Eva Sleeps (15 page)

A month earlier, Ulli had been to London. There, his homosexuality hadn't ensured him original status in the least. On the contrary, he'd been treated almost as someone quite ordinary. He'd liked that. It was also on one of those nights that I'd told him of my lightning marriage, celebrated and soon afterwards annulled, in Reno, to Lesley—or was it Wesley? I pretended not even to remember the name of that two-week husband. Naturally, Ulli didn't buy it and laughed. Afterwards, however, he'd fallen silent and looked at me with that sad, tender expression he often had.

“I wonder what Vito would say.”

I sniffed hard. There we were again, Ulli and I, on the same wavelength. Every time it came as a surprise and yet it was almost taken for granted: at that moment I was also thinking about Vito. And yet he hadn't been mentioned by anyone for years, either by Ulli or me. And especially not by my mother. What would that duty-bound Carabiniere from the South have said about me and that lightning marriage? I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

To prevent the snowcat from overturning on the steep slope, a cable secured/hooked to its front was attached to a winch at the station above. It shone like a precious necklace in the headlights. I remained silent, watching it tighten.

I began telling Ulli about how I'd met his brother Sigi at the
Altstadtfest
¹¹
wine bars the previous summer. Along with the stench of beer and Currywurst, these words had come out of his mouth: “If I ever read in the paper that you've ended up badly because of a man, I'll be sorry but not surprised.”

Ulli had continued to maneuver Marlene in silence, staring at the cone of light from the headlights on the snow ahead of him. He had long-term experience of Sigi's brutal and obscene way of speaking. Many times he'd asked me to help him understand just when exactly, and why, his little gentian-eyed brother, whose shoe laces he had tied for years, had turned out . . . like that. Now Ulli's eyes suddenly opened wide as he turned to look at me. In the dim light of the cabin his eyes glowed with indignation. “He wants to fuck you! Even Sigi wants to fuck you!”

“Why are you so surprised?”

“I don't want to fuck you.”

“You don't count; you're a
Schwul
.”

Ulli stopped the snowcat and jumped out, closing the door behind him. I was afraid I'd offended him, even though he'd used the word
Schwul
about himself earlier. But it wasn't that. He was picking something up he'd seen in the snow. Lit up like a rock star in the middle of the huge stage of the entire mountain, Ulli lifted his arm to show me what he'd found: a strange pink animal with two heads, no body and a long string of a tail. Only when he came back into the cabin, bringing in with him the night frost, I saw what it was: a lace bra.

We spent the rest of the night up and down the mountain's immensity inside our heated microcosm, wondering how it could have ended up there. During that harsh December which had made the stream in the middle of town freeze over, who—and especially why—had someone felt like peeling off, like an onion, the complex layers of ski wear in order to slip off the bra? And why on that particular track, the black slope where champions of the special slalom trained?

We talked about it all night without finding an explanation.

 

When I met Carlo, I decided for the first time in my life that I would be faithful to him. Carlo should never know that, of course, but it was a great relief to me, and still is, eleven years later. No one can deny that for me this was progress.

We're now between Bologna and Florence. The darkness outside the window has lost the deep breath of the night sky, but is now black, narrow and noisy: we go in and out of tunnels beneath the Apennines, just as I go in and out of my thoughts. What would Vito have said about me? If he'd been there, he would have said . . .

But he wasn't there.

Did he ever think about me? I'm sure he thought about my mother. Why didn't he phone her?

Vito called me. And now it's me rushing to him. Carlo knows nothing about Vito. I've never mentioned him. Realizing this is like one of the dams Ulli and I used to build as children: it stops the flow of my thoughts just as we would stop, albeit briefly, the streams. With splashes and hollow thuds, like a drum, we used to drop the largest stones we could find into the water: porphyry the color of black pudding, gray-green granite, salmon-streaked pale dolomite, schist glowing like cat's-eye. Our arms hurt from the effort and our hands, after soaking for hours, would become white and wrinkled like blind creatures from the abyss. When we managed to disrupt the water's course, it would start flowing in strange ways: it would dig furrows through the emerald moss hairs on the shore, form unexpected bogs in the grass, and start spinning in whirls in front of certain streaked rocks which up to then we hadn't considered as part of the stream but of the undergrowth. Still, it didn't matter how tall the pebble barrier we built was, or how much moss and bark cement we used to plug all the leaks: in the end, and always, the water found its way.

