§Fiction Central § § Links § §Our Family§
West Leederville 6007
Western Australia
Ph. 08 9381-3978
Dancing to the Inner Silence
by
Bart Alder
© Copyright 2000
for
My Beautiful Simone
The great Brazilian born composer Greenwich Luis Baptiste
showed no early signs of being a musical
genius.
His training on a three quarter size classical guitar from
the age of six was unremarkable. He displayed no great ear for pitch, no sense
of rhythm, no easy memory for melody. His progress in sight reading musical
scores was so poor that it was joked that he would never read music, but could
be painstakingly taught to mispronounce it.
He played his rather expensive guitar at one constant
volume, loud enough to rattle windows. There was no sense of emotion or texture
to the sounds he would produce, it was a flat, mechanical ripple, like a poorly
tuned driver grinding gears on a Ferrari. He hated the time wasted, riled
against the structure of the learning, the intensive practice of scales. The
repetition. The repetition. The repetition. He said of his early life that
music was his hatred. Music was his misery. He knew he had no desire to learn
it - everybody knew it - but nonetheless it was forced upon him.
Baptiste’s english speaking mother, Angela, was tall,
thin, pale, rich, frequently smart and perpetually venomous. Her total contempt
of others lent her an air of hawk-like superiority. Her eyes were solid
weapons, used to good effect on unwelcome or rude guests and family
indiscriminately. She also truly relished her ability to destabilise the human
flotsam she saw around her with well crafted stares of derision and a kind of
smouldering, smoking, ever present indifference. When someone truly offended
her, she would hiss as well. The effect was stronger and less comic than it
sounds. She was known among the wealthy section of town as La Wicca Rica. A pidgin phrase of Old English and Spanish which had
delighted her many Portuguese-speaking social enemies. They’d taken to using it
generously in her absence. It meant The Rich Witch. Her hiss, it was said,
could make a pregnant woman miscarry. It had happened three times.
Angela Baptiste wanted her son to become a soloist. She
needed it from him like only a person clutching for greatness can. Having failed
to do more with her life than marry old wealth and more especially, divorce old
wealth, she needed her only child to transcend her failure and attain for her
the social prestige she believed she deserved. The harder she pushed him to
fulfil her missing destiny, the more she told him it was for his own sake. That
he was an ungrateful brat. That she
was making sacrifices for him. Angela
said it so frequently that she came to believe her own lies in near record
time.
His lack of promise was no obstacle to Angela. She
expected to be driving him for at least fifteen years, until his 21st
birthday, by which time he would already have learnt so much music and so
little else, that his guitar would be his only serious option for generating
income. Angela was certain her son had no talent. She also knew it didn’t much
matter. If he had a tenth of the talent of others then he would simply have to
practice ten times as much. Talent was no match for determination.
Greenwich Baptiste’s guitar instructor, Ms. Polly Drago,
was the granddaughter of a Spanish missionary. English speaking and trained in
piano, French horn, bagpipes, oboe and guitar, she was unenthusiastic about
Greenwich’s chances of having any
musical life, once remarking that he might do better to play with his feet. She
said the only thing which interested him less than listening to music was
playing it. He is said to have agreed.
All the same, Polly Drago would give him tuition every
Saturday and take the warm fistful of money from his morbid, silent mother.
Polly considered Greenwich to be an obscenity, a waste of her own resources
musically, but he was also a financial nipple which could be milked to feed
other musical brains. She took the money and used it to teach students from
poorer families, students with more natural talent and with a hunger to learn.
She hated Greenwich openly sometimes and could occasionally become rather
fierce in her criticisms.
‘The sounds you make revolt me.’ she once blurted after
having heard him massacre three different pieces in one sitting. ‘You’ve
managed to offend every musical sensibility I own.’ She owned a large number of
musical sensibilities. Her tone was appropriately scathing.
‘The sounds revolt me too.’ was Greenwich’s honest reply.
