The old man’s story resembles a dream. The young man feels himself being drawn into a world that seems real but isn’t. At least, that’s what he thinks. At least, that’s what he hopes.
Maestro, is it a sure thing that he murdered her, though? I mean, he shot her in front of everyone, the musicians, the other actor . . . Couldn’t it be that at that very same instant, from backstage or the darkness of the audience . . . No, says the old man, and his voice betrays no emotion, not even a flutter of torment. No, he fired the gun. No one ever had a shadow of doubt about that. Well then, the young man asks, what are we talking about? Certainly, it’s strange that it should happen onstage, I understand that, but still . . . The old man listens to the swallows outside; they’ve started singing their high piercing songs just as his hands stopped running up and down the instrument’s neck, caressing the strings with the pick. He turns his ear to listen, his head tilted ever so slightly, as if he were searching in that noise, so subtle and chaotic, for a tone or a melody. The young man falls silent and waits. He’s learned that a story like that one, a third-person account, not unlike a memory belonging to someone else, or an article in a dusty old newspaper extracted at random from the teetering pile next to the bedroom door, might well just cut off midway through.
They’d talked about it during their previous meetings. A song is a story taken from life, you don’t just dream it up at the drawing board to stick it in a novel; it might even lack an ending, it might be about a single fleeting instant, a kiss or a gaze, a regret or a hope. Then why does it become a song? the young man had asked one afternoon, while it was raining incessantly outside, and there was nothing to be seen but the rainwater pounding furiously down at the window. Because, the old man had replied, these are moments that are important to the author, that count more than anything else to him and to his life. They have an unbearable weight and, even though they last no more than an instant, they wound deeply and leave their mark. A song is the story of a scar.
And so the young man knows: what the old man has started to tell him, executing in masterful fashion the first verse, might already be over; a faded photograph as it emerges from a rusty metal box.
Instead the story goes on. And the old man, having discovered the key of the swallows’ song, starts speaking again.
The policeman, he says, already possessed the solution. He just didn’t realize it yet. It lay concealed in the chaos and confusion, because in disorder there is everything. Look at this room, it looks like a storeroom chockablock with trash and old junk. Before long, after I’ve left this world, when Concetta finds me here with my instrument in hand and my jaw sagging open, my blind eyes turned to the window and the sea, and perhaps to the swallows, they’ll load all this rubbish onto a van and haul it off to the dump. But buried among the books and newspapers, the scores and the records, there’s a meaning, a sense to things, a purpose that I alone understand. A thread that runs from my birth to my death. And even though it’s been snipped, it will continue to exist even after the objects have been thrown away, tossed willy-nilly into and among the traces of lives of who knows what other people.
The same thing was happening in the policeman’s mind: a broken web needed to be knotted back together. But what he needed to know? He already knew it.
The young man asks, softly: What about the song? Couldn’t he just focus on the song?
The old man smiles and his face wrinkles up like a crumpled handkerchief. I’ve taught you well, guaglio’. Very well indeed. Yes, if he’d concentrated on the song, perhaps he’d have figured it out earlier. But he didn’t have anything to do with our art. For him, for most people, and even for many musicians, songs are just words and music, and maybe they’re a useful way to remember or preserve a thought, as if they were some kind of gelatine. He certainly could never have imagined that they were alive. Only people like us know that.
The young man senses a surge of proud warmth filling his chest. People like us . . . So in the end, I’ve received it, my diploma, he thinks. The old man goes on: For us it’s normal that certain things can only happen during a song. Because we know the stage, whatever form it may take, even if it’s just the street. It’s the place where a dream, every dream becomes real, infecting and invading life. There is no way out, there’s no place to run.
What do dreams have to do with it, Maestro? That man really fired his gun.
The old man struggles to his feet and goes to the window. His back is straight, his long thinning hair moves in the wind. The young man senses a flutter of wings nearby. Springtime or not, the swallows have returned.
