Dedicated To Sara: Fragments And Memories Of A Love Affair, Some Of It Fantasy, Some Of It Real

Written by:

MARCO FOGLIANI

Dedicated to Sara

Translated by: Barbara Maher

©2022 - Marco Fogliani

Table of Contents

EPITAPH (14/10/2015)

THE CONCERT OF LORENZO'S BAND

NOTHING ESCAPES MOTHER

CLARA'S POSTCARDS

GELINDO AND FLORINDO

THE ENCOUNTER IN DIGNANO (14/7/2018)

A DIFFERENT CHRISTMAS

A THOUSAND AND A HUNDRED MORE

ANNA AND I

A LUCKY WOMAN

THE OTHER SARA

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

A MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

CHOICE OF LOVE

PRINCESS CYCLAMEN AND CAVALIER BLUEBERRY

THE IMAGINARY GIRLFRIEND

NOT WITHOUT SAYING GOODBYE

THE THIRD SPRING (A ONE ACT PLAY)

REFLECTIONS AFTER A TRIP TO TIVOLI

EPITAPH (14/10/2015)

Hi Sara

A lifetime has passed since I met you more than thirty years ago at university.

A lifetime has passed since love first burst into my existence and shone a light on it, a beacon, and let me know its miracles, giving me the most beautiful and unforgettable moments. I loved you more than myself.

A lifetime has passed since, maybe twenty years ago, we had to leave each other.

A lifetime has passed, but love, like a family treasure, still remains.

A lifetime has passed since, perhaps the day before yesterday, you stopped suffering and left.

A lifetime has passed, but for me nothing changes or will change between us.

Goodbye Sara

SARA CAGNUCCI

(6/5/1964 - 14/10/2015)

THE CONCERT OF LORENZO'S BAND

One afternoon as I was coming home from school, I happened to see some posters advertising a concert of Lorenzo’s Band about one month later.

I thought of Clara at once when I saw them - because it was her favorite group - although my thoughts had probably been almost permanently fixed on her for a few months now. A good excuse, if I ever needed one, to call her that evening and have a nice little chat with her again. And then, who knows, maybe arrange to go together.

Did you see that Lorenzo's band is performing next month at the Concert Hall?

Yes, I know. And I went to Tivoli the other day to get some information about it from the tobacconist in the square. He’s the only one around here that sells tickets for the theater and concerts, but he had already run out of them.

I was a bit disappointed that she hadn't told me this earlier because, given how loquacious she is, it was almost equivalent to having kept it hidden to me, and she hadn’t thought of going to it with me. But as usual I really appreciated her spontaneity and sincerity, and I was very happy to have had a chance to make myself useful to her and earn her gratitude.

If you like, I’ll see if I can find them here in Rome. And if I do, let's go together, okay? I proposed.

Oh yes, I hope you do! And if you find some you should get one for my sister. She’d like to come too.

I would have preferred it to be an outing for just the two of us, but her sister was alright. She was nice and was on my side. And anyway, I would have been willing to do anything for Clara, even get tickets for all her friends in Tivoli, and maybe go and buy them in Naples if necessary.

So, I went downtown to inquire at the ticket office. I queued up for quite a while, and in the end I couldn’t find anything better than three unnumbered places in sector H from which, the young lady explained to me, you couldn’t see much but to make up for it you could hear everything, and they didn’t cost much.

A friend of mine who often went to that Concert Hall told me that in fact you could see the big screen quite well from sector H, though the people on stage were like distant specks; but he did not agree that you could hear very well. It was loud, yes, very loud, because there were powerful loudspeakers nearby, but this certainly didn’t mean that the audio was good, on the contrary.

I told Clara about my friend’s comments, and also his advice to take ear protectors or earplugs although then, he had explained, you feel the bass notes vibrating in your belly, and there are no earplugs that can stop it. But if you arrive very early you can choose the best places, and you might even be able to change sector; and in the worst case scenario you can go outside onto the square right in front of the gates, because you can hear from there too.

When I told Clara all this, she seemed resigned: Well I'll take ear protectors, and let's try to get there as early as possible, then we'll see, she commented.

About ten days later the outlook for our concert seemed to improve considerably when I ran into Franco on the bus. He was an old friend of mine, a tall man with a very deep bass voice. He asked me if I might need two tickets for the concert of Lorenzo's band.

I've already bought some, but they’re in sector H and they told me the audio is terrible there, I replied.

