Eva Sleeps (38 page)

“I would like to tell everybody what Ulli gave me.”

Surprisingly, there was a sudden, perfect silence, as though the most authoritative orator had taken the stand.

“But if my Anna were still alive I wouldn't do it.”

The shock had turned into anxious curiosity, which, in Leni's case, had become panic. Terrible revelations she hadn't asked for had already first taken away a husband, then a son; she was now staring at the sacristan as though imploring to be spared.

But Lukas continued. Over sixty years ago, he said, when he was a child, there was a forbidden word, more than forbidden, in fact—unknown:
Homosexualität
. A clinical, almost academic word: it was astounding, hearing it spoken by this modest man who for decades had been arranging breviaries on lecterns, spreading incense on bigots reciting the rosary, rewarding with non-consecrated wafers children who'd been well-behaved during catechism. Truly strange.

“There was Fascism, but that was a word we didn't even know in Italian.”

Lukas continued his story. When he was young he'd start sweating when he approached certain young men; but that never happened to him with women. At night, Lukas had strange dreams and confessed them to the priest who would tell him, “Say three Hail Marys and four Our Fathers and you'll have normal dreams again.”

In forty years of marriage, Lukas had only ever been able to get close to his wife if he shut his eyes and imagined her to be a man. Anna didn't blame him for anything, but she could sense something. She didn't know that word either, however. Lukas was sure he was the only person in the world with that twist in him.

Lukas was the loneliest man who ever lived.

Only when Ulli had openly declared his own homosexuality had Lukas understood.
Ein Homosexueller
. So that's what he was. And he was no longer alone since there were at least two of them in the world. Lukas was an old man, his earthly existence was almost over, his good, blameless wife Anna had gone. And so he had decided: nobody else should have to spend an entire life in loneliness, ignorance, and confusion, as he had done. He had to speak out. And now Lukas wanted to say it: without Ulli he would never have known who he was. And even though Ulli had lost heart and gone the way he had, he, Lukas, was certain that now the good Lord—with whom he felt he had an excellent rapport since he'd always kept His house clean—would welcome him kindly.

Around the open grave, nobody spoke. Lukas, too, fell silent. He'd finished. He threw a handful of light-colored soil on the wooden coffin about to be lowered into the grave. On top of it was placed the target with Ulli's name, the one his father had riddled with bullets at his birth, like a gloomy prophecy. The sacristan walked away, his gray hair ruffled by the wind, with small, hesitant steps, perhaps not just because of arthritis. The undertaker looked around as though to ask if we'd finished. There was no answer, so he started his job. Little by little everybody left except Leni and Sigi, and I.

Beyond the graveyard wall, the glaciers had never seemed so near.

Sigi hadn't said to Lukas, the sacristan, the filthy words that had killed Ulli. He stood with his head down, his wide hunter shoulders unable to bear this kind of load. I'd never have thought it possible, and yet I felt sorry for him

However, Vito wasn't there to support me as I leaned against him, and say: you see, Ulli's life wasn't in vain. Vito hadn't been there for many years, and wouldn't be there for many more: but that was the day when, more than any other time before or afterwards, his absence was unbearable to me.

 

And finally, suddenly, it's the end of the tunnels and the last knotty mountain at the tip of the boot, and we're once again by the sea. We've really arrived: the train is running just a few yards from the water. Even though the ballast of the rails is protected by a stone breakwater, I'm sure splashes of saltwater must reach the windows at high tide.

The tiny station of Favazzina is squeezed against houses, neglected, dirty, covered in graffiti among which, in huge lettering: WELCOME TO FAVAZZINA HILL. Immediately afterwards, we go past another station just as small and helpless, but with a more evocative name: Scilla. And finally, there's the red and white lighthouse of Villa San Giovanni, which states: the continent ends here.

O
dontometer, tweezers, magnifying glasses. Bent over his desk, Silvius Magnago was examining a perforation gauge.