‘Can we please stop now?’
Polly used the moment to get the fiscal nipple to secrete
a bit more cash into her life. Every time she reached a new level of inner rage
at his lack of interest, his sluggish rate of progress, Polly would refuse to
teach him any longer. Polly always left in anger but Angela would put a bigger
offer in writing, mail it to her and Polly, mollified, invariably came back for
the money. It meant new instruments could be purchased, more students could be
subsidised.
Only the three Brazillian maids and the Nicaraguan cook
who fed him covertly in the kitchen gave Greenwich any love, listened to his
torments or feared for his future. At night, he would creep from his room, pad
through the giant house to the servants’ quarters and creep into bed with one
or another of the maids. He would awaken to find himself in his own bed.
If the staff were caught by Angela, carrying her sleeping
guitar soloist back to his room, it would have meant sacking and disgrace.
Angela was not a fool. She allowed him their love, imagining it as a merciful
allowance on her part, but she expected them to never let her see it.
In spite of the danger he caused them, the maids never
once asked him stop his night visits. They cherished him for his strength. They
felt warmed by him. He radiated love to them and they could not help but
radiate back. He stopped doing it at the age of nine. He knew he was getting
too heavy to carry. He also knew it was time to grow up and face the world
alone.
For eight years Greenwich Baptiste trained in classical
guitar under the stern eye of his hopeful mother and although he undoubtedly
became more efficient in playing, there was an ever diminishing enthusiasm for
the life inside him. He was already planning to kill himself at the age of
fourteen. He had only to determine which of seven alternative suicide methods
involved the least pain and the least nerve, when, by a miracle, his mother
choked to death on an imported, chocolate-coated walnut.
They had never been close, not once had she shed a tear
for him. Not once had she cared about his life.
Angela dead, the property and her large pool of savings
were put in trust for him. The executors to the trust was generously held by
the same firm which had drawn it up, Madison and Benchley.
The maids were all sacked, the house was auctioned to
Gonzago Madison through a mile wide loophole. The firm made cash hand over fist
in the transaction process, billing hundreds of hours to the scam. Jude
Benchley also kindly stepped in as auctioneer, for a significant fee of course.
Thus Greenwich lost about a eighty percent of his wealth and the lifeline to
his only source of love in one single weekend. The kitchens, the people, it was
all gone.
He did not miss his mother remotely. In that regard he
felt divested of a personal burden. His mother’s ambition and cruelty would
never haunt him again, or so he expected.
He was preparing to meet with his father - whom he’d never met before - in Panama.
Before leaving Brazil, his home, his world, Greenwich Luis Baptiste lay down
his guitar on the paved ground outside, stuffed it with hot coals stolen from a
raging fire, and, throwing a pint bottle of gasoline at the body from ten feet
away, destroyed it. The flames curled around the curved body, making fast work
of it. The neck was more dense and needed more petrol before it started to glow
and then finally crumble.
Dorian Eldo Baptiste, Greenwich’s father, was an engineer
for an American firm in Panama building a giant bridge. His own income was more
than enough to send his only child into a boarding school in the United States
where he would receive a fast tuition in science and mathematics.
Dorian considered artistic things, other than social and
sexual adornments like wives and mistresses, to be a vulgar waste of
intellectual resources. The core sciences, physics and chemistry and the
mathematics underneath, were the only fields of knowledge practical enough to
be worth learning. He also believed that America was the only place in the
world worth learning it.
He considered it critical, now that he was responsible for
his son’s wellbeing in life, to give Greenwich the most important basics hard
and fast. Beat the musical training out of him as viciously and completely as
possible. It was of course for the boy’s own good.
He looked at his dirty, ragged son stepping from the train
on to the concrete platform, carrying a single faded brown leather satchel, and
shook his head. The boy had no bearing about him. He looked lost and
despairing. Dorian felt ashamed of his meek looking waif. It turned him angry.
