I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Read online

  I look back, nonplussed.

  “If I see you on the same subway car as me, I’ll hit send. If you even try to get near me again, I’ll scream. And if you keep following me, I’ll go to to the police station, report you, and give them your picture.”

  I pinch myself, and at the same time, I think:

  “Jesus, listen to the way she enunciates.”

  A few people are staring.

  I stand there, semi-paralyzed, too demoralized to attempt the slightest defense.

  The tremendous babe then sidesteps me without a care in the world and boards the train with impressive calm. I hardly need point out that at least five individuals of the male gender offer to let her get on first.

  Well, Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, I think to myself.

  I head for the stairs and return to the surface, staying close to the walls like a streetwalker. I emerge from that abyss in a state of near-death exhaustion. Is it a coincidence that the worst blows of my life always seem to happen in the subway?

  I walk into a café, go to the bar, and order an espresso and a glass of water. I stand there, gazing at the microbes in the air until the coffee is too cold to drink. The barista looks at me without a word, takes the demitasse away, and empties it into the sink. I leave the café and head home, walking down the sidewalks like one of those wanted criminals in an old black-and-white American movie who walk the streets with their head down, hoping to pass unrecognized.

  WHAT MALINCONICO WOULD SAY ABOUT

  GILBERT O’SULLIVAN, ABOUT HIS SUBMERGED PESSIMISM AND THE PEDOPHOBIA OF CONTEMPORARY POP MUSIC,

  IF ANYONE WERE EVER TO ASK HIM

  (A DECDEDLY IMPROBABLE EVENTUALITY)

  Alone Again (Naturally),” by the Irish singer-songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan, was an international hit single at the turn of the seventies. A song that was easy to listen to, with a persuasive charming little melody, one of those songs you feel like listening to over again as soon as the needle comes to the end of the record, even if you couldn’t sing along because you didn’t know English.

  It was so popular in Italy that Fausto Papetti recorded an instrumental version on one of those famous albums with the topless girls on the cover.

  My father, who like all the fathers of the seventies specialized in buying only and exclusively shitty music, which he listened to (and forced us to listen to along with him) in the car, obviously had the cassette. I still remember with horror cassette tapes by Fred Bongusto, Stelvio Cipriani, Bruno Martino, and—even though this is more recent—that tremendous pile of shit “A Comme Amour” by Richard Clayderman, infusing with despair the Sunday drives to see the grandparents. Those songs spread through the car, awakening the suspicion in our childish minds that life was actually a fairly grim proposition.

  In any case, “Alone Again” was such a pretty song that not even Fausto Papetti was able to drag it down.

  Gilbert O’Sullivan, who was actually named Raymond Edward O’Sullivan (he adopted his name as an artist in a tribute to the nineteenth-century librettist and composer duo Gilbert & Sullivan), first debuted in 1971 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, when virtually no one had heard of him. Other far more famous artists were scheduled to play that evening on the same stage, including The Sweet, Rockpile, and Ashton Gardner.

  Well, he went on stage dressed as a sort of latter-day pop version of Buster Keaton, with his cap turned sideways, a pair of shorts, and a puppyish expression. He stole the audience’s heart with his genteel, hummable, melodious songs, with a simple well-constructed format, in contrast to the glam rock that reigned uncontested over the music scene of those years.

  And it was in fact with “Alone Again” that O’Sullivan won international fame and renown, in 1972.

  The distinctive feature of that song is the fact that the words, in sharp contrast to the prettily composed tune, agreeable and easy to listen to, ooze an irremediable sadness and unhappiness. “Alone Again” is the clear-eyed, disarming account of a life marked by loneliness, an essential state that the merry-go-round of life, however many times you might ride it, inevitably brings you back to.

  Jilted at the altar on his wedding day, the singer reports events and emotions with shameless sincerity, rejecting the use of metaphor:

  In a little while from now,

  If I’m not feeling any less sour

  I promised myself to treat myself

  And visit a nearby tower,

  And climbing to the top,

  Will throw myself off

  In an effort to make it clear to whomever

  what it’s like when you’re shattered

  Left standing in the lurch, at a church

  Where people’re saying,

  “My God that’s tough, she stood him up!

  No point in us remaining.

  May as well go home.”

  As I did on my own,

  Alone again, naturally

  The effect that this elementary prose produces in us as we read it is an embarrassing sense of helplessness. If any of our friends were to confide these thoughts in us (and above all, if they told us they had or subscribed to these thoughts), we’d be left speechless. Any attempt to persuade them otherwise, to encourage them to hope, would be be quashed by the commonplace but irrefutable trifecta of subject-verb-object.

  For that matter, exactly what would you say to someone who sings lyrics like these to a delightful musical score:

  Now looking back over the years,

  And whatever else that appears

  I remember I cried when my father died

  Never wishing to hide the tears

  And at sixty-five years old,

  My mother, God rest her soul,

  Couldn’t understand why the only man

  She had ever loved had been taken

  Leaving her to start with a heart

  So badly broken

  Despite encouragement from me

  No words were ever spoken

  And when she passed away

  I cried and cried all day

  Alone again, naturally

  Like many other other artists of his generation, O’Sullivan conceals the pain of life in carefree melody. “Alone Again” is a foot-tapping song. You nod along to the tempo and then shudder in horror at the end of each verse. The music is a booby trap, it’s a cunning device that allows him to tell you how life really is. It’s so reassuring to listen to, so comfortable to slip on, that the words only reach you later, almost as if you had to make a special effort to listen to them. Like a suitcase with a false bottom that you can lift and look under if you’re really interested.

