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Rating: "I was sleeping. My mother went to work early. She would arrive at one in the afternoon, and I was still in bed. I remember getting up, dressing, grabbing the bag with the books from the day before, and sneaking out the window of my room while mom came in through the door. Mom trusted me"
Above the Interzona counter, a large plastic or polystyrene map, two or three meters away from me, marks the centers for the distribution of food products that perhaps in the post-war period, but perhaps even earlier, arrived in Verona from all over Europe: the former general markets as the center of a hypothetical world, with its peripheries and terminals being Paris, Budapest, Vienna, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Helsinki. Whoever marked Helsinki made a mistake, as it's placed in the Baltic, I think around Riga or somewhere north-northeast; but it doesn't matter, the idea is enough, and the idea that the Interzona is the center of something on a December night like this in itself has something reassuring.
"After the balls came the Try Again You'll Be Luckier ones. The most sought-after were those from Fort Apache, and if you passed the test, you could jump from the Brooklyns, the rubber of the bridge. At that time, though, chewing gums had a bunch of extra flavors, and the best, the most revolutionary, was Cinnamon. Cinnamon was the real taste of the Black Panthers, of Malcolm X. Cinnamon is cinnamon, but it doesn't count"
While I wait, they tell me the story of a man who worked here for fifty years and more, coming every morning and leaving every evening, and they point out to me that if we weren't here now telling and listening to his story, a story of ordinary normality - without madness or alienation - the memory of this simple worker would be lost like the lives of unknown men, someone might have written "not illustrious", who saw, a few decades ahead, the same skies and ceilings.
Meanwhile, Max Collini is not far from us, busy setting up the booth with CDs, vinyl, and T-shirts, dressed in black and wearing glasses, with a slight belly that makes him almost the double of a colleague of mine who was once very communist, then very fascist, and yet always very capable of being, anyhow, on the wrong side that no one struggles to recognize, starting from an ex-girlfriend who he battered and cheated on - it is said - during trips beyond Cortina, seizing the fruits of the Bolshevik misery he opposed, like in an old movie, with substitutes not too different from pantyhose and biros.
"What sort of nasties were the other guys she had befriended, we are not informed. For sure, Francesca hasn't been lucky with men, and the word "sensitive" remains dubious and ambivalent..."
He has such a familiar face, such a reassuring demeanor, Max, that I almost want to go up to him, to compliment him on what he has written, on the style, on the arrangements of his group, and for all those things you would like to say to an artist you admire, or to someone who somehow moved you with how they write and manage to express what you would like to think but can never express and can never say, to someone who, in short, realizes your dreams and imagines for you. And yet, as always, I don't have the courage to do it, I don't have the courage to show my face, I don't have the courage to make contact, to show the embarrassment and emotion, maybe even a kind of gratitude and certainly admiration, and so I stay on the sidelines sitting at the table, continuing the discussions from before about the Interzona at the center of the world and the workers from the old markets.
The room fills, the lights go out, the concert begins. They don't have the guitar and bass, so no "Kappler", no "Cinnamon", or "Sensibile", no heart throbbings of betrayal, no returns to the '80s as I also remember them, being a few years younger than him.
On stage, vintage objects, Tatranky packages to give to the public, a penguin, the phone book of Reggio-Emilia for "Onomastica", Max in the center and the other two Offlaga at their synthesizers. Sound plots overlap and disappear in the silence of a packed room as I've never seen before, full of people who could be Max's age-mates, and a few "place alternatives": with a bag, I'm told, of a particularly prestigious brand and not quite suited to an opposition that, perhaps, this place has even stopped seeking, letting it translate directly into music and to hell with everything else.
"I had never stolen anything. Then, once, I stole a car in front of three highway patrolmen not very interested in the Brazilian presidential elections. That it was mine didn't matter much that night"
Next to me there's a guy in his forties singing all the songs by heart, and I marvel, with a touch of envy, at the maniacal perseverance of those who know the lyrics by heart, the movie lines, remember all the birthdays and all the years of their life, while I remember almost nothing, and if I remember, I mix things up, confuse people, overlap facts trying to give them a barely decent shape, I see myself driving cars that aren't mine and in years when I didn't even have a driving license, I see myself at the checkpoint with the police officer who stops us and reads the surnames from the documents mispronouncing everyone's, but it's not his fault, it's not the place's (truth be told, the surnames are of his places, though). I am amazed by the perseverance of certain people, as I am amazed by the passion of those who never tire, don't move on, don’t give up and don't forget.
I wonder why there are so many people, besides those who have been invited, brought, or have accompanied, besides those who are here by chance and by habit, spending more time in the bathrooms than in the concert hall, and I wonder, above all, why someone applauds when Max talks about communism, talks about his - and a little of mine, maybe and of someone else's - "small ancient world-Fogazzaro" that the younger ones here can't even conceive of, having a rough idea of Space Invaders, of the Cinnamon Brooklyn with cinnamon, with the red package that if you weren't careful you mistook for strawberry, wasting your hundred lire and the whole afternoon chewing a flavor too strong.
"As a souvenir, I took thirty packets of Tatranky wafers, packages like Loacker but much better. Only after a few days did I notice a slightly hidden brand: Danone (...Kraft). They took everything from us. They really took everything"
I wonder why they have fun, while when Max Collini sings and the Offlaga play, I, and not just I, get a bit of a lump in my throat, and that lump in the throat that I’ve learned to suppress out of habit; not because he talks about things I've partly lived too, not because he sings about certain ideas that have waned and the cashiers of the Cavriago cinema not very different from the girls at the entrance of the Interzona who stamp you with invisible ink, not because he sings about a Prague club where in 1995 I experienced things exactly identical to his, except that there instead of Romina & Al Bano they loved some other leftover of our pre-modern musicality, with the absurd effect that a girl found decidedly "cool-ok-belisimo" what our more modern uncles had archived with the arrival of Lucio Battisti, not because this group should exist for longer and should be known by all, and not by a minority (with whom I even disagree for the questionable choice of some handbag).
It's that "they really took everything from us" that shakes me every time, because Max Collini, with his black sweater, his manners, the humility with which he sits at the table after the concert to give change for the T-shirt or the EP you buy, recognizing the dialect of one of his towns, with his being at once a singer, writer (perhaps poet, and certainly more than his more famous fellow countrymen) and real estate agent, has been narrating a single story for years, a story that only this evening I am fully realizing.
Every time I hear them, this evening I see them for the first time, the Offlaga put into music a sort of requiem, the end of a world that perhaps never existed - except in the experience and imagination of individuals, in the ability to translate gestures into words, and words into emotions that are transmitted to others - a world that doesn't even survive thanks to the cooperatives of Cavriago or Yucca Reverberi, a world that was only imagined, and that sometimes continues to be imagined as possible and at the same time elusive, like an evening in music, the stop in the bathrooms of the Interzona, the invisible ink on my hand, and the memory of those who worked, fifty years ago, in these same rooms, the forgivable mistake of those who put Helsinki in the wrong place on the map.
"Kappler mom, gave me eight"
It is, finally, all that remains.
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