‘Mushy little fag.’ Dorian muttered under his breath.
Two days later, the boy was in the United States.
The California School
for Young Men was a boarding school with a
military feel. All school uniforms came with insignia. Students were ranked by
grades first and military rank second. A private in the eleventh grade
outranked anyone from the tenth grade downwards. A tenth grade general would
have to polish an eleventh grade’s private’s shoes should he be so commanded.
This way even generals were routinely humiliated. Greenwich started as a ninth
grade private.
Greenwich was not capable of adjusting to his new prison
any more than he was capable of taking to his former one.
There were a vast array of punishments open to the school
principal. Official punishments were slight and formal. A letter to a parent, a
withdrawal of privileges, a curfew… unofficial punishments were far more brutal
and lasting. They came from within the ranks of the children themselves.
Ostensibly the school was against corporal punishment, but in fact it had
traded in it for decades. Corporal punishment gave the school its military
backbone.
A child caught stealing knew he could expect a broken
finger. A child going awol, the highest of all crimes, was, upon return,
stripped naked and humiliated before the entire school body.
A child who did not salute another child of senior rank
could expect a more trivial form of humiliation. Anything from scrubbing every
brass rail in the school to…
‘I will not wash toilets.’ barked Greenwich, shaking the
toothbrush with which he’d been given to do it.
‘You will or you will not eat tonight.’ growled the
outraged eleventh grade Captain ‘Froggers’ MacLaine.
‘Then I will not eat tonight.’ shrugged Greenwich. ‘And I
will not salute a cretin.’ It was a decision it had taken him about five
seconds to reach and a remark which earned him a boot to the chest.
‘Right, you’re going to the principal.’ It was delivered
as a threat-come-afterthought.
‘An excellent idea.’ countered Greenwich breathlessly.
Displeased with that response, Captain MacLaine and his favourite Sergeant,
Woodstock Bullion, kicked Greenwich a few more times until he spat blood. Then
they dragged him to the principal’s office.
Principal Vernon T. Gernan was something of a human
optical illusion in the sense that he appeared to be a stupendously
uncomplicated man to the naked eye, when in fact he was actually a sturdy
intellect on a pair of idle shoulders. He could sit on his well cushioned
bottom for eons, shifting every month or so to allow his arse to adopt a new
position of comfort. His greatest love was to read about fly fishing. Whole
hours would disappear into rivers of words, he’d feel the reel with his hands,
see the rippling, flashing water rushing past and around his boots, hear the
whipping of the rod and the fly, the splash in the water, the sweat of the
struggle to reel in a fighting trout.
There was a knock.
He put down his copy of Angler’s Momentum: Secrets of the River as the door opened meekly.
An apologetic face shrouded by curly shoulder length hair appeared around an
open sliver.
‘I’m sorry to bother you principal Gernan, but there’s a
problem that doesn’t seem to have any really easy solution.’
‘What is it now Mabeline for gawd’s underpants?’ growled
Vernon.
‘It’s a new boy. He’s… insolent.’
Her manner was one of troubled confusion. A difficulty with finding the right
expression. That and nothing else caught Gernan’s attention. ‘He… ahhh… refuses to salute.’ she whispered
eventually, in case it was top secret information.
‘Who?’ screamed
the principal. ‘Who won’t he salute?’
‘Anyone. He says
he won’t salute anyone he doesn’t know.’
‘SEND HIM IN HERE… RIGHT NOW!’
Greenwich waited for no further invitation. Pushing past
Mabeline, opening the door wider, with a gentle ‘Thankyou.’ he wobbled into the
room, wretched and bruised. Barely able to stand he smiled at the principal.
Mabeline closed the door to block out the worst of the carnage.
Inside the room, Greenwich had been given his first chance
to speak.
‘I’m going to give you three seconds to change your mind.’
said Gernan. Three seconds was more than long enough for the boy to lob his
first verbal stun grenade.
