Eva Sleeps (20 page)

Thy will be done . . . ”

 

It's not that I've unexpectedly discovered I'm a believer. I haven't suddenly found again a faith I haven't been longing for, not even thanks to this very human, inspired priest. It's just that it comes naturally to me to join those around me, here in this ugly chapel. They all seem like me, children of an unknown father.

 

After mass, I stop by the bulletin board at the church door. There are the usual missionary magazines, leaflets from religious orders, the program of a trip to Lourdes, the times of masses and extra services for Easter Sunday and Monday, and a checked sheet of paper with, handwritten: on the Tuesday after Easter the Italian rail company chaplain will give a blessing to all the Termini shops.

I can just picture the ant-like priest entering the lingerie shops with his squeaky shoes, walking among dummies with tits and asses covered only by baby-dolls and tangas. He will not lose his composure, he will bless everyone with his wide smile, sprinkle holy water with his long fingers over see-through push-up bras, look with benevolence from behind his thick glasses at sales assistants with too much make-up piously bowing their heads.

It's almost time for the train. I buy water, some fruit, no sandwiches because there simply has to be a restaurant car on a train journey of seven hundred kilometers, right? An eighteen-year-old Romany in a colorful skirt is sitting on one of the black, fake leather couches scattered around the station; she has a baby in her arms, plus a girl who looks about two and a slightly older, snotty-nosed boy on either side. They're staring intently at one of the flat screens constantly recycling advertising, paying no attention to the bustle around them. They're relaxed and at ease like any family watching television on their living room sofa. When I get on the escalator to the platform, they vanish from my sight.

T
he situation was as follows.

The hayloft of a very old maso, at the end of the summer. The harvest has been good, it hasn't rained too much or too little, the hay is stacked up to the ceiling. The chute through which the peasant is going to lower it down to the cowshed and into the troughs is made of very old wood; the floor, walls and beams supporting the roof, the tiles, everything is made of very old fir. There's a lit candle on the floor; it crackles, smokes, devours its wick. The wind is blowing through the cracks between the wall planks, agitating the flame. A stronger gust and the candle will be knocked over into the hay.

 

That summer of 1964, just about everybody had come to blow on the flames of Alto Adige.

First, it was started by the BAS who were in hiding, and who had dissociated themselves from the methods of the other
Bumser
, which they considered too soft. Enough attacking electricity pylons, they said. What was needed to free the
Heimat Südtirol
was action by armed guerrillas, and if blood flowed, then so be it.

Then Austrian Neo-Nazis had arrived. Self-styled intellectuals of the NDP, born of the Nazi party, pan-Germans who missed
Deutschland über Alles
. Italian Neo-Fascists. Far-right Austrian university confraternities. The KGB, which, from its Soviet diplomatic residence in Vienna, had made contact with the most extreme terrorists. Agents from the Italian, American, Austrian, German secret services, and even the odd Belgian one. It was understandable: any Flemish agent provocateur with an ounce of professional dignity would have wanted to emigrate to the troubled South Tyrol of the 1960s, which was far richer in career opportunities than Flanders. Finally, De Lorenzo arrived, the commanding general of the Carabinieri, as well as the recent head of the SIFAR secret service, and the man the CIA trusted to create Gladio, with his Carabinieri.

They were all there, in the fields fragrant with newly-cut hay, the rosy peaks, rocky slopes inflamed with rhododendrons in July, the sparkle of glaciers on the border and the cable cars teeming with skiers intoxicated by their athletic feats, all there to stage the dress rehearsal of something that didn't yet have a name, but which would subsequently be called, like an after-dinner game, “the strategy of tension.” The players: bloodthirsty, earnest extremists, agents provocateurs geared toward raising the level of the conflict, and government repression almost as harsh as under Mussolini.

All you needed was to light the fire.