The dream has everything to do with it, guaglio’, says the old man. Oh, it matters, that’s the only lesson you have yet to learn, and it’s the last one. I’m absolutely going to have to teach it to you, if I hope to protect you.
Protect me? What do you mean, Maestro? From what?
The other man turns around, his instrument grasped in his right hand, hanging at his side, like an extension of his arm. A dream, he replies, is a damned fog that envelops you and strips you of all your points of reference. It reduces your eyesight, it tangles up your emotions, it leaves you alone with the little you can see and nothing more. A dream is a perversion, because it tricks you about its reality. And it triumphs in sleep, when you close your eyes and the world that you have around you vanishes. A dream is like quicksand, like a lake with its treacherous still waters, like the sea at night. It swallows you up, and it never lets you go. That’s why I told you that swallows have only one dream, and they believe that life is that dream: returning and returning, over and over. Who can say how many of them die, flying away and flying back. By the thousands, or even by the millions, along the path that they travel. And yet they care nothing at all, stubborn as they are, because their damned dream, in those tiny, obtuse heads, is always the same: to return, to return.
His tone is angry, and his phrases come out chewed off and broken. The young man, peering into in the dying sighs of the sunset, sees the sprays of saliva as the old man speaks, backlit, and thinks to himself that this is an ancient rage, that it might perhaps come from some other fragment of the story. He doesn’t interrupt, but he’s dying to ask.
The old man drags himself to the armchair and lets himself drop into it; his eyes remain shut, and he pants to disperse the fury that’s filling his body.
Then he speaks again: in a dream, though, there’s nothing we can do. We can’t reach out our hand to defend ourselves, or to grab what we want. We’re just dreaming and our hand refuses to move. And we can sense our frustration, our sense of ineptitude. There we are, trapped, the protagonists of all that happens and, at the same time, helpless spectators, the only ones who cannot act.
As if guided by a mind of its own, the instrument suddenly snaps into position. And without playing the introductory chords, the old man sings another verse.
Vulanno pe’ città nove e stramane,
tu no, nun puo’ sape’ che te ne vène ogge o dimane.
E si nun truove maje chi te vo’ bene quanto te ne vogl’io
ll’amice ’o ssanno
che faje vulanno?
E torna rundinella,
torna a ’stu nido mo’ ch’è primmavera.
I’ lasso ’a porta aperta quanno è ’a sera
speranno ’e te truva’
vicino a me.
(Flying through new and distant cities,
no, you can’t know what will happen to you today or tomorrow.
And you’ll never find anyone who loves you like I do,
Your friends know it,
what are you doing, flying like that?
Come back, little swallow,
Come back to this nest, now that it’s springtime.
I’ll leave the door open, when it’s evening,
hoping to find you
next to me.)
The young man is breathless. Love, innocence, and pain, hope without hope, even madness. The passions concealed in the song—not only had he never heard any of them before, but he didn’t even believe that they existed. My God, he murmurs. My God.
Yes, says the old man. That’s exactly right. And while the policeman was searching for the broken thread, everyone else was a prisoner of their dreams. Each in thrall to his own dream. Blinded by that madness, they thought they could get away.
The young man feels his heartbeat pound in his ears; he sits waiting, but the old man’s mouth emits no sounds. He waits and waits, and then he asks: Maestro, what about the swallows? He points at the window, his finger leveled as if in some act of accusation. Dreams come true, don’t they? If they stick together, they achieve their dream. Certainly, a few of them fall by the wayside over the course of the trip, but the others arrive here, and they rebuild their nests here in your rain gutter. And as many are born as die, and perhaps even more. Isn’t that a dream come true?
The old man shakes his head. Yes, but among themselves they know they’re different, they’re not all the same, the way they might seem to us. And perhaps the ones that die leave a memory among the others. Not all swallows return, guaglio’. That’s the truth.
In a low voice, the old man resumes his story of dreams and flights without returns.