Eva Sleeps (14 page)

 

The janitor nun hadn't yet dared confess to her spiritual father the business with the tweezers. It wasn't exactly theft. Their owner, an unnatural blond with underwear that was a little too well cared for, had left the institute over a month earlier, leaving behind an extra orphan for whom they had struggled to find a family. Finding the chrome steel tweezers at the bottom of the empty cupboard couldn't be considered a sin, and perhaps nor could not handing them immediately to the Mother Superior. The fact was that once the pointless period pains which she had suffered for over thirty years had ceased—thank God!—a few hairs as tough as barbed wire had started to grow on the sister's chin. When nobody could see her, she would furtively look for them, holding her hand like a claw, and, with a decisive grip of her thumb and index finger, she would tear them out. The tweezers had been an epiphany.

Now, however, she feared the moment when she would find the strength to confess that sin of vanity, not just because of the shame and contrition that awaited her, but because she would then be ordered to hand the tweezers over to the Mother Superior once and for all. And so she would have to do without their neat, accurate pull, which was so much more pleasant and elegant than the angry gesture with her fingers. And so she was intent on tweezing tufts of very tough hair, still telling herself that it was the last time, though not really believing it because she had had this resolution for days without acting on it when, in the porters lodge that was her kingdom, the gate bell rang. To serve in that Institute was probably the charitable activity least likely to make a nun regret taking the vow of chastity. The sadness, disorientation and fear of the girls who found here a brief refuge was nothing to envy. “You're complaining now, but you enjoyed it before,” the janitor nun had said to Gerda when her labor had begun, which could have seemed like acrimonious jealousy. Instead, in that sentence that was not original but which she used with almost all the girls giving birth as a distilled point of view based on her experience, a question was especially implicit. Since they had enjoyed the before so much that they were ready to ignore the serious consequences they were suffering now, exactly what was so pleasurable about this before?

For over twenty years, the janitor nun had been watching lonely, depressed young women crowding the dormitories, clinging to their children like buoys after they'd seen their lives sink before their very eyes. Every so often, the very men who hadn't married them would turn up at the iron gates: boys with a shudder of regret or other women's husbands who, after all, felt affection for the mothers of their bastards. They were all so universally inadequate to the drama being lived by the women they had made pregnant that the porter nun couldn't bring herself to cast too severe a judgment upon those failed fathers. To her they looked like spoiled children unequipped to understand the harsh destiny awaiting their lovers. They would insist that the nun deliver cheap jewelry to girls who, instead, had to be watched so they wouldn't commit suicide; they would propose romantic trips to remote little hotels, taking advantage of wives who were conveniently away, to women who were suffering from mastitis because they had just given their newborn up for adoption. And these weren't the worst ones: they, at least, got in contact. They'd peep through the gates, looking awkward, wearing their best suits; the janitor nun knew they would have given anything to obtain from her a word or a look that would state that their choice not to acknowledge those children and marry their mothers was inevitable, understandable and right. The more of these men she saw, the less she understood what was so attractive about them as to lead these women to such disasters. It was a mystery to her, and meeting Hannes Staggl certainly did not shed any more light on the question.

When she pulled the heavy wrought iron bolt she noticed the cream-colored Mercedes 190 outside the institute gates. The janitor nun saw a large white bird on the chrome mudguards: her own reflection. It's only when she looked up that she noticed Hannes. He was behind the car: standing in the middle of the empty road, he was looking at the windows beyond the top of the surrounding wall. The nuns were not so naive as to lodge the girls in rooms overlooking the street, or they would have spent entire days checking for themselves whether the miracle that would save them was coming. The windows through which Hannes was trying to catch a glimpse of the girl he had gotten pregnant belonged to the staff.

She was struck by the young man's almost orange hair, his transparent skin and freckled hands. Hannes asked after Gerda Huber and the child she had given birth to, and the janitor nun found herself breathing a sigh of relief. She'd seen too many bastards forever condemned to carry around the faces of the fathers who'd abandoned them. Luckily for her, Gerda's daughter looked entirely like her mother.

