Her voice broke. I could hear her sobbing; her voice sounded distant, as though she’d turned away from the phone. While I waited for her to come back, those words—“it’s been”—reverberated through my head like shock waves from a bomb.
With all the courage I could muster, I tried to smooth over the situation by acting cool, even though I was falling apart by the second.
“Don’t worry about me, Gabriela. We’ll talk about it when you get back to Barcelona. Go and get some sleep now.”
A third pause before the final blow. “I’m not coming back, Samuel.”
Luminous Music That Makes You Feel Better Inside
Dear Friend,
I’m very flattered that a university teacher like yourself (yes, I checked you out and found your email address in the faculty directory—and prefer this to social media) should have listened to my CD and found it interesting. I know the quality of the sound isn’t very good. I decided to record the songs because I was starting to forget them. I’ve composed too many and there’s not enough room for all of them in my head. Once I started recording them, I realized I could make a demo CD.
Despite the sound problem, I think the quality of the songs themselves hasn’t been lost. Then again, the arrangement is always the same: always one voice and a guitar. As it has to be. From start to finish. The uniformity could make for monotonous listening.
As for the language, there is no language. It’s voice as just another instrument. Pure improvisation. The melody’s the same, but the sounds of the voice change. Those sounds are never repeated. This lets me create in a strict present and express the emotions I’m feeling that precise moment. It’s strange, but I think the listener somehow picks up this immediacy.
My experience is that when I sing like this I’m able to express feelings I can’t convey in words. I’ve always admired luminosity and (spiritual) power in my musical gurus. I like luminous music that makes you feel better inside, opens up a space of well-being, gives you strength and courage, and holds out hope.
If I manage to convey these values some day, I’ll feel fulfilled.
I like to say that I can’t be understood in any country, but everyone can understand me. There’s something universal about that.
Moreover, the ego kind of dissolves. I think that language is essential to the construction of our identity. It helps us to think about ourselves.
When I’m singing I really don’t feel as if it’s me singing. I experience it as a void. There’s no one there. Or maybe it’s the opposite. I am more me than ever. Creating my own language, able to change from one moment to the next, like reality itself.
I’m a big fan of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Foucault, and their studies on language. How language determines your way of seeing and understanding the world. But all this is just words. I’m complicating matters. The main thing is the music. And the fact that this urge I have to sing is natural and spontaneous. I believe it comes from an innocent, ingenuous spirit.
In fact, when I was a little kid and my brother and I were still sharing one room in bunk beds, he would always fall asleep immediately, but up in my top bunk, I would start to sing in the dark. I haven’t got a clue what I was singing. I was just a little boy and didn’t have CDs or favorite songs. I simply sang.
Anyway, as I’ve heard people say several times, the innocence of a child is unexceptional. The innocence ofan adult is the result of hard work. I don’t know whether I’ve kept it, or recovered it, or maybe I believe I haveit when in fact I haven’t.
Well, as you can see, I love talking about these things. I get carried away. And, after all that, I haven’t said much about music.
With warmest regards and hoping to hear from you soon!
Daniel Lumbreras
Sentimental Archaeology
It was four in the morning and I was still in shock. Lying in my now cold bath, I let my thoughts travel back and forth between Gabriela’s phone call and the long, profound email I had received.
All too often, things don’t turn out as we expect. I thought there’d be a fuss about the broken vase, but no, there was no fuss. What had been broken, at least for the time being, was our relationship. I imagined that my question to the man who sang in Atlantean would be met with silence or a couple of brief lines: instead, I’d received a letter I would read and reread several times in the coming days.
The world is unpredictable, but wise people maintain that everything happens when it has to happen. That’s the most worrying thing of all. I didn’t understand why, after eight years together, Gabriela should have sunk our personal Atlantis.
Trying to ignore that fact that I was freezing in the cold water, I went back over our relationship, doing my best to understand how we’d got to this point. A point where she wasn’t coming home after a business trip that was supposed to last two weeks at the most.
Our beginnings had been strange and moving. I’d first met Gabriela when she was a little girl, and then we found each other again after we’d both turned thirty-five. After some months of dithering, we started going out together. Two and a half decades of not knowing anything about the other person gives you plenty to talk about.
After a period of mad lovemaking, the phase of sentimental archaeology begins. You both feel obliged to look back over old relationships and explain why they failed. This can be boring, especially in the early days, when you just want to go and make love again. But it’s good conversation fodder when you’re walking in the park, dining out or lazing in bed after a night of passion. There’s something quite titillating in discovering what led your partner to other bedmates who are so different from you. It’s also a good thing to find out what went wrong in previous relationships so you can avoid making the same mistakes. You want the love you’re building now to last forever.
In this early phase, I didn’t have much to say for myself, because my loves had been more platonic than real. By the time I was thirty they weren’t even platonic. I’d turned the whole world into a hostile place and withdrawn into my shell like a snail.
Gabriela had told me about three of her relationships that she thought were important. I imagined the rest were just messing around. She didn’t offer too many details; she seemed set on wiping out the past as if it was something shameful to be buried very deep.
It was especially difficult for her to talk about the years she’d spent in Japan, where she’d worked as an English teacher. She lived in Osaka and, when she wasn’t with her students, she stayed in her rented room and read anthologies of short stories in English.
