Propaganda
A Secret Wish

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream?"

"Claudia Brucken, she's called, the singer, has a very strange, almost guttural voice at times... great band, huh? Listen to them, guys, it's fantastic, there's heart, there's technology, they play like gods, they hit like trains and the guests are amazing..." Diana would go on quite a bit about these Propaganda. "Who?" we'd say. "The ones of Duel?" Actually, the song was playing like crazy on the radio, it had become a real bore, there was a strong synth groove, but in the mid-eighties James Brown also had a strong synth groove, damn it, it was the sound of the moment, it was.
And she: "Duel sucks, it's for dancing, the rest is all avant-garde that gets its hands dirty with mainstream, top 40 intellectuals, I'd say... What a blast, singing for a band like that..."
Diana wasn't exactly beautiful, she was very thin, with platinum hair styled in the fashion of the time, a regulation fuchsia stripe in the middle, a narrow nose, a bit long, but it suited her, deep and sad eyes, heavily outlined in black, big hoop earrings, a very worn leather jacket, black fishnet stockings cleverly ripped here and there, high-heeled shoes of many styles, always on her gray Piaggio Sì with a giant Bauhaus sticker found at who knows what fair, maybe at the Gran Balon. Our girls, more or less dressed like her, us guys, some with leather, some with jackets, with aerodynamic, gelled manes, jacket sleeves rolled halfway up the arm, tight anti-reproduction pants and obligatory white socks.

"When sailing along the route, your happy smile, your funny name... A secret wish..."
Diana was with Amerigo, but now he was doing military service in the paratroopers and she, at the moment, was part of the non-coupled group, in our company of couples and non-couples, numbering around twenty, always together, at the beach, at concerts, in lazy hot afternoons on the benches of Piazza Rossetti or in the evenings in that thirty-seat spot near San Luca, one alley more, one alley less.
"How's the army, since you finished it?" she asked me. "Crap..." I replied. "Crap with pine nuts, but crap..." She looked at me and said that's what Diego told her, word for word.
"And then, you beasts..." she'd call us, bringing the conversation back to the beginning. "... Which band on their first record could host David Sylvian and Steve Howe and start an album with a rhythmic and hypnotic song, using Poe's 'Dream Within a Dream' as lyrics? These guys aren't normal, they'll become huge!"
Edgar Allan Poe? In technopop sauce?

"I am accusing you of murder, but in front of the verdict, all jealousy drowns..."
Sixty and Honors at the classical high school, then private exams at the conservatory, piano, of course, and goth and dark circles, occasionally a backup singer in the wave band I played in, with her beautiful Mancunian-accented English learned from a mother who had eventually packed up and brought her 140 kilos back to New Islington, tired of an unfaithful husband who would even gamble away the couch, on certain nights.
"Diana-The-Strange" looked at everything and everyone with an almost absent, dreamy air, as if learning the harshness of the world without losing her purity of spirit, she could be cheerful and communicative and then close in on herself and nod her head to the rhythm of music. Then those bruises on her arms, that scratch on her neck, not answering the phone for days, and then reappearing, just like from another dimension. My girlfriend, who had known her since middle school, had asked her if she had problems with anyone, she always seemed like she'd just been beaten up, but not Amerigo, who would never have mistreated her and then he was in Pisa... and those marks... The cat? Wow, what claws! Did you bump into the closet door? That's unlucky.