“It's a girl. She's healthy. Her mom is well too.”

He started blinking with those opalescent eyelids: the word “mom” had struck him with the force of reality.

“What's her name?”

“Eva.”

He looked at the Mercedes for a moment. “It's a beautiful name.”

“Yes, it's beautiful.”

Again Hannes raised his eyes to the windows of the building, and squinted. Was it to glimpse the interior beyond the sky on the glass panes, to stall, to get used to this beautiful name?

Here we go, the janitor nun thought, he's about to ask. He is not holding packages or flowers but it's a rich man's car and when a girl ends up here because of a man with money there's not much point in fooling oneself.

“Can I see her? The little girl.”

The janitor nun tucked her chin into her throat and looked at him from below. “Yes, if you give her your surname.”

He lowered his eyes to his well-made shoes. He remained like this for a long time. The hazel irises of the janitor nun had lost their definition with age and blended into the cornea with the gray halo; but her pupils were still clear and black. Her expression was not severe but rather objective, patient, resigned; it did not express condemnation, but not his yearned-for absolution either. She knew he would leave without a word, his head down so as to avoid seeing the windows behind which he thought there was the daughter he did not acknowledge whereas, instead, there was the bursar nun examining the invoices of the suppliers, and the cook deciding on the dinner menu.

As the Mercedes vanished beyond the crossroads, the janitor nun wondered once again what the pleasure was that made all this worthwhile. She really couldn't imagine it.

 

Gerda was informed, however, of the other visit she received.

When the janitor nun opened the bolt and found Herr Neumann standing before her, what she noticed were the puffy eyelids, the large belly that pushed against the buttons of his cloth jacket, and especially his age. She felt relief that the blond, solid girl who said little but was so helpful in the kitchen and whose gait everyone found attractive, even the nun, hadn't been made pregnant by this man. Then Herr Neumann explained that he only wanted one thing from Gerda: that she should come back to work. Nobody would say anything offensive to her about what had happened, he guaranteed it. The janitor nun was sorry for having misjudged this generous man from his exterior look. As if the hairs on her chin truly revealed who she was! She mentally slapped her fingers and ordered herself to report her superficial arrogance to the father confessor.

When Gerda came out of the building, Herr Neumann's breath caught in his chest and the buttons of his cloth jacket nearly exploded because of this extra pressure. Never in his life had he seen a more beautiful woman. It's what he had thought the first time Gerda had walked into his kitchen wearing the scullery maid apron, but he never thought of it again in order not to make working next to her unbearable. Herr Neumann had been not unhappily married for almost thirty years, had grown children who had already made him a grandfather and, besides, he had promised to keep Gerda safe from insults. So he just said to her, “
Gerda gibs lai oane
”: there's only one Gerda.

She packed her suitcase and got into the pistachio-green Fiat 1300 with the white top, for which Herr Neumann had already payed half the installments. Leaving the National Organization for Mothers and Children forever, Gerda took two things away with her: a five-month-old daughter who never cried, and significant progress in mastering the Italian language. One thing, though, she left behind: the certainty that absolute love existed and that she was destined for it.

Once the Fiat 1300 vanished at the crossroads, the nuns, the Star of Goodness midwife, the
Terrona
nurse and the rest of the staff were on the sidewalk, saying goodbye, happy that Gerda—at least she—had somewhere to go. The following day, the janitor nun waited for her weekly interview with the spiritual father. She confessed all her sins. Then, with relief and regret, she handed the tweezers to the Mother Superior.

A
year after the 1980 Bologna massacre, in the summer of my high school graduation, I was on my way to the Tremiti Islands with a school mate. I didn't care for him but he fancied me so had persuaded his parents, rich shopkeepers in Bolzano, to pay for my travel and camping too. Until then I'd only ever seen the sea at Cesenatico, opposite the square buildings of the ex-Fascist colonies: the only travel agent my mother could afford was Caritas. Sea holidays for me meant the rancid smell of tomato sauce, the stench of too many badly washed children in a single dormitory, sand thrown into the eyes of the weaker children by older ones, abused by teachers angry with exhaustion.

