Chords are played on a piano in Berlin. They are played with
a slow, melancholic touch, late on a cold night. The apartment is quiet and the
sounds travel through an open window and echo around the empty square below.
The music and the brittle light of the stars ricochet off the walls of
buildings gleaming with sleet, though ricochet seems to be too harsh a word to
use for chords of melancholy piano music, though I cannot find a more
appropriate word to use. I could say instead that the music bounced off walls
but perhaps bounce would be too frivolous. So we will leave it that when the
music was played by a slow, despairing hand the sounds flowed out of the open
window to be redirected out of the empty square when they touched the wet
walls. Some of the music along with some shards of broken light slithered down
the walls to dissolve in puddles of snow melt.
The melancholic soul of the
pianist was transmitted through the quiet atmosphere into hallways and attics
of buildings all the way to Vienna where they disturbed the dust in one
particular closed-up room where generations of my family took their turn at
dying over many decades. I heard the music arriving in the rustle of an evening
newspaper. My grandfather heard it also and it disturbed his sixty year sleep
and he paced around the room for a long time, fretting over pictures that had
hung on the walls since before he was a boy, photographs that had been faded by
age and revenge.
*
Now the light of the moon is
glinting off the wet cobblestones in a small town in Umbria. The world has
fallen silent, or just about. The only sound to disturb the cold peace that has
blown in from the countryside is the occasional squeal of a cat roughly mated by
a passing Tom. The back street I walk along is narrow; in places I can touch
the houses on both sides at once when I stretch out my arms. In the near
distance I can see wooded hills on top of which the moon seems to be balancing.
The smell of pines and cooking drifts about on the night air. A door opens
quietly onto the street, letting a wedge of light fall onto the cobbles. A
women puts her head out into the street, holding her dressing gown tightly
around her body. She looks around but doesn’t notice me standing in the
shadows. A man pushes out past her, takes hold of a scooter that he pushes down
the street away from me without responding to the woman’s wave, and soon in the
quietness I hear an engine kicking into life and the scooter zips away into the
night, buzzing like a demented wasp at the end of summer. The woman stands in
the doorway for a while looking up at the stars. I can smell the smoke from her
cigarette and hear a slow melancholy playing on a piano from inside her house.
*
And so to Syracuse. By the time
the music arrives the moon has moved away. I have an espresso on the terrace of
a café opposite the cathedral where the early morning sun glints off the wet,
white marble forcing me to hide behind sunglasses. No-one else is about, or
almost no-one. A priest comes out of a tiny dark door in the side of the
cathedral. Black, ankle-length soutane, black hat, green scarf. He sneezes in a
loud, uncontrolled fashion almost losing his balance and his hat. He looks
embarrassed and pretends it never happened, he never filled the quiet piazza
with a vulgar sneeze. A nearby dropping of pigeons is startled and lifts off
the white marble pavement in a flap of dry, dusty feathers to roost on the roof
of the cathedral, and as they and the sneezing priest leave the piazza it returns
to its melancholic quietness to make room for the piano music pouring into the
morning out of an upstairs window above the café.
No comments:
Post a Comment