He'd never been a big traveler. The furthest he'd been was the never-ending plain of Nikopol, in Ukraine, and his left leg was still there. He'd often been to Vienna, visited a few European capitals and, going up and down between Rome and Bolzano, had covered more miles than if he'd gone around the globe. But seeing the world for pleasure was something he'd never done. His way of traveling was to collect stamps from every country. After so many years, it was a blessing to have a little time to devote to them.

With the approval of the Package, the attacks, the bombs, and the deaths had stopped. Three years later, a few months ago now, it had come into effect. Now it was a question of passing the laws for implementing the individual processes. Taxes, education, responsibility for road planning and facilitated construction: the whole administrative autonomy of Alto Adige had to find its rules of application. A long, bureaucratic, pedantic job. Magnago had never minded the search for concrete, detailed solutions, so the enterprise, tackled along with commissions led by people he respected, such as the Christian Democrat Berloffa, didn't alarm him. You needed to be meticulous, concrete, attentive to detail, and precise: the characteristics of a stamp collector, which he was. It was going to be a demanding but not difficult task.

Even the atmosphere in the
Heimat
was good. Tourism was bringing a sense of wellbeing nobody would have thought remotely possible ten years earlier. At the recent elections, his party had been rewarded with two thirds of the votes by an electorate pleased with the historical mission accomplished. Above all, he no longer received phone calls in the middle of the night, telling him that a soldier had been blown up, that a young man had been killed at a roadblock, that the wick of the explosive charge that was threatening to blow up the entire province was getting shorter and shorter.

With advancing age, his leg, the one that had stayed behind in Nikopol, was having increasingly frequent conversations with the rest of his body in the secret language of suffering, a language he couldn't share with anyone, not even his Sofia. However, the frightening, exciting years that had led from the Castel Firmiano rally to the agreement with Rome were over. Now, every so often, he could even spend time with his stamps. And yet, whenever Silvius Magnago watched the events of the country of which, by signing the Package, his land had agreed to be a part of, he couldn't feel calm. What was happening sounded familiar, like a recurring melody, but if at first it had been whispered by only a few in a small, peripheral area like South Tyrol, it was now being played by an entire orchestra: Italy.

Bombs. Massacres. Attacks. Terrorists. Roadblocks. Planned coups. Cover-ups. Rumors about the involvement of secret services in dark deeds. And, above all, the dead. Too many dead. In the streets, in banks, in police stations from which questioned people emerged dead, in crowded squares. It wasn't a happy tune.

Sometime ago, with Sofia, he'd seen a documentary about tornadoes and typhoons on television. It was then that he thought of South Tyrol like one of those areas in the middle of the ocean, unknown to the majority, crossed by few, but where hurricanes originate. Microscopic areas of low pressure seldom signaled by world radars, marginal on the global canvas, but where winds sometimes start spinning, waters bubbling, clouds gathering, until what starts as a little whirlwind turns into a cyclone ready to sweep the coast of continents, and does so, but only after it has departed forever from the insignificant place on the globe where it had started to take shape.

Here we are. The rumble of thunder, the tempest, the blizzards that had agitated his land in those years of fire between 1957 and 1969, seen from there they just looked like the first signs of something much larger and widespread, something—Magnago shuddered at the mere thought—
which had had its dress rehearsal right here, it was here that they had learned how to do it
.

Magnago was possibly the only Italian politician to enjoy, so to speak, double status. Terrorists and more extreme factions such as the
Schützen
viewed him as a political hack who betrayed ideals and kowtowed to the state's position; the Italian political world, on the other hand, accused him of excessive understanding toward terrorists. So he was, after all, in the best position to see things from both sides. The South Tyrolean events helped him develop the sensitivity of a water diviner with regard to the attacks: he saw only too well that they were playing the game of those who would have to repress them. There had been many episodes, over the past twelve years, that couldn't be understood except by supposing that somebody, some corrupt element of the government, was trying to score his own goal in order to justify the extent of the reaction. Magnago would never be able to prove it, obviously. And the delicate negotiations he'd been conducting with Italian governments for years had never allowed him to share these suspicions with his interlocutors, far from it! Yet he was certain that he was right. Only once, at the end of a customarily friendly interview with Aldo Moro, had he dropped a hint to see the effect it would have, ready to retract it if it had fallen into the void.

