Eva Sleeps (33 page)

Ruthi, however, was sad. The little girl who had welcomed Eva like the present of a gift doll had become a girl of fifteen. She was still very blonde and a little too thin, but beneath her white lashes her eyes were so interested in others that everybody liked her company. Wastl, too. Very much. And she was beginning to realize that she found his company not just pleasant but almost indispensable. However, Wastl had just told her that after he finished his military service, he would save some money with the Val d'Adige harvest and that he'd then go to Morocco.

Morocco. It was the name of a place very far away, Eva thought, perhaps near America? Yes, that's right. Not so long ago, on Ulli's new television, they were talking about its capital: Morocco City. How did you get there? On the same bus that took her mother away? Perhaps Morocco City was in the same direction as the kitchen where she worked, only a little farther.

No bus, Wastl was saying. He'd be hitchhiking to Morocco. But he didn't ask Ruthi to go with him. The girl tried not to cry but the group on the stage, ineffably called The We, didn't make things any easier: they'd just started singing a slow, very sad song,with the electric guitar screaming in pain like a wounded animal.

Hitchhiking.

Another beautiful, cheerful-sounding word. Eva wasn't sure she knew what it meant but she said to herself: I'll do that too when I grow up.

O
nce again we're far away from the sea, with the mountainous mass of the Sorrento peninsula between us. From Angri downwards, whenever the train slows down, there's a terrible smell of burning rubber. I imagine it must be the brakes.

The farther south we go, the farther ahead we are in the season. Here, the fruit trees have no blossoms but already young green leaves. In the middle of the highway intersection, there stands an incongruous wrought iron and delicate glass Art Nouveau gazebo, like the pavilion of an Italianate garden. A little temple to beauty in the middle of nowhere.

All the rail tracks of Salerno Station are white with disinfectant, or perhaps lime. The impression is that here they're very keen on neutralizing those impolite people who go to the toilet when the train is stationary. The hill beyond the platform roofs is covered in identical buildings, really identical, identical in every detail without the slightest variation.

But they certainly do have quite a view of the sea.

The two American girls get off, presumably to go to the Amalfi coast. Once again it's the chubby one who pulls down both backpacks, while the other one just sits and watches her, impassive and sullen. This time I don't get up to give a hand, either, I don't know why. The stout girl puffs under the weight of her backpack with the pink teddy bear.

I feel like saying, turn the teddy bear over, you can't go around with a cuddly toy hanging head down! But I don't have the courage. It's unpleasant, and it's not a nice way of communicating, remember you're traveling, you need the kindness of strangers . . .

Perhaps, ever since Sigi, I've been too sensitive to the subject of “cuddly toys being used inappropriately.” The two girls have already left the compartment without saying goodbye. We travelled together for almost three hours and didn't exchange a single word.

“One of these days you should really hurl the backpack right at that anorexic tyrant.”

Before the train leaves again, a couple in their sixties and a young woman of twenty-five, thirty at most, with slightly pimply skin she clearly feels embarrassed about, the beautiful long eyes of a gypsy, T-shirt and jeans, come and sit across from me. The lady, her mother, I think, is right opposite me. She's holding her handbag, jacket, and a large plastic shopping bag, and doesn't look like she's going to make herself more comfortable. She doesn't put anything down even though there are two empty seats next to her.

There's loud snoring coming from the Indians in the compartment next door, as expressive as the recent, “Hallo? Hallo?”

 

From Battipaglia onwards, once again, greenhouses, greenhouses, greenhouses. Purple ones (curly lettuce), bright green (round lettuce), and red (tomatoes)—extend as far as some apartment blocks. There are even lemon groves in the midst of the buildings. The fallow field is covered in yellow, fuchsia, purple, blue flowers and, next to it, a field of brilliant green wheat. So many colors in this country.

On the other hand, the elegant spans of the decommissioned old railroad bridge are made of vermilion brick. It has a very narrow gauge, and the tracks look like those of a toy train set. I wonder if it dates back to the Bourbons, when Naples was one of the most modern cities in the world.

