Eva Sleeps (41 page)

Magnago collapsed on the chair and put his hand to his forehead. He asked her to turn on the television.

There it was, the body curled up in the boot. The crowd of policemen. The priest giving the last rites. Over his bent neck, the famous face with its secret intelligence had a long beard after all the days of anxiety, terror, imprisonment. There it was in full, the destructive force of the hurricane. Aldo Moro had been killed.

Magnago hid his face in his hands. His wife was standing next to him. He leaned his forehead against her chest, and wept.

 

On that May 9, 1978, Gerda too was standing in front of the television. Frau Mayer, patrons, cooks, and assistant cooks were all watching the screen together, in silence.

Among them only Gerda, Elmar, and Frau Mayer had been present at the banquet which, so many years earlier,
Obmann
Magnago had hosted for Aldo Moro, in that very dining room. The rest of the staff had been hired later. Gerda recalled how they'd all stood in a row to say goodbye to the two powerful men. She couldn't remember the expression of the Italian, but then she recalled that he'd kept his eyes down while giving her his hand, and that it wasn't really a proper handshake: the grip of a defenseless man who certainly wasn't very strong. She wondered why they'd killed such a gentle man.

Besides, no man, powerful or ordinary, deserves to be shoved into the trunk of a car like that, like a thing.

 

That wasn't the worst day because every death is worse than any other for those who mourn it and, afterwards, there were many deaths in Italy, too many. However, in comparison, some of the attacks that used to take place in Alto Adige seemed like the firecrackers that explode several days after New Year's Eve is over. Nothing but insignificant bang bang from tiny little crackers, in comparison to what was happening in the rest of Italy.

In 1979, the
Tiroler Schutzbund
, an extremist faction few people had heard of, blew up the Wastl in Eva's home town for the umpteenth time. For the past forty years, the monument to the Alpini had been erected and destroyed, erected again and destroyed again, as though it had become the stake in a very long competition.

For a couple of years now, Eva had been a boarder in Bolzano, where she had been admitted to high school because of excellent grades at the end of middle school. After many arguments, she had persuaded her mother that she'd never become a cook. That morning, she walked past the intersection and saw young drafted soldiers in overalls and boots, armed with brooms and dust pans, collecting pieces of Wastl from the ground. They looked more like good little housewives than military forces deployed against a now-obsolete form of terrorism.

Nobody was interested in these things anymore, on either side, except for a few fanatics. A few months later, even the National Association of Alpini took the wise decision not to reconstruct the monument again, but to erect a granite bas-relief representing Alpini in peace service. Until it was built, the headless bust of Wastl would remain in its place on the pedestal. The bas-relief, however, was never sculpted, and the stub of statue is still there even now.

 

Eva was back home for her vacation when the small package arrived. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a thin string. Gerda went to open the door.

The names of the addressee and the sender were in neat handwriting. Gerda recognized it immediately. “I nimms net,” she told Udo, the postman. I'm not taking it.

“But it's for Eva—”

“I'm her mother. I know she doesn't want it.”

Udo nearly asked if she was sure. But she looked up at him with her transparent, almond-shaped eyes and stood there, motionless, staring at him. He said nothing. He took a pen out of his breast pocket and a form from the leather bag. He handed them to her, now avoiding her face. “Sign here.”

Gerda signed. Then, suddenly gentle, she asked, “So what's going to happen to this parcel now?”

“I'll take it back to the sorting office and tell them you don't want it—”

“That Eva doesn't want it.”

“—and they'll send it back.”

Udo put the parcel back into his leather bag, folded the form, and slipped it with the other papers. He replaced the pen in his breast pocket after checking that it was closed securely. He was about to leave. The upper part of his body was already turning toward the road and his feet were about to follow when he had one last scruple. “Where's Eva, anyway?”

“Eva is asleep.”

 

The brown parcel traveled backwards along the road it had taken to arrive at that spot: two thousand seven hundred and ninety-four kilometers in total, there and back.

D
ear Sisiduzza,

Today, you turn sixteen.

It's an important day.

All your birthdays are important days for me, and even though I've not been able to see you again, I've never forgotten any of them.

 

The hotel room has marble tiles and sponge effect walls, with a fruit and flower frieze running along the top. The night is quiet and, lying on a bed with an iron headboard, I have the Walkman headphones over my ears.

Vito's voice. So young, so familiar. Every so often it breaks with emotion and then it hurts to listen to it.

Your mother and I couldn't get married for so many reasons, I don't know if she's ever explained them to you, but that's not important now. Things turned out the way they turned out and nobody can go back. However, I want you to know that for me you are not just . . . Gerda's daughter. You're also my Sisiduzza and I love you very much, and just because I haven't seen you for years doesn't mean that I've stopped.

I've written you so many letters but you never answered. I do understand, you know, I'm not going to tell you off, you were so little. What could you say to me? Perhaps you were angry with me, and you had a perfect reason to be. But now you're grown-up and it's different. If you want, I'd like us to write to each other, perhaps even talk on the phone sometimes, you could tell me how things are going in high school, for example. I know you've always been very bright, and I'd love to follow you in your studies and along your path, I'm not very well-educated, but your teachers will make sure they teach you, I just want you to know that you can always count on me.

Now that you're growing into a woman, I think you will need not to be alone, perhaps even more so than when you were tiny. I mean, of course you have your mom, she loves you very much and has done everything she could for you, even when things were very . . . difficult for her.
 

There's a long pause. Vito clears his throat.

However, girls your age also need a dad and, if you want to, I could be, well, let's say a kind of a dad, the one who gives you advice, comforts you, perhaps even chides you when you make mistakes.

Above all, someone who protects you.

