It was the begin of ‘99, when I was starting to know Chantal. We had met in the late summer, and after that she came to Switzerland, to hike the Jura range in december. So january and february came, and it was time for me to go and visit her in Utrecht. She had told me that she played piano, but I did not pay much attention. Too many people says it and then give you about three chords of Für Elise and two from Summertime. Arriving at her place, I was surprised at the Steinway in her living room. “It belongs to my father, but he doesn’t play it anymore” she said. I begin to suspect what was waiting for me, but nevertheless my attention was to other, perhaps more important, matters. She did play, eventually.
The Toccata from Khachaturian.
I didn’t quite get it. If you have seen Chantal you know that she is on the petite side, thin and not particularly extroverted. I know next to nothing about playing piano, but I would have thought that to convey even a little bit of the sound and the fury and the violence and the overwhelming rythms of Khachaturian, you needed to be strong, physically strong, with muscles that you can see and be impressed by. Of course, I was disabused of such a silly notion. I was blown away. I had trouble breathing when she ended, and she was just there, smiling at me. I could not do otherwise that moving to The Netherlands and live with her, couldn’t I?
Once in NL, it did take me about 15 years, but eventually I did start to learn Iaido, the art of unsheat and use a japanese saber, a katana. After few months I could take part in a beginners competition in which, to my great surprise I won couple of medals. The gold one was performing the kata called morotesuki. A kata is a predetermined set of movements, meant to be a response to a predefined situation. In Morotesuki you are threatened by three opponents, two coming straight at you, and one coming from behind. The idea is to cut the face of the first, then stab him, turn to the second, cut him (or her) too, and then turn again and cut the one that was after the first. A lot of turning, and a lot of violence. I should tell that in Iaido you normally compete with people that has a comparable technical level, so the jury tends to look for whatever they call fighting spirit. By then I was discovering that I could channel lot -and lots- of my anger to this iaido thing. Not a big surprise that I won that competition… and that I haven’t won another gold medal ever since.
Iaido, as I suppose any other form of fencing, needs quite some control of your body. It is not quite about the violence implicit in the stabbing and the cutting, but much more about the dosage of that violence. The fascinating thing, at least for me, is to discover that there are lots and lots of connected groups of muscles in your body which enable you to do what you are suppose to do. Practicing Iaido I learn about the hara, or the set of muscles that we call “core” in the west, the ones under your abdominals, that connect your legs with your back, giving coherence to pretty much whatever you do. I still remember when I understood what this hara-thing was about, I was very excited, so I came home and told Chantal. Whom of course, was smiling at me.
What? I asked.
It turned out that in order to play piano, you need to use your core. And she was aware of this long time before I even heard it. No wonder that Khachaturian sounded as it sounded in her hands. It wasn’t her hands, but her whole body, it was a bunch of muscles, many more muscles that what my untrained eye could see, the ones that enable her hands to hit the piano keys when they should, as they should. True strength, one could say again, comes from inside. And not from some pseudo-spiritual western-misinterpreted concept. Nope. From inside your body, from all those muscles that you are hardly aware of. Or at least, I was unaware of.
So here we are, some years further. Chantal still playing her piano and me trying to express -and control- myself by wielding a sword. As I started writing today, Chantal was out for her weekly lesson, where she is currently sharpening her interpretation of a piece from Simeon ten Holt, a dutch minimalistic composer. Minimalistic as in music that have few chords that repeats themselves in mesmerizing patterns. Almost as it would be very easy to play, very simple. And me, given that COVID19 has closed our fencing halls, practice at home, repeating the basic straight cut one and a million times. Starting to learn, slowly and by endless repetition, that expression, true expression, lies in some tiny change of tension in muscles that I didn’t know I had. Eventually I will fully discover them, and then probably I will run to Chantal before I know and I will tell her, all excited.
And she will smile, again.