Memoirs of London - 14

14.

- "I was talking about the liberation movement represented by rock music, which has, to some extent, captured the legacy of hippies ....
- But open your eyes, please !!! Do not you realize that hippie ideology has also been transformed into a commercial ideology? Here we sing love, peace, freedom! But life, loss, is not made of songs. As a matter of fact they are kicking us in the  ass! Starting with the great fruitful business of Rock Discography and Musicians in the head! Let alone for the liberation movement! "

- "Maybe Rock music is actually just a stage, a dream that enlivens life! But along with an idea, a great revolutionary idea we still do not know about the exact design! "

- "The only real revolution is that made  of action, not of dreams. Every idea to be credible must have an affirmation! It must contain the seed of application and we are due  to accomplished with it! Do you understand !? "

- "Who tells you that the ideas of the rock movement will not find a tomorrow’s application? Great ideas, you know it, can walk for centuries and then pluck suddenly like the underground veins of oil ...".

- "Just wait and hope for yourself. I got bored of waiting, thinking and even dreaming. We are doing the game of the masters, do not you understand? They give you music, they give you alcohol, they even tolerate smoking as long as you  do not break the bullocks on them. And if it is not enough for you to forget, there are other palliatives ... "

-" What are you referring to? To the heroine, by chance? "
- "Yes, even heroin! To heroin and churches! "
- "To the Churches ?! To which Churches! "

- "To every and each fucking church! To all the churches of eternal oblivion, of all the religions of this dirty world, from the west to the east. But in the end, to think about it, even a opium canopy is a church of oblivion. And if the heroine is not at your hands, you can take a plane and go to the East: then if your corpse will float in the Ganges, the West will have lost a scumbag and the East an ill-dreamer and so it is! "

Now his beard, dripping and scrubbing on dry cheeks, seemed to tremble. But I was not very impressed and went on exposing   my thoughts.

- "But do you see? There is a lot more and different from opium, in the East! Even there is like everywhere: everyone finds only the answers he’s looking for. Maybe the junkie finds them in the opium, perhaps he does!  But someone else could find them on a less materialistic and merciless dimension; on assuming an alternative way of life to ours; a model that is more like human; on discovering values ​​that are not just profit, career, or family! What do you think they've been looking for in the East John Lennon, Santana, George Harrison, and the other leaders of the Movement? “

While exposing  my thesis, Tommy had skillfully rolled  himself  a cigarette.

 He had pulled out of the pocket of his tweed jacket a tin can of rectangular shape containing an aromatic dry tobacco.  He had taken  a pinch with the thumb and  the index of his right hand and carefully distributed it on a cigarette paper he had previously spread on the base of the palm of the left hand.

 After a quick slip on the rubber strip, he had cleverly rolled it up just managing with the first three fingers of both his hands. Afterward he had passed over his right index  to verify the complete adhesion of the paper and slipped it in the left corner of his thin lips. Then he removed the lid, stuck on the base of the box, locked it in and passed it to me, with his right hand in search of his lighter.

I refused his invitation, lighting his cigarette with my Swedish matches. He leaned against the wall with his shoulders, his left knee leaning against the plant he had pointed at the wall too.

During our conversation, some tourists stopped to look at the mirrors Tommy had on exposition, slightly inclined to the wall.

Some Italians exchanged intentions, recognizing the familiar idiom; many asked abruptly "How much?" Pointing with their finger some mirrors of interest; others, perhaps more confident using the English language, stated "how much does it cost?", always pointing the mirrors with  the same gesture, or with the eyes.

Only the rare Englishmen and those who know something more than the simple grammar also added a "please" to their question. But Tommy, that day more than ever, seemed to be less interested in business, and he served only those who were really ready to buy,  putting the money in his hand. And he snatched them quickly, delivering the chosen mirror with a cold thank you.

- "Look, Eastern religions and philosophies are not so different from ours! A plethora of ideas that have the main purpose of repressing and conditioning people and above all to perpetuate the power in the hands of those who have it: priests and popes involved! No, I know what it takes to. For the conquest of the power we need  to change things in a different way. How did Lenin, Mao and Fidel Castro? "

- "There are so many ways of taking power, other than the revolution that is brutal and that seems to me a way to overcome! For example, one can take power by transforming it through the transformation of the future generations…without any violence anyway!

Tommaso's eyes showed to me  he did not understand.

"I'll try to explain better my idea on how to change the world!"-I continued to say -"If we could inculcate more serious, more equitable ideas on those who’ll be  on charge of power, as a result, we would necessarily be educated all the people that way. And I believe that these injections of novelty and trust would  come from the East. "

-"I think this way of yours is a pious illusion! Then is such a tortuous idea that it will not be able to give documented practical results "-he said sadly, shaking his head.

Then ended, in a more firm tone--"The more I think and the more I convince myself that the only viable path is that of the revolution."

I realized at that moment that he was just trying to convince himself and not me. I was convinced of the opposite, although several years later, returning with thought to that of our reasoning, I would have noticed that his analysis was more acute and rational than mine, idealistic and utopian, at the highest levels.