I press the stop button. I stare at the Walkman. I press rewind.

. . 
. one who gives you advice, comforts you, perhaps even tells you off if you make mistakes.

Above all, someone who protects you.

Rewind.

. . . —
one who protects you.

Rewind.

. . 
. who protects you.

Rewind.

. . 
. who protects you.

Rewind.

. . 
. who protects you.

Rewind . . .

 

There are bunches of grapes, lemons, and fruit I don't recognize. Poppies, roses, orange blossoms. Every so often, between a fruit and flower, there's a Cupid. How long do I lie there, staring at the frieze that runs high up along the walls? I have no idea. A gray light is beginning to filter through the window.

I can imagine him, a young non-commissioned officer in uniform, sitting at the table, talking into the microphone of the Geloso tape recorder. That fresh, affectionate, careful voice. It would have been there for me, but I lost it.

I lost Vito.

I lost him the way you lose at a fairground, when, instead of throwing the cloth ball straight and knocking down all the cans, so then they give you a prize, I threw but didn't win.

I didn't win a father. I didn't win him when I was born, or later with Vito. I didn't win a husband or children. I didn't win brothers or sisters who could share the difficulty of being my mother's daughter. I didn't win Ulli's love. They were right, the people at Ulli's funeral: they were saying, we lost him. I thought that wasn't true but, actually, yes, I did lose him. All my life I've been throwing cloth balls against cans but I've never been able to hit them, and now I think I've almost run out of balls.

I stretch, my arms knock down the parcel paper that the cassette tape was wrapped in. I pick it up. The address of the sender is on the back, like they used to do. It has been lying this side down in a drawer for so many years that it's still dark. The handwriting is neat, like that of a good soldier.

VITO ANANIA, VIA BOTTEGHELLE 17, REGGIO CALABRIA.

The side with the details of the addressee, however, is more discolored. It has obviously been in the light more. SIGNORINA EVA HUBER.

It was addressed to me. My name is, as a matter of fact, Eva Huber.

That name, it's me.

Above the address, in red, there's an oblique stamp: REFUSED.

Refused.

By whom?

Who?

I look up at the fruit on the freeze and recognize it now: it's a pomegranate.

It was she. She refused it.

She refused this package that was addressed to me, only to me, Eva Huber, and that's me, just me, not her, she has another name, she's another person, we are not the same thing, and yet she did this. I was sixteen years old and she told the postman to send back Vito's voice saying “I'll be the one who protects you.”

I could have not lost Vito. I could have him here. Everything could have been different. But she had the postman write: “refused.”

My solar plexus explodes with indignation.

It's all clear to me now.

It's her fault. It's all her fault. Everything, absolutely everything, is her fault.

I curse the day I was born, because that day Gerda Huber became my mother.

 

I go to the bathroom, throw cold water on my face, I am tired, tired but lucid as never before. Anger I've never known in my life presses on my chest like an iron hand. Tell her. I have to tell her.

Now the light streaming in through the window is pink and orange. It promises a beautiful day.

I go back to bed from the bathroom, sit down, pick up the phone, ask for an outside line, and dial a number. I have the implacable, precise movements of an assassin.

Gerda Huber has gotten up early all her life, and still does that now she's retired. After half a dozen rings, she answers.

I don't say hello. I immediately ask, why? Why did you get the postman to write “refused” on that package?

She says nothing

Maybe she was already awake, or maybe the phone has dragged her out of her light, pensioner's sleep.

I didn't even say: hi, it's me.

She takes a while to react while I throw other words at her, like blades, until she finally understands what I'm talking about.

“How do you know?”

“I'm in Reggio Calabria. I've come to see Vito, who's dying.”

“How . . . ?”

Instead of answering her, I carry on. “Imagine if someone had prevented you from having a father. Your father. When you were a child. And even later, when you were older. Think. Think what it would have been like.”

W
hen was the last time Gerda had seen her father? At Peter's funeral, a quarter of a century earlier.

These corridors were at such strange angles. You went straight ahead and ended up colliding with a window, and not a straight one but crooked. Even on the outside, the new retirement home had a façade full of oblique lines, triangular balconies, strange spires on the roof.

For a long time, the town had been waiting for the new
Altersheim
to be built. Perhaps because the population had increased, or perhaps because death had grown lazy, the old retirement home was always overcrowded. The waiting list was very long, families waited years to obtain a place. And, since there was only one way in which the occupant of a room could vacate it, it wasn't nice to wish for it. Now, finally, with a new building, there were far more beds and the waiting list diminished.

The town council had spared no expense in building it, partly because with the financial autonomy of the province there was more than enough money, to the point where one sometimes wondered how to spend it all. The architects who had planned it were pleased with their innovative work, the walls that met with daring perspectives, the large rooms that were never square or rectangular, but diamond, trapeze, scalene triangle-shaped. Unfortunately, moving amid those sharp corners could be very difficult for the guests; and anyone who brought furniture from their homes, so they could spend the end of their lives in their own beds, found that there was no way of putting them within those misshapen lines. But imagine an old people's home mentioned in architectural journals. What prestige!

Of Hermann Huber's children, Gerda was the only one the management of the
Altersheim
was able to track down: one was dead, the other abroad and no one remembered her married name. She was the only one left, at least the only one living in the town.

That's what the voice on the telephone had said in Frau Mayer's office, and she had personally gone to the kitchen to tell Gerda somebody urgently wanted to speak to her. The illness that had struck her father was in its final stages, the voice also said, he was no longer responding to therapy, and was on the danger list. If she wanted to say goodbye for the last time, she shouldn't waste any time. Unless she preferred to go there afterwards, in order to carry out the paperwork that would make the room available for the next person on the list.