Eva Sleeps

by Francesca Melandri

  Eva was back home for her vacation when the small package arrived. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a thin string. Gerda went to open the door.

  The names of the addressee and the sender were in neat handwriting. Gerda recognized it immediately. “I nimms net,” she told Udo, the postman. I’m not taking it.

  “But it’s for Eva—”

  “I’m her mother. I know she doesn’t want it.”

  Udo nearly asked if she was sure. But she looked up at him with her transparent, almond-shaped eyes and stood there, motionless, staring at him. He said nothing. He took a pen out of his breast pocket and a form from the leather bag. He handed them to her, now avoiding her face. “Sign here.”

  Gerda signed. Then, suddenly gentle, she asked, “So what’s going to happen to this parcel now?”

  “I’ll take it back to the sorting office and tell them you don’t want it—”

  “That Eva doesn’t want it.”

  “—and they’ll send it back.”

  Udo put the parcel back into his leather bag, folded the form, and slipped it with the other papers. He replaced the pen in his breast pocket after checking that it was closed securely. He was about to leave. The upper part of his body was already turning toward the road and his feet were about to follow when he had one last scruple. “Where’s Eva, anyway?”

  “Eva is asleep.”

  The brown parcel traveled backwards along the road it had taken to arrive at that spot: two thousand seven hundred and ninety-four kilometers in total, there and back.

  KILOMETER 1397

  Dear Sisiduzza,

  Today, you turn sixteen.

  It’s an important day.

  All your birthdays are important days for me, and even though I’ve not been able to see you again, I’ve never forgotten any of them.

  The hotel room has marble tiles and sponge effect walls, with a fruit and flower frieze running along the top. The night is quiet and, lying on a bed with an iron headboard, I have the Walkman headphones over my ears.

  Vito’s voice. So young, so familiar. Every so often it breaks with emotion and then it hurts to listen to it.

  Your mother and I couldn’t get married for so many reasons, I don’t know if she’s ever explained them to you, but that’s not important now. Things turned out the way they turned out and nobody can go back. However, I want you to know that for me you are not just . . . Gerda’s daughter. You’re also my Sisiduzza and I love you very much, and just because I haven’t seen you for years doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped.

  I’ve written you so many letters but you never answered. I do understand, you know, I’m not going to tell you off, you were so little. What could you say to me? Perhaps you were angry with me, and you had a perfect reason to be. But now you’re grown-up and it’s different. If you want, I’d like us to write to each other, perhaps even talk on the phone sometimes, you could tell me how things are going in high school, for example. I know you’ve always been very bright, and I’d love to follow you in your studies and along your path, I’m not very well-educated, but your teachers will make sure they teach you, I just want you to know that you can always count on me.

  Now that you’re growing into a woman, I think you will need not to be alone, perhaps even more so than when you were tiny. I mean, of course you have your mom, she loves you very much and has done everything she could for you, even when things were very . . . difficult for her.

  There’s a long pause. Vito clears his throat.

  However, girls your age also need a dad and, if you want to, I could be, well, let’s say a kind of a dad, the one who gives you advice, comforts you, perhaps even chides you when you make mistakes.

  Above all, someone who protects you.

  I press the stop button. I stare at the Walkman. I press rewind.

  . . . one who gives you advice, comforts you, perhaps even tells you off if you make mistakes.

  Above all, someone who protects you.

  Rewind.

  . . . —one who protects you.

  Rewind.

  . . . who protects you.

  Rewind.

  . . . who protects you.

  Rewind.

  . . . who protects you.

  Rewind . . .

  There are bunches of grapes, lemons, and fruit I don’t recognize. Poppies, roses, orange blossoms. Every so often, between a fruit and flower, there’s a Cupid. How long do I lie there, staring at the frieze that runs high up along the walls? I have no idea. A gray light is beginning to filter through the window.

  I can imagine him, a young non-commissioned officer in uniform, sitting at the table, talking into the microphone of the Geloso tape recorder. That fresh, affectionate, careful voice. It would have been there for me, but I lost it.

  I lost Vito.

  I lost him the way you lose at a fairground, when, instead of throwing the cloth ball straight and knocking down all the cans, so then they give you a prize, I threw but didn’t win.

  I didn’t win a father. I didn’t win him when I was born, or later with Vito. I didn’t win a husband or children. I didn’t win brothers or sisters who could share the difficulty of being my mother’s daughter. I didn’t win Ulli’s love. They were right, the people at Ulli’s funeral: they were saying, we lost him. I thought that wasn’t true but, actually, yes, I did lose him. All my life I’ve been throwing cloth balls against cans but I’ve never been able to hit them, and now I think I’ve almost run out of balls.

  I stretch, my arms knock down the parcel paper that the cassette tape was wrapped in. I pick it up. The address of the sender is on the back, like they used to do. It has been lying this side down in a drawer for so many years that it’s still dark. The handwriting is neat, like that of a good soldier.

