Eva Sleeps (12 page)

In a few minutes time we'll be in Val Padana.
Aussi
. I'm coming out.

P
aul Staggl was a businessman, so it was important for him to have his finger on the pulse of the world. He read
Dolomiten
but also
Süddeutsche Zeitung
and
Corriere della Sera
. When people talked about his homeland, more often than not, they did so in terms of “the South Tyrolean issue,” “attacks,” “bombs,” and he didn't like that. It was not a good thing that Italians heard so much about Alto Adige in this worst possible light. In addition to his other worries, the winter didn't look promising: it was already late December and there had been very little snow. Now that the new cable car had been inaugurated, the pistes were full of stones and desolate patches of brown. For some time now Paul had been thinking about the possibility of pistes that were no longer dependent on snowfall. He'd heard of Swiss research on the creation of artificial snow but the technique was still in its early stages and the results had been disappointing. However, Paul's belief in technology was equaled only by his belief in himself. The matter was still futuristic and experimental but, of this he was certain, it was the future.

Paul also knew all about that girl his
Trottel
of a son was fooling around with. The cable car workers had told him and it all was very clear to him. Of everyone in the valley, Gerda's father was the last man Paul wanted to be related to. Not because Hermann was a
Rückkehrer
, a Shanghai resident, or because his terrible temper had now turned him, even though he wasn't even sixty yet, into one of the many characters in provincial towns: Hermann, the abrupt, silent type, the one you couldn't get a smile out of even if you paid him. (Once, at the tavern
Stammtisch
, as a bet, a joker had offered him a nice little sum of money if he would only lift the corners of his mouth, but no one could tell if Hermann was offended by that or not: the dark, universally disgusted expression with which he had reacted was his usual one.) No, Hermann's only true fault was to have been Paul's schoolmate at a time when the land on the steep, north facing side, hadn't yet become synonymous with skiing slopes, tourists cable cars, wealth—just with abject poverty.

Paul decided that his son's professional training had been delayed enough. He sent him on a long educational tour of Engandin, Carinzia, Bavaria, and even Colorado: it had become imperative for him to study the management models of the most reputable ski resorts. Gerda never found out what Hannes thought of all this. When she called him from the hotel to tell him about her pregnancy, he had already gone. His father's polite voice advised her to call back after at least six months.

 

Gerda spent a few days in a state of shock. It's not that she became inattentive in her work. She cleaned, cut, sliced, beat, grated, kneaded, stirred, whipped and chopped as she had always done. She was no less careful than usual. She didn't burn the sauces, overcook the pasta, didn't slice julienne-style the vegetables she was supposed to slice
à la brunoise
, or vice-versa. As usual, she left her workstation clean and tidy at the end of the day, which is something that couldn't be said of her male colleagues. She had convinced herself that if she ignored what had happened to her, it would go away without a trace, just as you ignored a burn caused by a splash of boiling oil and it left a small scar. Nevertheless, persevering in her belief required an effort of concentration, so she had to eliminate any superfluous mental activity: talking to other assistant cooks, saying hello, responding to non-essential requests.

Even so, despite the intensity, the determination of her belief, her already full breasts were growing and swelling under her apron. It was as though she didn't just have one pregnancy, and not just in her belly that was still flat, but also in each of her breasts.

More than once a day, especially in the morning, she had to run and vomit in the staff bathroom. She would return to the kitchen with blue shadows under her eyes, pale lips, her cheeks still moist from the icy water she had splashed herself with, and resume her work with a neutral expression. Her silence stopped any comments or nosy looks on the part of scullery boys, cooks and waiters. And yet despite all this self-discipline and determination to deny reality, Hannes didn't call to tell her that he loved her and would marry her soon, nor did her pregnancy vanish. Gerda realized that cultivating the certainty that it would go away was no longer enough.

 

One evening, at the end of the shift, when even Elmar, the scullery boy, had gone to sleep, and the guests of the large hotel were having their nightcap on the terrace overlooking the mountains, Gerda went from the deserted kitchen to the vegetable store room. There were crates of Rovigo asparagus, Treviso radicchio, and lettuce from local peasants, all lined up methodically so the contents wouldn't get bruised. Gerda reached out for a bunch of green leaves in the corner reserved for aromatic herbs. It wasn't chives, sage or even marjoram. She took a whole handful, then another, until her arms were full and carried it up to the kitchen. She put it on the board and started eating one leaf after another. Her lips turned green, the leaves got stuck in her teeth, but she kept tearing more from the slender twigs and stuffing them in her mouth, chewing like one of the cows she used to look after during those distant, happy summers. Soon, there was a halo around her mouth, and she wiped it with the same gesture of the wrist her father used when wiping his lips after drinking milk as a child. Except that her mustache wasn't ivory but green, just like the leaves which, twig after twig, one handful after another, she chewed and swallowed.