  Back then, when there was still some freedom left, even pop music could hatch an occasional conspiracy. The adorable and tuneful young pop artists who wrote ditties to make young girls fall in love and record producers rich were actually just a pack of depressives who had infiltrated the music business with one objective: to infect their fans with a tragic sense of life. They put on a happy face and then calmly proceeded to tell you one chilling story after another when you were alone with them, every time you put them on your record player.

  Before vanishing from the scene (artistically speaking, that is, at least here in Italy), Gilbert O’Sullivan reprised the success he’d achieved with “Alone Again” by recording “Clair,” another picture-perfect pop song that climbed the international hit parade. The song got stuck in your memory after a first listen. Italian pop singer Johnny Dorelli recorded a very questionable Italian version.

  Once again, in “Clair,” we find the same dichotomy between lyrics and melody that is such a distinctive feature of the O’Sullivanian compositional style. But “Alone Again” is an undisguised surrender to grief, sorrow, and loneliness, “Clair” is a breath of fresh air in the realm of the greatest and most hopeful of all the emotions that make up the panoply of experience human: love. A love, however, that is openly addressed not to a woman but to a little girl, by the name of Clair.

  In this case, the
lyrics leave no room for ambiguity:

  Clair. The moment I met you, I swear.

  I felt as if something, somewhere,

  had happened to me, which I couldn’t see.

  And then, the moment I met you, again.

  I knew in my heart that we were friends.

  It had to be so, it couldn’t be no.

  But try as hard as I might do, I don’t know why.

  You get to me in a way I can’t describe.

  Words mean so little when you look up and smile.

  I don’t care what people say, to me you’re more than a child.

  Oh Clair. Clair . . .

  Once again, the composer’s sincerity in revealing his feelings takes the form of lyrics that strike us speechless in their sheer elemental simplicity.

  Clair, I’ve told you before “Don’t you dare!”

  “Get back into bed.”

  “Can’t you see that it’s late.”

  “No, you can’t have a drink.”

  “Oh all right then, but wait just a minute.”

  While I, in an effort to babysit, catch up on my breath,

  what there is left of it.

  You can be murder at this hour of the day.

  But in the morning the sun will seem a lifetime away.

  Oh Clair. Clair . . .

  The Italian version of the song (which bears the signature of Daniele Pace, the dean of Italian popular music and a member of the venerable band the Squallor), aside from a few understandable adjustments of the meter, basically adheres to the contents of the original. In fact, Johnny Dorelli sings:

  Clair, your mother and I dated once

  and you don’t know it, but why

  are you looking at me that way, with your eyes gazing up,

  there’s no finer memory for me than that,

  and yet since you’ve come into my life

  I don’t know whether to think about her or you.

  But you have stolen my heart

  a thousand times more than that

  I’m ashamed to be playing like this

  But after all, what do we care what the people say

  When you smile at me you’re no longer a little girl, Clair.

  And there’s more:

  Clair, now it’s too late for you

  Let’s go to sleep, that’s your bed

  And I’m not sorry

  It’s almost dawn by now.

  You’ve stolen my heart and you won’t give it back

  You can hear my breathing, you’ve almost taken that away too.

  We’ve had our fun, but tomorrow, in time,

  It’ll all be over

  It’s time to get some sleep, Clair.

  To read, in the third millennium—and to read in Italy, in the third millennium—words of this kind, is something that plunges you deeply and directly into a pool of embarrassment. Something that sends your eyes searching for the gaze of other people. That covers you with a mantle of disquiet, a lurking sense of guilt that you instinctively seek to avoid. It’s a safe bet that a song of this kind, broadcast today on a moderately popular radio station or television show, would trigger a population-wide uprising of blistering critiques that, at various levels of hypocrisy, would advocate a collective denunciation of this songwriter’s defense of the one crime around which modern society closes ranks and wholeheartedly condemns, in the most absolute terms.

  It is obvious that the lyrics, in their impassioned portrayal of childhood, possess all the poetic authenticity required to refute all suspicions and return the accusation to sender.

  But it’s even more obvious that the simple fact that the song lends itself to potential interpretation as a hymn to the molesta­tion of children would be grounds nowadays for a society-wide disapproval that would sweep it out of the musical marketplace with the irresistible fury of a tsunami, even though it still stands head and shoulders above virtually all of the right-thinking treacle that the contemporary pop music industry foists on its unsuspecting public.

