Eva Sleeps (29 page)

Of course he'd also found it tough when he'd first arrived in Alto Adige.

He had enrolled at the German language course for non-commissioned officers of his own free will. He liked the idea of chewing on another language, even though he'd only spoken Calabrian at elementary school. In fact, he hadn't found it too hard, nor driven his teacher to despair, like that guy from Bari who, when asked “
Wie alt bist du
?”
³⁸
always replied, “One meter sixty-three!”

Alto Adige was the right place for serving your country in danger, of that he was convinced, so after his two years of training, he took his oath and was proud to go.

His first disappointment was when he arrived at the barracks near Merano. Headquarters wasn't prepared for such a large dispatch of soldiers, and everything was provisional. The courtyard was full of weeds, the dormitories filthy and with peeling walls, so there were one hundred men cramped together in a single place with all their bodily smells, just a tent to separate him and the other Carabinieri from the Alpini. There was no kitchen, so meals were cooked on large camp stoves that stank of kerosene, and there wasn't even a mess, so you had to eat in the freezing courtyard from the same mess tins you then used for washing yourself.

And forget about the troops. These young conscripted and auxiliary Carabinieri had been selected of course, but not for their abilities. On the contrary: military service in Alto Adige was a punishment.

Many could barely read or write, and hardly had any sense of discipline or order. More than once, at 6
A.M.
, when it was his turn to do reveille, the staff sergeant had narrowly avoided being hit in the face with a shoe. The same boys who, after a month in the passes and screes, if asked the name of their hometown, would burst into tears like children.

And then there was the cold. What can a Calabrian possibly know about the cold? A Calabrian knows stifling heat and scirocco, he knows drought, he knows the cannibal sun that sinks its teeth into your head, and the wind that makes you mad, euphoric or unconscious; but a Calabrian certainly doesn't know this cold. The first time he'd experienced it was in the barracks courtyard, squatting like a beggar, eating soup that had frozen before he'd had the time to put his spoon into it. That was nothing compared to the freezing cold he was to suffer whilst patrolling the border crossings, but he didn't know that yet.

His only consolation, during those first months in Alto Adige, had been the pasta with chilies in a trattoria near Ponte Druso, owned by southerners, where he went with his comrades. And of course, there were the Fräulein.

He'd always pictured German women like the singing Kessler twins, with their never-ending long legs, glittering bodices, backcombed blonde hair. South Tyrolean women were not as elegant even though they were blondes, and didn't have toupees but plaits twisted around their heads like spare wheels. Still, you had to admit it: South Tyroleans legs were much more beautiful than Calabrian ones.

“These,” the mad second lieutenant Genovese would say, “have a high center of gravity.”

He'd spent the first year patrolling the border, the only Carabiniere among platoons of eighty or a hundred Alpini. Their mission: to stop terrorists from entering Italian soil. Or, better still, catch them so that he, who was on police duty, would hand them over to the law. They would hike up and down the passes beneath the peaks on the border between Italy and Austria—Passo Resia, Vetta d'Italia, Val Passiria. His backpack weighed over ninety pounds: weapons, machine guns, sleeping bag, tent and canvas, army meal supplies, mess tin with its little stove, shovel, pickax. All that on your back: the point was to go where no van could. They looked like tortoises, with all that stuff on their backs, except that nobody has ever ordered a tortoise to walk up to its waist in snow for hours on end.

They wouldn't return to the barracks for weeks.

By day, they walked along the watershed; at night they would make holes in the snow a couple of meters long, throw the tent canvas over it like a cover, camouflage it with some snow, then go to sleep inside. Two hours of sleep, two hours of watch. There was always a fierce wind blowing on the border—he came to realize that mountain passes are like open windows on both sides of the house, they compete. That's why they never put up the tents: if there was a snowstorm during the night, they wouldn't notice they were being blown away, they were so exhausted.