We cross a pair of small valleys with no houses and only after we've crossed Vallo di Lucania do the bricks of the ancient railroad reappear. Another bridge of that beautiful warm color launches itself over a gorge. The winding ballast carries on until it ends up against a house! Does it continue inside? Who knows? Perhaps it's like some houses in Rome, built around aqueducts: a span that, two thousand years ago, carried water to the Eternal City, and now acts as an architrave. It must be something, I think, to have a historic railroad going through your living room.

Some things happen only in Italy.

 

Now, whenever the train brakes, a sharp smell of dioxin penetrates my nose.

“What a stench!” the lady opposite me says.

Even though she boarded the train almost an hour ago, she still hasn't let go of anything: handbag, shopping bag and jacket, she keeps it all close to her chest as though we were on an overcrowded Indian train and not in a half-empty carriage over Easter. She even has the train tickets in her hand, ready to show the guard. After the usual Signora/Signorina ballet, we've started chatting.

They're from Messina. The husband is a retired policeman, as I should have guessed from the salt-and-pepper mustache and the formerly athletic physique. The daughter has a degree in ancient literature and is training to be a teacher. She is outraged.

“Even people with behavioral problems are admitted to the program, people who shouldn't ever be in contact with children. Or stupid people who have never studied but who know the right people.”

They ask where I come from. I tell them.

The mother has been listening attentively from behind her barrier of possessions. Her arms must be aching by now and perhaps that's why she's raised her heels and is on her toes: in order to hold on to everything better so it doesn't fall off.

“Once, we went on holiday to Ortisei. When the kids were still little. Alpe di Siusi, it's so beautiful, isn't it, Mario?”

“Yes, very beautiful. A paradise.”

Wife and husband smile at each other. Perhaps they're remembering a special moment they spent at Seiser Alm.

“You really do have regional autonomy! Not like us in Sicily, where we're autonomous from the Italian government but subjects of the Mafia. If I were to start my profession all over again, I'd move to the North and raise my children there. Without all those people with recommendations.”

The wife looks at me and catches me by surprise: “Sorry to ask but . . . Do you feel more German or more Italian?”

And she didn't even put down her bags before asking me! I catch my breath. Naturally, my answer is well rehearsed. “I have an Italian passport but my language is German, my land is the Southern part of Tyrol, other parts of which, however, like North Tyrol and East Tyrol, are in Austria. We call it Südtirol but in Italian it's Alto Adige, since the difference has always been where you're looking from: from above or below.”

My answer silences her. She looks at her husband.

“But didn't they speak Ladin in Ortisei?” she asks him.

“Yes.”

“Which is actually a different Ladin from the one they speak in Val Badia,” I say.

“What a complicated place!”

“Yes, it is.”

 

Until a few years ago, when you said you were a German speaker from Alto Adige, they thought you were a terrorist. At the very least they'd ask: but why do you people hate Italians so much?

Then things changed. In the weekly supplement of the newspaper, a few months ago, the front cover was devoted to separatist ethnic movements in Europe. It mentioned:

Corsica

Slovakia

Scotland

Catalonia

the Basque Country

Kosovo

Montenegro

Slovenia

Croatia

Bosnia

and

the Po Valley.

The Po Valley!

No sign of Alto Adige.

 

Once, when I took Zhou home after she'd been at my place, I met Signor Song, who was at home. A rare event since he's always out on his business, which is spread throughout the North-east of Italy. He asked me in and opened for me the box for fighting crickets, the only possession he took away from China. Inside, there were two miniature plates, one for water and one for food, finely decorated in enamel; the microscopic wedding cage where thoroughbred fighters are made to mate with the most fertile females; tiny scales for weighing the crickets in order to organize equal sides in terms of bulk and strength; a kind of small brush with a single horse hair at the end which, Song explained, was necessary to spur the crickets on before the battle and make them more aggressive. In that kind of tiny dollhouse the absence of the cricket, any cricket, evoked exile.