‘I’m ready to leave your school now.’
‘I’m… sorry?’
‘I’ve had enough of all this good education. I think I
preferred the bad sort rather more.’ he said.
‘Ummm.’
‘Thankyou for having me, but I will never salute a buffoon. So I must leave… you understand… for the
good of the school.’
It was clearly a rehearsed speech but the effect was
startling all the same.
Vernon turned his seat to face the window, his back to
Greenwich to conceal his confusion. Giving himself a few seconds to recover his
senses, he came to be very impressed. Every single child in his five years as
principal had crawled in, saluted, offered all kinds of dreadful apologies for
their uncomplicated sins, some of them had even cried with regret and guilt,
horrifying him with their complete weakness. This beaten, bleeding creep had
staggered in, issuing solid and eloquent ultimatums. He talked like an adult
and not like a spineless one.
Vernon T. Gernan swirled around to face the boy again.
‘Why will you
not salute?’ sneered Vernon arching his fingers predatorially against each
other. Hoping to catch the boy on a question he had no rehearsed answer for, a
question asked in a manner that should have made the boy feel exposed, forced
him to want to recoil, pin him back
down to the mat. Make him feel small.
The brat smiled.
‘Because it’s a fool who salutes a fool while pretending
to have respect. And the people I am expected to salute are all undoubtedly
fools.’
‘How do you know
they’re fools?’
‘Logic.’ declared Greenwich, ‘All they do all day is salute
other fools. If they had any brains,
they wouldn’t salute.’
Vernon was impressed indeed. There was no doubting the power of the argument. The students were all fools and there was all kinds
of evidence for it. Saluting was only one of many rituals of foolishness but
that was no reason to deliver crusading ultimatums over the matter. Vernon T.
Gernan was in no mood to tolerate this kind of conduct from a pip squeak. The
kid had him by the balls, but Vernon had ahold of the kid and he was worth
fifteen thousand a semester. There was only one proper punishment.
‘You do not have to salute anyone.’ he worked hard not to
smirk.
Greenwich was taken aback.
‘Instead, everyone else must salute you. I am promoting you to the status of a second order general.’ Gernan saluted. The smirk was working harder
now, still trying to break out too soon and steal his moment of glory.
‘A second order
general?’ Greenwich blinked a few times to let the words sink in. They remained
floating at the top of his head no matter how much downwards force his brain
applied. Second order general. It was
too horrible.
‘You disgust me young man.’ Vernon mumbled. ‘But your
argument is dazzling and I wouldn’t part with you for the world. You’re just the kind of second order general this school
needs. Someone who takes no crap.’ He saluted again, this time on cue, the
smirk came and with it a tendency to snort.
‘What actually is
a second order general?’
Principal Gernan had of course just invented the idea, but
there was no need for the mangy little bloodstain to know that. ‘A specially
awarded rank. Beyond the grade system. Even graduating generals will have to
salute you. A student on almost equal
terms with the staff.’
It was the worst punishment he could have handed out. He
saluted again to make the point as clear as he could.
‘This fight is not over.’ promised Greenwich furiously. He
went to leave the room. He felt trapped.
‘You can’t leave until you get your new uniform. How far
do you think you’ll get?’ Gernan pressed a button on his desk. ‘Mabeline, I
want you to order a full assembly immediately.’
A full assembly was duly ordered. Greenwich was displayed
in his new livery before the whole school. They were told who he was and that
they now had to salute him without thought or question. It was tonelessly
explained that he was a second order general. The generals and privates all
assumed he was a genius and had been given accordingly high status. They feared
Greenwich from that moment on because suddenly he’d become immensely powerful in
a system they had spent years scaling, without, it suddenly seemed, any real progress.
With the secret out that all one had to do to become a
second order general was to refuse to salute, a temporary outbreak of defiance
came upon the school. Vernon T. Gernan was not so easily misled by weaker minds
trying the same ruse. The first student brought before him refusing to salute
was also given three seconds to change his mind.
