Eva Sleeps (34 page)

Even so.

Gerda had to concentrate very hard so that nobody would notice, especially not herself, that among all the mothers of the communicants, she was the only one unmarried. Therefore, for the whole duration of the mass, she kept her eyes on the stained glass that illuminated the ugly 19th-century frescoes, the depictions of the hapless bearded female saint. She would occasionally lower them and only once or twice looked at the children, her daughter among them, who were sitting on the bench in front of the altar while waiting for the sacrament—the girls dressed as nuns or brides, the boys like little masters of ceremonies, white shirts under satin waistcoats, clean but often threadbare because they had been handed down by more than one older brother. Above all, Gerda never turned to the rest of the congregation.

Eva, on the other hand, always remembered the day of her first communion because of the skis.

Coming back home after the service, she'd found them propped against the front door of the furnished room where she lived with Gerda during the low season. They were taller than her, lemon yellow, very heavy to lift. She tried immediately, still dressed like a sexto decimo nun, but barely managed it. She was particularly struck by the grips: the metal double bites, even though she hadn't put her feet in them yet, gave her an oppressive sense of constriction.

When she saw the skis, Gerda grew wary. The furnished room was on the ground floor of a new building several stories high, each of them a tourist apartment: now, in May, they were all empty. It was on the outskirts of the town, not far from the slope leading to the little church and to Ulli's, Wastl's, Sepp and Maria's masi. Opposite the apartment block there was a potato field left fallow that year, crossed by a white gravel road bordered with lilacs. The white, pink and lilac flowers spread their fragrance in the air. The cream-colored Mercedes 190 was parked there. Hannes was leaning against the trunk, his legs crossed, with the eyes of someone who had been staring at the same thing for a while: Gerda.

She didn't look down. She just slightly moved her focus so that her gaze flew over the head of her child's father, drifted serenely beyond the shape she wasn't noticing, and rested, detached, on the line of glaciers on the horizon.

Eva immediately understood who he was.

Hannes came up to them. Gerda lit a cigarette and began smoking, holding her elbow in her cupped hand, her gaze lost in the distant infinity,

“Do you like them?” the man with orange hair asked.

“They're heavy,” Eva replied.

“Because they're good quality. With these you'll be able to ski like Gustav Thoeni.”

“I can't ski.”

There was a silence. The daughter of the son of the winter carousel king had never worn a pair of skis; this discovery seemed to disconcert Hannes Staggl.

“I'm a cook, not a lady, I have no money to waste.”

Gerda's voice, although it came from her mouth, less than a yard away from Eva, seemed to come from a faraway place. Hannes didn't turn to look at the woman—still very beautiful—he had impregnated not so many years earlier, and kept his face down toward the miniature white nun. “If your mother had wanted to marry me, she wouldn't be working in a hotel like a slave now. She would own a hotel.”

Gerda dragged on the cigarette and kept the smoke in her mouth for what seemed to Eva like an eternity. Then she let out perfect blue rings that floated toward the flowering lilacs like small, brave spaceships. But their epic crossing failed: they all dissolved in space before landing.

“Nobody asked me to marry them when I was pregnant.”

The cigarette wasn't finished but Gerda let it drop on the ground and crushed it with her heel. Then she took Eva by the wrist, walked with her through the front door, and closed it behind them. Gently, however.

It soon became evident that Hannes's present was incomplete: it didn't include ski boots. After trying to slide her rubber boots into the grips, Eva gave up.

It was Sepp who found a solution. He built two wooden stools and nailed one on each ski, which he had sawed a yard from the point, and to which he had also fixed a kind of handlebar. When winter came, Ulli and Eva came down the long slope behind the hayloft on their two
Böckl
⁴⁰
hundreds, thousands of times, without ever tiring. Gustav Thoeni would also have enjoyed it.