  VITO ANANIA, VIA BOTTEGHELLE 17, REGGIO CALABRIA.

  The side with the details of the addressee, however, is more discolored. It has obviously been in the light more. SIGNORINA EVA HUBER.

  It was addressed to me. My name is, as a matter of fact, Eva Huber.

  That name, it’s me.

  Above the address, in red, there’s an oblique stamp: REFUSED.

  Refused.

  By whom?

  Who?

  I look up at the fruit on the freeze and recognize it now: it’s a pomegranate.

  It was she. She refused it.

  She refused this package that was addressed to me, only to me, Eva Huber, and that’s me, just me, not her, she has another name, she’s another person, we are not the same thing, and yet she did this. I was sixteen years old and she told the postman to send back Vito’s voice saying “I’ll be the one who protects you.”

  I could have not lost Vito. I could have him here. Everything could have been different. But she had the postman write: “refused.”

  My solar plexus explodes with indignation.

  It’s all clear to me now.

  It’s her fault. It’s all her fault. Everything, absolutely everything, is her fault.

  I curse the day I was born, because that day Gerda Huber became my mother.

  I go to the bathroom, throw cold water on my face, I am tired, tired but lucid as never before. Anger I’ve never known in my life presses on my chest like an iron hand. Tell her. I have to tell her.

  Now the light streaming in through the window is pink and orange. It promises a beautiful day.

  I go back to bed from the bathroom, sit down, pick up the phone, ask for an outside line, and dial a number. I have the implacable, precise movements of an assassin.

  Gerda Huber has gotten up early all her life, and still does that now she’s retired. After half a dozen rings, she answers.

  I don’t say hello. I immediately ask, why? Why did you get the postman to write “refused” on that package?

  She says nothing<
br />
  Maybe she was already awake, or maybe the phone has dragged her out of her light, pensioner’s sleep.

  I didn’t even say: hi, it’s me.

  She takes a while to react while I throw other words at her, like blades, until she finally understands what I’m talking about.

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m in Reggio Calabria. I’ve come to see Vito, who’s dying.”

  “How . . . ?”

  Instead of answering her, I carry on. “Imagine if someone had prevented you from having a father. Your father. When you were a child. And even later, when you were older. Think. Think what it would have been like.”

  1992

  When was the last time Gerda had seen her father? At Peter’s funeral, a quarter of a century earlier.

  These corridors were at such strange angles. You went straight ahead and ended up colliding with a window, and not a straight one but crooked. Even on the outside, the new retirement home had a façade full of oblique lines, triangular balconies, strange spires on the roof.

  For a long time, the town had been waiting for the new Altersheim to be built. Perhaps because the population had increased, or perhaps because death had grown lazy, the old retirement home was always overcrowded. The waiting list was very long, families waited years to obtain a place. And, since there was only one way in which the occupant of a room could vacate it, it wasn’t nice to wish for it. Now, finally, with a new building, there were far more beds and the waiting list diminished.

  The town council had spared no expense in building it, partly because with the financial autonomy of the province there was more than enough money, to the point where one sometimes wondered how to spend it all. The architects who had planned it were pleased with their innovative work, the walls that met with daring perspectives, the large rooms that were never square or rectangular, but diamond, trapeze, scalene triangle-shaped. Unfortunately, moving amid those sharp corners could be very difficult for the guests; and anyone who brought furniture from their homes, so they could spend the end of their lives in their own beds, found that there was no way of putting them within those misshapen lines. But imagine an old people’s home mentioned in architectural journals. What prestige!

  Of Hermann Huber’s children, Gerda was the only one the management of the Altersheim was able to track down: one was dead, the other abroad and no one remembered her married name. She was the only one left, at least the only one living in the town.

  That’s what the voice on the telephone had said in Frau Mayer’s office, and she had personally gone to the kitchen to tell Gerda somebody urgently wanted to speak to her. The illness that had struck her father was in its final stages, the voice also said, he was no longer responding to therapy, and was on the danger list. If she wanted to say goodbye for the last time, she shouldn’t waste any time. Unless she preferred to go there afterwards, in order to carry out the paperwork that would make the room available for the next person on the list.

  Frau Mayer had left her alone in her office during the phone call. At eighty years of age, the Aztec green of her eyes was still magnetic, and just because the plait around her head was now white, it was no less perfect, on the contrary, it was even better sculpted, if such a thing were possible. And, since Gerda had become more essential and compact, she and Frau Mayer had started looking like each other, as happens with old couples. A little under fifty, Gerda was still a beautiful woman, but she no longer triggered in men the longing she once did, and this, no use denying it, had allowed Frau Mayer to be more kindly disposed toward her. When Gerda told her that she needed to be away for a day, she didn’t object. She just commented that she didn’t know her father was still alive.

  “I didn’t either,” Gerda replied.

  She walked down the corridor that led from the front door of the retirement home to the stairs.