Two seconds were all that were required. The hand went to the
child’s forehead and with a voice clipped of pride, ‘Sorry sir.’ were the only
words needed to grind the hasty revolt to an inauspicious end. Greenwich was
sole second order general of the school. The system around him failed to crash,
instead he became part of its folklore. Greenwich despised being used in such a
way. The principal had certainly won the first battle.
And so it came to be that Greenwich’s first attempt to rid
himself of his boarding school failed to do more than provide a new, isolated incarceration.
He would spend time near the kitchens but found no hope or solace there. He
never came to enjoy being saluted all day by other children, sometimes twice
his height. He hated the attention and false respect. He never once saluted
back.
The other students resented his special treatment and
wanted him punished for it but their fear of recourse prevented them from
harming him. He was well protected by the very system he condemned. He spent a
large portion of his spare time trying to figure out how to get thrown out.
With all other plans resulting in equal amounts of
failure, eventually he tried walking out the front door.
At the time he was fifteen years old. The torment of
incarceration had been killing him for eight grinding months and it was time
for him to find new solutions to the age old problems of food, water and
shelter. Solutions did not come easily. His inheritance still years away, he
tried to find work but the money he made was not enough to both feed him and
pay for a room. Unused to poverty and unable to handle the cold of winter any
longer he decided to return to the school, knowing the punishment which would
face him.
The school’s music teacher, Karley Benford, was a gentle
man in his late thirties. Known for acts of generosity and kindness as well as
a tight musical ear, he’d dabbled in sound recording and had really only
started teaching as a cash earning sideline.
Then he met a young girl at a government school named
Marissa Clark who’d played Cello. She was brilliantly talented for her age and
she had a musical sophistication which made him weep for joy. He’d decided to
help her achieve her goal of playing for a symphony orchestra. He’d remained a
teacher from then on. Talent was actually fairly common, what was usually lacking
was enthusiasm to do anything with it. Karley Benford’s greatest talent was
being an inspiration. He created hundreds of musicians in his lifetime. He
chose to work in places where music could help people cope with the inhumanity
around them. Such opposites were destined to meet.
Karley heard the sound of Greenwich’s guitar from across
the adjacent courtyard. A diffuse, windy sound of distorted fingerpicking at
first, his growing curiosity was belied by the frown on his brow. He moved with
gaining speed to find out who was playing a Mozart piano concerto on guitar so
early and how they’d gotten into the building.
The room was intended for concerts and rehearsals. The
volume inside the place was profound. Any single mistake on the instrument
would be amplified hideously. Karley Benford opened the door. He saw the boy,
naked, his eyes closed, the guitar held against his olive skin. It took Karley
a moment to make sense of what he was seeing. Even when it made sense it still
didn’t feel all that sensible.
Greenwich had spent his life neglecting his talent, hoping
it would die. It had taken effort to have no ability for all those years.
Playing the way he knew he could, letting go of his tension, feeling the
instrument against his ribs vibrating him, the frets were familiar spaces for
fingers to tread, strings plucked and tweaked with passion and sweetness, just
once making a sweet sound made him feel purged and clean.
The door closed with a pair of loud clicks. Greenwich
stopped playing. He saw the teacher.
‘Don’t stop, general. It’s beautiful.’
Suddenly Greenwich felt like a circus seal, honking horns
to a wide-eyed lunatic. There was no way he was going to end up a circus freak,
having spent years pulling down every tent he could find.
‘I’ll get you some clothes. Keep playing. Really, it’s
spectacular.’
It had been.
Note perfect, rolling volume, gentle lows, passionate highs, crashing sounds
leaping from wood and strings. Rippling, wondrous aural beauty worth millions
had moments ago hung suspended in the air. It was gone now, the silence was
traumatic. It held the promise of more beauty yet to come. But Greenwich had
given his only solo performance.