“And what if there were someone who didn't want Italy to become a real democracy?” Magnago had said. Moro, whose voice was normally so soft and clucking it was hard to make out his words as it was, had said nothing. However, he had looked at him with a deep, weary, understanding expression, and then half closed his eyes in an imperceptible but unequivocal expression of assent. From that moment on, Magnago had the certainty that he was right: there was a plan to destabilize democracy, and there were those who knew about it. But Silvius Magnago continued to be unable to share this conviction with anyone, just like the physical pain with which he'd lived since 1943— a lowering of the eyelids being his only proof.

And there is no point in wasting time on something that can be neither discussed nor tackled. There were already so many urgent issues to solve, complex regulations to be elaborated. For Magnago, especially now that relations with the Italian government were being normalized, there was another threat hanging over his
Heimat
, one that risked, in the long run, eating into its identity. It was the most destabilizing, most invasive, most dangerous phenomenon of all: inter-ethnic mixed marriages.

Yes, of course, he himself was the product of a
Mischehe
, but his parents had married when the entire undivided Tyrol was still part of Austria. Times when there was no need to defend the
Heimat
traditions against assimilation.

Now those times were over, and it was essential that a census be taken of the ethnic communities of Alto Adige, that they be quantified and clearly divided from one another: especially schools and cultural and language institutes, because it was only by separating South Tyrolean culture and language from the Italian ones that you could protect them effectively. The clarity of ethnic boundaries: after so many turmoils, it was the only way to maintain social peace.

It was the same as in collecting stamps. The place of
Sachsendreier
⁴⁶
or a
Schwarzer
Einser
⁴⁷
was in the historical stamps album, and not in the one for World Fauna, in the bird subcategory. Order, cataloguing: South Tyrol needed the best skills of a stamp collector. Mixing and confusion between the communities would lead, once more, to conflagration and chaos.

The perforation gauge of the stamp was in good condition, as was its coating. Silvius Magnago replaced it in its album with a contented sigh. It wasn't yet the right time to issue public declarations on the subject, but this would be the next political battle the father of South Tyrol's autonomy would be fighting with his entire authority. The moment would soon come to say it out loud:
Mischehen
between Italians and Germans would spell the end of South Tyrol.

 

The lieutenant-colonel who read out to Vito the extract from the regulations was a couple of years older than him but seemed younger. His pale innocent eyes made it hard to imagine him with weapons in his hands, in action in a mountain pass or in a raid. As a matter of fact, none of this had ever happened to him: he'd arrived in Alto Adige only recently, when the worst was over.

He'd summoned him into his office and addressed him with the formal courtesy of Turin residents or shy people in positions of authority: and he was both those things. He'd taken the trouble to make a copy and wanted Vito to read it in person. Not because he thought he wasn't aware of its contents, but because everybody had great esteem for this non-commissioned officer, so he wanted to treat him with respect. Moreover, it was a delicate, intimate matter, so it might help to have the support of a piece of paper.

“Umberto of Savoy, Prince of Piedmont, Senior Lieutenant of the Kingdom. By virtue of the authority bestowed upon us; in view of the legislated royal decree, etc, etc . . . In view of the deliberation of the Council of Ministers; with regard to the proposal of the Minister of War, in agreement with the Minister of the Interior and the Exchequer; we have sanctioned and will promulgate as follows . . . ”

Vito was sitting opposite him. The officer was leaning over the desk, pointing with his finger at the lines of the text he was reading. He smelled of cleanliness. Hanging on the wall behind him was the portrait of President Giovanni Leone, the face of a rodent in a thick black frame.