 

A few months later, Genovese invited Gerda several times to be his “fair company.” The soldier had noticed her at the non-commissioned officer party, but he was already busy with other female attendees, almost too many even for him: it was impossible to add another one. The last one, not long before, had taken her leave after throwing an iced drink in his face in the lobby of the Greif Hotel in Bolzano. Genovese had appreciated this gesture: his reputation was important to him. Only now, over a year later, was he free to go with Gerda.

She quite liked going out with that Neapolitan who came up to her shoulder and never shut up. At the dance hall, the difference in height wasn't a big deal: nowadays it was no longer necessary for the woman's waistline to be lower than the man's. The Tuca Tuca, a dance that consisted in stretching out your hands and feeling your partner to the rhythm of the music was very suitable for non-commissioned officer Genovese, so much so that he might as well have invented it, and not the singer Raffaella Carrà. Even in sex, he came straight to the point and couldn't be described as a generous lover. But that was nothing new for Gerda. Afterwards, however, he was relaxed and pleasant. He would tell her about his wonderful city illuminated by the moon in the Bay of Naples, his agitated ferret eyes would soften, and he'd say, “One day I'll take you there.”

She wasn't supposed to believe it but she appreciated the fact that he felt the need to tell her this lie. Above all, he made her laugh.

“Si accussì bella ca si faciss' nu pireto m' ‘o zucass'!” he told her one day while getting dressed again next to the bed.

Lying on her side, her smooth and voluptuous body on top of the sheets like an all-consuming letter S, she had looked at him without understanding. From under Genovese's shirt sprang his pendulous sex; short legs covered in black curly hairs, ending in the socks he would never take off, one of which had a hole in it. He spread his shoulders, straightened his back, lifted his chin, and declaimed in the accent of an Italian language academic, the translation in Italian: “You are so beautiful that if you farted, I'd suck it.”

She asked him what “farted” meant. He explained it. She burst out laughing and didn't stop, even long after he'd gone.

That was why Genovese hadn't yet been stabbed by jealous husbands or trampled by the many fellow soldiers from whom he'd swiped their Fräulein, or demoted by all the superiors to whom he was forever supplying a new reason for doing so: for all his vulgarity, his lies, his betrayals and his idleness, he cheered you up. Therefore, that day, knowing that Genovese would come in the evening and pick her up in his Cinquecento, a car more suited to the length of his legs than hers, she was singing the Tuca Tuca song, with a hint of swing in her hips and shoulders as she came down the steps to the pantry. She threw the woolen greatcoat over her shoulders, walked into the refrigerated cell and, still singing, took off the hook the half torso of lamb she would be using to prepare the
plat du jour
: ribs with fine herbs.

In the frost of the freezer the rhythm of her song became visible, every syllable a puff of condensation in front of her mouth.

Yes, Gerda was in an excellent mood today.

At that precise moment, in a corridor of the barracks, Genovese was talking to Vito. He had a date that evening, he said, but something new had also arrived, something called Waltraud, and he didn't feel like turning it down.

“Do you want to go instead of me? Gerda is a very beautiful Fräulein, you're bound to thank me afterwards.”

Vito didn't feel like going out that evening. The following morning he was due to go on patrol before dawn. Still, Genovese insisted, it's not nice—practically a mortal sin—to leave a beautiful blonde girl without an escort, and so, almost out of duty, Vito agreed.

 

Subsequently, when Gerda and Vito remembered the first time they saw each other, and compared their first impressions, they realized they'd been very different.

When Vito saw her, he considered running away. He could have done it: she hadn't yet made him out as the Neapolitan's substitute. In fact, she didn't even know someone else was coming. She's too beautiful for me, he thought. Not beautiful like any other healthy girl with a good body and a face without flaws. But so beautiful you felt pain, you felt longing even while she was right in front of you, so beautiful you wanted to hold her in the circumference of your arms and never let anyone or anything hurt her.

When Gerda, on the other hand, saw a Carabiniere in uniform waiting for her outside the staff entrance, her stomach seized up. What new terrible, unexpected event, was that Carabiniere about to inform her of? Was it to do with Peter? No, Peter was dead. Eva, then?