It was before the days of the Italian Eurostar with compulsory bookings, and our carriage seemed full of war evacuees. Holiday makers going to the sea in August were bursting out of compartments as though from crammed cupboards that won't close anymore, they sat on the foldaway corridor seats, on each other's laps, on the floor, on the steps outside closed doors, inside the toilets (especially those traveling without a ticket, and there were quite a few of those). The boy ready to pay and I, like so many others, were overloaded with heavy backpacks made of thick, coarse fabric, with aluminum frames that were supposed to distribute the load on your back but just dug into your ribs. We smelled of feet, cannabis, strawberry-flavored Del Ponte chewing gum, and especially smoke: we always had a cigarette in our hand, you still could then. When we arrived at Bologna, our train stopped on the first platform and I saw right outside my window the tear in the wall, emphasized by the glass which even today commemorates the exact location of the explosion, and the clock fixed at that time: 10:25.

I grew up in the South Tyrol of bombs and attacks, and I was already old enough to have formed a definite opinion about Uncle Peter's death; but even I, the child of a land of terrorists and roadblocks couldn't—can't—fully imagine the extent of the Bologna massacre. Eighty-five dead, hundreds of injured: a massacre that belonged to horror on a different scale. When the train started again, I tried talking about it with the boy. He didn't reply, skated over the issue, and changed the subject as soon as he could, so that I had to keep my confused dismay to myself. I added this obvious lack of sensitivity to the many other factors indicating that he was unworthy of my love. The fact that he had paid for my trip didn't seem relevant in evaluating the issue.

I spent the holidays allowing other people to come on to me before his eyes. In the evening, around the bonfire on the beach, I let other boys with sleeping bags or young residents of the island touch me, but then I always searched his eyes. He never protested. He paid for everything until the last day. It was only many years later, after I'd lost touch with him for a while, that I heard from mutual acquaintances that one of his relatives from Val Passiria had been among the Bologna dead. He had been very fond of her, they said.

Now, in the middle of the night on a train, we come into Bologna station. We're at platform four and you can't see the gutted wall from my window.

There is nobody beneath the drably-lit platform roofs. The loudspeaker announces the rare arrivals and departures like a voice in the desert: an invisible prophet with a thick Emilia accent. His hermitage isn't made of mystical rocks but of marble benches, drink dispensers, tracks. His tiny community of followers is made up of me, the Neapolitan attendant, and the engine driver whose presence I've been sensing for hours as the train slowed and accelerated.

The prophet hurls his invectives at us: “The night InterCity train 780 ‘Freccia Salentina' from Bari and bound for Milan Central, is about to depart from platform . . . ”

“The train 1940 ‘del Sole' from Villa San Giovanni and bound for Turin Porta Nuova . . . ”

The train departs again while the voice carries on preaching in vain.

We exit the old-fashioned station light and dive once again into the darkness of the countryside, the great obscurity of natural night time which is neither hostile nor friendly, but simply different from us.

That's exactly how it was when I kept Ulli company while he spent the whole night combing the ski pistes on Marlene, his snowcat that was more comfortable and personalized than a truck: the zebra seat upholstery, the heating turned up to maximum so you could sit in a T-shirt, the stereo light flickering to the rhythm of Queen or The Clash with dozens of luminous LEDs, still a novelty back then in the Eighties. Outside, the throbbing winter sky and the wind at 2,000 meters. And us going up and down the pistes, making the snow a perfect white velvet for the skiers, which the factory would churn out the following morning.

It was on one of those nights that Ulli told me he was no longer afraid of being a
Schwul
. He used that very word. Not
gay
or
homosexuell
, but the term used by pontificating retirees in the tavern
Stammtisch
, the one Ulli had heard uttered behind his back by his peers, by the neighbors' children, by his younger brother Sigi, ever since, at the age of eleven, he no longer wanted to play football or ice hockey, but only spend time with me.