Eva Sleeps

by Francesca Melandri

  He’d promised Gerda before leaving: I’ll tell my mother about you two. Gerda’s face had stiffened as though in pain, it was actually joy. She had never been introduced to a future mother-in-law.

  Next time I go on leave, I’ll tell her about Eva.

  He’d show his mother Eva’s exercise books, how good she was at school. I can’t wait to meet her, his mother would say. And also: I’ll buy her lots of presents, I’ll teach her our songs.

  Without honor, contemptible, false. That’s how Vito felt.

  He was in a carriage that went as far as Germany, it was the train of the Fremdarbeiter, the immigrants who were going back after a holiday in their villages. They were occupying entire compartments with their caciocavallo cheese, tomatoes in oil, demijohns of wine. They were talking to Vito about homesickness, about how hard it is to live far from your land. “It’s like a part of you is missing,” they were saying. They always envied him when they saw him getting off on this side of the Brenner. They didn’t know that, yes, it was still Italy, but just in name.

  The train started and the long ride back along Italy began. At one end, the place Gerda called home; at the other, the one he called home.

  Vito had been back a long time when he opened the door of the kitchen range and saw the ‘nduja. It had been there for several days. It was a present for Gerda from his mother, she’d given it to his fiancée. But she hadn’t been able to eat it. It was too spicy, too strong, too different than the flavors she was familiar with. And when Vito had left, she’d thrown it into the furnace of the wood stove. Now half of it was covered in ashes. It was gray, it stank.

  Gerda went and clung to him. “I just couldn’t eat it.”

  “Never mind.”

  But then he went to the window, the one overlooking the glaciers, and his lip quivered. He’d never felt so much sadness, and even he couldn’t tell why. His eyes grew red.

  Gerda was looking at him, scared. Why would anyone cry for a sausage? He straightened up, put an arm around her waist.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m a little tired.”

  He held her close, shut his eyes, searched for her skin. He only wanted one thing at that moment: to be blind, deaf, without a future.

  Weeks passed, then months. Nothing had changed between Vito and Gerda.

  They continued to visit Eva together, she lived with Sepp and Maria, went to school the rest of the time, and spent every free moment with her Ulli. Gerda worked in the kitchen, Vito at the barracks. They made love every time they had the opportunity. On the other hand, they didn’t go dancing anymore: they’d realized that neither of them really enjoyed it.

  Leni had built next to her parents’ maso a new construction with three small apartments for tourists. She hadn’t found it easy to obtain all the authorizations, but she had finally managed it. Her children caused her no problems at school, her elderly parents enjoyed reasonable health, she didn’t consider herself an unhappy woman.

  Wastl had moved to Munich, where he was teaching music and playing the clarinet in a jazz band. Ruthi had joined him, tried to show him that she was indispensable to him, hadn’t convinced him, had come back home and, soon afterwards, had married the eldest son of a maso on the opposite side of the valley. Now, not even eighteen, she was expecting her first child.

  Paul Staggl had finally become the grandfather of a grandson. His daughter-in-law had turned out to be an excellent mother; she was raising her children with a firm hand, even the three that followed. So as to spend as little time as possible with her or them, Hannes spent his days in his father’s office. This had considerably increased his knowledge of cable cars, ski pistes, and of that new technological frontier: artificial snow. He still had his cream convertible Mercedes 190, but he almost always kept it in the garage. He went to the office on foot.

  Hermann’s house was demolished with the rest of Shanghai, and residential buildings were erected in its place, according to a new town planning scheme. At the age of sixty-four, Hermann became the youngest resident of the Altersheim, the home for the town elderly. The staff didn’t find him to be a difficult guest. When he wasn’t eating or sleeping, he spent his time modeling figurines with the soft part of the bread; some of them were even displayed in the Nativity scene that was set up in the entrance hall at Christmas. He never had any visitors in the retirement home.

  When the winter season at Frau Mayer’s hotel ended, Vito said to Gerda, “I’m taking you to Venice.”

