As our vacation ends today, before getting out of bed I reach out and put the Funeral March from Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor on my mobile. I'm a little sleepy, I don't know if it's a joke or a statement of intent. I turn up the volume so that the music can be heard throughout the house and surroundings, I want to make public the holiday existential collapse: packing the suitcase is going to be an open tragedy. The chords of the Polish genius, with that repetitive and deep rhythm, wonderful and bestial, in a matter of seconds, invade everything. What a power. The waves curl between the sheets, climb up the legs to the throat. I think it's hard for me to swallow.
This music contains too penetrating emotional charge, I didn't remember it being so dangerous. I notice things in my chest. I hear the meow of a cat in heat. A jungle sorrow is breathed. I'm going to cry? Will we all end up in tears this morning, shaken by this deadly musical concoction? The piece advances in its funeral lament. In the house next door, the cry of a baby sounds. Creature. Things are getting out of hand. You don't play with Chopin. You have underestimated genius, I tell myself with a sailor's knot in my gut. But how is it possible that only with the combination of four notes, achieve this devastating effect? What is the mystery?
There is no escape anymore, this concise funeral melody is screwed into the mind and infects the neurons, which repeat it silently, obsessively, for hours, or days. One fellow has been known to end up spinning on a moor humming the Funeral March until he collapsed. Let no one now listen to this masterpiece of sadness to be tried, in an irresponsible way. For my part, I'd better get out of bed and face the game. This music is an artistic outrage. I don't know if denounceable.
Already on the highway, the first stop in the service area brings you down to reality with a smack. Especially if, of course, the conglomerate is in the middle of a good dry land. The views are lethal. There are people who fantasize about being abandoned in a service area. Like a dog. Or like one of those tropical parrots that talks too much and is never heard from again. Mature people who fear this type of thing usually have, inside their chest, that wounded child that has been talked about so much lately in therapy. There is an army of wounded children in the heart of the population. Be that as it may, in these moments of irrational fear in a gas station toilet, it is worth visualizing Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop, when they lived for 33 days in service areas of the South of France motorway, of their own free will; to experience the matter (with large doses of laughter and whiskey) and write Los autonautas de la cosmopista. A book that, by the way, should be a compulsory sale at all gas stations. Fortunately, almost every service area is haunted by the ghost of some genius, ready to laugh at you.
