Eva Sleeps (24 page)

Finally, after another tunnel, the sea. Close, infinite, luminous, sunny and, especially after the constriction of those ragged mountains, wide open. In the warm April sun, it's animated by sailboards, by the even lines of clam cultivations, by people celebrating Easter with their first trip to the beach. Formia Station is slightly uphill from the town, and it has such a wide view over the gulf that it makes you gasp. But not even now that the joyful light of the Mediterranean is flooding in through the window, that agaves, bougainvilleas, plumbagos, lemons, jasmines, hibiscuses, wisterias, and oleanders are hitting us in the face with their multicolored vitality, and that the sea is glistening like wrapping paper around the gift that is Italy, not even now do the two girls look up from their bestsellers. And so all this splendor is wasted before their eyes. I feel the same kind of disappointment as a proud hostess whose guests are too absent-minded to notice how beautiful her apartment is.

Hostess?

All of a sudden, a simple syllogism:

South Tyrol is my
Heimat
.

South Tyrol is in Italy.

Ergo

Italy is my . . .

How do you say
Heimat
in Italian? It's a word that has nothing to do with Italy, that feels too much like bread with cumin seeds, like a warm
Stube
when it's cold outside, like
Adventskalender
²¹
. “Homeland” isn't right either because it feels like monuments made of granite, like borders traced by absent-minded chancellors, like poorly-equipped boys sent to their deaths by elderly generals. “Country?” Yes, right:

Italy is my country.

I'd never said it before. But perhaps today is not the right time to do so, now that I'm traveling down the whole of this long, long Italy, splendid, defaced, dressed in flowers, monuments, and unregulated buildings, in order to reach the only man who's ever made me feel at home. The man who hasn't been my father, but almost.

Vito.

I
t was always the same question.

“
Fo wem isch de letze
?” Whose little girl is this? It would happen at the wedding of a great aunt's son. Or at a nephew's christening, with the
Pate
²²
and
Patin
, the most smartly dressed people there because it was their day. Or at the collective first communions of the first, second, and third cousins all turned twelve the same year, and who, that morning in church, had been given the communion wafer by the priest's hand in succession, like young battery hens. The result was that every time there would be a crowd of people in their best clothes—the women in dirndl but the men in jacket and tie so they wouldn't look old-fashioned—gathered in the area between the Schwingshackls's hayloft and house for a party after the religious ceremony. Everybody was linked to almost everyone else present by either blood or marriage: all were grandchildren, uncles, nephews, grandparents, godparents, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, cousins, great-grandchildren, sons-in-law, mothers-in-law, and daughters-in-law of one another. The relationships between them were woven with invisible threads, a large quilt of belonging, perhaps threadbare in places where two brothers weren't speaking or because of an obvious dislike between a mother- and daughter-in-law, but which, nevertheless, was spread over everybody and from which no one was excluded. No one, except Eva.

Like a tiny, disorientated buoy, Eva floated in that sea of people, the only one without relatives—even though Sepp and his wife always treated her like one of their own. Thirteen pregnancies had rounded Maria's body until it had lost its shape. Even the color of her eyes was no longer well-defined, although they were still sharp and luminous like the diamonds on the peacock-shaped brooch she would pin to her dirndl on celebration days. She wore her hair twisted around her head like Frau Mayer, but while the hotel owner's plait was the product of care and perfection, Maria's looked like a work of nature, unavoidable and necessary like an ear of barley, a tree, a potato. Her hands were so rough that when they squeezed Eva's soft, fat fingers, they were almost scratchy, yet they also conveyed a calmness that erased every anxiety—almost. Nobody knew how Maria, with her thirteen living children and dozens of grandchildren, found the time to walk hand-in-hand with a girl that didn't even belong to her. But her religion had taught her that there is no limit to the love of one's neighbor and, like Sepp, she was a strong believer.

Even so, sooner or later, there was always some distant relative from a neighboring valley, a partially deaf great-aunt, the mother of a young bride who'd just become part of the family, who'd ask who that little girl was.

“
Fo wem isch de letze
?”