-"But how can’t you see that you might be fighting  for a rotting corpse? I insist on you that it is necessary to intervene on the basis rather than aiming at the summit! ".

-"Bull  philosopher’ shit! If you intervene on the basis, than on the summit, it is clear that the times of intervention multiply to a disproportionate time and I believe only in this life and in what men can do through it. Moreover, the revolution has as its ultimate purpose to reeducate the people! But to do that, you must seize power! Do you understand it ? "

No, I did not understand it, even if I sensed that behind that speech, that his undoubtedly nervous attitude was maturing a decision whose  I had confirmed only several years later.

I was surprised to think of how different Thomas had seemed to me when I first met him.

 I had immediately taken as a  model. With his  detached way of treating the material things of life; the rejection of the values in which I did not believe too and from which I had moved away leaving Italy for other shores. And with him, in his group, with his friends  I had learned to let myself go, driven by the long and gentle waves of smoke, on whose clouds I had found myself suspended almost without realizing what I was doing, but pleasantly, without asking myself a reason why. And now I felt a strange restlessness as if suddenly I was awakened by a shattered dream and I was so much identified in him and I had believed so deeply in his London world that now his crisis could not be also mine. I felt the need to move away, to  walk lonely and think. I greeted him affectionately, as always and perhaps more. I never saw him again, because he left for Italy and I for other roads. I knew of him through the  newspapers: his wrong choices; his bad masters; his industrious repentance, whose sincerity I never doubted.

And his death, under the tires of a car, as an accidental shot, inexplicably and suddenly started from the time rifle fate.

14. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 13

CHAPTER II

TOMMY

13.

Tommy belonged to the old guard of the Italians in London.

He worked illegally and at the same time he perceived the weekly unemployment allowance which officially was due  for being fired from the factory where he had previously worked.

But  according to his personal opinion it  was instead a form of reimbursement of the taxes paid in those years.

 Afterwards, he sentenced, in a society like the English, where a pair of gloves for fox hunting cost a hundred pounds (that he was more or less how much he earned for a selling mirrors for a month in the street ( inclusive of  Saturdays and Sundays) is not surely up  to the proletarians like him make economy.

Moreover  he had to defend himself in some way from the inflation invented by bankers and masters to exploit the working class.

 And since the escalators in London were only in the subway, he defended himself by perceiving that little government aid that, coupled with the variable payroll of the mirrors, allowed him to live quietly.

Tommy (as they called him in London, but his real name was Tommaso) was a bourgeois guy, of those who, in the eyes of the majority, could  never justify their anxiety or their dissatisfaction in the society.

High, long-limbed, and with regular facial features (I admired him and a little envied him for the ease with which he attracted the women’s gaze) Tommy  was endowed with a willing and determined character that, combined with his affectionate and altruistic charisma, instinctively wore you to love him,  well despite some of his contradictions which himself  was unable to explain and  which he did not even realize.

 But the latter thing was a common trait of  the generational movement which I also belonged to.

He had left Rome in the early seventies, when the dream of a more liberal society had already been broken on the barriers of respectability  and bourgeois hypocrisy. So, disappointed by the betrayal of that working class in whose union he, activist of the student movement, had blindly believed; still overwhelmed by that youthful rage that in the ideal years of '68 had released the highest vital energy; shocked, unbelieving, that the bloody boom was just the outbreak of an air bubble rather than the first crunch of the fatal collapse of a weary system, to be cut off at all costs; with the desire to forget and to find the more than ever living animosities of emancipation; driven by the fascinating cultural appeal of the new frontier of the movement, which in the shadow of the Big Ben sought refuge and regeneration in those years where the instances and the search for a new identity of a restless and shaky West seemed to find, if not an answer,  at least a reverberation of hope and ransom in the crises and illusions of Oriental myths, of which the capital of the former British Empire for its past colonial and vocation constituted the ideal and secure outpost; uncertain, helplessly and  confused, he was  passively dragged into London by one of those energetic currents, as mysterious and inexplicable as invisible and uncontrollable that impetuously are capable of dragging the fate of whole peoples and nations.

- "Ciao," I said, getting  behind him from a narrow alley.
- "You bloody scared me," it was his lusty response.

- "Excuse me Tommy! You were so overwhelmed that I could not resist the idea of ​​a joke. How are you?

- "Well, well .... And you? Did you find a job at last?

-"Yes I did! A company for which I have worked in the past has promised me to summon me ..... maybe next week ....! Do you know those machines that turn milk into cream, hang on by souvenir shops along the streets ...? "

- "Ah, yes, I seem to have noticed them, sometimes. Tourists seem to be crazy for them, don’t they?

-" surely they do! But also British seem to like them a lot.
- "Then it is even better! How much  do they pay you? "
- "I  work a 10%, ‘you know?"
- "And how it comes weekly?"
-"I do not know! It depends on the position! There at Oxford Street there would be a lot, but I will not be sure of that! Given my past experience, however, I could also have a good pitch! Ihope well...
- "I have spoken to my boss anyway! I was waiting for you to call me at home ... "
- "Yes, I called you, but you didn’t seem to be there..."
-"Didn’t I?! When did you call? "

He always spoke in a calm, almost indifferent tone, as if his words were the story of other people, not his owns. That day I felt in his voice an unusual emotional thrill.

