excerpt
Though she was taking classes at business school, working part-time for Mr. Flynn, the family lawyer, and playing piano evenings at Le Chapeau Rouge, an elegant supper club on the uptown side of the park, she still found time to give Rick lessons and to talk with him like an adult about nearly everything. At first, Andrea had worried that he was making a pest of himself, but Marianna reassured her that she was happy to have him visit, and to use the place when she was away.
As he stretched his fingers to loosen them up the way she had taught him, he recharged his determination to be a good student, to please his aunt and to make her proud of him. He began with enthusiasm, practising scales in E flat major. But soon, though he reminded himself that the exercise was important, to build his technique, he began to be bored. He wanted to play music, not these meaningless notes that went up and down like a flight of stairs to nowhere.
Impatiently, he skipped the rest of the warm-up and went directly to the simple etude he had been working on all week. It wasn’t much better, and even when he tried to give it some phrasing, some emphasis, the notes sounded wooden and frivolous. But he kept at it until he could play it all the way through from memory. Then he experimented a bit, trying to improvise an arrangement of Jimmy Roger’s “He’s in the Jailhouse Now,” but he couldn’t find chords for the left hand and besides it was a guitar song and sounded wrong on the piano. He went back to the etude, but now that he had learned it, it held no interest for him and his mind began to wander.
Abruptly, he left the piano and went to the small solarium behind Marianna’s bedroom. It was furnished with some of the things that had been salvaged from the attic of the Staten Island house. What he liked best was the wind-up Victrola and the old records that had belonged to his uncle Enrico who had died young and was already a family legend before Rick was born.
He wound the crank until it began to feel tight, lifted the top, and smelled that dry spicy odour which he always associated with a time his family called the old days. He felt a stab of excitement, as though he were entering an era that had closed but remained available to him through the magic of recorded sound. He liked the look of the worn green felt on the metal turntable, the funny arm with its round ported head…
Libros Libertad 