergeant Anania had extended his affection not only to Gerda and Eva but also to all those they loved: Maria, Sepp, Wastl. And naturally, Ulli. To Eva, her mother’s presence had always been a synonym of scarcity: to see her arrive was already to fear losing her. Whereas Vito had brought along abundance: he had enough warmth for everybody.

  Eva particularly liked hearing them talk about her, just like a couple of parents. Once, when they thought she was asleep, they’d even almost argued.

  Gerda was saying that after middle school she’d be sending Eva to catering college: with all the new hotels being built she’d never starve. And especially, she wouldn’t start working as she had, not knowing how to do anything except get her fingers corroded by caustic soda, or break her back over dirty pots. No
, Eva would arrive at her first job with a diploma, a qualification, and skills. Perhaps she wouldn’t start as head cook but at least as assistant cook.

  “No! Eva must go to high school!” Vito had rebelled. “And then afterwards perhaps even university. She’s too clever not to study.”

  Gerda had flown off the handle. University?! The children of ladies and gentlemen go to university, people who have money in the bank and saints in heaven. Whereas she only had two hands and was proud of them, and if he thought being a cook was a job for . . .

  She’d stopped abruptly. In bed with her eyes shut, Eva had heard the silence, then the liquid sound of the lips searching each other, and Vito’s gentle voice whispering, “you are to me . . . ” and finally some indistinct murmuring. And even if she couldn’t see her mother’s face, she could imagine it, she’d seen it when Vito told her sentences that started with “you.” She would become so beautiful that even Eva almost didn’t recognize her.

  One day, at school, the teacher came to stand next to Eva’s desk. Instead of listening to the lesson she was drawing.

  “And who’s this?” she asked, pointing at the paper.

  It was the picture of a man with dark hair and eyes, wearing a cap with a peak and black pants with a red stripe. He was holding, like a bunch of roses, a huge green and purple artichoke.

  “Mein Tata,” Eva said. My daddy.

  His leave was over.

  Vito looked out of the window but saw only himself: the night train had just left Reggio and outside, on the side of the sea, there was only darkness.