Eva Sleeps (32 page)

At this point, however, he couldn't bear it any longer. A little earlier he had said: “Enough, it's past two-thirty, let's vote.”

The decisive ones had already slipped their piece of paper into the urn. The only ones still clutching theirs were the ones who had wanted to listen to all the orators before making up their minds.

The delegates from Schnals, Unteretsch, Gsies, Pfitschtal. From Sexten, Bruneck, Wolkenstein, Latsch, Kasern, Burgum. People who at this time were normally awake at the maso, not because they had been up all night, but because they were already milking their cows. On them depended the outcome of the vote. Eat, little birds, eat.

One by one, they slipped their crumpled pieces of paper into the urn. From there, they were extracted and counted.

And marked on the register.

The president of the assembly read out the results.

“Total votes: one thousand one hundred and four.

Votes in favor of Mr Magnago's resolution: five hundred and eighty-three.

Votes against Mr Magnago's resolution: four hundred and ninety-two.

Unmarked or spoiled ballot papers: nineteen.

Mr Magnago's resolution is hereby approved with 52.8 percent of the votes.”

52.8 percent.

Teixel, ist das wenig
! That had been his second thought: good grief, that's not much!

But his first one had been:
Du hast es geschafft
. You did it.

 

Paul Staggl, too, would have liked the bikini-wearing model.

Or rather: he would have liked the photo of the bikini-wearing model. Or even better: he would have liked the bikini-wearing model, too, but would have liked the photo even more. Or the other way around.

Anyway.

If only the Consortium he managed were able to host the skiing World Cup like Val Gardena! The publicity shot in Time Magazine had deeply angered his associates, but not him. Paul Staggl had been born to extreme poverty, in a sunless maso: if he'd wasted time and energy envying other people's good fortune he wouldn't have gotten this far. His thoughts spun like the wheel of a downhill cable car station: well oiled, constant, and with the sole aim of carrying it up high.

That's why he had paid great attention to the photo of the beautiful girl wearing nothing but panties, bra, ankle socks and ski boots, with one ski on the ground and the other stuck vertically in the snow in front of her, against the background of snow-covered Dolomites. And not just because some things are always a pleasure to look at, but because, as he was studying it, he'd had several thoughts. The first, and most obvious one, was that his town was not in the middle of the Dolomites. In the 1930s, somebody had tried to draw postcards with the pink needles of Monti Pallidi standing out behind the profile of the Medieval castle. A famous geographical forgery that was still possible in the prehistoric times of mountain tourism, but which nowadays was out of the question. Tourists watched television now, were informed, and couldn't be swindled like that.

The top of his home mountain, which was dominated by cable car pylons, built seven years before by his Consortium, definitely had a splendid three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view, but it was a far cry from the Dolomites. The whole world was in love with those coral-colored mountains, and the hoteliers of the Ladin valleys already had all their marketing done for them thanks to the location. No. Because there were no Dolomites here, there was another way of attracting hordes of British, Dutch, and Swedish skiers, the new tourism frontier, now that German and Italian—and perhaps even American—ones had been secured. And it was very clear in his mind. “His” mountain had to be turned into such an extended and diversified skiing area that it would have something to offer everyone. Staggl stared at the beautiful girl's naked belly and her pleasant curves for a long time.

Were they called “carousels”? Well, then, this was his vision: a network of ski lifts spreading in every direction in a sunburst pattern. So large that a keen sportsman would be able to ski for days on end without ever going over the same piste. There would be more modern lift technology, cutting-edge track maintenance, an investment plan worthy of a big enterprise. All this would allow his creature always to be state-of-the-art, as his colleagues from Colorado put it.

All his life, Paul Staggl had thought big. He didn't intend to stop just because he was past sixty. There was wealth in winter tourism. For him, his family, his valley, Alto Adige, the Alps. He was certain of it: the future was as brilliant as a snow-covered piste at dawn. And now even Hannes, who was approaching thirty, had made up his mind to get married, and perhaps he would finally give him some grandchildren. Of course those born to daughters are also a joy, but when they are born to your only son, everybody knows it's a special occasion for a grandfather.

