(you may want to read the introduction first)

It was more than twelve years ago. I was a former high school student without much ideas about his future and, as every summer, I had felt obliged to find me a job, just so my dad would not glance at me despisingly.
It was summer 1993 I think. I had found this job as a replacement cleaning person at the Malpensa's airport, far out northwest in the countryside.
It took two hours of commuting everyday to get there, and since the first day I had managed to find someone to share a car with, to make the trip at a reasonable cost of money and time.

Those were two colleagues, brothers, or maybe brothers in law. We used to meet nearby the jails of Libi Vittore in the early afternoon in Milan. I arrived with my old moped and they were already there, sitting in the black car parked in front of their house. The engine would start as I opened the door to get in.
"Ciao."
"Ciao."
That was all. They would sit in the front seats. I would be sitting in the back of this WV Golf Turbosomething, looking out of the window, first the city streets dispersing, then the fields and woods and villages running by fast along the freeway, in the smoky prairie.

During the journey out, the prairie was all grey, and greenish in spots, romantic when marked by old abandoned farms and lousy for the rest, of that bright glazing brown the new houses have in the middle of new roads and emptied fields, and the matured corns too.
During the getting back home trip instead, everything was black, indigo far in the distance, except the guardrail glinting orange and red fuzzy sliding madly aside the car.

They listened to the radio for the whole trip, constantly. Without even appearing to be listening, the volume set just a little slice under the maximum. The whole trip was flooded back and forth into music, and nobody was supposed to talk or anything. It would not have been virile to talk.

So there I was, in the back seat, bombed by a pair of 80 watts loudspeakers hidden behind the backseat. Those trips were a torture. That summer I learned one of my most peculiar limits, the fact that, to me, loud music was not only unbearable to the ears. It made me nauseous. It made me want to puke. To die.
To make matter worse, they listened only to italian music. I mean, to the cheapest italian music possible.

Sometimes, in desperation and always too much impressionable by my own feelings, I would ask them to lower the volume "just a little, please".
The driver, who was the bigger man of the two, a married dumb-ass taciturn large fellow, would turn to his companion pouring out a little laugh at his benefit, or an inaudible joke maybe. Then he would adjust the volume a little, pretending at first to lower it and then raising it instead. So next time I would have learned to think before asking such a wussie thing, like lowering the sound of "Radio Italia" down.

The hit of that summer was "Non c'è, non c'è" ('There is not, there is not') by Laura Pausini.
You know, they write a song, they make money out of it, and they never realize that their work can be used, and is used, as an instrument of torture. Like a barnacle, or the spaniard boot, or the thumbscrew.

I learned almost immediately all the words of the song, and after a few days of going back and forth with the two brothers I started to sing along with it. First in my head and then, in the effort to better my execution and inaudible in the stream of noise, I sung it loudly.
It was the only possible way my brain had, to do a little work during that trip. I had to take it.

As always happens, I ended up liking the song. I ended up singing it at home, by myself, or to astonished friends. I was convinced it was adorable of me, to hear me sing such a cheap song given the poses of intellectual I used to have (OK, OK, I still have them, what do you want).

Oh, the song was really cheap. The strophes were so trite you were at first surprised she actually had the guts to sing them. One went,

Tu non rispondi più al telefono
E appendi al filo ogni speranza mia

which means, "You don't answer to the phone anymore / and you hang all my hopes to the wire."
So she's still calling him, but he's not even bothering to answer. The song is all about this. A wonderful guy, who she adores, and who, alas, ran away. And a desperate girl who sings it.

Incantenata a una notte di follia
Anche in prigione me ne andrai per te

"Chained to a crazy night / I'd even go to jail for you". This may sound interesting, although quite unexplained in the context. But believe me, she uses the worse way possible to express it in italian.
Then the chorus would come, and with it the lines where she celebrated his good looks.

Non c'è , non c'`e il profumo della tua pelle
Non c'è il respiro di te sul viso
Non c'è la tua bocca di fragola
Non c'è il dolce miele dei tuoi capelli

"There is not , there is not the scent of your skin / there is not your respire on the face / there is not your strawberry mouth / there is not the sweet honey of your hair".

Those were the parts I liked.

The WV Golf would run across that hyperactive land passing all the other cars, and I would sit into it, still and desperate, imagining me as the subject of this song.
It was my mouth to taste like a strawberry, my hair to be sweet as honey, my breath to be craved by a woman's face. In my trapped imagination I figured myself as the object of desire of this deluded woman. Because, and the most important thing was this (as only now I realize it), I was gone. In the song, I had ran away without turning back.
Me, my strawberry mouth and sexy breath were just gone.

Strappando i sogni nei giorni miei
Te ne sei andato di fretta, perché

"Tearing apart the dreams in my days / you went in a hurry, why".

I was not at all that cleaning person prisoner of two dumb brothers in the vulgarity of music and besotted by its loudness.
I had took away, with all my good looks, by that ugly land.
After all, if only for that feeling of mine back then, Pausini earned her Grammy.