Chantal plays the piano, right now. She has been doing so, between half an hour an an hour, every afternoon since we live together. We move together when we were already pregnant, about twenty years ago. Those first months of living together pregnant and the ones thereafter with a newborn were not easy. Chantal was rounding up her PhD and starting a new job in a totally different field, I was wondering how to settle in (what still is ) a fairly weird country and also trying to complete research work that came out of my years in Basel. One afternoon, when Ayden was sleeping, Chantal regretted that she would not play the piano no more, since there did not seem to be any time left for us. So I told her that no matter what, she had to play. I would clean the dishes (eventually I bought a dishwasher), change more nappies, rock the little monster to sleep or whatever else needed. She had to play. If not for her, for me.
We are very happy that she made it work.
Right now I am sitting in the garden, typing away at the keys of the ipad. Now and then my clumsy typing fingers follow the rythm of the piece she is playing, now and then I loose the track of what I want to say and I try to hear what is she trying to say. The great thing of living with somebody that plays regularly is that she is busy with a couple of pieces at a time, so she repeats and repeats them. Even if being generally ignorant, I can hear the improvements, and perhaps, the moods that seeps into her playing. Now and then I have to stop writing because my hands, used to the conga’s, actually try to play with the rythm of the piece on the table. Chantal plays, and I hear and I think in ways that I can’t describe. We would not be the same people if she wouldn’t have keep up with it.
These lines started a while ago, when talking after dinner and thinking about sports, football and art. Art is not a luxury, Chantal said. Of course I agree. Art should not be a luxury, art makes us better. But the arts, actually, started out in luxury settings, in the houses of the powerful and the mighty, the ones that have time to spare from their business of rule a country, or become more powerful and rich. Even us, in a far more enlightened time, had to make an effort to allow one of us to play a little. Art should not be a luxury, but still is. For a great deal of us art, and sports, are but a piece of the daily occupations that, at best, allows us to do what we should do, our job. Art is a little bit like a holiday, those days that are not valuable in themselves, but exist just because they are the ones that are needed to work decently the rest of the year.
One of the losses of the pandemic is the time that we have not been to a new film, a known concert, a round walk in our prefered museum. I believe that there is a hole that has opened right there, a hole from which few of us are aware. A hole that is permitted by this functional view of the arts, as if they would be something with a function, something that is not needed in times of serious threats to our existence. But the arts are indeed needed. And more.
Not a luxury.
Escuchar a Chantal tocar el piano todas las noches fue una experiencia magnífica e inspiradora cuando estuve en vuestra casa...