Already after the first week, some would start hallucinating. It was the cold, the lack of sleep, the tiredness. Those who were constipated would start hallucinating first, un-expelled toxins mixed with exhaustion going straight to the head. Every so often, someone would become delirious. Everyone, sooner or later, would start calling for his mom.

Sometimes, the staff sergeant wondered what the point of these operations was. A hundred soldiers clinging to a snow-covered slope are more visible than a line of armored cars, whereas the terrorists moved about skillfully, two or three at most, and knew every scree, every rock, every protrusion in these granite mountains, and would slip over the border and back beyond the boundary stones, like chamois, without leaving a trace.

As a matter of fact, they hadn't seen a single one.

However, the motto was, “Usi obbedir tacendo.” Keep silent and obey. If he'd considered questioning orders he wouldn't have become a Carabiniere.

Another consolation was reaching the masi. There were some even at high altitude, especially in the neighboring valleys of Val Venosta, beneath the glaciers. It was normal to be welcomed by ten or even thirteen children. They were poor peasants with many children but they always had enough to eat. 50,000 lire was enough to produce a hot meal for the entire troop. The women would serve them then watched them eat, silently but without hostility. Not like some waiters in the town cafés, who pretended not to speak Italian and when he ordered a coffee, replied, “
Nichts verstehen
” or “
Wiederholen Sie auf Deutsch
,” so then he would enunciate with correct pronunciation, “
geben Sie mir bitte einen Kaffee
,” and then, Deutsch or not Deutsch, they had to bring him coffee. These mountain peasants, however, genuinely didn't speak Italian, and when he tried to communicate in German they didn't exactly smile but, well, almost. Then they would send their children up to the attic and give their eiderdowns to officers and non-commissioned officers, so that they could lie down on the tables of the
Stube
, in the warmth. He, however, would go into the hayloft with his men, without a single regret: lying in the fragrant hay, with the warm breath of the cows rising from the cowshed, you slept like a king.

 

Not so, here, in the hut abandoned by the customs police, where he couldn't sleep at night. During the day he'd lie on the camp bed for a couple of hours, and perhaps also have a snooze before evening. But never after dark. To keep awake, he would write. He brought along many notepads, the kind with the sheets bound together at the top, like the ones used by cartoon journalists. He also had pens, but now he realized he should get a supply of pencils instead: lead doesn't shrink in the cold like ink does. His handwriting was tidy, diligent and what he wrote was also precise: whether a magazine was jammed, how many tins of food had been used up, the sighting of a capercaillie. And, of course, the watch shifts.

He wrote on his rickety table, watching all those who slept and going out for a quick chat with those on watch. His hearing, which had always been sharp, had become even more so. He heard every sound in the night: the rustling of trees, the call of the night predators, the stones rumbling down the screes, the cracking of glaciers. Sometimes, he thought he could detect the buzzing of constellations that stood out with their sharp light from the cosmic blackness. That's when he knew he was really tired.

He was twenty-four years old while the eldest among his men was four years younger. He watched over them like a mother over sick children. After all, they were somewhat ill: with fear, isolation, cold, and homesickness. With silence, too. With that motionless, unknown mountain that gave birth to sons who could pop out of nowhere, massacre the bodies of fellow soldiers, then disappear again into her lap.

Right there, sometime earlier, terrorists had killed three customs officers. The border was less than ten meters away and, using a kind of zip wire, they'd run a bomb from Austrian territory to the windows of the hut. Three men had been blown up in their sleep and a fourth had been blinded.

It was too dangerous for customs officers to remain there. And so, for almost three months, it had been the staff sergeant's lot to be there, in the hut in the pastures, and command a platoon of thirty men—well, men . . . it was hard to call these frightened boys that. They had dug out a dozen holes in the snow around the perimeter of the building, and when it was your turn to keep watch, you'd get into one of them, only your shoulders above ground like a pestle in a mortar. At night, he would place a soldier in every emplacement, but two or three were enough during the day. He'd put up a barricade of barbed wire all around and, as they used up the food supplies, they'd tie the empty sauce cans to it: all you had to do was touch a single point of the barbed wire and it would ring out like cow bells. Nobody would be able to approach the hut without making a racket.

