Eva Sleeps (9 page)

Paul had married the eldest daughter of a wealthy family trading in textiles, whose four eldest daughters had been educated in Switzerland, far from the valley and its frugal peasant ways: they needed to polish in the girls that care for the inessential, so necessary for accessing middle-class circles. The plan had worked and now Paul frequented only the town's polite society. Shortly before the war, he finally had a son, without whom the creation of his wealth from nothing would have been an incomplete success.

At the time of the Night of Fires, Hannes Staggl was just over twenty. He had his father's Celtic complexion, almost transparent eyelids, and the pungent scent of a redhead. What he lacked, however, was his father's solid, grounded presence, his kind but determined smile, and the ruthless willpower you sensed behind his politeness. In other words, those very characteristics that had allowed Paul to rise.

Hannes would speed down the roads of the valley in his cream-colored convertible Mercedes 190 with a vanity that smacked of despair. He would change gears abruptly and, with his daring choice of trajectory, scare whichever girl happened to be sitting next to him at the time. He got drunk on speed. The wind slapping his face, the portable record player spitting out sexual Negro music, a soundtrack to his reckless driving—he imagined he was in an American movie. Except that the highway along the valley was not Route 66, he was not Rock Hudson, nor heading toward an epic destiny, but toward Bolzano at most. Above all, it wasn't he but his father who had accomplished the spectacular escape from the darkest of prisons: poverty.

 

Paul Staggl almost never came across Hermann Huber, his old school mate. If they ever happened to meet on the street in town, both adhered to a tacit agreement: they would be seized by a sudden curiosity for a shop window, or bend down to tie their shoelaces, or feel the urgent need to check if a button was fastened. Nobody could have attributed their lack of greeting to rudeness or embarrassment, let alone to Paul's arrogance or Hermann's envy. Their eyes failed to meet every time only through a series of fortuitous circumstances, which were minimal but objective, real, for which reason neither of them was responsible. It had been this way for decades and there was no reason to change. Consequently, their children had never met, either.

One day, though, as he was coming back from a ride in the car, more irritated than usual at how easily girls agreed to get into his cream-colored Mercedes, Hannes saw Gerda.

He didn't know she was his father's old schoolmate's daughter. He didn't know that, as a child, Gerda had spent her summers in a mountain hut and her winters in service. He didn't know that, for the past couple of years, she had only come to town during that couple of months when hotels were shut: a month between All Saints and Saint Nicholas, and a few weeks between Easter and Pentecost. He didn't know that, so when he saw her he just wondered: how come I haven't noticed her until now? Where has she been hiding, when was she born, this blond girl with oblong eyes, lips like tulips, a long but soft stride—not like the other women in the valley, who, although they have long muscles in their legs, also move harshly, like their men? Where has this girl with a woman's body, a woman's bust, a woman's bearing, and even a woman's ears, been until now?

Gerda was walking along the highway, in a little green coat that was somewhat threadbare and too short: she had inherited it from her much shorter married sister. It left exposed her straight legs, her feet in the flat, comfortable shoes of a hard-working girl, her fine wrists swaying in a barely pronounced movement as she walked. Desire rushed up from Hannes' groin so violently that he slammed the brakes and the wheels locked. The dark-haired girl sitting next to him hit her forehead on the dashboard of the Mercedes.

“What happened?” she asked.

He looked at her, suddenly surprised to see her there, on the crimson leather seat next to him. She was a pretty girl, and the scarf tied around the throat highlighted her sharp profile and fair skin. She was massaging her bruised forehead with her tapered fingers, her young breasts pleasingly round under the leather sports jacket. However, Hannes wasn't even interested in this girl's name anymore, now that he had seen Gerda walking down the road.

Who was she?

 

Gerda had been a
Matratze
for a year.

The
Matratzen
were the unloved. The orphans, the illegitimate, the lonely. Gerda was neither orphaned nor illegitimate. She was a
Matratze
because her father Hermann had let her go.

