Eva Sleeps (16 page)

The Mayer family had owned the hotel ever since the noble families of
Felix Austria
would come to take the waters here, in this southern outpost of the Empire, where the sun shines for two thirds of the year. The Kaiser, coming down to Tyrol in person to check on the emplacements of the Great War, had spent the night here. Frau Mayer retained a vague impression of an imperial hand, gloved and splendid, being placed on her blond curls. Was it an actual memory or a story someone had told her when she was three, and which had been repeated countless times? She didn't wish to know with certainty.

The hotel was destined for the eldest son, while Irmgard, the third of six children and the only girl, would give up any claim on her father's estate by getting married. History, however, had not treated the Mayer family plans with much consideration.

Julius, the eldest brother, had died in Montenegro as early as the first year of the second world massacre.

Karl, the second son, had been captured near El Alamein and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp in Texas. There, although he had never had any Nazi sympathies, he had refused to renege on his oath of loyalty to the general staff of the Wehrmacht, something required by the Americans of German officers in order to free them. He returned home almost three years after the end of the war, gravely ill. His fellow townsfolk shunned him as an ex-Nazi—especially those who really had worn the brown uniform of the SS. He passed away shortly afterwards because of “general deterioration” as the family doctor wrote on the death certificate.

Anton, the fourth son, who at the age of twenty had gone to seek his fortune in Brazil in the 1930s, had found it in a coffee fazenda, a mulatto wife, many lovers of various ethnicities, and a dozen children. That he would come back and manage the family hotel was out of the question.

Stefan, the fifth son, had died at the age of three in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1919.

Josef, the youngest, had been hit right in the forehead by a Russian sniper at Kalitva, on the loop of the river Don, south-east of Stalingrad, in 1943.

There was only she, little Irmgard, left to help the parents broken by grief. The profession of faith to the god of hotel hospitality, which marked Frau Mayer's entire life, was, in other words, the result of a dynastic accident.

 

The only employee who dared escape Frau Mayer's total control was Herr Neumann. It was he who made up the menu every day, who decided on the orders of the raw materials and who paid the suppliers. It was he who managed the kitchen personnel. This exception had been agreed on by Herr Neumann and Frau Mayer ever since he had first been employed, just a few years after the end of the war.

“Chef means boss, you don't need to speak French to know that. You tell me how much I can spend and I'll make sure the dishes reach the dining room. If the guests are unhappy you can fire me. But you can't tell me what to do. I'm not working in a kitchen where I'm not the one in charge. Take it or leave it.”

Frau Mayer had taken it and had had no regrets for almost twenty years.

Now that Herr Neumann was asking her to employ Gerda again, she had no reason to refuse. Of course, even she could see that she was a beautiful girl and her suspicion that this somehow accounted for Herr Neumann's stubbornness did not make her happy. However, she dismissed the thought: the chef had never tolerated anyone who didn't work hard in his kitchen and, until her belly had started knocking against the food counters, Gerda had been no exception. Besides, there wasn't exactly an abundance of good assistant cooks around to whom you didn't always have to explain everything, and that also had to be taken into account. However, she laid out very clear conditions: the baby was not to be seen or heard. And the possibility that she could disturb guests in the dining room wasn't even worth mentioning. No point in considering the inadmissible.

 

The day she returned to the kitchen, Gerda took an apple crate made of compact smooth wood and no prickles. She lined it with cushions and towels, placed it in a corner where it wouldn't be in the way, and put Eva inside it. Then she went back to work at Herr Neumann's side as though she'd never been away.

Even now that Gerda had gotten herself into the kind of mess that perfectly defines the
Matratze
—getting herself pregnant without making a man marry her—none of the other scullery boys, or assistant cooks, or waiters showed her disrespect. Perhaps it was Eva, in her apple crate in a corner of the kitchen, who made that impossible. Her presence diverted attention from the activity that is the usual subject of coarse jokes to what the aforementioned activity can produce: irresistible, pink, chubby babies. Nobody made any comments even when, several times a day, Gerda would untie her apron and, without taking it off, turn it to one side, unbutton her blouse and give Eva her breast. Of course, everybody looked. Waiters looked, while passing through the kitchen, shouting, “
Spinatspatzlan, neu
!.” Cooks looked, while frying, stirring and tasting. Elmar looked, while dropping leftover food from plates into the garbage buckets. That white roundness with blue veins and a dark nipple that glistened with milk that would appear and disappear into the little mouth was the focus of all the eyes in the kitchen. While in the sudden silence all that could be heard was the powerful sucking and clicking of the baby feeding, everybody contemplated, speechless, that part of Gerda about which they had always fantasized but which, now that it was performing its primary task, silenced them.