“Why don't you catch two crickets from our fields and try and make them fight?” I asked.

Signor Song looked at me with polite eyes. Without a hint of impatience, he replied, “Only a Chinese cricket can fight in a Chinese way.”

I remember feeling it was a sentence full of great wisdom, so I kept quiet.

However, now I wonder, is that true?

In 1981, Ulli and I went to shut ourselves in iron cages on a Bolzano bridge with many other young people. We were protesting against the ethnic census included in the new autonomy statute.

It was seven years before his, well, let's call it accident at work. Ulli was nearly twenty, he could already vote and I would also soon be eighteen. Every Alto Adige adult had to state whether he or she was German, Ladin or Italian.

Those who refused to fill in the statement wouldn't be able to teach, claim state benefits, or work as civil servants. Above all you could not describe yourself as multi-ethnic. It was the
Sprachgruppenzugehörigkeitserklärung
so longed for by the old Magnago. He, of all people, the son of a German mother and an Italian father, had started saying, “
Nicht Knödel mit Spaghetti mischen
,” you shouldn't mix Knödel and spaghetti. Schools, libraries, local authorities, cultural centers: in this vision everything had to be separate.

My mother claimed she was convinced this was the right solution.

“A marriage between an Italian man and a German woman could never work,” she claimed.

It was already eight years since Vito had left.

In any case, my mother has always worshipped Magnago. As a little girl, she too was at Castel Firmiano, and she never tired of telling how she had shaken the hand of the Father of Autonomy in the hotel where she worked. We young people, however, didn't like him that much. The Greens had organized the demonstration. They were led by Alexander Langer, a visionary elf with rabbit teeth who, for our now autonomous
Heimat
, entertained dreams of a larger soul, less petty, and not such a narrow-minded mountain apartheid. That's why so many good South Tyroleans hated him, and so did Magnago, more than anyone else. On each of the two iron cages on the Talvera bridge there was a sign. DEUTSCHE, was written on one, and ITALIANI on the other. Anyone walking over the bridge was invited to come into the one corresponding to his or her ethnicity. Once you were shut behind the iron bars you could no longer communicate with the occupants of other cage. Exactly what the heads of the SVP hoped would happen between
Daitsche
and
Walsche
.

It was a warm sunny day and the bodies of the demonstrators all crammed together in the
Daitsche
cage smelled of wool and sweat. That's when Ulli said to me, “I've been living in a cage like this since I was born.”

I couldn't turn around because we were too tight.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He answered, “Ever since the midwife told my mother: it's a boy.”

 

We're still crossing a timeless landscape: streams of limpid water, forsythias set alight by the sun, prickly pears clotted together like coral colonies, olive trees with manes wide enough for a whole family to fit underneath. Sitting under an almond tree in blossom, a young woman is breastfeeding her child. And once again, high above the gorge, the arch of a bridge of an ancient, vermillion brick ballast. That's the only place where the ancient railroad has been preserved: where it passes through the air and doesn't steal land from anyone, or where it has been incorporated into a new building.

Maybe the same is true for one's own identity, that very fundamental human fixation: either it remains unchanged outside History, or it gets transformed, or dies.

 

We emerge from tunnels to a view over the sea, then more tunnels, and more again. After Policastro, with its grey Medieval walls right over the sea, we're about to leave Campania.

W
hite veil, long white dress, white scapular down to the ribcage: except for her little girl size, Eva looked like a novice.

But not Gerda.

She was wearing a chiffon outfit with aquamarine patterns, not as short as the ones she wore to go dancing, but almost. That “almost” had caused her much concern. She had carefully considered the amount of thigh she could show on the occasion of her daughter's first communion. Not too much, in order not to offend. Not too little, so no one would think she was trying to camouflage herself. Gerda fully intended everyone to know: she wasn't ashamed of being a free woman. She didn't need to ask anyone for the money to buy bread and milk for herself and her daughter; therefore, she was the one to decide whom she let into her bed and whom she didn't.