Maria João Pires, Meret Oppenheim, Escargot, and Grape Fanta

I heard about Maria João Pires’s retirement far too late.
What the hell.

I was merely on my way home from work…

“I am no longer a pianist.”

I’ve always liked the word pianist—a clean, ivory sort of word.
(And “piano teacher,” oddly tender.
“Pianissimo” still escapes me, dissolving at the edges of my fingers.)

How powerful it is for someone to set down their own identity.

Not the decorative declaration of a new noun—
“I’m a cabaret dancer now,” or
“I’m a costume designer now”—
but rather the sentence, “I am no longer myself.”
The beauty of a door closing without a latch.

I remember the first time I listened to her Le Voyage Magnifique.

(My taste remains firmly fixed on Schubert’s String Quintet.
A preference that simply refuses to change—there’s nothing to be done about it.)

I still think of Ránki’s impromptus sometimes.
But Maria—her sound moves differently.
Delicacy isn’t the right word; resonance isn’t either.
I should reach for a better metaphor. I need something stranger.

Maria’s playing is… like fur.
Not Dürer’s solemn fur, but Oppenheim’s—
a thing that warms and unsettles simultaneously,
soft, perilously fragile, yet holding its pulse steady to the very end.

And now she is no longer a pianist.

At a cheap Italian fast-food place near the station,
I ordered escargot and grape Fanta.
A substitute for a glass of wine, just so I could write this diary.

I’ve had this dish in Montmartre before—was it different there?
I can’t tell if they use margarine or butter here, only that lately I crave fat the way one craves sleep after a long, wordless day.

An uncanny fullness lingering after a late dinner… and then,

Maria.

I had wanted to hear her in person someday.

Wrapped in some voluminous fur, in a hall where a large abstract painting hung in its gilt frame in the lobby..

I may have already written this scene somewhere before.

Fanta, whatever flavor it takes, is truly awful.
The sticky sweetness left in my mouth seems to slowly push something toward its end.