Eva Sleeps (6 page)

Gerda did not know her older brother Peter very well, either. He was ten years her senior and she had spent much less time with him than with her cousins. There was no intimacy between them: separated by sex and age, they had never had much to say to each other. They had lived under the same roof, eaten the same bread, but that was all.

Peter had become a tall, well-built young man but his movements were somewhat graceless, like his mother's. More than uncertain, he looked furtive; like a hunter lying in ambush who has to conceal the power of his firearm. He had also inherited his mother's dark brown eyes that didn't reflect the light. There was something opaque in his eyes that had frightened Gerda as a child. Now that he was grown up, Peter looked nothing like Hermann, except when he spoke—which, like his father, almost never happened—and when he really had to speak he did so with his mouth half-closed, as though words were precious objects you could only part with reluctantly.

Peter had never even brought a friend home. The girl he would have liked to marry had never yet been to their
Stube
. He would visit her in the courtyard of the
maso
where she was born. He took her small gifts: the long antler of a stag, which he had carved with geometrical figures; a bunch of capercaillie feathers with a steely sheen; a handkerchief he bought at the market. Leni, the girl, would accept them with a smile that made them precious, just as a sunbeam lights up a cat's eye and makes it look like a gold nugget. However, even with her Peter wasn't very talkative.

No, the Hubers were not known for being good company.

An excursion. With Peter. Gerda wasn't sure which of these novelties was more extraordinary.
Tata
and
Mamme
wouldn't come, he explained, they weren't interested. Nor would Annemarie: she worked as a servant in a family and had only half a day off on Sundays.

They left long before dawn. That year it was a mild fall, but it was still dark and cold. Gerda was surprised to see so many people in the street even though it was long before early mass. They were all going to the town center where a few trucks and a bus were warming up their engines. Gerda was wearing her confirmation dress. Twice already Johanna had let it out, but it was still tight over her chest and soon you wouldn't be able to fix it anymore. Over it she wore a boiled wool jersey, gray with green borders; and she had a red handkerchief around her neck. Peter was wearing the same suit as when he was looking for work in Bolzano. Johanna had restored it to life with patient darning and cleaning.

They climbed onto one of the trucks along with a couple of dozen other people. Some were in
Tracht
: the women were wearing long skirts, heavy satin aprons with an iridescent glow and lace bibs, like on a
HerzJesu
parade; many men wore waistcoats with red and green stripes, embossed leather belts over
Lederhosen
, and felt hats with capercaillie feathers. Even those not in Tyrolean costume were wearing their Sunday best.

Gerda was the youngest there. When she got on the truck the men made room for her as if she were an important person, the women offered her rye bread and elderberry juice from aluminum flasks wrapped in felt. Never had so many people smiled at her all at the same time. When the column of vehicles started moving, the headlights formed a wreath of lights, which Gerda thought was more festive than an Advent crown with its candles. The people on the truck started singing and she joined in with her still childlike voice. They sang “Brunnen vor dem Tor, Wo der Wildbach rauscht, Kein schöner Land”: songs in which romantic love merges with the love of the Heimat. Gerda didn't know the words: she'd never sung in chorus at a country festival. However, the melody took predictable, reassuring turns, and the notes resounded on the roof of her mouth and deep in her throat, as though she had always known them. The icy wind slammed in her face and she felt happy, even though Peter hadn't told her why there were so many people, or where they were going. For the first time in her life, however, he bent down to his little sister and smiled.

Three hours later, when they reached their destination, Gerda was asleep, her head in the lap of the woman who had given her elderberry juice. The truck stopped with a tired moan of the brakes and she opened her eyes.

She wondered if she was still dreaming. She had never seen so many people at once. Not even at the
HerzJesu
procession, or at the funeral of the local nobleman, when the funeral cart, pulled by four black horses, had proceeded along the Medieval street with people on either side. Peter lifted her off, his hands in her armpits, and put her down on the ground like a doll. Gerda was surrounded by people who squeezed her, pushed, halted and, like a river going in the wrong direction, flowed up the slope that rose from the Bolzano valley all the way up to the dilapidated ruins of Castel Firmiano. Gerda held Peter's hand tight, but she wasn't afraid. On the contrary, she felt as though the crowd was a single organism, a living entity of which she was a part, and whose emotions and waves she sensed before they became also hers. Something she felt she belonged to and which gave even her, a girl who wasn't quite twelve, meaning and dignity. She felt brave, enthusiastic, a believer even though she had no idea in what. Never again was Gerda to see such a crowd, except on television.