 

There was wealth in winter tourism.

Paul Staggl was not the only one to have worked that out. Besides Gerda, many peasants were buying new shoes for their children for the first time that year. However, in return, these children had to sleep in the basement or under the stairs both in the winter and in the summer. Their rooms had become like gold dust: renting them to tourists for the few weeks of high season brought more money than a whole year milking cows. The bombings and attacks were over, and there were an increasing number of Italian tourists. Their rapport with the local population wasn't always straightforward. They often mistook for hostility the dour lack of ceremony of certain landlords who were used to peasant manners. When a reply in Italian came too slowly, or there was a menu written only in German, the Italian tourists would protest, “We're in Italy!”

On the other hand some bus drivers displayed all their indignation at the unfair transfer of South Tyrol to Italy in 1919 by addressing rude grunts to passengers who said “Buongiorno.”

Actually, Italians were wrong when they thought they were the only ones to be treated with coarseness by some South Tyroleans: as it happened, Bavarians were also derided because they were drunkards, Viennese because they were condescending, Prussians because they were arrogant. But one fact remained, and it was the only one that counted: tourists brought money and money has no language, no frontiers, no history.

And no traditional costume either. Many new Italian guests had gotten into the habit of wearing and, especially, dressing their children in typical Tyrolean costumes. Platoons of mothers and daughters from Rome, Vercelli and Florence showed off identical
dirndl
with flower-patterned aprons, with a more uniform effect than the
Musikkapelle
. Miniature
Bauernschürtze
—the navy peasant aprons for which Hermann was beaten up during the Fascist era—were put around Milanese babies' necks as bibs.

At first, South Tyroleans were perplexed by this kind of masquerade (except for shopkeepers who made a lot of money selling
Trachtmode
³⁹
), but then they got used to it. Those who saw it, however, never forgot the Neapolitan family—mother, father and four children from three to sixteen—who, one August day, were seen walking down the main street in town, shouting and calling one another at the top of their lungs, twelve thighs fed on sartù and pasticcio di maccheroni coming out of their
Lederhosen
.

 

Ulli, too, had to sleep in the attic: his and Sigi's room was let to tourists during high season. With the money she made, Leni bought her parents a new kitchen with a Formica top, like the ones you saw on TV. While she was at it, she also got rid of a lot of old furniture. A man from Bolzano offered to take it away, and even gave her money in return. Leni really couldn't understand what he saw in that old stove that had been in the kitchen for generations, or in that chunky painted cupboard that made the
Stube
dark. You could tell it was falling apart by the date under the decoration in the middle: 1773. Even so, she took the man's money: it wasn't her fault if some people just didn't know how to do business.

Among the Italian guests that came year after year, there was a family from Milan with three children. They had grown fond of the beautiful view over the glaciers enjoyed from the maso, as well as the hospitality offered by Leni and her parents. The landlords may not have been very talkative, with their caricature Italian, but they were honest, sincere and, in their way, even affectionate. From the way she treated them, never would the Milanese family have ever guessed that the young widow's husband had been blown up while trying to attack representatives of the Italian government.

Their youngest daughter was the same age as Eva, with black frizzy curls around her head like an electric halo. She showed a disconcerting indifference to her condition as a city girl and had gotten along with Eva and Ulli so naturally that they could do nothing but accept her. Ulli and Eva would never have dived into the hay with their Italian peers who lived in the town, or dams in the stream in the wood; but they did with that little girl from Milan. Besides, as everybody knows, you must beware of your neighbors but it's all right to be curious about the inhabitants of other galaxies. Eva and Ulli would have been very surprised if she had said she was a friend: a friend doesn't vanish down a black hole eleven months of the year. But she was an intelligent girl, so she never did so.

 

As for Ulli, he'd always been Eva's friend.

