A year after the 1980 Bologna massacre, in the summer of my high school graduation, I was on my way to the Tremiti Islands with a school mate. I didn’t care for him but he fancied me so had persuaded his parents, rich shopkeepers in Bolzano, to pay for my travel and camping too. Until then I’d only ever seen the sea at Cesenatico, opposite the square buildings of the ex-Fascist colonies: the only travel agent my mother could afford was Caritas. Sea holidays for me meant the rancid smell of tomato sauce, the stench of too many badly washed children in a single dormitory, sand thrown into the eyes of the weaker children by older ones, abused by teachers angry with exhaustion.
It was before the days of the Italian Eurostar with compulsory bookings, and our carriage seemed full of war evacuees. Holiday makers going to the sea in August were bursting out of compartments as though from crammed cupboards that won’t close anymore, they sat on the foldaway corridor seats, on each other’s laps, on the floor, on the steps outside closed doors, inside the toilets (especially those traveling without a ticket, and there were quite a few of those). The boy ready to pay and I, like so many others, were overloaded with heavy backpacks made of thick, coarse fabric, with aluminum frames that were supposed to distribute the load on your back but just dug into your ribs. We smelled of feet, cannabis, strawberry-flavored Del Ponte chewing gum, and especially smoke: we always had a cigarette in our hand, you still could then. When we arrived at Bologna, our train stopped on the first platform and I saw right outside my window the tear in the wall, emphasized by the glass which even today commemorates the exact location of the explosion, and the clock fixed at that time: 10:25.
I grew up in the South Tyrol of bombs and attacks, and I was already old enough to have formed a definite opinion about Uncle Peter’s death; but even I, the child of a land of terrorists and roadblocks couldn’t—can’t—fully imagine the extent of the Bologna massacre. Eighty-five dead, hundreds of injured: a massacre that belonged to horror on a different scale. When the train started again, I tried talking about it with the boy. He didn’t reply, skated over the issue, and changed the subject as soon as he could, so that I had to keep my confused dismay to myself. I added this obvious lack of sensitivity to the many other factors indicating that he was unworthy of my love. The fact that he had paid for my trip didn’t seem relevant in evaluating the issue.
I spent the holidays allowing other people to come on to me before his eyes. In the evening, around the bonfire on the beach, I let other boys with sleeping bags or young residents of the island touch me, but then I always searched his eyes. He never protested. He paid for everything until the last day. It was only many years later, after I’d lost touch with him for a while, that I heard from mutual acquaintances that one of his relatives from Val Passiria had been among the Bologna dead. He had been very fond of her, they said.
Now, in the middle of the night on a train, we come into Bologna station. We’re at platform four and you can’t see the gutted wall from my window.
There is nobody beneath the drably-lit platform roofs. The loudspeaker announces the rare arrivals and departures like a voice in the desert: an invisible prophet with a thick Emilia accent. His hermitage isn’t made of mystical rocks but of marble benches, drink dispensers, tracks. His tiny community of followers is made up of me, the Neapolitan attendant, and the engine driver whose presence I’ve been sensing for hours as the train slowed and accelerated.
The prophet hurls his invectives at us: “The night InterCity train 780 ‘Freccia Salentina’ from Bari and bound for Milan Central, is about to depart from platform . . . ”
“The train 1940 ‘del Sole’ from Villa San Giovanni and bound for Turin Porta Nuova . . . ”
The train departs again while the voice carries on preaching in vain.
We exit the old-fashioned station light and dive once again into the darkness of the countryside, the great obscurity of natural night time which is neither hostile nor friendly, but simply different from us.
That’s exactly how it was when I kept Ulli company while he spent the whole night combing the ski pistes on Marlene, his snowcat that was more comfortable and personalized than a truck: the zebra seat upholstery, the heating turned up to maximum so you could sit in a T-shirt, the stereo light flickering to the rhythm of Queen or The Clash with dozens of luminous LEDs, still a novelty back then in the Eighties. Outside, the throbbing winter sky and the wind at 2,000 meters. And us going up and down the pistes, making the snow a perfect white velvet for the skiers, which the factory would churn out the following morning.
It was on one of those nights that Ulli told me he was no longer afraid of being a Schwul. He used that very word. Not gay or homosexuell, but the term used by pontificating retirees in the tavern Stammtisch, the one Ulli had heard uttered behind his back by his peers, by the neighbors’ children, by his younger brother Sigi, ever since, at the age of eleven, he no longer wanted to play football or ice hockey, but only spend time with me.
