Eva Sleeps Read Online Free Page A

transportation of timber between the valleys, and turned a blind eye if he spoke dialect with the lumberjacks. In any case, up there among those forgotten crags, even il Duce wouldn’t have been able to hear them.
    The years passed and one day, Hermann saw on the main road of the main town a group of Golden Pheasants—it was what they called the SA. Their eyes were like blades ready to cut down any obstacle to the creation of the magnificent Thousand Year Reich. They walked straight, impeccable, Aryan, infinitely German. Hermann thought they were beautiful demi-gods.
    He decided to become one of them.
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    Maybe Hermann lost love completely just as he was deluding himself that he’d found it—when he saw Johanna, an eighteen-year-old girl with black hair, thin and pale, who never spoke but walked with her head down as though wishing the world would overlook her existence. Maybe having at his side a woman whose every gesture apologized for her being alive would make him forget the shame, powerlessness, anger, and loneliness. That’s what Hermann sensed, although he could not have said it. Therefore, even though he didn’t love Johanna, he asked her to marry him. She immediately saw the coldness in his pale eyes. However, she also thought she saw a hint of concealed tenderness convinced herself that she had discovered, in this tall man who walked so rigidly, an all-consuming truth that was reserved for her alone. It wasn’t true, or perhaps it could have been true, but that’s not what happened. In any case, she married him.
    The first child, Peter, was born with his father’s saturnine temperament and his mother’s dark eyes. He was three years old when Hermann lifted him onto his bony shoulders and joined the crowd gathered where the highway met a valley-bound road. Perched up there, the child felt important, almost as important as Crown Prince Umberto, guest of honor at the unveiling of the monument to the Italian Alpine troops, which had been so keenly desired by the
podestà
. The statue was covered with a white cloth that was being lifted and lowered by the summer wind, like giant breaths. Peter thought it looked like a huge ghost, something inhuman yet alive, throbbing. After the formal speeches and the band playing, the cloth fell with an almost animal rustling sound, in a sinuous ectoplasmic movement. But there was nothing evanescent about what it revealed: that was very solid—almost obtuse—matter.
    A granite Alpino with a thick neck and not very slender—appropriately Italic—legs, directed his grumpy gaze to the northern glaciers, to the spot where the new border had been for the past twenty years. The not exactly sparkling expression of the stone soldier symbolized the blind, obedient and ruthless force that Fascist Italy would unleash against anyone daring to state that Alto Adige did not belong to her. This was not a superfluous clarification, and not only because of the reluctance of many, too many, South Tyroleans to recognize their very Roman lineage. The Fascist government had a more pressing reason for needing this clarification: on entering Vienna only three months earlier, Hitler had declared Austria, through the
Anschluss
, part of the Third Reich. And Austria, the lost homeland, was right there beyond the glaciers.
    But this, as the Alpino stated with his presence, and as the authorities gathered for the occasion repeated, this was Italy.
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    Mussolini’s project to Italianize Alto Adige had been thorough. However, he soon realized that to make the place “very Roman, Latin, imperial” it wasn’t enough just to prevent the peasants from speaking German and wearing traditional clothes. Nor was it enough to forbid school children to study their mother-tongue and force them, instead, to learn Giosuè Carducci’s poem about the serene, wholesome bull “Pio Bove” by heart. Besides, those poor women sent over from