“The music hall, not poetry, is a criticism of life.”
–James A. A. Joyce

for Daan

Yes, Thomas Gruewald sat by the fountain in the Pl. Nueva every Saturday and every Thursday. Yes, he waited until the line of shadow and sunlight crossed the road, and then waited another twenty minutes or so. Once the night crossed over this marked point of his with its signature, cool-aired mark, shadow becoming space, he would release himself humbly from his rest upon the bricks and make with his things over to the wall. The pink, sunlight marginalized stone of the old façade gave the scene, every reasonably clear evening, its own tropical zone. The zone, a picturesque naïvety. And every time Thomas began unloading his keyboard from its cardboard home he seemed to be preparing his set with the same measure and the same speed with which the sunlight exemplified slowly its sincere wane, with its faded and escorted day. He usually began playing just after the line of shadow and sunlight gave way to the checkered marble and the red umbrellas of the patio of the adjacent café.

Finn Fermore, the viola player, played ever day. Finn’s placement came every twilight, just before daybreak. He awoke around 3 or 4 in the morning. He would dress, climb onto the roof of the apartment building, contemplate with fervent warmth the fervent, warm, still far-off rising of the sun, decide the song he would later begin the day’s foregoing with, and set off on the cobbles with his pre-tuned viola. He was never there in the Pl. Nueva earlier than 6 o’clock, and he never began his first song of the day there in the Pl. Nueva later than 6:07. He would usually begin the day while scarcely around ten presences were to be found among the deserted Albaicín street. Usually, nine or ten of the presences were dead, Granada’s ghosts, as it were. Sometimes a live drunk or two scuffled homeward, singing and gagging the alleys with glee. Finn escorted them all home safely every morning. To universal safety. Back to sleep, really. By the time the streets were full of the morning hustle he was usually packing-up his viola and pursuing other ventures elsewhere.

Finn had no clue Thomas, the pianist who played Bach and Wagner on his keyboard every Saturday and Thursday evening and every Saturday and Thursday night in the exact same spot where he himself played every morning, was looking for a violin or a viola player to play classical duets with. Finn had no clue Thomas Gruewald even existed. Finn had no clue Thomas existed, that is, until the day Thomas decided to take a walk early one disarrayed morning after a long night’s drawl of tapas and bars to pay a little visit to his beloved spot. He expected merely a quiet portrait’s vacancy that winter morning. Thomas was still drunk when he and Finn first met. That was probably the reason he had enough of his wits about him to ask Finn if he would like to play music together, for Thomas was usually a significantly taciturn person. Yes, from the very first moment Thomas’s ears descried the sounds of Finn’s viola’s strings as they displayed their tender hooks from the far west end of Elvira Street, in that very moment he knew he had met a magical person, in that very moment he knew he had both caught and been caught by a luminary and mysterious presence, he knew he had fished a seminal and cathartic friend, seen a resounding perchance.

Before meeting Finn Thomas played every Saturday and Thursday evening and night and made very little money really but what he did make was emotion. He fell into and climbed up and ran over and was run over by deep, spiritual emotions throughout almost every Saturday and Thursday evening and night. Whenever someone would meet his eyes in passing as he played in the plaza, whether or not they released any fresh coins from their palms or let a few euros fall leaflike from their hesitant, quiet, homage-summoning hands, he would go into a state of pure ecstasy. Shifted, minted colors of wealthy consciousness. Planed tokens. He would immediately connect with himself and the listener simultaneously, and would then connect both ends of the empathetic reach which he formed together. Fused light. Forked return. Circuitous zodiac viscus. The chambers and their music. To drink or not to drink. Are you thirsty, perchance to thirst? Someone will ask the question.

He was given the idea to play duets by a foreigner, a new acquaintance, one stoney winter; the very same winter, it just so happens, in which he met Finn. He was handed the idea by this acquaintance only days before he stumbled upon the existence of the other musician who would become his musical partner. To merge his energy with a string musician’s candor and play, this idea presented itself fully clothed and with a proper beckon’s gentility by a tired-looking man, a messy-haired man who held his breakfast in his hands and his mouth and talked like an American. The streets that winter had been especially cold and the tourists were of their usual plentiful numbers yet they had not been as discreetly generous as they tended to be. What a morose and stifled holiday season it has turned out to be seemed to be the universally agreed upon attitude that year. Thomas was packing up his keyboard in its cardboard and getting ready to depart for the plaza one afternoon after a small bout of pre-evening practice when a man, a fellow foreigner who lived in the same crowded flat as Thomas, approached Thomas with a bowl of cereal in his hands. The hungry fellow took a hefty bite, his food crunched in rapport with his jawline, and he asked Thomas a queer question.

 “Have you seen Harry Potter?”

