THE MUSIC STILL PLAYS IN THE MOUNTAINS


By Benjamin Williams © 2006

In the late evening of an early fall a small man sat among the blazing leaves where he always sat. The notes of his violin flitted among the clouds with a lazy intensity that seemed to mock even the birds. As the villagers passed him they didn't look up. He had been there so long that they had stopped asking questions, and even the children, who once used to steal his resin and blow leaves like saliferous kisses across his wispy beard, had long since become habituated to his presence. It was no longer fun for them to try to irk him, make him put down his violin and chase them. And even at night, when the quiet of darkness would swallow the land and empower his music to cross the many miles of the valley, the villagers wouldn't stir in their sleep, nor dream of the music they heard, as so many had done so long ago. Even the newborn, as if his music could somehow penetrate the womb, revealed no acknowledgment of the musician who had played different tunes for almost half a century. Except that, in this village in the small valley between the sweeping mountains and the bustling brooks, no one had cried—not even a baby—for almost fifty years.

Of course it wasn't that everyone was happy, elated, or even just content. Like everywhere in those times, the people of the valley had their hardships, their misery, and pain. They had their winters where supplies dwindled, and hunger ravaged, when babies caved in, and mothers' breasts withered, where bones fell apart, and the fires could burn only the fuel of the dead and dying, the outcast and the pagan, the wretched and the wicked. But not a single tear was shed to pit the snowy vales, or to cake dust in the dying summer sun.

At dawn the villagers would begin their march to the fields, through the vineyards and stolen glens, to the streams and ribbon lakes, and at dusk they'd march back again, silent, oblivious, laden with the fruits of the days' labors. And while the bow skipped across the strings, and the old man's hand danced madly, his beard trembling with gusto, his notes as crisp as ice, the people trod, and walked, and ran, and hunched, and were birthed, aged, and withered like blooms on a gnarly bough.

Once they had gathered around him, to dance, to sing, to drink the grapes and eat the fish. Twice they had come to him in the snow, his ragged clothes skipping like his beard in odd synchrony to his sliding rhythm. And they had asked him, questioned him, then ridiculed him for his idleness. When snows made the ground infertile, when blight ravaged the crops, when the fish were found floating belly up already warm and tepid, they had come to him, and asked why he laid not his violin aside, took up a hoe, a rod, or a sickle, and levied them his assistance. He answered them in D, eyes like shining pearls amid a sea of hair.

When three families lost their kin to the famine, and their loins were left as dry as the lake, some had even come to throw stones at him. But he never stopped, never ate, nor even stood to stretch those legs that had grown almost together at the knees and ankles from so many years of being crossed. His teeth fell like the snow, his hair like the rain, and his face shriveled like that of a grape. His nails grew, and were abraded short by the violin's neck on his left hand, stretched in frightful curls that would drop of their own accord on his right. And the only silence to fill the valley was when he re-strung his bow with the course hair from his own head.

The leaves fell all around him in autumn, the blossoms in spring, and the butterflies in summer. No-one even knew his name, his face or his hands. And it was often said and thought that he didn't really exist at all, but was made marvelous by the village's shared empathy for the song of life. But that was all before they had forgot him, pushed him away from their inquisitions, and left him unheard and as empty as their insatiable curiosity had been of his voice.

When visitors, tourists, and mountain climbers fell by chance to the vale, their importunity was met always with a shrug; no matter whom they importuned. Until they too, upon subsequent return with the seasons best suited to their endeavors learned not to see him, not to notice, and not to hear. Besides, he had no teeth, and surely had not long to live. He played to their mute ears, filling the valley with the chords of his heart, singing the seasons like an eternal clock without interval in time, but in pitch and amplitude. He splashed waves like the sea, wearing aural bays and eroding auricular headlands. His fortissimo matched the moon, and his tempo reached the stars. And with time more ears grew mute, as more travelers returned, and more houses began stretching across the vales, piling stone walls to partition the vineyards. And it was only when the men came and took him away that the people noticed the dreadful silence that swallowed the valley, and the wailing of the new born were heard again.