  VOLUNTEERS FOR KNOWLEDGE

  I’m still asleep when the door buzzer startles me awake. I start to climb up my mattress and my eyes creak open, but of course I can’t see a thing because it’s dark out and the light is off. I struggle and grope and touch and grab and miss and I keep on until I get oriented, wall, window, Leksvik dresser, Nives getting dressed in front of me, now I remember everything, yes yes, the Slabang alarm clock on the Hemnes night stand, the digital numbers blinking in the dark, the number on the right is missing its central upright but you can still tell what number it is, zero eight colon zero nine, who the hell rings people’s doorbells at 8:10 in the morning?

  I implore my body to come to my aid and I get to my feet, dragging myself down the hallway like a hunchback. If it’s one of those idiotic old geezers who show up before the blood and urine lab opens in the morning and just ring doorbells at random to get in, I swear by the Virgin Mary, I’ll give him a stroke this time.

  “Who is it?”

  “Dad?”

  “Alfre’?” I ask. But in the tone of voice of someone who’s not sure they have the right name, if you know what I mean. It’s schooltime. He should be on his way to school right now.

  “Can I come up?” he asks.

  I buzz him in.

  I give my hair a quick brush with my fingers. I rub my eyes. I yawn.

  The first thing I do is open the door to the landing. I leave it on the latch, so when Alf comes up he doesn’t have to knock. Then I go into the kitchen and open the wooden shutter, evicting a pigeon who was loitering on the windowsill. I pick up the Bialetti Moka Express, I turn on the TV and switch to the morn­ing news on Canale 5. I don’t know why when I turn the TV on in the morning I always turn to the morning news on Canale 5. I hate it with a passion, the morning news on Canale 5. Especially the theme music, that tremendous theme music that seems to have been composed just to remind you of the horrible things that happen out there in the world. In my opinion, the catastrophic theme music of the morning news report on Canale 5 is designed to make you afraid to go outside. That way you can stay home and just watch shows on Canale 5.

  So I fill my Bialetti espresso pot, put it on the burner, pull a Stefan out from the kitchen table, turn it facing the television set, and sit down, waiting for Alfredo to come upstairs and the coffee to boil.

  I listlessly watch the news roundup, and then I conclude (with a dismissive air that I don’t know where I get) that what the hell, nothing happened again today, and finally I hear Alfredo come in, softly close the door behind him, and call me.

  “I’m in the kitchen,” I call back in a disgusting gummy voice.

  I come close to losing it when he walks in to where I’m sitting. A two-tone bruise tattoos half the left side of his face, almost up to his eye. His lower lip is swollen, making him look like an old woman who’s had one too many facelifts. He’s limping.

  I leap to my feet so suddenly that it’s a miracle that I don’t keel over. The Stefan clatters to the floor behind me, though. My heart shoots off like a billiard ball.

  Alfredo waves one hand as if to say, it’s nothing, it’s nothing; which obviously makes me believe the opposite. I freak out, and even I can’t say whether it’s out of anger or anxiety.

  “What the fucking hell have you done this time?” I ask, without even realizing that I’m shouting.

  “Please, Dad,” he says, as he pathetically licks his swollen lip, the sight of which sends a wave of pain through me as if I’d just been stabbed.

  He pulls out a Stefan and sits down in slow motion.

  “Let me get a look at you,” I say, leaning over him.

  “Everything’s okay, I’ll be over it in no time.”

  “Everything’s okay?” I raise my voice again. “Everything’s okay? What are you saying, what kind of language are you using, this comes straight out of some American movie!”

  They always ask the same idiotic question, in American movies. If somebody hits the edge of
a table with their knee, it’s not like the other person in the scene asks: “Did you hurt yourself?”; no, they say: “Is everything okay?” as if hitting a table with their knee might shatter much more than just their left kneecap. That’s just the way Americans are; apparently they’re always convinced something much bigger is going on than meets the eye.

  “But just look at what somebody did to you. You need to tell me who it was.”

  “Dad, stop shouting, please. My head hurts.”

  “Ah, you see, something hurts. That means everything’s not okay!”

  He dismisses my stupid retort with a labored sigh, as if to say that this is no time for nitpicking about schematic details. Which, I instantly realize, is true. Suddenly aware of what a shit I am, I impetuously throw my arms around him.

  “Sorry, Alfre’, I’m sorry.”

  Suddenly I’m on the verge of bursting into tears.

  “Ouch, Dad!” he cries.

  I pull back.

  “Damn, sorry.”

  “It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” Alf says, making an effort to smile. And he reaches up to touch his face, as if I’d knocked it out of alignment or something.

  “Do you have some ice?” he asks.

  “Yes.” I bolt for the fridge.

  The Bialetti burbles away. I pull an ice tray out of the freezer, I look for a clean dish towel. Alfredo turns off the burner under the Bialetti. I find the dish towel, I pry the ice out of the tray with my fingers, ice cube by ice cube. Alfredo pours the coffee. I tell him not to worry about it, because I don’t want to interrupt what I’m doing for a coffee break, but he keeps on doing what he’s doing. I pile the ice cubes in the middle of the dish towel, I make a little ice bag, and I hand it to Alf. With a series of grimaces, he starts to apply the ice bag to the injured part of his face.

  I sit down next to him.

  “How’s your lip?”

  He signals “so-so” with one hand.

  “Are you bleeding?”

  He looks at me.