Ta Voix

She is observing him behind the curtain, barely breathing. She is reluctant even to blink so she doesn’t miss a move. His body is a battlefield in which the mighty Apollo fights the nymphs. The Apollo inside him scrambles, trying to ward them off while they sensually hang on to his neck and upper arms, waving their hair and twisting their graceful bodies with the goal of overpowering him. The scuffle looks more like a passionate quarrel between lovers than a bloody fistfight in which one side convincingly wins. Here, there are no winners or losers, only ever-lasting wrestling, reaching, pushing, gripping, sighing, suffocating and caressing. An ordinary observer sees only reflections of that fight through the skin, because even an average person can notice that something arcane lurks at times in his eyes, twitches in a movement of his hand or springs in his step. The observer attributes the seen phenomenon to youth and its inclination towards rebelliousness and passing fads, or to a certain temperament, or to exotica, or to artistic eccentricity, or to whichever square, one-dimensional category they might think of at that moment. Then, they readily throw the object of their temporary curiosity into the chosen box, stick an imaginary label on it and continue about their business after they self-congratulatorily applauded their own perceptiveness. But she stays. She knows that no matter how long she watches him, she cannot ever fully fathom all that he is. It scares and thrills her at the same time, and she knows she is in too deep now to detach herself and run away.

Somewhere inside him lies the unreachable East, and faraway southern beaches imprinted white grains of sand onto his olive skin. He is woven from untimely courage barely mustered within cold school walls, from loneliness and fear, from fire temples and piano playing, from old Hollywood movies and cabaret dancing, from laugh and shame, and silence silence silence about the deepest, most fragile parts of himself. He is also the chaos of a Western metropolis, a reckless adventurer finally free from the shackles of tradition, an impressionable teenage witness of the formation of a new era, an era in which long hair breaks stale conventions, in which men and women wear flowers and play music and laugh irrepressibly. Meters of colourful fabrics have shaped the silhouette of his body, and the creases of his mind have been formed by hundreds of hours spent in front of a record-player blaring out demonic sounds produced by guitars played upside-down. A restless searcher for a safe haven and more more more, ever distrustful of people and ever hungry for their love. Always vigorously creating, gloriously pretending and never tiring of art’s and life’s divine gifts.

On the other side of the curtain, bodily sensations quiver through the veins; the sound of a purring cat connected to an amplifier. Vibrations beneath the feet sound like regular beats of the aorta and hypnotize the nerves, coming into the body from below while the gaping darkness ahead responds with the electrified murmur of thousands of throats filled with something like awe. He observes the immense darkness with his intoxicated eyes, the darkness that by no means looks like an empty space ahead of him, not only because it is randomly sprinkled with flames from cigarette lighters, but also because he feels them, their energy and hunger, both their muffled shrieks and the ones they dared to let out of their tired lungs. All of them are one and he is connected with them by the same unquenchable passion and the same stuffy air they are inhaling tonight, perspiring, trembling in expectation, being synchronized with the wild rhythm of drums.

Absorbing the safety of darkness around him, he firmly grips the sticky mic stand and through damp eyelashes stares into those few barely discernible faces in the first rows. They are a reflection of the whole room, everything tangible and intangible in it, the reflection of a whole generation that rages because it understands this world’s truths and laws with the ease of breathing, and sees none of these applied to everyday life. Their big eyes look up from the front rows, searching for answers, wanting to soak up at least a fragment of the illusion ahead of them, which should be reality on all counts of sanity. They’re watching the ones like them who managed to climb the world’s rostrum and let out unspoken frustrations. They are watching him, the one who’s giving voice to all their quelled longings and silenced curses, and expect another burst that will set them all free. At that moment, he understands everything, understands them to the bone, feels his own body permeated with stirred nerves and his heart like some pulsating incandescent precious metal in his chest. He wants to give them everything they need and yearn for, he wants to give it to himself too, here and now, while he senses drops of sweat falling from his forehead to his eyelashes, forming little kaleidoscopic prisms before his pupils.

Some kind of fever takes over him and, with eyes closed, he feels his moment coming closer, while he simultaneously becomes aware of their presence:
the unremitting thumping of drums in the background; he feels it like a safe rock in his midriff. On his right, bass guitar plays the role of energy transmitter, while electric guitar on the left is connected to him by densely-lined magnetic forces. He senses it coming closer to his feet; the dark bass enters the body at a gallop through his heels, climbs over the back of his knees and inner thighs all the way up to the depths of his belly where it finds its shelter, very low, somewhere between the bladder and those immobile vertebrae at the end of the spine. An intensely sensual feeling, that flickering in his insides, the intro to an inevitable explosion which is only a few beats away.

At that moment a violent cry hits him from the left, a prolonged and passionate sound of the guitar which refuses to take any detours, but directly and swiftly hits the core of his being — the incandescent heart in his chest, which instantly turns into bloody, soft muscle tissue, into something completely human, something which is no stranger to tears, laughter, nor ecstasy that shortly follows – the guitar sounds he listens to start to spread from his heart to his spine and finally erupt through his skin like millions of icy needles, giving him goosebumps while he takes a breath to finally perform a little part of his purpose here on Earth, and bring to an end this hypnotic whirlpool of perfect nonsense. He slowly opens his eyes and realizes he now stands exposed in the spotlight, so he grabs the mic stand harder. In that millisecond, all that unbearably accumulated in him finally explodes and he lets his voice out from unimaginable depths, clear and powerful. Twitching in a trance, he realizes that he floats in complete harmony with the distorted, chaotic space around him. All produced notes linger in the condensed air like confetti long after thorough stillness takes over the room.