"They stare eye to eye, winners and losers, wounded by envy, deeply cut, in front of their illusions the scars of old romanticism remain on their cheeks..."
Crappy place, in Nervi, that winter night, freezing wind outside and a hundred sweaty beasts inside, the speakers blasting PMachinery, those desperate, thundering synths, the bass deep and heavy, Diana dancing with Monica and Claudia, shaking their heads back and forth, she a new Siouxsie as slim as Debbie, suffering like Patti and as inscrutable as Laurie who falls to the ground, in the middle of the dancers, maybe she'd drunk, but can't handle alcohol, but she weeps, she despairs, shouts, slurs, we carry her out, four of us, I've seen too much, I immediately take her arms and look, nothing, no marks. She hugs me, calms down a bit, we take her to the marina, sit her down, we ask nothing.
Then one girl says to her, stroking her face: "Now you tell us everything, alright, and if you want the guys to step aside for a bit..." She nods, we walk a hundred meters away and sit on the dock. "No..." I tell them who question me with their eyes. "No, she doesn't have marks on her arms, I thought so too..."
When the girls return, they're all crying, faces streaked with running mascara, mine asks for a token (yes, a token...). "Call her father?" I ask. "I'm calling the cops, I am..." she replies. "She doesn't have the courage, her father, that bastard, has been raping her for months, since her mother returned to England, he's beating her... I'll report him, you do whatever the hell you want..."
Diana, shit, is it true? Zero salivation, breath held, shit... She vomits first, then cries and yells that yes, it's true, she's going to have to abort, she's pregnant, shit, she's pregnant, that bastard beat her up, that evening, when she told him, shows us the bruises on her thigh and back... And you went dancing, for heaven's sake, you came to Nervi, like that... Diana, Diana...
We look at each other, two look for the car keys, but what the hell, they're in my jacket, at the club, one takes the house keys from his pocket, come on let's catch him at home, let's gut him with a fork...
My girlfriend puts her in a taxi and takes her home, she'll stay there as long as she wants and woe betide anyone who talks. We are in the grip of fever, we're red-faced, Diego pulls the knife we bought in Turkey, fifteen centimeters of blade, while Mauro drives like a madman, De Ferrari, Castelletto, Via Bari... Ten minutes, usually it takes a good half hour. The Voxson blasts the slapping bass line of Murder Of Love and triples our heartbeats, we sweat and outside it's two below zero...

"Kein Zurück für dich, there’s no way back, non si torna indietro.."
Mauro opens the gate, I open the door of the house and we go in four... House, well, a mess of empty wine bottles, dirty stuff everywhere, a vomit-inducing stench of a public urinal, he isn't there, we look everywhere, open closets... that bastard has escaped, guys, he's not there... I find the phone under a tower of greasy papers, call Claudia at home, her mother put Diana to bed, gave her a sedative... No, we didn't find him, he ran away, what do the cops say? What, tomorrow? But what the hell, someone has to be raped during office hours to file a report? I slam the receiver down, damn, damn, damn... Different times, there was no red bench or anti-violence centers and the metallic German rhythm of the Voxson was booming in my head and Amerigo's face when I would tell him, because it was up to me to tell him: school, basketball, music, North stand, we did everything together, except the army, and now he was there jumping out of a plane...
She stayed for two months, as a guest at Claudia's and they never found him, Diana's father who, in the meantime, had an illegal abortion, low-level butchery, so much so that she was never able to have children again, ever, ever, then disappeared, suddenly, with two hundred thousand lire in her pocket given by my girlfriend, no trace, just a few postcards sent to Claudia and Amerigo, one from Lyon, one from Malmo, one from Jerusalem, another from Oporto, in which she thanked her and her family for the hospitality, and greeted the whole group, I'm fine, she wrote, I don’t stop to not think; forget me, love you but forget me.
Amerigo didn't forget her, never forgot her, he looked for her without hope, spent wages to go where the postcards were sent. Until an aneurysm took him three years later, at twenty-four.
That terrible beast who was said to be her father, instead, encountered the front of a locomotive, in Tuscany, wanted to or not, who cares, he was gone for good, a month after the disappearance of his daughter.
The gray Piaggio Sì with the Bauhaus logo remained chained to the streetlight under her house for another two years before the municipal decided enough was enough and took it away one September morning.
It rained.

