Bruno Martino
Estate

There are songs that are born in the heat, linger on the beaches, and die in September, and others that travel beyond the years and seasons, with a sense of emptiness that's hard to fill. We come into the world with the enzymes of happiness but often lack the antibodies to pain.

I abandoned winter hibernation to expose myself without protection to the poignant August sky, rediscovering the lost paths that lead to the sea. For one new and last time, I tried to love you, but the explosion of blue overwhelmed and drowned me.

Bruno has always refused to become a character to remain a person.

A simple person. He waits patiently, in that space of darkness where the night is a short step between two tongues of flame, his gentle time, the regular beat of his life at dawn. We will find him again seated in front of a shiny Steinway rather than under a beach umbrella. Because he doesn’t love summer, just like me. Summer is for those who believe in it, a hot place to process painful memories, too hot to freeze the heart.

I walked in silence along the shoreline through the winter, rediscovering that adult taste of nostalgia through a time that eludes itself. Wrapped in my coat, absorbed in improbable readings of pulp novels, I waited unhurriedly, like a sentinel, for its arrival to then slip away like an elusive breath, a moment before. A moment before the sun. A moment before the heat. And a moment later hordes of conquerors planted beach umbrellas like astronauts landing on the moon. Yes, I hate summer.

Lost kisses, past loves, sun and sunsets. Brighetti whispers words to a blank sheet and Martino composes jazz unaware of a future promised to the Olympus of Standards.

Summer dances with a floral skirt in wheat fields and in the festive bacchanals by the sea smelling of hops and watermelon.

The post-war era is a distant memory and the economic boom an excited gambler. The boot longs for frivolities and craves moon tans, wandering between poppies and ducks.

Martino, a very nice person, balanced and calm, drives a car the wrong way in the scorching summer of '60. A revolutionary without weapons but armed to the teeth with melancholy and disillusionment, ready to condemn that summer that seduced and abandoned him once again, one last time. But an apologue too bitter for a period bred on bread and lightness is doomed to remain relegated in oblivion, lost along the way to the sea, mired in the steppes of the scrub.

Today I no longer feel a prisoner of an ancient season but of a foreign present. Time has failed its promises, delivering me a basket full of nostalgia. And I miss the smell of the mixture in mopeds, the effluvium of shower gel on skin clear in moonlight, the saltiness after bathing, and the fireflies in the nights, forever gone along the road to the thermal baths.

Summer is a big deception; it kills you at the moment you feel you can no longer do without it, entangled and powerless in the mesh of its memories.

Bruno gazes at the horizon, that suggestive line between the sky and the sea, now in his field of vision, tomorrow among the memories, and finds himself again seated in front of his Steinway, while singing softly and gently his disappointment, a moment before the sun, a moment before the heat, crystallized forever in a melody too bitter and beautiful to die, like so many others, on a September beach.

Another winter will come, of course,
but I will never forget this summer.