Or perhaps he was also just a playmate until the day when, in the churchyard after mass, a child of the same age said that Ulli's father deserved to be dead because he was a
Verbrecher
, a criminal, and that Eva's father was alive but didn't want her. Like so many other times to come in his life, the words to defend himself remained stuck in Ulli's throat, rotting inside and infecting only him.

 

So Eva stuck the index and middle finger of her right hand in the little boy's eyes. Ulli and Eva became inseparable.

Sigi, on the other hand, was never Eva's friend, and she always considered him one of those unpleasant facts of life that you cannot eliminate or solve, but only ignore: a wood splinter that's too deep to be extracted, a wobbly tooth that won't fall, a father who's never been there. And if Eva had ever risked feeling any kind of affection for Sigi, the danger was averted forever the day when, at the age of five, he started making trophies.

It was Eva and Ulli, while Leni was in the cowshed, who found him sitting on the wooden floor of the
Stube
. Around him, there were a kitchen knife, nails, a hammer, pieces of wood, and the decapitated bodies of various stuffed animals: a red and white duck, a brown teddy bear with a red scarf around his neck, a hound with long black ears. The severed head of every cuddly toy had been nailed to a wooden plank.

Eva and Ulli looked at the scene in silence: it was too strange to trigger a reaction. Not even Leni asked Sigi for an explanation when she came in and saw all those poor stuffed animals reduced to hunting trophies. All she did was raise her eyes to the larch wall. There, fixed onto wooden shields, hung the only remaining traces, besides her two children, of her husband's passage on earth: the heads of deer, ibexes, chamois, their antlers as sharp as the day Peter had killed them.

 

Every so often the
Schützen
went to ask the widow of their former comrade-in-arms if she needed any help.

Leni would reply, “No, thank you,” and her face relaxed with relief when they left.

Ulli never stayed long in the
Stube
when they came.

“Your father gave his life for you,” the men said to him, and these words triggered in Ulli a mixture of hunger, nausea and questions without answers. How could he ever repay such a disproportionate gift?

Sigi, though, would follow them onto the street after they left: he thought they were beautiful. Soon, before he even started school, they began taking him along on their drills. They said, “Your father gave his life for you” to Sigi, too, but what he felt was the void without memories his father had left in his stomach finally start to fill up.

Leni wasn't happy about Sigi spending time with the
Schützen
, but what could she do about it? The Schwingshackls agreed with her. Eva's adoptive parents felt sorry for Leni and the children, and also for that sick soul that was Hermann, who had lost his only son and disowned his daughter. But the fact that Peter was a hero was something they did not agree with. There are so many ways in which you can be useful to others, some of which require courage and sacrifice, but what was heroic about blowing up Christian folk and yourself was something Sepp and Maria would never understand.

 

Then the Open Air Concert arrived. Even saying the name tasted like the future.

It wasn't music. It was something solid that wrapped around you, which you didn't listen to with your ears but with your feet, your stomach, your hair. It would make your hairs stand up on your arms, grab you by the knees, and make you say yes to anything. And that rhythm! Who had ever heard such rhythm? The drummer shook his hair, long like a woman's, like snakes, spraying sweat all around: it was impossible to believe that the instrument on which he'd let himself go in a crazy solo could be a relative of the snare drum of the
Musikkapelle
. And in fact it wasn't. Nothing was the same. Even the castle, up on the hill over the town, where Eva, Ulli, Ruthi and Wastl were now, wasn't the same as before. Not even during Medieval assaults had those ancient bastions ever been shaken to their foundations by anything like this: a rock concert.

There had never been so many people like that, on the grass and under the larches around its ancient walls: girls with bare legs and long hair tied with leather strips, boys with colorful T-shirts and handkerchiefs on their heads, entangled couples touching each other everywhere and kissing on the mouth. And, around and above everything, like thick liquid in which Eva, her cousins, young people in love, and the castle all floated, there was that divine devil music. Eva did not have the eyes, nor the ears, nor the skin for what was happening around her.