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| Of bottled air and enchanted dreams | |
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| Kabir's Italian radio show Ch@t - weekly wrap - Pirate and housewife have never been closer than this week, with the opening of a new espresso bar on the Italian shoreline! But there is distant romance, too, with the story of Dante and Assunta in Argentina. Come and see all kinds of things in bottles, like messages, and air! And join Sandokan the commander and Verdeluna the stowaway... #41 - Sandokan reminisces about his trip to Vienna with Yanez, where they went to the New Year's Concert at the invitation of Riccardo Muti. The Maestro had been on Mompracem, where Yanez' coffee granita with cream so beguiled him that he simply had to do something equally delightful in return. Ahhh Vienna, that concert... it was as if time itself had been suspended, and all the women were dressed like the Empress Sissi... Let us dance... One, two, three, our heads are spinning... Hold me tight... We are in a room full of mirrors that reflect the light from the chandeliers above... But above all, they reflect the light of your smile, Verdeluna, which makes my heart spin....Ooooh Sandokan, hold me so tight I can't breathe... All'assalto!! And so on to Yanez' Aunt Faustina, the last in a long line of air collectors. SANDOKAN!!! No I'm not joking! She captures the air of important events in little glass bottles to lock in the memories, the atmosphere. She has travelled the world, sniffing and bottling the real mementos of mankind... Pink Floyd plays in Pompeii? She's there! The Berlin Wall comes down? Aunty has already bottled some Berliner Luft. A meteorite hits Alaska? She's riding on top, even before it hits the ground. Grace Kelly's investiture as Princess of Monaco is among her personal archive, and even - no one knows how she pulled that one off - the first moon landing! When you open one of her little containers, you are instantly taken back to the instant where it was harvested, in all its intensity, in all its sensuous splendour. But of course you can only do it once. The bottle, once opened, will loose its air instantly and the experience can't be repeated. Sandokan opens a bottle just for Verdeluna, and she is instantly transported to the time she took a boat trip to Lisbon with her son Valerio. By the way, he's very seriously in love with his Mexican astrophysicist, Pedro Miguel. Verdeluna recalls another event. Valerio had been hit by a car and was in a coma for a couple of weeks. She was constantly at his bedside, refusing to budge until finally he came round. Oh how she loved life that moment! Sandokan opens another bottle and yes! yes! that's exactly how it was!!! Three years ago, Patrizia ran away from home after Verdeluna had a particularly bad row with The Twit. She looked for her daughter all night, but - nothing. Finally she found the 14-year-old girl at a train station looking at the timetables. So they just bought tickets for Paris, on impulse. Does Sandokan have that bottle? Does he ever.... Ahhh Sandokan, you must get Faustina to bottle all our memories too! #42 - A world without chat would be a world of long telephone calls, of stacks of letters stuffed into shoeboxes... To chat, you don't need envelopes and stamps. Just send your message into the universe and see what comes back. Like a message in a bottle... Connecting... Connecting... Waiting.... Sandokan, another victim of Net Nostalgia, is a fan of bottled messages. There's quite a few of them on the beaches of Mompracem. One day, in search of mussels, the pirate digs up a bottle. Not just any bottle: a bottle of 1910 vintage Dom Perignon, no less... Inside it, there was a message in Portuguese, which Yanez translated. A musician describes how he has continued to play almost unto death, how he found the bottle of champagne and drank it, affirming life moments before it was about to end, how he entrusted his final thoughts to paper and then to the bottle... Wait a minute, 1910... couldn't that be the Titanic? [note: the Titanic went down in 1912] Verdeluna isn't happy at the thought, with her own son sailing the seven seas... She recalls how crazy he was about playing the trumpet as a child, never ever wanting to put it down even for one minute. So how come he became a chef, not a musician? He took to making pies for the family, never eating one himself, so he got thinner and they all got fatter. They were excellent pies... So is Verdeluna now taking singing lessons? Errr, no. She's too intimidated by the presence of Martina, the talented singer and shop assistant. Take it as a game, and enjoy using your own talents, says Sandokan. It's a shame not to! Verdeluna bought a beautiful old globe on the flea market the other day, and the first thing she did was to look for Mompracem. I can't find it, she cried to the salesman! Well, Mompracem is a funny old island, he replied. If you want to find it, it's there, and if you don't, it isn't. Anyway, say hello to the Tiger for me! Wouldn't it be nice if you could rearrange the world to suit yourself? Verdeluna would swap Mompracem with the island of Elba. That would bring Sandokan a lot closer! But would the Italians like it? The sea would be full of pirates... All'assalto!! Then we could swap the United States and Africa, or England and Sri Lanka, or, perish the thought, Naples and Milan! #43 - Verdeluna? Would you like to come and play with me tonight? That all depends on the kind of game, Sandokan. Tell me about your wishes, and tonight I will make them come true! Well, you could start by making my ex's shiny new car disappear... You should see how he races it around the street to impress young Vanessa - no. Better still give it a brand new scratch, all along one side, every morning. Okay - and when I've defaced the Twitmobile, what else do you want? You get two wishes, so just one more. Those are always the rules in games of this kind. Hurry up, it's nearly dawn... Oh of course I know. I want you - or is that too much? Is it too much of a desire? Verdeluna, it's my very own wish, my very own desire. Why not make it come true? Yanez and I are in Italy! Sandokan! Where are you?!? I'm on the beach of Positano, near Naples, where Yanez has been asked to officially open a beach kiosk tomorrow... Oh Sandokan tellmeit'snottruetellmeyou'rejustjokingtellmeit'sallasillygame.... And if you do tell me that, I'll be as mad as hell, I'll be like a child when you take away his ice cream, no his birthday cake! There's an intense perfume of espresso