Eva está dormida

In Milton's Paradise Lost, the archangel Michael reveals to Adam the future history of humankind, but gives Eve a sleeping potion: she mustn't listen because she is a woman. While Adam learns the secrets of the future, Eve is asleep. The Eve in our novel is also asleep at some crucial moments in her life, but a call in the early hours from Vito Anania, the only man she once loved like a father, catches her awake: Vito is very ill and would like to see her one last time. A retired Calabrian carabinieri officer, Anania served in the 1960s in South Tyrol, the region of northern Italy where Eve grew up, her lost paradise. Those were dark years, marked by tension and attacks, by intense confrontation between the Italian state's security forces and the inhabitants of that province. Yet, this did not prevent love from blossoming between that young carabinieri officer and the beautiful Gerda Huber, a cook in a grand Alpine hotel, sister of an independence activist, and, above all, mother of Eva, a single mother in a world that stigmatized such a condition. It is Easter time, and Eva can only find a train to travel south. In the nearly 1,500 kilometers that separate her from the Dolomites to her destination, Eva will recall her childhood and the turbulent history of her family and her land, which was ceded to Italy after the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the First World War. Overnight, Mussolini's fascist government, through force and repression, compelled the population of South Tyrol, as it then came to be called, to forget their traditions and their mother tongue, German.