Eva Sleeps (8 page)

She, too, however, looked at them. Some of them didn't seem all that different from the men in the town where she had grown up, from her cousins or her schoolmates. Some Alpini from Friuli, for example, walked in the slightly stiff way people from places of stones, forests and slopes once did: that was exactly how her father Hermann walked, and Peter, too. She had also seen the taut lips, beneath eyes from which an almost childlike light escapes: when emotions become difficult, mountain people purse their lips but, higher up, their clear eyes seem to beg to be saved from all that silence. Other, more Southern faces, however, were new for Gerda. A certain almost feminine softness in the hips, a lack of rigidity in some of the wrists, a way of smiling that didn't take anything, especially not oneself, too seriously: these things didn't exist among the adult males of her people. She'd also never seen two men walking close to each other with that familiarity between male bodies which some of the Southern pairs on patrol had. And then there were the compliments! These were soldiers sent on a mission to a place where they feared a full-blown attack on the government, armed from top to toe, and certainly also frightened; and yet they still had something light about them, or perhaps they were reckless enough to tell a blond girl wearing a
dirndl
, so clearly German, “You're beautiful!” and manage to make her smile in spite of everything. Their eyes were like velvet, and their eyelashes long like little girls', and even with their uniforms and weapons, they just couldn't manage to be totally military.

Not all of them, however, were like that. In a hotel not far from the one where Gerda worked, an entire battalion of the new special branch of the police created by Mario Scelba were quartered: the
Celere
. Their compliments were frightening.

They looked at the population with the expression of those who've come to bring back order to things which had very clearly run amok with the end of Fascism. Those who were certain that every Tyrolean was a terrorist by virtue of the mere fact of speaking German, those who—had they known about the Option (but they didn't, no Italian knew about it)—would have considered it an excellent idea: Alto Adige is Italian, and anyone who doesn't like Italy can leave.

Still, most of them were young men far more interested in good food and lovemaking than in shooting. One day, at a road block, Gerda saw a cameraman documenting the commitment of the Armed Forces to the defense of the nation. Seeing he was being filmed, a soldier stopped controlling the documents, lifted his arm, the same arm which was holding the semi-automatic machine gun, and waved “ciao” with his hand. Gerda found that gesture very revealing.

 

Even though tourists did not show up that season, the large hotels were not left idle. That entire summer, in the kitchens, hundreds of pounds of spaghetti, macaroni and polenta were cooked and stirred every day. The streets filled with the warm smell of fried onions, the slightly sour scent of tomatoes, and even the pungent aroma of raw garlic, which even the bravest of skilled local housewives had never used until then. Gerda's apprenticeship in international hotel cuisine (
tournedos, coq au vin, pâtes feuilletées
) was postponed. Instead, she learned a lot about the preferences and flavors of the South: a large chunk of the latest generation of young Italian males had arrived in South Tyrol, and they had a healthy appetite.

However, none of these soldiers, who called the braid twisted around the local girls' heads a “spare wheel,” none of the officers lodged in the requisitioned hotels with balconies covered with cascading geraniums, none of them knew that, a few weeks earlier, the commander of the 4th Army Corps, General Aldo Beolchini, had communicated to the heads of the army that there was the risk of an unprecedented wave of violence. He had reported to his superiors that trusted informers had warned him that infrastructures, electricity pylons in particular, would be targeted.

The heads of the military did not follow up on the general's warning. He was, in fact, immediately transferred far from Alto Adige. Shortly afterwards, the explosions of the
Feuernacht
took place.

 

The comprehensiveness of the attack created panic in Rome. According to the news, the attackers were determined to strike at the unity of the government. No deployment of means against them was considered excessive. They were said to be cold as killers, sneaky as spies, immoral as hardened criminals. And extremely dangerous.

