Eva Sleeps

by Francesca Melandri

  1973-1977

  It was the “license” that saved Gerda’s life.

  Or maybe she would have gotten through anyway, and the will to live would have forced her to regurgitate everything; or maybe somebody would have rushed into her room and stopped her. Or maybe, at the last minute, she would have remembered Eva and thrown the pills down the toilet. As it happened, Gerda didn’t die thanks to the law on bilingualism, the cornerstone of the new provincial autonomy statute.

  After years of South Tyroleans being forced to speak a foreign language in the public offices of their own land, the Package had corrected things. All the operators of public services had to produce a certificate of knowledge of both German and Italian: that was the so-called “license.”

  The law was compensating for a historical injustice, only it was a pity nobody had thought the practical issues through. What would happen to the Italian employees who didn’t speak German well enough to pass the exam, in other words, almost all of them? Would they be fired en masse? And what about those who worked in public utility services, what would happen to them? Pharmacists, for instance.

  Dr. Enrico Sanna had left his native Cagliari after university, and opened a pharmacy not far from Frau Mayer’s hotel. Thirty years had passed since then, and all he had learned in German was to say hello and goodbye, “please, thank you, enjoy your meal” and a few other words. To understand the names of medicines, however, you don’t need languages; hand gestures and facial expressions suffice to describe the symptoms of a headache or indigestion: he never considered not speaking German as an obstacle to his profession. His customers had never complained, either. On the contrary, in their dour way they’d always been warm toward him and his wife, who came from Barbagia and who had always felt at home among these people who were undemonstrative but true to their word. Until the day an official letter arrived for Dr. Sanna, requesting him to sit an exam to obtain the certificate of bilingualism.

  Vito had been gone a couple of weeks. Gerda had returned to the kitchen. The food she prepared for Frau Mayer’s guests was no less tasty, no less well cooked, garnished with no less care. When the waiters arrived with orders from the dining room, shouted “Neu!” and left notes on the counter, she was no less quick at supervising the cooking of a sauce, no less careful about basting the roast in the oven with the sauce, no less precise in slicing the roulé. However, during the lunch break, when the staff went down to eat and she, the faithful imitator of Herr Neumann, would remain alone in the kitchen in order not to leave the stove unattended, she sometimes happened to look at the bottles of detergent in Elmar’s sink: it wouldn’t be difficult to drink a whole one all in one go. Or at the meat knives: in her expert hands, these trusted blades would have no trouble finding her veins.

  But the lunch break came to an end, the cooks returned to their counters, the hotel guests were hungry, and Gerda had survived another hour.

  It was a day off, always the worst time. She was in her room, lying on her bed, but that was also unbearable, to stay like this right on the bed where she and Vito . . .

  Suddenly determined, she got up, got dressed, and left the hotel. She went to the national health clinic, waited her turn amidst children with mumps and old people with diverticulitis and, when her turn came, she told the doctor about her problem: insomnia. The doctor saw her gray skin, the purple rings under her eyes, and prescribed her some benzodiazepine.

  Are they sleeping pills?

  Yes. With these she’d finally be able to sleep. Gerda went to the pharmacy. Was she waving the prescription like a samurai the sword with which he was about to perform harakiri? No. She’d put it into her handbag, with her face powder and her purse. But she was as determined to die as a Japanese warrior.

  However, Dr. Sanna’s pharmacy was shut. Gerda stood there, puzzled: it was four in the afternoon, it was a Monday, it wasn’t Christmas. There was a sheet of paper full of official stamps attached to the lowered blind. It started with the title:

  PROVINZVERORDNUNG/PROVINCIAL DECREE.

  Gerda looked around. There was a small crowd on the sidewalk outside the pharmacy. Old men, young mothers with their babies, drafted soldiers. They needed aspirin, mouthwash, anticoagulants, insulin. Condoms, thermometers, antibiotics, gauze, syringes, lice powder, sore throat sweets. Benzodiazepine to put an end to suffering. However, Dr. Sanna hadn’t passed the bilingualism exam and so he couldn’t sell anything to anyone anymore.

