The violin

Here is a wee story to mix with todays post...

The violin

The family of that violinist lived in the house next door. Almost always absent in far away places, in cities whose names acquired a magical halo in your imagination, he occasionally returned for a few weeks to his country and to his family. Although you never learned of his return from seeing him cross the street, with his strangely foreign and artistic air, you could tell from the sound of the violin when night fell.

You went down the corridor to the far side of the house, to the room where, on the other side of the wall, he studied. Alone and in the dark, you were deeply attracted without knowing why. You listened to those languid phrases, of such a deep penetrating melancholy that they called to you, and spoke to your young soul, evoking a past and a future equally unknown.

Years later, you heard the same sounds. You recognised them and attributed them to that beloved musician. And in those sounds there subsisted, under the renown of their author, the vastness, the immense expectation of a latent elemental force awaiting a divine gesture that, having given a form to them, must burst into the light.

The child does not respond to names but to acts and the power that defines them. What called to you from a wall in the solitary darkness of a room, and left you nostalgic and breathless when the violin ceased to play, was the fundamental music. The music that came first in time and was greater than those who discovered it and played it, like the fountainhead compared to which the river and even the sea are just tangible and limited forms.

My translation and adaptation of an 'Ocno' by Luis Cernuda