Meanwhile, Vito hadn't run away. He told her that Second Lieutenant Genovese sent his heartfelt apologies but had been prevented from keeping his date. However, if she was happy with the substitute for an evening's entertainment, then he was respectfully at her disposal. The language of an official report at the same time as a jungle inside his chest: as he spoke, his heart beat in his rib cage like a bird of paradise that's just been caught.

Only then did Gerda manage to see in Vito traits other than the fact, predominant up till then, that he wasn't Genovese. He was the same physical type as the Neapolitan. He too was short, dark, with the pronounced nose of ancient seafaring people. But as far as his personality went, he might as well have come from a different continent: as noisy and over the top as the other man was, this one was silent and serious. A man who, moreover, looked straight into Gerda's eyes, and not at her hips, where her dress was a little tight, or at her breasts.

Gerda wasn't too disappointed. It was almost part of the deal that Genovese would one day disappear, and, as it was, their acquaintance had lasted longer than expected. Ruining her evening wasn't her style, so she accepted Vito as her escort.

Subsequently, even their memories of that first evening didn't match. Vito claimed he had taken her to dinner at the Trattoria near Ponte Druso; she was certain they'd gone straight to dance. In reality, Gerda didn't have many images of those first hours together. She didn't remember what music the small orchestra played, or their first dance. He probably stepped on her toes, though that wasn't a memory but rather deduction: Vito never was a skilled dancer. Gerda did not keep a particular memory of what the Carabiniere said or did. She was much more struck by what he didn't do.

The hands with which he held her by the waist during the slow dances didn't start to inch down her back and toward her buttocks. He didn't try to touch her breast after the third beer. In fact, he didn't even drink a third beer, but stuck to one. When he took her back home, Gerda expected a kiss, but he stood there, his arms hanging down his sides, stiff as a sentry. Moreover, for the entire evening, Vito's body had been that of a sentinel: it was the only way he'd managed to stop himself from making love to her on the dance hall floor.

Gerda went back to her room in the attic and undressed, a little disappointed. Clearly, Sergeant Anania really didn't like her.

 

The following day, Vito went looking for Genovese. It wasn't an easy enterprise. The Neapolitan went to his office as often as one visits distant relatives: only on special occasions and never for long. When he found him, he asked: would he mind if he, Vito, saw the woman he'd taken to dance instead of him, again?

“Absolutely not!” Genovese said. “I knew you'd get stuck on her.”

He stared at him. There was something in Vito's expression which, for a rare moment, made him remain silent. Genovese had seen faces like that, head over heels in love, many times, and had formed a specific opinion on the subject: it was never good news.

“You know her brother was a terrorist?”

“Was?”

“The stupid delinquent blew himself up.”

Vito's face darkened.

Genovese looked at him with his small eyes as sharp as a tailor's pins. “Anania, you're not like me. You're a serious man, so be careful. She's an unmarried mother, good for a fuck and nothing else. Remember that.”

But Genovese knew that talking like this to a man in love was as pointless as taking roses to a brothel. Guys who got that face, kept it. Life wiped it off them soon enough. That's why he, Genovese, devoted his own existence to avoid getting it for himself.

 

The second time Vito met Gerda, he said, “Your eyes are beautiful and sad.”

Those same beautiful eyes widened with astonishment.

Men had always said to Gerda: you're so cheerful, you're so lively, you really know how to have a good time. But not sad. That's something no one had ever said to her.

Only now that Vito mentioned her sadness did Gerda think about it. Yes, there was a part of her that had been sad for years, but she hadn't noticed. So how did he know?

The first night they spent together, he did not penetrate her. When he saw her naked body, he was so overwhelmed with emotion that his sex had remained inert. With any other woman, this would have made him feel diminished. But not with Gerda. He felt an inexplicable trust that everything was going the way it should, and that there was no rush. She fell asleep and he held her in his arms until dawn, not believing his luck.

The next time they saw each other, he said, “You cross your big toes.”

They were in a bar. He leaned his elbows on the table, raised his hands with his palms toward her, and slid one thumb into the nook of the other.