It was therefore a disappointment when, just over a month later, almost all of them were caught and discovered to be, in fact, ordinary people: small traders, mechanics, blacksmiths, peasants. Except for Sundays and when asleep, the conspirators always wore the blue work apron, the
Bauernschurtz
, symbol of the Tyrolean work ethic. Their hands were callused from wood, soil and engine oil. They had courted their wives at
Kirschta'
dances, married young, and had many children. Many among them, or their fathers, had been persecuted as
Dableiber
during the Option: they hadn't wanted to leave their land but neither had they wished to pretend they were Italian. A few of them had been sent to Dachau for dodging the SS draft. They cared little or nothing about Communism: it had no bearing on their peasant, Catholic reality. They were all believers, some of them deeply religious, and had vowed not to endanger human lives. When the road worker Giovanni Postal was blown up because of a faulty fuse, many of them wept in their homes: the death of an innocent man was the worst thing that could have happened to them, both personally and to their cause.

For years, they'd had gatherings, though not, as Italian journalists insinuated, in secret underground lairs or foreign consulates, but in the timber
Stuben
of their houses, and in taverns. They had been collecting explosives for years, carrying them through the Brenner Pass and the old smuggler trails; they'd hidden them in haylofts, in workshops, buried them in manure. They'd practiced with explosives on minor but symbolic targets: for example, the equestrian statue of the Duce at the hydro-electric plant in Ponte Gardena, which was still standing sixteen years after Mussolini's death.

When they had started to prepare the great Night of Fires, each one of them was entrusted with the task of identifying targets in the area he knew best, in other words, near his own house. After stuffing the pylons with explosives they would take precautions so that when the pylons fell they would neither claim human victims, nor damage the neighbors' orchards. They were men who understood what hard work meant, and for whom an act of protest wasn't worth destroying a vine or ruining a peasant.

Contrary to what Italian newspapers wrote, the components of that first generation of bombers were not members of the secret service, nor veterans in search of action fifteen years after the end of the war, nor anti-Communist idealogues. They were not pan-German, or Neo-Nazis, or paramilitaries. All this did come, but later. It came along with the Neo-Fascists, the secret service, the corrupt Carabinieri of General De Lorenzo, and brought bloody attacks against barracks and customs houses, and people killed, but this time not by error. At that point, though, the first generation of bombers—the
Bumser
, as they were subsequently called almost affectionately—these people who had been careful about preserving orchards, were all already dead or in prison.

 

The
Bumser
were down-to-earth people but, when it came down to it, they trusted in human beings. The conspiracy strategy was simple: if someone was arrested he could simply keep quiet and not mention any names. In other words all you had to do was respond to the interrogators with silence and the organization would be saved. It wasn't hard.

Before that, none of them could have imagined those interrogations. Before that, none of them could have imagined the blows, the deprivation, the fluorescent lights straight in the eyes, the scalp naked because hair had been forcefully pulled out by the handful, fingernails wrenched out, teeth falling out, cigarettes extinguished on the skin, salt water down the nose, electric shocks to the genitals. Before that, none of them had heard of the “hot box,” a technique perfected by the OAS in Algeria, and which Italians were now applying diligently, always with successful results. Before that, none of them could have imagined that uniformed representatives of the Democratic and Republican government would reduce them to a “subhuman, subconscious state in which you would do and say anything just to make whatever it is they're doing stop, and you're no longer a person but just a thing,” as one of them said after he was freed.

Some prisoners managed to let people on the outside know about the torture they were enduring, by means of notes written on toilet paper. The Minister of the Interior, Scelba, inventor of that special police corps that frightened Gerda, was asked to comment.

“Police everywhere, all over the world, beat people up,” he replied.

The conspirators talked. All of them. The network of attackers of the Night of Fires was dissolved in less than a month. Two of them were tortured to death in jail. Some time later, the carabinieri who tortured them were tried for cruel and unusual treatment and all were acquitted.

There was a full-page headline in huge characters on the front page of the newspaper Alto Adige on 23 June 1961:

 

BOLZANO IS AN INTEGRAL PART
OF THE ITALIAN STATE.

IT WOULD BE BEST IF EVERYBODY
ACKNOWLEDGED THIS REALITY.

