Eva Sleeps (3 page)

My mother, as a little girl.

 

It's pointless trying to sleep after crossing six time zones—and in the wrong direction at that. I spend the night awake, tidying up. Now I open the window.

Even though it's April, the air still smells of snow in the middle of the night. Yet the larches are starting to awaken, the resin is already rising from the dark depths of the trunks, and its oily essence is beginning to spread through the air. I breathe in deeply. On sleepless nights like this, I remember how lucky I am to be living somewhere that smells good. The pale blue stars are throbbing, promising a fine but still chilly day.

On the mountain across from the balcony, snowcat lights go up and down, as they do every night. All in line, like obedient little spaceships. With the advance of spring, the upkeep of the snowy slopes for end-of-season skiers becomes an increasingly thankless task, since the snow melts quicker and there's less of it falling. Watching those lights climbing up and down, there are many things I don't think about. About the warmth inside the driver's cab of Marlene, the snowcat with a woman's name, thoroughly heated during icy winter nights; about the music wars between Ulli and me—my Eurythmics against his Simply Red, shot through the stereo he had installed in the cab by himself; about the absurd, zebra-striped covers on the seats, as though Marlene was a Texan truck and the ski slope US Route 163 in Monument Valley. I don't think about these things. At least not every night.

Up on the summit, in the crisp air 2,000 meters, right beneath Orion's Belt, the permanently lit beams of the factory glisten as relentlessly as those of a prison. I look at them for a long time. Another thought that doesn't even brush past me: the factory could have been mine one day. Instead, it will never be so.

I take in another breath, and close the window.

I sip my first coffee before dawn. It's not to wake me up, I'm not sleepy yet—not even tired—but what else can you drink at six o'clock in the morning? The night is wasted anyway, I tell myself, so no point in trying to sleep anymore. I'll go to bed early this evening and tomorrow I'll get to my mother's rested. At least I hope so. I know she's been preparing Easter lunch for three days with Ruthi and the other relatives.
Schlutza, Tirtlan, Mohnstrudl, Strauchln.
And
Topfentaschen, Rollade
and grappa made of last summer's cranberries. I wouldn't wish to fail in my duty to pay homage to the treats they're preparing but if I don't get enough sleep, I don't have an appetite.

The mountain still looks black against the opalescent sky while in the east a lonely little cloud stands out, glowing pink—almost orange. The snowcats are now asleep in the hangars dug out of the rock. The factory is still lit up but not for much longer. Two hours from now, the steel cables, taut between pylons, will start transporting the thousand, ten thousand, one hundred billion skiers on which our valley depends to perpetuate its own wealth. I'm the first to agree: without the factory, there'd be no tourists. Without tourists, no hotels. Without hotels, no wellbeing. Without wellbeing, no events to organize. For me that would mean no trips, no Prada shoes, no previews in Chelsea full of promises of Asiatic art, no trips to Indonesia or Yucatan. Not even Jack Radcliffe from Bridgeport, Connecticut, with his perplexed beady expression, or his thwarted erotic hopes.

God bless the factory for generating happy skiers for us all.

I sip my coffee, wrapped in the blanket my mother gave me: a patchwork of knitted squares made from the leftovers of my childhood pullovers. It has subdued, ill-matched colors. The sign of a time when if you were lucky enough to have any clothes at all, the way they looked was the least of your concerns. Loden blue, apple red, mousey gray, forest green. An orange square (I've no idea which pullover this one comes from) sticks out like a sore thumb. This blanket is totally out of place in my elegant home, all in lime green and aquamarine shades. It's also rough, like barbed wire, and feels like wool that hasn't been carded. I can still remember how that coarse kind of wool used to make my arms itch. How did I ever put up with it? No wonder I have only cashmere or mohair sweaters now.

The telephone rings.

In the stillness of dawn, that sharp sound makes me jump and I almost spill my coffee. I'm about to answer but freeze. Who'd be calling me at this hour? It's probably a wrong number. I let the answering machine start.