  Eva would have run after the pigeons in St Mark’s Square for hours but there were so many other things to see. Especially the streets made of water, gondolas like black fish, houses that looked made of lace and not bricks, and people. The city seemed like a single, permanent open air concert: tourists had long hair, either very short or very long skirts, almond-shaped or blue eyes, milky, amber or leather-colored skin.

  There wasn’t such a variety of people where she was born. In comparison, the tourists that filled her town during high season all seemed related to one another. Whereas here, there were Americans, Asians, Scandinavians, and even the odd African. Their skin was such a wonderful color. Why did they call them “black,” anyway, when they should have called them “brown”? And how did Japanese women manage to see through those eyes as narrow as slits? Eva would squeeze her eyes to try to find out and discovered, in fact, that you couldn’t see anything above or below but only to the side. And yet, and that was what was so strange, they didn’t move their heads to look up; but then perhaps the Japanese weren’t interested in the sky. While a passerby was taking a photo of her, Gerda and Vito together, she saw a woman wearing a tablecloth and a man in pajamas.

  “Indians,” Vito explained, but Eva was still astounded: she’d always imagined Indians with feathers on their heads, plaits and moccasins. This variety wasn’t just fascinating to watch, but also a kind of calling: if the whole world came to visit Venice it meant that Eva, too, some day, would be able to visit the world.

  Vito and Gerda walked with her in the middle, went up and down bridges, and along calli; when these were too narrow, they’d walk in line and take larger strides until once again there was room to be close to one another. They were staying in a little pensione behind San Stae. The owner had two purple rings under his eyes because of years of sleep interrupted by nocturnal patrons to whom he had to go and open the door. When they’d arrived at reception he’d said “Signora” and “your husband” to Gerda, and “your little girl” to Vito. Then he’d read the surnames on the documents and had grasped the situation. For the two days of their stay he managed to avoid addressing Gerda directly (at that point, “Signorina” would have been offensive), or specifying whose daughter Eva was. It certainly wasn’t the first time this had happened: too many couples without wedding bands on the fingers had been there, and then, over the past few years, he’d seen all sorts of things, so he certainly wasn’t shocked. Gerda, however, lit up a cigarette as the hotel owner was handing them the key, and Vito handed Eva the bronze bell on the counter, and said, “Look.” But she knew: when her mother stared like that into space, taking puffs of smoke with indifference, it was never a good thing.

  Apart from this brief moment of unease, Gerda was happy. She was in Venice! With Vito! And Eva! She felt as though she was living a song, a photo love story, a movie. In the movies, lovers in Venice kiss in a gondola and Vito had rented one. Leaning back on the red velvet couch, Gerda half closed her eyes.

  “Will you take me to the Amalfi Coast on our honeymoon?”

  Vito stroked her hair and held her tight, and Gerda didn’t understand that it was so he wouldn’t look her in the eyes. But then he said to her, “I would like to marry you.”

  “Would like” is similar to “want” but not the same, so she straightened up to look at him. That’s when Vito confessed: he’d told his mother about Gerda. Not about Eva.

  Sitting on the foldaway seat at
the prow, Eva did not turn around.

  Vito spoke softly, so he wouldn’t be heard. “I’ll tell her on my next leave. It’s a promise.”

  Eva continued to stare at the oar with which the gondolier was slicing through the putrid water.

  Vito kissed Gerda’s face. She let him.

  Eva looked at the little arched bridge going overhead and thought: if it breaks and falls on me I’ll go underwater, swim, swim without breathing and get to the shore.

  KILOMETERS 1303 - 1383

  After Vibo Valentia, the view of the vast golden arch of the Calabrian coast line is interspersed with noisy darkness: one tunnel after another. It looks like a film projected so slowly that you can see the black strips between the frames. Then the sea disappears, we’re inland, and between one tunnel and another round hills and monumental olive groves appear. We’re now passing under the Aspromonte: a tunnel that never seems to end, as dark as despair.