However, there were also difficult hours. When bitterness gained a specific flavor through the incessant rhythm of the daily actions and tasks, just as the bitter taste of radicchio suddenly explodes in your mouth after hiding among the other ingredients of a salad.

In the evening, before going to sleep, Gerda would give Eva her breast one last time in her bed in the attic dormitory she shared with the rest of the female staff. The little one suckled expertly, then both would fall into a deep sleep, the daughter huddled in the crook of her mother's arm, both enveloped by the smell of milk and diapers. On the first night they were back at the hotel, Eva woke up after just a few hours and began searching for the breast. Gerda's fingers, numbed by sleep, took a long time to unbutton her nightgown. At first, Eva emitted breathless little moans, then cried increasingly loudly. Protestations, huffs and half-accusations rose from the beds of her dormitory fellow-occupants, which ceased only when Eva found the nipple and quieted down.

The following night, Gerda gave her the breast straightaway to prevent any protest. However, after the feed, Eva began to cry. Gerda lifted the baby from the bed and started walking up and down the dormitory, patting her on the back with the palm of her hand, as the Star of Goodness had taught her. Once again, sleepy voices commanded silence. Gerda was able to go back to bed only when a nice big curdled-milk-smelling burp put an end to Eva's crying.

There was a repeat of this for a few nights, always in the darkest hours before dawn, when anyone waking up has to fight their own ghosts before they can fall asleep again, and doesn't necessarily succeed. After a week, her roommates gave Gerda a brief, not impolite but direct speech: if she wanted to carry on sleeping there with her daughter, she couldn't disturb their sleep anymore.

Gerda could understand them. Like them, she knew the tiredness at the end of the working day, limbs hard as stone, joints on fire, a foggy brain: only sleep can, at least in part, make the idea of starting all over again the next day bearable. The protests were fair: you can't run around all day from the dining room to the kitchen, your arms loaded with plates, or tidy up dozens of rooms and leave them as new even if they've been used by vandals, or wash the floors of a four-story hotel as well as an outbuilding, if you haven't had enough sleep. Nor could you stir, slice and cook in the overheated kitchen, for that matter, but that baby was her daughter, not theirs. It was therefore her problem. They made a deal: Gerda could stay in the room until the feed before dawn. Then she'd have to go out.

For weeks, Gerda spent the final hours of the night strolling in the corridor with her baby on her neck. Exhaustion and fatigue separated her from the rest of the world like the walls of a prison: she couldn't imagine ever escaping. Sometimes she fell asleep on the very steps from which, a few months earlier, she had thrown herself precisely so she wouldn't have to hold a fatherless child in her arms. But Eva was here now, and would let her little blond head down on her shoulder, in a pose of total trust. Gerda had never felt so alone.

Sometimes, during the day, she would fall asleep for an instant while standing at the work table or between steps as she went to fetch ingredients from the store room. Once, she was suddenly overwhelmed by sleep while inside the meat freezer. She had put on the heavy, coarse wool greatcoat, and couldn't resist lying down on the ground among the quarters of beef and the kid halves covered in brine. If Herr Neumann hadn't come down immediately after her to fetch a turkey for roasting, she would have frozen to death.

That day Nina, the waitress from Egna, offered to mind the little girl during the
Zimmerstunde
.

“It won't do you any harm to get a couple of hours' sleep,” she said, taking Eva from her arms. Gerda looked into her disillusioned eyes that were too close together. She felt gratitude take over her body, like wind before a storm, and she burst into tears. She calmed down only when she was in her bed. However, sleep was waiting to ambush her and grabbed her suddenly, the way you capture a prisoner.