- "I called a few days ago. Then I knew about the ice creams would take me back and I did not try again…’ you know? I just came to say hello to you! “

He  smiled slightly, seeming to regain his indifferent air as usual.

- "What did your boss say by the way?" I went on.
- "He said the place is available for you"

- "well I'm glad hearing it; thank you. Anyway,  I try in the ice cream now; Later, if they do not give me good wages, I might be asking them .... "

- "As you like! Do not worry, the work here is easy. And then maybe you'll take my place. Here is good enough ... "

- "How are you leaving?"
- "I’m going back to Italy"
- "Do you go on holiday?"

- "No, not on vacation. I'm meditating a more challenging step, a more important choice. Here in London I just broke. Think that yesterday the police broke into the house while there was no one and when I came back I found all my stuff out of the door ... "

-"Do not tell me! Another certainty of London that crumbles .. "

I was genuinely sorry for that news, not just for my friend, but for the fact in itself. I paid five pounds of rent for my furnished room on Caledonian Court Road, but I had always been fascinated by these free-lance communities that in  London were called  squatting houses, because, according to my way of thinking at that time, it was more appropriate to occupy unlived  houses that let them empty and lifeless.

At that time, I only considered the sociological and cultural aspect of the squatting phenomenon without worrying about the economic aspect, especially from the point of view of the owners of the houses .
Anyway, so things were going to happen, even if the situation was  to change seriously very soon.
- "Bloody Hell," Thomas continued, "only last year they would not be allowed to do such a thing! Crushing a squatting! "
- "I heard that they were about to issue a new Squatting Act .... do they have already done it?"
-"No I do not think so. I would have known if they did. The Conservatives are still on  the opposition but  they are getting stronger ... "

Again I noticed in her wards  that unusual emotion.

- "Where are you living  now?"
- "I have sheltered in the house of friends, in Fulham; They are organized; There is always someone at home and if they all leave, especially in the evening, they leave the lights on. And even the houses on the side are occupied by squatters: families of unemployed workers, poor devils. There they will not dare to break through …"
- "So you're okay, right?"
- "Yeah, maybe it was all there!"

He stared heavily in my eyes as if he were considering the importance or the opportunity to continue talking. I supported her gaze, then I offered one of my cigarettes. He continued after breathing smoke into the sky.

- "But tell me what am  I still doing  here? I'm bursting, ‘you know? I do not even remember what I  came here for and what's worse, sometimes,  I do not even remember who I am! My life, my thoughts, my actions are so different since I live here! Who is the real Thomas, do I ask to myself? It was only yesterday that I fought, albeit naively, to change society and  today I’m living  in a cloud of illusions, in a space which  I don’t even know the course? "

His unusual tone lit up my congenial polemic force and as I could, I tried to face him, also because, although he did not know the course, as he said, I felt I had to continue my journey; moving forward and without turning back.

- "Movement always follows a course, in my opinion! We need  to wait! We are in a moment of stasis; Soon clouds will light up! ...

- "No! Enough it’s  enough!" He  interrupted me abruptly, "I want to go back to earth, I have to tie myself to my past, to my true story! And, by the way,  what movement are you talking about?"

13. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 12

 Other street traders I knew in London were "the mirrors sellers". Except for a few apart in  some isolated places, the mirrors sellers were mostly located in a narrow net of roads around the famous Carnaby Street, the real commercial hub of London’s tourist and rolling on since the epic of the Beatles.

 A little already decayed, but still a great attraction in the second half of the seventies. All the range of the consumer’s  symbols and the new western mythology, which also might be found in the T-shirts sold as souvenirs in the many stores that occupied the short road, the kingdom of cheap and quick tourist shopping , alltogether with the symbols of London, were reproduced on mirrors of different formed and sold on the street in front of those stores, which also constituted their store and warehouse.

From  Marylin Monroe to Humphrey Bogart; from Gin Beef Heart to Coca Cola; from the stylized liberty models to Union Jack, passing through the Irish beers Scottish whiskey, rock bands and even the Royal Family, everything was reproduced on those colored mirrors, gently framed and sold from a minimum of 99 pence to a maximum of £ 20 depending on their size and from  the buyer's tourist wallet and luggage.

The mirrors sellers of this area were almost all Italians or Spanish people.

Young people who had come  up to London in order to study English  language and know the city.  Or may be escaped from the economic and political climate of reflux and, in any case, all invoked by the great fascination that London's capital of Rock Music still exercised on the young people of that poorer Europe and they sought, together with greater freedom, a job that allowed them to   live in a decent way, relying only on their strength and without weighing on the family. Among the Italians stood the young freak looking , distinguished by the seemingly cluttered appearance .

I called them the minor brothers of the sixty-nine revolutioners. But among the mirrors sellers  of Carnaby Street there was an authentic and remarkable representative of the former young’s revolution whose name was Tommy.

12. to be continued...