Maria, Sepp, Eloise, Ruthi had tried to explain. “It's the little Huber girl, not the ones in the maso above us, but the ones in Shanghai, the daughter, Gerda, got into trouble and . . . ”

However, what the nosy parkers wanted to know wasn't Eva's story, with its difficult side plots (unmarried mother, terrorist uncle, and a grandfather who gave you the creeps when you so much as looked at him). All they wanted was to see the stitch that reassuringly darned the communal cloth of belonging. People like Sepp and Maria, generously tolerant of loose threads and frayings, are few and far between. Therefore, a different answer became commonplace:

“
Fo wem isch de letze
?”

“Fo niamandn.”

Whose little girl is this?

Nobody's.

 

Until she turned thirteen, when she went to high school as a boarder in Bolzano, Eva lived with Maria, Sepp, Ruthi and the entire Schwingshackl family for ten months of the year, during the hotel's summer and winter seasons. In November and again soon after Easter, from the steep slope to which the maso clung, Eva would start scanning the cars driving on the highway down along the river like busy ants. She learned when she was very young that joy arrived on a blue bus with yellow letters. She soon grew able to differentiate it from other vehicles: cars, trucks, tractors, tourist buses, and vans. When the bus from Bolzano emerged from the bend at the bottom of the valley, her heart would leap in her chest like a grasshopper in a cage. She would start following it with her eyes as it turned at the intersection, tackled hairpin curves, disappeared in a thicket of fir trees, reappeared, then stopped, huffing, in the space in front of the little church.

Then Eva would let go of Maria's hand, stop playing with Ulli, disengage herself from Ruthi's arms, and would have even taken leave of herself if she could have, in order to run faster, and she never tripped over so she wouldn't waste silly time on getting back up. But for days on end she ran in vain: the bus doors would open like a promise but the people who got off were useless, and not her mother. Then, every time, in fall and spring, during all those years, just when a desolate hollow was beginning to grow in Eva's chest, and a grayness would extinguish her thoughts, then, lo and behold, a pair of long legs would appear on the steps of the bus, then a face that was astoundingly beautiful albeit familiar, two strong arms would lift her up and hold her tight, and the smell, the smell, the mammal smell of happiness. Gerda was back.

The tourists who stayed in the town while Gerda was working in Frau Mayer's hotel would all leave during the low season. There were plenty of vacant furnished rooms when she came to stay with Eva, and it wasn't hard to rent one. Gerda was now earning enough to provide for herself and her daughter without needing to ask anyone else for anything. Not that Gerda or the other members of staff were earning a fair wage. Yet nobody protested: everybody knew the story of the Trade Unionist, as she was still called.

It was Nina who had told her about the Italian waitress who had been kicked out a couple of years before Gerda's arrival. She was a young woman with more education than the rest of them: she had attended high school for at least two years. She was in the third year of her bookkeeping course when a two-hundred-pound hook had fallen on her father's skull—her father who wore himself out working overtime at the steelworks in order to give his daughter a qualification, and the possibility of a better life. Left with a widowed mother and three little siblings, she'd had to abandon her studies. After working in Frau Mayer's hotel for two years, she noticed in her work booklet that she had received only one month of employer's contributions per season, instead of five. She had protested. Not only that, but she also dared make another demand. The weekly day off started at three in the afternoon and lasted until eleven the following morning: she and the rest of the staff would have to be remunerated for the missing four hours off.

Fray Mayer fired her on the spot. She even took care to report the episode to all the young woman's future potential employers. Despite the demand for personnel caused by the tourism boom, the Trade Unionist, as everyone was now calling her, never managed to find work in the hotel industry again.

As she told Gerda the story, Nina's close-set eyes were impassive. She commented neither on Frau Mayer's behavior, nor on that of the young woman. She let Gerda make up her own mind.

And she did. She checked her own work booklet. And that's how she discovered that she had lived the recent years of her life on an eternal, careless vacation: only a handful of working days a year were recorded in the work booklet. She also saw that Frau Mayer knew how to time travel, from the present into the future, to steal the pension of the elderly Gerda.

Thief! she wanted to scream at her.

But Gerda had two things, and no more: a daughter and a job.

And Gerda knew only too well the terror of losing everything.

So Gerda said nothing.