It was a mild day. It was mid-November but the sun was more like September and made people's eyes glisten as they smiled and greeted one another, even strangers, even if they came from different valleys. Peter was right: this festivity in Castel Firmiano, Sigmundskron in German, was something that had never been equaled before in the whole of South Tyrol.

There were banners, signs. On many of them, Gerda, read:
Volk in Not
, a nation in danger. The rally was surrounded by two rows of Carabinieri, black as tar, with red stripes down the legs, which made them look like strange insects, their hands on machine guns. They watched tensely as the crowd went up to the ruins of the castle. They were young, some very young. They were more afraid of all that crowd than the crowd was of them, and Gerda saw that as soon as she caught the eyes of one of them. He was only a little older than her: eighteen, nineteen at most. He kept his eyes on hers as though finding comfort in them. Gerda had already realized that “they” were not a part of that thing she and Peter and all the others belonged to. On the contrary they represented exactly the “danger” her “people” were in. However, the boy in uniform, with his hat lowered too far down on his forehead, kept looking at her as though clinging to the grace of that little girl with dress that was too tight, in order to be able to bear his fear more easily. Gerda couldn't help but smile at him. The red handkerchief she was wearing around her neck got untied and fell to the ground. Instinctively, the Carabiniere made to bend down, and the hand that wasn't on the machine gun reached out to pick up the handkerchief.

The comrade in arms next to him turned abruptly and stared at him. He gave him a hard look, one that promised he would be reported to his superiors, or worse. The young Carabiniere's smile stiffened into a mask tenser than before. He hesitated, then his trunk became rigid and straight again, and his hand returned parallel to his hip. Gerda looked away. She picked up the handkerchief by herself and carried on walking. Peter didn't notice anything. The crowd was already pushing them ahead, to the top of the hill.

Bunches of people were hanging from the trees. They were gathered in the castle clearing, on the high ground around, on the battlements of the dilapidated bastions. It looked to Gerda that this field of people had germinated from the soil like gigantic grass made of flesh, clothes, hats, faces: you couldn't see the ground in between the people. Only on the overhanging rocks, from which the ruins sprang like fairytale excrescences, could you get a glimpse of the blood-red porphyry in between people's bodies.

There was a man on stage at the foot of the castle tower. Gerda couldn't decide which looked more stripped of flesh—him or the crutches on which he was leaning. He wasn't old, but he looked ill and very fragile. Gerda had seen many veterans who carried in their bodies the memory of the war that had ended just twelve years earlier: she immediately recognized the thinness of disabled people, those who had lost a leg, like this man who was now talking to the crowd, or a hand, or an arm. The part of them that no longer existed was in constant pain, which radiated and sucked the life out of what remained of the body, draining it like a vampire. The same man really looked as though he was prey to this phantom parasite: he spoke in a brooding, metallic voice that had nothing of the orator about it. Yet the crowd was listening to him in absolute silence. Only when he mentioned the then Minister of the Interior Tambroni did he have to interrupt his speech because of the hisses and boos. He did not lose his composure but waited, calmly, without betraying signs of impatience, and let the crowd boo the representative of the Italian government to its heart's content.

A minute passed. The catcalls continued.

Two minutes. The soldiers and Carabinieri forming a cordon at the foot of the stage began to exchange looks, as though wondering if they should do something.

Three minutes. The hissing directed at the government minister to whom they answered gave no sign of subsiding. Gerda picked a blade of grass, dusty and trampled on by the thousands of feet that had walked on it. She raised it to her lips which the same gesture John Gallagher, from Leeds, United Kingdom, had seen at the hut. She blew and produced a very high-pitched whistling sound. For the second and last time in her whole life, Peter turned to her and gave her a pleased smile.