tonight... Yanez and the kiosk owner are fine-tuning their coffee machine so that everything will be perfect for the grand opening tomorrow. When I look out of the window, I can see the church of San Pancrazio, halfway between Positano and Amalfi. I told you Verdeluna, I am here, I am close to where you are... Oh Sandokan, if you're joking I will really kill you... No, I've been waiting all my life for this day... I'm getting into the car right now, I'm on my way... I'm waiting for you Verdeluna! The Tiger of Malaysia is waiting for you, pacing up and down Mount Vesuvius... Oh Sandokan, Sandokan, where are you......... Oh Sandokan, I fell asleep over the computer keyboard, waiting for you. Wait, wait, connecting, connecting, wait, waiting.... Pleasepleaseplease just be there!!! Verdeluna? Sandokan? Where are you? On Mompracem, as always! And if I said Positano, Sandokan? You mean the church of San Pancrazio, Mount Vesuvius? How do you know about those? Ahhh some years ago an Italian fisherman came by on Mompracem and we talked for a long time about the beauty of the Amalfi coast... And I dreamt we were going to meet there, in the Green Grotto... Every night before we go to sleep, the maker of dreams sits down next to us, and reads our deepest emotions. And he builds a bridge that crosses between dreams and reality, between the last glimmer of the moon and the first rays of the sun. Give me your hand, Sandokan, and let's cross that bridge together... Too bad that chatters make it all up... Just like in your dreams, Verdeluna, not everything, not quite everything... #44 - Are you there, my buccaneer of celestial marvels? As always. Last night I found another message in a bottle on the beaches on Mompracem. I want to plant a majestic tree in the middle of my room, it said, and make my house into a great gallion. Signed: Verdeluna! Verdeluna, too has found a kind of message in a bottle. She walked singer Martina to the stop of the No. 59 bus she always takes home, in the pouring rain, and while they turned around to avoid being soaked by a passing driver going through a puddle, Verdeluna saw it... an ancient book lying on the bus stop bench. So she waited for the No 59 to take away Martina, and picked it up. The book contained a note: "Read me, and leave me where you think someone else may find me." (Sandokan once discussed a similar idea with Mr Feltrinelli, as the publisher visited Mompracem, but somehow the idea never took off...) The book was "The Secret Sharer," by Joseph Conrad - almost a colleague of mine, says Sandokan. He knows the story well, of the anonymous captain who rescues the drowning Legatt, only to find out that the man to whom he bears such great resemblance has in fact killed a sailor. He hides the fugitive and helps him to safety. Would you hide me in your heart, Sandokan, if I were a fugitive? We are two kindred souls destined to sail the seas together, the fugitives of love, the captains of our passion. So where are you going to leave the book when you have read it? In the supermarket, maybe, or in the cinema, or I might put it back at the bus stop. Verdeluna, too, has been a stowaway. Not on a ship, but in a hotel on Sardinia, in 1982, when Italy had just won the world football championships. Verdeluna and her friend Francesca had been camping on the Costa Smeralda, near the gorgeous Hotel Bristol, and they got curious. Still on a high after the football victory, they talked their way past reception and... WOW!!! Those beds!!! Those rooms!!! They spent a week moving from free room to free room, knowing all the service entrances and fire escapes... Verdeluna never had such fun in her life, even if today she would deny all knowledge of the event to Patrizia... Didn't they ever find you out? You were real pirates!!! #45 - Sandokan has been watching wave upon wave of migrating birds flying over Mompracem. They seemed like so many angels, against the backdrop of the moonlight! Not even a pirate would have their courage and determination to reach the promised land, to stay alive no matter what. Not even Sandokan? Well now, that's different. All'assalto!! Aunty Assunta, the sister of Verdeluna's grandmother, emigrated to Argentina at age 15. In mid-Atlantic, her ship hit such a storm that even the biggest, sturdiest men were on their knees, praying, and kissing their wives' rosaries. When she arrived in Buenos Aires, her father was there to greet her, and such was her joy at being reunited that she fainted, and had to be carried to a nearby bar, where she came round in the middle of a crowd of men, to her profound embarrassment. They had a huge farm on the outskirts of the city. The Argentinian government gave away large plots of land to immigrants, and the Italians those days had excellent farming skills. Too bad they all had to leave Italy - A curse on gob.. gleb... globalisation! Another plan the immigrants had was to rebuild the village square they remembered from San Lorenzo, the town they left behind in Italy - church, cafe, pharmacy, tobacconist and all! It took them seven years. And after those seven years they had a huge party to celebrate! (The true history of mankind is made up by common people heroes pursuing their dreams, just like this, Sandokan knows...) And then... that's where Assunta met her future husband, Uncle Dante. They fell in love instantly, and after a short while, he decided he would ask her to marry him while they were dancing the tango! The only problem was that Dante was a terrible dancer and he didn't want to make a fool of himself in the country that invented the tango... So he took lessons in secret, resolving that if Assunta were ever to find out and get jealous, he'd tell her he danced only with partners in masque... Then one evening... a dance floor, a band, the moon, the sea - and after a long night's dancing the tango, Dante finally popped the question! They were the happiest couple in sight... When they returned to the original San Lorenzo in Italy after many years, they bought a little house surrounded by chestnut trees. And on many an evening, they would put a tango record on the gramophone and dance the night away, holding each other tight like it was that first dance all over again. What if I asked you to dance the tango with me? Round and round we would swirl... More's the pity that it's all made up, in the chatter's mind... But not everything Verdeluna, not quite everything... ...to be continued You'll find daily updates of Kabir's radio show CH@T online at kabir-bedi.com... |
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