That phone call, the worst ever, didn’t come in the middle of the night, or at the first light of dawn. It rang at a deceptively harmless time: right after lunch. Magnago had just finished coffee with his wife Sofia, and was about to go back to his office.
It was a familiar voice, with a Roman accent. It told him about the red Renault in the middle of Rome city center—right next to the headquarters of the two large political parties—and about the body under the blanket.
For some time now, Sofia had been having trouble remembering the names of things, or rather it was that they just refused to be found in her language. That thing with four legs that you sit on, she couldn’t remember what it was called, yet she immediately gave it to her husband: she didn’t know what they’d said to him on the phone, but she could see very clearly that Silvius was about to fall.
Magnago collapsed on the chair and put his hand to his forehead. He asked her to turn on the television.
There it was, the body curled up in the boot. The crowd of policemen. The priest giving the last rites. Over his bent neck, the famous face with its secret intelligence had a long beard after all the days of anxiety, terror, imprisonment. There it was in full, the destructive force of the hurricane. Aldo Moro had been killed.
Magnago hid his face in his hands. His wife was standing next to him. He leaned his forehead against her chest, and wept.
On that May 9, 1978, Gerda too was standing in front of the television. Frau Mayer, patrons, cooks, and assistant cooks were all watching the screen together, in silence.
Among them only Gerda, Elmar, and Frau Mayer had been present at the banquet which, so many years earlier, Obmann Magnago had hosted for Aldo Moro, in that very dining room. The rest of the staff had been hired later. Gerda recalled how they’d all stood in a row to say goodbye to the two powerful men. She couldn’t remember the expression of the Italian, but then she recalled that he’d kept his eyes down while giving her his hand, and that it wasn’t really a proper handshake: the grip of a defenseless man who certainly wasn’t very strong. She wondered why they’d killed such a gentle man.
Besides, no man, powerful or ordinary, deserves to be shoved into the trunk of a car like that, like a thing.
That wasn’t the worst day because every death is worse than any other for those who mourn it and, afterwards, there were many deaths in Italy, too many. However, in comparison, some of the attacks that used to take place in Alto Adige seemed like the firecrackers that explode several days after New Year’s Eve is over. Nothing but insignificant bang bang from tiny little crackers, in comparison to what was happening in the rest of Italy.
In 1979, the Tiroler Schutzbund, an extremist faction few people had heard of, blew up the Wastl in Eva’s home town for the umpteenth time. For the past forty years, the monument to the Alpini had been erected and destroyed, erected again and destroyed again, as though it had become the stake in a very long competition.
For a couple of years now, Eva had been a boarder in Bolzano, where she had been admitted to high school because of excellent grades at the end of middle school. After many arguments, she had persuaded her mother that she’d never become a cook. That morning, she walked past the intersection and saw young drafted soldiers in overalls and boots, armed with brooms and dust pans, collecting pieces of Wastl from the ground. They looked more like good little housewives than military forces deployed against a now-obsolete form of terrorism.
Nobody was interested in these things anymore, on either side, except for a few fanatics. A few months later, even the National Association of Alpini took the wise decision not to reconstruct the monument again, but to erect a granite bas-relief representing Alpini in peace service. Until it was built, the headless bust of Wastl would remain in its place on the pedestal. The bas-relief, however, was never sculpted, and the stub of statue is still there even now.
Eva was back home for her vacation when the small package arrived. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a thin string. Gerda went to open the door.
The names of the addressee and the sender were in neat handwriting. Gerda recognized it immediately. “I nimms net,” she told Udo, the postman. I’m not taking it.
“But it’s for Eva—”
“I’m her mother. I know she doesn’t want it.”
Udo nearly asked if she was sure. But she looked up at him with her transparent, almond-shaped eyes and stood there, motionless, staring at him. He said nothing. He took a pen out of his breast pocket and a form from the leather bag. He handed them to her, now avoiding her face. “Sign here.”
Gerda signed. Then, suddenly gentle, she asked, “So what’s going to happen to this parcel now?”
“I’ll take it back to the sorting office and tell them you don’t want it—”
“That Eva doesn’t want it.”
“—and they’ll send it back.”
Udo put the parcel back into his leather bag, folded the form, and slipped it with the other papers. He replaced the pen in his breast pocket after checking that it was closed securely. He was about to leave. The upper part of his body was already turning toward the road and his feet were about to follow when he had one last scruple. “Where’s Eva, anyway?”
“Eva is asleep.”
The brown parcel traveled backwards along the road it had taken to arrive at that spot: two thousand seven hundred and ninety-four kilometers in total, there and back.