There are names that stay in you as if the out-of-tune
raspy saxophone’s sorrow played in a city corner, behind a tortured hat, placed
inside up, and empty. And, one rainy
Easter Sunday, you sit by the window, launch Pandora on your iPad and listen to
Yves Montand, then to Leonard Cohen.
A face you try to remember passes slowly between the
songs. You try to listen, to go back to where you heard that song first, hoping
you will see the sad face again. Instead, you hear the evening wind play with
makeshift window curtains; you smell salty pistachios and Portuguese rosé wine
from an evening on the Mediterranean.
Then Pandora shifts to Italian songs. The beat of “Volare, oh oh; cantare ooh, ooh, ooh
ooh” takes you to another time. Another name. Another face.
The wind whistles through the window and you get up
to make tea. It smells like a sleeping dog in the room and you scratch behind
his ears on your way to the kitchen. He lifts his hind right leg hoping for a
belly rub but gives up with a deep sigh. Green tea or black? Now it’s Fergus
Macroy singing “I was thinkin’ the other
week about love”. So you decide to
make coffee.
Suddenly, you do remember the last time you heard
Leonard Cohen. You stop the microwave oven where you were boiling water for
your instant coffee, shut your eyes, and think about a garden you often wanted.
You hear midnight lullabies you never sang on a balcony, and see a half moon
over that garden now full of night-blooming Jasmine perfume. You push “On” to
heat the water again in the microwave oven.
Somehow the aroma of instant coffee reminds you of amber
and ivory cigar holders you admired in an antique store in Prague. Or perhaps it was just the smell of past
times filling that store. On the way to the window, you scratch your dog’s belly.
Not a rub, just a scratch. And he accepts happily. You sit back by the window
and look at the Inner Harbor: you, Baltimore, and a sleeping dog. A triangle
like the point of an arrow aimed at memories which make you miss the past.
Francine Labrie, another Canadienne and
once a neighbor of Cohen in Outremont, now sings “Souviens-toi Fernand…”
The wind is still from the West, and you remember it
is Easter Sunday. That once you wore a white shirt and white shoes, you held a
candle taller than yourself and went to church with your parents. You take a
sip of the coffee and realize that you forgot the sugar. But you keep looking
out of the window. Your children also wore white and rose on this day decades
ago: she was a beauty of a girl, and he was jealous of the attention she got.
A swindle, you whisper. Memories cannot be
rekindled. That face you wanted to remember does not exist. There will always
be little boys and sweet girls holding candles taller than they are. Your boy
is now a man, much taller than church candles. And your girl is dead.
Curiously, the whispering wind reminds you that the first time you heard
Leonard Cohen you did not speak English. Now you do, but Cohen does not tear
your eyes anymore.
You get up, realize that it still smells like a wet
dog in the room, scratch behind his ears, and turn your iPad off just before
Françoise Hardy was to sing “La Valse des
Regrets”. Not a good song on Easter Sunday, you reflect.
March 31, 2013
©Vahé Kazandjian, 2013
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