Eva Sleeps (25 page)

Herr Neumann was neither embarrassed nor humiliated by the stale smell, the small window, the modesty of his quarters despite his status as head chef. There was joy in his heart and his legs were no longer throbbing, or at least he didn't notice: Gerda was there sitting next to him on the wooden bed and he was guiding her hand, showing her how to bone, slice, and scoop.

The huge quarter of beef, he explained, was like a block of marble in the hands of a great sculptor: all it required was for its true shape to be revealed. The long, fleshy cylinder of the fillet, the triangle of the rump, the deformed pyramid of the shank with that bone sticking out, so graceless but so full of flavor . . .

Querrippe, Entrecôte, Steak, Lende, Kugel, dickes Bugstück, Zungenstück, Hüfte, Hals, Zwerchfell, Schulter, Schulterspitze, Dünnung, Schenkel
. The names of the meat cuts in German were precise and unambiguous, like everything else in that language of philosophers and mechanics.

The Venetian, Calabrian, and Sicilian workers of which the Bolzano slaughterhouse was now full, and where Herr Neumann bought his supplies, had also taught him the most florid words from the South:
filetto, sottofiletto, fesa, spalla, costata, piccione, cappello del prete, campanello, pesce, lacerto, piscione, lattughello, imperatore, manuzza
. . .

 

The cut was everything, Herr Neumann explained. No amount of perfect timing, flavoring, stuffing, marinading, browning, or salting can save a poorly cut piece of meat. The frying pan, tin or pot where it's cooked is like the bed where the marriage between the meat and its cook is consummated; but the house where the couple lives more or less happily is the chopping board where it takes on its shape. If it's cut badly, in a rush, or carelessly, the meat will behave like a woman who's badly treated by day: however much her husband might flatter her at night in the bridal bed, she remains cold, unresponsive, depressed. When you handle her right, however—Herr Neumann was looking at Gerda, at her lips, the curve of her breasts pushing against the apron splashed with blood, the roundness of her behind digging a hollow in the mattress and almost brushing his deformed leg—meat is like a satisfied lover: it melts, becomes yielding and tender, and gives up its juices.

These, however, were thoughts Herr Neumann perhaps couldn't allow even to brush his mind.

 

By the time the chef returned to his kitchen, Gerda had been promoted to assistant cook at the meat counter and, whenever he had to go to his increasingly frequent medical appointments, his substitute. Hubert, never much of a talker, stopped speaking altogether. Naturally, Gerda paid no attention: ever since she was a child she'd known how dense the silence between two people can be. So it was she who made the
Wiener Schnitzel
, which had now become her specialty, for the prestigious guests who sat at Frau Mayer's tables on that Sunday in 1965.

The hotel owner had rushed into the kitchen, her turquoise eyes blank like those of a crazed clairvoyant, breathless from pride and excitement, to tell Herr Neumann that tomorrow he would be cooking for the
Obmann
of the
Südtiroler Volkspartei
and his guests, representatives of the Italian government. What with local and national politicians, lackeys and undersecretaries, there would be over fifty people eating.

Frau Mayer had no interest in Italian politics, but not because it was so convoluted and incomprehensible to the uninitiated. In her eyes, as in the eyes of almost all German-speaking South Tyroleans, the only noteworthy politician in the country whose citizenship they had was the figure leaning on a stick, with a hollow face and straight hair: Silvius Magnago. The residents of the rest of the peninsula were starting to get used to their politicians, like relatives to whom, no matter what, you're linked by fate; Frau Mayer, on the other hand, didn't even know their faces. Therefore, she didn't recognize Magnago's guests, nor did she feel any curiosity toward them. Only after an obscure master of ceremonies informed her did she realize that the Prime Minister himself (as well as interim Foreign Minister) would be sitting in her dining room, stopping in on his way to the Alpine hut between Alto Adige and Austria where he was to meet the Austrian Foreign Minister Bruno Kreisky. But this seemed a privilege less extraordinary than being able to serve at her Obmann's table.

Herr Neumann was requested to provide a menu of samples illustrating the Alto Adige gastronomic tradition to the guests from the capital city.

