Chapter 5: A boy realizes his potential
The boy sat in the classroom, a pale child in a mixed sea of colours, blue-eyes swimming in a jar of brown eyes, a child of North America in Quezon in the Philippines, a budding rejecter of monotheism in a religious school devoted to it. His father was an engineer, his mother a free-spirited artist and daughter of rich intellectuals. He was schooled with the children of the local rich as well as the patronized poor, usually better company. A blaze of claret was at his throat, the colour of the school. A text with a fable by Aesop was open under his long fingers. A ledge nearby held tempera paints and table tennis rackets.
The nuclear bomb had only just been unleashed upon the world, the Philippines just unlocked from Japanese rule. His father was helping rebuild, his mother was helping heal with the arts. Colonialism still, yes, but an idealized form of it, sensitive to the local reality, aware of the taint of oppression, and respecting the rich traditions of art upon the islands instead of insisting upon the techniques and themes of European masters. Licit colonialism perhaps, not cheapened by cynicism or an intent to push foreign and controlling memes upon a local populace traumatized by war or shocked by exposure to modernism.
They were learning of litotes, the double-negative or understatement of rhetoric, a means of establishing superiority by claiming inferiority, a verbal magic. It was an eye-opener for him, the technique a Yale lock opening in his mind. A labyrinth unfolded for him, a twisting map of the human psyche barely glimpsed.
And then it was time for a two-school recital in the school hall, the sister school to his bringing their girls together with his school’s boys. Dutifully, he rose with his uniformed classmates, the wool chafing in the tropical heat, a sprite entrapped in swaddling cloth.
The school hall overlooked an inlet in the Philippine Sea, the setting a section of grassy field sloping down to agate water. Swells broke against the shore, and diesel fumes often intruded upon the classrooms from fishing boats and tramp freighters.
The recital was the typical chaste fare: symphony #40 by Mozart banged out ham-handedly by a sincere middle-school boy, Handel’s Care’ Selve sung beautifully if tentatively by a prepubescent choir and Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Little Swans performed trillingly by a trio of well-wrapped girls.
But then came an epiphany: Bach’s cello suite №3 performed by a senior girl, her legs straddling the shapely wood.
A cache opened, the Yale lock tumblers that had been exposed by the knowledge of litotes turned over again by the effect of the music, and the heat, and perhaps the lingering resonance of the horrors of war.
His mind reached out, tentative and unsure, found the cellist’s. He espied something unfamiliar but alluring, something in hailing distance of where she already was. He brought her body into tow, her bow flashing in the lights, her legs clamping the cello, urged her to that place he saw. He heard the Bach transform, become more passionate, more unrestrained, saw her tossing her head back as she continued to draw more and more out of the wood and strings and rosin.
The suite ended. The girl shuddered, gasped and fainted. And he found himself with a wet spot in his pants, and a languid and dangerous torpor in his limbs and skin.
He was thirteen. He turned into a man of sorts in that moment. And something more.