My japanese lesson ends late at night. At the door of the school a friend waits, and we slowly walk the quiet street down to her house to drop her laptop. From there onwards to a quiet bar with few patrons and a slow whisky. It is Wednesday and the city is alive, but quiet. We talk, smiling at the slowness of the service that combines with Astrud Gilberto singing Corcovado, and the mood of a wednesday midnight in Utrecht.
It should not.
Joao and Astrud Gilberto, perhaps with Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, invented Bossa Nova in Brazil, about 70 years ago. In their own words, they saw that the whole world was busy killing each other, so they got busy singing. I have always experienced their music as one of the softest melodies possible, so it touches me to think that it was -also- an answer to one of the most cruelest dictatorships ever. Nothing like that has ever touched the Netherlands, and still my friend O. and me sip our drinks slowly and smile to each other at the fitting of the rythm. So our friendship. I have drifted to this shores after my parents escaped the argentinean genocide and I run away from the venezuelan collapse. But without the anchor that my beloved have provided me, I might have washed anywhere else. O. escaped the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after years of living in England, decided to settle at the other side of the channel. We met in a Kendo lesson and nowadays share research and literary interests. But how likely is that a russian linguist and an argentinian biologist would meet in a japanese fencing practice in The Netherlands to become friends? I suppose as likely as the voice of Astrud Gilberto adding to the peace of a bar in Utrecht.
It should not, but it does.
From our chairs we read a poem in the wall across the street. Far away sounds/a fanfare/there was again party/in the street. O. tells about neighbors and their closed doors parties. The muffled sound of the music, the idea of a throng inside the walls and behind the closed windows. Half an hour later we had parted our ways, and I cross the center proper of the city on my way home. The youngsters that start university after a whole year of uncertainty are out and out, the cars screech on the asphalt, the young women laugh hard and the boys push each other. There are lights and stridency and the beat of dancing music. A fanfare of our times, a party in the streets of our times. All few hundred meters away from our quiet cafe, and the city throbs and shouts and dances.
In the eighties I loved to walk to a triangle of grass, in Caracas. There was a statue to Cristobal Colon and there were avenues all around. I could seat there, at midday or at midnight, and let the city and her cars wash all around me, their rush, their lights, their sounds, all foreign to me, and yet part of my life, of my body. Once I tried to explain to my father, the old fashioned communist, how had I settled in Utrecht, after the deadly rush of Caracas, how I got to enjoy the possible peace of some of its corners. I never got to know if he aproved, or if he ever understood. I do remember that when I told, he said that I had become a petit bourgeois. Tonight I told O, and she laughed. After, she said that my father was right. Given that we didn’t manage to become Grand Bourgeois, we had to be content with being Petit.
I think my father would have liked her.
Eloquent. Very.