 

Peter had only a very vague idea of all this. Yes, he'd taken part in secret meetings in Alpine huts just over the border, where he'd met people who were very different from what he was used to. Students with thick glasses, for example, who recited passages from
The Robbers
as though Schiller had written it just for them, who would fill their lungs with the sharp air of a night in the Alps, like someone living a heroic moment and wanting to fix it in his memory. A young university assistant from Innsbruck, with thick lips and fat fingers, eloquent despite the shortness of breath he owed to his weight, convinced he hadn't been born too late to still live the dream of the Thousand-Year Reich. A Bavarian chemist who'd taught Peter to put together a bomb, whose hands hovered over explosives and detonators with the light precision of butterflies over flowers in the field. None of them ever mentioned the fact that in order to gain a public office certificate in his own land, Peter had to speak a language that wasn't his, or that he hadn't found work in a factory because he belonged to the wrong ethnic group. They were concerned with other issues: the struggle for national liberation, the holy soil,
Bedrohtes Grenzlanddeutschtum
¹⁵
,
Volksund Kulturgemeinschaft
¹⁶
, the expansion of the German people in their rightful
Lebensraum
¹⁷
.

Peter knew nothing about them but asked no questions. He didn't know that they had already taken their explosives right into the heart of Italy with secret plans bearing names straight out of a photo-romances:
Operation Sophia Loren
, a series of explosions in Bolzano cinemas frequented by soldiers stationed there (the project was aborted before being executed);
Operation Panic
, against public transport in some large Italian cities (many were wounded on a tram in Rome, the car of one of the attackers was blown up by mistake);
Operation Terror
on Trains
: a high-potential bomb at Verona Station (about twenty injured and, finally, after trying such a long time, the first dead).

The only thing that interested them about Peter was that ever since he was a
Bub
¹⁸
he'd walked up and down the border passes with a shotgun across his body. He knew better than the wrinkles on his mother's face the tracks of deer and on both sides of the border between Austria and Italy, slight lines of moved soil carved between mountain pines and gravel. He could therefore point them out to someone carrying sticks of dynamite under his shirt, someone who needed to avoid a guard post in order to take Italian soldiers by surprise, or someone on the run after an attack. And, finally, what these men, who were so much more educated than Peter, were interested in was the fact that Peter didn't feel squeamish about killing—and not just trophy animals.

What turns a man into a murderer? At which moment does anger over a historical injustice blend into another resentment that's more ancient, private, shameful because nobody else shares it, and make this man put his hand on a detonator? When does his desire to obtain what he considers the general Good become indifference to specific Evil committed in the name of that same Good? What makes him capable of breaking the most important of prohibitions which, like a wall, divides the human consortium into those who have killed even just once, and those who haven't? What that man needs above all else is absolute conviction, or rather a state of mind that has become cold, silent and motionless like a winter lake, in which pity no longer flows except downwards, downwards in dark and invisible eddies which may barely stir the light pebbles at the bottom, but not the icy slate on the surface. Peter never explained it to anyone, let alone himself.

Gerda's brother, whose eyes were so dark they didn't reflect the light, had only ever seen his son Sigi a few times, and just for a couple of hours. Unlike what he had done with Ulli, Peter didn't shoot at any target with “Siegfried” written above it in Gothic lettering: he wasn't there for his second child's christening.

For some time now, Leni had stopped waiting for her husband. Her parents had taken her and the two children back with them to their maso not far from the town. On the rare occasions Peter would reappear, fleeting visits and mostly at night, after weeks of absence, nobody asked any questions; not only because they wouldn't have gotten a reply, but especially so as not to query their own opinion about the state of affairs. Officially, Leni was still Peter's wife, but she knew now that her husband's true family was no longer Ulli and the newborn Sigi, but unknown people who didn't share his bed or the warmth of the
Stube
, but weapons, explosives, mines, wicks, detonators, plans of escape, forged documents, border crossings along smugglers' paths, and the avoidance of roadblocks.

