It was by chance that I saw the light of the headlights going up the hill, in the darkness that preceded the dawn. I had just returned from a strange night populated by ghosts and confused images, and in my half-awake I remembered the doll I had broken for Mimmina. A remote fact, forever forgotten, a sudden need for vengeance dictated by infantile anger, punished by a vague remorse carried with me for a long time, like a useless burden. Yes, I still remembered that. We used to argue often, my sister and I, and when it was all over the only regret of our anger remained, to keep us together. Two sisters know how to get hurt, it's a subtle strategy, imbued with poison and complicity. In the darkness that enveloped the room, the memory of that childhood scene convinced me to get up. I was shivering in my cotton dressing gown, useless for an April in the hills, and the first thing I found to cover myself up was the woolen shawl my mother had forgotten on her one visit and hung near the front door. I knew that among the knots of wool I would find, barely perceptible, the shadow of her perfume and smelling it was an instinctive gesture that ignited other unwanted thoughts, and immediately chased away. I started heating some water for an herbal tea, turned off the light and went to the window, looking for the first traces of dawn. There weren't any stars, dense gray clouds reflected the lights of the town behind the hill, or perhaps it was the moon in transparency, I forget. Tight in the shawl I saw the two cones of light projected towards the sky, closer and closer, and I realized it was him. I wasn't expecting him, I knew that he had had a date in Trieste, the last one before the Easter break, and coming back after the concert would have been crazy, one of those he often did at the time.
He entered happy, soaked in the cold of the night and the smoked cigarettes. We hugged tightly, and kissed. An interminable contact, full of all the things we would have liked to say to each other and which would have been superfluous, between us. Dazed, I listened to him talk about his tour, the new contract with the Milan record company, how good the new drummer was, whom I absolutely had to know. To return had been an irresistible impulse, especially since he was to be in Milan the next afternoon, for the signing. He hadn't managed to stay up there, he told me, returning to the hotel he had packed his bags, got into the car and drove off, without even saying goodbye to the boys who were waiting for him for dinner. He had left the restaurant number with the porter, begging him to notify them himself. I went into the kitchen, the water that had been boiling for a while had put out the flame and there was a smell of gas. I opened the window, without realizing that he had arrived silently behind me, but I felt his mouth brush my neck, his hands resting on my shoulders. There was something else he had to tell me. I turned around, looked into his suspicious eyes, he smiled, took me by the hand and led me into the living room, towards the piano. He had a vertical one, of modest value, but endowed with a particular sonority that made it different from all the others. We had chosen him among many others in a warehouse on the outskirts of Rome, to take him to Tuscany, to the place where we had decided to move in together. He opened it, settled himself on the stool, warmed his fingers for a moment, spread them over the keys. It had happened before, I'd come home and find him restless, waiting for me, because he'd written something and he couldn't wait to let me hear it. I asked him to tell me about it first, to tell me about it in his own words, to explain to me what he had wanted to describe, how he had succeeded. When he finally sat down at the piano, instead of playing it, he hinted at the motif with his mouth closed, accompanying it with the fundamental chords, and if he had some words ready, he sang them, like a fixed point where he could rest just for an instant, before continuing his flight. Sometimes he had verses already written, or the whole text, but that was rare. We would talk about it together and the next day or two at the most he would show up with the completed sheet music. If I already knew the music, and could sing it, it was for him. It was through my voice that he heard many of his songs for the first time.
It was cold in that hour before dawn, and I wrapped my shawl tighter around me and curled up on the sofa to listen. There were no leaflets or sheet music, nothing. She was silent and still in front of the keyboard and this surprised me, because he had never done it before. The D minor chord remained suspended in space for a moment, as if to prepare the phrasing that would follow it, first slowed down, then gradually faster and faster, in a sequence of ascending scales. Through a circular path, the succession of notes seemed to want to return to the starting theme but it was only an illusion, in reality it ended up reaching even higher, towards a C chord that announced the next phrase. A music without verse or refrain, cyclical like a canon, repetitive yet different, capable of demolishing barriers, penetrating your soul, speaking inside you. Above that miracle, a perfect text in its simplicity: the discovery of loving and being loved, the effort to protect that feeling and the awareness that it won't be forever. A magical piece, one that you recognize at first hearing, that you understand that it is suspended in the sky, waiting for someone to take it and bring it down, stealing it from the angels.
We made love for a long time, repeatedly, without even realizing it was already morning and then, almost immediately, he fell into a deep sleep. I was exhausted too but I felt that a moment like this couldn't be wasted, I felt like going out, running on the grass wet by the night, shouting our love, our luck to the sky. Instead I got up, carefully closed the bedroom blinds, unplugged the phone and lay down next to him. In the evening I had a concert in Rome, the sound check with the group was set for six and without a few hours of rest my voice would have suffered. Before giving in to sleep, I watched his profile drawn by the dim light on the bedside table. I bent over his face, I brought my mouth close to his, I breathed the same air as him, the breath that he smelled of fresh wood, and of cigarettes. Then, after turning off the light, I lay down against his warm back and closed his eyes.
Was it really coincidence that we met at the exit of the rehearsal room of the auditorium, after years away? I had been invited to the celebratory evening of my first record company, I knew it would have been an experience to avoid, but Franco, my ex-manager, cared so much that I hadn't had the strength to invent an excuse. I had seen him emerge from a side door, together with a guy I didn't know who was walking beside him, talking intensely. He was only half listening, he looked bored, he looked very tired. When he had seen me, for a moment, for a single infinitesimal moment, he had thought of turning a blind eye and leaving. Instead he had put on a smile of wonder and had come towards me with his arms wide open, in a theatrical gesture that I didn't know of him. Something had changed in all those years.
