Читать книгу Suzanne - Anais Barbeau-Lavalette - Страница 18

It’s a good piano. A Heintzman, wood. Its front is engraved with scrolls that chase each other, swirling, never meeting.

It came into the house twelve years ago. Claudia, your mother, loved it. She played piano as a teenager. Her aunt taught her scales. Claudia found scales more musical than most pieces and played them one after the other with heartfelt enjoyment. She could have played only scales.

It moved her deeply that the pressure of her slender fingers could make such passionate sounds, filling the space. She liked to touch the piano keys; they gave her power. She felt alive.

Later she took lessons with a woman who wore pretty flowered dresses and sheer stockings with no runs.

With her, Claudia took off her shoes when she played, to feel the crisp cold of the pedals on the soles of her feet.

She played Chopin, because it sounded like the sea.

She had talent.

Then she met Achilles. He was a teacher, knew a great deal and didn’t speak much. He had the sort of presence that leaves an impression. Someone you feel has been there several minutes after he leaves. Claudia wanted to swim in his wake, bathe in what overflowed from him.

They got married. They found a big house, on Cambridge Street, in the working-class quarter of Ottawa. It was across the street from the church, which was handy.

Claudia wanted to take her piano with her. Achilles carried it there with his bare hands.

They picked a nice spot for it in the house, so that Claudia could sit there, like a queen on her throne.

But Claudia had her first child and never again sat down at the piano.

When Achilles asked her to play, she would smile inside. An evasive smile.

One day, she simply told him she no longer knew how.

Achilles stayed, waiting for her to go on, and she couldn’t get away from him, so she said that she didn’t know how to touch the keys, because she had nothing more to give.

That she felt as though the notes would crash into the walls and the ceiling, then fall to the ground.

Achilles was calm and quietly told her that all they had to do was open the windows.

Claudia loved him and cried a little. But she never played the piano again.

The piano still sits enthroned in the middle of the living room. It gathers dust and that annoys her.

One night, you saw her clean it. She rubbed it furiously with a rag. As if it were one big stain.