A month earlier, Ulli had been to London. There, his homosexuality hadn’t ensured him original status in the least. On the contrary, he’d been treated almost as someone quite ordinary. He’d liked that. It was also on one of those nights that I’d told him of my lightning marriage, celebrated and soon afterwards annulled, in Reno, to Lesley—or was it Wesley? I pretended not even to remember the name of that two-week husband. Naturally, Ulli didn’t buy it and laughed. Afterwards, however, he’d fallen silent and looked at me with that sad, tender expression he often had.
“I wonder what Vito would say.”
I sniffed hard. There we were again, Ulli and I, on the same wavelength. Every time it came as a surprise and yet it was almost taken for granted: at that moment I was also thinking about Vito. And yet he hadn’t been mentioned by anyone for years, either by Ulli or me. And especially not by my mother. What would that duty-bound Carabiniere from the South have said about me and that lightning marriage? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
To prevent the snowcat from overturning on the steep slope, a cable secured/hooked to its front was attached to a winch at the station above. It shone like a precious necklace in the headlights. I remained silent, watching it tighten.
I began telling Ulli about how I’d met his brother Sigi at the Altstadtfest11 wine bars the previous summer. Along with the stench of beer and Currywurst, these words had come out of his mouth: “If I ever read in the paper that you’ve ended up badly because of a man, I’ll be sorry but not surprised.”
Ulli had continued to maneuver Marlene in silence, staring at the cone of light from the headlights on the snow ahead of him. He had long-term experience of Sigi’s brutal and obscene way of speaking. Many times he’d asked me to help him understand just when exactly, and why, his little gentian-eyed brother, whose shoe laces he had tied for years, had turned out . . . like that. Now Ulli’s eyes suddenly opened wide as he turned to look at me. In the dim light of the cabin his eyes glowed with indignation. “He wants to fuck you! Even Sigi wants to fuck you!”
“Why are you so surprised?”
“I don’t want to fuck you.”
“You don’t count; you’re a Schwul.”
Ulli stopped the snowcat and jumped out, closing the door behind him. I was afraid I’d offended him, even though he’d used the word Schwul about himself earlier. But it wasn’t that. He was picking something up he’d seen in the snow. Lit up like a rock star in the middle of the huge stage of the entire mountain, Ulli lifted his arm to show me what he’d found: a strange pink animal with two heads, no body and a long string of a tail. Only when he came back into the cabin, bringing in with him the night frost, I saw what it was: a lace bra.
We spent the rest of the night up and down the mountain’s immensity inside our heated microcosm, wondering how it could have ended up there. During that harsh December which had made the stream in the middle of town freeze over, who—and especially why—had someone felt like peeling off, like an onion, the complex layers of ski wear in order to slip off the bra? And why on that particular track, the black slope where champions of the special slalom trained?
We talked about it all night without finding an explanation.
When I met Carlo, I decided for the first time in my life that I would be faithful to him. Carlo should never know that, of course, but it was a great relief to me, and still is, eleven years later. No one can deny that for me this was progress.
We’re now between Bologna and Florence. The darkness outside the window has lost the deep breath of the night sky, but is now black, narrow and noisy: we go in and out of tunnels beneath the Apennines, just as I go in and out of my thoughts. What would Vito have said about me? If he’d been there, he would have said . . .
But he wasn’t there.
Did he ever think about me? I’m sure he thought about my mother. Why didn’t he phone her?
Vito called me. And now it’s me rushing to him. Carlo knows nothing about Vito. I’ve never mentioned him. Realizing this is like one of the dams Ulli and I used to build as children: it stops the flow of my thoughts just as we would stop, albeit briefly, the streams. With splashes and hollow thuds, like a drum, we used to drop the largest stones we could find into the water: porphyry the color of black pudding, gray-green granite, salmon-streaked pale dolomite, schist glowing like cat’s-eye. Our arms hurt from the effort and our hands, after soaking for hours, would become white and wrinkled like blind creatures from the abyss. When we managed to disrupt the water’s course, it would start flowing in strange ways: it would dig furrows through the emerald moss hairs on the shore, form unexpected bogs in the grass, and start spinning in whirls in front of certain streaked rocks which up to then we hadn’t considered as part of the stream but of the undergrowth. Still, it didn’t matter how tall the pebble barrier we built was, or how much moss and bark cement we used to plug all the leaks: in the end, and always, the water found its way.
I have never told Carlo about Vito.
That “never” is like a slab of rock thrown into the flow of my thoughts. They stop for a moment. When they start flowing again their nature is altered and they have become something halfway between sleep and waking, something different, just like the secret water of a bog is different than the fast and gurgling water of a stream.
