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24 Apr 2016

Der Pianist

The pianist

Photo by Marta Santos
It was raining as if there will never be an end. It was a thick, strong rain... almost a water curtain. Most of the village locals were watching the show sheltered under the arcades in the plaza, except for him. He wanted to watch it closely. He didn't mind being poured to his entrails by that celestial cascade.

He stepped ahead and got a little bit closer. The water was flowing and bubbling through his hair, pouring out by the edges and soaking his back completely. Everybody was looking at him but he didn't care too much. His face was so wet that it was impossible to distinguish the rain out of his tears. His resemblance was unshakeable, and honestly, it was very hard to realize that he was crying. More to say, it was impossible, as there were no traces of life in that stony face... only two cold, wide opened eyes staring at the view of the piano getting dissolved in the middle of the plaza.

It was a gorgeous grand piano. You could say that, only the sound produced by the keys could overtake the elegance in its appearance. However, people were smiling while it was melted like butter under the tapping water drops. It was being hurt and destroyed by them, they were dying all the keys grey and dissolving the piano insistently, as if it was a wet carton. People were looking at it with curiosity and morbidness. They were having fun with that. Public executions have always kept people happy. The major knew it and that was the reason why he was nodding in content while the piano was falling down completely under the destructive strength of the rain.

He was the only one crying for the grand piano, staring displeased. That instrument was his life and with its death he was also dying… or better to say, his soul was dying. His body was standing poured and motionless with the impotence of those who contemplate their own suicide.

That was a sad town. That was a grey town. Nobody spoke in Silence Village. The streets were always mute. Only the melody that instrument sang under his fingers confirmed him it was alive, in the long mornings, the long afternoons. The long nights. It will always be winter now. Those thin and long fingers knew it very well, that is why they were contracting hardly in a fist. It will never be day time again for them, even when it stopped raining.

The gloomy and absentminded inhabitants of Silence Village started leaving the plaza bit by bit as soon as the piano was completely dissolved. Like puppets with no strings, like shadows with faces... they retired to their grey houses. That rainy November afternoon, only one man stood in the centre of the plaza, getting soaked under the rain. His name was David, but they called him ‘the crazy chap’.

Nobody understood that he refused to do anything apart from spending hours and days in front of that thing he called piano, pressing that sort of white and black teeth again and again... sometimes very slowly, other times so fast that his hands seemed to disappear above the keys.

He didn't use to labour the earth, he didn't get drunk in the tavern and he didn't go stealing apples with the young boys of the town, nor spying the girls when they took a bath in the river.

He was like an alien. That ‘piano’ seemed to be absorbing his soul, and there was no way to make him have some fun with others. That was the reason why the neighbours of the town spoke to the major and the decision was taken among them together, to condemn the piano to disappear under the rain.

This was the reason why that cold and grey November afternoon, David lost his soul.

Nobody missed the prodigious melody that wrapped the town in summer and winter. Nobody missed the celestial music which danced among the leaves of the trees in Silence Village. Nobody was saddened because the wind didn't sound in half and eighth notes any more.

There was no grief, no sorrow that cold and grey afternoon, because all the inhabitants in Silence Village were deaf.


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