Gap-toothed, the piano waited in a corner
For fingers to give it voice – a hopeful yellowing smile.
As the bats hung beneath their vines,
The tarantulas dreamed of cool, starry nights.
It’s amazing how in South and Latin America, a family’s history becomes myth quite by accident. The patriarchs and matriarchs of the house humbly rise like colossuses, their deeds already legend and far more ancient than the calendar suggests.
On a bamboo shelf, a small group of figures gathered,
Just as stones bearing their names have gathered
In a field beside the clock tower.
They smiled from beneath a layer of dust,
Which fell gold but settled grey, and seemed
Far more distant than the years that separated us.
My grandfather and his sisters were rescued by a Scottish missionary’s wife. He was sent to shine shoes and clean a dentist’s office but became a doctor out amongst the plantain fields instead.
He stumbled into political power, dodged assassins and helped to overthrow a murdering tyrant. Then he returned to his wilderness amidst the lime trees and shuffled round an old whitewashed villa listening to Gregorian chant and chasing the cockerel out of the yard with a catapult. Every weekday, he’d open the doors of his study wide, and treat anyone who appeared there for free.
I still remember waking up, opening the slatted windows and finding hundreds of curious eyes staring back at me. A queue that had begun to form before the sun rose, a line of sick people that had travelled through the night, snaking round the white veranda that hugged the house. Just days before he died, he was still in clinic.
Outside, the lime trees gave way,
exhausted without hands to relieve them,
And dropped fruit that sunk down to join its ancestors.
Once, a boy had watched me from between those leaves,
With silent feet ready to fly and eyes that sparkled but told me little.
These days, there’s only my Tia Betty left from that Gabriel Garcia Marquez past. She wanders the old house still but lives mostly in the 101 years of accidental fairy tales that have made up her life. When I look in her eyes, I know the place she seeing is far more magical than the one I’m standing in.
For two days he threaded his way between the branches, broom in hand.
Then he disappeared – off along the road out of town
That begins to dance, then hover,
Then escape, up into the heat.
Like the humidity, and the crystal clear water and the thick creepers draped over everything that can’t escape them, there’s something intoxicating about those stories.
But something sad too. A sense that perhaps their magic has been driven away by the iPhones and selfie sticks. A sense that when there was much less to do and fewer things to see, so much more was possible.
These days, my playing isn’t up to much. I can’t think of many pieces I could bring that old piano back to life with. But this is one of them.
It never fails to make me think of that old house, wrapped in its heroes and folklore, far more alive in its past than in will ever be in its present.
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