Eva Sleeps (23 page)

 

We're barely out of Termini and already crossing an extraordinary landscape which, in any other part of the world, would merit a special journey: a countryside with the ruins of Roman aqueducts. But we're in Italy and nobody pays attention to these monumental vestiges of efficiency, grace, and longevity. Not even my fellow travelers, even though, after all, it should be their job as tourists to look at the view. They're both immersed in reading paperbacks, iPods in their ears. I'd like to say: Quick! Look up! Don't miss it! These aqueducts are one of the wonders of the world! But they just sit there. In fact, it's worse than that: when they first look up, it's when we're going past a graveyard of cars, the banal degradation of an urban suburb. One of them immediately goes back to reading. The other one, as though on purpose, looks back down just a second before the Roman chaos once more gives way to the countryside, with fragments of aqueduct standing out, slender and arcane. All around, there are sheep lying on the ground: sleepy, motionless, exhausted after Easter. They must be the mothers of the lambs Romans will have for lunch today. Maybe they miss their babies but don't know how to say it. It looks like a watercolor by a Grand Tour traveler with the title: Beneath ancient ruins, wistful sheep.

“Hallo? Hallo?”

From the compartment next door, a male voice with an unmistakable accent: Indian. After a brief pause, a female voice. It sounds mellow, with a tone suggestive of flesh and soil trampled on with bare feet—even though, in Italy, this Indian lady wears shoes. What about a sari? Who knows? This is another advantage of carriages with separate compartments: you can fantasize about what your neighbors look like from their voices. The concept expressed by the woman is not very different:

“Hallo? Hallo, hallo? O.K., O.K.”

There's also a baby who emits low wails, but is immediately quietened down. By a breast, a bottle, an adult entertaining him with a game of grimaces?

On the right-hand side of the train stretches Agro Pontino, flat like only land snatched from marshes can be. An expanse of cultivated plots, with heaps of plastic boxes: an exclusively dark blue heap, in the field next door just a yellow heap, then a red, then a green one. They look like pieces of Lego sorted by color by a bored child. They're waiting for the next work day to be filled with vegetables. Here, the soil is the color of blood sausage, you feel like plunging your hands in and sniffing it, and even at a distance you know it's extremely fertile, a far cry from the gray soil of my valley where you're lucky if you can grow as much as potatoes. Far away, an elegant line of Mediterranean pines and then, beyond that, almost like a glow blending in with the light from the sky, is the first view of the sea.

On the left-hand side of the train, however, a different world is rushing past, a natural graduation of bare, arid hills covered in sparse Mediterranean woodland, and populated only by goats. Low, dry stone walls carve wretched little spaces for puny olive trees; here and there, the ruins of houses built with the same stones as the walls, which is actually what the hill is made of: stones on top of other stones, containing stones—that's how hard this soil is, such an extreme contrast to the fertile plain it looks over. Every now and then, the chain of Roman hills opens up and behind it tall mountains appear that are even darker and more desolate, enveloped by clouds, with no trace of human habitation. We're still almost at the gates of Rome, but it feels like we're penetrating into Italy's harsh belly, the land of wolves and brigands.

Then the train enters a tunnel, dark and very long, and you can't see anything anymore.

 

Wesley, the one lucky man I've ever called my husband, albeit for just two weeks, always claimed that the first time he saw me he noticed me because of the way I was looking at the landscape. Perhaps. Even though, it must be said, that day I was on a beach in Sri Lanka, among a dozen women in saris, and I was the only blonde, the only one with blue eyes, the only one who was almost five foot eleven tall. The only one in a bikini, too. I was twenty-two, it was the first exotic holiday I'd allowed myself with the proceeds of my work.

Still, Wesley was right, I do pay attention to landscapes.

Just a few hours after we met we had dinner together, and it was one of those tropical evenings manufactured especially to get Westerners to wind up in bed together: curried lobster served by a graceful woman wrapped in silk, the ancient cries of a faraway peacock, the black waves of the Indian Ocean illuminated by phosphorescent plankton, the exchange of childhood memories. I told Wesley about how Ulli and I would go and shout at the rocks of a landslide which, a couple of years earlier, had washed away a slope of the mountain under which we lived. We would stand with our legs spread over the edge of the new ravine, where the flood had eaten away a chunk of field like a mouthful of
Krapfen
, and shout at the pile of rocks beneath us. The rocks answered with voices like ours but not identical, as though the mountain used our words to express something else. But what? Wesley looked at me with the expression of a gold prospector who had finally found a nugget in his pan.