 

On 27 August 1964, the
Musikkapelle
of a nearby town staged a special concert on the peak of the mountain where Staggl and other members of the Consortium were building, at amazing speed, a splendid ski carousel. The event had been organized in order to contradict those who had already started to call it “the Factory”: a mountain that had now been ruined by the steel of the cable cars, no longer suitable for real nature lovers. Staggl wanted to prove to his fellow citizens and some guests who, despite the chair- and ski lifts, the refreshment spots, the poles of the cable cars (soon they would occupy three sides of the mountain), the restaurants with the innovative self-service formula copied from the soldiers' mess, the three-star hotel built at about 6,500 feet altitude, that in spite of all that, nature still reigned supreme up on the peak and the beauty of the
Heimat
, with a view that spanned three hundred and sixty degrees from the glaciers on the border to the faraway Dolomites, was still the ultimate winner. The city tourists, after all, didn't come here just to ski, now a compulsory sport for the middle classes of the economic boom, but also to enjoy all this majestic splendor.

And nothing could highlight this better than a concert performed right at the summit by musicians dressed in the costumes of their ancestors. The program included the first performance of a composition by the director of the
Musikkapelle
, called “An meinen Berg,” To My Mountain.

On that day, the cable car tested out by Gerda and Hannes took a lot of money: tourists and town residents went up en masse. Leni brought the children and her parents. The newborn Sigi, inebriated by the rarefied 6,500-foot air, didn't wake up once, not even when his baby carriage kept knocking against the stones concealed in the tall grass. Ulli was holding his maternal grandmother's hand tight, his forehead rounded like that of a roebuck, his eyes with their long dark lashes open wide in that expression of anxious anticipation he would so often have during his brief lifetime.

The public finished settling on the folding chairs arranged in the field and silence fell, punctuated only by the intelligent caws of the crows. The conductor lifted the golden baton with which he beat the tempo of marches during parades: and one, and two, and—a bang.

On the highway at the foot of the mountain, a couple of miles east and 6,500 feet lower down, a Carabinieri jeep had exploded on an anti-tank mine. Nobody died, but there were four injured, all of them seriously.

 

At the beginning of September, a Carabiniere was killed in a neighboring valley with a shot to the head through the window of his barracks. The death was attributed to terrorists, but apparently it was a settling of private scores.

In the night between the sixth and seventh of September, in an isolated Alpine hut, a Secret Service infiltrator executed in his sleep Luis Amplatz, one of the two BAS
Schützen
in hiding who had decided to embrace armed struggle. His funeral had more resonance and attendance than a state funeral: even the South Tyroleans who didn't share the armed struggle considered Amplatz's death an execution by the regime.

A few days later, near the town where the Hubers and Staggls lived, another military jeep was blown up, this time by a remotely controlled bomb. Six Carabinieri were injured, four of them seriously. One of them lost an eye, the other, a leg.

 

The cows are sniffing anxiously the acrid smell of the candle. Soon, the flame will reach the hay. It's hard to imagine who could save the hayloft at this stage.

 

Once a month, a boy would deliver to Frau Mayer whatever was necessary for making sweets: flour, sugar, pine nuts, raisins, candied fruit, confetti made of colored icing, silver beads, cocoa powder. He was from Trento, and had a surname ending in “nin,” like a child's nickname, but everybody called him
Zuckerbub
: sugar boy, or sugary. The latter interpretation was owing to the glances, sweeter than his merchandise, that he would shoot toward every woman without exception. When they announced his arrival from the kitchens, even Frau Mayer would check herself in the wall mirror behind the bar.

The hotel owner did not interfere with Herr Neumann's management, and let him supervise the sacks being unloaded from the van. However, when the
Zuckerbub
arrived, she always found a way of going to the spot at the back of the kitchen; she'd ask for details of an old invoice, send her regards to the boy's boss—her old school mate—or give the general duties man instructions on how to dispose of certain barrels: anything, just so she could show herself, even briefly, to those eyes that would wrap around a woman's figure like silk. Frau Mayer spent the rest of the day when the
Zuckerbub
made his deliveries in a state of vague anticipation, of trusting melancholy, in the blurred memory of something all-consuming but which she wouldn't have been able to name.