The head cook took the request to heart.

As a starter, he suggested top quality
Speck
and
Kaminwurz
²⁴
, accompanied by
Schüttelbrot
from Val Venosta and apple horseradish; goat's cheese with herbs spread on
Breatl
²⁵
; little
Tirtlan
with sauerkraut, spinach and potatoes. These were served very hot and crisp straight after being fried, and the Roman lackeys asked for a double portion.

The same members of the political underworld, however, wondered if the second helping had been a good idea when, arriving on trays garnished like paintings by Paul Klee, various kinds of
Knödel
were served (with liver,
Speck
, cheese, spinach),
Spatzlan
,
Schlutzkrapfen
served on slices of
Graukäse
and red onion rings, and wine soup.

There followed the pièces de résistance, an appropriate word since many guests were beginning to feel as if they were on that frontline where exhausted gastric juices, heroic but desperate, put up resistance before advancing battalions of food: oven baked shank, lamb chops in herb crust,
Greastl
scented with bay leaves, venison shoulder on red cabbage and, finally, accompanied by blueberry sauce, Gerda's
Wiener Schnitzel
.

There were cooked vegetables to lighten the load: asparagus in vinaigrette sauce, young watercress salad with
Kohlrabi
²⁶
, sauerkraut with juniper, and
Rösti
²⁷
with potatoes from Val Pusteria. When the desserts arrived, the members of the government, who had wanted to try everything for love of novelty, felt discouraged: the capacity of their stomachs had gone beyond all natural limits, and yet more dishes heaped with delights were coming their way. Assorted cakes (carrot cake, buckwheat cake, cake with berries, walnut cake),
Linzertorte, Buchteln
²⁸
, apple fritters with vanilla cream and, to finish, hot slices of the unmissable
Strudel
with vanilla cream. Moreover, besides delighting the members of both delegations, Gerda's
Wiener
Schnitzel
(her secret: before dipping the veal slices in flour, rolling them in breadcrumbs, and frying them in an abundance of lard, she had marinated them for half an hour in marjoram-flavored lemon juice) had triggered a discussion about history two tables away from the table of honor. Middle-ranking government representatives from the Bolzano Christian Democrats and the
Südtiroler Volkspartei
were seated there. The South Tyroleans had surprised their interlocutors with their correct, albeit rigid, Italian; nobody among the government delegates in charge of solving the Alto Adige issue, however, had deemed it necessary to learn a single word of German. The discussion therefore took place in Italian, more or less as follows:

“The breaded cutlets, like so many good things in the North, were actually copied from Italy by the Austrians.”

“We had nothing to copy, we've always breaded our meat. Like in the
Wiener
Backhendl
²⁹
, which is also called
poulet frit à la viennoise
.”

“But it's a well known fact that it was Radetzky who took them to Vienna! He may have fired his cannons at the Milanese, but he certainly liked their cutlets.”

“That's a myth! Both in Vienna and here in Tyrol, we'd already been eating them for centuries.”

“
Cotoletta alla milanese
or
Wiener Schnitzel
, what's the difference? You're all Italians now!”

(No reply; the sound of chewing, embarrassed clearing of throats.)

The person who had less food than anyone else was the
Obmann
Magnago, sitting at the table of honor, but his guest the Prime Minister also ate with moderation. There's a singular man, Magnago thought, watching him toy unnervingly with his food before putting it in his mouth: closed, introverted, he never looked his interlocutor in the eye and when he laughed it seemed he did so under duress. He listened with heavy, half-closed eyes as though his mind was far away. He spoke very softly with sleepy, exasperating slowness, and his gestures and movements were limp, as though as a child he used to trip when he ran, slam drawers on his fingers, and forget to tie his shoelaces. Everything about him seemed helpless, weak, certainly not a man of action but rather, the classicist Magnago thought, a
cunctator
. And yet, over the course of several personal meetings, the
Obmann
had had occasion to see that this inexpressive face concealed highly subtle political intelligence. Unlike so many other representatives of the Italian government, the man sitting next to him was an intellectual, as well as a high-ranking lawyer. Above all, he was a man out of whose mouth, no matter how tired or distracted he was, stock phrases would never come.

