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The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana :: Эко Умберто
Страница: 48 из 286Who can say-maybe the way I put my socks on, or the color of my shirt, or a can I glimpsedout of the corner of an eye had triggered a sound memory.
"Except," Paola noted, "you only ever sang songs from the fifties or later. At most, you’d go back to the early San Remo festivals-songs like Fly , Dove or Papaveri e papere. You never went farther back than that, nothing from the forties or thirties or twenties." Paola mentioned Sola me ne vò per la città , the great postwar song, which had been on the radio so often that even she, though only a little girl at the time, still knew it. It certainly sounded familiar, but I did not react with interest; it was as if someone had sung Casta Diva , and indeed it seems I was never a great fan of opera. Not the way I am of Eleanor Rigby , say, or Que será , será , or Sono una donna non sono una santa. As for the older songs, Paola attributed my lack of interest to what she called a repression of childhood.
She had also noticed over the years that although I was something of a connoisseur of jazz and classical music and liked to go to concerts and listen to records, I never had any desire to turn on the radio. At best, I would listen to it in the background if someone else had turned it on. Evidently the radio was like the country house: it belonged to the past.
But the next morning, as I was waking up and making coffee, I found myself singing Sola me ne vò per la città:
All alone through city streets I go ,
Walking through a crowd that doesn’t know ,
That doesn’t see my pain.
I search for you , I dream of you , but all in vain…
All in vain I struggle to forget ,
First love is impossible to forget ,
Inside my heart a name is written , a single name.
I knew you well , and now I know that you are love ,
The truest love , the greatest love…
The melody came of its own accord. And my eyes teared up.
"Why that song?" Paola asked.
"Who knows? Maybe because it’s about searching for someone. No idea who."
"You’ve crossed the barrier into the forties," she reflected, curious.
"It’s not that," I said. "It’s that I felt something inside. Like a tremor. No, not like a tremor. As if… You know Flatland , you read it too. Well, those triangles and those squares live in two dimensions, they don’t know what thickness is. Now imagine that one of us, who lives in three dimensions, were to touch them from above. They would feel something they’d never felt before, and they wouldn’t be able to say what it was.
"Except," Paola noted, "you only ever sang songs from the fifties or later. At most, you’d go back to the early San Remo festivals-songs like Fly , Dove or Papaveri e papere. You never went farther back than that, nothing from the forties or thirties or twenties." Paola mentioned Sola me ne vò per la città , the great postwar song, which had been on the radio so often that even she, though only a little girl at the time, still knew it. It certainly sounded familiar, but I did not react with interest; it was as if someone had sung Casta Diva , and indeed it seems I was never a great fan of opera. Not the way I am of Eleanor Rigby , say, or Que será , será , or Sono una donna non sono una santa. As for the older songs, Paola attributed my lack of interest to what she called a repression of childhood.
She had also noticed over the years that although I was something of a connoisseur of jazz and classical music and liked to go to concerts and listen to records, I never had any desire to turn on the radio. At best, I would listen to it in the background if someone else had turned it on. Evidently the radio was like the country house: it belonged to the past.
But the next morning, as I was waking up and making coffee, I found myself singing Sola me ne vò per la città:
All alone through city streets I go ,
Walking through a crowd that doesn’t know ,
That doesn’t see my pain.
I search for you , I dream of you , but all in vain…
All in vain I struggle to forget ,
First love is impossible to forget ,
Inside my heart a name is written , a single name.
I knew you well , and now I know that you are love ,
The truest love , the greatest love…
The melody came of its own accord. And my eyes teared up.
"Why that song?" Paola asked.
"Who knows? Maybe because it’s about searching for someone. No idea who."
"You’ve crossed the barrier into the forties," she reflected, curious.
"It’s not that," I said. "It’s that I felt something inside. Like a tremor. No, not like a tremor. As if… You know Flatland , you read it too. Well, those triangles and those squares live in two dimensions, they don’t know what thickness is. Now imagine that one of us, who lives in three dimensions, were to touch them from above. They would feel something they’d never felt before, and they wouldn’t be able to say what it was.