The men had come from some other country, did not speak the local dialect, and asked no questions. There were seven of them, each identically dressed, and the town noticed them for their clothes were funny. Everyone remarked how the strangers wore such clothes so contrary to the climate, to working in the fields, and even fishing. They ate with tools, never washed their hands, and in the two days they had been there before the music stopped and it was decided that the man had existed, and that he had been stolen by the town's forgetfulness, that the whole town had muttered about the seven men who came not to climb, to farm or to fish. They paid their dues and accommodation with large bills the likes of which had never been seen in the mountains. They ordered the most expensive fruits, drank from the best wines, and gathered the change into large leather wallets that each man kept in a breast pocket interior to the strange jackets they wore. It was remarked how their noses were so strait, how their complexions were like the snow, and how the shoes they wore—so black and shiny—squeaked as their unladen strides padded out footsteps that left impressions in the snow with heavy heels and light toes.

There was not a person in the town who hadn't noticed them by the second day, and it was decided that they had somehow taken the music when they left. If the town had noticed that it was the music that had stopped, and not the strange silence brought by its sudden cessation that had began, they may have had a chance to track the men, who had left their footprints in the snow. Yet, because for so long the music had become akin to a sort of silence itself from which the small town eked out its existence, it took weeks to determine what had happened, why the babies lamented, and why each of the citizens was filled suddenly with a strange uneasiness that resounded silently from the crags and mountain tops, filling them with its interminable emptiness. Suddenly the days in the fields, in the vineyards and by the lake, seemed steeped in redundancy, their toils beating to a metronome as separate and distinct from each other as their own faces. People began storing their own produce in their own barns, and the whole town scowled quietly, as if the sun had turned to pitch, and a darkness had infected their crops that precluded their sharing. Councils formed, attempting to first track when the silence had begun, from where it had come, and how the seven men had left such an invisible foe after their departure until the oldest woman in the town remarked that perhaps the silence hadn't begun, rather something had stopped. And the town stood open mouthed while she explained that perhaps nothing had been left, rather something had been taken.

The three strongest men in the town were commissioned to track the seven men who had left early in the morning two and a half weeks ago. They hefted their sacks weighed with their provisions and began the long march into the mountains while the mayor supervised the assemblage of a new band with brass and strings that would serenade the town in shifts as the council busied itself searching for the records among the nativity and death counts that might lead to a man who had never died in the town where he was born. But they found nothing. The brass of the band rusted, the snow cracked the violins and cellos, and the musicians were struck with a numbness in the hands from the cold fohn winds. They found it increasingly difficult to play tunes to a town and keep up the charade, and they began wondering how the old man had stayed, for so many years, inveterate to his violin without the slightest gratitude from his audience, an audience that had become so accustomed to his presence that they never even acknowledged him. Boys were trained, instruments shipped, and scholarships levied for musical pursuits in the academy that began to grow, not with success, but from failure. And the legends grew too.

The old man had never really been playing for the town, at least not for the town solely. He played like the birds sang, for the reason the moon drew the seas. He played for himself and everything reflected in his small pearl-like eyes. He played like a prayer, and he played because music was a better form of silence. It was four years and fifty-eight days when one of the three strongest men returned, sallow, and gaunt from his sojourn in the hills and the lands beyond the valley. He had collapsed amid the band, who had already started repeating tunes for they had run out of music, and went deeply into a distant coma. They nursed him as best they could, keeping him alive against the decimated condition of his body, and even when they had managed to open his eyes they could get no sound from his lips. The other two were never seen again, and at length the town adjourned once more to select another party to find the old man, at least what had happened to him, and if possible, to bring him back. It seemed that, as he had already lived more than sixty years (the oldest woman in the town alone could recall the time when the music began, when the people would gather by his tree to sing and rejoice with the minstrel), that perhaps he was eternal, like the muses, and that maybe he still lived in the capture of the strange seven men. Three more men were sent off, and a group of women examined his tree, finding his teeth in the topsoil, and the curves his seat had left in the earth. Yet nothing could be done, the band was disbanded, the repetitions too much even for those who were able to shut out the ruckus, and the whole town sank into a solemnity never before witnessed in the mountains.

It got so bad that solemnity turned to lethargy, and the crops faltered, the wines dried up and the carpenters stopped until the town began to rust. Without the music the selectivity of the peoples' minds, so unburdened without their musical thread, narrowed so that the world around the town suffered, the birds left, the ice refused to thaw, and the lake turned into a glacial chunk. The fires in the town flared, and the forests were eaten out from the inside until the town lay like abandoned rubble amid a great white sheet. The stars disappeared too, melted by the fires And the people withered, raged, and fought. Again the town adjourned, and sent three more men in another direction through a different pass in case the seven men had left footprints that led backwards. The remaining governing body set up parties of loggers to spread into the neighboring valleys to salvage wood to keep the fires bright against such a devastating cold. But a desert grew with their cupidity for warmth, and no fire could usurp the ice from their hearts. The visitors left, the climbers' ropes hung like abandoned cobwebs, and the town returned once more to a village. With time the village grew senescent, the youth sent in search of a lost minstrel, or killed over plots of wood, or deserted to sweeter climes where wood grew full before it was felled. And the rust covered everything, peppering the hair of the populace with its tawny tinge.

