First flashback. That time in a novel I had written someone told an anecdote in which one said “Ciao”, someone else replied “You and your son fennel”, and then knowing my chickens I had one of them say “Lucio Dalla” , and the legal office of the publishing house told me very seriously that I risked a lawsuit for having given Dalla some fennel, and at the time I had much fewer years of social media in my curriculum vitae and I still didn’t know that the legal office was the average reader: who didn’t does not even catch the facilitated quotations.
We used to know birthdays and phone numbers. Mostly we knew them: «I would have liked to talk to you tonight but I’m alone in the house in Rome and I don’t know your number in Teramo», Dalla wrote to Roberto Roversi after having finished recording the first album.
It makes sense that we remember the phone numbers we often dialed. But birthdays, how the hell did we do? Now, if Facebook doesn’t remind me, I don’t even know my birthday.
Every sixteenth of April I think it’s my middle school friend’s birthday, and I haven’t seen her in over twenty years and I haven’t wished her happy birthday in maybe thirty-five, but dying if I remember the birthdays of people I talk to every day, and who doesn’t have Facebook, having no respect for other people’s forgetfulness.
In common between the two seasons, there is the only birthday that we all know, because it lies in a title (like Napoleon’s death, she said thanks to Google, holy Google who avoided saying that May 5 is notoriously Napoleon’s birthday, on the other hand «Ei fu, siccome immobile» is a very typical phrase from a greeting card).
There is no reason to celebrate the birthday that everyone knows, since there is no one left to celebrate, but we are such a stupid age that we say happy birthday to the dead, and therefore today is the eightieth birthday of Lucio Dalla, a man whose there is nothing to say.
What about a piece of landscape? What do you say about your house? What do you say about a guy who, when he decided to start writing his own songs, wrote “How deep is the sea”, what do you say when forty-six years later the songwriters, not even rookies, write lyrics that look like middle school themes, what do you say, Luckily you’re dead and you don’t know they haven’t learned anything? (“The responsibilities are many, the commitment is total, the possibilities infinite”, Dalla always writes in that letter to Roversi of the century in which a record was a point of arrival).
Maybe we could play Dalla’s favorite record, Dalla’s favorite song, Dalla’s favorite verse, but it’s an impossible game: I change my mind every fifteen seconds, I’m only certain about my sorrows (“Caruso” is for Dalla like “One day particular” is up to Scola: if you like those two works, you don’t like those two authors).
“Piazza grande” is one of the two songs that make me cry the most in the history of music, but I’m not sure it’s Dalla’s best song. Maybe “The park of the moon”. Maybe “Call me in twenty years”. Maybe “Desperate Erotic Stomp”.
(What the underprivileged who don’t like Dalla and Scola will never understand, in their madness about “Caruso” and “A particular day”, is that they are all good with longing: moving the public is easy, it’s shooting “Ugly , dirty and naughty” or write “Desperate Erotic Stomp” that makes you a genius).
Second flashback. It’s an elementary school summer, in the tennis club pool that my family attends even though they don’t play tennis. Dalla is in the shower, and a braver girl than me convinces me to go and ask her if she sings “The year to come”. I remember the details of this scene differently every time I sell it again – I think I sold it for the first time when he died, eleven years ago, well in advance of the egotic crocodile that is worn so much in this decade. The only detail that never changes and which I’m sure isn’t a false memory is: Dalla took the shower with a woolen beret, which seemed perfectly normal to me when I was seven years old, since he had that beret on the album cover, I didn’t have the sense of the seasons, being him a cartoon. You don’t expect to see Popeye not dressed as a sailor.
The fourth of March in which Lucio Dalla would turn eighty is the eleventh fourth of March in which Lucio Dalla is not there, in which there is no possibility of a new “Quale allegria” but not even that of a new “Mambo”. In which we leaf through artifacts from the lives that were, we read the thirty-year-old Dalla who writes to Roversi «I wouldn’t sell this record even for my mother’s life (perhaps I exaggerated)» and crying we feel like laughing, in which every line of every correspondence, especially the one about «sweet scoundrel mediocrity», which – if he was talking about himself and not about the new releases on Spotify – it’s only because he hadn’t heard them, lucky him.
I know, I know: I became my grandmother. Nostalgic and always with the anecdote ready in my pocket about how green my valley was and in my day what do you youngsters know about it. How much pomade and courage I put on: look today how I cry.