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How ugly train stations are at 7 in the morning. When the repetitiveness of gestures permeates your days, even the most elementary thing becomes distressing. And there's a certain aftertaste of sadness standing still there, every morning, waiting for the 7:30 with the usual delay. To the point that people's curses for these delays no longer make the news, you hear them without even noticing. In fact, to be honest, you don't notice anything at all. I find it’s the only moment of the day when I become one with myself, I think a lot and get to know myself better.
The same old faces. And wouldn't you know it, I always end up next to the same old lady who talks trash about the hundreds of thousands of immigrants that fill these carriages. 'Ma'am, I swear I don't care,' I’d like to tell her while nodding like an idiot. Surely, looking out the window might not be the best idea, given the distressing metropolitan horror that surrounds me, almost absurdly, having on me the effect of a pen thrust into the eye. Building after building, decay after decay, weeds upon weeds. Yet I found a way to amuse myself even like this, memorizing the signs of all the warehouses visible in the distance. And damn, I remember them all by heart. Strange for someone who forgets even his own birthday.
This, until the usual jerk of a conductor starts staring at me from afar with that Clint Eastwood air in 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,' in the famous duel scene. 'I have a subscription, jerk,' I’d like to tell him while showing the card with an indifferent look. But only when I realize I don’t understand a damn thing those two Koreans sitting in front of me are mumbling, do I decide that the only escape from those 35 minutes is a pair of headphones. Headphones. They have saved my life more times than the seatbelt.
I’m very attached to that dualism created when you overlap the pleasure of music with the human decay that surrounds you. I touch what I listen to and somehow an unspoken happiness emerges, lingering until I realize there's no signal under those damn tunnels. At that point, I have no choice: I search the memory card, among the songs I've stored. If only it weren't that I haven't updated that list since 2010 and the least brutal sound is that of Amon Amarth, it would be the holy grail. But in a little corner of memory, almost as if closed in a drawer, there's inexplicably a handful of Sergio Endrigo songs, which I can’t help but rely on every morning journey.
Sergio Endrigo has been comfortably forgotten, left there, in a little corner, as if he never existed. But what he did was a real revolution: as a perfect songwriter of the 60s, he became trapped like many in the musical canons imposed at the time, navigating through genres, without ever sounding banal or predictable. Without ever straying from his true roots. The various appearances at Sanremo, the collaboration with maestro Bacalov, the passion for Brazil, the love for the guitar. The debut in '63 with the hit 'Io che amo solo te', and many, many songs passed down to posterity, between themes of love, social issues, and childish fantasies. The partnership and collaboration with Ungaretti, the almost international success of 1974 with 'Ci vuole un fiore'. Someone apparently considered second-rate rises to an all-round character, becoming a point of reference within me.
'Lontano dagli occhi, che culo,' I whisper when I find the song on the playlist. You know, I have this strange tendency to fall in love with songs and listen to them so many times they become nauseating. There are only a few tracks that manage to escape this extermination. Yet this one, not at all banal as the Sanremo culture dictates, remains an evergreen for my ears over the years. And memories of that Sanremo 69 come back, when that man in jacket and tie took to the stage of the Salone delle feste, with a sad and heartfelt air, making this song his with the attitude of one who lives with what he sings, who carries it inside. Of his voice so deep and polite, of his jaw so strange that over time became a hallmark of expressiveness. I think of how that orchestra masterfully accompanied Sergio's voice, of how well that piano played, of how everything was so perfect. And how inexplicably that much-contested edition was won by Iva Zanicchi with 'Zingara,' by Don Backy, by Nada with the memorable 'Ma che freddo fa,' of the first appearance of Battisti with 'Un'avventura,' for an edition in which the ghost of Luigi Tenco still hovered over the skies of Sanremo.
The theme of distance was dear to the songwriters of the time. People like Endrigo built half of the first part of his career on it, without ever falling into the banal. But it is a distance not necessarily measured in kilometers, but seen as a state of mind. A mental and not a physical distance. One can be extremely far while being close, and very close from far away. But Endrigo knows this, and recites one of the most beautiful phrases my years remember: 'For one who returns, and brings you a rose, a thousand have forgotten you.' That gesture that redeems a thousand disappointments, that person who revives life in the form of a rose. And the rose, precisely it, as a sign of delicate innocence that stands in contrast to the sadness of sentimental neglect. And of the urban neglect, which I observe with sorrow through the windows of the carriage.
A rose. The answer to everything is a rose. And perhaps it's from this awareness that I ought to begin. The train stops, and 47 years fly through my mind in the blink of an eye. The social hypocrisy so dear to me cannot wait, and I head towards yet another day as an out-of-towner. But chasing the same chorus that I have in my eyes every time:
Lontano dagli occhi, lontano dal cuore ♫
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