"Take this kiss upon the brow, admit that these days were dream; all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream?"
The year of grace two thousand nineteen, spring, Düsseldorf, crowded conference hall, everyone does my job, I'm one of the oldest, what a bore, damn it, there are colleagues from all over Europe, all cheerful and chatty, then there are doctors and service staff, translators and stewards. Dinner and dancing in the evening, nonsense, crappy music played by very goofy Germans in white tails, styled like James Last, the English very drunk, my wife and I are exhausted.
A tap, a mock punch on the shoulder, I turn, I see her, she smiles, a breathless moment, music stops, a larsen squealing in my ears, a restaurant suspended in time and space. I look at my wife, who was my girlfriend thirty years before, the one who hosted Diana, she remains with the flute mid-air, I... I... Diana? Is that you?
My wife gets up and overturns glass and chair, they embrace and cry, cry and look at each other, is it you, is it you, is it me, is it me, how are you, and you, your people? Then she hugs me, I feel her bony and angular as she's always been. Then she looks at my wife and asks: "For fuck's sake, did you marry this fool, you’re still together..." And then, then what are you doing here, I'm the one organizing these things, come on, let's go to my place, I live out of town, I have the car, then I'll drive you back to the hotel. Sport driving, drives a black Cayenne, she doesn't speak, we don't speak, we don't need to, we laugh, we cry.

She's all blonde now, more of a lady, she's always her.

You're still so skinny, I eat nothing, I climb, ski, and swim.
"I looked at you for a quarter of an hour, at dinner, before deciding yes, it was you..."
Nice house, rich stuff, let me introduce... Lisa. They've lived together forever, since this German milf, back then a young doctor, found Diana wandering near Liège, along the railway, stopped her car, and helped her, she was limping, second-degree sprain. Then love, which she had lacked from an emotionally cold mother and an unworthy father, the love Amerigo had felt for her but she hadn't, hadn't been able to love him back. When she names him she sees our faces immediately, understands, asks to be told of everyone but not him, her father, doesn't want to know alive or dead, doesn't exist, for her. "Twenty years of therapy, but I made it, up his ass."
Let's drink, come on.

"Another hope feeds another dream, today it comes true what common sense denies, on joyless roads we walk in lines, a calm but constant flow..."
End of story, three in the morning, stay here, no, we have everything in the hotel, okay, I'll take you... But first, a moment, I have something for you... She opens a cupboard, rummages, overturns, curses in German, Lisa laughs, tells us if it weren't for her the house would be a freaking mess, a fuckin’ mess, yes. Then she reappears, we look at her again, tight in her branded jeans and pearl gray lurex top of a great brand.

She's all blonde now, more of a lady, she's always her...

She holds something we didn't even remember existed, a cassette, a worn-out original audiocassette, she doesn't even know if it still plays, she says, keep it, we wore it out, in the car and at parties.

I take it, I look at it.

It's "A Secret Wish", damn it, it's "A Secret Wish".
The slapping bass of that night echoes in my head, the martial drums of Murder Of Love, Brücken singing, sweet and determined, sharp and soothing. The car ride, at night, with Diego's knife glimmering, reflecting the streetlights on Corso Firenze...
"You know..." she tells us. "One evening, some six or seven years ago, here in Düsseldorf I meet her on the street, Claudia Brücken, remember, the big-nosed singer of Propaganda, I tell her I know her, admired her since I was young, we have a beer together, she gives me two tickets and a pass for one of her concerts, two nights later, we go, then with the pass backstage, she introduces us to the band, an Italian friend of mine I didn't know, she tells them, but we've known each other for thirty years... And she signs my cassette of A Secret Wish, you see, here, on the back cover. Now the cassette is yours, you are my sister and you my brother, even if you are Genoese..."

Damn, I suddenly remember her with the Doria scarf around her neck, on Sundays, those unbearable colors, better not to think...

"Now you know where I live, come whenever you want, even without notice, it’s your home..."
Now the cassette is at our house, in a box, never played by us, along with the photos of our parents, of relatives, mine and my wife's and those of that group of twenty odd layabouts, rather, nightborers, half dark, half wave, with improbable hairstyles, in the middle, her, smiling.
Smiling.
Smiling.

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream?"