Chapter 4 Diary of a dancer
After dancing and walking around the room in a dance she lit a cigarette and remained leaning on her window frame, looking at the small piano located in her room, she sat down in front of the piano and played some keys with the cigarette between her fingers. She remembered Georgina's words to the phone....
"You know what it's like to change plans in love. I heard you lost weight and stopped dancing for a whole season when you ended your courtship with your first boyfriend..... Your old flame What was his name?"
"Cristian" She said
"Cristian"
\- Cristian - Birdy whispered and his lips trembled, he lay on his back on the piano, turning his waist over the keys. Then he glimpsed a box inside the cabinet. She walked over to it and tiptoed down and placed it on the piano. Checking inside she found photographs of her grandmother, a pair of cloth ballet slippers and a diary embroidered with Japanese fabric and a flower pattern woven with colored thread. Biry's long skin-colored fingernails edged the journal. He took a puff on the cigarette and walked to the balcony threshold to read in the dim light coming from the streetlights.
He read the words:
"Diary of a Dancer."
She turned on the light in her room and sat down on the piano, then read:
September 15- 1923. - You can become so beautiful when you write about the man you love, and you can become so cruel to the whole world when you stop dancing - She told me before she walked away from me forever.
November 13- 1923. -
When I was seven years old I attended ballet classes at the Studio Massaro in Paris in the 11th arrondissement. I attended classes only to listen to the piano notes while we danced as I had no prior knowledge of ballet. During the time I took my ballet classes, my mother gave me a Vivaldi record, "Four Seasons", Vivaldi's music was my favorite music to do my homework at school. When Christmas came, I preferred to listen to Vivaldi or Debussy rather than Christmas songs. My experience with music is endless, and it has saved my life in every way a person can be saved. Everything, absolutely everything in my life has had music and dance as a change of lights to live my destiny. I live in the city of lights as I have danced all my life in Paris. The true light within me has always been dance. When talking about my experience in the area of music, it becomes so extensive, that I will focus only on talking about my experience on the piano.
From an early age my mother wanted me to learn to play a musical instrument. I chose the piano, my first piano lesson was in the music room at her work. She worked at the Fiscal Control of France, in the area of finance and administration. When the orchestra of her work, made up of working musicians and their children, performed at a concert or music recital, my mother always took me along. In the midst of all the adults, I would stand silently listening to the music. At that time, I did not have a deep mind but I could move with the beauty that emanated from the music to hidden places in my mind. My mother took me out of piano lessons because she said she could not afford to buy me the piano I needed to practice. Although she was not a poor woman, she always had great concern for her finances and for that reason she was an administrator. On the contrary, when it was time to buy an instrument, she gave me a mandolin as a gift. I exchanged my piano lessons for mandolin lessons. I had two mandolins, and although the sound was delicate and subtle, and made me connect with the fragility of my feelings, I never accepted in a good way to give up the piano. So the mandolin lessons were in vain and I eventually gave them up. Thus, I resigned myself to a world without the melodies of the piano, it weighed on me and pained me for a long time not to be able to play it except in the deepest and most desperate desires of my heart. But I was a complacent and noble child so I never expressed pain for not playing the piano, and my family watched me with disappointment giving up the mandolin without understanding very well the reason, for I never said it.
"I always wanted to play the piano...J'ai toujours voulu jouer du piano" I read aloud. I continued reading my grandmother's diary, immersed in her words.
"I was growing up and when I was asked if I played any instrument I was ashamed to say that I didn't play any instrument. At the age of 17, my mother again, enrolled me in guitar lessons at the Orchestra belonging to the Fiscal Control of France. The guitar then seemed to be a very welcoming comfort, for I was a teenager with a pronounced taste for music and I looked forward to playing the guitar. But I have always been so stubborn that I eventually gave up the guitar because I felt again that I lacked the freedom that I only feel when playing the piano. At the age of 19 I fell in love with a young Frenchman who was studying music. He was studying a Bachelor of Music in Lyon. He played the guitar and gave lessons from a very young age. I loved him deeply, I still love him as I write these words, and besides the love that flowed between ourselves with a harmony I had never dreamed of, we also had a very strong bond in common. We both loved music. All the transcendental experiences of our history were marked by music.
Inn that moment I stoped of reading, there was someone in the window, a shadow, righstraiht looking at me.