quicksilver sea – walkway – music school

The boy’s airy feet dangle over a flight of stairs, timeworn concrete. The sea air chills between his teeth, but his lungs are too busy to savour the freshness. His fingers are red, swelling from carrying a suitcase meant for an adult, black and half empty.

With his mind busy with dragons and magic, he jumps at the highest step, lands on the checkered tile floor. At the backdrop there’s a dirty canvas of a sky; and the sea, labouring quicksilver.

The Music School, formerly the boys-girls split School of San Sebastián, remained a monument between the town and the ocean. It stood alone in the seaside walkway, protected by metres of stone and mortar, against the beach that is ever advancing. A magical and miserable place. Quite like the old men in this town, it remained still in military elegance, but was home to all kinds of darknesses inside.

The boy hurried to pull the zipper of his jacket, even as the foyer was wide-opened. Here students from all schools – catholic, uniformed, or in tracksuit like him – mingled and exchanged germs. He hurried stairs up without greeting, caressing the wall, decaying paint, with his left hand. He pushed through heavy blackened doors, and dodged a teacher pulling someone’s ear for playing the tuba in the middle of the corridor.

His glasses turned slightly white as he finally crossed the moist boundary of the classroom. There were twenty or twenty-five awkward children, sitting alphabetically on desks arranged like a U, enveloping a table so thick and sturdy that might have belonged to a military officer. Behind it reigned the blackboards, lined with white musical staves, perhaps the only clean object in the whole room. From the windows on the left, one could only see the gloomiest whiteness.

The boy sighed in joy that the teacher was not there yet. He left the gloves he forgot to wear on a scribbled radiator, because they felt nice when he’d put them later, and clicked his mysterious suitcase open. He looked for the pencil, the giraffe-shaped rubber, pulled the ginormous sol-fa book, and his warped down stave notebook.

He took 7 minutes to straighten it until silence invaded the relatively quiet room. A man about thirty-five arrived, with his brown wool shirt and his hair swept back. In soul, he was perhaps as old as the building. One could hear the practicing wind instruments, and lazy piano notes from another room, while Mr Torres laid his own version of the sol-fa book in the mathematical middle of the table. As he rested his Frankenstein hand on the cover, all the children motioned to their own books. Mr Torres treated the sol-fa book as if it was the Holy Scripture, and beware the children that wouldn’t.

The class started with the usual procession of notes. Do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do, do-si-la-sol-fa-mi-re-do. The teacher would sing first, and then the rest would mimic, just in case they’d get lost. Next, to see if everyone did their homework, which was practicing a simple stave with a few quaver strings, quick notes, going up and down. He’d make them intonate the exercise one by one, following the U shape, A to Z, while the rest would stay in perfect stillness like quiet flamingos. Anyone who’d break the silence would get yelled, or on worse days, a slap on the wrist.

The boy was sitting more or less at the bottom of the U, so he entertained himself with some sort of game with his fingers and sleeves under the desk, as he emptied his mind waiting until his turn. Everyone was used to this, as every lesson would be a repeat of the same waiting for one chance to sing.

A scream spelled him out of his musings. The girl three chairs from him had done six mistakes. The teacher would remind her, intensely, to not spell the notes wrongly, to keep consistent rhythm, and to keep the voice clear. The boy would crush his own hands under the desk. He was terrified. Many children in that room were terrified.

The girl lowered her face to make the kids stop watching her. She wouldn’t be given a second chance.

Next student. The boy’s heart raced. His turn was so close.

…           

He had practiced at home, like every day. He took it more seriously than real school, because in school he was doing fine, and here he was doing terribly.

But school was different, right? The tables were green. The books were shiny. The teachers were nice. The subjects were interesting. Everything was new.

Still, Music was more important and timeless. It would survive wars and dictatorships just to stay the same: what was preached in that enduring building, set to a different note than the rest of town, and married to the quicksilver sea.