I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (11 page)

I get to the platform and look around, but it's not difficult to find her; in fact the search is made ridiculously easy by the guilty embarrassment that nearly all the men on the platform share, having immediately zoomed in on this particular specimen and then clustered around her, nonchalantly acting as if nothing in particular were going on.

At that point I join the crowd and act just like the rest of them; in fact, I don't have any clear idea of what I'm doing here. After a short interval I realize (maybe it's the wait, the air of uncomfortable, soul-crushing normality hanging over us) that my irritating rational self-consciousness is starting to row upstream, attempting to undo everything I've done up to now.

Hey, did you get a good look at her? I ask myself.

I sure did, I reply.

Are you positive? I say to myself.

Why don't you just cut it out? I answer.

No, why don't you? I say to myself.

But I'm not doing anything, I reply.

Don't try telling me that, I say to myself.

Anyway, what's going to happen now is she'll get on the train and I'll never see her again, I say brusquely.

Still, the fact remains that you came down here, I say to myself.

It's not the way you think, I reply.

Oh noooo, I say to myself.

Whatever, I act all offended.

You're letting yourself be deceived by appearances, I say to myself.

What do you mean? I ask.

That right there is the beauty of the present day. A Pho­toshop beauty, I say to myself.

How do you mean, I ask.

Sure, it's a retouched beauty, I argue. Based on the correction of defects and the enhancements of good features.

Um, I answer, rather intrigued.

But just look at it, the beauty of today, I say to myself. They're all the same: idiots with tattoos and gym workouts. There are thousands of them just like her, don't you know that? There isn't an ounce of individuality, of authentic eroticism, of mystery, of genuine difference; they're . . .

Sure sure, of course, I say to myself.

And that's how I conclude the dialectical exchange.

 

Only now do I realize that I've ventured dangerously close to the tremendous hottie, and there's a straightforward mechanical reason: in fact, while I was engaged in debate with the opposition, the girl has pulled out a set of earbuds and inserted them in her ears, and she's listening to an old song that I'm beginning to recognize bit by bit. In other words, I'm on the verge of bumping into her just to figure out what song it is.

There it is, I finally caught the whole melody: it's “Alone Again”, by Gilbert O'Sullivan.

Incredible. I'm nonplussed, almost moved at the thought that such a young woman might be enjoying a hit single from my own youth (I was just a child at the time). I interpret the odd circumstance as a metaphysical confirmation of the fact that I had tailed her, the purpose of which I had not hitherto suspected. At this point, I have to talk to her.

I brace myself, as the train is pulling down the platform and the people are starting to mass along the yellow safety line.

“It's ‘Alone Again', isn't it?” I ask, with a fairly vacant smile. I point to her earbuds, a deeply pathetic gesture, truth be told.

She doesn't glance in my direction even though—I'm positive—she heard me clearly.

“Gilbert O'Sullivan,” I try again, pathetically.

She looks at the train snorting to a halt, pulls her cell phone out of her pocket, flips it open, points it right at me, and takes my picture. Then she punches something into the phone and holds the display out just a few inches from my face.

“Now, can you see the number?”

I rock back my head. I can see it perfectly: it's 911.

She looks me straight in the eye.

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.

 

 

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.