 

Every day, Herr Neumann's legs hurt more and more, and he had to leave the kitchen increasingly often to urinate: his diabetes was getting worse. One spring day he was standing by his table and, trying to ignore the hollow throbbing of the poor circulation in his shins, he was cutting open, gutting and slicing a kid with expert fingers, the only remaining tapered part of his body. The carcass was losing all semblance of an animal and assuming that of biblical matter. When Herr Neumann had finished, he carefully arranged on his right hand side the dead meat which, soon, through the mystery of digestion, would become living flesh again, but made human: and on his left he put the insides that were now chaotic and deprived of any function.

From the salad counter, Gerda had been watching attentively, as usual. She approached the head chef and pointed at the liver, dark red like a carnivorous flower, with the small heart-shaped bulge attached to it like a uvula it could have been a creature apart from the rest of the carcass. Shyly, she asked if, instead of his throwing it away, she could use it.

For a second, Herr Neumann forgot the annoying throbbing inside his legs. He'd been expecting this moment for a long time: he'd always been certain that, sooner or later, Gerda would ask to experiment, invent, try something out. Trying not to show how pleased he was, he nodded. Gerda cut the liver into very thin strips, quickly fried it on the hotplate, seasoned it with thyme, marjoram, shallots, garlic, and lemon, poured it all into a bowl full of purslane and, finally, seasoned everything with a few drops of balsamic vinegar. With the understanding expression of a child showing the drawing she's proud of, she proffered him her invention. Herr Neumann stuck three bare fingers into the concoction, squeezed them like pliers and, while Gerda watched him, put a handful of salad and liver into his mouth. It was balanced, flavorsome, satisfactory. Just like Gerda: simple and very well put together.

From his first courses and cooked vegetables counter, Hubert had watched the scene with vague condescension. He handed Gerda a handful of chopped chives.

“
A bissl Schnittla aa
. . .
²³
”

Herr Neumann gave a definitive shake of the head. Gerda's invention already had everything a successful dish needed: any further addition would have been too much.

Peeved, Hubert pirouetted on his long wiry legs without a word and went back to his first courses. He had just finished stirring a pot full of
Schlutzkrapfen
in browned butter. He took the handful of the snubbed chives and threw it in, as though hurling an insult.

 

One morning, when he woke up, Herr Neumann's legs were inert like undercooked chops. Urgently called by Frau Mayer, the doctor administered insulin and anticoagulants, then said that the kitchen would have to do without its chef for a few days.

The meat counter was only a couple of yards away from the first course counter but Herr Neumann's kingdom had always been inaccessible to Hubert—as it had been to everybody else. Hubert suggested standing in. “Temporarily,” he said, but it was clear he was considering this, finally, to be his chance. He was wrong.

Herr Neumann had a wife and three children who lived in a respectable apartment with geraniums at the windows, at the far end of Val Venosta. Like the lowliest of scullery boys, like Gerda, like all the hotel staff, Herr Neumann returned to his family only during the low season closure. During the working months he stayed in one of the two single rooms reserved for the staff: besides him, only the maître enjoyed the privilege of not sharing with others the tiredness at the end of the day, the body smells and the indiscriminate, revealing sounds of sleep. Until the doctor arrived nobody had ever entered Herr Neumann's room except him. And now Gerda was there.

Ever since, at the age of sixteen, this beautiful, very beautiful woman, too beautiful for him, had walked into his kitchen, there had been one thing he'd wished to do more than anything else, and he was doing it now: initiating her into the secrets of meat.

It was Elmar who helped her carry a quarter of beef weighing eighty pounds to the little room in the attic, puffing and stopping halfway on the steep wooden stairs where Gerda had tried not to become a mother. They were both wearing the woolen greatcoats you used for entering the refrigerated cell and which were now protecting them from the blood and the grease. Gerda had set up a work table on Herr Neumann's desk, dragging it from the little window overlooking the mountains to the bed to which he was confined. She had retrieved all his knives from the meat counter: for carving, boning, filleting, the bone hatchet, the carving fork, the flintlock, knives forged into specific, unmistakable shapes for roasts, hams, cured pork and venison. Gerda could barely believe that she was able to touch their impeccable, functional forms: to hold them, use them, and even wash them was the head chef's exclusive privilege. Their cold, steel glow highlighted further the sad physicality of the sickroom.