“You really do have a romantic soul, you know?” he exclaimed. He was assistant professor of English literature at the University of Indiana, and spoke like the English poets about whom he wrote books with titles like
Divine Manure: the Myth of Gea as Nostalgia in the Self-Conscious Narrative of Modern Intellect
—that there are people in circulation who dedicate essays to “Divine Manure” is one of the many things I really didn't know until I met Wesley.

The romantic soul, Wesley explained, is convinced that the landscape has something to tell it; that it's always about to reveal something the human beings who inhabit it don't know, or have forgotten, or consider irrelevant; that in reality geography is a book written in a language unknown to us, but whose significance will perhaps one day be revealed.

“‘Call the world, if you please, “the vale of Soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world.' Keats.”

I raised my eyes from the lobster and looked at the waves. I wonder what Keats would have said about that phosphorescent plankton: it looked so poetic and artificial, like the anti-darkness stars in a child's bedroom.

Actually, what Ulli and I were shouting at the landscape in order to obtain a revelation of its soul, were, at most, insults against our enemies:

 

“
Di Greti hot dreckige Untohosn!”

“Do Sigi isch an Orschloch!”

“Do Pato Christian figgt mit di Kia,

und mit di Hennen aa
!”

 

Rocks would confirm that our fury and our contempt were a good and righteous thing:

Gretl has dirty knickers (
Untohosn . . . hosn . . . hosn . . .
).

Sigi is an asshole (
Orschloch . . . schloch . . . loch . . .
).

Father Christian shags cows (
mit di Kia . . . Kia . . .
) and also hens (Hennen aa!).

 

But I didn't say that to Wesley.

That night, Wesley came into my bungalow on the beach, and stayed for three days. Sexually, he wasn't as romantic as his poets. He had the body of a WASP who's been practicing sport since kindergarten: long, toned, covered in fine blonde down, without an ounce of fat despite being over forty. With athletic efficiency he provided me, as well as himself, with strictly equivalent orgasms. When I took the initiative to give him pleasure, he appreciated it but then reciprocated immediately, as though it was very important to balance the double entry between giving and receiving. In other words, an accountant's sexuality, but when you're twenty-two, you're not looking for subtlety. At least, I wasn't.

On the morning of the third day, I went for a solitary dive in the ocean while Wesley was still asleep. When I returned to the bungalow, I woke him up by covering him with my wet body.

“I know why you sleep so little, Eva,” he said. “You don't want to miss out on the secrets that the Archangel Michael confides to Adam.”

“What?”

“Milton,
Paradise Lost
, Book Eleven.”

I must have looked at him with the expression of a gold prospector who's finally found a Rubik's cube in her pan. He caressed my thighs, which were still damp and salty, with the patience of a lecturer who has to explain everything at length to ignorant, bikini-wearing students every single day—because, after all, somebody has to do it. “In the penultimate book of his masterpiece, Milton gets the Archangel Michael to speak with Adam. He shows him the future: Cain and Abel, the destruction of the Temple of Solomon, Kublai Khan, the Russian Tsar, Montezuma . . . ”

“What's Adam got to do with Montezuma?”

“Nothing. Michael reveals to Adam the future history of man. That's why he gives Eve a sleeping potion: she mustn't hear, she's a woman. And so, while Adam learns the secrets of the times to come, Eve sleeps.”

He slipped a hand into my bikini. “You're also a woman, Eva . . . ” he started moving his fingers, “ . . . but you stay awake, so you can hear.”

A liquid warmth began to rise between my legs. “I'm not interested in knowing the future,” I said. “That's a man's desire.”

“And yet it's obvious you don't want to miss out on their secrets. That's why you refuse to sleep.”

Something in Wesley's words rang true, but I didn't know what. Meanwhile, his fingers had found the center of me, and I couldn't think anymore.

