Long Players by Peter Coviello

Author:Peter Coviello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

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ON MY LAST NIGHT Roberto takes me to the Vomero, in the center of the city, to watch Napoli play someone . . . Juventus, maybe? Torino? Some team they are not supposed to beat. We sit, a dozen of us, in a basement bar. Before the match starts they present me with a team scarf, dusty blue and white and inscribed NAPOLI, and this I wear throughout the night, in a knot that, once back in America, will impress everyone with its Laocoönian complexity. I am embraced, I am kissed, drinks appear before me in unbroken succession. (There is wine, then beer, and then, later, some ghastly hazelnut liqueur, the effects of which will prove to be impressively malign.) “Lui è mio fratello Americano!” Roberto hollers to all the strangers in our orbit. Through some extra-time heroics I no longer recall, Napoli wins, and the jubilation expands and intensifies and finally overflows. We spill into the streets, which are madness, and I follow along, arms hooked in arms, as everybody sings club songs I don’t understand.

Later, six or so of us confined to a car of about the dimensions of a washing machine, the singing continues. We try out American staples. I lead us through AC/DC, Madonna, an unexpected burst of Hall and Oates. “Pri-i-vate eyes! They‘re watching you!” We are a traffic-stopped karaoke bar. And then Roberto hushes everyone. He puts a track on the car stereo that, within seconds, I can tell is dear to them all, important in ways both private and shared. It’s an Italian pop-rock song and I will confess to being surprised that, despite this, there is in it none of the clumsy amateurishness I tend to identify, maybe a bit too readily, with Euro pop. It has a perfectly serviceable rock-radio production, layered and clean, and is sung by a man with a lowish resonant hum of a voice, stagy and a bit self-regarding. I swear he sounds like no one so much as an Italian Neil Diamond, the notion of which causes me to think, Jesus, imagine the pants.

The man is called Ligabue—the cry goes up in the car, “Ah, Ligabue!”—and the song is “Il Mio Pensiero,” which of course I don’t know at the time, or even after it is played through three or four times on repeat as we climb back toward Ercolano. I learn this only when Roberto gives me back my iPod the next morning, to which he has somehow managed to add the song, so that it might accompany me on my subsequent travels. I play it enough to memorize some lines in the chorus, and puzzle them out:

E adesso che sei dovunque sei

Chissà se ti arriva il mio pensiero . . .

Now, wherever you are, I wonder if my thoughts arrive to you . . . It’s a good way to remember the Italian you’ve learned, Roberto tells me, and then, with a half-frowning nod, kisses me good-bye.

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