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THE FATHER OF ABBA (!?).
It's almost midnight and I've been wandering for half an hour in this new place called RAVE MARIA, a really trendy spot, a place listed among the "coolest clubs" in the Capital.
Right at the entrance, instead of a stamp on your hand, they give you a host, which you need to keep intact until you leave, and just this little (irregular) detail says a lot.
After the first few meters, you realize you are witnessing something truly unique in the history of "alternative Roman entertainment": along the corridor, there are the 12 apostles (six on each side) fanning you with huge palm leaves while a donkey, escaped from some circus, passes in front of you (!).
Candles and wax lights are all around, worse than being in church. But luckily, it isn't a church. Otherwise, those two fake-priests making out on those huge stools in front of the bar wouldn’t make sense. The music is still low, and I recognize the voice of Ratzinger singing a pseudo-sermon over an old-school house beat by Underworld.
On the platform, a beautiful virgin is performing her lap-dance, clinging to a 4-meter tall candle placed in the center, which melts gradually with the rubbing of the dancer's beautiful, hot, and half-naked buttocks.
Truly suggestive, I think to myself.
If they did things like this instead of the Sunday Mass, churches would be filled with lost sheep.
Well... probably only those, I later reflect.
I roam cautiously with my hand tightly on the wallet slipped into my back pocket: when you linger around priests and nuns, caution is never too much.
"One Taj Mai," I tell the bartender dressed as a handmaiden with two wings anchored to her bare shoulders, held up by two SS-style suspenders that remind me so much of Charlotte Rampling in Cavani's "The Night Porter." The girl, puffing a 20 cm Havana, lifts her Nazi officer's cap and looks at me with blue eyes, with mascara running down to her neck: "no alcohol, my little sheep... just soda and holy water: tonic or sparkling?" I grab an iced tonic holy water and sip small amounts of sanctity while peering at the varied humanity milling around.
A nun is dancing a sort of South American rhythm, rubbing between two boy scouts, while on the sofa, a barefoot Carmelite is playing footsie with a neo-catechumenal catechist, laughing loudly amused.
"Mh... a little bird told me there'll be divine music tonight..." I say to the bartender busy shaking a redemption-fizz.
"They say... there's a DJ from Jerusalem who's supposed to play a KarolDoubleIù record."
"That would be?"
"The second stage name of the old pontiff... he only used this when he made house music... he couldn't exactly sign as Pope John Paul II, right? Decorum and etiquette would never have allowed him..."
"Mh" I say thoughtfully as the thong of the handmaiden lap-dancer flies into the face of a reverend sitting at the first table under the stage.
"There he is..." says the Angelo Azzurro from Testaccio, and after an unreal silence, anticipated by incense fumes rising from below, the "Abba Pater" record by our National Karol, smelling of holiness, begins to play.
The music is quite simple and banal, as I expected, a mix between Gianni Moranti, the church songs now sung during Sunday sermons, and a certain tendency towards Mystical-World-New Age. Sure, the arrangement is sumptuous and rich, like the latest records by Renato Zero or the late Barry White, with an orchestra and violins, but personally, I find the thing flat and insignificant, not to mention the lyrics: a sort of patchanka of predictable and obsessively maniacal sermons/prayers/invocations. However, the pope's voice is ethereal and strangely seductive, with its halting and skewed Italian smoothed by a reverb I would dare call "supernatural" (cleaned and filtered by a trio of producers: Leonardo De Amicis, collaborator of Riccardo Cocciante and Gianni Morandi (oops!); Stefano Magneti, film score composer, and the third, Mimmo Verduco, writer for Eros Ramazzotti, Lucio Battisti, Anna Oxa, Patty Pravo, Renato Zero, just to not contradict themselves...)
"Of course, these tunes remind me of someone..." I say, thinking aloud.
"The Abba" says the bartender while pouring me a third holy water with a lemon slice from Cana.
"Exactly... the Abba, but..."
"Like father, like sons..." the girl says, extinguishing the cigar on her forearm.
She beckons me to lean closer and continues in a low voice, checking with the corner of her eye not to be spied on.
"You know... there's talk of a youthful mistake, that famous trip to Sweden over 60 years ago... the story of the 4 children born by mistake and their attempt to claim their rights... well, it seems it's all true... few know it and it's always been kept Top Secret for obvious reasons."