In the kitchen hierarchy, the
Matratzen
were down there with the scullery boys, except that they were worse and lower than them, because scullery boys at least, even if alcoholics and poor, were men. They were women, and even if they were assistant cooks or, in rare cases, cooks, they would always remain
Matratzen
because, as everybody knows, a woman in the kitchen is only respectable if it's the kitchen in her own home.

The kitchens where the
Matratzen
toiled, on the other hand, were in large seasonal hotels, huge rooms full of smoke and steam that had nothing in common with the domestic hearth, with the quiet, healthy atmosphere where children do their homework and mothers darn clothes while waiting for the soup to boil. The kitchens where the
Matratzen
worked were noisy and overheated caves full of shouting, swearing, and sweating, steeped in penetrating smells and sticky fumes, so that the only way you could survive was by becoming insensitive.

The
Matratzen
were called that name by the scullery boys, the cooks, the chefs who managed the kitchens and, albeit never openly, also by the hotel managers. They were made for just one thing, it was said, unlike the mattresses they were named after, on which, if you wished, you could also sleep.

Theoretically, Gerda too was a
Matratze
. However, nobody could use coarse language with her, not even the drunkest scullery boy. She had long legs, high breasts and, especially, eyes that never looked down. The desire she triggered was too real and intense, and men would have felt they would be exposed in their very essence if they had made to her the coarse insinuations they made to all the others. Of course, it would have been better to have sex with the other women than not to have it at all: none of the cooks, not to mention those wretched scullery boys who couldn't even spare a penny for the
Nutten
¹⁰
on the highway, did it very much, hardly at all, in fact. But they really would have liked to do it with Gerda. They would have liked to slide their tongues into the groove between her breasts. They would have liked to slip their fingers into parts of her body which, just imagining them, put you at risk of cutting yourself because you lost your grip on the meat cleaver, and your blood drained from your head and descended elsewhere, lower down. They would have liked—and how could they confess that to the other men in the kitchen?—to watch her smile at the moment of pleasure. No, you couldn't make coarse jokes about Gerda. Nobody could.

What did Gerda think about the desire she triggered, and had triggered ever since she was a child, in the males around her? Actually, not much. It's not that she didn't notice. Even when she slept in the hay next to Simon and Michl, she'd noticed the brief, suffocated breaths, the strange rhythmic oscillations of the wood beams followed by strangled moans like little insults and then, suddenly, the embarrassed silence. She couldn't understand those goings-on very well, but already felt that they had something to do with her. Ever since she was a child she'd been used to having upon her the eyes of all the men she crossed in the street, always, especially in the summer when thin dresses emphasized her figure. John Gallagher from Leeds, United Kingdom, had merely been the first. She learned to recognize those looks, both predatory and confused, vulgar and adoring, but they washed over her without permeating her; they told her nothing about herself. That desire corroded only them, the men who felt it, not her; just like caustic soda corrodes only the fingers that handle it and not the cake pans that are scoured with it.

In reality, ever since she had been a small child, Gerda had felt destined for something which, she was sure, she would recognize when it appeared before her, and which she would certainly be able to tell apart from those looks. This something resounded within her like the longing she experienced when listening to certain songs, or when the thaw diffused the first fragrance of resin in the air that still smelled of snow, or in the middle of her menstrual cycle, when her breasts would harden and something, like a call, grew between her legs. It protected her from coarse jokes like a cloak. So the men looked at her with dismay and rapture, like a force of nature outside their control, and ended up desiring her even more, but from a distance.

So Gerda became the first
Matratze
in the history of Alto Adige hotels to be respected by the men working beside her. She would not be the last, nor the only one; at one point, more or less at the time when the pop singer Mina retired from the stage, they even stopped being called
Matratzen
. But she was the first.

 

As was only right, Gerda started from the very bottom: washing dishes.