It was twenty-three years after the start of the never ending winter that had consumed the town, reduced it to a village of rust with the old squeaking in huddling congregations muttering stolen voices about a time their forgetfulness had killed. The academy for music set up to inspire the muse fell to pieces, its bricks like massive teeth dropped from an old giant, and the instruments were set on the fires, the brass melted, the wood burned, and the wind heated. And it was only then that they realized that they had no food, and that their tables could not be eaten.

During the plaguing famine that followed, within which families died, the dead were eaten, and their bones set aside for reminders of the old man and the plague his music had stopped, that one of the boys returned. At first no-one noticed him, so shut up in their private houses with the shutters fast for trapping the glowing heat of the personal fires, but at length, as he strode in the strange clothes down the streets leaving heel prints in the snow beneath his lofty strides, the doors began to open, and the people once more gathered in the streets. The man told them of his travels, of the world on the other sides of the mountains, of the oceans, and distance. He told them of a great ship made of ivory which had granted him berth to cross the seas that brought him to the world where everyone dressed in such funny clothes so contrary to work in the fields, life on the lake, or the climate of the mountains. He remarked that he had eaten with tools, never washed his hands, until his complexion paled and his nose grew strait like an icicle. And at last he talked about a man kept inside in a small prison in a small town in the north.

Reaching into his pocket he drew forth a single golden string that had never rusted and upon whose length the small tarnished marks of fingers lay. It was a string from a violin that an old man had once played. He told how the people of the town, across the oceans and in the North, explained that they had untied the strings until the knot of the violin came apart, and the bow unraveled. This was how he knew the old man was their old man, despite never seeing him. The strange seven men had taken him, placed him in a box, and unraveled his music. At first he had tried to sing, or hum, but the years of silence had crusted his voice in thin wispy cracks from which no music came. And the attempts left him dry and miserable. The people of the town across the seas in the north remembered the wailing of a dying man, who night and day lamented the loss of his violin, and knew not why he had been taken. The people of the village wept when they heard what their forgetfulness had done, and they kneaded their hands crying to heaven to forgive their injustice. The boy continued, explaining that within his solitary confinement they had visited him with doctors and medical machines to test him, study him, and find out what sort of stomach needed no food; just music for sustenance, and why as a man he had never died. Until one day they brought him out in a sack, and took him away to bury him in a furnace whose ashes swallowed his bones.

But in the cell of his incarceration flowers had bloomed. Roses crept up through cracks in the floor, and ivy carpeted the walls as the tiles split and the bars were stretched. The strange men with in the funny clothes did all they could to curtail this forest; they cut it back, fought it down. But always it returned, creeping slowly from cell to cell and out into the town. They had convened meetings, the strange clothes dotted under the arms with sweat that crept like drops of ice down their whitening foreheads. They brought fire to quell the growth, but in the ashes new roses bloomed, and night and day the orchids stretched.

Some of the town in the strange country enjoyed the marvelous forest of flowers that choked out the pavement and span roots through the houses--the more wild ones singing about the miracle man, dancing amid the petals. But that was before the insects had come, and the pollen had swept into the sky hiding the sun with tenebrous clouds. It was not long until their croplands were choked up with flowers, and soups and meals became clustered with petals that turned the town green. In the midst of outpouring inflorescence he had left to return, leaning heavy on his stick to leave the town to famine among the most beautiful garden ever seen that stole the town into its flower beds, and stung the populace with its bees.

The villagers knew not what to do, their fields beneath ice that only music could thaw, their golden musician dead, their youth corrupted and vanished, their ages curling their bones. They lamented and gnashed their teeth, those who still had them, and clapped their gums, those who did not. The traveler took his hand from his pocket, and with a flourish scattered a handful of seeds and a whoosh of pollen into the air. And as he walked toward the mountain path from which he'd returned the flowers were already blooming, the snow already melting, and the bricks of the houses turning slowly to moss covered soil. In time the music had swallowed the village, and the birds returned, the lake thawed, and a jungle thrived. And deep amid the undergrowth, high up in the hills, a bare breasted man with a face like clouds played a flute to the forest that swallowed the village to a time, a beginning, an end long forgotten.