‘I have clothes.’ replied Greenwich. ‘And no. I won’t ever
play again. Now they can come and laugh at me. We can get this ridiculous thing
over with.’
‘Put your clothes on. Come with me. Nothing’s going to
happen. You’re going to play guitar for the rest of your life.’ It was a well
intended remark.
Greenwich held the guitar by its head and smashing its
body into the ground until only the neck was left, ‘I don’t think so.’ he said.
Karley Benford looked destroyed. ‘But you obviously love
music so much.’
Greenwich wanted to hiss at the man and caught himself
about to do it. He breathed stutteringly for a few moments.
‘Are you all right?’
It took a moment before he spoke again, a more composed
reply. ‘I’m ready for the punishment now. Bring the students in.’
‘Please put your clothes on and come with me.’ Benford
said again, more hopeful and sad than demanding. And Greenwich, mollified,
obliged. He got dressed slowly and deliberately, making no effort to rush,
giving no indication that his nakedness concerned him even remotely.
They left to meet with the principal.
That meeting went for an hour and a half. Mr. Benford made
a strong case for Greenwich’s musical genius and stated boldly that Greenwich
would be soon lauded around the world. Principal Gernan was impressed enough by
what a star musician could do for the school’s overall reputation, to want to
believe Karley Benford uncritically. Greenwich calmly continued to demand
punishment.
Principal Gernan had learned long ago that Greenwich’s
negotiating style was always the same. He saw you when he was ready, took one
position and wouldn’t move a nanometre. The only way you could beat him was to
invent constant interuptions which gave you time to think of ways out of
corners. This time there was nothing at all he could do. There was no point in
a four hour meeting which would end the same way. Vernon T. Gernan said the
only thing left to say.
‘Punishment it is then.’
‘Thankyou.’ murmured Greenwich, patronisingly. ‘You’re
learning.’
It happened that night. Since it was a non-statutory
punishment, no teachers could be present. The students came to the great hall.
Greenwich was already waiting. When the doors were locked, the seats were full
and the room was dark except for a spotlight on him, he began undressing,
deliberately, slowly. The crowd started booing him and laughing. His clothes
continued to come off. By the time he was naked they were all laughing,
revelling in his moment of torment. Now that he was prone, all their months of
rage against him found voice. The cacophony of delight was shattering.
He stood there, his little body, now white and pale
against the dark floor and the brazen light. And astonishing them, he began to
point and laugh at the invisible crowd around him. He laughed at them, hiding
securely in their cloaked darkness, wrapped in clothes. He found them
hysterical for their sheer cowardice, laughing harder and harder. After a full
minute of his cavorting the entire room was silent, but for Greenwich’s sturdy,
insane cackle. His laughter ended in a few deep sighs. There was now total
silence. He felt he had their attention.
‘Your punishment is over.’ he said finally, his voice
doing laps of the room in echo. ‘I have humiliated you enough.’ it was said as
though he was giving them permission to leave but nobody stirred. ‘You may all leave now.’ Generals and privates, they
all left, stunned. Greenwich, deliberately, slowly, put his clothes back on.
‘He is a
genius.’ many muttered as they watched him calmly cover his naked form. From
that day on he was known as The General.
The rest of his education was unremarkable. He graduated
eventually and moved into law through a kind of mental inertia. A desire to see
the underdog represented, a hunger for finding any loose thread of social
justice somewhere among the fabric of regulations and procedures. Clinging to
that thread in hope. Tugging it madly if he felt it give any slack.
He’d also never bothered to take any interest in science
as his father, Dorian, had hoped. He’d never proven capable of doing
mathematics without yawning for boredom in seconds. He had fine language skills
and a powerful intellect. Law embraced him. He went to Harvard on a
scholarship.
He’d been practising criminal law with a high paying firm
for twenty eight years and was thinking about a life in the judiciary when his
father died while working on another giant bridge, this time in Columbia.