  If Gerda had really wanted to, there were other pharmacies in nearby villages. But the determination that had led her thus far had lost its momentum.

  So Gerda didn’t die. But she started not wearing the woolen greatcoat. She would enter the refrigerated cell in her shirtsleeves, sweating, straight from the kitchen. The sweat would freeze on her instantly, burning her kidneys like an electric wire, but she would only remember to put something on when she was already out. Gerda belonged to her father Hermann’s hearty brood, so she took a long time to get sick, but finally she developed a very high fever. When Frau Mayer went to see her in the attic room she got scared: her head cook was sweating and shaking as though she had cholera, and the pillow was covered in hair she was losing by the handful. She remained in bed for three weeks. When she was finally able to get up, Gerda still hadn’t turned thirty but had large bald patches on her head. For months, she tied a handkerchief around it. Then her blonde hair grew back, but it was never as soft as it had been.

  Gerda resumed her life of hard work. Everything was the same. Only, if anyone put the radio on in the kitchen, she would immediately turn it off. She gave Elmar the one in her room. Listening to music was more painful for her than anything else. If she met a man in a bar she wouldn’t ask his name, and if he told her, she wouldn’t listen anyway. There was only one name she wanted to hear. One morning, during a break, as she was preparing ingredients for the day’s meals, she went out to the rear for a smoke; she was holding a ladle she’d forgotten to put down. Hannes Staggl was there, waiting for her. He’d put on weight, his red hair had splashes of gray, his eyelids were increasingly like those of a salamander. He was standing there, rooted in the middle of the courtyard of Frau Mayer’s hotel, like the wrong frame in the middle of a film.

  “Figg lai mit mir, Gerda,” he said. Fuck only me. “That guy dumped you because he didn’t love you, not like me. I was ready to pay for everything. Fuck only me from now on, and you and Eva will want for nothing.”

  Gerda took aim and hurled the ladle at her daughter’s father. She hit him on the side of one eye. Hannes Staggl was lucky: ten minutes earlier, Gerda had been boning a side of beef with a cleaver.

  For weeks, his eye remained half closed, blue and swollen, like that of an overage boxer. He told his wife that he’d opened the car door on himself. He’d finally sold his Mercedes and not yet gotten used to the door of his new Lancia.

  When Gerda arrived at the little room where they lived during the low season, she found dozens of letters. She felt despair even just touching them. She threw them, unopened, into the wood stove. Many were addressed to Eva. She threw away those too, like she had thrown away the sausage with too much pepper in it.

  Whenever Eva saw a tan (or even light grey, yellow or black) Fiat 600 climbing up the bends leading to the masi, her legs would feel paralyzed as though they’d sprouted roots, her breath would catch in her chest, and her mouth would dry up. If pumpkins could become carriages and some frogs be transformed into princes, then why shouldn’t Vito appear in the square?

  But it was useless. It didn’t work. She was ten years old now, and no matter how hard she tried, she didn’t believe in fairytales anymore.

  The only solution was to stay put up in Nanga Parbat with Ulli, and to come down to the altitude of other human beings as seldom as possible. It’s cold at fifteen thousand feet, you can’t breathe easily, but at least you’re high above desolation and homesickness.

  Then, all of a
sudden, almost from one day to the next, Ulli’s voice started to change. At first, his childish soprano became a graceless croak, then, after a couple of years, it acquired the resonance of a tenor. Even so, he continued not to show any interest in girls, except Eva. In the morning, he’d wake up with a sticky pubis after dreams populated by strange animals.

  At around fourteen, Eva began to feel men looking at her. Once, she was walking with Gerda down the main street of the town when a group of youths started to whistle. Gerda didn’t turn around, certain as she had always been ever since she’d become a woman that the compliment was aimed at her. Eva met the excited, scared eyes of one of the boys and understood that, actually, they only had eyes for her, for the bare legs under the miniskirt, for the chest, already full, that was pushing against the blouse with the butterflies.

