Today we work on yogic breathing. Maestro talks about the diaphragm. “When you breathe, you must expand the muscles,” he says. Actually, he says “muskells.” We all stand and breathe in various ways, feeling our muskells expand.
After that, we have individual lessons, including mine. This is my third lesson. My first was a nerve-wracking attempt to play the assigned music resulting in a suggestion that I try something more “at your level.” During the second, Maestro nodded as I played a Telemann sonata and had me work on tone. This time, he tells me I’m much improved. That, in just the past few days, I have taken an important step in my recorder training. When he says this, I feel exactly the same way I did in kindergarten when I got a gold star for counting to fifteen.
I love the school. From the window of the classroom, you get a view of pretty hills dotted with old cottages. During the break, I stand there leaning out, soaking up the day. A young woman is in the courtyard below, beckoning to a calico cat. A young man comes up behind her and wraps his arms around her waist. She sinks back against him. They are clearly in love. Everything is sun-drenched.
Music is everywhere–all of it Medieval, Renaissance, or Baroque. You hear it coming from every room: recorders and lutes, violas da gamba and harpsichords. In one room, dancers practice Renaissance dance steps, clicking castanets. This morning, when I stop in the bathroom on my way out, I find a violinist playing passionately, apparently unable to find a practice room. He is soaring through a gorgeous sonata while I pee in the stall nearby.
I buy cheese, tomatoes and peaches and walk back to my dorm to practice and write.
Later, I head back down to a lute concert held in the Palazzo Ducale–the 15th-century Palace of the Duke. Concerts start late here–at 9:30–and I arrive early. Three tall, striking women in red blazers are collecting tickets and directing people to their seats. I have a good view. The lutest comes out, says some words in accented Italian (he’s American, I realize with surprise), and begins to play. I’m transported. He’s playing a fantasy by the 16th-century composer Molinaro. It’s like lace made of sound.
Then, suddenly, I’m coughing. I mean, I’m really coughing hard. I had a cold before I left the States and I’ve had a cough ever since, but what I’m doing now isn’t ordinary coughing, it’s a monstrous, outrageous cough that echoes through the whole concert hall drowning out the delicate strains of the lute. It’s a machine gun of a cough and it WON’T STOP. Horrified, I leap from my seat and bound up the aisle, hacking and rasping like a hyena the whole way. The doors are obscured by curtains, and I can’t find the way out, so I’m racing around hacking and desperately trying to escape. Finally, I find the door, stumble out into the lobby and nearly collapse in a fit of coughs.
I’m almost too embarrassed to go back into the concert hall. But my bags are there, on the seat. And anyway, the cough has stopped now. I might as well hear the rest of the performance. When I hear applause, I go back in and take my seat as the lutist begins his second piece. And then it comes again, the same cough, charging like a locomotive, just as loud and just as unstoppable as the first time. I make for the door again, this time with my bags.
Back in the lobby, I stand gasping for breath and trying to stop hacking. My eyes are streaming and my sides ache. One of the red blazer women looks at me with concern. She comes toward me. I’m touched. She’s going to ask if I’m all right, I think. Maybe she’ll offer me water. “Madame,” she says. “Would you please go outside? You’re interrupting the concert.”
In my head, I say some very unladylike things to the red-blazer lady, but out loud I just say, “Yes, yes, I’m leaving.” And I flee into the night.
I grew up with a mother who was terrified of drawing attention to herself–“making a scene,” as she put it. Terror is the only way to describe it–she once scolded me for checking the mail too often because the neighbors might notice. When you’ve grown up with that, it’s hard to shake, so I still often suffer from shame even over trivial things, and even when it’s not my fault. Also, I tend to catastophize, so it’s easy to go from “Wow, that was embarrassing,” to “Once I get back to Minnesota, I’m never leaving my house for the rest of my life.”
I trudge back up the road. I stop again at Mamma’s Cafe for a late-night cappucino, and sit there shivering with shame and thinking how I’m not really fit to show my face in public and should be confined like the crazy wife in the attic to prevent any more scenes like this evening’s.
Then someone says, “Are you all right?” I look up, startled, to see the cafe owner standing over me, looking down with concern. “I was a little worried,” he says. “You look like you’re not feeling well.” What he saw on my face was shame, not illness, but still, this time I really am touched. “I’m fine,” I say. “Thank you, but it’s nothing.” And I realize it is.
Anyway, it’s something to write about. I think as I head back to the dorm. It’s all just material.