  The lower floors overlooking the garden were occupied by guests able to feed themselves, read Dolomiten, fall in love, throw angry scenes of jealousy at one another. On the upper floors were those who were not self-sufficient. The closer or more probable the departure of a guest, the closer their room was to the sky.

  Gerda followed the instructions she was given at the reception desk and turned right, but found herself outside a bathroom door: she’d gotten lost. This happened to all visitors the first time they came in: it was easy to misunderstand the directions indicating right and left with all those unexpected turns in the corridors. Gerda retraced her steps, deciding to bypass the elevator and use the stairs instead. She was already halfway down the corridor when she came across a small crowd. A dozen people, care workers, guests, and visitors were gathered around a tall, gaunt figure, agile on his crutches in spite of his age, unmistakable. Gerda was startled: her Obmann!

  “I guarantee you this, gnädige Frau,”48 Silvius Magnago was saying to an elderly lady in a wheelchair, “osteoporosis in the hips doesn’t affect your spirit. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. If intelligence were in one’s legs, then I’d be half an idiot.”

  And the Frau in the wheelchair burst out laughing like a girl who could have gotten up and danced.

  Drawing close to eighty, Silvius Magnago was no longer either the president of his province, nor the Obmann of his party, of which he only kept an honorary presidency. A few months earlier, in June, Austria had given Italy a declaration which stated that the Italian government had fulfilled its obligations toward the German-speaking minority in Alto Adige. The official term for this certificate was: Discharge Receipt. A legal term, an accountant’s term, like a shopping receipt, not one fit for a hero—and perhaps therein lay Silvius Magnago’s historical success. His own task fulfilled, he’d found himself another one: visiting the retirement homes of the province and surprising people his own age with the gallows humor no one had ever detected during his years of political activity.

  Magnago indicated the cigarette in a young male nurse’s hand. “The management has forbidden me from bringing cigarettes, they say they cause cancer. But in the Lana home they’ve allowed me to, and you know why? They have a very long waiting list there so they need a hand.”

  A brief silence, then a collective giggle, liberating, almost wild.

  Gerda approached, a lump in her throat. Seeing him there before her, she suddenly felt like the little girl who’d seen him with the crowd at Castel Firmiano eating out of his hand.

  “Herr Obmann . . . !” she whispered.

  Magnago saw her, gallantly turned around, and shook the hand she herself was surprised she had the courage to proffer. “Beautiful lady, you’re too young to be living here. Are you visiting a relative?”

  “My father.”

  “Good for you. We old people need young people not to leave us on our own. How is your father?”

  Gerda’s mouth felt dry. Thankfully, at that very moment, after making a great effort to walk across the corridor with a stick, an octogenarian started telling the Obmann that he’d wanted to meet him in the flesh all his life.

  With a long finger Magnago pointed at his own skinny chest. “In the bone, perhaps, but, sorry, there isn’t much flesh left . . . ” He said it like an experienced comic actor, deadpan, with a stern mouth. The public enjoyed it and burst out laughing again.

  Confused, Gerda had already walked away.

  The smell of disinfectant and bleach masked the discharge of a dissolving body. However, the air was still, like when death isn’t far away. Hermann’s shoulders were still broad and square; at the end of the long legs his daughter had inherited, his feet touched the tip of the bed. The arm stretched out on the sheet, with an inserted drip, was still muscular. He was asleep.

  Standing at the door, Gerda hesitated. It was a large, bright room, although of an irregular shape. The space between her and the form on the bed seemed very wide to cross. For a long time, she stood looking at him from a distance. She needed an effort
of will to approach, take a chair—of a daring tubular design—place it by the bed, and sit down.

  Hermann gave no sign of noticing her presence. The windowsill was covered in figurines made with the soft part of the bread. They stood out against the light, like a little nation against the sky: beyond the glass pane, lenticular clouds with blurred edges drifted across the azure, propelled by the Föhn. Gerda didn’t call the man who, for a time, had been her father, didn’t try to attract his attention. She remained silent and motionless, as though her emotions too had been sterilized with bleach.

  How long she remained like this, she didn’t know. After a while, her father opened his eyes. He noticed her presence and turned to her. He stared at her with an opaque look at first then, once he’d focused, it became as brilliant as that of a child.

  It was her.

  Yes, yes, it was her.

  The almond-shaped eyes. The high cheekbones. The soft mouth that only knows kind words.Hermann lowered his eyelids with a moan of relief, satisfaction, comfort.“Mamme . . . ,” he whispered, with his eyes shut. He’d been waiting for her for so long. A lifetime.

  KILOMETER 1397

  Gabriele has come to pick me up and taken me to his parents’ apartment. His mother opens the door. She comes up to my shoulder, has short gray hair that must have once been curly, a heavy build. But she also has luminous green eyes, and music in her voice. “Here you are, finally! You’ve no idea how much my husband has been looking forward to seeing you!”

  Embarrassment? Jealousy? Not even a hint. On the contrary, she comes closer and drops her voice. “Please don’t be offended, I’ll pretend I don’t know who you are. I don’t want him to think I’m upset.”