Elmar, the scullery boy, returned to the kitchen. As he often did, he was coming to steal a drop of brandy or marsala or any other liquor from the spice and seasoning shelf. He looked at her, guilty at first then puzzled, his face too long between the protruding ears, like an eggplant.

“
Wos tuaschn
?”

“I'm making green sauce,” Gerda said, her lips appropriately green. The absurdity of her lie didn't make her cast down her eyes and in the end, as usual, it was Elmar who had to look down.

At night, lying in her cot in the large attic where she slept with the rest of the female staff, Gerda held onto her stomach, suffering terrible pain. She got a fever, diarrhoea, vomiting, then a couple of uterine contractions which gave her great hope. But nothing else.

 

The parsley didn't work, so Gerda tried with the pine wood stairs. They led to the attic where she slept, the only non-refurbished part of the hotel, unchanged from the time when this was still the southern stretch of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Viennese middle classes would come and spend the winter.

To avoid cushioning the blows, Gerda kept her legs straight. She would push herself off with her elbows and throw herself down the stairs, hitting every step, which meant fifteen hard knocks. Knocks to her hips, which was fine, but also to her ribs and shoulders which was useless, however. When she reached the bottom, for a few moments light and dark would swap places: the lights that coming in from the narrow window would become black and sticky like tar, while the shadows would light up with a supernatural glow. Then, she would stagger back upstairs.

There were fifteen steep, narrow steps made of pine wood time had turned gray, slumping in the middle after centuries of use. The ridges and depressions of the grain were in relief and the knots were like dark, oblong spirals, like miniature galaxies. But Gerda wasn't admiring the perfection of the old wood: she would climb back up to the top, sit and throw herself down again.

She hurled herself down the stairs twice, five, ten times. Twenty times. She lost count. Her coccyx hit the steps with a nice full sound, like a musical instrument: the stairs were like a xylophone and she, the mallet. After a while she thought she would go on like this forever: throwing herself down these steps all her life, then go back up with more and more bruises, to play that rhythmic composition of wood, anger and determination, hollow, without thought, simple, almost pleasant. At the bottom of the stairs, sprawled on the ground like a disjointed puppet, Gerda closed her eyes. The shadows were throbbing, fluorescent, and there was almost no light anymore. On all fours, she climbed the stairs again.

To Eva, a tiny little lump, the knocks were cushioned: out there, things had boundaries that could hit one another, slam into one other violently, and get hurt. But that couldn't happen to her. Those knocks were no more than little waves in the boundless ocean that contained her.

Finally, Gerda lay almost unconscious at the bottom of the stairs. She looked up. Outside the narrow attic window, clouds were rushing over the mountains: tall, incessant, implacable. She stared at them for a long time without focusing. The dark shadows of the nimbus clouds brushed the wooded slopes and pasture against the grain, scraped the bare rocks of the crags, and she thought she heard the rustling sound of this outsized caress. She remained like that for a long time, her body aching, her mind a blank. Then she slowly got up. Supporting herself against the wall she went down the corridor to the staff sleeping quarters that gave on to the narrow corridor.

She had failed.

Eva's eyes were just two dark bulbs, huge compared to the rest of her body. They had no eyelids or lashes, and still couldn't close. But Eva slept the sleep of fetuses, that of creature and creator joined as one, the sleep of a god who dreams the beginning of time: his own.

F
ifteen minutes' walk from my nice, elegant apartment, as you leave the Medieval city, following an ascending path, you get to a wide clearing where corn and potatoes grow. In the middle of the field there's a small chapel. From there, the slopes of our valley open up and the sky grows very broad. People come and sit on the bench along the low wall of the little church, and enjoy the sunset and the view over the glaciers.