“This is number . . . /
Hier spricht der Anrufbeantworter
. . . ”

I let Signorina Telecom/Fräulein Telekom finish her elaborate homage to bilingualism, and keep listening. There's a protracted silence. There's a presence on the other end of the line. Then, a little louder, comes the faint sound of breathing. I can't believe they play tricks even at this hour! Before even going to school! Maybe it's the sleepless night, or perhaps the jet lag but the adrenaline starts pumping in my veins. I grab the receiver. “Stop it! I'm fed up with this!”

“Eva . . . Is that you?”

It's a man's voice. Not a young man. Perhaps he's tired or ill, or both. Taken aback, I say, “Who's that?”

A pause.

“My
Sisiduzza
. . . May I still call you that?”

I stare at the absurd square in the blanket. The orange one. I really must ask my mother which pullover it comes from. Perhaps it wasn't mine but one of Ruthi's.

“Is this a joke?” I whisper.

“No, it's me—Vito.”

I look up. The sun has risen. A golden light is bathing my kilim.

 

Woe betide the daughters of loveless fathers: their fate is that of the unloved. Only once in my life has my mother, Gerda, been sure of a man's love, and I of a father's. All the other times have been like summer downpours: they came, made our shoes all muddy, but left the fields dry. With Vito, though, it was the real thing. Both for her and me, his presence was like a rainfall in June, like water that makes the hay grow and refills the springs. But even then we weren't spared the drought, before and after.

In a tired voice, Vito tells me he hasn't got long left to live.

He also says, “I'd like to see you again.”

A few hours later, I'm already on my way. I'm going South, I'm going to him.

V
ofluicht no amol!
” Hermann burst out in a loud voice.
“Vofluicht, scheisszoig!”
⁴

The basket his master had given him to take to the market had fallen on the ground. All the wheels of gray cheese had rolled on the ground.

He hadn't sworn in Italian, as demanded by the Fascist laws now in force, which dictated that only Italian be used in public. He hadn't even used a blasphemy, which would have been frowned upon but not considered illegal, as long as it was in Italian. He had sworn, and sworn in German. And, to be more precise, in dialect. An employee of the Fascist land registry office, who was walking past, heard him and, wishing to defend the Roman spirit of Südtirol, now Alto Adige, struck Hermann right across the face with his ink-stained open hand, then decisively tore off his
Bauernschurtz
, the blue work apron.

No German to be spoken in public, no Tyrolean clothes, no dirndl or
Tracht
or
Lederhosen
. Nothing to imply that the new Brenner border wasn't the holy limit of Italic land. It was the Fascist law. Among the peasants and
Knechte
at the market, nobody looked up or defended him.

Some time later, despite the slap and the humiliation, or perhaps for that very reason, the badge, the fasces pin of party members began to gleam on Hermann's collar. The local party officials looked on this favorably and taught him to drive a truck. They entrusted him with the transportation of timber between the valleys, and turned a blind eye if he spoke dialect with the lumberjacks. In any case, up there among those forgotten crags, even il Duce wouldn't have been able to hear them.

The years passed and one day, Hermann saw on the main road of the main town a group of Golden Pheasants—it was what they called the SA. Their eyes were like blades ready to cut down any obstacle to the creation of the magnificent Thousand Year Reich. They walked straight, impeccable, Aryan, infinitely German. Hermann thought they were beautiful demi-gods.

He decided to become one of them.

 

Maybe Hermann lost love completely just as he was deluding himself that he'd found it—when he saw Johanna, an eighteen-year-old girl with black hair, thin and pale, who never spoke but walked with her head down as though wishing the world would overlook her existence. Maybe having at his side a woman whose every gesture apologized for her being alive would make him forget the shame, powerlessness, anger, and loneliness. That's what Hermann sensed, although he could not have said it. Therefore, even though he didn't love Johanna, he asked her to marry him. She immediately saw the coldness in his pale eyes. However, she also thought she saw a hint of concealed tenderness convinced herself that she had discovered, in this tall man who walked so rigidly, an all-consuming truth that was reserved for her alone. It wasn't true, or perhaps it could have been true, but that's not what happened. In any case, she married him.

