82

I enter into Beatrice’s room with my guitar slung over my back. I feel like one of those wandering players who frequents the subway trains and in the end begs for a little happiness.

Beatrice smiles: I’ve kept my promise. She is lying on her bed, on her belly, reading, while the stereo makes the voice of Elisa bounce off the walls—Elisa, who is looking for a way out through the crack of a partially closed window.

“Well then, today we begin!” says Beatrice, her smile spreading all the way to her green eyes, as if we were destined to begin something that would never end.

“I want to learn to play this song,” she says, nodding with her head toward the stereo.

“I have waited for so long

For something that isn’t there,

Instead of watching

The sun rise … ”

“With a teacher like me, no problem. … Of course, I’ll have to come every day … ”

Beatrice laughs with all of her heart in her eyes, throwing her head back and bringing her hand to her mouth, as if wanting to suppress a gesture that is more expressive than what she normally allows herself, she who could allow herself anything she wanted.

“I would like you to, Leo, but you know that I can’t do it. … ”

I take out my guitar from its case as if I were The Edge.

I sit on the edge of the bed, near Beatrice, who pulls herself up. I would like to capture the perfume of her movements in a smell recorder, if such a thing exists. I arrange the guitar on her legs and show her how to hold the handle, which seems too awkward on her weak body. My arm guides her from behind to help her reach the correct position, and for a second, my mouth is so close to her neck that I wonder what my brain is waiting for, why it doesn’t order my lips to kiss it.

Elisa’s song ends.

“Here, now you have to hold the chord down on the handle, putting pressure with your thumb from behind and strumming the strings with your right hand.”

Beatrice tightens her lips in an effort to make a sound come out, a dull sound that leaves her body without strength. Her body, which should fill the world with a harmony never heard before, with a symphony that is limitless, cannot produce one graceful note. I place my hand on hers and apply pressure with my finger, delicately. Our hands are overlapping, like mine when I used to pray as a child.

“Like this.”

And the strings begin to vibrate. With my body I am allowing Beatrice’s to play. Beatrice stares at me and smiles as if I have shown her a treasure that has been hidden for centuries, and yet I have simply taught her how to strum a chord.

She passes me the guitar, impatient. “Show me how you do it so I’ll learn more quickly.”

I take my guitar while she sits back, curling up and hugging her knees between her arms. I begin to strum the chords of Elisa’s song. Beatrice recognizes it, closes her eyes in search of something lost.

“Why don’t you sing?” she asks me.

“Because I don’t know the words.” I hurry to answer her, but the truth is that I am embarrassed to sing, out of fear of singing off-key.

Beatrice, with her eyes closed, opens her lips, lightly, and a fragile sound comes forth from her lips like a freshwater spring that has just started flowing.

“And miraculously

I can’t give up hoping.

And if there is a secret

It is to do everything as if

You saw only the sun … ”

My fingers become part of her voice, which runs over them like a vocal river along its bed. Her song fills every corner of the room, even those where the light never reaches; it sails forth from the window, floating around the sleepy city, which is blind in its gray and repetitive comings and goings, softening the right angles of daily life, and the tensed jaws of pain and fatigue.

“The secret is

To do everything as if,

To do everything as if,

As if you were seeing only the sun,

As if you were seeing only the sun,

As if you were seeing only the sun …

And not something that isn’t there … ”

I accompany the last words with a closing arpeggio. We remain in silence, in the silence unleashed by the end of the song: a double silence, squared, in which the echo of the lyrics resounds like a lullaby that has put to sleep all useless worries and awakened what counts.

Beatrice opens her eyes and smiles; the green of her eyes and the red of her hair are immersed in her blinding smile. These are the colors that have painted the world.

Then Beatrice is crying, with a smile that is mixed with tears. With a fixed stare, immobile, aimed at her, I ask myself why pain and joy cry in the same way.