Epiphany (excerpt from around books 5-7, Hunter series)
World, this guy could play... (About the similarities between music and ... other things. Or: A slow revelation of a personal nature.) [Slightly redacted to avoid a main spoiler for book 1&2.]
The instrument looked a little strange to my eyes at first – I’d never seen a bajaya with just one string yet. None this big, either. The ones I’d seen always had at least three strings and had been much smaller, made for playing on your arm, not… between your legs? Just one? I wondered. What’s he gonna do with one?
Well. A lot, it turned out.
World, this guy could play. He was using some strange thing that looked like some twig, with hair fitted to it, an almost comically flimsy-looking addition compared to the bulky instrument itself — it was called a ‘bow’ I was told by [XXX], who of course caught my doubtful look. That description had me inwardly laughing. A bow? They call this thing a bow? My mirth must have spread to my lips, because he gave me that wild look again, where he rolled his eyes and made a face, which had me in trouble of not blurting out and ruining the performance.
“Well, then you and me should be really good with it, eh?” I couldn’t help myself, even though our neighbors on the bank looked a bit scornfully at us and our untoward behavior. Strangers, I could hear their inner voices rolling up their eyes. Papá’s smile was absolutely worth it.
But the sounds suddenly coming from that more than just simple looking thing up on the stage had me pricking my ears and my eyes involuntarily drawn back to the man on stage. How does he do that? A different kind of wonder spread throughout my being. The man got more and sweeter tones out of that thing than I had ever heard from any bajaya before. Fuller, too.
Maybe it helps that the ‘box’ is bigger? I kept wondering as his slow, slow hands caressed the instrument, showing their full nimbleness only slowly, ever so languidly as the rhythm sped up in tiny increments. At the height of it, the instrument was singing so sweetly that my whole being seemed to sing and vibrate with it. According to the sighs all around me, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. A quick glance snuck at Sintram told me even he didn’t seem unaffected. The expression in his eyes was as rapt as I felt, even as his thumb unconsciously kept caressing the shoulder that he’d drawn towards himself, drawing me with it.
I snuggled into the crook of his arm again, staring at the man on the stage working a wonder -and not even a small one in my eyes- with a hollow lump of wood and a ‘bow’ that was not a bow. The tune had my heart quickening and sighing with its ups and downs, speeding and slowing, rapid trilling and low humming and … I’m lacking the words for this.
What words I have don’t do his music any justice. It was like a soul unfolding and soaring above all. What that man did? It made me finally understand the phrase “pouring one’s soul into something” that poets like to use for artists.
No wonder people had looked at us the way they did when we‘d been giggling at the start. They’d obviously known what was coming, offended by our disrespect — and well-earned that offense was, in hindsight. The man was… I don’t know that I should say genius, because I don’t know if intellect had much to do with it. Passion, more like. At least it felt -and looked- that way. The melody swept consciousness up and blew it away in a torrent of feeling vibrating through your whole being, from elation to tears and back. And all with just one string.
And his movements! Gods, his movements.
Not just the nimble fingers he finally revealed after the melody had sped up in such a soft climb one didn’t seem to notice until it was already racing and one was wondering how his fingers kept up with that. Or what those same fingers would be able to evoke on certain body parts… His whole body was moving and swaying with the rhythm that he brought into being, moving and bending and pressing up against and around his instrument much like—well, like a very lithe person might do around their lover. Never quite showing the strain it had to put on his body when he was keeping the instrument up with just one leg, or even when the wood was caught in between his whole body. The thing certainly didn’t look light. Yet he lifted it as gently and seemingly easily as if it were made of gossamer. His movements were so passionate it was hypnotizing.
One didn’t need to see the rapt look on his own face to realize he was living within his music and being swept along by it just as much as any of us listeners. In fact, it rather looked like… well, I think I already said that. He might as well have had sex on stage.
.
For some strange reason, his movements made me think of how [XXX] had been swinging up and between and swooping down those high jungle trees all the way back. Maybe because it’d had me hypnotized just as well? I’d never seen him do that, before then. And his movements had been even lither, flowing more easily and naturally, if such a thing was possible at all, than what this man here did; like a glittering fish made for speed zipping through rapids. Mh… not quite the right picture. A bird of prey swooping through the sky, maybe? His whole body the instrument in question that he’d trained to a fault, for so long that it became not only second nature, but actual nature. As if he were made for it.
.
It had me abruptly wondering if he’d ever learned to play an instrument. What his… playing would look like. He’d surely be good at it. [XXX] was good at anything and everything. I ruefully chuckle-smiled inwardly. Well, fat luck, with all that experience. He’s got a lot more than the one lifetime others had to learn their craft.
If his playing was anything like his voice…
I suddenly had shivers running down my spine that I was quite sure didn’t come from the music filling the air around me and shivering through my body, as crazy as that sounds. Still searching for the correct words to my mental flashback picture as I was. Flowing from those trees, he’d looked like… like—