 

Ever since a grenade had torn off his leg, Silvius Magnago hadn't slept well. The physical pain in the phantom limb had been his secret companion for over twenty years. Only to it did he feel he could reveal his true nature: his strength, his anger, his tenacity and despair, his resentment toward healthy people who don't know what it is to live with the suffering of the flesh, but also his ability to focus on what's essential. Ever since Magnago had received those pieces of rough toilet paper purloined from the jail in Bolzano, however, the pain in his leg seemed like nothing in comparison with his other pain: that of not having done anything for those who had placed their last hope in him.

The clothes returned to the wives of those imprisoned after
Feuernacht
, some time after the arrests, were covered in blood, vomit and excrement. However, the
Bumser
of the BAS were, after all, simple men. In spite of everything, they trusted the fact that if the world had known about the inhuman treatment they were suffering in Bolzano prison, it would have done everything to save them. They'd done all they could to communicate information outside the prison about the torture they'd been subjected to. A few notes were intercepted and their senders punished, but others managed to evade censorship. The obvious addressee of their request to help had been him, Silvius Magnago, the most authoritative political voice in South Tyrol.

Magnago had received those wretched pieces of paper in late 1961. And he, who knew physical pain only too well, had felt the spasms of lactic acid in arms kept raised for hours as if they'd been his own; the tissue torn by fists and the sinister clicking of shattered bones; the retching of incredulous horror of someone forced to eat his own excrement; the lungs bursting because your head is kept under water; the delirium of sleep deprivation. He'd read the notes almost without breathing. He'd wept in the silence of his pale, wood-paneled studio overlooking an exclusive Bolzano street. Episodes he'd witnessed as a young
Gebirgsjägerleutnant
¹²
at war had flashed before his eyes, images he'd hoped never to have to remember again. He'd directed his gaze outside the window, at his beloved chimonantus tree that was now bare; the yellow flowers that announced the spring with their scent of vanilla hadn't blossomed yet. They couldn't comfort him either.

The
Südtiroler Volkspartei
, the party he led, couldn't afford to be associated, even from a distance, with the
Bumser
. The process of acquiring true autonomy for South Tyrol was still too fragile. The biblical timing of politics, the dance of talks, of promises and threats on the part of a government that had denied the problem so long it had allowed it to fester, and was beginning to realize that a plan for this province was necessary only now that it had become a ticking bomb—all that had to be taken into account.

Magnago had started to weave a fine and delicate canvas of negotiations and compromise in order to obtain that provincial autonomy (“
Los von Trient
!”) which alone could resolve the South Tyrol deadlock and prevent the worst possible scenario: an ethnic war. He knew very well that the strong German accent with which he spoke otherwiseimpeccable Italian convinced his Rome interlocutors a priori of his fundamental, encysted hatred toward them. He knew how much diplomacy, patience, and deliberate deafness to jokes was necessary even just to explain the starting point of the negotiations: South Tyroleans did not hate Italians but rather the colonization they had endured on the part of the Italian government. He knew that he couldn't take the risk of being painted with the same brush as those who had resorted to bombs even simply against infrastructures.

However, there was another reason for anxiety, which wasn't linked to considerations of political opportunities but rather an existential one, in those little sheets of paper which were written on literally with the blood of tortured men. At his Bologna alma mater, from where he'd graduated in Law, Magnago had become convinced that only dialogue, the search for a compromise, the hard but honest meeting between positions, no matter how different, were tools superior to any—any—form of violence. Whoever gives up on verbal discussion and resorts to destructive action against people or things, no matter how justified the reason, automatically gets on the side of the wrong: that was Silvius Magnago's one and only political creed. Never had he been seduced by any of the ideologies of this fire and arms century. He'd reached adulthood just before the start of the world massacre, and had seen only too clearly what is achieved when politics gives way to violence: a planet in flames. He felt in his own amputated flesh and the pain it radiated every second the duty to safeguard bodies, always. Not just the bodies of the people of his
Heimatland
, those who'd charged him with a mandate to represent them; but also the bodies of his opponents, of the ignorant politicians in Rome, even those of the administrators who from their positions of small, obtuse power made his people's lives difficult. His duty was as follows: to separate, always, political struggle from physical destruction, even that of electricity pylons.