Greenwich Baptiste had also started to go deaf. And as the deafness encroached,
the music in his head started to come.
At first it was at night, when he put his head on a
pillow, the soft strains of cellos being plucked drifted into him. A rhythm, a
pulse. For the first week of hearing the music, Greenwich Baptiste ignored it
all but completely. He would awaken tired and unrested. Spend his days with a
nose buried in papers, motions, briefs, letters. The world of words pursued him
home, keeping him safe from the melodies forming in his mind.
But the darkness would bring to life the sounds in his
head all over again and the restless tussle with bedsheets and pillows would
begin. Music of sweetness and beauty, of rage and passion filled his failing
ears and he found every last note painful to the mental touch.
Soon it was cellos and pianos, percussion, then a
unwelcomed brass instrument might chime in with accompaniment from some subtle,
floating woodwinds. As time wore on, he slept less and less and the orchestra
in his head grew ever more elaborate and populated. The music he heard playing
in his head overnight also became more wondrous, spectacular and hurtful to
him.
On the morning of September 25th 1998, he awoke
hearing the music. It would not go away, even in daylight. He went to see a
doctor. He couldn’t hear the doctor telling him that he was now clinically
deaf.
‘I think I’m deaf.’ he shouted at the doctor over the hail
of the third movement of a long symphony which had lasted the whole morning.
The doctor nodded heavily to show that he’d reached the
same conclusion. ‘As a post.’ he yelled back so that the staff in the corridor
could enjoy the moment.
Greenwich resigned from his job the same afternoon. His
letter of resignation took him three hours to write. It was one paragraph long.
The music in his head was becoming a fanatical obstruction.
Whole days became long elegaic compositions, stormy
requiems, four part fugues. In terror of never hearing another moment’s silence
he determined to hang himself.
Before he slung the rope around his neck, he decided to
write one piece of music down. Just a single phrase of sound, so that others
might hear the noises which had driven him to lunge for oblivion. A musical
suicide note. He found some blank paper and ruled the familiar staff lines,
drawing in a treble and a bass.
His hand drifted across the bars, dotting quavers and semi
quavers with haste. As he moved along detailing instruments, writing playing
instructions… allegro… pianissimo… forte… molto gusto… he felt the sound within
his head begin to weaken and perish. The faster he wrote the more silence he
heard. When he stopped writing, it began slowly but gaining speed like a
marching headache it would torture him louder and louder. Only picking up the
pen, and the respite of sleep gave him any relief.
Over the following years he wrote thousands of pieces of
music. He awoke with the strong melodies in his head and would command them
into silence so long as he was able. He wrote over a hundred sonatas, over
three hundred concertos for all ranges of instruments, a hundred symphonies,
even fifteen operas and ten film scores. His productivity has never been
matched. He wrote his music down for at least fourteen hours a day non-stop.
With his reputation as a maestro beyond doubt after ten years of creative
output, with recognition of his musical genius all around him, the obvious
comparisons to Beethoven made and discussed by university intellectuals, after
eighteen years of sonic torture, the rush of music in his head finally died.
His creativity had been sapped and extinguished.
‘At last,’ he sighed, ‘her demon is dead.’
‘What are you going to do next?’ he was asked. The
question came to him from his agent, Kenny Billings, by mail. Billings had
hoped that the answer might involve another opera since the last one had paid
for the agent’s second mortgage single handedly.
The reply was short.
‘Enjoy the silence.’
Four years later, aged 73, Greenwich Luis Baptiste died of
a massive heart attack. He never married, never had children. His tragic
musical legacy, adored by millions, lives on and on. His last words were yelled
rather loudly at his live in maid, who occasionally, he crawled into bed and
slept with. He said:
‘How come nobody ever listens to a silence the same way
they listen to music?’
She, a music lover of old, replied somewhat testily ‘You
can’t dance to a silence.’ But of course he never heard her. I like to think
that he was too busy dancing.