  She looked at her mother. Gerda was walking with her back straight and her mouth tight, like a woman who doesn’t respond to compliments. Eva parted her lips to explain the situation to her but then, excited, embarrassed, and with a vague feeling of betrayal, said nothing.

  KILOMETER 1397

  It’s not Vito but Gabriele, his son. He’s come to pick me up at the station. He loads my trolley suitcase into the trunk of his Opel Vectra and, for an instant, I picture Carlo performing the same gesture. It feels like a year, but it was only two days ago.

  It’s too late to go and see Vito. The pain from the bone tumor keeps him awake at night and he manages to sleep only a little in the evening. Gabriele is now going to take me to the hotel, and I’ll go to see him in the morning. As he drives, I can’t help stealing glances at him. He also casts a furtive look at me. Caught red-handed, we burst out laughing.

  Vito’s son and I are laughing together in his car.

  Imagine that.

  He didn’t say “Signora” or “Signorina,” we’ve immediately used our first names as something right and natural. Gabriele talks as he drives. There’s not much traffic and we’re going fast but I can see nothing of Reggio Calabria. I have eyes only for the sharp profile and crooked mouth of the man who, ever since he was born, has been able to call Vito “Daddy.”

  He does know a few things about me. When he was a little over twenty, Vito told him: about the woman from up north he’d loved as a young man, and her little girl.

  “And so I imagined this little girl with very blonde hair, almost white, like the children who arrive from Germany in the spring. And so you are.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You’re not a blonde?”

  “I’m not German from Germany. I’m South Tyrolean.”

  He looks at me. Serious, but with laughing eyes. “And that’s something completely different . . . ”

  “Yes, completely different.”

  He looks so much like his father. He has the same slightly crooked way of laughing: half his mouth rises, stretches and widens, while the other half remains still as though waiting for the other to finish playing around—but without any impatience.

  “And what else has he told you about me?”

  “That he would have liked to know that you’re happy.”

  I look away.

  “Are you hungry?” he asks.

  It’s a little restaurant in a narrow alley, but where you can smell the sea. The ricotta rissoles and the mixed fried fish taste better than anything I’ve ever eaten, perhaps it’s because I’ve not had a hot meal since Fortezza.

  Gabriele is also a Carabiniere. He has two degrees, in Political Science and Law, and he speaks three languages, plus a smattering of all the languages from the places where he has been on a mission: Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq.

  When he was in Kosovo, the most important thing was greeting both Serbians and Albanians in the appropriate manner, without confusing them. Never order three coffees in an Albanian café by raising your thumb, index, and middle finger, because that’s a Serbian greeting. You have to raise your index, middle, and little finger. If you make a mistake, they take it as an insult, and it’s in nobody’s interest to offend an Albanian. In Pec, he and his men raided a “girl farm.” That’s what the paramilitary called it. He doesn’t want to say what he saw inside. He arrested the camp’s boss himself and kept him under surveillance until handing him over to the emissaries of the international court. He was a middle-aged man, married, with a devoted wife and three daughters the same age as the women prisoners his soldiers were using like pieces of meat.

  “It makes no sense.”

  “When I hear that kind of thing, I realize we were lucky in Alto Adige”

  Gabriele nods. “Yes. Very lucky.”

  After coffee, I look up at him and smile. “You’re not asking me.”

  “What?”

  “If I feel more Italian or German.”

  “Why should I? It’s as if you were to ask me if I feel more Calabrian or Italian. Or rather more Norman, Arab, Greek or Albanian.”

  I look at him and wonder what it would have been like to grow up with Gabriele as a younger brother.

  * * *

  When we reach the hotel, Gabriele turns off the engine. He remains silent for a minute before saying, “My mother also knew about you two.”

  “Your mother! How did she know?”

  “It was my grandmother, she’s dead now. When they got engaged she told her: my son’s true love was another woman, he will never love you like that. But he will always respect you because he’s a good man. Take it or leave it.”