Four minutes. The hands of the younger Carabinieri were beginning to leave sweat halos on the machine gun handles. The man up on the stage calmly looked at the tens of thousands of people catcalling. He was in no rush to resume his speech. He was taking advantage of the interruption to calculate the turnout to the demonstration he had organized. He was pleased. There, before him, Silvius Magnano, on that 17 November 1957, at Castel Firmiano, there were at least thirty, forty thousand people. Seeing that the total population of South Tyrol was scarcely three hundred thousand, that meant at least one tenth, possibly more, was there. Like Gerda and Peter, they had left in the middle of the night on trucks, buses, cars, motorcycles, tractors. They came from the outskirts of Bolzano, Oltreadige, but also from valleys farther away: Ahrntal, Schlanders, Passeier, Martell, Gsies, Vinschgau. From places where, in dialect, you count
oans, zwoa
. . . and also those where you say
aans, zwa
. . . And so they continued to hiss and boo, as though they never wanted to stop.

Five minutes. The Carabinieri looked at their superiors.

The skinny man onstage caught his breath and opened his mouth as though to resume his speech. Silence returned at once.

Silvius Magnago reminded the crowd of Canon Gamper di Bressanone. The clergyman, who had been persecuted by the Nazis, had launched an appeal a few months earlier: “
Es ist ein Todesmarsch
!” A death march was what South Tyrol was heading for, if things carried on like this: with forced immigration from Southern Italy, jobs being denied to the natives, the growing poverty and emigration. South Tyroleans would soon become a minority in their own land, before being finally swept out of History.

What he would fight for, promised Magnago, the head of the
Südtiroler Volkspartei
, the German-speaking South Tyrolean party, was an autonomous province that wouldn't be attached to another Italian-speaking province, like Trento. A true autonomy that would allow South Tyroleans to take back control of their own land.

He ended his speech by shouting once, twice, many times: “
Los von Trient
!”—Away from Trento! Away from that region with an Italian majority where, once again, Germans were in a minority and unprotected. The crowd cheered, and seemed never to want to stop.

Suddenly, the sound of a sheet being beaten came from the keep of the dilapidated tower. Everybody looked up. Two young men had penetrated the ruins and now, leaning out of one of the slits, had deployed a long, red and white flag. Displaying the Tyrolean flag was still forbidden by Italian law: one of the many Fascist laws no one had bothered to repeal. A small group of Carabinieri started to run toward the tower. Before they were arrested, the two young men began to shout, “
Los von Rom
!”

Peter and the others, mainly young men, joined them. “
Los von Rom
!' cried a small part of the crowd.

In other words: No to the autonomy of politicians, of diplomacy, of compromise. It's not enough just to leave Trento. Leave Rome. Leave Italy.

Magnago pursed his lips as the activists were being taken away by the Carabinieri.

 

Just over a year later, the monument to the Alpine troops in the town where the Hubers lived was targeted once more. This time, there was no red and white paint, no student-like provocations, but an explosive device blew up the pedestal. However, Wastl, little Johnny made of stone, was not destroyed: the charge was faulty.

That day, Peter was in a nearby valley, helping his father with a load of timber. After a quarter of a century driving trucks, Hermann was starting to have back problems. His son's help became necessary, even though that meant giving up the extra money Peter could have brought home from other work. In the evening, when they came back home, Johanna did not comment on what had happened to Wastl that morning. She felt sufficiently relieved that, this time, it hadn't been her son.

 

One June day a couple of years later, a man from Merano came to see the Hubers. He was
Daitsch
but swore in Italian. All the South Tyroleans were now swearing in Italian everywhere, even in the privacy of their own homes. During Fascism, so many of them, like Hermann, had had to endure disapproval and even blows if ever they let exclamations slip in German dialect. So the entire population was therefore convinced that perhaps it would be better to swear in Italian even at home, just to get used to it. However, nobody can tell for sure if there wasn't perhaps also the hope that the
daitcher Gott
, the German good Lord, might not be that well versed in foreign languages: perhaps He wouldn't have entirely understood a
walsche
swear word, and would therefore have been less offended. Whichever way you decide to interpret this, the unanimous adoption of Italian swearing on the part of German speakers turned out to be, of all the Italianization imposed by Fascism, the only success story. But a lasting one.