The first child, Peter, was born with his father's saturnine temperament and his mother's dark eyes. He was three years old when Hermann lifted him onto his bony shoulders and joined the crowd gathered where the highway met a valley-bound road. Perched up there, the child felt important, almost as important as Crown Prince Umberto, guest of honor at the unveiling of the monument to the Italian Alpine troops, which had been so keenly desired by the
podestà
. The statue was covered with a white cloth that was being lifted and lowered by the summer wind, like giant breaths. Peter thought it looked like a huge ghost, something inhuman yet alive, throbbing. After the formal speeches and the band playing, the cloth fell with an almost animal rustling sound, in a sinuous ectoplasmic movement. But there was nothing evanescent about what it revealed: that was very solid—almost obtuse—matter.

A granite Alpino with a thick neck and not very slender—appropriately Italic—legs, directed his grumpy gaze to the northern glaciers, to the spot where the new border had been for the past twenty years. The not exactly sparkling expression of the stone soldier symbolized the blind, obedient and ruthless force that Fascist Italy would unleash against anyone daring to state that Alto Adige did not belong to her. This was not a superfluous clarification, and not only because of the reluctance of many, too many, South Tyroleans to recognize their very Roman lineage. The Fascist government had a more pressing reason for needing this clarification: on entering Vienna only three months earlier, Hitler had declared Austria, through the
Anschluss
, part of the Third Reich. And Austria, the lost homeland, was right there beyond the glaciers.

But this, as the Alpino stated with his presence, and as the authorities gathered for the occasion repeated, this was Italy.

 

Mussolini's project to Italianize Alto Adige had been thorough. However, he soon realized that to make the place “very Roman, Latin, imperial” it wasn't enough just to prevent the peasants from speaking German and wearing traditional clothes. Nor was it enough to forbid school children to study their mother-tongue and force them, instead, to learn Giosuè Carducci's poem about the serene, wholesome bull “Pio Bove” by heart. Besides, those poor women sent over from Caserta, Agrigento and Rovigo could only weep at the thankless task of trying to make these blockheads produce the musical sounds of the Italian language. Brave teachers throughout the territory carried on teaching German in
Katakombenschulen
,
⁵
the clandestine schools. Italianizing place names hadn't sufficed either. Now, people would look up at the bell towers to work out where they were: if it was bulb-shaped, they knew they were in Völs, if pointy, then in Blumau. As for “Fiè,” “Prato Isarco” and all the other names invented by Mussolini's topographer, Tolomei, nobody used them except bureaucrats.

There was only one solution for truly Romanizing that beautiful, vertical land: allowing only Italians to live there. It was not enough that the flow of immigrants from other regions was motivated and supported by Fascism in the hope that, someday, German-speaking South Tyroleans would become a minority in their own land. No, they actually had to leave.

Hitler embraced this idea enthusiastically. Ensuring the purity of nations by moving (or erasing) larges masses of people across the map was his favorite occupation. So he promised Mussolini that if the
Südtiroler
wished to carry on being German, they would be welcomed with open arms by the Greater Germany, and by their brothers who belonged to the pure Aryan race. He would give each and every one of them a new maso as large as the one they'd left behind south of the Brenner Pass, the same size fields and pastures, the same number of cows and, so assured the propaganda, of the same color coat as those left in the hayloft by their ancestors. The Sudeten, Galicia, Styria and even Burgundy then, later on, the boundless lands taken away from the worthless Slav people: Tatras, in Poland, the immense Hungarian
puszta
, and soon also lush Crimea. Anyone who left Alto Adige would find fertile lands that only needed a virile German workforce to become paradise on earth.

Mussolini, at the same time, was threatening the
Dableiber
, those who remained, with forced Italianization: speaking German was totally forbidden, even in private, and anyone not adopting Italian—in fact, Roman (with a capital “R” on the flyers)—customs and practices would be deported en masse to Sicily, to grow prickly pears—what they were exactly, nobody really knew. The choice wasn't between staying or going, but between declaring yourself to be either a
Walsch
or a
Daitsch
: Italian or German. You could not remain a German on Italian soil.