We got married a few days later in Reno, Nevada. I'd changed my flight from Colombo to Frankfurt for a Los Angeles one. I'd sent my mother a telegram:
I gea heiratn
, I'm getting married.

The Reno marriage license office promises its public to issue a license within ten minutes at most. They gave us ours after eight. An employee with a pock-marked face and the aquiline nose of a Native American, asked our names, surnames, marital status, place of residence of our mothers (but, to my great relief, not our fathers) and fifty-five dollars in cash—the marriage license office must be the last place in the US not to accept credit cards.

Then we went into the office of the Commissioner for Marriages, half a mile away. It was a room covered in pink and orange carpeting. A black woman with monumental legs constricted in anti-varicose-vein pantyhose was standing in front of a chunky wooden desk. It was she who married us. Our witness was the cleaning man, a Mexican about my age. He had an upper lip like the baroque volute of a colonial church, and the eyes of a little girl. He'd just obtained his Green Card through a lottery, so the joy with which he added his signature at the bottom of our marriage certificate was very sincere.

When we came out of there, Wesley suggested we celebrate our wedding night with Joan and Elliot, a couple of friends of his who lived on Lake Tahoe. Now he was a married man, he said cheerfully, he'd be able to have sex with Joan: he had me to offer her husband.

I told you, his book keeping was precise.

I remembered what was written on the inside flap of the book about divine manure:

Before becoming Associate Professor at the University of Indiana, Wesley Munro was a shoe repairer, a member of youth gangs, a boy scout, a dish washer, a golf caddie, an undertaker, a coffin shiner, a hamburger maker, an engineering worker, an assistant plumber, a voluntary subject in medical experiments, a lab assistant in charge of cleaning hamsters' teeth, an organist in a Baptist church, a soap dialogue writer, a private tutor for wealthy teenagers, a translator, a truck driver.

He collects stamps
.

 

Only then did I realize that “collects stamps” should have rung alarm bells.

“Pull up, please,” I said, and got out of the car.

 

Our marriage lasted two weeks for the simple reason that it was only two weeks later that we were together again in the same room, that is, in the office of the Commissioner for Divorce.

It was identical to the other one, but with gray and green carpeting, colors more suitable to a failed marriage, in fact, than pink and orange. The two weeks between wedding and divorce, I spent with the Mexican cleaner cum witness, who shared with me his joy about his Green Card. As for Wesley, I have no idea. With no hard feelings, we signed the document which separated our fates for ever, left that green and gray room dazzled by the naked desert light, and never met again.

Over twenty years have passed since my brief and only taste of that legendary status: a married woman. Now, however, whenever I need to renew my identity card, I can put “divorced” on the marital status line. Not “single,” as my mother has had to do all her life.

“What would Vito say?” had been Ulli's comment when I told him about my lightning marriage.

An impossible question, of course, which never got an answer. Now, however, there's another one: what will Vito say when he sees me? He's sure to ask me if I'm married, if I have children. Will I tell him about Wesley? I don't think so, not because I'm ashamed, but because we won't have any time to waste on what's irrelevant. And what about Carlo, who doesn't speak about his wife and children and after whom I don't enquire? If Vito were my real father, would I confide that in him? If Vito were my real father, would my life be like this?

My throat feels tight. I'd better go back to observing the landscape outside the window.

After Monte San Biagio, the mountains on the left of the train are triangular peaks, almost like pure geometrical forms, without a single human construction. However, toward the sea, the stretch of greenhouses on the plain continues. Once again the windows on the right and those on the left seem to give onto two opposite worlds, very distant from each other.

The skinny American girl, whose waist is narrower than one of the other girl's thighs, hands the latter a cookie. Her gesture is that of a tamer: she holds it in front of her but at a distance, denying it to her, expecting obedience. The fat girl has the expression of someone ready to do anything just to get that cookie; the skinny one, that of someone who knows it. Only after a while does she grant it to her with a smile that suggests power. Her companion grabs it quickly, immediately looking away from the one who is both the perpetrator and the witness of her humiliation and, chewing, returns to her book. The title is embossed in gold lettering, illegible, and I only manage to make out the subheading:
A true story
. I imagine it must be the story of a tormented life, complete with a difficult childhood, abuse, and an edifying final redemption.