I have two tickets for seats in sector C at 25,000 lire each. If you want you can have them for half price. Unfortunately, I can't go because I’m being sent on a mission in Turin that week. I can't find anyone to sell them to, apart from my boss, and I don't want to give them to him. All my friends have already bought their tickets. What do you say?

I say that I’d also have another problem: that I need three tickets. I already imagined how it would end: me alone in the hell of sector H, with Clara and her sister sitting comfortably on two seats in the stalls being harassed by handsome young men in suits and ties, like two flowers being attacked by wasps.

Come on, think about it. Let's make it 20,000 for both. Maybe they won't notice if one is different when the tickets are all together.

Okay, I'll make something up, I replied reluctantly. To tell the truth, I was nurturing the hope that Clara's sister might change her mind, maybe at the last moment, and not come.

Listen, let's do this: we’ll be in touch before I leave. In the meantime, I might be able to get hold of another ticket. And anyway, I don't have them with me right now.

We left it like that, and in fact he contacted me again.

I would have found two more tickets for the stalls. That bastard the captain has sent my colleague in mission too. We think he did it on purpose: he couldn’t find tickets and sent us out of town. And then guess what, he asked us if there was any chance someone could sell him some tickets. But over our dead bodies, we said, rather than give them to him we’d tear them up. Or we could give them to him for a million upwards … But no, come on, if you want them, they're yours, let's say 20,000 for all four of them, okay?

Well, thank you, and to your colleague too. In return I can give you three tickets for sector H, where the audio is bad, and you can't see anything. At this point I don't need them and maybe you can use them to spite your captain or make some money on them …

Well, in the end, with only a week to go before the concert, we made a deal on the tickets. But when I had them in my hand, I already had the feeling that they wouldn’t be of any use to me. Clara had come down with a cold a couple of days before, and I already knew what would happen: first the scarf, then the reddened nose. Guess if she would go out in the evening in that condition! On Thursday she didn’t even come to classes. In the evening I called her at home, and she confirmed her poor state of health.

I'm sorry, I think I won't be able to come to the concert on Saturday, she told me.

The show won’t be the same without you, of course I replied jokingly, but sincerely sorry. What about your sister?

In fact, I would reluctantly have gone to the concert without Clara, and going to it with her sister, just us or with someone else I didn’t know, could have become embarrassing: but if she or Clara had insisted, it would have been morally difficult for me not to go with her. It would have been like pulling back from a commitment I’d made.

No, she’ll stay at home with me.

I was relieved by this news.

We found out that the concert will be live on TV, so we’ll watch it together.

Too bad you're not well, otherwise I could have come to watch it with you, I said. I would certainly have gone whatever illness she had, but I knew that there was no way she would allow me to do so.

But in the end, it was actually as if we had gone together.

That evening, as soon as the concert began, I phoned her, and we spent maybe more than an hour on the phone. We quite often spent entire evenings on the phone, but generally it was to talk about everything and nothing, and maybe unconsciously just to hear the sound of our voices. That time, though, there was no conversation except for a few brief comments between one song and another, some her explanations about what she liked about this song, or what another reminded her of. I could hear the TV on in the background, and she sang along as best she could, as far as her state of health and her voice allowed, a bit hoarser than usual but never loud and always very beautiful for me.

I don't know if you should be singing in your condition, I pointed out timidly. For once I was playing the part of the apprehensive mother/nurse, the role that she usually played with me. She didn't even try to justify herself with an excuse, but I let the thing drop. I felt that her soul came out with her voice so happy and carefree, and it was a wonderful show to listen to.

She was lying or sitting in her bed, with the television that had been taken to her room especially for the occasion, with long cables stretching out around the house. I, who instead had not won the exclusivity of the television in my home, had sunk into the armchair listening very relaxed, and occasionally singing along with her the few words I knew.

It is for you only that I sang,

it is for you only that I studied,

it is for you only that I died,

only for yoooou …

I had always been rather indifferent to Lorenzo's band, a group like many others even if I had to admit that some of their songs were nice; but since I’d met Clara, I had begun to appreciate them too, only out of solidarity with her at the start but little by little also because I was really convinced.

It is for you only that I danced,

it is for you only that I fought,

it is for you only that I smoked,

only for yoooou …

In the most famous pieces, her sister joined the choir too. She occasionally went out of Clara's room and left us alone, then returned after a while; sometimes she too made her comments, in the background, but so that I could hear them too. This and everything else that was going