MASOCHIST AHOY! (PART TWO)

Sometime last month it became official: I’d be giving piano lessons to three young children.

My students were a cheerful bunch of girls, two siblings and a neighbour of theirs. They were nice and eager to please, it seemed to me, which was a relief because I am not particularly fond of children. (And I actually have a short-circuited fuse in my head which tend to blow up at the mere sight of a brat). So there: I found myself talking in a patient tone and telling them for the umpteenth time which one was a “C” and which one was “D” and telling myself oh-my-God-was-I-this-stupid-when-I-first-studied-the-piano-no-wonder-my-old-teacher-kept-screaming-obscenities-at-me.

What surprised me the most, until this time (we’ve had about 7 meetings so far), was the way they’d scream and refuse to go further down the pieces. Really, these are all very simple passages, with just one hand at a time, nothing seems complicated yet. But every time I turned a page, they’d scream: “NO! It’s difficult! It looks too difficult! I don’t want to study!” My jaw would drop open; I surely never behaved this way in all my years of studying. If anything, learning a new piece always triggered new enthusiasm in me. It was my teachers insisting that I played the same thing over and over again for two months straight that tempted me to scream “NO! I don’t want to study!” though undoubtedly I never contradicted my teachers in any way.

Sometimes when they just refused to cooperate, when I wanted to bang my head to the piano and told them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (which was: learning the piano was indeed difficult and since the first day of meeting them I knew, only one of the three of them would continue studying for at most 4 years down the path, and the other two simply weren’t made to understand musical notes at all), I asked myself why I asked for this trouble anyway.

Nobody pointed a gun to my temple and forced me to teach these three stooges. My main job is very mentally satisfying and also provides enough money to support my life so far. On the contrary the pay I get from teaching the piano doesn’t even cover my lunch expenses for a month, and after each piano class I feel my days of taking regular blood-pressure control pills are drawing near.

Really, why did I put myself voluntarily in this trouble?

This question keeps me from banging my head on the piano up to now. With this question swirling in my tired brain one day, I tried to cheerfully taught one brat a simple song, because she had refused to do the finger exercise. To my surprise, she persevered, until long after her time was up, and I didn’t have the heart to remind her that her mom only paid me to teach for 30 minutes. I sat there watching her struggle, I was growing tired and bored, realising with a sinking heart that I had a lecture to give at 7 AM the next day. Then the other student, her younger sister who was six years old, crept behind me and told me I smelled nice.

It was about 7 o’clock in the evening, and at 7 o’clock in the evening, I was sure I smelled anything but nice. “Oh no I don’t, I smell hideous” I told her smilingly. She shook her head and clasped a lock of my hair and started sniffing it and said “Oh your hair too. Your hair too. Smelled so nice. Did you have your hair coloured? Why is your hair not black?”

I almost jumped off my chair because she made to nuzzle my neck, all the way saying I smelled good. Really, I don’t mind nuzzling or necking, but Girlie, you’re not only the wrong age, but for the fucking love of God, you’re the wrong sex as well.

“Will you see that,” her mother said to me, “She and her sister were so shocked that first day they saw you, they thought you were this older, strict woman. They kept telling me that you were beautiful. And this little one here is just dying to kiss you.”

Beautiful. I repeated that word slowly, trying to taste it with my tongue, sliding back and forth among my teeth. It tasted different, that word. It somehow tasted different when the persons calling me beautiful were young children who had no intention of playing mind-trick on me and get me to bed.

“And I am dying to hug you!” said the older sister, leaping from the piano bench and hugged me full-forced with her oversized body. “Did you notice? I played that song! I could play the piano!”

“You’re great,” I told her, grinning. The truth was, she couldn’t play the piano. She couldn’t read the notes, I had to help her translate each note to numbers and that was very, very bad. Totally intolerable in the world of classical music.

But this time, I told myself, I wouldn’t care. This time I would go home happy, knowing that I had taught three young girls to distinguish C from D from E. Those were only three notes from the gazillion other notes I still have to teach them, but it was a start nonetheless. Suddenly I didn’t feel like banging my head on the piano anymore.

Why should I? After all, I had had a marvellous 1,5 hours with them and convinced one of them that playing the piano, despite the struggle and perseverance it required, was one helluva fun. And I had learnt that there were three people in this world who insisted to call me beautiful, the same people who let me know that I smelled nice, and that my hair smelled nice too, even at the end of a long day, even at 7 o’clock in the evening.