"Gloria, how are you, you don't know how happy it makes me to see you again..."
He had held me in his arms as one does with an old friend, he had kissed me lightly on the cheeks, first one and then the other, then he had moved away a little, holding my hands, to observe me with satisfaction.
«Damn, but you are beautiful, I can't believe it… my Gloria, what a surprise!»
I could not imagine that the following day he would have an evening in Rome and I asked myself if I had come anyway, at the risk of meeting him. Maybe yes, who knows, the wounds were now well closed, the memory of the pain vanished.
“Listen, I absolutely want you to come to the concert tomorrow. I won't accept excuses, and don't tell me you have nights out somewhere because I'd check, you bet."
While he was walking away quickly towards the service car, I had imagined that no one, least of all him, would have noticed my absence. This thought had reassured me, I would have decided in the afternoon, calmly. I didn't have any commitments for the next day, nor for the following ones, I had been in control of my time and my life for a long time.
It was as I approached the mirror, worried by the traces of the night of being awake, that I admitted to myself that I had already made up my mind. I would have run for cover with the old method used so often during tours: a long hot bath and an hour of absolute rest in the dark, with my eyes closed. For the rest, a slightly more accurate make-up than usual and something decent on would have been enough. By eight I was ready, with the menacing prospect of at least an hour to fill. I booked a cab, brewed a big shot of straight single malt, threw myself on the sofa and allowed the memories to come back, for the first time in a long while. No budget, for heaven's sake, just a sequence of images left free to flow through the maze of the mind, after a whole life spent rejecting them, out of survival instinct. The lawn of our house in Trequanda, the desired child that never arrived, the trip to the States, the awaited dawn lying on Zabriskie Point, in a personal celebration of all the myths of our generation. On the evening of our farewell, his suitcases at the bottom of the stairs, he at the door ajar asking me to understand, despite everything. It had to happen, sooner or later, and this was no worse night than any other to get rid of ghosts that had been dragged along for too long. I sighed with relief when my cell phone warned me that there was a taxi waiting for me at the doorstep.
My seat was reserved in the front row, quite lateral. After the via crucis of greetings and hugs I managed to sit down, with the looks of the people behind me. Did everyone know, did everyone remember, or was it just my paranoia? Suddenly the desire to get up and run away was irresistible, I had to use all my willpower to stay seated, to avoid such a blatant gesture. I would have stayed until the end, I would have applauded enthusiastically and only then would I have been free to leave. I had made a huge mistake, I just had to resign myself, resist to the end and make it home more or less unscathed.
He started with some songs from his album that came out a few weeks ago. I knew a couple of them in passing, picked up on the radio in taxis or in the supermarket near my house, where a private radio was raging with bad Italian music. I caught his wink, returning it with a knowing smile, at which point I could relax and start watching the musicians accompanying him. All good, young and cute. The guitarist, thin and supple as a reed, jumped and ran from one side of the stage to the other. The little boy on bass, gifted with a remarkable technique, stood motionless like a statue in the center of everything, leaving his fingers to run very fast on the strings. Once I would have taken away from him, his young bass player. The one on drums was the older one and I knew him well, he had played with big ambitions in a couple of rock bands in the nineties and had only recently resigned himself to an honest career in the shadows, between recording studios and well-paid gigs around Italy. A decent craftsman, convinced he was an unfortunate talented artist, I knew heaps of them, like that. A host of which I too was part, at the end of the day. As usual, he changed instruments with each song. It was a malignant pleasure, mixed with a veil of sadness, to notice his tummy tucked up, and how the Fender hanging at the height of his pelvis gave him a ridiculous and vaguely melancholic air, like an aged clown. But what most attracted my attention, despite all efforts to ignore it, was the unknown cellist. Very young, pretty, elegant in her little black dress, she played holding the instrument between her legs parted and accompanied the music with a kind of dance. In truth it was only the arms, and with them the bow, that moved in the pauses of the instrument, drawing imaginary and supple figures in the air, scenography chosen for a music like that. He was doing well, judging by the public reaction. I looked for a knowing look, a spontaneous nod between the two of them, but there never was. That's right, I thought, and then anyone in his place would have done the same. The concert went well, the audience around me was warming up and he skilfully exploited every trick of the trade. The roundup of successes continued decisively towards the finale, the one with the old warhorses. At the last piece I began to relax, I thought the encores were the same as always: a couple of songs on the piano, with him alone under the bull's-eye, and to conclude his most famous rock piece, made especially for forcing the audience to stand up and let loose before the cheers. A consolidated script, to be respected to the end. I was already preparing for the torture of greetings in the dressing room when the lights suddenly went out again. In that moment I understood that it wasn't over, the bitter cup had to be drunk down to the last drop and I had deserved it, stupid as always. The D minor chord started in the dark, in the silence of the already standing audience, motionless again. Even so, even in the pain of a wound that was reopened and ripped out point after point, I couldn't defend myself from the beauty of a music that came back to penetrate me, unchanged, piercing like the first time I had heard it from him. At that moment I felt, with absolute certainty, that he was playing it for us, that those three minutes of grace were dedicated to our life journey together, to our youth.
* * *
Claudius Coletta was born in Rome in 1952. A cardiologist by profession, he has a long scientific research activity in the clinical field, with numerous presentations and publications in prestigious national and international medical journals. Passionate about cinema, in 2007 he was a member of the international jury of the Rome Film Festival. Writer of short stories of various kinds, in 2011 he published the noir novel Avenue of the Polyclinic for Sellerio, which they followed Amsterdam blues (2014) Dante's manuscript (2016); it will be out soon Before the snow for the same publisher. Above all, he is an avid reader of contemporary fiction and great classics.
