'There must be a story in that!' by Sandra Horn
At the beginning of January, we were in Turin for a few days. On the first evening, through the (closed) hotel window and the traffic noise, I heard someone singing. It sounded awful. ‘There’s someone out there murdering ‘La Vie En Rose’ , I said. We came across the singer the next night. An African woman, crouched on the ground with a paper dish for contributions in front of her. Without the previous evening’s distortions, she sounded wonderful. A powerful voice with a Piaf-style raw edge to it. She was still singing the same song, and after she ended with ‘Alors je sens dans moi mon coeur qui bat, la la la la la la,’ she began all over again. We stopped to chat and make an ‘offering’. She spoke only French, no Italian, and we talked about Piaf and how much we had enjoyed the song. We parted with lots of blown kisses from her and ‘Je vous bennisse.’ We heard her the next night too, but didn’t see her. She was still singing La Vi...