"Mh" I say thoughtfully as the reverend, climbed on stage, plays blindfolded with the supine handmaiden on top of him.
"But anyhow, Karol was great regardless of everything..." I throw in to break the ice, downing the holy drink in one gulp at -20°C.
The usual banal conversations that never hurt anyone..
"And who argues..." says the nazi-bartender "I just say that this public confession as a title could have been easily avoided, don't you think?"
"Sure" I continue "what's the point of making a para-religious song album with cut-and-paste lyrics from any catechism text and titling it this way, unless to come out... after all, he did support these Abba greatly for a long time, and they became what they became, right?"
"Well, being sons of such a father, they must have had a little push, don't you think?"
"If you mean that, just having a great-uncle in the Vatican to grease the wheels, and you can get in anywhere..." I conclude brutally.
"Mh" says the bartender while she stains a "Sister Pinha Colada" squeezing a full milk breast directly into the large glass.
She continues: "I read on Google that the CD sold 50,000 copies JUST on the first day and reached A MILLION COPIES in two days, can you believe it?"
"Well, it was all planned and, if you allow me, predictable..."
"And that it was recorded in Latin, Italian, French, English, and Spanish doesn't seem weird to you?"
"Politically correct... in his position, he couldn’t really displease anyone."
"The album then is made of 11 tracks with arrangements ranging from pop to soul, with splashes of classical and world"
"Same as before," I add.
"Hear this" she reads off the back of the CD "… The album was born to undertake an inner pilgrimage towards the house of the merciful heavenly Father; a journey of conversion in charity, in sharing with the poorest, and in dialogue with the brothers. A pilgrimage not solitary but universal, led by the Pope himself and, through the variety of expressions, languages, voices, sounds, proposed to all peoples; a pilgrimage not spectacular but interior, thus oriented to the search... oh, HEY Punisher ... are you SLEEPING!?!".
"Oh...uhm...sorry, it always happens when I hear people speaking in priestly language... it was a prelate speaking like that, right? I knew it..."
"Well, actually those were the words of one Father Pasquale Borgomeo, the General Director of Vatican Radio who organized the whole operation...".
"Of course! By now, I have a real allergy... after 40 seconds of listening to a priest, I fall asleep instantly and have killer dreams, commit the worst misdeeds, and utter the most unpronounceable blasphemies! I've tried everything, but there's nothing to do" I tell the girl while leering at her champagne cup breasts popping out of her latex bra.
"But in the end... regarding 'this album, what do you think about it?"
"Mh".
The girl tries to decipher my murmur, but she realizes it's better not to insist.
I'm getting bored to death, and maybe tonight has to be this way: tonight, I'll be good and go to bed without murdering anyone.
Maybe, but this album has done a good deed on me, if it were so for everyone, it would be a real miracle, no joke!
I grab my bag with the arsenal and sneak out of the venue.
I swallow the host before exiting and approach my perpetually muddy Rav4.
In 10 steps, a bespectacled, pimply CL member comes up to me: "Hey, brother... buy a copy of the CD for 20 euros and you'll save your soul, the more we sell, the more we ensure Paradise, as Don Mazza says... spread with us the word of the Holy Father and become part of our Lord's Great Family, shake m...".
I don't let him finish "ano".
I've head-butted him and knocked him down, sending the CD pile flying all over the cobblestones: "brother" you say to your sister, I whisper at zero decibels. Before leaving, I make a couple of maneuvers on the gravel to ensure the complete destruction of the CDs and then leave the venue tired and distraught.
It's not so much the "KarolDoubleIù" that bothered me (let's leave Ratzi out of this discussion because I can't even stand to see him on a postcard...)... alas, it's this whole congregation of servants, lackeys, bureaucrats, slaves, catechists, bishops, under-bishops, cardinals, cardiovasculars, liege lords, scribes, beetles, magnates, magnets, big eaters, economists, agr's onomists, neo-Pentecostals, neo-evangelists, subcutaneous moles, sisters of Maria, brothers of Mario, followers of Eve, fans of Eva (Henger), blasphemers of the other Eve (that whore), in short...
It's all this circus of business & faith around it that has never convinced me and probably never will.
The good old Karol, however, well... that one I suppose was made of another cloth, another mettle, but I prefer not to talk about it.
Not here, at least.
There are things that come under an unwritten law, a millennial and spiritual law by which the less you talk about a thing, the more value it acquires.
Believe me and have faith.
At least in this.
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