Lucio Dalla
Futura

Sticky, humid heat; stagnant, spoiled air, from an urban suburb cut through by too many roads. A stentorian “Chissà!...” comes from the radio left on overnight, and the disagreeable climate of the full Padania summer, nearly thirty oppressive degrees even at two-thirty in the morning, coalesce for a moment demanding my awakening.

Or almost... I remain in that dazed state between the two worlds of dreams and reality, and it’s in this thoughtless, defenseless, and prejudice-free condition that music manages to invade the brain with maximum force, finding no obstacles or diversions, creating definitive situations, imprinted perennially on the consciousness so obscenely open. And so I swallow, rather let myself be pierced by this splendid song from the ugly, disagreeable, greedy, brilliant, unique Lucio Dalla at the peak of his art.

It’s simply my favorite local FM station broadcasting the usual nighttime tape, heard and reheard… In a flicker of rationality, I realize to myself that after this Dalla song will follow, as usual, the equally beautiful, though from entirely different worlds, “Burnin’ Sky” by Bad Company, but by now the die is cast, and it will be this “Futura” to remain seared into my best memories as a symbol of an era, a life choice; around it and every current listening still, persists a coagulation of freedom, youth, adult innocence.

What is happening to me that is so special to elect that nighttime moment as a decisive, epiphanic passage in my life? Nothing... I am just alone like a dog in my student house, all windows wide open to let the walls breathe after the scorching day; two rooms and a kitchen shared with four other peers, at that moment all absent, already on vacation since it’s late July. Do I still have a college exam on my plate? Or maybe I am simply still here because it is always worth staying away from home, where my parents are ceaselessly quarreling like beasts and showing me, each in their own way, a stubborn lack of respect and esteem. And yes, there’s the seaside at home and old friends and many familiar places to reach, but I am grateful to this city that hosts me, large and complex, full of kids from all over Italy, so interesting and stimulating, making it worth staying until the last moment and beyond before the summer break, even if I find myself alone with no one left to give or receive company.

Alone, I know how to be… I don’t always need to open my mouth, to tell stories or listen; it’s nice to enjoy and reflect on the general situation of one’s existence, what has been done, what one would like to do. I’m alone and in my underwear, as Dalla would say, but unlike the story in that other song of his, I’m doing just fine, because I am young and still have life ahead. I am a bit bored at the present but at peace, if nothing else because the usual nuisances of my life are at a safe distance. Sure, a girl… a little sex wouldn’t hurt but come on… it would be too hot to enjoy it properly tonight. I am an out-of-town student, in a city much more stimulating than mine, responsible for myself twenty-four hours a day, with my thoughts and needs for study and affection of course, but with adequate freedom of choice, few coins in my pocket but enough for what’s needed: I have become an adult. I feel free and fully self-determining, still untouchably healthy as one can feel only when more than twenty years but not yet thirty, and the health is there for sure, and so it is taken for granted.

In short, I am... happy, as one feels a few times in life, and then if lucky, the moment roots itself in the memory, to eternal benefit and also consolation in tougher times.

When and how often have I been happy in my life? At the birth of my son? Passing that big final exam with flying colors? When I found that important job? Yes, great, very important moments but the psyche is a strange beast and my moments of pure happiness associate more easily and instinctively with experiences much more rationally trivial, like when at six years old I unwrapped that gift under the tree and it was the wooden box of Meccano (box no.6 I remember… no.5 was instead smaller and made of cardboard). Or also when I saw San Francisco Bay coming at me at night through the window of the airplane after thirteen hours of flight on my first trip to the U.S.A., and for sure when I peeked at the rear of my beloved as she returned to the bedroom, both of us coming from the bathroom where we had gone to wash after doing it, for the first and last time alas! The most remarkable one-time sexual event of my life.

And exactly then when, in my sleep-wake, this song hit me in the heart. And it must have been the tenth or fifteenth time in my life that I heard it but all other occasions had been during the day, when we are busy, social, protected, prejudiced and shielded. A song composed, the biographies say, in front of the horrendous Berlin Wall still in full service, with the Italian singer and composer sitting on a bench and around only another guy, curiously also a singer and composer, named Phil Collins, ten meters further away and also on a bench smoking a cigarette and pondering in front of that abomination (“…i russi, gli americani…”).