My mother used to bring me here on her visits when I was a child. I didn't dare tell her that I would have preferred to spend my precious time with her going to the pond on the other side of the fields, and giving pieces of dry bread to the ducks who had hard, voracious beaks; or else slipping between the bushes along the path and picking raspberries until our faces and fingers were red, and perhaps even taking some back home in a glass jar. I didn't say a word about my wishes, and would run after her with my short legs, clutching her hand. All I had to do was feel how tight she held my hand to realize that she was distracted and wasn't thinking about me—and yet her hand was always wrapped around my fingers.

It was only a few months ago, coming back from a weekend in Paris, that I realized where she had taken me during all those years. Countless times, even as an adult, I have sat on that bench, looking at the sky, gone into that chapel, and looked up at the fresco decorating the small apse. Staring into space, Mary is about to tread on a little dog who, poor thing, is standing up on its hind legs, trying to show affection. I've never paid attention to the sign the Tourist Board put outside the chapel a few years ago but that day, for some reason, as I was reading it, that my mother must have always known the story of that chapel, just as she had known, ever since she was a child, the story about the bearded female saint in the little church among the
masi
where I grew up.

The chapel was built by a local nobleman who had led a dissolute life as a young man. He was punished, after a marriage that sanctioned his return to sobriety, with the birth of a son with the body of a dog (the sign states as fact the direct relation between his previous depraved behavior and the monster: “and so a son was born that . . . ”). The man made a vow to the Blessed Virgin that he would build a chapel in her honor if she would show him the grace of making the child die. Judging from the fresco of the poor little dog about to be squashed by Mary, the nobleman's prayers to the Virgin were granted. In fact, the sign above the altar, in high German, says: IN PRAISE OF GOD AND WITH CHRISTIAN THOUGHTS THIS CHAPEL WAS BUILT IN 1682 A.D. As I was reading it, I thought: my mother would never have done that. Even if she had had the necessary means to make a vow of an entire chapel, she would never have asked for my death.

My mother never told me I ruined her existence. On the contrary. When I was a little girl she would cling to me like a small raft and I was proud of that, I wanted to be able to take her to safety beyond the rough waters of her life. But I didn't save anybody. Not myself and not her.

As a young adult I tried to run away from my inability to make her happy. I remember the day of Ulli's funeral, I decided to leave our luminous mountains, with the air fragrant with hay, the balconies full of flowers. Suddenly, all this beauty seemed to me like a cruel farce that could no longer cover up the narrow-mindedness that had killed him. I could afford to do it. I was twenty-five years old, with no children (all my life I've taken great care not to get pregnant). I'd already been working for several years and had put some money aside. I was planning to go to Australia and look for work there. I wanted to get away, away from Alto Adige/Südtirol, and from its obsession with itself, away to a new life in the Antipodes!

When I communicated these intentions to my mother, she replied, “I've always wanted to see kangaroos, and now I'll finally get the opportunity.”

I couldn't get anything else out of her.

I didn't go to live in Australia in the end. When all's said and done, I am a
Dableiber
.

 

Lying on the bunk, rocked by the motion of the train, I can't get any deep sleep, only shreds of dreams. The Po Valley flashing past us outside the window penetrates the side of the carriage, the blanket provided by the train company, and my skin. Its monotony, no less absolute just because it's invisible in the darkness beyond the glass, takes possession of me, and my mind becomes flat and without relief. Even so, every time my consciousness starts to forget itself and finally dissolves into sleep, the clatter of a high-speed train bursts in on me. A metallic, linear, daytime ego self that wakes me with a start. Once, startled, I prop myself up on my elbows, lift myself up and look out. We're standing still in a small, deserted station. The blue sign with white lettering says: POGGIO RUSCO, a name that evokes countryside, tractors, home-cured pork without polyphosphates. For some reason the train stops there for almost half an hour. The Po Valley air is so thick with the juices of the soil that the cones of orange light projected from the tall lamp posts look like jelly. I try opening the window. It's jammed. If I wanted to call the attendant from one compartment to the other in that intimate, almost conjugal way, he'd rush straight away, his eyes puffy with sleep. He would clumsily try to conceal the excitement triggered by the unhoped-for night call, unblock the window lock with a spanner, watch me as I inhale that greasy humidity smelling of manure and recently plowed fields, then ask, “Why aren't you sleeping?” And I would have to explain to him that I am already an insomniac as a rule, let alone today that I'm traveling the entire length of Italy, rushing to Vito's bedside.