Magnago knew very well that the hard German accent with which he spoke, however perfectly, the language of Dante, and the fact that he had done his war service in the Wehrmacht made his interlocutors immediately associate him with Nazism. He knew how futile it would be to try and explain that not all German officers had been Nazis, and that he'd been drafted into the German army because the residents of his land had had to choose between . . . No, it was impossible: he couldn't forever inflict a compendium of South Tyrol's complicated history.

And so the word “Nazi” remained implicitly and powerfully unspoken between him and almost all those with whom he spoke on board the ocean liner that is the Italian Parliament, and something he was very much aware of. Every so often, the label would become explicit, especially on the part of certain right-wing leaders, particularly those who really had some explaining to do as to where they had been after September 8. They, of all people, weren't ashamed to call South Tyroleans of German ethnicity the name given to traitors during the Risorgimento: austriacanti. As though the Italianization of Alto Adige from Fascism onwards had been the Fifth War of Independence, as though here too Italians had been the oppressed and Austrians the invaders, instead of the other way around. Magnago had lived and studied in Bologna, where he still had many close friends from his university days; and because he knew them very well, he knew that when Italians are given the choice between identifying with the role of victim or that of the aggressor, they will always choose the former. Even in the face of historical truth, if necessary. “Self-pity,” a concept that has no lexical equivalent in the language of Goethe, and which Magnago, even when he spoke German always used in Italian.

However, fortunately, the thought process of the man sitting next to him was not as lazy as that of so many of his fellow countrymen. Naturally, he wasn't the only intelligent Italian politician. Of course there was Andreotti, for example, though his subtlety and complexity, Magnago thought, sometimes verged on the abyss. Then there was the intellectual refinement of Fanfani, although somewhat corrupted by the envious nastiness typical in some people of small stature: Magnago knew that his own grenadier height triggered irremediable aversion in Fanfani which, he felt, would yield nothing worthwhile in their negotiations. No, the
Obmann
thought, the intelligence of this man who had allowed the waiter to pour his wine with absent-minded indolence but who had then muttered a submissive “thank you” was as refined as that of Andreotti and Fanfani, but much more humane. When he had met him for the first time after spending years in the baroque halls of Roman palaces, in order to bring to the government's attention the necessity of a negotiated solution in Alto Adige, years of absent-minded interviews lasting just a few minutes and with a quick handshake for the sole benefit of photographers, Magnago had asked him, “How long can you give me?”

And he had replied, “As long as it takes.”

This interminable luncheon wasn't just celebrating the start of real talks on the future of South Tyrol, Magnago thought, dabbing his mouth with a linen napkin—picked out especially by Frau Mayer in the workshop of artist weavers in Val Venosta. What was also worth celebrating was the fact that his interlocutor was none other than Aldo Moro.

 

After lunch, Herr Neumann, Gerda, Hubert, Elmar and the entire kitchen staff washed their hands, straightened the white canvas caps on their heads and, under the fiercely proud eyes of Frau Mayer, stood in a row in order to say goodbye to the illustrious guests.

Gerda didn't meet Aldo Moro's eye, and barely heard him say goodbye. Later, she wasn't even able to say whether his hand had brushed hers or not. However, when Silvius Magnago shook hands with her, she recognized the skinny man she had seen, as a little girl, direct the course of the crowd in Sigmundskro like a captain on a ship. He was barely ten years older now but already looked like an old man. And yet during that time, Gerda thought, the one who had been most transformed by life wasn't the
Obmann
: it was her. And the thought made her feel pride as sharp as the steel in Herr Neumann's knives.

 

The political reconciliation in South Tyrol that was beginning to be planned wasn't good news for everyone: there were those who did their best to sabotage it.

The newspapers became war bulletins.

23 MAY 1966: ATTACK ON THE FINANCE POLICE AT PASSO DIVIZZE. CUSTOMS OFFICER BRUNO BOLOGNESI IS KILLED.