 

“The bombs are driving tourists away.”

That's what the people in the town were saying when Gerda went home at the end of the season.

Meanwhile, Peter had managed to get married. Leni, a small, dark girl like Johanna, but who liked dancing, had gone to live with the Hubers, and was now expecting a child. Gerda's sister Anne-Marie, too, had got married a couple of years earlier, and joined her husband in Vorarlberg. Since then, her parents hadn't seen her: going to visit her would have been a journey/hike.

“The bombs are driving tourists away.” It was especially the members of the new Consortium and its president, Paul Staggl, who were saying it.

The poorest among Hermann's schoolmates, the one who would join him and Sepp Schwingshackl on the way to school, had become a man with reddish hair, pale, reptilian eyelids, a rough voice, the wide-set legs of someone who owes his success solely to his own abilities. Out of the steep, shady land that had kept his family in grinding poverty for generations, he had made his fortune. At the end of the 1920s, while Hermann was being taught to drive a truck as a reward for becoming a Fascist, young Staggl had built a rudimentary pulley on his land. The adventurous skiers who would climb up to the pastures above the town, armed with long skis and seal skins, would attach themselves to it so as to be taken uphill, and save time and effort. In the beginning, the pulley was operated by his father's large draft horse, but soon enough Paul earned enough from the toll paid by the skiers to be able to afford a generator.

When his father died, during those troubled 1930s when Hermann had become first a Fascist then a Nazi, Paul had convinced his mother and two still unmarried sisters to rent out the rooms of their maso to those same skiers who were using the rudimentary ski lift. What could be better for German sportsmen than to wake up early in the morning and be already at the foot of a ski slope, and on the right side of the Alps, the south side, at that? Soon, business was going so well that Paul was able to invest in enlarging the house next to the barn. Its most sensational novelty was the creation of a real toilet, and not in the courtyard but—an unheard-of luxury—inside the house: so when nature called on a winter's night you wouldn't have to go out in the open anymore. Paul invited the entire neighborhood to the inauguration party. He behaved with great generosity: not only did he show his neighbors the immaculate
Wasser Klosètt
, but insisted they try it in person. To make sure the exceptional occasion was exploited to the full by everyone, adults and children alike, he got his mother and sisters to prepare large quantities of
Zwetschgnknödel
—prune dumplings.

The
Wasser Klosètt
was tested by the neighbors time and again. The waste outlet didn't get blocked. It was a memorable party and people were to talk about it for many years to come.

 

At the time of the Option, Paul Staggl had kept a low profile. He had avoided taking dangerous stands, opting to be transferred according to the wishes of the authorities. Good businessman that he was, however, he had taken into account the fact that the imminent war would postpone, prolong, perhaps even interrupt everything. It turned out to be one of his many accurate predictions: the only ones who left in time were wretched people who had nothing to lose, or fanatics like Hermann. He also had a stroke of luck: his property on the steep side of the valley was untouched by Allied bombs, which destroyed so many houses at the bottom of the valley.

And so, just a few years after the war, instead of the old
maso
with its very steep field that had broken the backs of generations of Staggls, there was a large hotel, and the wide view from its rooms over the glaciers soon attracted an international clientele. Paul had built three other pulleys on as many neighboring fields. Even those who would never have agreed to pay the ascetic toll of effort and sweat in order to climb up for just a few minutes of exhilaration, could now be skiers. Every winter, tourists flocked in increasing numbers.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Paul Staggl wasn't yet one of the richest men in town, but he intended to be. There really was no place for bombs in his plans. As for the South Tyrolean issue Peter and other angry young men were so passionate about, Paul refused to express his opinion: Italians, Germans or Austrians, it was all the same to him, as long as they left their money in the hotel owners' coffers. Money, Paul realized much earlier than many of his contemporaries, not only has no stench but also no ethnicity.
Das Geld, l'argent, the dough, la plata
, has no
Sprachgruppenzugehörigkeit
,
⁹
and never will.