A few yards beyond no man's land, there was an old Austrian customs house, much smaller than the Italian one. The zip wire that had killed the customs officers had been dispatched from there. He always kept an eye on it day and night. Was there anyone inside? Would they return and kill them from there? Sometimes, farther away, he could see two men with binoculars watching the horizon for hours. They never got close enough to be recognized. It was hard to resist the impulse to go check them out but the orders were quite definite: do not cross the border. The terrorists made relations between Italy and Austria tense enough as it was, the last thing they needed were skirmishes on the border.

He was a soldier, he wasn't in the business of politics. He used to think that Alto Adige folk, all of them, were ungrateful traitors to the unity of the country. Then he had arrived in Alto Adige. No sooner had he left the cities at the bottom of the valley, with their factories full of southern workers, and met the peasants, than he had immediately understood: there was nothing Italian about the people here. However, terrorists were bloodthirsty cowards who wouldn't even let you see their faces.

Since the recent attacks on fellow soldiers, the atmosphere in the barracks had become heavy. There was talk that an officer of the Alpini, a guy who used bombs and grenades as paperweights and who, instead of the President of the Republic, had a portrait of the Duce behind the desk, had declared, “It's now the turn of a South Tyrolean.”

The staff sergeant didn't want to hear such things, not even as a joke. Then, a few days later, that young man from Val Pusteria had been killed at a roadblock. The soldiers who shot him were young conscripts, so it could only have been a tragic error due to the tension. And yet, when it happened, he'd remembered the officer's words and, for a moment, felt the blood chill in his veins.

Now he had received an order: the Italian flag had to flutter on the boundary stones. And so, every morning, the raising of the flag was performed with pride by the soldier in charge.

However, there was another order to execute, which was no less difficult because he'd given it to himself: to return every one of these boys to his family.

There was a false alarm at least once every night. “I heard someone cough,” one of the men would say. Or else, “There's a small light among the trees.” And immediately, all the others keeping watch would confirm that yes, they too had heard a suspicious noise, seen a light, heard footsteps crunching in the snow. They'd stir one another like pigeons. Or else he would fire a reconnaissance flare with the Garand rifle, and in the eight seconds between the shot and the little comets lighting up in the sky, somebody would start screaming, terrified, “They're attacking!” and perhaps even start machine-gunning at random with the
Maschinengewehr
. In the morning, they would find larches and fir trees mown down, stone dead: no wonder they used to call the MG 42 “Hitler's saw.” It was a miracle that there weren't any wounded among them yet. Thankfully, he didn't have to give his superiors an account of the ammunition.

Once when—by pure chance—the radio was working, he had begged for reinforcements: he'd explained to headquarters that the men were exhausted, that they couldn't take it anymore and, especially, that there weren't enough of them to take it in turns to keep watch. He could no longer guarantee the effectiveness of the service or the safety of his men. He'd even drafted an official report.
It has become necessary to replace the soldiers who have been here for over a month
—he had written.
I, the officer in charge can no longer answer for those who are in such an altered state of body and mind.
Then he had tied the envelope to the dangling wire attached to the belly of the helicopter that dropped supplies and ammunition.

Another month had passed. No reinforcements or replacements had arrived. And even the helicopter hadn't appeared for days because of the strong winds. They'd finished almost all the cans of food, and all they had left was a little flour. Those with a good aim had been given permission to go hunting, so they'd eaten the odd hare. But they were beginning to feel hungry. They'd spend the evening huddled around the radio, trying to make out the warm trace of human voices through the crackling. Like miners who go deeper into a dark and muddy gallery in search of rubies.

 

He took the pen from under his armpit. It gave out much more warmth than he felt inside. He read what he'd written up to then, and resumed his writing. The ink ran fluid once again.