Extracts from writer's works
Aristi Urtuzaga, Pako
Narrative (short story and novel)
TRAINING FEELINGS
I began to learn the organ at the age of nine. Goodness knows why. Maybe it was the first manifestation of my tendency in life to do things in response to a burning impulse without thinking twice. Donato, the elderly organist, was willing. They found out about it at home a few months later. Maybe it was the first serious attempt by someone who felt confident enough to take decisions on his own. Or else I belong to the time when children were not controlled as much as they are today.
Accompanied by the elderly organist I went after school every day. By that time he had begun to use a walking stick and I would go all the way up to the organ loft beside him one step after another and we would tell each other things, but it was mostly him telling me things. Compared with the usual pursuits at our age like football matches, cycling races, mountain walking and stealing apples, going up to the organ loft beside the elderly organist was immersing oneself totally in a time of tedium; for example, learning to play the organ itself was even more tame compared with the pelota match I had played a short time before. Without realising it, I was gradually beginning to learn to live at a slow pace alongside music.
Not long afterwards I began to feel like an inhabitant of a new house. The church was that house, a vast church all for me. It had huge doors and inside them smaller doors to take sadness out and bring joy in. That church became the measure of my solitude, the measure sufficient to make anyone dizzy, but also of the kind that made one experience feelings that would not germinate just anywhere. With their thick stone walls churches are places that keep the silence that has not emerged from them for centuries very much alive and fresh for the person who knows how to appreciate it; but training is needed for that, too. Without realising it, I began to learn to appreciate silence as well as music.
It was there that I also became acquainted with fear, the fear that grips the back of one's neck and makes one's hair stand on end. The elderly organist would escape from the cold, take refuge in the warm kitchen and stay there. Where we live the winters are long and very dark. So in winter the meagre streetlights of the town could not throw light into the damp shadows of the cold, and the streets were entirely empty when that nine or ten-year-old child made his way into that enormous church... The darkness there was pitch black and the cold was dirty slime that stuck to the walls. A single bulb illuminated the whole church, and once you had arrived, there were another two light bulbs in the organ loft plus the light for the organ. Going past the saints used to terrify me, or past the deep-red curtains of the confessionals, or past the half open black mouth that outlined the doors. Afterwards I developed a deep fear, which would not allow me to watch horror films, and which I felt until I reached the organ loft in that church during those winters and, once the lesson was over, until I got outside. Yet that fear was like a physical embrace which opened up the doors of a more profound fear inside me: a profound fear that makes one feel that one is going under water and that one lacks the strength to fight against it. Just as I learnt music, I began to learn to recognise the measures of fear, too.
That musical instrument I was gradually learning during those years became the centre of my life as I walked past the fringes of fear, and broke the silence in two halves. For the villagers I am still the "organ player", more than a "newspaper man", at least for the older inhabitants. As I endeavoured to master the scores, I held quite long, deep conversations with myself in an attempt to define the so-called music that the pressure of my fingertips was sending through the pipes into the air, and to understand the mystery of music: why some notes together produced sweet sounds and why others only produced snorting and moaning.
So while my friends engaged in energetic football matches, cycling races, mountain walking and stealing apples, I had a beautiful vocabulary of feelings at my disposal: like children who add tears as the finishing touch to a painted face, the composers scattered words over the scores: "larghetto" slowly, "andantino" slightly faster, "appassionato" provocative, "morendo" mortal, "dolcissimo" softer and sweeter impossible, "disperato" despairing, "mezzo forte" moderately loud. and many more. I knew I had to learn how to feel these words deep down in order to get to the very heart of music. I knew that as well as learning to move my fingers in the correct way and at the right speed, understanding and internalising those words and nudging the notes by the breath of those words rather than by the strength of one's fingers was also a feature of music, which in fact led me to a higher level: playing the notes is indispensable, but music is complemented by the emotion which the notes instil in somebody.
One day I arrived at my practice session with a deep sense of "sadness" and instead of playing the piece "andante", I played it a feeble "dolcissimo": to my surprise I saw that the structure and harmony of the piece were better suited to this depressed tempo than to the playful "agitato". In other words, I was in charge of how the notes should be played and not someone else. Now, after spending many years hammering away at a hard stone and imperceptibly chiselling it, music suddenly turned into a flower that opens out in the fresh sunlight with a whisper of a gentle breeze, ready to open out and be caressed by feelings.
From then onwards no one had to make me go to the practice sessions, because I had a space in which I was the sole master. Everything turned upside down in my life: the fear of being alone turned into the fear of appearing in public; the clash of the feelings that were growing inside me concealed my appreciation of silence; and the heartbeats of the baby who had learnt to live quietly beat faster and faster, leaving the measured rhythms of the seasons behind and becoming immersed in the frenzied dance of he who demands more of life.
I had spent years trying to establish how I felt towards music; from then on music would be the servant that would carry my feelings.
I needed somebody who would be moved by those notes. Music turned into the messenger of my love wish, a strong call in the midst of the rusty corners of my childhood which could no longer contain my restlessness and which broke the silence, cracked the fear and destroyed that dull life.
And one day love appeared.
One afternoon a girl sat in the church pews. And the next day. And the day after that.
Love: a girl with her back to me in the church pews in semidarkness listening to my music.