  Ulli’s coffin was about to be lowered into its hole when an old man with hands deformed by decades of pulling the bell rope came forward. “I’d like to say something,” he said.

  It was Lukas, the sacristan. In church he hadn’t gone up to the lectern next to the altar, like Sigi and the others, to carefully and vocally ignore the reason for Ulli’s death. I hadn’t done it either, or gotten up to take communion. I hadn’t taken it since the day when, after Vito had gone, the parish priest had welcomed my mother back into the flock, but more as a broken lamb then a lost one. Lukas had been the sacristan of the little church facing the glaciers for almost forty years but nobody was accustomed to hearing his voice. At first it trembled, then he gathered his courage.

  “I would like to tell everybody what Ulli gave me.”

  Surprisingly, there was a sudden, perfect silence, as though the most authoritative orator had taken the stand.

  “But if my Anna were still alive I wouldn’t do it.”

  The shock had turned into anxious curiosity, which, in Leni’s case, had become panic. Terrible revelations she hadn’t asked for had already first taken away a husband, then a son; she was now staring at the sacristan as though imploring to be spared.

  But Lukas continued. Over sixty years ago, he said, when he was a child, there was a forbidden word, more than forbidden, in fact—unknown: Homosexualität. A clinical, almost academic word: it was astounding, hearing it spoken by this modest man who for decades had been arranging breviaries on lecterns, spreading incense on bigots reciting the rosary, rewarding with non-consecrated wafers children who’d been well-behaved during catechism. Truly strange.

  “There was Fascism, but that was a word we didn’t even know in Italian.”

  Lukas continued his story. When he was young he’d start sweating when he approached certain young men; but that never happened to him with women. At night, Lukas had strange dreams and confessed them to the priest who would tell him, “Say three Hail Marys and four Our Fathers and you’ll have normal dreams again.”

  In forty years of marriage, Lukas had only ever been able to get close to his wife if he shut his eyes and imagined her to be a man. Anna didn’t blame him for anything, but she could sense something. She didn’t know that word either, however. Lukas was sure he was the only person in the world with that twist in him.

  Lukas was the loneliest man who ever lived.

  Only when Ulli had openly declared his own homosexuality had Lukas understood. Ein Homosexueller. So that’s what he was. And he was no longer alone since there were at least two of them in the world. Lukas was an old man, his earthly existence was almost over, his good, blameless wife Anna had gone. And so he had decided: nobody else should have to spend an entire life in loneliness, ignorance, and confusion, as he had done. He had to speak out. And now Lukas wanted to say it: without Ulli he would never have known who he was. And even though Ulli had lost heart and gone the way he had, he, Lukas, was certain that now the good Lord—with whom he felt he had an excellent rapport since he’d always kept His house clean—would welcome him kindly.

  Around the open grave, nobody spoke. Lukas, too, fell silent. He’d finished. He threw a handful of light-colored soil on the wooden coffin about to be lowered into the grave. On top of it was placed the target with Ulli’s name, the one his father had riddled with bullets at his birth, like a gloomy prophecy. The sacristan walked away, his gray hair ruffled by the wind, with small, hesitant steps, perhaps not just because of arthritis. The undertaker looked around as though to ask if we’d finished. There was no answer, so he started his job. Little by little everybody left except Leni and Sigi, and I.

  Beyond the graveyard wall, the glaciers had never seemed so near.

  Sigi hadn’t said to Lukas, the sacristan, the filthy words that had killed Ulli. He stood with his head down, his wide hunter shoulders unable to bear this kind of load. I’d never have thought it possible, and yet I felt sorry for him

  However, Vito wasn’t there to support me as I leaned against him, and say: you see, Ulli’s life wasn’t in vain. Vito hadn’t been there for many years, and wouldn’t be there for many more: but that was the day when, more than any other time before or afterwards, his absence was unbearable to me.

  And finally, suddenly, it’s the end of the tunnels and the last knotty mountain at the tip of the boot, and we’re once again by the sea. We’ve really arrived: the train is running just a few yards from the water. Even though the ballast of the rails is protected by a stone breakwater, I’m sure splashes of saltwater must reach the windows at high tide.

