from This Side of the Sea

WINTER 2005

When you spend them awake, nights are long. My wife Paola and I take turns next to Nicola; just a few months old, he’s ravenous as a wolf, no matter the hour. With great effort I’m nearing the end of my project about migrations in today’s Europe, and I’m full of doubt, so much so that I often ask myself if I’m even capable of writing a whole album on a single theme. I think about Fabrizio De André and the intensity of his folk music monographs. I read and reread the copy of One-Way Ticket that Erri De Luca gave me recently. It has great beauty and clarity, and I take it as a sign of encouragement to continue.

During this period I disappear every evening for a couple of hours into the quiet of my study to reflect and revise. When I surface again I speak with Paola, and I let her hear the changes, the new versions. But Nicola isn’t giving us any peace, so our dialogues get interrupted constantly by the needs of the newborn.

I suddenly remember a story that Erri told me about a market in Finland where, at a vegetable stand, he’d found a potato variety named Van Gogh. For the painter to be memorialized by a kind of potato, I recall Erri insisting, was far from offensive. He said he too hoped one day to be entitled to some vegetable or other (he’d have preferred garlic, but felt that too great an honor): that way he’d have his name called out in the most natural and friendly of places where people meet—a marketplace. A lot better than ending up on some public land registry as the name of a street, square, or school, he said.

De André and his monographic records, Erri De Luca and his story of a Finnish marketplace . . . So one night, almost from inertia, I started playing an arpeggio in 2/4 time, repeating the style of so many ballads by De André and Brassens (like “Le Gorille,” if you see what I mean, or “Bocca di rosa”), and I started thinking about that very prototype of markets, Torino’s Porta Palazzo—a place where the salad bowl of cultures is a given.

From all this come two rhymed stanzas; in the middle I insert—even though Torino isn’t a port city like Genova—the shiploading dock, in homage to De André. But I’m not able to keep going; in fact, I’m almost embarrassed by my brief divertimento, given its theme. When I come out of the study, after offering countless qualifications and introductory remarks, I play the two stanzas for Paola—the fruit of this evening’s efforts.

“It’s about time,” she tells me, “about time that you put some happiness into all this stuff you’re writing.”

“Okay, I agree—but I don’t have the faintest idea of how to continue the story.”

“So sing about a baby,” she says to me, “tell the story of a birth: it’s the most natural thing in the world, and, for many, it’s what makes them leave home.”

I spend a few evenings wrinkling my head over how to stuff some sort of Christmas into Porta Palazzo. I look to Nicola, and I think about the legitimate demands of well-fed souls born into the “right part of the world,” and then I think about the ius solis that doesn’t exist in Italy but which ought to be a natural law, enforced in every civilized nation, and I think as well of the absurdity it would take to add injustice to an event as ordinary and beautiful as the arrival of a newborn. In short, I’m buried in a whole pile of commonplaces and clichés, and I just don’t feel I can escape.

Finally I decide to do what I always do when my thoughts jumble together without any obvious way out: I try to think—in the...