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When he’s done he takes the glass to the sink, rinses it until it sparkles, and places it rim downwards in the drying tray. Then he walks into the front room and stands before the piano bench.
He has not asked permission for this and he hesitates, weighing what he is about to do. He imagines that his aunt Marianna is watching him and waits to see if she will approve. He remembers her smile from the night he crawled beneath the piano and her presence now in his mind seems to nod yes as he lifts the squeaky mahogany top.
The sprawl of folios and sheet music has the aura of a treasure trove, collected by pirates in the books he read before he started school. But it’s not like that, really. It’s not a shiver of gold coins, a tumble of gems and chains. It’s much more… mysterious, important…
He remembers how Marianna looked intently at the page before she began to play. It must be like reading, he thinks. You look at the marks on the page and they make words and the words make thoughts and pictures in your head. It must be like that. Only it’s not thoughts and pictures. Somehow, the pages tell her fingers what keys to touch, and how to touch them. Fast or slow. Strong or soft and which ones together.
He picks a music book at random and carries it to the centre of the room where sunlight has already warmed the Persian rug. He lies on his stomach and opens it.
As he studies the strange markings he begins to see that there are patterns, repetitions. Eye-shaped black marks with long straight tails. Some of the tails have little flags at the end. Some of them point up, some down. They rest on lines or have lines running through them. Some are white in the middle. Some are larger, like little footballs. Sometimes there is nothing on all the lines but a black rectangle like a box. Sometimes the notes are stacked together on the same tail, up or down. And there are other marks, squiggles, and dots. There are words too. Forte. Accelerando. Adagio. Allegretto. And one he almost understands. Pianissimo. He turns the page. He tries to hear what the marks mean, but after a while he gives up. Then his heart flutters with excitement.
For the rest of the morning he sits at the kitchen table with a pencil, a ruler, and some typewriter paper. He draws five lines across the page, leaves a space, and draws five more, until all the pages are filled. Then he begins to draw the many different marks he has memorized.
Libros Libertad 