SPRING FEVER ESPAÑOLA

after the concert, at dinner with the quartet, it wasn’t difficult to convince the musicians that i was crazy. and that without even having gone through with the plan to convince them that i was a concert pianist. it’s in the air. but i would have had trouble feeling embarrassed in front of a group of classical musicians living in vienna, because even if i hadn’t my own concert career, i had read “the piano teacher” (and seen the movie too). who were they to think me strange? it was true, however, that i didn’t know anything about the music. but for the second consecutive week i hadn’t managed to get myself to the free monday night “pianos de la primavera” concert at the san bernardo campus of the university, and so i felt happily obliged to accept an invitation to one of the performances in the contemporary music festival happening at teatro central. and just crossing the barqueta is much easier than walking all the way to nervión. although we must not have seen the programs as we were going in. thankfully though, the woman on the viola announced as soon as the musicians were on the stage that the program had been shuffled and that two of the quartet’s regular members had been replaced by substitutes. at least we’d be somewhat less less prepared. but then, and whether it came from the audience or from the stage (from a musician or from his or her instrument), then apparently there was the fart. and she started laughing…and so i did as well. not having identified the sound as such myself i laughed because she did…and moved my glasses to my knee so that i could cover my face with my hands to wipe the tears and stifle the sounds. but without my glasses I wasn’t able to focus on the movements of the musicians, which made the stifling easier but not my appreciation of the show. how was something like this (meaning any of the four pieces played by the four musicians) scored? with stage direction? (how the musicians moved as they played was apparently just as important as what they were playing, and, to be honest, i wouldn’t have purchased the soundtrack to listen to.) but was the moth flying in the heavy white light stage light above the quartet throughout the two pieces before the intermission part of the act? the broken bowstring so deftly removed and cast away by the woman on the first violin? this is what i asked at the intermission in order to gauge the stupidity of the questions before putting them to the musicians themselves (although i more or less approximated answers to most of them for myself when the woman on the first violin showed me the score to the final piece at the restaurant.) still, we had the second half of the performance to go and needed to comport ourselves intelligently after having met the festival programmer. but regardless of how the majority of the crowd seemed (to want) to interpret it, the man on the cello was hilarious in that one scene. and this time it was the woman behind us who started laughing, and this time i decided to let myself enjoy it. i mean, it was funny. we were the ones with our tickets paid for and invited to eat with the quartet. (don’t look at me like that: it’s funny.) but i did feel bad for the young man sitting next to the woman who started the wave in act two, surrounded by laughers but finding nothing funny himself. he, however, took advantage of the muffled noise to try to muffle the noise of his opening a bag of something much ruder than a laugh (if the laughter was rude at all). then i though i’d take advantage and try to silence him by reaching back and grabbing his crotch (were these pieces maybe scored for audience participation?). but for as much as i realized right then how much the first piece had made me focus on his package where it was behind my left shoulder one riser up, i also realized in my contemplation that i had become particularly sensitive to smells and that the smells in the theater seemed to have made me sick. i needed to be careful: i might already be pregnant. it was in the air. but it would seem that with these things, as with most, you like what you like and you don’t what you don’t. more specifically in this case, you hear what you want. “um, i don’t think you’re listening.” “no,” she said, “this is the man with whom…” “no…no. this is the men’s restroom. you probably shouldn’t follow me in.”