When she would walk into the kitchen at around six-thirty, there wasn't anybody there yet. Every morning, it was up to her, as the latest arrival, to light the oil burner that fueled the stoves. She was skillful and fast, she had been handling fire and flammable material while still half asleep ever since she was a child, and it came easily to her. The oil burner would take over an hour to warm up and, by eight o'clock, you had to be ready to serve coffee to the guests—no one in South Tyrol had heard of Neapolitan-style espresso yet—and boiled milk. As it switched itself on, the burner produced a dense, pungent, bituminous smoke. A black cloud would spread through the still deserted kitchen, and there was always a moment when her breath would catch in her throat. That balmy air smelling of pine needles and hay, which the guests of the large hotel came especially to fill their lungs with, seemed, inside there, like a treasure lost forever. When the burner would start pulling, the kitchen would become alive with the arrival of cooks, assistant cooks and scullery boys, and Gerda would start her day at the marble sink. Dishwashing machines didn't exist yet: everything, from the huge braising pots to the teaspoons, was washed by hand.

Some encrusted pans had to be scoured and rubbed for over half an hour: at the end of the day, Gerda's arms and shoulders were so sore that she would take off her apron slowly, like an old woman. The worst thing was the soap. It was made there in the kitchen, boiled on a stove slightly apart from the others in huge pans full of caustic soda and pig fat. The result was a kind of sticky cream which Gerda then spread on a wide board, like polenta. Once it had cooled and hardened, she'd cut it into blocks. Soda soap burns your skin; after a month the tips of her fingers were stripped to the flesh. But if she'd put on gloves she would have been considered “delicate,” an insult almost worse than
Matratze
.

If the extractor hood wasn't washed every seven days, the accumulated grease would start dripping down on the food. Once a week, on a Friday, Gerda and the scullery boys would boil it in a tub full of soda, and scrub all the kitchen tiles thoroughly. On those days, Gerda had to skip the
Zimmerstunde
, the hour of break in her room between the lunch and dinner shifts.

Her final task of the day was to sterilize the wooden board used for meat and fish. In the evening, once the kitchen was closed, she would pour alcohol over it, then set it ablaze. Gerda's day began and ended with fire.

 

Herr Neumann, the head cook, was a fat, ruddy man with puffy eyelids like ravioli and a small, Cupid-like mouth. He never used spatulas or forks. He said that the consistency of food accounted for half of its flavor, and a cook who doesn't touch it has no idea of what he's cooking. For this reason, he always used his bare hands, sticking his surprisingly tapered fingers into pots and skillets. He didn't even use a ladle for trying sauces. He'd dip a finger in then lick it: a quick, childlike gesture, like a little boy being caught stealing. And yet he never burned himself.

When the almost two hundred places had filled up with hungry guests, urgent orders would start coming in thick and fast. Waiters would practically skate in from the dining room and read out their notes, screaming, before stacking them up beside the serving hatch:

 

“
Gerstesuppe, neu!”

“Filet au poivre, neu!”

“Lammrippen aux herbes, neu
!”

“
Rollade, neu
!”

 

They would swipe the dishes the cooks had laid out on the serving hatch, stack them up on their arms and forearms as many as six at a time, then set off again, skating on the marble floor to the dining hall.

The cooks never talked among themselves, or at least not during rush hour: they were too busy cooking, stirring, trying not to scorch themselves, garnishing. Some conveyed their rush with abrupt gestures, like nervous birds. Like Hubert, the cook in charge of the counter for starters and cooked vegetables, who would dance among the rings on stiff legs that looked about to snap like dry spaghetti. Herr Neumann did everything with equal speed, but calmly. Sometimes, the cooks' paths would cross and then, with large, elegant air gestures, they would stop the burning pans from hitting people's backs. It was a frenzied, urgent dance which nevertheless had an essence of quiet concentration.

As far as waiters and commis coming from the dining hall were concerned, however, any delay, even a few seconds in the limbo between the steamy kitchen and the dining hall full of impatient guests, became an obstacle for which to blame someone. This would often result in insults between them and the cooks.