I have never told Carlo about Vito.

That “never” is like a slab of rock thrown into the flow of my thoughts. They stop for a moment. When they start flowing again their nature is altered and they have become something halfway between sleep and waking, something different, just like the secret water of a bog is different than the fast and gurgling water of a stream.

In this half-sleep I see myself as a little girl. I'm about to fall asleep in the furnished room where I lived with my mother during the low season. There's an Italian Eurostar train standing still next to the bed she and I share. There are passengers looking at me through the windows. They have the expression of people who have already spent a long time staring at the passing panorama: a neutral expression untouched by the landscape rushing past them for hours. Some don't even look up from the newspapers they're reading. Only then do I realize something: they're all men. And I notice that, lying next to me, there's my mother Gerda as a young woman. She is supporting her head with her hand, her elbow digging into the mattress, her heavy, full breast falling on one side of her slip. She's more beautiful than I will ever be. The train conductor whistles, the fast train starts again and crosses our room like a station. A man strains his neck so he can see the bed from his window for as long as he can. She puts a finger to her mouth and, addressing the train, murmurs suggestively, “Eva is asleep . . . ”

“No, she's not!” Vito's cheerful, musical voice breaks in. “My
Sisiduzza
is still awake.”

He appears next to me, with his laughing, loving eyes. To fall asleep more easily, I hold his hand tight. However, the Eurostar passes next to the head of the bed and wakes me up completely with its loud rattle . . .

 

An insistent metallic din wakes me up. The ladder the Neapolitan couchette attendant has taught me to use as an anti-burglar device is rattling against the handle next to my head.

“We arrive in Rome in twenty minutes!” says a male voice from the corridor.

I have no recollection of Florence Station, I must have dozed off in the Apennines. My eyes are puffy and my hands are clumsy from waking up suddenly; only after messing about and knocking metal do I manage to free myself from the prison of the anti-burglar ladder. Even before I open the door completely I can smell coffee. The couchette attendant hands me a plastic cup with a contrite air.

“It's cold. I'll make you another one . . . ”

“Oh, no, please don't worry . . . ” I reply, taking it.

He also gives me a sachet of sugar and the little white plastic spatula that acts as a spoon.

“Thank you . . . ”

I drink the coffee in one sip and wipe my lips with my wrist. “The same gesture as your mother,” Ulli once said to me and once again I promised myself from then on to use my fingers, like everybody else, except that I never remember until it's too late.

I stare at the Neapolitan couchette attendant with my hands still in front of my mouth, like a Muslim veil.

He's also looking at me, with a serious expression. His forehead is a little low but he has the wavy mouth of the Southern seas. I also notice his neck, which emerges decisively from the light blue uniform shirt, his shoulders broad, just as I like them, the skillful hands of a man familiar with engines, minor home repairs and a woman's body. I'm a lot taller than him. Neither of us has looked away from the other one yet. His eyes have clouded over as though with a sudden sadness. Or is it desire? My breathing has gotten deeper, and so has his.

And I find myself thinking: I've been faithful for eleven years—not to Carlo but to his wife. So why not betray her with an attentive couchette attendant who hasn't taken advantage of the situation and is ready to make me another coffee if this one gets cold?

“Thank you . . . ” I say, returning the empty cup. He takes it, careful not to brush my fingers. I'm about to go back into my compartment. “I'm going to tidy myself up.”

“You don't need to.” His beautiful, pearl-fisher mouth hints at a smile.

“Thank you,” I say for the third time and close the door behind me.

The train is already running next to the fork in the motorway past the Fiano Romano signal box. It'll soon go past the ring road and we'll be in Rome.