  “And your mother took it.”

  Gabriele nods. “It wasn’t an unhappy marriage. On the contrary.”

  He drags my trolley suitcase as far as the reception desk. Before leaving, he hands me a package. It’s small, wrapped in brown paper, tied with a thin string. It’s very old and smells of musty drawers.

  “My father told me to give it to you when you arrive. You can use this,” he says, handing me an old Walkman with headphones. We say goodbye with a slightly clumsy hug, like people who want to hold each other a little longer, but are too shy.

  1978-1979

  That phone call, the worst ever, didn’t come in the middle of the night, or at the first light of dawn. It rang at a deceptively harmless time: right after lunch. Magnago had just finished coffee with his wife Sofia, and was about to go back to his office.

  It was a familiar voice, with a Roman accent. It told him about the red Renault in the middle of Rome city center—right next to the headquarters of the two large political parties—and about the body under the blanket.

  For some time now, Sofia had been having trouble remembering the names of things, or rather it was that they just refused to be found in her language. That thing with four legs that you sit on, she couldn’t remember what it was called, yet she immediately gave it to her husband: she didn’t know what they’d said to him on the phone, but she could see very clearly that Silvius was about to fall.

  Magnago collapsed on the chair and put his hand to his forehead. He asked her to turn on the television.

  There it was, the body curled up in the boot. The crowd of policemen. The priest giving the last rites. Over his bent neck, the famous face with its secret intelligence had a long beard after all the days of anxiety, terror, imprisonment. There it was in full, the destructive force of the hurricane. Aldo Moro had been killed.

  Magnago hid his face in his hands. His wife was standing next to him. He leaned his forehead against her chest, and wept.

  On that May 9, 1978, Gerda too was standing in front of the television. Frau Mayer, patrons, cooks, and assistant cooks were all watching the screen together, in silence.

  Among them only Gerda, Elmar, and Frau Mayer had been present at the banquet which, so many years earlier, Obmann Magnago had hosted for Aldo Moro, in that very dining room. The rest of the staff had been hired later. Gerda recalled how they’d all stood in a row to say goodbye to the two powerful
men. She couldn’t remember the expression of the Italian, but then she recalled that he’d kept his eyes down while giving her his hand, and that it wasn’t really a proper handshake: the grip of a defenseless man who certainly wasn’t very strong. She wondered why they’d killed such a gentle man.

  Besides, no man, powerful or ordinary, deserves to be shoved into the trunk of a car like that, like a thing.

  That wasn’t the worst day because every death is worse than any other for those who mourn it and, afterwards, there were many deaths in Italy, too many. However, in comparison, some of the attacks that used to take place in Alto Adige seemed like the firecrackers that explode several days after New Year’s Eve is over. Nothing but insignificant bang bang from tiny little crackers, in comparison to what was happening in the rest of Italy.

  In 1979, the Tiroler Schutzbund, an extremist faction few people had heard of, blew up the Wastl in Eva’s home town for the umpteenth time. For the past forty years, the monument to the Alpini had been erected and destroyed, erected again and destroyed again, as though it had become the stake in a very long competition.

  For a couple of years now, Eva had been a boarder in Bolzano, where she had been admitted to high school because of excellent grades at the end of middle school. After many arguments, she had persuaded her mother that she’d never become a cook. That morning, she walked past the intersection and saw young drafted soldiers in overalls and boots, armed with brooms and dust pans, collecting pieces of Wastl from the ground. They looked more like good little housewives than military forces deployed against a now-obsolete form of terrorism.

  Nobody was interested in these things anymore, on either side, except for a few fanatics. A few months later, even the National Association of Alpini took the wise decision not to reconstruct the monument again, but to erect a granite bas-relief representing Alpini in peace service. Until it was built, the headless bust of Wastl would remain in its place on the pedestal. The bas-relief, however, was never sculpted, and the stub of statue is still there even now.