It was one in the morning when he returned to his apartment, soaked in rainwater and something that felt vaguely like obscurity. The two hours he had spent at the recital seemed so distant now, so unreal, compared to his staid, gloomy apartment. There had been so much life at the concert, so much… he could not find the right word. Whatever it was, there was none of it here.
He changed out of his clothes wordlessly (as if there could be any need for words in this wretched place, he chuckled), and ate something cold that had been left over from breakfast.
Then he sat down at the piano, from habit, and spent an hour playing some of the pieces he had painstakingly learnt over the years. He knew only bits of certain pieces, the odd measure, a chord or two, measures that sometimes added up without any forethought to an entire composition – poor caricatures of the immortal works of Chopin, Beethoven, and Bach.
There was nothing to fear here, none of the odium of playing before others. The room, though poorly soundproofed, nevertheless kept the neighbors from hearing the awful cacophony. So he played with furrowed brow, with the grotesque, passionate spasms of the talentless, the writhing need to do something terrible.
By the end, his fingers hurt. He had never understood why he played the piano, why he had spent so much of his measly income on this untamable beast. It was an itch, he decided, and he had scratched it successfully. As always, it left him feeling strangely nauseous.
As he trudged to his bedroom, he wanted to throw up, or cry, or blow his nose – or some combination of those things – or to fall asleep, or hit his head against the wall, or die.
When he awoke the next morning, he would feel like a normal person for a little while; and the dull pain in his piaculative fingers could be attributed to his overzealousness at the typewriter.
0 comments :
Post a Comment