It's six-thirty in the morning when we arrive at Rome Tiburtina, but it hasn't been daylight for long: it's already daylight saving time so the sun rises late. A middle-aged woman is watching our train as it stops at the platform. She has two commas of silvery eyeshadow beneath her plucked eyebrows, a purple coat that opens on a black sheath dress too short for her age, and gold leather shoes. She looks like the survivor of a night that has fallen short of her expectations. Behind her, there is a plaque on the wall commemorating the passage of armored trains carrying the Roman Jews rounded up in 1943. In order to send them to Auschwitz, the Nazis made them go up Italy along the same rail track I have just travelled on.

The couchette attendant brings my suitcase down from the train. He hops off the footboard with an agility that betrays his youth. However, he's all grown-up and earnest as he holds out his hand.

“My name's Nino.”

“I'm Eva,” I reply, shaking his hand.

“A beautiful name, almost like you . . . ”

Driving my trolley suitcase, I walk away cheerfully: nothing puts a spring in a woman's step more than a compliment. Something my mother knows very well.

T
he pact between Frau Mayer and Herr Neumann was clear. If he really wanted to have back in his kitchen that assistant cook who'd gotten herself in trouble and whose trouble, as it happened, was already two months old, with fat pink cheeks and her mother's transparent eyes, then she wouldn't stop him. For years, the chef had filled her esteemed guests' bellies with Tyrolean specialties which, if they were not fancy then at least were perfectly produced, and thus contributed to their return season after season. So now she had no plan to deny him this favor.

Frau Mayer was a woman of about fifty who could have been described (and, in fact, was at one time described) as a “classical Aryan beauty”: slim, with athletic legs, a bosom not large but emphasized by the low-cut bodice of the
dirndl
and a thick blond plait twisted around her head from which no one had ever seen a hair stray. She spoke good Italian with an almost elegant turn of phrase, being a former pupil of a Fascist period school, but it was when she spoke
Hochdeutsch
with tourists that she revealed her deep love of correct language.

Everything about Frau Mayer was controlled, except for her blue-green eyes. Frightening yet beautiful, they suggested that, instead of spending her life bestowing dignified smiles upon her guests, she could just as well have lived a life of wild excess. It wasn't impossible to picture her as a temptress in a
Kabarett
who drives men to the brink of suicide, a barbarian female warrior with dragon blood on her dagger, a prophesying poetess in touch with the underworld.

Perhaps it was that talent for the absolute which shone from her eyes that had led Frau Mayer to give up the chance of a family and devote herself to the well-being of her guests like the worship of one god. Despite the large number of staff upstairs, in the dining room, and in the kitchen, not a single detail of the hotel management escaped her. The correct plumping up of the goose feather pillows in the birch bedrooms; the supply of sacks of sawdust to throw on the kitchen floor; the decorations made of dried flowers and the threads of plaited hay that embellished the dining room; the boiler repairs: everything had to be approved by her. Even the choice of music played by the small orchestra on the terrace during warm summer evenings relied on her taste, which was based on a very simple premise: always—always—favor sad love songs! Those guests who were lonely and melancholic would feel understood and in harmony with the atmosphere, those happily accompanied would generously take part in the wide range of human emotions, and everybody would have more drinks.

The only detail that sometimes escaped her control was death. Almost all her guests were there because of the town's spa, whose waters were renowned for being beneficial to a wide spectrum of ailments. Therefore, many of them were of an advanced age and unfortunately this carried a corollary: every so often, they died. Moreover, with little consideration for Frau Mayer, sometimes they even did so in the rooms of her hotel.

Frau Mayer didn't think of herself but rather of her guests (the live ones, that is). For them, witnessing the transfer of the dead body of someone their age just as they were searching for relief from their own ailments wouldn't have been pleasant. For that reason Frau Mayer had agreed on a special service with the local undertaker. The corpses were not taken away in traditional coffins but in single-door wardrobes made of good, ancient walnut, thus giving the impression of a house move rather than a funeral. So the only guest whose holiday was disturbed was the one who—peace be with him—would not be having any more of them.