Eskimo [English translation]

This Sunday of September wouldn't have felt so heavy

Summer used to end more lightly, twenty years ago or so...

With a thoughtless lower abdomen and some brave ones carrying L'Unità1 in their pockets,

You pay all your dues, and at a high cost, for what they call maturity...

But you haven't changed much, even though everyone can see now

What it took me a lot of effort to see, even philosophising about why

But you haven't changed a lot, and if you know now what an orgasm is

You will be able to understand what it felt when I was twenty, you will be able to understand everything...

At that time I used to wear an innocent eskimo coat,2 and that was only because I didn't have a penny,

It wasn't because of the permanent revolution: there was nothing of that, and that's it.

I used to have an immaculate conscience that you tried to kill, but

All your efforts, with family portraits and overcoats, were vain.

How much I have changed since then, and my brother wears

that eskimo coat you used to know, and you would like to wear it too now, but cannot

One has to make your choice at the right time, you can't just get there in spite:

You walk around bare-titted now, I used to do that twenty years ago!

Remember, I was with you at Santa Lucia, at the Portico dei Servi at Christmastime,

I thought that Bologna was all mine: we danced together at New Year's Eve, or at Carnival.

Each of us left someone then, who didn't make a fuss about it, or perhaps I can't remember,

But I felt awkward with my sweaters on, and bothered by that overcoat of yours

But the revolt was running through my fingers, money in my pockets: none, and you know that

And you had to pay for my cinema ticket, astonished, because you never had had to do that before!

I never understood why you loved me, who was so different from your stereotypes,

Why, among all the many ones you struck, beautiful one, why you threw yourself to me...

Indeed the flowers of the first time weren't there anymore in '68,

At last the revolt burst, or perhaps it's just that I got annoyed,

You still waited for them, but I had already started shouting that God was dead, before that, but, perhaps,

I rebelled against the system, dreaming of Dylan and Provos...

And Gianni, back from London, spoke at length about LSD,

He almost gave a cultured conference on his freak-style honeymoon trip

And we hadn't done it yet, and we wouldn't ever do it,

Still that grass used to grow all around us, but for us all that grew was our problems...

Perhaps we took comfort in making love, but we were already precarious in that

In a cubbyhole at a friend's, or in a motel where all the city used to go.

That make-do love, cold in that bare room that didn't belong to us:

To see you stark naked or not was a matter of climate, not a choice!

And now that we could do it, and now that all the problems are gone,

How I sigh for those times we did it against the wall, or in a cinema, or wherever it was possible...

And now that we know almost everything, and now that the problems are gone,

We would even like to do it standing, out of nostalgia, forgetting about the carpet and the hi-fi...

Let's say it lightly, but it's true, we laugh because we would cry otherwise, because

If I recall what you were, what I was, what a pity I feel for you and me.

And yet at times I wouldn't mind to be back into our old selves,

maybe because we would be fifteen years younger, or because everything happened from pure chance...

Because everything is still whole, at twenty, because everything at twenty is still who-knows,

At twenty one is stupid for real, how many lies are in one's head at that age.

And yet back then it was just us, it's not a matter of the youth of then:

Tell me what is left of all those debates, rallies, and heroes...

So this Sunday in September is slowly fading away

Like all the others, while we absent-mindedly try to do and understand.

Perhaps our old friends are thinking of this too: the gone ones, the resigned ones, the pleased ones:

Perhaps they too play at saying that we were happier then, remembering who got lost in those parties...

And I, who still wear an eskimo coat, equal to that one you surely remember,

I, like always, do what I can, and I'll think about it tomorrow, maybe.

And I will sing you this song, similar to many others that I sang you:

Do ignore it, as you did with the others; and these are going to be the last ones, anyway...

1. An Italian newspaper, originally of the Communist party2. Low-class coat

• Artist:Francesco Guccini