  The tiny station of Favazzina is squeezed against houses, neglected, dirty, covered in graffiti among which, in huge lettering: WELCOME TO FAVAZZINA HILL. Immediately afterwards, we go past another station just as small and helpless, but with a more evocative name: Scilla. And finally, there’s the red and white lighthouse of Villa San Giovanni, which states: the continent ends here.

  1973

  Odontometer, tweezers, magnifying glasses. Bent over his desk, Silvius Magnago was examining a perforation gauge.

  He’d never been a big traveler. The furthest he’d been was the never-ending plain of Nikopol, in Ukraine, and his left leg was still there. He’d often been to Vienna, visited a few European capitals and, going up and down between Rome and Bolzano, had covered more miles than if he’d gone around the globe. But seeing the world for pleasure was something he’d never done. His way of traveling was to collect stamps from every country. After so many years, it was a blessing to have a little time to devote to them.

  With the approval of the Package, the attacks, the bombs, and the deaths had stopped. Three years later, a few months ago now, it had come into effect. Now it was a question of passing the laws for implementing the individual processes. Taxes, education, responsibility for road planning and facilitated construction: the whole administrative autonomy of Alto Adige had to find its rules of application. A long, bureaucratic, pedantic job. Magnago had never minded the search for concrete, detailed solutions, so the enterprise, tackled along with commissions led by people he respected, such as the Christian Democrat Berloffa, didn’t alarm him. You needed to be meticulous, concrete, attentive to detail, and precise: the characteristics of a stamp collector, which he was. It was going to be a demanding but not difficult task.

  Even the atmosphere in the Heimat was good. Tourism was bringing a sense of wellbeing nobody would have thought remotely possible ten years earlier. At the recent elections, his party had been rewarded with two thirds of the votes by an electorate pleased with the historical mission accomplished. Above all, he no longer received phone calls in the middle of the night, telling him that a soldier had been blown up, that a young man had been killed at a roadblock, that the wick of the explosive charge that was threatening to blow up the entire province was getting shorter and shorter.

  With advancing age, his leg, the one that had stayed behind in Nikopol, was having increasingly frequent conversations wit
h the rest of his body in the secret language of suffering, a language he couldn’t share with anyone, not even his Sofia. However, the frightening, exciting years that had led from the Castel Firmiano rally to the agreement with Rome were over. Now, every so often, he could even spend time with his stamps. And yet, whenever Silvius Magnago watched the events of the country of which, by signing the Package, his land had agreed to be a part of, he couldn’t feel calm. What was happening sounded familiar, like a recurring melody, but if at first it had been whispered by only a few in a small, peripheral area like South Tyrol, it was now being played by an entire orchestra: Italy.

  Bombs. Massacres. Attacks. Terrorists. Roadblocks. Planned coups. Cover-ups. Rumors about the involvement of secret services in dark deeds. And, above all, the dead. Too many dead. In the streets, in banks, in police stations from which questioned people emerged dead, in crowded squares. It wasn’t a happy tune.

  Sometime ago, with Sofia, he’d seen a documentary about tornadoes and typhoons on television. It was then that he thought of South Tyrol like one of those areas in the middle of the ocean, unknown to the majority, crossed by few, but where hurricanes originate. Microscopic areas of low pressure seldom signaled by world radars, marginal on the global canvas, but where winds sometimes start spinning, waters bubbling, clouds gathering, until what starts as a little whirlwind turns into a cyclone ready to sweep the coast of continents, and does so, but only after it has departed forever from the insignificant place on the globe where it had started to take shape.

  Here we are. The rumble of thunder, the tempest, the blizzards that had agitated his land in those years of fire between 1957 and 1969, seen from there they just looked like the first signs of something much larger and widespread, something—Magnago shuddered at the mere thought—which had had its dress rehearsal right here, it was here that they had learned how to do it.