Thomas had seen all of the Harry Potter films but he hesitated. He hesitated to answer the simple question because he thought, and he was correct in doing so, that the man questioning him only asked the odd question because Thomas did, in fact, look very much like Daniel Radcliffe. So, the question was not really queer, except when taken out of context. Thomas’s whole existence was the context. Context contextualized. Thomas Gruewald looked very much like Harry Potter. Not only did he look like the actor who famously played the role of Harry but he also acted very similar to him in almost every way, and he himself was conscious of this fact. So it went that, every time the series was brought up in conversation or in passing Thomas would grow tense with caustic apprehension. In the moment this particular fellow asked Thomas the question, “Have you seen Harry Potter?” Thomas compulsively made a stoic, tender face; the face ironically mimed, to an even further extent, Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter. It was ethereal and simple, magical and with a childlike adjacence to life’s undulating and material coarseness. And since he had given his blank face as his only answer, the fellow with the bowl of cereal opted for a laugh and continued chewing. He maintained, “Hey, I’m Jacob. You kinda look like the guy who plays him, Harry Potter I mean.”

English and Spanish were the languages one generally made us of whenever one spoke with the others who lived in the flat. Thomas was fluent in four languages: his native Dutch, German, English, and Spanish. Jacob Foghorn, the token American of the crowded flat, was fluent in one language: his native English.

“Oh, Thomas. I am Thomas, nice to meet you. And, uh, no. No, I haven’t seen Harry Potter. Though, I know many of my friends have. Yes, it’s very popular.”

“Cool, cool. You play out on the streets? I used to play, back in the United States. Haven’t played here in Granada.”

“Yes. Yes, I play in the Plaza Nueva some days.”

“Nice, man! Nice. Well, maybe I’ll see you out there. You know, you should play some duets with a violinist or a viola player or something. Strings and piano, or keyboard, that combination always set my heart wide open. Really breaks it open. Really gets the flow and the emotional state all fixed for lift off. Anyway, have a good one, man.”

“Yeah, thank you. That’s a good idea. I’ve never thought about that. You’re right.”

“Dig it, man. Well, have a good play.”

“Thank you, you too. I mean, oh, yes. I will.”

The tall, wirey American fellow walked up the stairs with his cereal and Thomas walked out the doors of the flat with his keyboard under his arm, and also with his new idea. A few days passed, during which this new idea of Thomas’s fermented and reached toward the prospective of its own blooming and realization, before Thomas met Finn. After they met that fateful winter morning, or should we say, for Thomas, after they met that fateful winter latenight, they forever played together every day. Yes, every early morning and all through every evening. Every morning they waxed like Gershwin and every evening they waned like Coltrane. The seance’s light and a sailor’s marred skepticism married upon one slight lift of the eternal dove’s wingspan. They were a simple duet; they painted their music with the simplicity of the seasons.

And while they maintained their separate rests, while they slept their siestas in-between their sets, the world would go round. Rounded sleep of swear notes and choreographic dreams. Their sleep rolled with the silence. And the ghosts kept the nocturnes and the fiestas alive, even into the light of their awakening and their taken-for-granted and formless detachment. The broken lamp of an implicit and inherent sunrise was dark no more over the Spanish souls and the foreign souls who managed the twilight myths of the Alhambra and its corners and its quarters.

Finn and Thomas played simple duets every morning for the ghosts of the Alhambra, and every day the man with the bowl of cereal chewed and chewed his simple breakfast and handed out his mouthfuls of suggestions to all the others in the flat. Sometimes they considered them. Sometimes they even acted upon them.

And every night Finn Fermore and Thomas Gruewald played for the sacred airs which filled and danced about the Pl. Nueva. The people of the city fixed their foodbaskets contentedly and the babies all felt at home in their blankets and strollerbeds when Finn and Thomas played their duets. The songs one can hear along the streets of old Granada’s Albaicín are varied and perennial, like the spontaneous summertime breakfasts sporadically eaten by a happy and homesick old vagabond; the song sung by a surfeit and fatherly voice, welcoming. The heavy, flowing mix of Granada’s patchwork is a home of the homesick, a paralleled miracle of desert oases, an enchanted motherlamp of a careworn destiny, a spinning sunjar of tangy, dark-colored spices. The streets of Albaicín, where one eats only by listening; the streets of Albaicín, where one is quenched only by the selfsame, thirsty tune, the tune which paints a soulful belly’s hunger-vibrations.

And so it goes as the after-siesta movements begin to swarm and cook and stew among the streets and alleys. Whenever we hear Finn and Thomas play a tune, whenever they play their tunes, we know always to listen for the sunlight, too. It steams just the same, for our salivation and salvation; and may we savor it well, may we savor it, yes.