In this half-sleep I see myself as a little girl. I’m about to fall asleep in the furnished room where I lived with my mother during the low season. There’s an Italian Eurostar train standing still next to the bed she and I share. There are passengers looking at me through the windows. They have the expression of people who have already spent a long time staring at the passing panorama: a neutral expression untouched by the landscape rushing past them for hours. Some don’t even look up from the newspapers they’re reading. Only then do I realize something: they’re all men. And I notice that, lying next to me, there’s my mother Gerda as a young woman. She is supporting her head with her hand, her elbow digging into the mattress, her heavy, full breast falling on one side of her slip. She’s more beautiful than I will ever be. The train conductor whistles, the fast train starts again and crosses our room like a station. A man strains his neck so he can see the bed from his window for as long as he can. She puts a finger to her mouth and, addressing the train, murmurs suggestively, “Eva is asleep . . . ”
“No, she’s not!” Vito’s cheerful, musical voice breaks in. “My Sisiduzza is still awake.”
He appears next to me, with his laughing, loving eyes. To fall asleep more easily, I hold his hand tight. However, the Eurostar passes next to the head of the bed and wakes me up completely with its loud rattle . . .
An insistent metallic din wakes me up. The ladder the Neapolitan couchette attendant has taught me to use as an anti-burglar device is rattling against the handle next to my head.
“We arrive in Rome in twenty minutes!” says a male voice from the corridor.
I have no recollection of Florence Station, I must have dozed off in the Apennines. My eyes are puffy and my hands are clumsy from waking up suddenly; only after messing about and knocking metal do I manage to free myself from the prison of the anti-burglar ladder. Even before I open the door completely I can smell coffee. The couchette attendant hands me a plastic cup with a contrite air.
“It’s cold. I’ll make you another one . . . ”
“Oh, no, please don’t worry . . . ” I reply, taking it.
He also gives me a sachet of sugar and the little white plastic spatula that acts as a spoon.
“Thank you . . . ”
I drink the coffee in one sip and wipe my lips with my wrist. “The same gesture as your mother,” Ulli once said to me and once again I promised myself from then on to use my fingers, like everybody else, except that I never remember until it’s too late.
I stare at the Neapolitan couchette attendant with my hands still in front of my mouth, like a Muslim veil.
He’s also looking at me, with a serious expression. His forehead is a little low but he has the wavy mouth of the Southern seas. I also notice his neck, which emerges decisively from the light blue uniform shirt, his shoulders broad, just as I like them, the skillful hands of a man familiar with engines, minor home repairs and a woman’s body. I’m a lot taller than him. Neither of us has looked away from the other one yet. His eyes have clouded over as though with a sudden sadness. Or is it desire? My breathing has gotten deeper, and so has his.
And I find myself thinking: I’ve been faithful for eleven years—not to Carlo but to his wife. So why not betray her with an attentive couchette attendant who hasn’t taken advantage of the situation and is ready to make me another coffee if this one gets cold?
“Thank you . . . ” I say, returning the empty cup. He takes it, careful not to brush my fingers. I’m about to go back into my compartment. “I’m going to tidy myself up.”
“You don’t need to.” His beautiful, pearl-fisher mouth hints at a smile.
“Thank you,” I say for the third time and close the door behind me.
The train is already running next to the fork in the motorway past the Fiano Romano signal box. It’ll soon go past the ring road and we’ll be in Rome.
It’s six-thirty in the morning when we arrive at Rome Tiburtina, but it hasn’t been daylight for long: it’s already daylight saving time so the sun rises late. A middle-aged woman is watching our train as it stops at the platform. She has two commas of silvery eyeshadow beneath her plucked eyebrows, a purple coat that opens on a black sheath dress too short for her age, and gold leather shoes. She looks like the survivor of a night that has fallen short of her expectations. Behind her, there is a plaque on the wall commemorating the passage of armored trains carrying the Roman Jews rounded up in 1943. In order to send them to Auschwitz, the Nazis made them go up Italy along the same rail track I have just travelled on.
The couchette attendant brings my suitcase down from the train. He hops off the footboard with an agility that betrays his youth. However, he’s all grown-up and earnest as he holds out his hand.
“My name’s Nino.”
“I’m Eva,” I reply, shaking his hand.
“A beautiful name, almost like you . . . ”
Driving my trolley suitcase, I walk away cheerfully: nothing puts a spring in a woman’s step more than a compliment. Something my mother knows very well.